The blue-light was worse than evil. It was a trap.

Pain wracks her as the eyes glance across the white squiggles, agonizing pain— waves of burning fire, aching thorns jammed in joints. Pain so vibrant and all-consuming that thought ceases to form, charging and receding with each pulsing contraction of the spiracles.

Yet, each hurt-spike leaves in its wake new-thoughts, new-feelings, new-knowings. This-pain, forced upon her by the blue-light, it has changed the body and the mind, in ways hard-to-know.

The pain was not only physical, to her dismay. These new-things, they disrupted the calm and practicality of before; the capacity for language, for knowing, has left her better able to comprehend what has happened to her.

Perhaps worse, the blue-light is hunting her. Tracking her like prey, remembering her. Remembrance of all her actions, her failures, keeping them in its clutches like claws to tear at the mind when it is most vulnerable.

Have the sisters ever encountered a thing such as this? Has Mother?

To-know is difficult. Certainly, Mother is above all, powerful beyond knowing. Perfect, even. She needs no blue-light to warp and ruin Her. But… Mother also was a larvae once, no? Mewling and squirming limblessly as all young do?

Had She always been perfect?

Such musings were, of course, nonsense; Mother is Mother, and She is absolute. To question otherwise is foolish and deserving of punishment. And yet… something in the mind, sickly and wretched, nibbles at these thoughts. A burrowing-worm, chew-gnawing, bringing this-heresy to attention when the mind is idle.

She hates being forced to think these-things. They defy her-purpose, malign her-beloved-family… but she finds that the mind is uncontrollable, in disarray. It is… confused.

As she thinks on this, a new-thought like dark-wet-sky-fire shoots through her, forcing itself above the morass of feeling and heresy: The mind holds no knowings of any sisters changed as the body has been. No knowings of scent-trails which speak of blue-lights or new-feelings. No hushed, chittered heresies.

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She is alone again, in a way forever unable to be fixed-changed.

An urge strikes her, to throw herself against the walls of the burrow-home, to claw and gnash and inject venom into—

But there is no-enemy to slay. When she returns to herself, the mind no longer driven by feeling, she is in the larder, caked in gore and shredded-meat. The foul-ugly-abnormal appendage that had been the abdomen jammed stinger-deep into a cut of soft-flesh which weak-twitches-contracts as stop-venom spreads through dead-flesh.

No sister would ever waste food this way. No sister ever had such grotesque structure.

Would the family even recognize her now, if they saw her? Would they accept her?

She curls inward, the body tucking itself into a ball, disgusting hands— wrong hands— grooming the antennae with frantic fervor.

Would they not just kill her? Butcher her stranger-corpse, feed her soft-flesh to the larvae?

She does not want to be killed. The thought of being eaten fills her with fear-revulsion-anger, and these new-feelings drive her thoughts now. She can never return, not like this. She will have to live without her family, for whatever living in such a way even mattered.

Living means gathering more-food, now that she has wasted what she had. It means scouting, hunting, foraging without a scent-trail to guide her or sisters to defend her.

She clicks the mandibles. This-thought scares her, but it is necessary. With a deep inward draw of breath through the spiracles, she gathers herself, keeping the new-feelings at bay with frenetic grooming. So doing, she exits her new-home, and she starts walking, following the flowing-water which she had spied after the death of the snatching-thing.

Many-steps pass. The bright-orb hangs low in the sky. A new world unfolds before her. The stone-walls widen abruptly, sprawling out to either side. The flowing-water has changed its course now— downwards, straight off the side of the sheer-stone on which she now stands. Before her, far below, grows a green-sea of unfathomable size. Reds, yellows, blues and purples can be caught in glimpses beneath the leaf-roof, and she can hear the calls of feathered-things as they soar above.

It is a long trek from here to new-home. It may be time to relocate. By Mother’s grace, it just so happens that she was born with the right tools for the job. Healed and stronger than before, with more limbs with which to dig and compact, constructing a new-new-home will surely take far less time than before. However, securing food comes first.

She takes stock of her surroundings. The fall to the basin floor is steep, with no handholds on the sheer-stone’s face to latch onto. No vines grow downward. Her only hope for a way into this new paradise lies at the end of the falling-water; a puddle more clear and vast than any she has ever seen before.

She looks once again at the area around me.

She turns her gaze back to the puddle.

She offers a quick exultation of Mother’s grace, hoping for any to be metered out.

She walks, first, and then runs— at the penultimate step before oblivion, she leaps with all her might toward either folly, or salvation.