In the House of the Worm by George R. R. Martin

recovered his nerve. Before he was finished, he had used at least ten matches; each served to illuminate only a part of the long carcass.
    The worm—it was not the White Worm after all, Annelyn finally decided, though it was certainly bigger than anything he’d ever encountered—was far gone in its decay, past the peak of its ripeness, for which Annelyn was profoundly grateful. Even the ghost of its putrefaction was bad enough. Though shrunken in death, it filled the burrow three-quarters full, so that Annelyn had to hug the wall to squeeze by it. A thousand lesser worms and other wriggling things had feasted on its immense corpse, and a few still remained; Annelyn could see them crawling around inside, through the great worm’s milky translucent skin.
    The skin was part of the terror. Most of the monster’s meat had decomposed into noxious fluids or had been consumed by the scavengers, but the skin was intact. It was like thick leather, cracked and brittle now, but still formidable. Not easy for an enemy to cut through. That was part of the terror, yes.
    The mouth was another part. Annelyn saw it briefly by matchlight, and wasted a second match to be sure. It had teeth. Rings of them, five concentric rings each narrower than the one before, in a circular mouth large enough to swallow a man’s head and shoulders. The inner rings were bone, ordinary bone, and that was bad enough, but the outermost ring, the greatest—the teeth were bluish black, glinting like  . . . like  . . . metal?
    That was the second part of the terror.
    The final part was its size. Annelyn measured it, match by match, step by step, struggling to get by, struggling not to choke. The worm was at least twenty feet long.
    He wasted no more matches when the corpse was behind him. He plunged forward as quickly as he could, blundering noisily through the dark until the smell was only an unpleasant memory and he could breathe again. Sometime during his rush forward, Annelyn realized why this burrow was so strange. A wormhole. He giggled insanely. It must be a wormhole.
    When the blackness was once again a clean blackness, he slowed down. There was nothing to do but press onward, after all.
    He was remembering something strange the Meatbringer had said when he had been babbling about the Changemasters. Something about “huge white eaterworms, who multiply and grow more terrible every day.” It hadn’t made any particular sense then. Now, now it did. The Meatbringer had been talking of the Changemasters, of things they brought into the world to afflict the grouns. The thing that lay behind him was indeed an affliction. For the first time in his life, Annelyn felt sorrow for the grouns.
    The burrow turned. He felt ahead of him and followed it around.
    Then Annelyn saw a light.
    He blinked, but it did not vanish; it was a small thing, a purplish glow so dark it almost blended with the blackness, but by now his eyes were very sharp for any trace of light at all. Not hurrying, he began to walk toward it, never daring to hope.
    The light did not fade. It swelled as he drew nearer, growing steadily larger though scarcely any brighter. He could see nothing by it, nothing but the light itself, so dim was its glow.
    After a time he saw that it was round. The end of the burrow. The wormhole came out somewhere.
    When it had grown to man size and was still there, only then did Annelyn take heart and begin to tremble. He ran the last few feet, to the glowing violet circle of freedom, the magic portal that would restore his vision. He held the burrow walls with both hands as he looked through, and down.
    Then he was very still indeed.
    Below him was a huge chamber, bigger than the Chamber of the Changemasters. His wormhole had come out high above the floor, a round gap in a hard stone wall. He could see a hundred other wormholes with a glance, and things moving in some of them, and he could imagine a hundred others. The ceiling, the walls, the floor, all were