Pylo knew this was going to be important, It was the last time she would swim in the spore and love of her family home.

https%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FX1JdVKj.png [https://i.imgur.com/X1JdVKj.png]

There might be a revisit later, a time when she could submerge into the ebb and flow of her mother’s court, of her sisters and the many cousins.

Know the courts and governances and ideologues again. But at the same time it would be after they had all had time to change, after she had time to change.

There would be someone new then. Someone who could remember being Pylo and home as she was right now. Who could even slip back into this very memory. But that would be a reversion from who she and her family would be then.

A return from a destination. Never again would she be at the foremost of herself and home again.

So it was important to etch the memory as deep and solid and strong as possible.

It was something to be Treasured and Loved. She was going to become different, she would always be able to appreciate her youth and sprout to bloom here in the creche of her Mother’s estate.

But this Moment was a beginning and it deserved to be made as indelible as possible.

So she flexed and-

And Pylo did not wake up.

She existed.

At first that was all.

Then, there was a then, a rhythm, a synchronizing of before, after, current, then tingling future.

Potential.

Experience, linearity slowly accumulating from past occurrences. And as the accumulating strata of one rhythmic pulse to another flowed the texture and webbing of it took upon the suddenly growing clarity of more than merely existence or presence, but a knowing.

A scaffolding to grow onto.

Shape was there, recognizing orientations, structures, assembling as they went into recognition of a thin skeleton of being which had been ready for time, and with the feeling of its own structure the ready made capacity for space.

But it was a sparse and thin shape, one that encircled and enwrapped itself around voids. hollows, emptiness.

There was within the skeleton the root of implication, and on itself the implication of the purpose, the purpose to the shape, the form to the function. The linear stacks upon stacks of ingrained woven, etched, mastered grooves of preparation that in spite of their existence were left unmoored.

There was meant to be more than just the skeleton, just the presence.

The self existed but it had a shape meant for another complementary and ever so much vaster form, a world. And there were spaces and shapes meant to know but were instead left to eagerly yearn to discover instead.

But no memories, no knowledge of the world.

Simply existing in the nothingness.

For a time there was time and the bracing growing realization of self and one's own borders. Of how self could reach into self and change, how the very reaching was a change. How all of this floated awaiting contact.

Craved it.

Yearned to swallow it and be shaped by it. To drive division of reality and cut into and be cut by it.

To know and test and realize.

It emerged from the scaffold, it grew in sprouting branches of point and counterpoint. It filled self up with revelations.

At first it was shocking and terrible, for all the yearning for external force to push against the sudden intrusion was painful, raw and unwelcome at first.

Then as the raw reality of that which was not self cleared it began to settle and click, to become natural and flesh out the voids and mysteries that had been before.

Enzymes and heirlooms of heritage cascading into and out of each other in abstracted perfections of form and function that could never live, never breath. But could exist here in endlessly branching petals of expression here within herself.

Trust, Comfort, security, familiarity.

With the sparse wonders of the very ideas of life, of breath, of so many more the foreign unself unfurled and revealed sharp painful unpredicted shapes and delightful swelling enfoldments.

Contexts, greater depths. Weaving intertwining branches that marveled and dazzled her even as she yet could barely assemble comprehension.

The identity of her, she, self, female, incubator, child-bearer, primal deep undeniable shapes that had before been unmoored but were now so fundamentally true.

She ventured further into realization.

A monumental, endlessly unfurling gift of labyrinthine travels. Each a spiraling guided tour of impulse and idea, thought and action, concept and feeling.

Amongst the realizations was the symbolic self, the name, that which she was.

Pylo, warm and welcome and purely hers and herself.

She was.

Pylo meandered through the profusion of experience, concept and idea with wild and uncaring abandon. She caught hitches and snarls that quickly undid themselves to her attention and in doing so discovered the very concept of her own abandon and freedom.

Before she was a void with only the skeleton of potential.

Now she felt rich and fat and practically turgid in growing leaps and bounds of associations, of context, of new fresh connections and experiences.

She reveled and luxuriated in it and it washed over her and she flowed through it and then at last slowly, emerging from the fogged dissolution and overwhelming sensation of simply being she began to ascribe the meaning to the structure, the reality of the message that had at first simply washed over her as a world onto itself.

Pylo did not wake up, but she did something similar as her embryonic mind for the first time perceived the intent outside herself for what it was. A Message.

Addressed to her, shaped for her, with timbres and forms that as she was coming into her own self echoed and hummed with familiarity.

She had never spoken, never even conceived of the idea that you could push meaning, internal selfness into the otherness that had been all but utter lack before.

But now as she soaked in this message she recognized herself.

Her voice.

“I could have been you”

It said in this echoing self similarity.

“You are still part of me.”

The intent and meaning swelled with comfort and safety. With a shield against much harsher and sharper and far more cutting and somehow even more terrible and dangerous things then neven the brief unexpected unknown that the message itself had contained.

“You are here to know this time as a first time.”

The eagerness to know, to bite, to throw herself on the harsh edges and terrible dangers tingled in and out and all through herself.

“Do not be afraid.”

Why would she be afraid? Pylo was eager to dive into the fury of the world! She already was tasting the faintest hints of it in the very essence of the message left by herself. In the words that existed for her. The meaning of language itself.

She reached for the void, the expanse, the connection, the outer knowledge that would let her finally shear herself against new wonders.

And promptly recoiled in raw searing pain.

Blinded, Numbed, Overwhelmed to the point that all of the newly found textures and knowledge of meaning were lost in the sheer wash of it.

She had thought herself pre-shaped for the world. That she had left herself a foundation to know and apprehend it freely and smoothly, that she understood what the trials and unexpected shocks to herself would be.

But she was so raw, so unformed, so unprepared for the assault that sensation would be. There was not a single part of herself that felt unmarred by the burning of experience.

It had stung!

It hurt!

It had been different and not at all what she wanted, what she expected.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

The shock of it made her tremble within herself. She recoiled and hid for a time, for pulses of time.

And then the pain was slowly soothed, gentled, soothed by the presence of herself, the former self, the outer self that was now as she found interposed as a buffer and a barrier and a safety from the torrent of the world.

Even without the nuanced undeniable recognition of her own similarity to the message Pylo would have welcomed and loved herself then.

The relief of the unsensed, the unfelt, the unsmelt.

Warm, soft, gentle darkness and void waiting for her, nestled all around herself.

She was safe, and the stinging raw foreign nature of experience could wait outside as long as she wanted.

There was time for her to recover, and the pain to dull, then the sting to recede and finally the hunger for another biting lash to emerge.

She had not been able to even comprehend all that was received in that first taste. It had blinded her, deafened, numbed, muffled, frozen and burnt.

Ideas she had no context or even barest hints of before washed over in her attempts to grapple with the enormity of reality.

Words, meanings, sensations had all flowed in and been supplied ready and waiting as she tried to digest the sheer vastness of what existing entailed.

As the pain faded and she grew and branched and shed of herself Pylo was feeling eager to try for another cut.

She was emboldened by it. Enough to reach out towards the searing reality of the world again.

Which was again a complete and total incomprehensible sensation.

She had tried to only take a sip of it but that was still too much.

Even the merest fraction she could conceive of making of it was too much.

Pylo felt like a fool and an idiot and a failure.

But the warmth of the outer self was amused and joyful and tender with her anyway. The attempt was not viewed as a failure, the tentative fumblings of a broken thing. But merely the innocent unknowing exploration of the unjaded. The exact perspective she existed to provide.

But even so she was not to struggle utterly alone.

A concept was presented, softened, gentled, abstracted and narrowed for her.

The outerself provides something much more like the shape of the world after many layered and long digestions and contemplations.

Pylo engaged with it with great care and trepidation earned. The world was far more violent and painful to apprehend then she had ever imagined. So even this sanitized and softened form of it seemed worthy of respect.

But still the morsel was a thing to devour, to cut apart, to know and hone herself on.

And oh such it was.

At first it was an incomprehensible jumble, associations of frequency and pattern. But then she realized that she was pulling on the raw form of it. And in doing so had completely circumvented all the gentling her outer self had lovingly provided her.

Foolish idiot Pylo!

She turned the concept around so she was only touching the soft and safe sides of it. And at last it settled into something familiar.

First the fuzziest and softest squishy parts of it.

Inheritance.

Next an Encoding.

An encrypting, meaning for a thing rather than a thing itself.

After an assembly, the specific forms which would assemble from and in the inverse inside out way boil back down too.

It came in pairs, complementary pairs. Woven with each other, knitted at the ends.

There was a sharp pain here, it was harsh and foreign and much more rigid and complicated than the way of thought, abstract and memory like she had been born too.

There were varieties, one pair to another pair. She shied away from the geometries of it, the painful contorting nuances. She rode up to the expression, back to the encoding, then the inheritance, nuzzling in and out of the encryption as she gnawed at the thing.

As she worked at it she started to feel how there was a part of herself that was linked up in the exterior, a part she was feeling almost mirrored in the outer self.

And if she let herself relax, let it flow was eager to taste the deeper layer, the assemblage that was hard and rough and sharp to handle.

That softened the idea into something oh so much more comfortable to perceive.

Pylo eased up on the constricting smothering that hid her deep in the warm blindness of her outer self even more slightly then she had even imagined was possible before.

A single trickling thread that flowed in soft wrapped cascades of the far harsher and more prickly and painful realities.

It had a dual flow to it, one stream coming up to fill her with endless forms and flows. Endless meanings packaged up soft and cuddly and for the time incomprehensible. But no longer painfully raw on her own associations.

But there was another waiting for her to release a flow back.

She felt the gentlest accepting and poke from her outer self.

“Go On”

And let the little packet of inheritance go into the stream.

It was a thing that was wrapped around a genomic that was wrapped around an encryption that was wrapped around a sharp jagged unfriendliness.

In barely moments she felt the stream flowing back to her returning, mirrors, echos, duplicates of the concept she had passed down to it.

It was an overflowing fluffy hoard of softness but different and yet similar.

Abstract and yet manageable. The simple thing had been brought apart somehow without actually being unfolded.

“Metaphor”

Provided outerself with the greatest gentle welcoming patience.

The fluffy easily manageable ideas could... be a stand in for the sharp painful parts inside them?

Pylo reached again and tried to delve and this time she could cut deeper before she was too raw, too unknown, too unfamiliar.

And even though it still stung but enough it was only exhilarating.

She pushed deeper and deeper until she could practically taste the hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, phosphates.

She had no comprehension of what those were, but they WERE.

The torrent of associations and senses tied to those was too much for Pylo and she was drowning.

Burning in herself in all the fresh raw newness. It was just as blinding, just as dumbing, just as searing, just as chilling.

But she could feel the burn of it strengthening her anyway.

She was getting the shallowest grasp of it herself.

The faintest most tiny of victories on the unfathomable abyss that was reality.

It felt heavy and harsh and overwhelming inside her.

“Relax”

She listened to herself, who literally already knew. She let the complex of ideas in fuzzy contusions and sharp painful specifics drift into the output feed of her little thread.

And in a delightful deluge an even more enwrapped and metaphorical meaning enveloped all the soreness and bruising she had incurred forcing the idea.

Oh.

That was so much easier then what she had TRIED to do.

“Compiler-Knower-Motherthought”

The layered deeply soulful idea blossomed from her outerself.

Pylo touched the intake from the thread and began to feel the flow of it. This was a part of her, it had a name and a purpose.

The hint of the meaning.

She fed mysterious sharp painful fragments back into it and received softer, easier compositions in gentler wrapped envelopes. Not reduced but rendered less sharp to handle.

She stopped feeling worn and bruised, she felt comfortable and at ease with herself.

This was a nice gentle and soothing stream of reality in manageable shallow little sips. She could work through the world like this and grow fat and comfortable and knowing all things.

Pylo was growing certain she could experience the world as required like this. She had figured it out.

Then the outer self prodded her again.

And Pylo nearly folded in half as she was pressed into an innumerable profusion of threads, surrounding her and filling her, spearing through every facet of her.

Making their presence known where before she had studiously ignored them as the deeper scaffold that held up every aspect of her structure.

She quailed and tried to shrink back into blindness and ignorance of anything but the one thread she had already lost track of in the multitude.

But the outerself was firm now, not letting her return to anything close to the comfort and relative oblivion of before.

It was sterner then she had ever felt from it before. Nearly as unyielding and sharp as the reality of the world had been at first.

“Now, Look, Feel, See.”

Pylo had too despite how much she struggled to avoid it.

And the World poured in.