The Arched World: Worlds of Creators, #3

By Davi Cao

When a new world rises in front of Colin's eyes, he prepares a message to Mae, the Creator of Terra, his only hope of having his home world back.

Mastering his powers of creation, Colin rebuilds a portrait of old home in the shell of the new. His city, his country, his planet, the beauty is all back. 

Except that the planets of the new world are different, unlike any planet before them, and the humans inhabiting them are nothing like those from Terra. He'll push his ideas against the new world, so that Mae can find his creation, but he'll meet resistance from friends to foes. 

The ensuing revelations will force Colin to consider the most important question of his existence: how much sacrifice is he willing to make to have his old world back?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Davi Cao
• Release date: Dec 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386341161

Book preview

∙ 1 ∙ The col.loc

Under the blue sky of the primordial col.loc, the land breathed. Molten blood pumped the walls of rubbery soil, pulling them in and out as the liquid punched its cage with colossal violence. In the col.loc's core, a gigantic beast squirmed, wrapped in the longest of carpets. The creature fought against prison, it resisted the bending of the world.

The col.loc revolved around space in the shape of an immense cylindrical arch, a living being of planetary proportions. An arch hanging from its edges on the universe's walls, spinning on itself, vast, abundant, alive. The monster struggled under the mantle of elastic ground that bound it, until it tired of the effort. It left the land at peace. The creature would never reach the surface, it would never leave its cage.

When boredom struck at the col.loc’s core, its monster tried to escape again, and doing so, it created a mountain. The landscape expanded at a fixed point, a finger pressing on a rubber balloon, pushing against air, forcing its flexible membrane to the apex of its resistance.

The mountain grew and became a tower of smooth walls, with round edges, perfectly integrated to the plains beneath it. Soon, other towers like it would appear, from the core’s raging fury, or it would give up on trying to strangle the sky and allow its finger to come down.

The col.loc formed a vast community with others of its kind. Up, down, left, and right, other gigantic arches spun with their edges fading into the universe’s walls, countless others, infinite col.locs. Their rotation sometimes coincided with the ones around them, or they spun in different rhythms and allowed for close contacts.

One huge cylindrical arch could get near the other and allow for migration, the crossing between planets a mere jump away. In such moments, even their spin slowed down, attracted as they were by their presence's weight, moving on in the same pace when the universe’s unreachable dimension propelled them back to their rotation.

If one walked across the col.loc until the edge, meeting the wall of mystery, one would fade as matter faded, and one would never understand what awaited in the other side.

On the newest mountain of the primordial col.loc, juices flowed from a set of orifices at the summit. Yellow slime, tinting the bluish ground, dribbling on the mountaintop, running down to the plains far beneath. It erupted as dust, and coalesced into liquid, forming blobs that could either float in the air or roll on the ground. While the eruption stayed calm, the juices prepared the terrain for new life. When it exploded, gushing blobs of dusty ooze, it brought along a human being.

Her name was aWa. She emerged from the mountain with body painted yellow, yellow fluid dripping from her flabby breasts and voluminous belly. Her wet hair wrapped around her neck, colored in absolute black, falling short over her shoulders. Small eyes, black pupils, flat nose, mouth with fat lips, and born with a smile. AWa was destined to plenitude, created in the shape of a chubby woman, daughter of the col.loc’s inner angst, its gift to the world it only dreamed of reaching.

Dust flew over her standing self, making swirls as it came out from the mountain’s pores. It crossed her body, sticking on her, bathing aWa with powder. Dust then became slime, erupting with enough pressure to create a liquid column from a hole. Its color changed, becoming pink, falling on aWa, changing her skin to bluish tones.

Colors combined unlike Terra, waves of similar lengths affecting brains in innovative ways. AWa bathed in the slime, raising her arms over her head to make sure that the entirety of her body received the core’s bliss.

Dripping blue fell on her eyes, it penetrated her sealed lips, the orifices in her ears, in her genitals. When the shower ended, she opened her eyes again, smiling, staring at the distant land below. She traced a necklace on her shoulders, painting jewelry with the soft touch of her index fingers. Blue turned into dust, and dust turned into a necklace.

Naked, aWa had one piece of ornament, and one piece only. Ready for life, daughter of the col.loc, she walked in circles around the mountain’s edges, circumventing the tiny beach of an islet. One step further, and she would fall from an immense height.

In the moment after birth, aWa discovered that her life was meditation. She wandered the small space with her mind focused on the journey, not on the destination, a monk learning to stride. During this process, she placed steps over the mountain edges, threatening to quit the plateau in which she existed. Life, for aWa, meant an eternal walk, something she knew from instinct. Raised from the col.loc's depths to be a good human, she wanted to play her part in the universe.

The core’s monster brought the mountain down, leveling it out with the region's mounds. The terrain gained scars, abundant relief that formed valleys, pinhole plains, spiky hills, mountain ranges, square mesas, dented gorges.

It all changed fast, decorating the col.loc with colossal sculptures, tall, wide, deep, slimy monuments that appeared and disappeared in the interval of a mere col.loc rotation. Seen from afar, even the mightiest mark the core’s creature could create blurred in the land's enormity. Its skin stretched for such vast distances that its overall shape, the cylindrical arch, defined its identity whole.

Feeling the space, all the places where she could go, aWa stepped over the edge. She fell freely, slipping over the hill's flat surface, rubbery, elastic, a wall that rushed past her as the ground came closer.

Mountain transitioned to plain over a smooth slope, a finger pushing through an air balloon. AWa hit the slope fast, her body rolling uncontrolled, banging her hipbone on the soft surface with violence enough to throw her waist up and shake each of her arms and legs.

AWa rolled downhill until her limbs managed to dissipate her energy. She still lived, hurt, her bones painful at the hips, elbows, and knees. Her head escaped the fall unharmed though, and for that, she smiled.

The main sun shone, at the time, above aWa’s col.loc. The col.locs spun close to each other, spreading themselves to infinity in the great spatial alley. Between them, at random intervals, huge heat tubes pierced the two walls of the universe, giving light to the col.locs around them.

Energy came from the outer dimension, boring a hole through time and space. It existed for a moment while it traveled in a concentrated beam toward the opposite wall. It then disappeared to the unreachable dimension where nothing had a given destination.

Night came when the natural col.loc's rotation put the surface in the shadow. Faraway stars helped dissipating darkness, white flat lines, some thicker, some thinner, one on top of the other, never to the sides, eclipsed by arches. The energy beams made the nocturnal sky a spectacle of its own.

Limping after the fall, aWa walked, excited by the sight of blue land ahead, many mountains away. Dried up, centrifuged due to the rolling, her dark-as-coal hair framed her round face with delicacy, not one strand out of its place.

Necklace warming her chest with the excitement of life, she drank the land from her large brown feet, hot spicy rubber ascending through her blood. Her legs propelled her in wide steps, her round belly bounced with her advance. She walked to enjoy life, to make sense of creation.

In front of her, a new mountain range began the rapid process of its formation. A dozen spikes expanded from a region of already high lands, growing tall, one penetrating into the other, forming a wall that interrupted aWa’s intended path. She circled them in a walk that would last through the night.

The upper col.loc, faint above the atmosphere, also served to measure time, besides the sun’s elongated position in the sky. It got closer and closer to aWa’s own col.loc, becoming clear against the blue haze in every daylight hour. It descended to meet her col.loc, nearly touching it. They rotated in sync, allowing for easy migration from one to the other. In a few hours, the sky would give way to ground.

Despite having to walk further than she expected to go around the mountains, aWa smiled in peace. The journey meant everything, it defined eternity. She would make a detour by the side of the new geography, then she would reach the blue land, and she would keep walking, forever and ever.

Beyond the obstacle, the attractive land lay still. Following her inner will, aWa headed there to see, only to see. Made of flesh, human, she existed in a place where nourishment got to her through the soles of her feet. Rich ground, slimy, filled with nutrients, able to keep her going indefinitely. Therefore, she kept her calm pace, walking, because walking gave her food and rest.

The blue land revealed itself on her arrival, a large puddle of gel, its mounds covered with a thick malleable membrane. At each of aWa’s steps, her feet made craters which grew larger by themselves, spreading throughout the smooth surface a pattern of chaos that showed human presence.

Beneath her chubby toes, a myriad of pebbles, feathers, rings, and dust announced themselves, sleeping in frustration, waiting for aWa’s arrival. They poked her bones, pressed her skin, and she walked on them with her regular joy, immersed in tranquility, living the life she was born to experience.

One small flowery form rose from the blue slime. Energized by aWa’s presence, its internal mechanisms accelerated and gave it the ability to leave its deep slumber. It had two membranes of concentric petals made of a perforated tissue, intricate like webs, one membrane penetrating the other, x-shaped. It had a rotation of its own, it could float in the air, and choose the direction of its flight. Although free, it depended on aWa, for the energy it received came from the human’s presence.

For the flowery web, aWa became the center of life. Such a majestic creature, following an independent path, sharing its existence with the helpless beings of the ground, she represented the essence of goodness, the sun to which it owed its life.

It knew beauty, the flowery web, it drew itself toward it. It created a path to admire aWa in all her grace, circling around her human curves, from her fallen buttocks to her breasts, not missing one single detail of her necklace, of her short hair, of her tiny fingernails. The flowery web orbited around aWa, performing an endless rotation while its fleshy sun traveled through the universe.

The flowery web belonged to the large family of ous, tiny creatures which slumbered in the col.loc's skin. It joined aWa's influence, and hoped to be only the first one on aWa's ou.uo, the name given to the ecosystem of ous that formed around humans.

The next ou to awake from sleep rose in the shape of a ring, decorated with rounded horns and dust streams roaming the inside of its circle. It rose with aWa’s energy, drawn into her marvelous presence, and left its bed under the slime to meet the air, where the new center of its world moved in simple steps.

It floated to see her better, it approached her fat arms and rejoiced with beauty. It followed her, noticing the flowery ou already in orbit. To meet it, the ring ou accelerated while allowing for the human body to serve as the major force in the universe, getting stuck in her sphere of influence by the need of life. If ous desired to wander around the land and be at peace with the col.loc’s monster, they had to ride with their daughters and sons.

Humans could sustain a certain number of ous, from twenty to forty, depending on the person’s strength and the ous own will to live in crowded spaces. The ou.uo depended on humans, unaware of the humans’ indifference to their presence, for humans existed to walk and nothing else.

While aWa did so, new ous sprouted from the slime, finding her through the chaos of her steps in the gel, or by the touch of her soles. Once enchanted by her arrival, the excited individual pebbles, rings, feathers, and dust floated and spun around her, matching orbits with the first comers.

AWa gained a disc around her torso, becoming a Saturn of human scale. Small creatures instead of ice blocks, jewelry made of the ground’s life. It reached its saturation point when new ones did not get into orbit, her walk leaving a trail of fallen ous, those slowly getting back to slumber, until someday, they would be lucky to find another human crossing their region again.

Once completed, aWa’s ou.uo learned to spin in unison, rejoicing in all the company they had found. They lived in bliss, gathered in a diverse group, fitted with the potential to perform countless projects.

To explore its capacities, the ou.uo had to work within itself. Each of its components had abilities that only blossomed when interacting with others. AWa’s ou.uo had pebbles that orbited her body at speeds higher than any other ou, the closest ones to her skin. They risked hitting her arms if she decided to raise them, but she walked in a contained way, hardly swinging, and kept them safe. These pebbles ventured to the outer orbits only to check the rest of the ous and see if any could fit with its innate potential.

When the pebbled ous found the ring ones, they tried to cross the middle of their holes. With precision, energized by aWa’s life-giving presence, the first pebble flew through a ring and left a trail of dust behind its trajectory.

The dust took a while to recede, getting back to the small portal from which it had erupted, until another pebble spread it out again, by crossing the ring. One after another, the ous discovered that rings and pebbles could bring dust to their planetary plane.

Dust formed thin lines that tended to disappear, however. The feather ous adjusted their orbits to intercept those trails of pink and blue mist, and when the first of their kind touched it, the dust lost its attraction to its parent ring ou, floating weightlessly around the feather. The more the feathers engulfed dust, the more of it got free to roam along the ou.uo's current, following the feather sweeps and spins over aWa with the ous' guidance.

A misty disc surrounded aWa. Her ou.uo formed a beautiful frame to her silhouette, despite its primordial state and the poverty of its means. She formed a galaxy of her own, the bearer of dust, to which she was also indifferent.

The feather ous attempted something new. One placed itself in front of a ring, and when the pebble hit it, it penetrated the feather and broke it, causing a giant dust explosion. The feather ou, touched by dust, recovered its integrity at once. They left one sole trace of their collision, the misty sphere that grew to aWa's height, which bathed her with powder that liquefied in contact with her skin. The blue color of her birth dripped over her calm face, flowing down her neck, chest, belly, arms, and legs.

Bruises of purple marks, veins destroyed by her long fall from the birth mound, muscles and tendons strained from the impact, cracked bones, she had a little of everything. Thus, she limped, because even hurt, she would walk, unless she died. The liquefied dust acted in silence, entering her pores and orifices without asking for permission.

It had a regenerative effect on aWa’s body. Cells multiplied, ligaments strengthened out, bones calcified. Perfect brown became the color of her skin once more, not one purple spot ruining the smoothness of her complexion.

Her ou.uo, aWa’s devout followers, noticed an improvement in her walk, a gracious swing at last freed from the irregularities of her limping, an end to the threat of their own extinction. Without her, they’d be back to eternal slumber, never to be reunited such as they were now, and to have healed the center of their bliss was the ultimate realization of their potency and mission in that universe. They had the power to make good things to aWa.

∙ 2 ∙ AWa meets uiTiu

AWa's journey on the col.loc ended on itself. It had as much purpose as a planet orbiting a star, a leaf flying with the wind. She, a human, spoke no language, nor would ever do so, and to communicate with the world, she used her senses.

Having her needs satisfied by the land itself, over which she wandered in bliss, survival was a certainty in life. Only her ou.uo led a fragile existence, worried about aWa’s whereabouts, about their journey's dangers, unable to control her steps and their group's fate.

Their concern found its justification on the risky grounds in aWa's path. The plains beneath her feet, for the past thousands of strides, slowly rose, pushed by the col.loc's fury. It punched the surface to try to make it break.

She got closer to the sky, being on the center of the elevated plains, which came up in a squarish shape, round edges separating it from the lower lands. Her ou.uo orbited her with excitement, spreading more dust in their disc, the feathers moving closer to the rings, ready to take care of their aWa in the case of an accident. And an accident was due, given her unending walk and the incoming border ahead.

She fell down a gorge. The entire ecosystem of her human existence slid on the smooth walls of a huge opening in the raised plateau, throwing all the dust at their disposal on the soft body energizing their orbits. Acting thus, the ou.uo hoped to conceal her in a cloud of healing, protecting her from major damage.

AWa banged her head on her tumble, she cracked her femur after a fall, she injured her spine after another big one, rolling down with loose arms and legs that bruised, and squished muscles. The dust liquefied all over her, keeping her well, while the ou.uo troubled itself with the barriers to their orbit around aWa, penetrating the wall and nearly losing ous as they struggled to get back to her.

When she reached the ground, unable to get up, although still alive, the ou.uo lacked dust. Their group spun intact, to their relief. Stabilized on the ground, noticing the center of their world having difficulty resuming her walk, they worked to get the dust flowing.

Pebbles crossed the rings, hitting feathers here and there, exploding in bursts of powder. Soon, aWa got ready to get back on her journey, placing a firm step on the slimy rubber under her soles, reinvigorated in full.

The land breathed, alive, and the naked eye followed its constant transformation with vertigo. Wandering in the valley between two big walls, aWa became dizzy when the horizon disappeared from her gaze, losing balance, and stopping for a second to wait for the changes.

High lands surrounded her, getting lower by the minute, leveling down not with the rest of the plains, but falling underground, creating large creases by her sides. The result left aWa standing on an elevated path, the bottom of a steep valley turned into the highest point in a region of depressed landscape.

To walk in such a tight space put her at risk, having just recovered from an immense fall from the former highlands. The ou.uo spun in haste to spread dust and recompose their disc's glory, preparing for the worst once more. AWa could easily step toward the chasm, and they wouldn’t have enough dust to keep her intact along the way.

She swung uncertainly on the tiny space available to her thick legs, walking closer to the edge. A ring ou attempted a close contact with her skin, hitting her face after a tight orbital maneuver. She didn’t blink. In unison, a few pebbles synchronized their movement and did the same, turning aWa slightly to the side, making her change course and keep going in the safe direction.

In safety, she left the high paths with a beautiful ou.uo disc filled with dust. At a distance, over a rugged terrain, the ground bubbled. Tiny creatures awoke from deep slumber, crossing solid matter toward the air, where a new power plant walked the land. An ou.uo began its formation, energized, spinning in their first orbits around a man called uiTiu, who walked in aWa's direction.

Life in the col.loc existed underground. Diversity stayed a potential hidden from human eyes unless they crossed paths with large ou.uos. And ou.uos didn’t exist on their own. They needed people, around whom they formed their tiny galaxies. A new human in the horizon was thus a major sight, one capable of attracting aWa’s attention, offering a precise direction to her path.

The more she approached the walking silhouette, the more his shape sharpened under her gaze. UiTiu's limbs trembled with fat, his brown skin shone with the bluish slime of birth, a short man, long hair, straight and black. His belly hung from his torso like a ball, smooth and naked. Humans born from the core’s monster had no bellybutton, creatures of the mountain. That man, uiTiu, wore necklaces longer than aWa’s, hanging from his neck, the lower end circling the bottom of his swollen abdomen.

He walked clean, devoid of the dust mist surrounding aWa. Around him, though, his ou.uo made experiments among its limbs,