Chapter 1: Angry Rock

The world was mostly a sense of warmth or coldness, smooth or rough, noisy or quiet, and life or death. The sea would ebb and flow, the safe earthen cave surrounding her and her siblings sometimes filled with water, salty and chilly. She might even like feeling weightless, and she might like the moments when the water receded and she and her siblings were left in small piles on the various structures of the salt-washed earth. Siblings that drifted with the water out of the safe confines of the cave into the ocean were never seen again. It was probably death to leave the cave.

When the water was not filling the cave, often loud and warm things would come through. They were also death if they came too near; she had once been slow to flee the warm and noisy things. A pointy and cold object grazed her and nearly tore through her before she squeezed down between a stalagmite and an overhanging shelf of stone. A scream of frustration echoed through the cave; the sound chased her deeper into the earth.

It took a long time before she was willing to come out; the spot where she'd been sliced took a long time to stop feeling sensitive and bruised.

Death was common here, and she wanted to stay alive, even if she found the warm things interesting. She often wondered what it would be like to touch one, but now she was afraid of the cold metal biting things. She observed that many siblings perished when caught too close; the piercing rip of a cold metal thing or sometimes the sickening splat of a blunt wood thing spelled their end.

For a long time, her entire world was the ebb and flow of the tide, the tasting of different things mixed in with the salt water, the feeling of wetness, the feeling of cool, and the way minerals tasted in water purified of salt by passing through the rocks above. As she got much bigger, she went a short way out into the sea, along the bottom with the sand and pebbles. She learned about shells; sometimes they had squirmy things in them that she would let go. She found interesting new things that had a different flavor from the crystals in the cave. They were thin and waved in the ocean currents; lots of warm and active little things liked to pick at them too. But, there were also sometimes bigger flitting things that would peck at her with hard noses, and she did not like that very much. They were too fast and slippery to catch, so she would always return to the cave with its passage for the other air-based warm things that lumbered and clanked.

Today, she was settled on a high cleft in the rock and sensing the warm things beneath. She was in the middle of the cave; the places the warm things entered and left were about the same distance from her spot.

Suddenly, they started screaming at each other, and the sound of metal ringing against other metal echoed from the walls as they attacked one another. She didn't hear the sounds so much as she felt them vibrating through her. Her siblings scattered, but she stayed, uncertain what this all meant. Almost always, the loud and warm ones passed through this cave quickly, avoiding the rising tide and the other slimes that lived here. These ones had stopped in the middle, and that was very unusual. She didn't understand what they were shouting at each other, but one of them was forced to kneel with her hand outstretched.

She screamed and screamed as they put something on her arm, pushed her down, and then left her there. In the slime's understanding of heat and sound, the spot on her that the other warm things had held up was now radiating heat through that same arm.

She writhed on the ground, clutching at that arm, screaming until her voice started skipping and breaking. She seemed so... helpless.

The slime slid down off her perch, slowly approaching. The warm thing didn't notice. Wetness was coating her face, coming from her eyes mostly, though also her mouth and nose. Something in her instincts told her that this creature was feeling something similar to what she had felt when she was nearly killed by the pointy, cold thing.

Stay away from me; this creature is mine.

The meaning came from somewhere outside of her. It felt strange, wrong, almost alien to comprehend the words instead of understanding concepts through sensation only. She also felt, despite the warning, an element of bluff, maybe something of fear. What was talking to her? She barely ever talked, even with her siblings; what was there to say? The wet ocean was salty? But she could feel the emotions, feel the meaning of the words.

She advanced, and it came again, this time with more intensity. No! Get away! Do not touch us! This creature is mine, you stupid little slime.

Sometimes there was a sense that clung to the warm and loud things that came through, an aura that sometimes felt like the air, sometimes the earth, or sometimes the water to her. It wasn't that there was water, air, or earth there hovering around the warm creatures, but that there was, perhaps, a spirit, an echo of those things. From this woman's arm, there was an echo of water, but it felt twisted. It was coming from a stone buried in hot metal.

The warm creature had seen her now too, and she raised her hand and batted at her ineffectively as if to drive her back. She oozed to the side, listening to the uneven and guttural noises that she could not understand.

The feeling, the comprehension, was coming from the thing on her other arm. And, that thing was hurting the warm thing, trying to spread corruption through her, and so she was screaming like this.

She didn't really know how she knew she could eat it, but she did. Sometimes, she would slip deep into the crevices of the cave and find certain kinds of crystal rocks and work on them, slowly dissolving them and adding them to herself. This stone wasn't that much different, except that it had a spirit in it that was afraid and wanted to cause pain to this warm creature.

Even though the warm creature flailed and shook as if she could fling her off, she just crept up along her arm until the stone began to scream at her. She ignored it until she had the arm completely contained and all the angry water spirit flowing from the metal band too.

The warm creature had a salty flavor that was different from the ocean water. It wore away to a faintly sweet flavor. It wasn't like anything she had touched or tasted before. The skin felt fragile beneath her touch, even more fragile than her own body was. Maybe that was why the warm things were always such dealers of death.

There was a moment where she was tempted to keep going, but the way the stone fought back against her took up most of her focus. That, and staying on the warm thing until she got too tired to flail. That tiredness came soon; once she had that spirit contained, the pain left the warm thing, and she just slumped there. She whimpered noises, but they didn't mean anything the slime could understand.

She worked on dissolving the band and its water-haunted gem like it was one of the stone crystals, bubbling away at it until there was a crack in the gem. The angry spirit rushed through her, almost boiling her insides with how intense it was as she trapped it, held it, and strained to make it her own.

Even to her, the pain lasted a long time. Nothing could be the same after it. Before she endured this boiling sensation, the world had only been hot or cold, smooth or sharp, loud or quiet, wet or dry, painful or not. She realized that the cave she was in was also dark. There were lights. There were shades and hues on all things within it.

The spirit was water magic, and magic was what she had felt coming from the warm thing's equipment. She held on to that magic. She was determined to make it hers; even as the warm thing's flailing threw her off, she took the metal band off the arm with her and then landed somewhere on the ground not far away. The force of the fling sent her bouncing and wobbling into one of the deeper tidal pools. The remains of the stone and metal resisted as she drifted downwards; it didn't want to die. It wanted to become someone else and take their body and soul. It wanted to live; it had hung onto life for all that it could, and to die like this to a slime was the worst humiliation it had ever imagined for itself. Deeper in the water, color left things, and she was back to just the sense of how things felt. It was a relief; she was starting to feel other things: hunger, emptiness, loneliness, even empathy for the woman who had been betrayed.

But it was hers now, and it wasn't alive; like her, it was a thing. It was just a memory of someone who had once been alive.

So, she ate it. Every last bit.