Morning came in all its glory, our tangled bodies unweaving from the pile with a slow, somber reluctance. In truth, if not for the duty of the morning which called at our bones, I suspected we’d have spent a good long time still together, smelling the scents and feeling the warmth of each other’s presence.

A gift from the Alpha.

I felt closer to these killers beside me than I had to anyone in my previous life, save perhaps my closest of family members. A nervous, connection which felt like it transcended mere likes or dislikes. The kind of closeness which snuck up into your chest and made your heart beat with anticipation at merely facing them here at the beginning of the day.

For now at least, it felt like peace.

Untangled from the others as you were now, you couldn’t help but cast a multitude of critical eyes upon them... tasting the collective essence of the group which seemed now to mix and mingle in some murky conceptual manner. It made it easier to examine and compare parts of the greater trove of essence and understanding gathered together and pledged under your name.

You’d tasted essence from several over the course of the night… a sharing which seemed all at once completely natural and right… and in the same breath horrific in what it entailed, calling back up a squeamishness in me which had been all but missing since the first day in which I’d found myself ripping my way out of some poor bastard’s chest.

For now, I found the time to sit alone and contemplate.

It was a bit strange how sleep still played a part in Zerg life, the great arbiter of connectivity and integration… both embraced and yet despised for the manner in which it exposed a being to dangers yet prepared one for them all the same. For Zerg to have a careful time so focused inwardly that they were all but insensate was a necessity if one step farther on the road to perfection was to be taken.

All understood this. Thus they hid, or they skulked, or they surrounded themselves with armour and shell.

Or they remained mediocre, destined to die anyway.

The primal world of the Zerg never accepted mediocrity as a measure.

Thus only the least intelligent and simplest of Zerg were sleepless in nature, necessitating strategies to come about for covering that weakness in every intellectually superior creature on the planet. Either way, for the moment I found myself drifting away on a light tide, halfway floating on a sea of information being sorted by my nearly unaware mind.

I made a once over of my body, a quick systems integrity check to ensure the keen function of every single minor part of me, a routine which had become standard in my