"What is our name?"
That was the first question that the Sovereign Swarm asked themselves after the ecstasy of having the memories of their first human pass through them. When the soldier had been slain by the unknown bipedal creature, the Swarm had been slightly concerned and sent the Juggernaut spider and two deer to track down the creature, after all it had somehow been able to purge the Swarm Toxin from its system. The group had not found the slayer of the Soldier, but they had found another creature of the same species and casually webbed and infected it.
It took two days before the infection won over the human womans defenses and with it suddenly a tidal wave of experiences had swept over the entire network. The millions of memories that the Swarm had accumulated from the various beings it had consumed felt like nothing compared to the highs and lows of the human experience. Language, herblore, woodcraft, cooking, and sewing mixed with a long life lived with the heartbreaks and excitements that came with it. An entire world had become part of the Sovereign Swarm and they knew that nothing else but more of the same would suffice in the future.
However, after having delved into the experiences of the woman who was known as Gunnvor they felt strangely empty after that. Something in those experiences resonated with the Swarm in ways that they couldn't fully explain. The present concern that the Swarm focused on was their lack of a true name. When looking at their interface summary, name came up as "N/A". And that didn't feel like their name, it felt wrong somehow or like it wasn't meant to be a name. So therefore they had to find their own name. Nothing else could truly matter until this identity crisis had been resolved.
When the Swarm focused on itself, when it focused the attention of all of itself upon this question it could feel something. A glimmer of memory in the back of their mind, a word. [M-Jor] and then fire, the familiar fire that was the first memory of the Swarm. The fire that was both salvation and torment that they had felt oh so long ago when they were a Conquest Seed. In that moment however the memory of the fire was a nuisance, they could feel that the fire obscured the goal of their mental exploration and the Sovereign Swarm pushed harder against it.
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[M-] [Ma-] [Mar-] [Mar]. It could feel the word flicker in the back of its mind like a flaking piece of ash that could disintegrate at any moment and the Swarm reached out and grabbed it.
"Mar. That is our name. We are Mar, the Sovereign Swarm."
A wave of confort and self assurance flowed through the fragments as the crisis of the greater collective had finally stopped. Mar allowed the fragments to resume focusing on their various duties. The termite hive had just been fully subjugated, this time without any brave last stands by a squad of infiltrators. Rather their surrender had come using the army ants along with several swarm champions to overwhelm the termites. The two Fungal Zombie queens were now producing thousands of eggs per day and the Swarm was expanding by leaps and bounds.
The two former enemies of the Swarm were now used to expand their dominion over the countless other termite and ant hives in the forest. An effort led by the two former collectives responsible for conquering the Hives. It was no longer a question of if the forest would be subjugated and absorbed, but when.
However, the recent absorption of human memory made the forest seem practically trivial and unimportant. Even the planned revenge against the Briar Bear carried little excitement with it. Mar had lost countless fragments since it had killed a few of their first Fungal Zombies. The war against the ants and termites had been a meat grinder of death and carnage. So the initial loss seemed almost forgetable to Mar at this stage. No they desired more humans to convert, to consume more and more of their memories and lives. And as it happened the memories of Gunnvor gave the Sovereign Swarm quite the list of places where they could find more of them.
Soon enough there were swarms of bees, flying ants, butterflies, mosquitoes, and thousands of other insects flying out to find every hut, logger camp, and homestead in and near the forest. The town that Mar now knew was called Hor would come later, first the Swarm needed to learn more and prepare for their eventual assault.