She strolled through the mainland forest, a touch overwhelmed by the vibrancy of the life around her. Birds trilling, jewel bright insects buzzing, deer and raccoons and wild pigs abounded. So much life. And so unlike the other worldly stillness of her own forests. She had taken care to avoid detection from the human settlement nearby, busy as it was, humans sometimes only perceived what their minds allowed them to, focused on their own short existences.
They had grown there for a few centuries, building on top of the debris of the previous city, demolished in the after effects of Roxom’s calamity. The god-king had grown his demi-army much too close to Csialeide’s shores, but she had been sleeping at the time, unaware of the danger close by. When she had woken to find the apocalypse at hand she had laughed at the nearness of the death that might have taken her.
Cheating death had been something she hadn’t had to think about for a very very long time. Not since her childhood, a small snail crawling along a celestial meteor of godseed. Her family had tried to consume the mineral therein as well, but she alone had survived the transition, eating over their corpses, ignorant of their demise in the half-consciousness she used to possess in her pupal form. She had consumed the entire meteor by the time the transition was complete, forming the base of her shell from the space rock. The calcium of bone had been added later, skeletal bodies offered at her altar as the city offered sacrifice to her, ancient as she was to them. They sought her protection, or at least her indifference. She had found them frivolous and uninteresting, caught up in the race to their deaths, accepting the sacrifices as her due tribute for not destroying them for building so close to her home.
The forest of whispers is what they called her woods, where mighty flora grew but no fauna. The stillness of the grave, as many of them would come to find for themselves, when they sojourned uninvited. They too joined their sacrificial brethren, when she devoured them, building her shell with their poisoned remains. The waters of her home were sweet and enticing, but deadly to the uninitiated. Only Csialeide’s selected would survive their imbibement, to be accepted by her as acolytes. The process required the sacrifice of one’s body, to be transformed into a shape befitting them and their new station.
Csialeide paused at the base of a large water oak tree, though it only reached above her a nonsignificant measure. She hummed softly as she peered through its branches, her antennae weaving through the foliage, observing. A couple beetles mulled about, a caterpillar munching on the leaves, a raccoon peaked out at her from a hollow. Their lives were just as meaningless as the humans’, but the simplicity, the focus of their experience appealed to her, reminding her of her own childhood. Was she looking for something similar to herself? Was she that self-absorbed that she only wanted children to see herself in them? Noctua had seemed to imply that the more difficult children were more interesting. But she didn’t want to bring a child into her world just to watch it struggle. That was too selfish for her.
A speckled bird sung sweetly from the branches, its song light and sorrowful all at once. When it caught sight of her it chirped curiously, tilting its head to take her in. With a sudden swoop it gilded onto one of her wisteria covered branches. She was delighted. Such a brave little bird, to approach a massive monolith such as her. A second bird joined it, more warily, a thread of grass in its beak. Slowly, a nest began to form in her branches. She watched, enchanted. She would be a mother soon.
