enby_me

No metaphysical entities were harmed in the making of this chapter.
This one took me much longer because I've been a bit sick and busy with uni, not a good combination to have an abundance of energy to occupy in hobbies. If I may leave you with a little advice: be born as a caterpillar. Clearly, they have a greater time than us.
Also, some brief descriptions of what could be considered body horror, although at this point, I think it's to be expected.

I feel strange.

The days have passed with an odd rhythm. Brief, intense moments of battle with time pausing to watch anxiously, and long lulls of feeding, almost boring were it not for the whisper.

My siblings and I kept growing at that horrendously quick pace. We are bigger than most of the insects around us by now. If I hadn’t protected them from the predators we have come across in our path, I wonder how they would have managed to survive. Not counting me, our species seems to be an unfairly tasty snack that has no means of defending itself.

As I grew I realized that I was approaching the size where a molting would take place. My skin would start to feel constricting and eventually my body would burst out of it, new and improved, better in almost every sense after colluding with the whisper.

But none of that came.

Instead, I feel full. But not of food; my appetite seems to be the same as ever. And yet my insides feel like they are being compressed by something.

Ah. I see.

The time has come.

I remember.

Birds chirping savagely on the trees. My feet tender from the long walk, clothes moist with sweat and clinging uncomfortably. The pure and refreshing air of nature cleaning my lungs from pollution. And those white, delicate eggs like spider nests compressed into the palm of my hand.

I remember.

The fluttering wings that shone rainbow under the light of the sun. An erratic flight that brought them over to a small flower, fully in bloom. And a resting pose fit for an art gallery, feeding invisibly on the patch of color.

I remember.

[Molt has evolved into Metamorphosis]

[Metamorphosis: To grow is to decease]

My chrysalis.

A second reincarnation. The irony is not lost on me.

My body urges me to find a suitable place, to hide in the branches and do… something.

[Skill unlocked: Silk]

[Silk: To hide is to protect]

The previously forgotten glands on the side of my mouth did give me a pretty big clue.

With a last look at my unaware siblings, I leave their side. Whether they will live or not isn’t my concern anymore; I have to focus on my own survival first.

My instincts tug me in a seemingly random direction. I follow the whisper instead, future possibilities bleeding into an almost incoherent rumour that I do my best to understand.

It leads me to a remote nook far away from our usual route. Or at least I assume so; orientation is hard without sight and points of reference. I climb a branch and the pressure in my abdomen feels about to burst. I let my caterpillar mind take over, observing with curiosity how a secret muscle deep inside my body is used to push a thick, sticky substance that is hastily wrapped around me. In contact with the air, it seems to transform into a single, long thread that slowly but surely begins to undertake me completely.

The process is oddly fascinating. But I concentrate instead on the whisper, its murmur intensifying into an almost deafening river of information. The few words I manage to catch are impressive in their range, from water to stinger and tongue and tornado, none of it seems to come together. It’s surprisingly hard to keep up with this phenomenon that I’d started to think familiar.

The cocoon, after what feels like seconds, covers me entirely. Strangely, I don’t panic. Even as my stomach acids slowly start to dissolve me from the inside, I’m more distracted by the tumultuous voices of the whisper than my imminent demise. I struggle to reach comprehension, and my innards are gone. I try to decipher the words, and my thorax disappears. I battle against the growing cascade of rumours, and the acid eats my brain.

Soon, I am but liquid encapsulated in my chrysalis. The void comes, but… not. It is muted. As if contained by the same thin veil that protects my physical self. In fact, that might very well be what is happening. Time is still with me, ceaselessly ruminating about my existence. And so is the whisper, of course, with its impossible to ignore noisiness.

The void helps me to understand it. Devoid from distractions, it is much easier to hear the things the whisper is saying. This is how I became so close with time; although absent, its memory still lived in me and I learned to appreciate its company.

Truthfully, a part of me had missed the void. If I truly hated it, there would’ve been no way for me to remain. It is incomprehensible and alien, the antithesis to my sense of self, but I’d always liked quiet nights in solitude. The void is merely an extreme version of that.

As I concentrate on understanding the whisper, time looks almost curiously above my shoulder. It is then that I have an idea. I wave time over, inviting it to see what I’m doing. Eagerly, it pokes the whisper to see how it reacts. I grin. In my dreams, thunder booms menacingly in the sky.

Time, perhaps without meaning to, slows the whisper until it feels like it’s moving in slow motion. I watch as it experiments with it, poking and prodding almost childishly. It slows and accelerates, rewinds and fast-forwards. When time starts to get bored I take the reins and push it into the whisper, cackling maniacally. They fuse together into a strange river of whispering time, currents of potential flowing erratically in impossible patterns.

The whisper had never distinguished between past, present and future. It was my job to separate the useful from the unneeded, the pearls of wisdom from the random gibberish. Time was present but always isolated, its own individual process that I had to do within my self afterwards.

But now I can control the whisper itself. Separate the different voices that compose it. I can listen from the reasonable beginning to the pertinent end what it tries to tell me, and I can choose which one to give all of my attention to. Glorious, marvelous simplicity, even though… it feels a bit like cheating.

Cheating only matters when there is someone to complain, though, so I don’t particularly care. This way, learning becomes that much more amiable. I can hear what each voice means and how it interacts with the others, what a few together sound like and how it all comes together to form the raging river that composes the whisper.

I understand.

It is, in essence, just a bigger molting. I can see the potential in my new shape; the possibilities that making a body from scratch entails. I can also see what the default option is, and I have to say, it doesn’t look very enticing.

A heavy thorso, able to fly only in short bursts. No mouth and no digestive system, for long-term survival isn’t part of the plan. An incredibly sensitive nose and enough hormones to flood an entire forest. I find it kind of insulting. If I wanted to reproduce, I would’ve done so in my last life.

There’s little I can salvage from that joke of a being. The wingspan is too short, the eyes a bad mimicry of compound sight and the sense of smell stupidly specialized in hormones. But I can see a few currents that modify them just enough to fix their deficiencies.

Everything else is useless. Luckily, the whisper is teeming with numerous replacements, some so extreme that they border on the grotesque, and I don’t seem to suffer from a lack of choice.

The most powerful currents are those that include the skills that I have. It seems that they have a bigger influence on my body when they reach the threshold of a word. I could eliminate them entirely, but that would be a shame. Investing in my strong points seems to be the smartest course of action.

With a thought my future form retains its silk. Then a shift in pattern and my hormone glands are also saturated with poison. And a small price in energy and my body keeps its capacity for regeneration. Lastly, a brain is remade from the echoes of the previous one, more powerful and efficient still.

I consider the food problem. For this new body, leaves will simply not do. The whisper is full of suggestions, and I take care to look at them carefully. I don’t want a repeat of my first molting.

Going for the straightforward flower nectar seems best, but my unique anatomy has more varied nutritional needs. Fortunately, Liquify still seems to be a viable option, and it gives me plenty of diversity if I adjust my digestive system properly. For that end, I adopt a fairly ordinary insect mouth; a short proboscis that is hardly different than my previous one. But it is more fitting, and I suspect that I will make more use of it.

There’s also the problem of predators. I suspect most insects will not pose that much of a challenge anymore; the real threat will be birds and amphibians. Since there’s little I can do against them short of poisoning when they eat me, I will instead focus on hiding. I could also make it as obvious as possible that I am, in fact, unfit for consumption. And the whisper grants both of those options into one.

One current grants a difficult to understand but apparently highly effective camouflage. It seems to be able to reflect a wide spectrum of light through my wings, making them bleed into the environment or flash bright colors to alert predators of poison. Similarly, my skin can also tint itself to a certain degree. I think camaleons would protest for copyright if they knew, but luckily law doesn’t apply in the wild.

When all is said and done, my new shape isn’t too extreme. Certainly not as bad as the eldritch nightmares that the whisper seems so fond of. It could almost be natural, if you didn’t look closely. It makes me wonder what kind of beings exist out there.

I have concluded with my choices, but my body will take some time to emerge. Meanwhile, I will rest. Play with the whisper, rendezvous with time, sort through my dreams to find more pieces of my identity. It is pleasant, not having to worry about survival. I will try to make the most of it.

I have the feeling I won’t have many opportunities like this.