The One Who Chirrs in the Darkness

He was born in the darkness, and that became his first memory. Not the darkness itself, but its texture — moist, viscous, pressing in from all sides, like an embrace that didn't want to let go. His world was a sphere, and he dwelled at the very heart of it. Then came the Sound. Not the chaotic rustle that clung to the walls of his cradle, but a rhythmic, insistent one. A knock. Knock-knock. Knock-knock-knock. It was a code, a password, unlocking a door from one state to another.

The shell gave way, and he was struck by light. It wasn't just bright; it was pain, digging into thousands of eyes unprepared for it. He shut them all at once, and it was as if the universe had simultaneously gone out and been born anew — inside him.

His name was Beetle. Just Beetle. He knew no other names for himself. His world was the Heap — a giant, incomprehensible conglomeration of everything: half-rotted leaves, twigs, the scents of decay and sweetish pollen. The Heap was his universe, and it had its own laws. The main law was simple: what is above is unreliable and dangerous. What is below is safe and true.

His first teacher was the Old Beetle, his grandfather, a creature with a chitinous carapace cracked like old bark and antennae that caught the vibrations of worlds invisible even to compound eyes.

"Remember," the Old Beetle would say, perched on the Thinker's Mushroom, the highest point of their world. "The world is a Sphere. But not a simple one. It is woven from hexagons. Perfect, like honeycombs. Everything you see is merely a projection of these hexagons onto the curved surface of Chaos. Our task is to roll our Sphere, polishing the chaos until it becomes perfect."

"What Sphere?" asked Beetle, looking at the formless pile of leaves beneath his feet.

"The one inside," the Old Beetle answered mysteriously, pointing his antennae towards the sky. "And the one outside. They are one."

The sky was the strangest thing. It changed. Sometimes it was Blue — dazzling, frightening, bottomless. Sometimes it was Black, studded with tiny, cold points which the Old Beetle called "holes in the ceiling of another world." And sometimes it was invaded by the Gray, Cold Quagmire, from which fell heavy, transparent spheres. Water. Each such sphere was a whole ocean, capable of washing away an anthill, drowning a caterpillar, altering the Heap's topography.

It was during one such Quagmire that Beetle met Her.

He was hiding under a burdock leaf, watching the world outside melt and flow. Water streamed down the leaf's veins, forming temporary crystal rivers, and the entire familiar world turned into a wavering, unstable realm. And suddenly he saw someone else climbing down a slippery stalk leading down into the impenetrable thickets at the base of the Heap. It was a Firefly. She was unlike anyone. Her abdomen emitted a soft, warm, greenish light. She slipped, fell, got up again, and her little light flickered but did not go out, like a stubborn thought in pitch darkness.

Beetle, driven by an impulse he couldn't have explained, leaned out from his shelter.

"Hey! Over here!" he signaled with his antennae, in the language of vibrations understood by all beetles.

She flinched, her light extinguished for a moment, then flared up again, brighter, studying. She crawled to his leaf. She smelled of night flowers and something subtly alien, like a wind from beyond the edge of the world.

"Why are you alone here?" asked Beetle. "Everyone hides during the Quagmire."

"I am searching," the Firefly simply replied. Her voice was like the rustle of silken wings.

"Searching for what?"

"Other lights. I've seen them. Far away. Beyond the Great Flat Wall. They blink. I must understand what they are saying."

The Great Flat Wall was the edge of their world. Beyond it lay the Unknown. No beetle in its right mind sought to go there.

"It's dangerous," said Beetle. "The Legs walk there. Great, like tree trunks, they fall from the sky and shake the earth."

"I know," said the Firefly, and her light suddenly wavered, turned sad. "But I must. Otherwise, my light will go out forever. It fades when I am alone."

They sat under the leaf throughout the Quagmire. Beetle told her about the theory of the Sphere and the hexagons. The Firefly listened, and her light pulsed in time with his words. She said that perhaps the Sphere was the very perfect light she was seeking.

When the Gray Quagmire crawled away, yielding to the Blue Emptiness, the Firefly thanked him and crawled down, towards the edge of the world. Beetle watched her go until the greenish dot of her light dissolved in the russet chaos of the Heap. And for the first time, he felt that his own world, so reliable and understandable, had suddenly become cramped.

He returned to the Old Beetle.

"Grandfather, what is light?"

The Old Beetle was cleaning his antennae with his forelegs.

"Light is the memory of what was before the darkness. And the promise of what will come after. It is deceptive. It shows only surfaces. The truth is in the darkness, in the soil, in the roots."

"But it comes in different kinds. There is the one from above, hot and blinding. And there is... another kind. Warm. Like the Firefly's."

The Old Beetle stopped cleaning his antennae. His facets for a moment reflected the infinite blue of the sky.

"Ah," he uttered. "You've met one of them. The fire-wanderers. They seek their mirrors in the night. It is a sad path. Their light is their soul, turned inside out. They burn so as not to freeze in solitude. But sooner or later, their fire attracts He Who Devours Light."

Beetle didn't know who He Who Devours Light was, but a chill ran down his back at the very name.

The days flowed on. Beetle rolled his dung ball, like everyone else. He pushed it up the slopes of the Heap, feeling his muscles strain beneath his chitin. The Sphere was his karma, his duty, his meaning. But now, looking at its perfect, dark, polished surface, he saw an imperfection. It had no light. Neither the blinding one from above, nor the warm, green one, like hers.

He began to notice things he hadn't seen before. The world was full of signals, invisible dialogues. Ants, scurrying on their inscrutable business, exchanged touches of antennae, transmitting complex messages about food supplies and routes. A recluse spider sat motionless in the center of its silver web, like a monk in meditation, catching not only flies but also the world's tremors, the vibrations of the wind, in its silken nets. A caterpillar, with whom Beetle sometimes spoke, assured him that all of this was a dream, and real life would begin later, after the Great Transformation, when it would shed its old skin and become someone completely different.

"Isn't it frightening?" asked Beetle. "To become another?"

"It's more frightening to remain the same," the caterpillar replied philosophically, chewing a leaf with appetite. "We are all in a cocoon. It's just that mine is visible."

The thought of a cocoon struck Beetle. Maybe the Heap was just a giant, crude cocoon? And the Great Flat Wall was its boundary?

One night, when the Black Sky was studded with holes, he saw the green light again. It was weak, barely noticeable. Beetle abandoned his Sphere and crawled towards it.

The Firefly lay at the foot of the Great Flat Wall. One of her delicate wings was broken. Her light flickered like the last ember in a dying fire.

"He is there," she whispered, seeing him. "I saw. A whole swarm of lights. They blinked. They spoke. But I couldn't understand... Too far. And a Leg... almost stepped on me."

Beetle brought her a droplet of dew collected from a spiderweb. He sat beside her, in silence. Her light gradually grew stronger, warming his side.

"Why don't you abandon your Sphere?" she asked. "And come with me?"

"I cannot. It is... my essence. My portion of Being."

"Or maybe it's just a habit?" the Firefly said softly.

She recovered after a few days. But something in her had changed. The flame of her soul no longer strained outward with its former force. It became even, pensive. She often looked at the Sphere that Beetle rolled.

"It really is very perfect," she said once. "It has its own beauty. The beauty of completeness."

And then Beetle did something insane. He rolled his Sphere up to her.

"Help me," he said. "Let's roll it together. Maybe together we can roll it to the edge and see what's there."

They began to roll the Sphere together. It was a strange sight: Beetle pushing his dark, earth-scented burden, and the Firefly, whose soft light illuminated their path, turning the chaos of the Heap into a fairy-tale, shimmering landscape. In her light, familiar twigs and leaves looked different — mysterious and beautiful. Beetle realized the Old Beetle had been wrong. Light did not conceal the truth. It created a new one, one that could not be discerned without it.

They talked about everything. About whether the holes in the Black Sky were other worlds or just cracks in the dome of their own. About whether the caterpillar remembered its past lives after the Transformation. About whether a Leg, that colossus falling from the sky, was itself a being, simply living on a different scale of time, where one of its moments was a beetle's entire lifetime.

The love of the beetle and the firefly became their quiet pact against universal loneliness. They could not merge in a passionate embrace, like moths. Their bodies were too different. But when her light fell on his chitinous back, he felt a warmth that no sun could give. And when he touched her antennae, her light flared brighter, and that was more eloquent than any words.

They rolled the Sphere to the very edge of the Heap, to the foot of the Great Flat Wall. Beyond it lay something unimaginable. A flat, green, cropped emptiness. And in the distance — giant transparent cubes, from which came voices like rolls of thunder, but ordered. The world of the Legs.

And then they saw Them. Other lights. Not green, but yellow, warm, flickering in the darkness of that world like constellations descended to earth. They blinked. Not chaotically, but with a certain rhythm.

The Firefly froze. Her whole being became one big listening ear, one absorbing facet.

"I understand," she whispered. And her own light began to respond. Slowly, timidly. She was speaking to them in her language of light.

Beetle watched this dialogue of lights and felt a surge of that primordial darkness from which he was born. He was here, on the brink of two worlds, and she was already there. Her soul was flying across the chasm, to its own kind.

The dialogue did not last long. Then the lights there, in the distance, went out one after another. The Firefly turned to Beetle. There was no joy in her light. There was a quiet, bottomless sadness.

"They said... that it is the end of the season. That the Cold will come soon, which will take all the lights. They are leaving. And I must go."

"Where?" asked Beetle, already knowing the answer.

"There. From where one does not return. To a place where there is no Heap, no Wall. Where there is only light and silence."

He understood. He Who Devours Light was not a monster. It was the Cold. A white, soundless emptiness.

"Go," said Beetle. He found no other words.

She looked at him, and her light suddenly became so bright, so piercing, that Beetle felt as if he could see through the entire world — and all the hexagons it was made of. She touched his antenna with the tip of hers.

"Thank you for your Sphere," she said. "Now I know that a perfect form exists."

Then she spread her wings, even the broken one, pushed off from the Wall, and flew away. Her green little light, so fragile and unquenchable, drifted away into the darkness, towards alien worlds, growing smaller and smaller until it dissolved into the night, merging with those distant lights that had also gone out.

Beetle was left alone. At his feet lay his perfect, dark, useless Sphere. He pushed it with his leg. The Sphere rolled, crossed the invisible border of their world, and fell from the precipice into that flat, green emptiness. Beetle heard it strike the ground of the world of the Legs with a dull thud and roll on, into the unknown.

He did not follow it. He raised his head and gazed at the point where her light had dissolved. The sky in the east was beginning to lighten. The Blue Emptiness was replacing the Black. Soon the blinding light that does not warm the soul would appear.

The Old Beetle died just before the Cold. He simply fell asleep and did not wake up. Beetle found him sitting on the Thinker's Mushroom, his antennae aimed at the sky, as if trying to catch the last, most important vibration.

Beetle survived the Cold. He burrowed deep into the Heap, into that very first, salvific darkness. But now it was not a womb to him. It was a crypt. He lay motionless, feeling life stagnate, and thought about the sphere. That perhaps the Old Beetle had been right, but hadn't understood it completely. The world really was a sphere. But to roll it does not mean to polish it. To roll it means to search. To search in the night for another such little light. And when you find it, it no longer matters where it rolls. What matters is that it illuminates the path.

When the Cold receded and the world came to life again, Beetle crawled out to the surface. He was alone. The caterpillar must have succeeded in its Transformation, the anthill was deserted, the spiderweb torn.

He crawled to the edge of the Heap, to the Great Flat Wall. He knew he could not fly like her. He knew his light was only a dull reflection in his chitin. But he knew something else, too.

He found a small, inconspicuous flower breaking through near the wall. It was like one she had once described to him. And every evening, when the Blinding Blue was replaced by the Black, Perforated Infinity, Beetle would climb onto the very bud of this flower, turn towards the emptiness, towards the place where alien lights had once burned, and rub his elytra against the stem.

A quiet, chirring sound would ring out. No music, no light. Just a vibration. A whisper in the dark. A code. A password. A message into nowhere that had become a message into eternity.

At first, it was merely a ritual of remembrance. Through the act of rubbing his elytra, he would summon her image from non-existence: the phantom warmth on his chitin, the greenish gleam on the wall, the rustle that wasn't there. He spoke to the void, and the void did not answer.

But one day, on an especially clear and starless night, his chirring, reflected from the smooth surface of the Wall, returned to him altered. A new overtone appeared in it, an alien, barely perceptible frequency. It was not an answer, but merely a confirmation that his signal was not drowning in nothingness, but was going somewhere further, into curved space, where, perhaps, alien ears had their own antennae.

It was then that his ritual ceased to be nostalgia and became a practice. A meditation.

He no longer rolled Spheres. He sat on his flower and observed. He saw a new, young beetle with a fanatical gleam in his facets rolling his freshly molded ball, muttering something about hexagons and duty. He saw ants, united by a single rhythm of an invisible pheromonal mandra, carrying a dry pine needle, majestic and useless, into their citadel. He was outside their flow. He was the one who watches the dance from the side, not hearing the music.

Old age for an insect is not a fading of strength. It is a slow hardening. His chitin was becoming brittle, his joints losing flexibility. But inside, behind this congealing carapace, his consciousness, on the contrary, was softening, becoming permeable.

He recalled the Old Beetle's words about truth hidden in the darkness. Now he understood them differently. Darkness is not the opposite of light. It is its foundation. The canvas on which light embroiders its temporary patterns. Her light was one such pattern. His life was another. The disappearance of a pattern does not spoil the canvas. But did that make the pattern any less beautiful?

The next night, he crawled to the flower again. But he did not chirr. Instead, he began slowly, methodically, to walk around the base of the Wall along its perimeter. His legs tread the very boundary where the loose, familiar earth of the Heap gave way to the cold and perfectly smooth surface of the Alien.

He was looking for a crack. A fissure. Any flaw.

His search was devoid of despair or hope. It was simply a new action, replacing the old one. If one cannot fly to the lights, perhaps one can crawl through?

After several days, he found it. At the very bottom, under an overhanging clump of compacted dirt, was a tiny passage. Not into the Alien world, but somewhere deeper, into the very bowels of the Heap. From it wafted the smell of old, dead moisture and something else... silence. Not the one outside, but a dense one, absorbing all sounds.

He squeezed inside. The tunnel led downward. He crawled, almost blind, navigating by touch. The walls were cool and rough. Sometimes his antennae detected webs, but old, abandoned ones.

At the end of the tunnel, he found himself in an Emptiness. Not a celestial one, but an underground one. It was a cave, gnawed out by someone long ago. Its vault was lost in darkness, and in the center lay a Stone. Not large, but perfectly smooth, polished to a mirror shine by thousands of touches. It was warm.

Beetle approached and touched it with his leg. The Stone radiated a steady, muted warmth, like a sleeping animal. He settled down beside it, pressing his back against its surface. There was no wind here, no sound of other crickets chirping. Only the steady hum of the earth itself and the beating of his own hemolymph.

He sat like that for several hours. And suddenly he realized he wasn't thinking about anything. Not about the Sphere, not about the Firefly, not about hexagons. His mind, usually fussy and anxious, grew still. He simply was. Warm stone at his back. Darkness before his eyes. Silence.

He had not attained enlightenment. He had not comprehended a great truth. He had simply found a quiet place where he could rest from himself.

When he crawled back out, it was already getting light. He looked at his flower by the Wall. It was still as small and inconspicuous. Beetle crawled up to it and broke it with one movement of his leg. The ritual was over.

He did not go far. He found a secluded spot under a large burdock leaf not far from the entrance to his cave. Now he had two places: one for peace, by the warm stone. The other to observe the life of the Heap, as one watches a flowing river.

He saw the young beetle, the one with the shiny carapace, furiously smash his Sphere against a snag because it had crumbled. He saw ants carry past the body of their soldier, torn in two. He saw a new Firefly, just as fragile and green, fluttering uncertainly in the twilight, her light just as lonely.

He felt neither superiority nor pity. He simply saw. And in that, there was a strange, flat consolation. Everything repeats. Suffering, searches, fury, love. It was just a seasonal cycle in which he no longer participated.

He began to notice small, practical things. How the movement of ants could predict rain. How the spider weaves its web always according to the same pattern, yet each new one is slightly different. How the taste of morning dew differs from evening dew.

He lived. Simply lived. Without a grand purpose. Without striving for an ideal. Without hope for a reunion.

One day, shortly before the arrival of the new Cold, he descended into his cave to wait it out. He settled by the warm stone, curled up, and closed his facets.

Outside, the wind howled, the first frost was falling. But here, below, it was quiet and calm. He did not think about what was happening out there. He did not think about what would come after. He felt only the steady warmth of the stone and a heavy, slow calming in his entire body.

His final thought was not a memory or a revelation. Just a sensation. The sensation that he, in essence, needed nothing more. And in that was its own, very simple and very quiet truth.

And somewhere far away, beyond the Wall, in a warm house, a child turned on a desk lamp. And its light, soft, yellow, passed through the glass, fell upon the frosty ground, and illuminated a small, clumsy, long-forgotten dung ball lying at the very edge of the world. And in that light, for a moment, it no longer seemed like a clump of dirt, but something infinitely valuable, almost sacred. A mirrored sphere in which the whole universe was reflected.