The outlanders were an anomaly within the moors. They had no permanent settlements. Instead, they traveled from their homeland in tightly clustered expeditions.

By their very nature, they seemed at constant war with the environment around them. A war they just as constantly lost.

The first appeared over a hundred and fifty years ago. Or rather, that was when I first became aware of them.

Initially, everything scared them to the point attempts at contact were impossible. However, some of the gam had been able to make ties with outlanders who returned on a yearly basis.

Those ties quickly expanded as our value became obvious. That was because their entire reason for coming here was to gather the materials we often had in great supply.

Hide, bones and just about every part of the beasts we hunted were what they treasured. While we drank the blood and used some of the remains for crafting, they would trade for the inevitable excess.

They also loved many plants that we could easily harvest. And, it was a good thing we did, because the outlanders were terrible at it.

They referred to their species as the alma, and were far different from the norm in the moors. The insects that ignored gam would swarm around alma.

The bites made them bleed and often killed them as if toxic. That applied to many of the substances we found harmless.

They needed to eat the food they brought with them several times a day. This almost constant eating made it hard for them to stay for prolonged periods.

They also needed to sleep every day for several hours and ran out of energy when performing continuous tasks. That was all on top of being unbelievably fragile.

I was not wholly unfamiliar with such creatures. While most of the moors’ inhabitance used the same form of animus, there were exceptions.

The terms Gæri The had left in my mind labeled the common form unlife animus. The other type only appeared in small animals.

That second type was life animus. And, it was what alma used. I glanced up to the flies swarming around me.

Small insects like them were my main test subjects for studying life animus. My discoveries had shown why so few creatures run on life animus. I had to assume most died off. It was just that impractical.

It failed to properly control the body, leaving anything using it too rely on physical chemistry to keep themselves alive. That meant they died the moment that chemistry was disrupted.

They had to eat and drink. Everything they ingested would them go through the chemical reactions within them. It came out as one or another form of excrement.

That was not even the worse flaw. They were in a constant state of systemic failure.

The perpetuating chain reactions would become less and less orderly the longer they continued. After a while, the cells would become unable to operate as needed for survival.

The unfortunate creature might become to weak to escape predators or find the food to perpetuate. It could also fail to defend against a bacteria capable of disrupting its chemistry.

And if it avoided outside hazards, it would die when one of its systems simply failed. If it used life animus, it was only a matter of tine before it succumbed.

I wondered if the name life animus was intended to be ironic. After all, creature’s fueled by the stuff were dying from the start.

Of course, there were exceptions and anomalies. Most creatures running on unlife animus lacked the flaws of life animus.

But, some had what appeared to be forms of one or more such weakness. Pill beasts were a good example.

They were unliving, as far as I could tell, but their souls could not create new matter for them to heal or grow. That required them to eat. Otherwise, they would stop growing and slowly break down from minor injuries.

Urser were similar. If they did not eat meat occasionally, they would grow weak and fragile.

Some creatures also needed to go inactive on a regular schedule. Others had a limited time before their body would shut down and die.

All these creatures registered as being unliving to my senses. It almost seemed like they had flaws built into their souls.

I watched Dreel sitting across from the alma I took to be the leader or chosen negotiator. Beside each leader sat a back up representative of their side.

The events were reaching me through the senses of a fly perched on the hat of a nearby guard. My actual body was in a tree about half a mile away.

The sound was slightly distorted by the fly’s vastly different processing of sound. Still, I could tell Dreel was talking about how hard telling Kirs they could not come was.

They did not seem to be explaining why Kirs had to stay behind. With how eclectic the narrative was, I doubted anyone noticed.

The alma sitting across from them was a green and brown skinned male. The two pigments speckled in a way that faintly reminded me of moss. However, it still appeared smooth.

The alma were reluctant to share information about themselves or the land they came from. I got the impression they were commanded not to by some authority.

Even so, I had met with them many times and collected quite a lot of information. Not least of which was a fair mastery of their language.

The language was learned from the leaders, but most other information was gleaned from guards and lower ranked members. They shared the same apprehension towards us.

If anything, it was stronger. However, persistent friendly interaction slowly eroded that caution.

One thing I had found from both observation and inquiry was that alma could have a wide variety of colorations. Unlike the gam’s monochrome pigmentation, alma could have essentially anything.

Their hight ranged from four to eight feet. That put them far above the gam’s average of three feet.

They were also build far heavier than us. Alma tended towards sturdy frames and significant muscles. It did vary, but I had never seen one that came close to the lanky build of a gam.

Another major difference between us was the two variants within their species. As explained to me, half of their species possessed only female reproductive organs and the other half only had the male ones.

That was not an entirely alien trait. A handful of the species in the moors had a similar delegation. However, they were anomalies.

The majority of species had the normal full set of organs in all individuals. A smaller percentage reproduced asexually.

I had eventually discovered how different their reproduction was from the gam. The biggest breakthrough came when I managed to convince one of the new guards to mate with me.

Gam resembled alma females, if unusually slender ones. We had the same wider hips and narrower shoulders.

That apparently made us attractive to some of their males. At least, I had been to the male guard.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

There were certainly differences. The alma females had fatty organs on their chest that the males lacked.

I had learned the breasts were intended to produce a nutritious fluid fed to their young. Gam hatchlings did not need sustenance of any kind, so it was not surprising we lacked such organs.

The males also had nipples, a component of the organ. Asking why they had nipples if they could not work revealed that the alma had no idea.

The guard had been adventurous enough to not care about the difference. They had only really started panicking when I lay my egg.

Apparently, alma were viviparous. On top of that, the offspring remained inside the female for almost a year after fertilization.

This was highly problematic for them. The growing offspring would inhibit the alma more and more as it grew in size.

By the time it came out, it was at a size that made the process dangerous and traumatic. That was not a completely unfamiliar problem.

Like the gam, reproduction was trivial for many of the moors inhabitants. However, it ranged all the way to species that had to rip their entire body in half and regenerate into two new specimens.

Me laying an egg after it was fertilized by the alma equivalent of a tail had disturbed the clearly inexperienced guard. There had been a similar effect when he tried to explain what he called a blow job.

A closer look at my teeth had dissuaded any interest in that. Apparently, they reminded him of the teeth of a giant carnivorous fish from the alma homeland.

I took that egg with me and let it hatch. The resulting hatchling seemed no different from any gam, although I could see a vague resemblance to their sire.

The expedition leader’s backup was a blue skinned alma female. She seemed to be taking notes.

I hoped she was not recording Dreel’s laments. It would be a staggering waste of valuable paper. Then again, it might be the only way to decode the narrative.

I had not yet been able to convince any female guards to mate. It might have been my feminine appearance in their species’ terms.

It seemed they only felt mating instincts towards the other sex. That was logical, although I had gotten a few comments that made me think there were exceptions to this.

I also suspected that the females were less receptive to my strategy of asking them directly if they could show me how alma mate. I was not sure why.

A few attempts had resulted in uncomfortable and vague answers. Those did not really expand my knowledge.

Other cases had not been received as well. Some of those ended with my party members dragging me away for causing a disturbance.

Of course, that was not the only way I got them to do that. The most recent time I had been dragged away was the reason Dreel was currently not letting me near the negotiations.

I had been talking with a pair of guards. The topic of how we hunted a giant bear whose pelt was being exchanged came up.

I ended up telling the story of how a particularly large specimen of the species was taken down. It was an account from years back.

I had been serving as the group’s trapper, and chose the story for how the quarry broke free unexpectedly. I narrated the battle and how the beast bit off my head.

Enraptured and shocked, they asked if I was resurrected. It took a little clarification to determine the word’s meaning.

I was equally shocked to discover that it was returning life to the dead. According to the guards, it was a rare art in their homeland.

Still, it was only a matter of convincing someone skilled in the art to return the dead to life. They mentioned a group called the Church of the Creator who contained such skilled individuals.

That made me wonder if the ability to resurrect their dead was how the alma survived. It would explain how a species so fragile could keep up their population.

Once they realized I was not resurrected, they asked how I survived. So, I pulled out a knife and stabbed myself in the head.

I thought it was hilarious. Unfortunately, the lore keeper leading my party thought the screaming and panicking was disruptive.

Honestly, they way over reacted. The blade barely came out the other side. It was not like the head had anything vital for a gam.

The tissue that filled the skull was similar to that in other bones. That being, it manufactured blood to help us heal faster.

Since then, I had met with several different expeditions via different villages. That let me farther confirm the existence of resurrection.

However, Dreel’s village still remembered how much of a disturbance I made last time. Dreel was incredibly nice about it. But, they were not letting me near the expedition itself.

I had made extensive attempts to figure out resurrection since that first mention. The fly I was using to observe the proceedings was one of the results.

Flies and other insects made excellent test subjects. They were easy to capture and contain. In addition, there simplistic biology and weak souls made it easy to use magic on them.

I had been unable to restore them to proper life. Simply repairing their body was not effective.

The cells would not function without a soul. It appeared even souls formed from life animus served some part in keeping cells alive.

Attempts to restore the soul were slightly more promising. Souls broke down once the fly died.

It was a slow process. The parts would remain together for a time, before coming apart as the animus ran out.

The only thing I could find that vanished immediately was the source. A source was a tiny speck hidden within all the souls I examined.

It was not a structure. Or, I could not detect anything about it beyond its status as a point.

From that point, animus flowed out and was distributed to the entire soul. It was the thing I had been lacking when I created essence.

The source vanished moments after the body died. From that point, it was only a matter of time before the soul dissolved into increasingly unrecognizable shrapnel.

I tried to stop the source from vanishing. The problem was I could not identify where it went or how to hold it.

It would not have done much good if I succeeded. Experimenting on the source was mainly curiosity.

I was hoping that I could learn how to restore the gam within me to life. That meant manipulating a creature’s source was unlikely to help.

Gam had no sources. It was entirely possible the method for resurrecting an alma would be of no use for a creature fueled by essence.

Even so, the possibility that I could give new life to my descendants was not one I could ignore. That is why I tried using essence next.

I was able to convert flies, and later other small creatures, to use essence. It was only a matter of flowing essence through them until they started trying to use it.

Once they started using it themselves, essence would take over more and more of their soul. Eventually, all animus would be replaced and the source would vanish.

This did not seem to harm the creatures and gave me more appropriate test subjects. Unfortunately, I still could not resurrect them.

The flies’ essence networks still gave out when they were heavily damaged, and I could not get them going again. I had ended up with a bunch of flies and small animals in my void. That was interesting, but not helpful.

The only true benefit I got from all these attempts was when I tried feeding animus into a dead soul. The source was what provided animus. I had theorized I could just supply that myself.

I was not actually able to make animus. However, I could command essence to take on all the properties of animus. With how much time I spent studying animus, the imitation was indistinguishable to me.

By making a link to the spot the source had been, I could provide a best replica of unlife animus. It sort of worked.

The flies bodies received the animus and started working again. However, the soul remained inactive and they lost all will.

They would just sit there and do nothing. The body lived, but they did not.

Further experimentation let me manipulate them through my essence turned animus. I could puppet them like tiny extensions of myself.

It was a noticeable drain on my essence and focus for larger animals. However, flies were easy to supply and control.

My reanimated flies were spread across the camp I was not allowed in. I did not mind.

This was an effective way to observe the expedition. Plus, it was better if they never knew I was here.

I told Dreel I was leaving the party once we arrived. They would not be expected to meet up with me on their way back.

That was because I was not planning to go back. Or, at least not immediately.

I was making no progress on restoring my descendants to life. The only hint I had was from the alma, and it said the answer was in their homeland.

It did not hurt that I had always been curious about the place the alma came from. I was going to go there sooner or later. It might as well be now.

The expedition was at least fifty strong. I was guessing around thirty of those were guards. The rest had jobs harder for me to determine.

Following the alma should not be especially difficult. They were not very observant or subtle. My flies would only make that easier.

All in all, I was looking forward to whatever I would discover. I might even find out how to help those who slumbered within.