But before she left she had one last task to complete. She bent a finger in the air, a summoning gesture, pulling forward a thin golden thread out of nothingness, connecting her to her cochineal subjects, a thread for each beetle, each glinting strand joining the spool draped across the bend in her finger. She wouldn’t be leaving without them. Or at least, the part of them that belonged to her. She pulled. The golden thread turned red, beads of golden luck giving way to ominous carmine. She would be taking their sacrifice with her, it was hers to begin with, after all, and she wouldn’t allow the humans to benefit from it any more. She was their god, their mother, their exterminator. She laughed spitefully.
She walked through the prickly pear field, the empty cochineal husks wafting gently in the breeze from their silk cocoons, now resting in sweet dreamless ever-sleep. Only their bloodless corpses would remain for the humans, emptied of both their lifeblood and the sacrifice it represented. She had freed them of the humans’ bondage as well, permanently and irrevocably, not even a single ghost left. Her devout family. Their final prayers echoed in her ears, chanting praises and supplications from a pulsing hive mind devoted to her completely. She felt…charged. Energized with the magnitude, the weight, the finality of their sacrifice. Their blood filled her now, flushed through her system, still warm from the heat of their tiny bodies, pulsing faintly with their now synchronized heartbeat, each pulse a worship. She walked out of the field, onward, leaving the humans behind.
She had been traveling for a while now, walking farther and farther from her birthplace, gaining stability and balance from her first fawn-dainty step. It felt so good to not constantly worry about whether or not she would lose her awareness, to not be at the whims of the humans. Her resentment for them was diminished, somewhat, now that she was not at their immediate mercy, though that they had ever benefited from her and her people still disgusted her. She traveled on, the living mineral inside her humming about other beings, great ones, like her, urging her not to linger in these sacrilegious lands. It drove her ahead, traveling far past the desert and its dusky beauty through many strange new lands.
Humans were everywhere, she thought with disgruntlement. They inhabited every type of biome she encountered. She avoided them as best as she was able, but sometimes she had to walk among them. Through intensive practice of her meditation, she had learned to manipulate her skin, the power of the mineral and her people’s sacrifice lacing through her, imparting enough her strength to take on a more human vessel, morphing her brilliant golden hue to a human-like shade, dull and banal, in her opinion, and lengthening her limbs from her smaller statue-like stature. She still felt uncomfortable around the humans, wary that at any moment they would jump at her with the burial wrappings, covering her and banishing her back to the dark. It was a sobering fear, detracting from the leisure of her journey, one that kept her constantly on edge.
Eventually she found a land not infested with humans, something in her settling upon her arrival. An old old land, the trees massive things, towering over her, no matter how tall she stretched herself. She had discovered a fondness for being tall. She had been smaller than the humans for so long, as a statue, that she delighted in towering over them, being the tallest among them, having them look up at her, the awe in their eyes at her height a meager proxy for her due worship. But this forest set her back, reduced her to a small being once more. It filled her with a mild irritation, this small delight taken from her. But this was where the god seed lacing her golden flesh had called her, and she would respond to its call.
The first god she encountered was a shock. She had known there were others, the god seed had not let her forget it, but to see another was still a surprise. She had just caught a glimpse, a distant shadow of a strange, tall, four legged beast, walking in a bizarre stunted sort of way, ungainly. As if it were walking backwards, almost. She snuck closer, unwilling to call out to this unknown creature.
It was another humanoid, though so obviously not human it was laughable. Two human bodies, limbs slender to the point of malnourishment, joined at the face, no facial features visible between their sealed visages. What a wretched creature, Ketsuri thought, suddenly and startlingly grateful for her own human shape, for the first time. As it walked away, the god seed in her called out, a despairing feeling, a mourning inside her, longing for company. She hesitated, unsure. How long until she would encounter another god? Would they all appear so gruesome? Sigh. She called out to it.
