Glossary Entry: Crawlers

If you've read Whom the Gods Love, you may have noticed my interest in mythology and folklore. As long as I can remember, being interested in writing and reading, mythology and folklore have always held my intense interest. The idea of being able to create my own myths and legends for a world was exciting and fun.

As I began writing Whom the Gods Love, I started up a glossary for the series. It seemed the easiest way to keep track of all the people, places and things I continually referenced throughout the work. After I finished the first book, looking back at the glossary I realized that it often held far more detail about some of the entries than the book ever went in to.

I thought including some glossary entries would be a fun way to reveal parts of the world of Tanavia without spoiling too much of the story, particularly if I picked entries that I knew weren't integral to the main plot of the story. So here's the first entry I've chosen. I hope you enjoy it!

·        Crawlers - Crawlers are huge worms (adults ranging in size from 40 to 80 feet in length) that travel deep underground and eat early in the morning. There is a saying on Tanavia, “Only the early worm catches the bird.” This saying comes from the fact that crawlers enjoy feasting on the nests of rocs. Baby rocs are their favorite prey. Crawlers can sense heat even from deep within the earth. In the early morning hours, when the parents of the young rocs have gone off to look for food, the babies will sometimes fall out of the nest in anticipation of their meal. If they do not make it back up to the safety of the rocky crevices where their nests are, they are likely going to become the meal of a crawler. Crawlers will also make a quick meal of a traveling party if the group has not taken care to sleep atop hard ground when in crawler territory. Around the same time as the dew begins to settle in the morning, men will disappear from a camp, bedding and all, into the mouth of a crawler. Crawlers have mouths capable of opening wide enough to easily swallow a man whole. Unfortunately for the victims of a crawler attack, they have no teeth. Instead, they have a very tough leathery interior to their mouths that is extremely slick with saliva. The tough, slimy orifice makes it difficult for the prey to claw or cut their way out. The walls of the throat and digestive track of a crawler are also very muscular. Yet they do not constrict the life out of their prey. The final unhappy factor in being eaten by a crawler; they eat their prey feet first. This is particularly gruesome for the victim because the airway and the digestive track of a crawler is the same common passageway right down to the fork where air is funneled into the lungs and food is funneled into the stomach. Due to the unique qualities of the crawler’s digestive system, it can take the crawler days to fully pass a meal into its stomach. In order for the crawler to breathe while it eats these large meals, it must lodge food tightly into the passageway to the stomach until it had fully passed beyond the common duct. The prey, awash with oxygen, can still live while its lower extremities are being digested.  Some men say they can tell when they are near a colony of crawlers by the faint, muffled screams coming from beneath the ground. Crawlers have no known predators, but adult roc pairs have been known to take one down in defense of their nestlings.