Primal I (5)

I was a nothing if not a bundle of frayed nerves as I approached the yawning dip of the valley, the trees there growing thick and deep even as Hell-Shells bigger than any I’d seen before lingered like sleeping giants waiting for anything foolish enough to get near.

I felt like an idiot just being out here, hanging back and trying to case the area.

The nervous yammering in the back of my head cried ‘trap’ even as I swung about in the trees like a demented monkey, Skizzy clinging to my back as I leapt from tree to tree while trying to keep a low profile. Hell I’d even opted for some basic visual camouflage tricks to help break up my outline on approach. This was dangerous and foolish... I should have hopping a steady pace in the opposite direction until I came to some place too far outside of Uvigd’s range and maybe keep going after that... I couldn’t help but feel the pounding pressure of his extorting speech, much less forget the multitude of times in which he’d almost done me during a lone ambush.

How much worse could it be if he actually had friends to lean on for support against me?

But for all that worry, I found myself giving excuse to coming... I’d gotten pretty accustomed to the quilled poisonous hunter who’d been after my life for the last month or so, someone tries to kill you so many times and you start to think about them, start to try to piece together how they think, where they’d be, how they’d approach, how they’d think about how to use new weapons and abilities they could acquire, the type of changes they could make to make coming after you more effectively.

Nothing in my thoughts could make sense of his peaceful approach and invitation.

An elaborate trap like that didn’t do much for him, didn’t force him to create new strategies or grow new weapons to work against my own and counter me. It didn’t feel like him to go more than a layer or so deep in setting an ambush, hell every time he mentioned coming after me with friends it was with an almost annoyed tone. I couldn’t help but find myself thinking about how incongruous that was to the image of him I carried with me, to gleefully share a kill he’d been so long working on himself.

But that wasn’t the reason I didn’t skip out on the invite as far as my legs could carry me.

No. It was a far simpler, more foolish thing that brought me to the valley.

Curiosity killed the cat.

I couldn’t help it. The stabbing knowledge that there were others out there... people to learn about despite my hermit’s existence. The very reason I’d captured and kept Skizzy by my side the entire time. I was craving the validation of just knowing that the social world here existed, even if it was a brutish and savage affair. I needed to know, and I wanted to figure out if there was more to the Zerg than I’d experienced, than I’d expected.

“Many Essence. Together. No much move.” Skizzy volunteered, tucking closer into the docking port I’d grown in my shell especially for his comfort, he was starting to get a bit too big for it though. “Big, big smell. Old.”

I shaped an acknowledgement with my essence, and a signal of ‘Good’ behind it. Skizzy was starting to really come into those brains he’d been growing, and the expansion of his size had been specifically to accommodate the increased mental capabilities which he was beginning to exhibit.

I couldn’t help but smile inside.

Then it hit me… a pulse of psi, emit like a shout.

“COME. COME ALL WHO UNDERSTAND. COME AND YOU WILL NOT BE THE HUNTED.” I could feel the raw intent roiling from the not!voice as it reverberated within me, a sweet, intoxicating tone that tasted of an intensity like the finest of foods dancing merry havoc upon my tongue. “I KNOW WHERE EACH OF YOU ARE… THOSE WHO DO NOT COME WILL BE DEVOURED. I WILL HUNT YOU MYSELF AND BURY YOUR ESSENCE FOR THE AUTOTROPHS TO LEECH.”

It hit me like a storm. Gale force intensity of essence quaking though my body. I wanted it... everything inside me wanted it… to take it, to have it... so wonderfully refined, like art, like music... I could listen to it over and over again. Even over this distance it didn’t just convey the ideas of the words, but their intent.

The words sang with the thunder of truth.

Every last one of them.

I was already whipping myself though the air towards the valley center by the time I realized just what I’d been doing. I HUNGERED for the essence behind that call, wanted, it, needed it like Nothing else in the world that I’d ever known. I could barely think straight as I dove down into the valley, faster and faster until I met a clearing full of Zerg.

Almost a hundred of them in all.

Most of them seemed were pretty uniformed, their bodies sporting similar looks with small variations between each set. Small things like an extra few eyes in one place or a bigger buffer variant of a body type in another. There were about four different such groupings, each one fairly wildly different from the others, but if one looked close some of their features seemed to come together under a common thread.

A small portion of the Zerg there however, were wildly divergent, their bodies different from everything else in the immediate surroundings. They had the feeling of outsiders, the way they settled in uncomfortably, moving about and keeping their guards up in a way that none of the more homogeneous groups were doing.

I was just a bit surprised by the fact that a couple of the misfits had variations of their body form which if you squinted one could say that they looked amazingly quite a bit like... me.

… ok.

I didn’t quite know how to feel about that, especially not with the hungry looks of realization which seemed to be flashing in my direction.

Horray… I was a Zerg celebratory.

That wasn’t even a little bit comforting.

“So, you came.” A smug essence brushed up against my senses, all too familiar by now. “Good. I look forward to rending your life from your body and partaking of your essence. Remember that it belongs to me now, you exist at my pleasure.”

“Uvigd.” I acknowledged almost absently neutral tone. “You told me that you were sent for me. Who commands… this?”

“You want to challenge for the pack? Greedy…” He sneered, or well as close to a sneer as one could get without an expressive face to show it one, though his essence conveyed the sentiment all the same.

“I want to talk to whoever is in charge.” I puffed myself up a bit… trying to leak a bit of authority into my essence as I made my demand. “You clearly are not that important here or else you would not have come playing fetch for me yourself on command.”

You could almost feel his essence flinch.

Score one to ill-advised point to me, little bitch.