Starfall Devourer

The crater had teeth. We saw them as the stars above its rim bent into a mouth wider than the farmhouse buried in the center. Meteor spines held black limbs around a body of glassed earth. The impact site itself stood up.

Our lantern sparks dragged toward its throat. Loose stones rolled uphill. The sound of the bite came before the wound it made in the world. We threw the star compass into an empty well. It insisted down was somewhere else. The Devourer turned its appetite on its own shadow, and the crater closed around it.

It changes where falling ends. Loose matter tilts toward the body; local weight tests structures until it finds an anchor that resists. That anchor takes the bite. Light attracts it, but mass sustains it. A fortified refuge offers a denser mouthful than open ground. Another directional law can confuse it, especially an instrument or ritual asserting a different down. After a large meal, it briefly folds inward to compress the mass. That collapse is its nearest approach to vulnerability.