by shaun lawton
From high above, the Flagellators, looming large, look down on the Meditators, so far away and tiny, they are like a brood of stars, until time itself dilating everything, shrinking the single-minded wrigglers, causing the ripened clutch to grow in size, and a reversal of fortunes spills the ceaseless swimmers, now descending into proximity and entering the labyrinth, finding their ways through the crust of broadening hallways, dropping into expanding fissures, until one by one they begin to weaken, and the vast majority lodge in a crevice somewhere and expire, unless one or two or so survive long enough for the strange sun to creep up to them, whispering pale cool flames in their ears, the coronal language of welcoming them into the fold of their tomb, itself a flower triggered to awaken and discharge the emissaries of oblivion, who start out very small at first, but manage to grow and mature into new spore factories, some capable of producing billions of Flagellators, and others countless Meditators, until they are wrenched apart in an explosion which will eventually come to reverse itself, from high above, and on below, where the cycle repeats again and again within the breathing flesh of time. Wink.