RE: First
04-16-2016, 08:57 PM
Some of the others drew your attention more often and for longer than the less interesting, farther apart ones. You especially enjoyed being with and learning about the ones that last long enough for you to watch for more than a tiny instant but change enough to be interesting. Old wood and hidden roots and the diffuse networks of fungal colonies that join them always held more fascination for you than meat or stone or air. Even the void, comfortingly empty and everpresent, could distract you little when your mood turned to matter.
Most recently, you found a sapling. It was tiny and sickly, a hopeful but foolish sprout from a long-dormant seed. You knew that there were once great forests in the soil it clung to, but by the time a rare rainstorm happened to trigger that sapling's growth, there was little but ash and dust. Something about it appealed to you. It was the first. It would be the First.
You looked the dying plant in a way you rarely bothered to waste on others, and as your awareness filled it, it grabbed back, desperately and thirstily trying to support itself on your being. You capriciously consented, and before you were really aware of it, the two of you were woven together. You spread out, pushing its branches ever higher and its roots ever deeper; you spread into the tiny things that lived an and in it, the things it needed to live and the things that fed on it; you filled everything and in return you discovered you had a body for the first time, one miles across and greener and deeper and more varied than it could ever have been without you.
And then, not all at once and certainly before you noticed, it all started to fail. The complex orders you arranged fell to simplicity, things stopped moving as much, and you felt... something. It was new, and you did not know how to process it or what it was, but every part of you screamed that it was wrong, that it was bad. Even as your body shrank, the smaller parts of you consuming the larger ones as they fell, you wondered how to respond.
What do you want?
Most recently, you found a sapling. It was tiny and sickly, a hopeful but foolish sprout from a long-dormant seed. You knew that there were once great forests in the soil it clung to, but by the time a rare rainstorm happened to trigger that sapling's growth, there was little but ash and dust. Something about it appealed to you. It was the first. It would be the First.
You looked the dying plant in a way you rarely bothered to waste on others, and as your awareness filled it, it grabbed back, desperately and thirstily trying to support itself on your being. You capriciously consented, and before you were really aware of it, the two of you were woven together. You spread out, pushing its branches ever higher and its roots ever deeper; you spread into the tiny things that lived an and in it, the things it needed to live and the things that fed on it; you filled everything and in return you discovered you had a body for the first time, one miles across and greener and deeper and more varied than it could ever have been without you.
And then, not all at once and certainly before you noticed, it all started to fail. The complex orders you arranged fell to simplicity, things stopped moving as much, and you felt... something. It was new, and you did not know how to process it or what it was, but every part of you screamed that it was wrong, that it was bad. Even as your body shrank, the smaller parts of you consuming the larger ones as they fell, you wondered how to respond.
What do you want?