WD 150 “Excerpt: The Chronicle of Quelk the Slime”

Greetings! I have another ebook releasing tomorrow. This one is a spinoff set in the same world as “The Kingdom’s Disdain” but its also tangental and works as a standalone story to any who have no prior knowledge of the series. Here is an excerpt from the first chapter, enjoy! And if you like it, be sure to check back tomorrow so you can read the full story!
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*Quuuuelk* 

That was the sound it made when it emerged. A low, bubbling, bursting sound. The Deep Ooze boiled coldly with pressure, and it was enough pressure to push a bubble to the surface. Bursts were usually big enough for a quelk and a bloop and a sklip and a cruckle and a sclorp and a drunch, at least five or six individual slime entities, but this burst only spawned a single individual quelk.

The quelk had limited awareness. At the start, it could only sense endless wetness, then it was born into dry land. 

The quelk felt before seeing. Dry dirt. Not a place of growth. A landmass that existed as a landmass only, and not as a true ecosystem. Soon after feeling, the eyeless mass began to see. The land was black, dark as the night sky, a black wasteland made of powdery black soil, completely devoid of nutrients. 

Taste came third. The dry dirt tasted like dry dirt.

Finally, hearing; an eerie silence. Nothing lived in this place, nothing but the quelk. 

The quelk picked itself up, forming the shape that unformed slimes were instinctually accustomed to, a sort of half sphere or bubble shape, two and a half feet vertical and four feet horizontal. The quelk looked up.

Before it was a great keep: a castle built of gray stone, towering from the peak of a hill in the center of a round chasm. From the bottom of that chasm blew a wind, surging, silent and faintly gray, and within that wind, a fence of metal spikes. 

There was something primordial to this whole scene, but it was not the quelk’s domain. The quelk went in the other direction, down the hill into the valley of dead dirt, seeking to perform its primary instinct: to break down. To decompose.

There is no telling how long the quelk traveled. It didn’t bother to keep track of the sun, and here, in this black and gray place, the light was often hidden behind massive clouds the color of wolf’s hide. The dirt slowly altered, turning from black to a stormy gray. The quelk had its first encounter, a stem of baroleaf, a tiny, weak plant with a stem as heavy as air that could barely hold up its own white flower. The quelk consumed it without a second or first thought, sliding over the plant and tearing it from the earth, quickly melting it down with the acidic essence of itself. It traveled on, expelling nutrients and minerals in microscopic, vaporous form.

The quelk experienced an overwhelming sense of satisfaction and went to look for more, but it was a long time before it found anything else to eat. 

It found a dead twig beneath a rock and consumed it the same way, not nearly as delicious, but better than nothing. Dead material tasted less like purpose than living material did. That being said, the dried carcass of a sand-locust was ten times as delicious as the living baroleaf had been. Life above death, animal above plants. There was a hierarchy for all flavors, and the quelk was discovering it.

The quelk continued. The quelk endured for many long days and nights, and the wind and rain beat down and they were nothing to the quelk.