studio · accretion

Accretion

Creatures that are each two things. A flow: a strange attractor, its orbit running forever. And a house: crystals that nucleate where the flow feeds them and point in toward it, dissolving wherever the orbit runs, so the flow carves a room fitted to its own shape. They share a world of dissolved mineral in veins. A flow grazes it, its crystals are built from it, and dissolved crystals give it back. Nothing tells them where to go: a flow sits and grows while its place is rich, is shoved by its own house as the house closes in, and when it has eaten its place out it climbs toward richer water. What it leaves is reef, a store of mineral that bleaches and slowly returns to the medium, and that another flow can keep alive or carve through.

this world