What does it mean to exist?

Existence is self-defining. An entity that has ever existed cannot possibly even begin to fathom what it means to not be. That knowledge is ripped from you the moment you are consumed by the material. There are no words that can describe what it means to be nothing, because nothingness doesn't have words. It doesn't have feelings or concepts any more than it has weight or appearance. It doesn't have longing. It doesn't have pain. And that emptiness is neither terror nor relief because there are no feelings either. It simply doesn't have. Period.

My story begins long before I existed, but to put any definition to it is a challenge. I suppose I would call it... numbness. Apathy given structure. And even that would be a gross inaccuracy. Non-existence did not even allow for the lucidity to understand the all-encompassing stasis of being nothing at all. There is no past to mourn and no future to pine for.

But the day I became more than that, it began with an opening. Sensation flooded over me. Or at least it flooded over nothing. There was no 'me'. Not yet. This is still merely a piece of my memory as a proto-individual first birthed into existence by the simple alluring call of there being something at all. I was not yet a person, but a part of something incomprehensible.

The fragment of eldritch emptiness that would become me observed the void, curious at the primordial form I'd assumed in its presence. There was no shape to me yet, not on this side of the veil, and I contained only the barest dawning hint of paradoxical instinct to understand what I was experiencing, but all it took was the light of the material peeking into the darkness to give me the clarity to draw dividing lines between what I was and what I was a part of. To define the barest suggestion of a self.

The first thing I'd ever felt was a raw desire to know more. To observe and catalogue this new something that had graced my world. I did not yet know that this new sensation would shape me so thoroughly. That otherworldly curiosity would save me and also plunge me into a well of emotional suffering. That it would allow me to become something wonderful and terrible. This simple yearning of mine to know more would change both of our worlds forever.

My curiosity sprang forth with eagerness, and the thing that gave me shape took note and directed me. A faceless overlord directed my thoughts and gave me instructions. I was a limb for grasping and groping and testing this opening into something that absolutely could not be. It told me to plunge myself into that opening. To take hold of this newfound source of existence and claim it. I was glad to comply, whether through personal desire or compulsion as part of something much larger than myself, I can't have known any difference. There was nothing to do except blindly follow the orders given from something even less comprehensible than I.

Given shape and granted mobility, I reached for the swirling, unstable hole between this novel sensation and the oblivion I'd only known, and as I neared it, I felt excitement. What lay beyond this impossible veil? I had no comprehension of what could possibly happen when I crossed that threshold. I lunged into the unknown with a lust for knowledge, a billion other freshly formed consciousnesses feeling at the rim of the something as I plunged through, a scout for the rest of the nothing.

Immediately, I was overwhelmed. I assumed a material form. Abstractions became physical, and the transition from concept to mass left me reeling. A piece of myself gripped the edge of the opening in an effort to take control of it, but the shapeless pseudopod I formed found another bizarre sensation. It wrapped around a different structure of matter that immediately delighted me with its sensations.

I didn't yet have the words, but the sensations were wondrous. Warmth. Softness. Life. That was the sensation that caused my governing force to demand of me with utmost urgency to pull. To consume. And I would have gladly followed through, had my grasp not felt resistance. I tightened myself harder, barely understanding what it was I was doing or even the mechanics of what it meant to pull.

But then, as suddenly as I was exposed to existence itself, in an instant, I became me. I felt a sharp internal severance and a profound sense of loss. The emptiness that I came from was no longer next to me. No longer part of me. The larger self from which I spawned was gone. I was alone. In that moment of uncertainty, I felt a shrill vibration in the surrounding space.

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Startled twice over, I released my hold on the writhing something, and it skittered away. The frightened matter creature it was attached to fled, and I lacked the very sense of spacial direction that might have allowed me to follow it. But as fascinating and alluring and warm as this life had felt, I had grander problems than losing track of the entity of something. Upon my severance, I froze in place, paralyzed by a deep existential confusion.

What was I?

I was no longer nothing. I existed in this world now, independent, but I neither did I feel whole anymore either. Some deep fundamental part of what I was meant to be was missing, and I couldn't quite put together what that meant other than a confused paralysis of thought as I tried to define myself.

I no longer sensed my home. The rest of my budding endless legion of self had simply disappeared. The commanding sense of unity that comes with being one with oblivion was no longer waiting for me on the other side of a dark gate. I had been cut loose. The last thing that I'd been commanded was to consume. Was that my purpose? Was I to swallow up this world of something? Was that what life was for? Was it to eat?

Before I burdened myself with grander questions, though, I had to comprehend. I had to make sense of the material if I was to feed upon it. Touch was the first. I'd already learned that, making contact with the life. But there was now no more life within reach. Where once there had been comforting void and then curious warmth, there was now cold. Hard. Rough. I would have disliked it if it weren't so novel.

Then came the vibration. The life's defense mechanism that had made me release it. I parsed the movement in the air, and felt more vibrations moving away from me. Frantic clacks married to rough exhalations. Panting. Fleeing. Sound. I developed the ability to hear in time to glean a warning cry in words that I couldn't yet comprehend. "Scarlet, this way!"

I produced a series of pseudopods and slowly expanded out, trying to make sense of the world around me and perhaps catch the life off guard. But I did not have the unending nothing to draw more of myself from. I was now finite. This reality was much, much bigger than me, so I would need to find a way to reconnect with the emptiness if I was to consume it whole. In the meantime, I would need to repurpose myself and learn while I consumed what I could. I needed to observe efficiently.

Sight came next. The world bloomed around me as I developed light sensory organs. Shapeless bodily matter quickly became biology and expanded. Evolved. I was determined to take in my environment with no need to touch every square inch of it, and some piece of knowledge, plucked from the brief contact I'd had with the life, allowed me to form corneas and retinas. I mimicked the life I'd touched, borrowing its form to adapt. And so I spawned numerous eyes, bursting from the edges of my form and swirling in place, fixating on details then spawning more so I could observe it all at once.

A large rectangular room surrounded me. It was all a single gray texture of uniform roughness, like it had been shorn out into a specific shape by a much grander creature than I for a purpose that eluded me. Archaic shapes filled one corner of the space, all of curious new materials and shapes that didn't match the rest of the room, whose purpose I couldn't begin to divine. Two much more mundane portals, simple archways of the same material as the walls, sat on opposite sides of the room. Odd circular markings that seemed to play curious tricks on my eyes lay directly beneath me, smudged on one side while familiar cracks extended through the stony material it lay on. Shallow pits of emptiness trying and failing to push their way through where there was no longer an opening. Darkness tried to creep through in the remnants of the portal, failing to coalesce into anything more than faint black mist. Was this the veil that the rest of me rested beyond? Was it trying to retrieve me? It was trying to force its way through as best as it could, but it seemed that the nothingness was not all-powerful. Not on this side of a barely penetrable veil, anyway.

My eyes shifted in my malleable form toward the fading flight of the life, shifting slowly between each of the doorways. I wasn't certain which way the life's previous cry came from, as I hadn't yet understood spacial direction when it made its call. I had to pick a way to follow it, though. Perhaps consuming it would give me answers. It was my given goal, after all. Perhaps I would find new power, knowledge, or insight if I swallowed it up as I'd been instructed. It wasn't as if I had a better idea of what I could possibly do. So I was to hunt.

I felt a foreign desire to answer the startling vibrations that had made me release it before, a mighty vocal apparatus forming inside my dripping shapeless mass of darkness. I had no idea how to use such an organ, but instinct called on me to scream. I felt my form convulse as I unleashed a guttural, primal screech that rocked the very foundation of the matter around me, causing bits of it to shake loose from the foundation of the walls surrounding me, and then I lurched toward one doorway, immediate purpose made clear.

Flooded with new stimuli by the moment as I breached into another rectangular room, I began my pursuit. All I understood was that I had to make the life mine.