I am an Ing

The first experience you have is that of the horde.

Chattering voices, barked orders, the heritage of the genes. Purpose and place, identity, and uniformity. You walk before you speak, you work before you think. You are born as nothing more than a pod of thinking cells inside a mist of dark fog. You see the world through phantom eyes for the first time. Your world is comfortable and dark, invisible airwaves crackle with life at all times. Your body moves almost on its own, weaving the energy from the air into strands. The strands are woven into ropes, the ropes packed into shapes. The first shape you form is the nest that you will sleep in for the rest of your life. A tiny, joyless thing meant only for the biological purpose of rest. You grasp at strands of the energy and eat them out of the air. You fall asleep soon after.

Too many voices speak at once to make any one of them out, too many concepts and duties. The rush of information is immense, almost too much for you to handle. The whole hive chitters around you disparately but they share one thought. It is time. A voice cuts the noise clearly, speaking to all at once but somehow personally to each. It dulls the chorus to a low roar.

"Slowly now, little ones. Time favors our kind. Time must be taken to adapt. To learn."

The voices continue to fade into the background of your mind, slowing and easing. You begin to relax, finding it easier to filter between the messages and create clarity. The dominant voice is powerful enough to feel otherworldly. It is divine. But if it is a god, it is a kind one.

You lack anything that could truly be called eyes, but if you sharpen your consciousness you can feel and perceive things roughly. The voice comes from a figure that dwarfs the whole of your kin so much as to make you motes of dust. It has no definite shape, but its ambiguity feels correct to you. Its voice changes, becoming softer but more focused. It speaks directly to you now.

"You, little one. You see without eyes. The time will come when you will be like a behemoth among the small. You are special. You are our future."

The voice is powerful enough that each word feels like it shatters your body and rebuilds it. You feel yourself being plucked from the nest that you built within the first minute of your existence. You're pulled from the hive of chattering drones and taken somewhere far darker, somewhere where the energy is even richer. Your new home is softer, more beautiful. Your intangible eyes move about easier and see more. The beings in this room are even larger than the one who bore you here, their thoughts slower but more personal. They feed you energy and sing you their histories. You grow quickly, your limbs and body growing as the cloud of mist around you forms into new pieces of yourself and yet still grows with future potential.

The eldest warriors of the hall date back to the birth of the dark world you live in. They visit your hall and regale you with the knowledge of how your kind should fight dwellers of the outside. They leave again to do war with the world outside but they always come back.

Until one day they stop coming back.

The eldest warriors start to disappear slowly. It's a great sadness when one never returns. When another doesn't come back soon after the others begin to speak in hushed tones. The mood of the great hall changes, the beautiful soft home becomes nervous. More and more word comes back about the interloper, an ally of the near-defeated Luminoth who can walk between this world and the outer one with no concern. The barrier between them was always what kept the Luminoth as little more than a stepping stone to your greatness; if one now moves freely in Dark Aether...

The clock runs out for the Ing only days later. The interloper arrives in the great hall with no warning. You watch the elders fall torrentially as they try to stop the invader. You try to deny what you see, the shining outworlder silencing great voices without remorse. You throw yourself from your imperial nest, lurching toward the intruder. Your body is half-formed and you stand no chance. The intruder doesn't catch your approach and you slither along the ground toward it. With no better hope of victory, you throw yourself at the intruder with the sharpest part of your beak.

To your shock, you find purchase in the hard shell your superiors failed to scratch. Your beak strikes the lower leg and punches into it. You don't do much, but it's enough to crack the hard armor caked around them. You don't register much more than a scratch against the Outlander, but it's enough to cause the beast to stagger. Were there halls of history left to record your deeds, your deeds would be celebrated for ages to come.

The reward you receive instead is a vicious strike to your core. The Outlander doesn't even honor you with the same beam that cut down your kin, instead stomping you like an insect with the leg you injured. The pieces of your misshapen half-formed body scatter and splash across the ground. You feel every piece of you dying in unison, but eludes you. You're reduced back to the simple clumps of cells that you haven't been since leaving your birth nest. Untold cycles of work and growth are sent scattering across the floor to join the bodies of your ancestors. But you yet live, and with no body and no kin left you are reduced to one desire.

You are the last of your kind, humiliated and reduced to a crawling insect, and you will have .

You slither along the boot that destroyed your body, up toward the hole in the armor that you won. You slip inside and try to pass into the Outlander. You are rebuked by a wall of scorching light. There's no way you could control this being with your current strength.

You settle to merely stowaway within the suit of armor for now. You know better than to travel exposed to the outside world. You've never seen it before, but you've had a lifetime hearing the dangers of it.

The world you've known disappears into the fading swirl of cool black. Your intangible eyes completely fail you in this world, you resign yourself to sitting and waiting to be taken back to the home of the Luminoths where you'll find some dark corner to try to inhabit. You allow yourself the curiosity of experiencing the world of light just once.

The light is an agony worse than you knew possible. Any atom of yourself exposed to direct light feels like it's being boiled raw and then re-healed every millisecond. Even leaving aside the pain, the light literally melts you on a compositional level. You pull back the feeler you extended out into the light, only to find that nothing that was exposed remains. Parts of yourself exposed to sunlight will need to be manually rebuilt.

Even though you've never seen the home of the Luminoths, you're certain that where you've ended up isn't it. It's an enclosed vessel, like the leviathan ships you heard the eldest tell stories of. The burning light of this foreign world is replaced with a soft artificial glow. You realize that you can use your intangible eyes again, but only barely. You might want to try evolving some real eyes. You extend an un-melted feeler into this light. While it doesn't destroy you, you don't like it.

The vessel hums to life and lifts up out of the atmosphere. The Outlander steps heavily toward one of the walls of the vessel. They turn away from the wall and you hear hundreds of mechanisms within the suit of armor unlatching and whirring. You stay hidden in the armor even as its inhabitant steps out of it. Before you can react they're crouched and looking right at you. You freeze, waiting for the inevitable end of your life, but the animal looks right past you. They inspect the hole you made in the suit of armor for a moment, but then press some buttons on the wall of the ship and walk away.

The suit of armor begins to slide away from the rest of the ship and you see the wall closing in around it. Even with the promise of a dark cabinet to hide in, it occurs to you that you probably don't want to be here. You yourself out before the doors can shut and scan the room around you. The interloper sits on a flat cushioned platform, pouring some liquid concoction on your victorious wound and then hiding it away behind a clean cloth. They recline on the platform and seem to fall asleep. You scurry to the nice shadows underneath the platform, but the easy process is surprisingly time-consuming. You realize that it's because you have to constantly generate more mist as you move. Moving around in this artificial light is energy-consuming, best to save any strenuous actions for the dark.

You make it into the soothing shadow and you feel out for energy in the air. The ship hums constantly with electricity, but not anything that you can use. The outlander also hums with energy, but you can't possess it in your current state. If you were a bit stronger, you could probably latch onto it somehow and feed on it but for the time being, you can't even reach it. Some of its life energy leaks outward into the room. It's a pitiful meal, but for now, it will have to do. You eat enough to keep yourself going and weave the rest into a pitiful nest. You settle into that and rest.

When you wake the ship is dark, the outlander breathes slowly and evenly above you. You feed on some of the castoff energy and set to scurrying about to familiarize yourself.