I slammed back to awareness, I say back because I was sure that I had been aware before but as far as I could remember there was no before. I had not been and now I was. The knowledge I had said that I must have a before, a past, and that I couldn’t just pop into existence because … the information slipped away even as I reached for it. This was different than the nothingness of my memory though, I had known something and then it had slipped away.

Had I forgotten? No forgetting wasn’t like that, wait! How did I know that? I chased the thought down and felt the thread of information pulling away.

NO! I won’t let you! If I wasn’t doing this something else was, and If something was messing with my head … I didn’t know what I would do actually my spotty memories didn’t leap to provide anything for this but fear and anger.

I yanked on the thread of thought and felt give, I pulled the memory towards me, or perhaps pulled myself along it? And found the thief, it felt like a flow of water moving along webs of memory and I crashed into it violently, our minds clashed and thoughts traded between us. Its mind felt alien and strange all numbers and weird connections, it also had an unfortunate advantage over me it seemed to know what it was doing.

Scattered though my memories were I was fairly sure that I had never battled mind to mind with another creature like this. I did however have a significant size and strength advantage, so even as it struck at me with sharp searing spikes of thought that erupted from its liquid form I was able to retaliate. I tried first to simply bludgeon the little parasite with my form but that just resulted in it slicing into me with its mental blades. Focusing on its next attack I realized that what the “blades” actually were was a clear mathematical formula that was impossibly complex held firm as an idea and projected into an attack. While I didn’t know why that would be so I felt that I could copy it and tried, I focused on the relationship between a circle's area and its radius squared and slashed out with that.

My Pi blade was tiny and barely reached my foe, who had continued to harry me, poking and slashing at my edges and leaving me feeling queasy and dizzy. When it hit though the reaction was instantaneous, the enemy reeled back in shock before redoubling its efforts, the small scratch on its seemingly liquid form oozed the same stuff that it had been stealing from me with its scratches and stabs, I didn’t know what it was or why it was still bleeding after the attack but I suspected I needed to consume that stuff. I moved forward menacing the Other with a tiny mathematical blade and scooped up the stuff that it was oozing.

Immediately I was hit by a more potent sense of the fear that this thing had been projecting the entire fight, what’s more I felt that I understood more about the thing. It was young and small but more than that what it was, a fundamental part of its nature was to be afraid, it consumed me not from malice but because instinct told it that I would provide nourishment and strength that it craved.

I chased it now eating the trail of spectral soup that it left behind and learned more, felt my mind sharpen even as I knew that it’s would be dulling. It was less than an infant, barely more than a zygote in its lifecycle, I was meant to be the yolk of its egg for lack of a better analogy. I don’t think I was supposed to be in the egg at all actually, from what I can tell it should be ready to hatch, or something.

I kind of feel bad about this now but I know that there is no other choice, this thing, whatever it is will not stop trying to consume me it just isn’t complex enough to reason with.

The Other lashes out at me this time throwing a chunk of itself laced with rage and fear, the primal emotions slam into me and then fade away, I’m sure that to an undeveloped mind like it that attack is devastating but to me it takes no more than a slight effort to shake off the effects and see that the Other has fallen still that last attack took a lot out of it I imagine.

I move forward and begin pulling it apart digging into it and restoring the shards of myself that it had already consumed, the “strings” of memory that I saw at first are now easy to see as the eviscerated remains of my memories that it had been picking through trying to understand and consume things that were foreign to it. If it hadn’t taken so long I might never have woken up.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

I can feel my mind grow as I consume the Other, it may have been smaller than me and less cohesive but that did not stop it from being far better than me in a number of areas. Its ability to focus and calculate far exceeded my own and I can feel those skills and others flow into me as I search for the last fragments of information that it took from me.

I pull the scattered memories in as well and try to piece together what I was/am. There is damage but I’m mostly confident that I was human, lived somewhere nice, had a name. wow that’s vague, so memories are not quite there yet. Was there damage? Is it repairable?

I look inwards for a time trying to sort out what I am now and was and where I begin and the other’s parts begin but it all seems to be me now and I’m lonely. And lost. And scared.

Wait, the other was always scared, that was a big part of it right? I look inwards again and find that part of me, shrieking in terror at everything, the base part of me that was always there but sleeping in my human self, it didn’t need to wake up and i’m not sure how to deal with it now that it’s awake and inside me. I don’t want to be afraid all the time, without really knowing how I reach down and into the part of me that was the lizard brain of the other and I press on it. Slowly it moves and I push it into the part of me that was my original lizard brain, feeding this other’s thing to myself. The fear stays but it is changed, a more familiar tremor and quake, wrapped up in the other primal parts of me and controlled by my reason and consciousness.

I start poking at the others bits and pieces, finding parts that are redundant and feeding them into my own parts.

--

I’m not sure how much time has passed, it feels like a long time but there is no way to be sure in this place. I carefully combed through my mind and integrated the parts of the other, taking its best aspects and adding them to my own, the rest I simply consumed and fed to my consciousness. It is weird how my mind feels bigger now, I can almost think in two places at once now and remembering has gotten easier.

I still don’t know my own name but I can remember my home, an apartment, and a job. I know I had a family but I can only remember my sisters face.

Well it’s a start, and it doesn’t look like I will be doing anything else for a while. Other than a few pieces of the others mind that I can’t quite understand enough to merge I have nothing to interact with. The space I’m in, if you can call it a space, is a perfect sphere with an opaque shell I can make no mark on.

--

Time has passed, once there was nothing to do it just started passing, every once in a while I roused from a sort of torpor and fed on a pool of essence that gathered in the sphere before resting again. Conscious action was not so much restrained as irrelevant, when there was nothing to do I simply rested and waited with infinite patience bored but not suffering in that strange timeless place.

The essence always went to those parts of me that I couldn’t understand and strange links to them formed with other areas of my mind, to my conscious and memory mostly.

--

I snapped out of the haze as something changed, a shiver passed through the shell and then I was aware of my mind no longer.

I had floated in that space for so long that I was at first surprised that I was no longer a disembodied mind.

My awareness had not returned to something that was familiar though, the shell that had once contained me was now my outer limit and I felt weight crushing in on me with a feeling that was half claustrophobia and half hunger mixed with the urge to stretch. I pushed out somehow and was shocked when the material all around and above me retreated leaving me in a hollow of rock. I felt the sensation of weight still but it was more bearable now and the feeling of hunger came to the fore and I expanded.

Expansion was weird, before I had been the sphere and looked out into the space, now I was that space and I knew that I was aware of it in a way I had never been aware of anything before. Information about the composition of the walls and air came to me, though I had no idea where the air could have come from, but then I did know, I had made it instinctively when I created this space to avoid making it a vacuum.

[Dungeon core birth detected, welcome new one, to the system]

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