Author: Lewis Richards

I carry a world on my back, bearing it forward across the emptiness ahead. I feel for life in the darkness, not to add to my little world, but to consume so I may endure. So I may tend.

This is not my first world, I grow and must leave the worlds I wear and the life that fell upon them from above in the care of the younger gods. In turn I take on the worlds of gods older than me, collecting what seeds of life might fall upon them.

I find my old worlds in the inky blackness, some flourishing, some cold and still, left alone to die in the dark, their gods having moved on or succumbed to the void.

My world is vibrant. Fields of verdant greens and oranges feeding the colonies living upon it. Some with great heads gazing into the dark above.

I feel the urge to shed this world now. To stride out into the dark to find an old god ready to leave their own in my care, or find one of the still words waiting to be reborn while I hand mine down in turn.

I will miss this world, but new life cannot grow if the old does not give it purchase to do so, so I carry my little worlds forward until is time for another to do so.

This is the order of nature, and one might as well try and argue with the tides. And who would know this better than I?

I am a Hermit Crab after all.