Watching a swarm of scalamander larvae aimlessly swim around, eat and digest for an extended amount of time was as entertaining as you would expect. Not very. Even if those larvae happened to be your own kids. It all had felt much more exciting when it had been me in their shoes.

Admittedly, the lack of any actual danger might have played a role in that. Was I a bad mother if I didn’t expose my offspring to the threats of this world quite yet? I didn’t think so.

Scenes of myself, discovering all the things that wanted to eat me for the first time, flashed through my mind. Evading a hungry Dragonfly when I swam too close to the surface. Zipping past myriads of diverse mantis-like water bugs until I finally grew big enough to eat them in return. Narrowly avoiding being snatched up in a single bite by the ‘Thing’. And of course, a damn spike pike tearing my leg off.

Yeah, I still definitely would have to show them later. Somehow. Perhaps a little crash-course or something? When they were a bit bigger. If I waited until they left the pool, I doubted I’d see many of them returning here in a few years.

I’d also have to teach them to trust each other. Every male I met outside of mating season was mostly indifferent to my presence and most of the females had been wary, regarding me mainly as an intruder in their territory. Sanguine had been the sole exception to that. I wasn’t sure if Ferra could be counted as an exception now too. Meeting her again next year would tell me, I figured.

If I couldn’t socialise them, make them learn to live together, there wouldn’t be much of a community to continue a budding cult on their own after I was gone.

It was noteworthy that I could only taste nine distinct girls in the water of my little nursery. The other 27 larvae were male. I had no clue if that was just the usual ratio or if the environmental conditions around the eggs played a part in that, as they did with turtles.

Well, technically there probably were no turtles in this new reality yet, but that’s what previous me remembered about them.

I had to admit, I really wasn’t very optimistic about my sons regarding that whole teaching and religion project. So far, my encounters with the male members of my species didn’t exactly demonstrate the same flickers of intelligence I witnessed in many of the females. That may have been a difference in temperament and instinct though. I’d have to wait and see to be sure. I wouldn’t want to be prejudiced against my own kids now, would I?

Well, all that was still at least a moon away. I had been 82 days old when my profile was unlocked. Of course, I wouldn’t wait for my kids to start their transformation before ever interacting with them. I’d have to observe if any of them showed atypical behaviour, but otherwise…

For now, all I could do was to lie down in the spawn pool every time I wasn’t out procuring food so that they could get used to my taste and presence.

In any case, all those plans for the future didn’t change the fact that, for the time being, watching my children was excruciatingly, mind-numbingly boring.

I huffed and regarded Vigil for a moment. It still was as giddy as it had been ever since the hatching, creeping along the shore of the pond and watching the scampering and scudding little scalamanders with an attention and fascination I wished it had been able to muster at any of the countless times I tried to explain pronouns.

The jarring difference in attitude made me feel awkward. Whenever I had checked previous me’s memories about mothers, babies and childrearing, I honestly had expected myself to behave more or less as the elemental did right now. I didn’t feel guilty, exactly. It rather was some kind of bitter resignation considering the apparent lack of any and all motherly instincts in my species.

I could already feel the future headache coming when I’d try to convince my daughters of the benefits of childcare. Why they shouldn’t just plop their spawn out and go back to do their own thing immediately afterwards. Even if some of them might understand this on an intellectual level, I was a certified genius and still was so absolutely bored that I was genuinely tempted to just leave for a while myself and just come back periodically to check who was still alive.

I didn’t really care about my children. I only did because I remembered I ought to.

I splashed a few water drops at Vigil to get its attention. They sizzled away on its dark grey skin with no visible response from the elemental.

So I did it again, with bigger ‘drops’.

A few minutes later, one of the unoccupied pools was empty and the amount of moisture in the air around us was quite a bit closer to that in a steam sauna.

‘[no] [amusement] - [annoying]’, Vigil finally wrote to me. ‘[why?] [Sweetie] [no] [watch] [babies] - [babies] [need] [more] [food] [soon]’ Did I only imagine it or was the proto-spirit a bit grumpy and wanted me out of its hair for a few hours?

‘[babies] [have] [food]’ I replied. ‘[Vigil] [ongoing] [ignore] [Sweetie] - [Vigil] [no] [talk] [with] [Sweetie] - [boring] [boring] [boring]’ I threw a few more splashes of water for every [boring] to emphasize my complaint.

Vigil hesitated before answering.

‘[babies] [interesting]’ It contemplated for a moment. ‘[watch babies] - [exciting]’ Then it regarded me critically. ‘[no] [understand] - [why?] [Sweetie] [boring]’

I sigh-huffed. Twice.

That was the crux of the matter, wasn’t it?

‘[nevermind]’, I wrote back while heaving myself out of the nursery, making the water all murky with the mud clinging to my limbs and belly. I’d just go on a short walk. I had to refill the empty pool anyways. I’d just combine that with another food run.

For the kids AND for me.

I really could go for some prawns right now.

Over the next few days, I busied myself with expanding the vocabulary of my pictogram script. It was sufficient enough to communicate with Vigil on a basic level, but if I had to genuinely teach complicated concepts like gods, magic and a sense of community, my language needed to be up to snuff.

Previous me knew a lot about language and its influence on our thinking process for some reason. Most of the time I’d honestly have preferred it if I had been a tiny bit more interested in biology and less in anthropology in my previous life. At the moment though, I couldn’t get the nagging thought out of my head that it was beneficial to make it easy for any word to become the subject of a sentence. Regardless if it was originally a proper noun or not. This supposedly made it more intuitive to express abstract thoughts and to philosophise. Well, it was probably way too early for the latter, but the former seemed pretty important to me.

Anyways, the need to teach in the foreseeable future was one reason for me to work on my language. The other was obviously that I wanted to be able to have normal conversations with my children. I was tired of dumbing down my thoughts into simplistic phrases and sounding like a retard more than half of the time. I was a genius! I had an image to uphold!

And I wanted pronouns! It didn’t matter that a certain someone found them silly and unnecessary because it couldn’t wrap its hot little head around the concept. They were important! I absolutely refused to write down up to 36 separate symbols every single time I was simply referring to my children as a group!

I was astonished that Vigil still called the whole collective [babies] in the first place. Perhaps that was due to the elemental witnessing for itself how the tiny cluster of eggs developed into three dozen little creatures. Maybe I was wrong in dismissing its excitement over the process? I wondered how I would feel if I was an animated, sentient blob of elemental energy and was presented with a live presentation of the wonders of animal reproduction for the first time. Probably as fascinated as Vigil? I wasn’t sure. It still shone a different light on its behaviour.

The days from then on passed in relative quiet. Could you believe it? I was a mother of 36 and complained that my days were too quiet. I should have known better. I really should have counted my blessings as long as they lasted.

I didn’t notice when it started. But all of a sudden, one of my daughters had developed an abnormally high interest in me every time I returned to the pool after being gone for a while.

At first, I thought she might just have made the connection between my absences and an increased amount of food whenever I came back. But then she even began to stay in my immediate vicinity to sleep. She didn’t even have her hind legs yet and I could fit her whole tiny body in a single hand of mine.

When I tried to touch her gently she didn’t flinch away like all of her other siblings. Even when I positioned her on top of my nose she didn’t flee.

She felt safe with me. She trusted me.

I was baffled.

When she didn’t sleep or eat she zipped around in the pool, exploring every little nook and cranny, including her siblings. They all were still relatively similar in size, so I didn’t feel the need to separate them yet. She was dashing to and fro, enticing them to play catch with her. And to my utter surprise, some of them even did! How was that fair? I tried that too when I was a kid! Everyone just ignored me or ran away!

I wasn’t spared from her explorations either of course. She examined my entire body bit by bit. Not all at once. I guess, her attention span wasn’t quite high enough for that yet. But after getting another snack, playing around a bit or just resting, she always continued from where she had left off in her previous self-study session.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

She began to always stay close for some time when I returned after leaving for food. She also started to cuddle against me whenever she was sleeping, clinging onto my scales with her tiny little claws, as if she was afraid I’d be gone when she woke up.

She was adorable with her yellow-brown smooth skin and her feathery fluffy pink gills. I might not have had any motherly instincts. But who could have resisted such personified cuteness?

Eventually, I began to bring her little treats from my food runs. A juicy little grub, a crunchy bug or sometimes, when I felt especially generous, a strip of crayfish meat.

Of course, that didn’t go unnoticed by her siblings. The five brightest between them soon enough were copying her behaviour, expecting treats as a reward. Interestingly, one of them was a boy.

Vigil had watched the whole development and expressed its sadness, about not being able to touch the [babies] as well, multiple times. As the days went by though, more and more of them got smart enough to realize that it was possible to get extra yummy food from me. From then on I was constantly swarmed by my attention-seeking little brats. The elemental’s tone shifted from envy to mirth about my ‘predicament’ pretty quickly.

Obviously, I was annoyed at first. But this rapport of treats as rewards proved itself to be an indispensable training tool. I only had to tweak a little what I was giving those rewards for.

This was when I realized that I was training my children like pets.

And that thought inevitably led to how Memory was treating me.

Was that why I cried my eyes out in her arms? Why I missed her presence after? Because she was now something like a mom to me? Or was it simply because she was there at the right time? In any case, she was also training me to do her bidding. With the difference that I was intelligent enough, for her to be able to tangle my treats potential lifetimes into the future. I had to wonder when I would start to do her tasks just because she asked me to and not because there was something in it for me or she’d punish me otherwise.

And while we were already at it… Could I ever be sure that the part of her she used to interact with me was a genuine, if simplified, reflection of her inconceivable greater self? It could as well be a mere mask that was designed to appeal to me specifically. I’d never know. Did it really matter if it was all a facade if I’d never get to see anything else anyhow?

In the end, I decided that ignorance was bliss and that I could allow myself to take a break from existential crises until my next life. I’d try a bit of this ‘faith’-thingy for now. I was about to found a religion after all.

The ‘schooling’ of my offspring was… Well, let’s just say it had ‘mixed results’. Iris - that’s how I decided to call the trusting and curious one - was a natural. It didn’t matter much which symbol I tried to teach her. As long as I had an example or a little water puppet-play to explain it, she understood. Mostly. Remembering them all was a different matter altogether of course. She obviously couldn’t produce any writing herself for now, but reading was absolutely part of her skillset.

Junior - the clever boy - and his four equally smart sisters at least recognized a few dozen pictograms reliably by now. Most of those were different kinds of food. I mean, what else could it have been? But things like [water], [surface], [ground] and [mom] were also in their repertoire.

I refrained from teaching them personal names so far, simply because I didn’t give most of my children a name yet. I wanted to wait until I could judge what they would look like after their metamorphosis first. So, if they didn’t have any unmistakeable quirks like Nibble for example, who had to take everything into her mouth before she trusted her taste buds, then I hadn’t come up with any. I could tell them apart by taste just fine after all.

I didn’t know yet if I should even bother with the majority of my other children. There were, of course, some that at least understood the concept and tried to remember their favourite food symbols, but a whole 20 - more than half - didn’t even bother with that. Two of those slackers were even girls! Could you believe it?

Well, I should have expected that, honestly. It was an amazing result nonetheless, considering everything. Next, I would start to introduce them all to small predators to retrain their fight or flight instincts after all that wholesome socialising in the kiddie-pool. Hopefully, that particular lesson would take a bit better.

Turns out, recklessly endangering your children when introducing them to fish and aggressive armoured frogs did indeed have positive side effects.

Vigil helped me keeping the brats safe from life-threatening injuries, of course. Even though it wasn’t happy at all with my education methods. But after I reminded it of a few highlights of my own childhood, the spirit was horrified and reluctantly agreed to my plans. When did it become such a worrywart? Where was the lava elemental that happily roasted boulder toads for me? Well, it had been a very long time since Vigil changed out of its scalamander form. Maybe it began to see itself as one?

A thought for later, perhaps. If it stayed around my descendants, they would have a powerful guardian for generations to come for sure.

Anyways, healing little scratches and missing fingers, toes and tail tips was a convenient opportunity to introduce the larvae to magic energy. It was a slow process as always. The smarter ones seemed to be able to absorb energy faster, though. Since my sample size was limited and the injury rate got lower the higher the intelligence was, I couldn’t be completely sure.

It took quite a bit longer to instil a sense of caution in everyone than I’d have anticipated. And I fully expected to have to repeat that lesson regularly if I wanted it to stick with the slowest.

Overall, I’d say it was still a resounding success. Even Vigil had to grudgingly admit in the end that many of the [babies] would not have survived if we’d send them off without any sense of danger or fear.

I did have to deal with a massive increase of cuddling frightened children clinging to me on the other hand.

While it was a bit annoying, it wasn’t exactly a bad experience to feel needed. This was what I wanted, right? A family?

Well, my plan for the next couple moons was set. It would be incredibly busy. The bigger they got, the more food I had to bring. That wouldn’t have been a problem if I didn’t insist on it being life prey, but I didn’t want their hunting instincts to dull either. And they were ravenous! Why did I complain about being bored again? I should have smacked myself and just enjoyed the quiet.

‘[Mom, why I feel so tired all time?]’ Iris asked me with tiny filigree water symbols one morning when I returned with a fresh batch of trapped frogs and small fish. She had begun her metamorphosis process a few days prior. She was the second of my children. Only one of her two lazy sisters - Caprica - was faster.

I dropped the prey bubble into the pond. ‘[Why do I feel so tired all the time?]’, I corrected her, highlighting the missing symbols.

‘[I know that!]’ She muzzled up to me, resting her jaw on my forehead. ‘[It’s just less to write.]’ She didn’t have enough control yet and had to reform the previous sentence for the next one every time. ‘[You never correct Vigil.] [That’s so unfair!]’, she complained.

I chuckled a few huffs. ‘[I gave up on that a long time ago. Vigil doesn’t think the same way that we do. You are smart. You should know better.]’ I pulled her from my neck frill and placed her back in the water in front of me. The first magic she had learned was to coat her gills in water so that she could finally explore outside the pond. I would have done the same if I’d been able to use magic when I was her age, but she tended to overdo it with her little forrays outside. ‘[How long have you been out this time? Can you still breathe well enough?]’

She plopped her head back out of the water. ‘[Not long.] [Just for a little bit.] [It’s so boring inside.] [But I’m always so tired.]’

‘[Then eat and sleep! That’s normal. I told you all about the transformation before. Did you forget? Your body is going through many changes.]’

‘[Yes, you said that I would] [look more like you after.] [But you never said] [I’d be that tired, mom!]’ Yeah, she was definitely whiney.

But before I could reply, Junior approached from my other side to welcome me back as well. He still had a frog in his mouth. ‘[Mom!] [Welcome back!] [Missed you!]’

He was so sweet. ‘[I missed you too, honey. Did you behave? How were your lessons with Vigil?]’

My son deflated a bit. ‘[Hard]’ He glanced at Iris for a moment, who was sleepily drifting over. ‘[No fire yet.]’

‘[That’s okay. Mom can’t change the temperature at all. You’ll figure it out.]’ I tried to comfort him. ‘[Why don’t you go play a bit?]’

‘[But everyone sleepy!] [No fun if no one run.]’ He replied.

‘[We can practise too.]’ Iris interjected smugly… with symbols made of ice.

‘[Mom!] [She’s mean!]’

I sighed. Why couldn’t they just get along? Or at least solve it amongst themselves? Fortunately, most of them were too lethargic to bug me all the time since the metamorphoses began. Junior was a bit late with that. It should be any day now though.

And Iris… well, was Iris. Curious and energetic to a degree that lying around and resting was a hell of boredom to her. Even though she was evidently dead tired. Even now, when teasing her smallest brother, she had trouble keeping her eyes open and her head above water.

I turned to her. ‘[You should eat something and then sleep. I’m sure there are a few fish left.]’ The surviving frogs most likely would have fled the pond by now. Maybe I should just bring larger already dead food from now on. It would be way less work and I doubted it would make much of a difference at this point.

Iris started to form a reply, but it unravelled halfway through.

‘[See? You are so tired you can barely focus. Just settle down and sleep a bit, okay?]’

She looked at me, then her brother, then me again. ‘[okay]’, she relented and sank beneath the water.

I turned back to Junior. ‘[Now, what shall I do with you? Are you sure that you ate enough? You have to get big and strong.]’

‘[I’m full now.] [Can’t eat anymore.]’, he insisted.

‘[What about Rose and Juniper? Did they get tired too while I was away?]’ Yeah, I know. I didn’t wait with giving everyone a name after all. How would you explain to your children why some of them have a name already while the rest still lacked one. You don’t. You come up with some names on the spot and hope they don’t lose faith in you.

‘[no] [lessons with Vigil]’ Junior replied.

I turned to look over the pond. It was a single big body of water now, no longer three puddles. While the little larvae grew, Vigil and I had to expand even beyond just connecting them to give everyone enough room. Now, every single one of my children was at least a sixth of my size, the girls closer to a fifth. And they would still be growing during the transformation.

Vigil was lying next to the shore, tirelessly demonstrating fire and earth magic to a couple of little scalamanders dipping their heads out of the water. I couldn’t make out from here which of my kids were attentively reading over there. But Rose and Juniper were the only ones besides Junior who still had to enter their metamorphosis.

It was surprising to see them both study so diligently tough. Maybe being nibbed by one too many sharp fish teeth made them want to prepare the best they could for the big bad wide world? Or was it one of my numerous horror stories?

Hehe, I wouldn’t know.

‘[What do you want to do then? No more practice?]’ I turned back to Junior.

He shook his head. A gesture my children had to have picked up from me. I never saw any other scalamander do that. ‘[Mom tell a story again?]’

I smiled, well, more like bared my teeth probably. ‘[Sure. Which one do you want to read?]’

‘[Tell about Memory?] [How she saved you?]’, my son asked, hopeful.

Again? How often did I tell him this story by now? I honestly lost count.

‘[But that’s such a sad story. Are you sure you don’t want to read something else?]’

Junior just shook his head in response. Then nuzzled against my nose. ‘[Please? Mom?] [Again?]’

Well, if he insisted. I did have a bit of time until Vigil’s lesson would be over. And I was supposed to found a cult, wasn’t I?

So I settled down, got comfortable and began to write into the air above us with the wide empty sky as the background.

‘[A long, long time ago, there was a world on the verge of dying…]’