Uxotark

The Account of the Azimuth Astronomer

His Description of Outer Uxotark

The aforementioned planet of the Azimuth Astronomer has gravity that radiates inversely; the rugged surface is barren and lifeless and looks like unctuous candle wax diverging in every direction. Yet there is life here – underneath countless layers of stone there lie monstrosities indescribable. The only evidence of their existence is the innumerable tendrils resembling umbilical cords that emerge from grooves and chasms that comprise a reticulated maze that scars the face of the planet.

Uxotarkian Humanoids and what was known to him of their civilization

Attached to the end of these cords are shock-maned humanoids without genitalia or stomachs, who are suspended between the benevolent life-giving earth and the infinite void that stretches below. Their cords are the subject of immense cultural importance. They are the sole flesh-tether that binds the individual to the deity which nourishes and protects them from the black gulf of outer space – death would be preferable to being slashed asunder, and one’s soul plummeting into dark unknown. All beings doth hang from the crags, but none else dangle from the mazy chasms and owe their survival to a mother-deity of protoplasm and ichor that they have never seen, which blest them with the intellect and ways of civilized people, and the inner fire of enmity which plague all intelligent life. With leaf-shaped swords of jade and ivory, the warriors of this planet slash only above the shoulders, or if should they fight to settle a feud, the precious life-cord becomes the principal target. Their wars are bound by ancient taboos telepathically agreed upon by every soldier on the planet.
And of their settlements, they are built in perfect harmony with the chasms to avoid entanglement. There are no roads, no complex affairs, only singular rooms or towers intersecting with a ravine. Only close-hugging reihendörfer flanked by fields of hanging leaf vines and huge powder-filled bulbs. Puddles and lakes of metallic fluid, men clepe the “sweat of the world” ripple without provocation.

A subsequent observation of Inner Uxotark in the account of Wu the Wayfarer

The Nature of the Concave Planet

And now we return to planet Uxotark, which seems on the outside to be an inhospitable planet peopled by the most basal forms of life excluding umbilically-attached humanoids and barometzes, rudimentarily adapted to survive on a world where gravity works inversely, repulsing most objects. But the source of the humanoids and the being which feeds them has been assumed to slumber deep underground – la, so far beneath the stony earth do these unseen beings reside that they are buried not in solid rock, but they inhabit another world that lines the hollow innards of the planet. For Uxotark, beneath its outer crust of clammy stone some twenty kilometres in depth adheres zealously to an obsolete theory that we of the 21st century find ludicrous - the concave earth. Instead of a core or a mantle there is an enormous cavity filled with air. Much like an oyster, the cavity is lined with robust organic substances – in some parts it is chitin, and in others it is keratin. The ocean is warm and shallow; for one might glimpse the waves reflected in the nacreous seafloor. It is bathed in candescent light that looks as if it were filtered behind a slab of dubious living flesh. The horizon does not vanish suddenly as it does on earth, where the transition between sea and sky is vulgarly sharp and abrupt like two differently coloured sheets of paper overlapping each other.

The Sun Within

And when one looks up anywhere in Inner Uxotark, be it at Horiseous se Venag or Parroush Chout, he will behold a wonder so uncanny that he will gasp and stagger backwards if he does not prepare. In place of a sun there is instead an organ that looks like a horrific overgrown cross between a pineapple, a heart, and a cancerous tumour, and its fleshy warmth substitutes the rays of a sun. Hundreds of relatively small organelles comprise this meat-sun, and within there is bioluminescence. Manifold rubbery tendrils weave about the skies. From afar they’re like mycelium or pulsating veins. But the forthcoming observer will note their monstrous girth, which are a thousand score paces wide when they dip into the shallow ocean, at which the tendril’s skin soaks up water and shrivels. Somewhere in Skabrouke Chout there is a cairn from which a keratinous pylon juts out and tapers until it terminates in a broad fan of ivory that can be seen from across the sea. There is a red tendril that coils round and round it until it finally vanishes underground, its entrance rimmed by a soil ring.

Present Life-Forms

Like the barometzes of Outer Uxotark the cavernous concave cavity is populated by all manner of gruesome zoophytic beings, for the boundaries of plant and beast are non-existent, and the taxonomy of nature as we know it is ordered differently from that which we are used to on earth. Gas bladders and flagellae are common forms of propulsion, as is the locomotion of the molluscs; there are no wings nor legs, appendages are limited to tentacles terminating in sucker mouths or crab-claws, and all things writhe like exposed, irradiated flesh, undulating and bending and folding.

There are few specimens of sophisticated life on Outer Uxotark, let alone plant life adapted to the emaciated soil and atmosphere and the antigravitic properties that distinguish Uxotark from others. Most of the powers, whatever divinities or spirits that govern the form and shape of living things, have yet to muster the courage to mandate the growth of plants beyond the same mosses or lichen, for fear that any deviance from the stultified anatomic patterns to which they have adhered for eons will collapse upon conception, shrivelling up. For a week it will remain a hanging corpse until it withers up enough to be blown free by the aether-wind, at which it will plummet into the abyss. Hence, they rely on the powers of Inner Uxotark to stretch forth their tendrils of dripping flesh and fashion mockeries of sapience that exist as instruments of a god’s will. But there are exceptions to this state of affairs, for as rare as native Outer Uxotark life is, it still exists, tethered not to the abominable puppet-masters within whose bloated protuberances pump sustenance directly into the bellies of their humanoids and barometzes, who are without self-sufficiency or self-determination.

Bullet-Berries

Of these is a fascinating specimen of one of Uxotark’s few flowering plants, which are as rare as copernicium is on Earth among the myriad evolutionarily stunted ecosystems of the Outer World.

Connotations in Culture

Some cultures detest these plants, for they draw their sustenance not from the secretions of the ever-benevolent earth-mother of the unfathomable womb-cavity below, but the hardened rock, nitrous and phosphorescent protrusions, and the ichor that threads through the skin of the world. To ingest their fruits is to abuse and betray the sapience blest by the earth-mother unto one’s soul. Indeed, it is venomous to the amorphous and incomprehensible organ that connects them all, henceforth all who pitch a masticated globule of its sinful substance down the sacred tether are hereby severed from the life-giving earth and cast down to the cold black expanse that hangs below. Others revere them, deeply admiring the plants’ autonomy and agency in contrast to the hapless dependency of the Uxotarkian humanoids or barometzes to deific forces that they never witness. But most of them do not expend precious time from their lives attaching such arbitrary meanings to these weeds of the corruptible and temporary outer world, nor do they risk immediate bodily harm punishing those who do, because these plants seldom do affect their lives in any way, shape or form.

Physiology

And as for the plant itself, its form and shape and the manner of its doings, my tautological prattling and stilted evocation be damned, it stands atop a hillock of woody flesh from which its many roots, stronger than steel, bore deep into the rock in pursuit of crystalline deposits of nutritious minerals. Like an anchor are these roots, that bend like hooks - at the end it tapers, curving again in a barb. Along the main roots, of which there are perhaps a hundred wooden hooks embedded deep in stone, most of it remains woody and bare, but some points along it where the concentration of nutrients waxes, it spills forth its filaments which wither and die the moment the richness of rock runs out. Above the stem is short, but it is here where the plant branches off at three points, so in total it terminates in twenty-seven twigs. At the ends of these are phosphorescent Pennatulacean frills.

Reproduction

These plants have no need for sunlight, for shadowed Uxotark is a rogue planet and there are no pyres in the night skies save for the twinkling stars that arrive and vanish with each passing year. Even the prior statement is false, for there is no sun to orbit around, no blazing orb overhead. Instead the frills of these sift for the dust of supernovas borne aloft by the aetherwind currents, which are particularly strong here for the same reason the flowering plant of Uxotark lives at night. However, you may be questioning the flowering nature of this plant, and never fear! Despite the sea-pen properties of this plant it still has a stamen and pistil and fires pollen laterally via a gas sac. When it grows a fruit, it clings tight to its twig until the moisture is withdrawn from said twig, then once it is ripe and the organs within it have been prepared it plummets for some twenty seconds before exploding with the force of a gunshot, hence the sharp seeds are embedded into solid stone.

An Account of the Gebbraxian Colonies

Platform-Cities

With the wickerwork of Jhaeloe the colonists of Gebbrax weaved multitudinous platforms that were fixed to the exterior of Uxotark by chains appended to gargantuan hooks embedded in rugged stone. When one flies across its surface the platforms oft overlap stalactites, tethered by themselves alone, but on the exterior’s flatter regions they hang at varying distances. Naturally, as befits the arachnid Gebbraxian physiology, the platforms are connected by webs permanently stretched taut by the constant swinging of the chains. It is indeed fortunate that female Gebbraxians can casually repair these agglomerated filaments with their spinnerets alone, provided that they do so on full stomachs.
Several balloons filled with levium are stuffed underneath every platform in the hanging colonies. And the wickerwork platforms which hang at the nadir of their colonies from the longest chains are also the most tightly woven and oft layered with scaffolding between them, for they are the landing platforms of the treble-masted catamarans of the Gebbraxians conveying home-world cargoes. Sailors unload crates and barrels encrusted with stardust, load them into pedal-powered elevators that lead to gargantuan antechambers where idle ships and warehouses alike stand side by side. Otherwise the cargoes are stacked in bulb-shaped web-woven storage-bulbs above the platforms. From here the city is a cascading network of platforms, hanging high above the night skies whose hoary winds howl underfoot, meticulously tethered to a ceiling that looks as though it were melted. The outer city faces the upside-down wastes of Uxotark head on.

Sights to See

The platforms purvey supplies to explorers and traders, high-class restaurants and hostelries overlook – or should we say, underlook – herds of zoophytic ridgedrifters, frolicking among bulletberry bushes and diffident filter-feeding frilltrees, serving gravied aspic as is common fare among Gebbraxian colonists albeit in its jellied confines the braised flesh of barometzes hang suspended in its jellied confines, and the jelly itself concocted from the cartilage of the Jeduah, who are to the Uxotarkians as chimpanzees are to us.

The Barnacle-Geese of Uxotark

Even the icy void that yawns below is not devoid of life beyond the animalcules that encrust the hulls of oncoming ships, for there flap the geese of Uxotark who originate from gnarled, overgrown trees. So thick and mighty are their roots that they split the rocky crust into scree and gravel and imbibe the percolating ichor of Inner Uxotark, and their stillborn branches grow leafless and cadaverous. Earthen eyes would liken the texture and weight of these trees to driftwood months after dropping. But when the branches of these trees wither at last and plunge into pitch-black oblivion they do not drift and bob in the seas of eternity until they wash up within orbit of some nearby planet or star. Instead as they pass the threshold of the animalcular strata life erupts in them and a humble goose of Uxotark spontaneously emerges from dead wood in a crackling eruption of bark and sawdust. Wings flap loose ashen-pale debris and bear the noble bird across the ceiling of once-molten rock.

Type

Planetoid / Moon