The Great Leviathan
The following comes from Dr. Volkov’s diary during the first cycle of settling on the Cluster. While it was preserved in Dr. Volkov’s diary, he did not write it himself. The actual author is unknown.
It came from a void.
That is what we know. It is not from Sol, even if it buries itself in Sol.
When the Leviathan died, it drifted into our system, pulled at by Saturn’s immense gravity, the gas giant pulling the decayed corpse to itself like a cloak. The heat of Sol warmed the beast, its body breaking into pieces to be scattered amongst Saturn’s rings, held in place by gravity like a spiderweb. Pieces of the beast were shepherd moons, collecting debris to itself as it rotted and decayed over time. This is where we were born. The Cluster grew from the decaying shepherd moon made of Leviathan DNA that we barely understood, that we still barely understand.
We do not know it in its full self. We know pieces, mycologists playing pretend at paleontologists, reconstructing what we think of the creature through the bends of its bones, the force of its many hearts, the distribution of its eyes. Like a jigsaw puzzle, we evaluate. We test. We build hypotheses, but not truths. There are no hard truths here. Just our best guesses born from the scientific shoulders we stand on and the mythical tendencies of our psyches.
It had to have been colossal if we can call pieces of it our home.
It has hearts. Many hearts. Of course, a beast that would provide us food and hearth would be composed of countless hearts. Distributed across its vast musculature, pumping recycled and repackaged oxygen through
It has more eyes than hearts. Eyes that do not look into the expanse of space, but rather inward. Tracking its own vitals. Monitoring the oxygen passing through its system. Calculating the gases, minerals and nutrients it processes over millennia. It is a slow system, we have discerned. Slow, yet stable.
It could’ve lived for millennia. Maybe it lived for eons. We do not know what killed the leviathan, what caused it to fall from its grace into Sol, irrevocably changing the shape of humanity’s course through the cosmos.
We found signs of distress. We buried these; we refused to let others know. We found scars in the leviathan’s flesh. Rips and tears on a cosmic level; we didn’t understand what we saw at first. And then, when we realized, when we began to understand what it was we were looking at, our fear made us silent. Whose jaw could be powerful enough? What teeth could rend such flesh?
If the leviathan we call our asteroids, that we walk on, that we till, that we call home… if the leviathan can be bitten, then we do not want to know by what.
Thanks for reading the third entry of The Cluster Archives! We'll continue to unearth the history of the colony and its people in future entries. The road to Act Two continues.
✨ See you in the stars,
Colin [Community Manager]