The Chained Watcher

Backstory: Jormungandr

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(First bit's gonna be a little explanation/summary, cause I want to tell people about the happy little snake without needing to fill in too much of the in-between bits.)

(Also, this is a bit of a sight into my writing process. I'll tell myself I'll just make a brief outline, but as I continue, my bullet points become paragraphs, and before I know it my outline has seamlessly morphed into a chapter halfway through.)

Jormungandr was the most successful living statue experiment Grian made, at least when looking at size. Its predecessors either grew too brittle as their magic was stretched too thin across their mass or didn't have enough resilience to support their increased sizes.

This (not so) little snake was so successful that it managed to attract its own atmosphere in the later years of its life. It wasn't very pleased by this, even if Grian found it hilarious.

The way Jormungandr moved through space was with slithering/swimming motions, pushing off of literal space itself and negating the need for other types of propulsion. It never figured out how to go faster than light, but it doesn't get tired or need refueling either.

Sometimes when Grian would come to check up on it, Jormungandr would bring him wrecked spaceships it had found over the century(ies) since it had last seen him. Like a cat proudly showing off a mouse, it would bring him the shiniest bits of its hoard and make him take them. Grian studies tech from time to time, even if most of his focus is on magic, so he usually just shakes his head and takes what he wants from the ships before giving them back.

After it reached a certain size, the gravity well it produced started to be noticeable. It sometimes curled up into a ball and napped for a few decades, and when it woke up it had several asteroids and comets in orbit to snack on. The little bits and pieces that it couldn't clean off its hide ended up helping to conceal it whenever ships would fly by, usually mistaking the coiled planet-sized snake for an actual planet.

Earlier on, when Jormungandr was a lot smaller and Grian checked in with it more often, it managed to find an escape pod lost in the asteroid field. The occupant was still alive, but their propulsion systems were barely functional and only life support was at full capacity. Poor guy must have panicked when a giant space snake appeared outside his pod and started circling him curiously.

It doesn't exactly have any hands with which to carry things, so after flicking its tongue at the pod a few times to make sure there was actually something alive in it, it carefully, freaking out the stranded spacer in the process, caught the pod in its mouth. It didn't bite it, nor did it crush it, it just held the pod as gently as it could and started swimming towards one of the planets it remembered its master describing as 'habitable'.

Jormungandr doesn't like descending down onto planets. The gravity makes it feel sluggish and restrained, and it can't do much of anything without wrecking its surroundings. But, its curiosity got the better of it, and so it brought the escape pod down to the planet's surface.

Lowering its head to the ground, it rolled the escape pod out of its mouth and onto the lush grass, unknowingly bouncing the spacer around quite a bit. Grass is quite strange to it, being living but not living in the same way it does, not the same as its master does. Its master likes explaining things, maybe it should ask?

An hour passes with it coiled around the pod while giving it a decent amount of space, and the metal shell around the living thing breaks open. No wait, the shell is mechanical. See, it knows some of what master talks about! Even if a lot of what master says doesn't make sense, it can still recognize that this metal shell is mechanical.