Minutes turned to hours, and hours bled into days.

The remnants of Thena’s soul refused to be lost. Scattered and fragmented, they had seeped into the soil, absorbed by the earth like forgotten whispers. And yet, even in dissolution, there was a pull—a quiet, stubborn instinct knitting the pieces back together, thread by thread.

Days became weeks. The soil shifted, roots stretched and coiled through the land, and yet the gathering fragments persisted, drawn to one another as if following an unseen command.

Weeks stretched into months, and in that time, something began to take shape. No larger than a pebble, a perfect sphere rested beneath layers of dirt and stone. At first glance, it was indistinguishable from the countless other rocks scattered across the landscape—its surface hardened, weathered by the relentless passage of time.

Months turned to years, and still, it remained. Seasons raged above it—rains fell, snow blanketed the land, the winds howled, and the sun scorched the earth in its cyclical fury. The world moved on, unaware. The shifting of vegetation, the ebb and flow of nature, carried the small orb from one resting place to another, burying it, exposing it, burying it again.

Finally, within its depths, something was stirring.

Microscopic tendrils branched out, delicate and precise, weaving a network of impossible complexity. They stretched and connected, firing the first flickers of thought—silent, fragmented, incomplete. There were no memories, no awareness of self, only the hum of something becoming.

A presence, infinitesimal yet undeniable, waiting in the void of its own existence.

The orb did not yet think. It did not yet know. It had no nerves, no senses, no voice. It was a thing out of time, caught between death and rebirth, lying dormant beneath the surface.

But it was waiting.

Years became decades.

The tiny pebble—if it could still be called that—had long since developed a method to sustain itself. Deep beneath the soil, hidden from the world above, it worked tirelessly, refining its network of microscopic tendrils. It wove, unraveled, and rewove itself, an endless cycle of self-improvement. Every discarded strand was replaced with something stronger, something more efficient. It was a pursuit without rest, without distraction—an instinctual, unyielding need to perfect the self.

Decades stretched into centuries.

And then, without warning, something changed.

A flicker—faint, almost imperceptible. A memory.

Not a full recollection, not yet, but something close. A whisper of something long forgotten, an echo of a time before.

Book.

Light.

Road…

Door.

Scattered images with no context, like fragments of a shattered mirror. They came without meaning, slipping away as quickly as they emerged. But the orb—it—was learning.

Like an infant grasping at the world for the first time, it began to explore its own thoughts. Only, unlike a child, it had no eyes to see, no hands to touch, no voice to speak. It had only its mind, and a will that had refused to die.

At first, a single thought could take weeks to form. It was slow, clumsy—trial and error in the dark void of its own existence. But time, in its endless abundance, worked in its favor. What once took weeks began to take days, then hours. Now, it was minutes.

And with those minutes, the thoughts became sharper.

Wait.

This conclusion—this idea—was never complete.

A string of calculations unfolded within the orb’s mind. The solution it had once believed in, the one buried in the depths of its fractured consciousness, was flawed.

If we changed the flux-insition with a combrunce-bridge prior to the cobble-stage, we’d have way higher efficiency…

A realization. A correction.

It was thinking. It was reasoning.

Centuries became millennia.

By then, time had lost all meaning. The orb no longer measured its existence in days, years, or cycles of the seasons above. It had become something far more than a dormant fragment of lost life.

And yet, something unexpected happened.

It grew bored.

It had thought, calculated, refined—revisited every fragment of memory it could salvage, turned every equation inside out, perfected its understanding of itself. But there was nothing new. The same cycles, the same patterns, over and over again.

Until, one day, a discovery.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Some hundred or so years prior, it had unknowingly developed something… more. A sensory network—coiled tendrils arranged in an intricate pattern, a system that could interpret the faintest vibrations around it.

The world, once silent and empty, was suddenly alive.

It felt the slow, deliberate writhing of worms as they burrowed through the earth.

The shifting of stones carried by the winds of violent storms.

The rhythmic tremors of heavy feet—creatures unknown, walking the land above.

It was not alone.

For the first time in what felt like eternity, a thought stirred within the orb.

There is more than this.

It had learned to exist.

Now, it would learn to return.

One day, a distant sound reached the pebble—not through ears, for it had none, but through the delicate vibrations it had learned to sense.

A shifting. A disturbance.

At first, it was faint, barely distinguishable from the usual tremors of the world above. But it was there. And with each passing day, it grew stronger. Closer.

A feeling it had no words for took hold. Anticipation.

What is this?

It was unlike the slow, creeping expansion of tree roots, which it had long grown accustomed to. It did not move with the aimless, pulsing wriggle of a worm, nor the frantic skittering of an insect.

Too slow… too deliberate.

It was something else. Something unknown.

I’ll call this… a UGO!

The name formed instinctively—Unidentified Grounded Object. A designation, a label. A way to make sense of something that defied expectation.

The pebble—no longer just a pebble, but something far more aware—turned its full attention to the phenomenon.

The UGO advanced, weaving an intricate path through the earth, moving with a purpose the pebble could not yet understand. It watched. Observed. Fascination bloomed within its ever-growing mind.

Closer… closer…

And then—contact.

A delicate, near-imperceptible brush against its surface. A whisper of something alien, something alive.

Oh… I know this.

Recognition surged through the pebble’s thoughts. This was not just any movement. This was hyphae. A network of fungal tendrils, threading their way through the soil in search of sustenance.

The excitement flickered into something more cautious.

Hyphae… they digest. They break down.

They dissolve.

The pebble had no flesh to rot, no organic fibers to consume—but it remembered. It knew. Given time, given the right conditions, these tiny, persistent strands could wear down even mountains, turning solid rock into dust.

A new thought, sharp and immediate:

Am I in danger?

For the first time in millennia, the pebble felt something akin to but not entirely fear.

It had spent untold centuries waiting. Surviving. Rebuilding itself, fragment by fragment, idea by idea.

Would it all end here? Reduced to nothing by something so small?

It listened. Waited. Watched.

And for the first time, it wondered if survival would require something more than patience.

The fungi advanced with quiet persistence, its delicate tendrils weaving around the tiny pebble like creeping fingers in the dark.

At first, the pebble only observed, as it always had.

It could feel the mycelium spreading, threading through the soil, encircling it in a slow, deliberate embrace. Was it curiosity? A simple probe to understand what it had found?

Or was it hunger?

The answer came soon enough.

Thin, near-invisible filaments pressed against its hardened shell, searching—prodding—testing. A slow but insistent pressure.

Then, the first attempt at invasion.

The fungi did what fungi always did. It sought to break down, to digest, to consume.

For the first for as long as the pebble had existed, something outside was attempting to change what the pebble had become. To undo it.

A flicker of instinct, something long buried beneath the weight of forgotten time, surfaced in an instant. Human fear.

No, no, NO!, I will not be erased. Not after all this time.

For so long, the pebble had simply been. Enduring. Surviving. Waiting. But survival, it now realized, was not just about waiting.

It was about resistance.

The thought ignited something deep within.

I will not die.

The pebble—no, Thena—summoned its will.

She wove her tendrils tighter, reinforcing the dense structure she had spent centuries refining. Layer upon layer, she condensed them, making the outer shell unbreakable.

The fungi did not relent.

Days swiftly became weeks. The battle between them played out in slow, imperceptible movements—one pushing to infiltrate, the other fortifying, defying.

Thena could feel herself changing.

With every moment of struggle, more of herself returned.

She was no longer just a pebble, lying in the dirt.

She was Thena.

For three days, the battle had reached a deadlock.

Neither side could advance, neither could retreat. The mycelium had wrapped around her, but it could not break through. Thena had fortified herself, but she could not push it away.

A perfect stalemate.

I need to do something… I need to change something.

She turned inward, sifting through the vast web of thoughts and memories that had reawakened within her.

What if I try to reach out?

Fungi communicated through their mycelium. A vast, intricate language of biochemical signals pulsed beneath the surface of the world, unseen yet omnipresent. If she could just find a way to speak to it—on its terms—perhaps this didn’t have to be a war.

It could be a conversation.

Slowly, carefully, Thena adjusted a minute section of her outer shell, weaving a tendril outward.

A simple gesture. A first attempt at connection.

The moment her tendril neared the hyphae, a surge of enzymatic acid was released.

The tendril dissolved instantly.

Ouch! Turn to ash you friggin dimwit!

Frustration flared, but she refused to give up.

Again, she extended another tendril, adjusting its composition, reinforcing it, hoping to bypass the fungal defense.

Again, it was destroyed.

And again.

And again.

Endless attempts, endless failures. Each time, she adjusted, recalibrated, restructured. Each time, she learned.

Then, at last, one of her tendrils managed to slip past the defensive enzymes, curling gently around a single hypha.

For the briefest moment, nothing happened.

Then—

GWOOOOOWWWWWWW

A tidal wave of sound—no, of information—rushed through her, a chaotic, deafening flood of impulses, raw and unfiltered.

Thena reeled.

It was overwhelming. Dissonant. Unstructured. She wanted to recoil, to shut it out—but she forced herself to stay.

She listened.

Bit by bit, she tuned herself, refining her connection, deciphering the chaotic noise into patterns.

Patterns into fragments.

Fragments into meaning.

Days passed as she struggled to understand.

Then, one day, the chaos shifted.

A flicker of coherence.

A two-way pulse.

A conversation had begun.

For the first time in thousands of years, Thena was no longer alone.

And for the first time in an eternity—

She felt hope.