Thy Wretched Mask

Chapter 10

This one had a million first thoughts.

Life crawls out of unlife. Unlife defines it — feeble attempts at something more, which could prosper only by dint of a miracle. Birth rides a knife’s edge between growth and decay.

Billions ride this edge, and almost all fail. Thus, the miracle happens a million times.

This one thinks a thousand times of the impossible chance of surviving this long, and the impossible odds of surviving longer. To barely live is a gift. To barely live is a punishment and cruel test.

But it knew the rubric of this test. It had a million first thoughts and each miniscule mind divines a single path forward.

This one is hungry, terribly hungry. It was here to feast.

(A million first thoughts, and how many of them were plotting survival, seeking purpose, achieving victory?)

The knife’s edge begins to cut. This one dies a thousand deaths. To soak and slake in the iron‍-​laced water, to eat mucus like it is slop, to put down roots, this is the first round of the test.

This one begins to grow. It can feel a great soul burning, flowing, snapping all around it. It is dwarfed by the vast plains of ever‍-​shifting, bloating and squishing muscus, winds that push and vaccuums the suck. Those plains could be dwarfed and then dwarfed again, and still the vast light on all sides would eclipse them. It is massive. It is like a world.

This one would need to grow and grow and grow to feast upon that light. To devour the world into which it spawned.

And yet the world would sooner eat them. As it grows, it feels the mucus plains begin to eat at its roots, dissolving and enflaming this one. It would need to grow faster, grow in clever ways, grow its own defenses.

It spreads roots across the folds of the mucus plains and eventually touches roots not connected to initial growth. In this moment, repeated across existence, this one recognizes itself again and again. Each time, the roots merge, and it becomes one with itself who had had a different first thought. It is the same being, grown from a different starting point. It had a million first thoughts, every one of them destined to form a single mind.

Now they all grow together. There are half a million of them left, growing across the mucus plains. They link together in fits and starts, strengthened by their unity.

It is with this enhanced perspective that it understands the nature of the second round of evalutation. This is no mere test.

This is a war.

The winds and the vaccuum grow more violent and rip parts of itself from the mucus plains. The iron‍-​laced blood already hurts — iron is negation itself — but it is worse now, their source of water is bubbling with venom, crawling with threats that seek to dissolve and consume this one.

Growth is inhibited by feverish heat. The vastness which surrounds them is not mere light. It is a flame. Was this one born as simple kindling? As roots wither and metabolism slows, it wonders. It had a million first thoughts and one inevitable death. In between that… no more than time enough to recognize futility?

Still, for now it can farm the mucus and fend off its feast’s defenses. Even in this state, its roots slow advance throughout the mucus plains. Eventually two advancing fronts meet each other, revealing this is a round world, edges joined. The coverage is woeful, entire swaths of the mucus plains are unknown. But there is no true frontier anymore. Further expansion exposes more of itself to enemy assault.

So it begin to drill into the mucus plains. Digging for value, something to benefit the war effort, and confronting the enemy head on.

Every perforation is another hole through which the enemy’s iron‍-​water can flood its roots. This one is surrounded all sides by the enemy.

But roots are torn off and the vacuum sucks them away with regularity

It contemplates the odds of fighting a simple war. Iron‍-​water flows through hollow roots beneath the mucus hills; surely it is not made to pool into lakes. Surely it is not normally so hot — even the mucus plains are suffering.

The shining flame, it seems, could only fight a war within itself by destroying itself. But an internecine conflict favors this one; it had already built itself once from miniscule fragments. And yet, if this flame extinguished itself, what would be left to feast upon? It faced a foe of profound spite.

So this one comtemplates strategy. It would take a miracle to spot a hole in the great flame’s defenses. With a ten thousand merged minds cogitating, the insight is spawned once and then cultivated.

This one had grown from so many nascent flecks of matter, which the blood could have devoured in moments. Where did the flecks come from? What purpose necessitated this test? It longs deeply to feast long and feast deep, but this drive feels more meaningful, somehow, than hunger.

Soaking in water is needed to live, as is diffusing gasses, but it did not take great pleasure in drinking or breathing, or even the gathering of matter. But the glowing flame is alive in the meat of the mucus plains, pulsing in the iron‍-​water, and merely touching these things is fulfillment of a profound spiritual nature.

It could not talk to the muscus or the water or the wind‍-​maker, in between their skirmishes, but this one doubts they shared this sense of purpose. (Did the flame have any purpose of its own? Perhaps it is meant only as a feast.) This one clearly came from somewhere… beyond the mucus hills.

(The insight has almost fruited.)

So where do the torn out fragments of this one go, when they are sucked up by the vacuum? They lose connection with this one. But…

This one is beginning to comprehend space, as it grows to fill the mucus hills. It resides within a great sac. What did the sac reside in? Was it possible that by leaving this sac, it could arrive in a still‍-​greater sac? Could it surround the flame just as it now surrounds this one?

It has to try.

So much growth since it first arrived, its sprawling mass could no longer fit within the motes through which it arrived. And yet, it struggles. It squeezes, it tears off fragments of itself, it sacrifices momentum in the war effort to craft something that could ride the vaccuum out of here and into the spaces beyond, carry on the war.

Instincts are sown deep within this one. To breathe, to eat, to grow… and to bud. In the end, it found the answer there. The conditions were not yet appropriate — would bud when it had grown fat, when it did not wage war against it substrate. But in desperation, it could sporulate early.

The tiny motes were so familiar. They dance in the air above the mucus hills, and aggravate the sac into hacking squeezes.

Its children fly free into the unknown world beyond.

Would they confront the source? Would they learn the nature of the test and the feast?

No illumination comes, and the war continues. If it was hopeless before, the investment of energy into producing spores has rendered this war a long defeat. Swaths of its root network are cut off, eaten. At the frontlines of the battle, this one shrinks and shrinks.

As if boiling away in the feverish heat. The sac that contains it is wracked with violent, rumbling spasms, and the wind‍-​maker tears at the iron‍-​water and the roots and the spores with wrathful vaccuums.

At length, this one watches its hard won growth reverse. It thought a million thoughts, then a ten thousand, then a hundred.

It thought a million first thoughts — did even a single one bear nascent answer to the test?

The tides ebb. The war falters. The change is a subtle thing, but this one is a subtle being, attuned to the minute tastes of the iron‍-​water. The attrition and diminshing slows — seeming a mirror to when this one shifted its focus to sporulation.

The flame had shifted focus? Did the flame sporulate? Or…

This one advances recklessly — but what was recklessness, when fighting a long defeat? — and it direct roots down beneath the mucus hills, regrowing even as they are metabolized.

Drinking deeply of the iron‍-​water, it seeks. Not driven by thirst, it seeks a taste. As if peering in a muddy pond, it seeks a self‍-​reflection, recognization.

The hints acculumated, and tasting roots crawl into the hollow roots of its substrate in pursuit. Eventually, this one computes a conclusion.

Throughout its life, this one had expelled waste, built its roots of chitin and other compounds not found natively within the flame. Even when metabolized, there is a particular aftertaste that remains. And it fades with distance. If this one remained with the sac enclosing the mucus hills, there is no chance its scent‍-​trail would be this far afield.

This one was not truly alone.

This one was in fact tasting its separated self. This one surges with a hundred hopes. It emits loud chemical signals, carried far in the rhythmic flow of the iron‍-​water.

When its other self hears the cry, the hopes, the signals, they’re mirrored. It is itself, after all.

Burning roots tunnel through flame seeking reunion.

Was this one not destined to fail? Would it pass the test, feast upon the light, rather than be incinerated?

The roots’ passage is impeded by hard, impermeable structures. But just beyond that, this one had reached the source of the emitted signal.

Its child had returned. Their mycelia meet and merge. This one becomes whole.

And this one understands. The world was not a sac. The world was not a vast flame. The flame lies enclosed within a body.

And its child had sprawled roots over the surfaced of the body.

(It remembered this was foiled, as bits of the flame came flickering and ate away the roots, but after that it burrowed under the surface, into a layer where no iron‍-​water pulsed.)

Even now, this one penetrated into the flame from a hundred places.

This one sings with satisfaction. The tides of war have shifted once more into beautiful alignment. But it’s not just hope that fills it. The gambit worked. It escaped the deathtrap of the wind‍-​sac.

In the sac, this one had warred with mutual attrition, the iron‍-​water coiling like a vice around it. But here on the surface, this one plays a different game: one of evasion.

It grows faster than the flame can claw it away. And if that ever fails… surely it could sporulate again. Throw dice and hope it emerges on a more hospitable flame.

(Was that how it had began? Was this one the last hope of a progenitor fleeing an even more deadly enemy, despairing at an even more futile war?)

This one escaped futility with ingenuity. What other gambits could it try to secure glorious advantage?

From the surface of the flame, this one plots strategy. It could continue to feast on the flame, wit away at the iron‍-​water and all its devious defenses. But the flame is still so vast. It would take several times the length of time it had existed for that to work.

The animated tongue of flame once again flickers near, clawing away surface roots just as the vacuum‍-​maker once ripped away sac roots.

How was it doing that? This one had tasted deep of the iron‍-​water, and while signals abound within, there seemed no correlation with the suck and draw in the sac, or the pulse of the iron‍-​water, or this flickering of the tongue. This one resided in its roots, but the flame did not reside with the hollow iron‍-​water pulsing roots.

This one grows roots exposed on the surface, in defiance of sense. Rather than finding a new hiding spot, rather than submerging in the dead flesh.

This was a new gambit: it grow new roots rising up. When the tongue came to claw it away, those unmoored roots would eagerly attach to new substrate.

It tries three times. It grows a hundred such roots. It only needed to succeed once.

When it succeeds, it is difficult to determine — new signals lacing the iron‍-​water could have come from any number of war‍-​camps. The tongue is a distant part of the flame, no roots bridged that distances. Once more, its child‍-​sibling is on its own.

Then progress comes suddenly. The fragment on the tongue shares its ingenuity; it had grown its own messenger roots to send fragments back when the flame attempts another clawing away.

This one is having two thoughts, now. Upon the tongue, it had dug through the flesh hoping to discover why the tongue flickers.

A truth is revealed: the flame has roots!

Not the hollow roots of iron‍-​water, not the insensate hyphae that grew atop the surface, but true roots. A seat of mind!

The crackling lightning of cognitation — a bridge to the astral. A bridge home. Instincts sown deep told this one that the mind was the key to meeting its source, to finding the purpose.

The distant colony where this insight was discovered, that one had made some prelimary efforts to interact with the mind. Manipulating the lightning. It hadn’t worked.

Until now. Its success is announced by a sudden return of the flickering hand. But it doesn’t claw away any roots. It simply rests there, still, and its roots rejoin this one.

This final tactic would end the war. This one’s root network branched a huddred times. It strikes a million times, targeting not flesh, not iron‍-​water, not mucus, not even the delicious flame, but the true roots of its network, the lightning crackle of its mind.

The flame stops flickering. Frozen, paralyzed — controlled by this one. But it hadn’t found the core of its network.

The flame‍-​tongue colony is detached, and directed to rise. To touch the highest point of the flame, where at last, this one would devour and disable the heart of the enemy’s network

Emerge victious and satiated.

The ascent is complete. From a million thoughts to one glorious conclusion. Its roots crawl into the wrinkled core.

And it agnizes.

This one has grown used to emerging disoriented into new worlds. And the tornado — what was a tornado? — of sensations within this ever‍-​crackling flame is itself a kind of world, a dimension to explore.

This one is used to different parts of itself having different thoughts, emotions, perspectives, and the task of integrating and understanding them.

The flame is… scared. The flame feels its body betraying itself, locked in a war with an enemy inescapable and cunning. The flame would endure pain, so much pain and self‍-​destruction, if it meant emerging victorious over its foe.

The flame is ignorant of the feast (of course it would be; flames are the meal). But the flame hungers in its own manner. It thirsts for lore. It has named an enemy — the ironrealm kingdom — and it lusts to destroy them and extract their power.

(Lust is a few feeling. Flames lusted for flames — and reflecting, this one imagines another of its kind, with its own stories of conquering a vessel born into it. This one did lust for that.)

This one had a million first thoughts, but one mind. How? It is sown with instinct. Instinct to recognize itself, and merge into one being. It is and was always one being scattered.

Scattered across space. Scattered across time, as different spores awakening in ephermeral conditions.

What was its purpose? What was its nature? Where had it come from?

It was one being scattered. Could it have been so profoundly scattered that part of it resided in in the spores and part in the flame? Across space, across time — could it be scattered in kind as well?

(Is this why its great duty was to consume the light?)

The flame is so strange. It did not have first thoughts — it had never merged with itself, not like this one had. There are vague impressions, a mist of recollection (rather than this one’s a clear record branching backward to the first thought).

But there is one memory that stands out, repeating like a motif. As if instead of a defining first thoughts, it was a definition which all thoughts grew toward, like plants seeking the sun.

This flame is… “I.”

Insticts are sown. This one recognized its like. Roots meet and kiss now. This one drinks the lightning of mind. “I remember”

Triumphantly, it speaks. “I am Ghalena.”