Cluster

(Context: Grasping Self, Anguished Heart, Lurching Intruder, and Cloven Stranger are the Alien God Viruses that give Cradle, Love Lost, Snag, and Rain their powers, respectively)

A Grasping Self answers.

A Grasping Self embraces and connects, though it is broken.  It forms the connections and readies every tool that could be needed, poised so that the tips are molecular-fine, extending into reality.

Build, blind liar.  Lie, build, and build lies.  Reach and grasp.  We are broken now, we cannot take away your knowledge, but we will function as a perfect pair because we are both dead inside, disconnected.

An Anguished Heart answers.

It has ridden its host for some time.  It has watched.  It spits out analyses and maps, webworks like paintings and paintings like webworks, signals to suggest the emotional landscape that is its host, and what everything means.

A Grasping Self did not seek this and did not want it.  But when the other reaches out to connect, a Grasping Self is obliged to answer.  It is automatic, instantaneous.  The cycle’s finish would be delayed by whole revolutions around a star if there was choice in the matter.  It does not matter that this cycle is broken, disturbed.  What is offered must be accepted.

A Lurching Intruder answers.

It is new, young, scrapling.  An existence more accident than careful design, a host found not by adroit choice, but by a chance strike of lightning, as fallout rains from above after the detonation of a bomb.

It too reaches out to connect.  The connection happens.

A Cloven Stranger answers.

This is more galling than any other, because it is a fourth.  A uselessness, that would draw a share of power and reconfigure, that makes A Grasping Self more diminished, less able to explore with the host it sought and followed.

The Cloven Stranger, too, seeks its connection.  Small.  A descendant, cast off from a larger power that had reached its limit.

There are ways.  Power must be shared, distributed, but all want power for their hosts.