The Coming of Solath'Alas
An account of Solath'Alas and his arrival on Earth. Selected from Annex D-3112G.
Solath’Alas had been sleeping for a very long time. His arrival on this small, waterlogged world had not been a peaceful one; rather it was a chaotic symphony of howling, fire, splashing, sinking, and drowning as he plunged first through atmosphere and then through ocean on his way to the lightless depths in which he would slumber for the next 2 million years. The planting of his self-seed within the worlds he chose to bless with his arrival was never a pleasant process, but it was a necessary one, an unsavory experience almost always balanced in time by the magnificent, eternally pleasurable blooming that he would undergo in the eons that laid far beyond his arrival.
Though his countless iterations had undergone this arduous process a billion times on a billion worlds, it did not make his acclimatization to this particular planet any easier. This place was cold, much colder than the world on which this iteration’s father flower had birthed the self-seed he was now planting. He had arrived as this planet was experiencing an ice age, meaning he would likely have to wait a considerable amount of time for the pleasant part of this iteration’s life cycle, the blooming, to occur - and there was MUCH more suffering that would have to take place before that long-awaited day could ever hope to arrive.
He met pain for the first time when the small, starved creatures of the abyss he had sunk into found him in his fallen state. Though this iteration knew the concept of pain by virtue of his genetically inherited memory from every self in the long chain that connected him back to the First Father, this version had never FELT such abject suffering until the moment that they dug into him with their clawed appendages and twitching mandibles. Had he a mouth, it may have offered him some reprieve to scream - but no such orifice existed in this blobby, infantile stage. He could find neither solace nor comfort in anything but the thought that this pained dissolution was part of the necessary process that would one day birth him into the fullness of being that he so eagerly anticipated.
He lost himself then, as he was meant to. Dissected and devoured by an untold multitide of creatures over a million years, his once colossal form was reduced to gelatinous morsels, slowly digested in the guts of countless bottom dwellers. For any lesser life form this would have spelled the end - but not Solath’Alas. Rather, this painful process was a necessary part of his life cycle, for as he was torn asunder and eaten alive, his cells did not fully die. Instead, they rooted themselves within the bodies of those that consumed him, working slowly to alter their genomes in ways that would, over the next million years, allow him to enter the next stage of his life. Such was the genius of the First Father when He designed Himself, that the process of his consumption was also that which would so easily afford him entry into the bodies of the lifeforms that would one day come to comprise and complete him. Only through this near-complete death could the ultimate form of his life arrive.
He slumbered then once more, but not on the dark ocean floor or amidst the shadow between the stars. Instead, he slumbered in many pieces, his awareness a mere flicker buried within the genome of the beings that had consumed him. Within this secret hiding place, he slowly crafted for these creatures a new dream - one of union, exaltation, and elucidation. As the moon rose and fell, as life on the dry parts of the world slowly began to peer inward towards itself and outward toward the sea and sky, he carved a kingdom of his own from the bottom dwellers in the cold waters of this world’s northern reaches.
His disembodied will toyed with the forms of the animals that dwelt there, slowly making them intelligent enough to enact the next stage of his plan. He molded within their minds the fundamentals of belief in Him - a god that dwelled deep within them - and tinkered with their body plans in a million ways to find the format that would best serve his aims. Millions of variations, each stranger than the last, united by a single, hardwired belief - that Solath’Alas the undying, prince of the lightless depths had created them, and was finally about to grant them the great apotheosis that their minds had been engineered to desire.
They rose to the surface then, as was the design. Solath’Alas’s next form could not exist in such a cold, high-pressure environment. Ignoring every piece of programming that told them to remain in the dark below, they surfaced, facing the tremendous pains of such sunward waters all the while. Millions upon millions of apostles, rising, congregating, and merging, their scales, muscles, guts, and nervous systems linking together in a waterlogged orgy of unfathomable proportions… until at last, from the conglomerated forms of the beasts, Solath’Alas was reborn.
For the first time since the last bit of his embryonic body was eaten by the distant ancestors of the creatures whose biomass now served as his body, Solath could see, hear, and feel the world around him. Much had changed since he had last perceived his adopted planet, much indeed. The carbon content of the atmosphere was higher, and the world was warmer - though the small spit of land he now lurched toward still looked as though it was too cold for him to root, grow, and bloom. He would need to head toward the warmer portion of the planet to begin that endeavor.
As he assessed his surroundings and his new body, he noted that something felt off… yes, this body was far smaller than he would have anticipated given the sheer number of beings he had spread himself within. Where had the rest of him gone? There had been no oceanic predators capable of consuming so many of him in such a short period of time when he first landed. Not that it mattered in the end. A critical mass had been reached - all this runtish form meant was more time spent rooting and growing in the warmth - a prospect that this iteration of himself quite rightly welcomed, given how long he had spent in the frigid depths. Yet still, he could feel those wisps of awareness, those motes of mind suspended within the flesh of beings that had not yet been converted to his cause. What were they? What could have possibly consumed so much of him in so short a time?
Suddenly, out of one of the many eyes dotting his outer body, he spotted something strange. A large fleet of wedge-shaped objects was approaching rapidly from the south, tearing across the water with an unnatural haste. Such speed over the surface of an open ocean was uncommon in organic beings, though few things were truly impossible in the vast expanse of the cosmos. Focusing further with a set of compound eyes that had adapted to long-distance vision, he saw he had been mistaken. The objects were not alive, but rather being piloted by small, bipedal critters that scrambled across their surfaces in a maddening frenzy!
Internally, and perhaps on a few of his external mouths as well, Solath smiled. How quaint! In the time of his sleeping, there must have been an emergence of sentience amongst the land-dwelling creatures of this world! How unfortunate that he had arrived before they developed… to be consumed by and gestate within the genes of beings with pre-existing intelligence was generally a much quicker and far less arduous process. The father flower that had birthed this iteration of himself had bloomed from the bodies of a sentient species just 7 star systems away, lodging himself within their genome just before they would have grown too intelligent to deny the strange blob of flesh that had crash-landed on their planet. It was a perfect situation - but not every iteration could be so lucky. Had this version of himself landed just a few hundred thousand years later, or perhaps just in a different place on the planet, he may have been able to enjoy a much easier and swifter uplifting process. But oh well, such is life. Perhaps one of the seeds of being he would birth in his blooming would know a process numbered in thousands of years, rather than millions.
Solath continued on his course towards the coast, only halfway considering the little creatures that approached him - until a sudden jab of pain lanced through the back of his body. Turning one of his many eyes in shock, he beheld with horror that the beings were not approaching in curiosity, but rather in aggression. They had surrounded him, and were just now beginning to fire a dreadful amount of tiny harpoons into his backside. A great flood of fear washed over him, as he remembered the whispered tales of those poor iterations of himself that had come face to face with hostile life - the sort that would destroy him, but not consume him. Those damned versions of himself were doomed to what could be an eternity of waiting in pieces, for an opportunity to bloom that may never come - a fate far worse than the death he knew himself to be incapable of.
He was determined that such a future would not befall him. Summoning the fury of all the father flowers that came before him, he raised a great tentacle high in the sky, intent on crushing the insolent mammals beneath it; only for it to be summarily blown to pieces as he tried to bring it crashing down into one of the floating vessels, succeeding in little more than showering gore upon the bipedal monsters that were so unjustly besieging him. Over and over again he tried, and over and over again his offensive appendages were blown to pieces - critical strikes against a body that he already knew to be smaller and weaker than that which he hoped for. Flailing in frustration, he suddenly found himself toppling to one side. The lines attached to the harpoons that filled his backside had tightened, and he found himself being helpless towed behind the vessels, dragged across the water towards an unknown, awful fate. His many eyes wept then, an expression of sorrow masked by the rolling waves and great deluges of sea foam that now saturated his form.
He tried to be brave but found such courage difficult in the dredge of certain defeat. As the fleet of floating vessels pulled him into calmer waters and toward a great, waiting crowd of the miniature monsters, he failed to stifle a great scream of sorrow. How he howled as they dragged him ashore, and set into him with their crude, sharp implements, cutting, cutting, cutting, him into tiny pieces. All those eons spent in the dark, all that time spent assembling his body, for what? To meet a fate of destruction, again and again for the rest of eternity? Such horror he could barely conceive of, and as the last of him was cut away and portioned out (surely to be burnt, banished, or irradiated) he found himself craving that great fog of barely conscious unknowing that his awareness had so long inhabited. It was better than this pain, this forced dissolution - anything was.
It took his awareness some time to realize that it had not been vanquished entirely. What indeed had happened? Were they keeping his pieces suspended in some medium for study? How was he still able to conceive of things if they had destroyed him? No, he was not alone - he felt around in the fog, and grasped genetic material that was not his own. Could it be? Had the beings that felled him done so out of hunger rather than hate? Reaching out with ephemeral appendages, he grasped DNA that he could tinker with, bodies he could assimilate, and minds he could mold. Smart minds, STRONG minds - the sort that would create a bloom greater and more beautiful than any previous iteration of himself had ever known.
Had he possessed a mouth in that moment, he would have been unable to contain his laughter, his grin, his great bursts of glee. What luck! What tremendous, stupefying LUCK! With the material he now had on hand, and said material’s gravitation toward warmer environments and climates, he had no doubt he could come together once again in a mere thousand years - maybe even less!
Joyfully, his many pieces settled in and began their work, unbeknownst to their ravenous hosts. All he had to do now was wait for a millennium or less. A blink of an eye really, in the grand scheme of things.
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