The Shamir

The creature, no bigger than a grain of barley, has six eyes and can eat stone. After all, it helped Solomon build the Temple and etch sigils into the priests’ breastplates. But even a tiny creature can peer into the sky. The moon is out but tonight its light is weak and the stars are visible, the vast array of constellations seemingly asking to be connected, each to each, in patterns. Ursa Minor. Orion. Cygnus. The scorpion. The stars are there, or were there, twinkling ruins of what was, of time and the inevitable—inexorable— inconstancy. Ghosts of fusion. 

The creature does not look at the stars but instead fixes its minuscule eyes on the vastness of empty space, that place where there is nothing, or where nothing is visible. In time, even this nothingness will expand. Where is that region of the universe where nothing changes, where there is constancy? In the mind of this creature, there is no place of rest or of certainty. It can conceive of what could be termed Platonic ideals but knows that even ideas fade. Memory. Boundarylessness. Confusion. Death. Temples fall. Emptiness expands. What is distant becomes more distant. Change itself changes. Temple eater, wall biter, chewer of stone, time has a heart and its blood is knotted.

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More about The mythical worm that could eat stone and helped Solomon build the temple.