Life Cycle

by Kaen Okami

You are just one of many. You are nothing. And from the moment you're born until the moment you die, you will never be able to satisfy the hunger deep inside you.

You are nameless and inconsequential.

You are not the first, nor will you be the last. You are not merely one, you are one of many. They and she, she and they, are in you always, buzzing in the back of your head and tugging you this way and that like any base instinct.

You are strong, yes, terrifyingly strong. But more than that...You are hungry. Certainly, moving to sate that bottomless emptiness somewhere deep inside you is more important than anything else. After all, it was the first sensation you ever knew.

~0~

Of your gestation, you have only the faintest trace of memory. Perhaps it was only the briefest instant before your birth, that half second of the darkness and warmth that had wrapped tightly around you, smothering you even as it fed and grew you. At least it did before everything, quite out of nowhere, was torn to shreds around you. You had grown too big, and some invisible signal shoots through your nervous system and you feel your body start to uncurl and thrust forward. You aren't sure how much of it is being done by your own will and how much is reflexive, but in the shock of it all, you don't care.

And as you do, the tiny, fleshy pouch you had slept in, and the walls of tissue and fat around it, are ripped open, giving way to your teeth, tiny but impossibly sharp, and your rock-hard head so quickly and easily; they are nothing to you. You can't move very well for the first few seconds of your life. There is so much to absorb, so fast, and at first you have no idea what to do. It's all so overwhelming, compared to the dark, warm, and quiet you knew before. The air is so cold it almost burns your as-yet-unarmored body, and there is a high-pitched, keening screech in the ear that stabs your exposed aural canals like the point of a pike.

This sound is one that will become familiar to you over the rest of your life. It is your first taste of what fear is, the guttural, all-consuming fear of prey that knows in every fiber of its pitiful being that it is about to die and there is nothing it can do to stop it. There is nothing anything can do to stop you. This you know, as deeply and instinctively as prey knows its fear.

The sound, though, is no longer a concern after a quick moment. It deteriorates into whines and moans, then little whimpers and gurgles on saliva and blood, and then the silence of death. That means little to you, however; you are already on your way, leaving it in its pile of flesh, guts, and impenetrable webbing. Movement comes easily to you, despite the fact that you are, at the moment, just a little shred of flesh and nerves streaked in the blood of your womb. You can skate easily on your thin wet belly, over the stone and shards to where you can smell that the others of your kind are gathered. It is pure instinct to go to them, to know that they are where you will find protection, sustenance, your inborn purpose.

You are tiny, compared to your dark and cavernous surroundings, and squishy and weak, compared to your brothers who tower over you. Their head crests are long and intimidating, their armor is dark and shiny and already bearing the dents and ravages of battle, their tails are long, spiked, and swinging, and they've grown their second set of jaws. You have no capacity to be self-conscious, but you are on some level aware that you are, in essence, nothing more than that scrap inside their mouths. Neither do you have any capacity to be envious, but you know that you must become strong like them. The hunger already gnawing at your sparse insides demands it of you.

It does not take long - at least, you don't think it does. The many nutrients necessary for such a dramatic growth are everywhere, even outside the womb which fed you easily, and even lacking the ability to efficiently hunt for meat. The land around you is filled with dull glass, thick dark earth, and many-colored sands, which do nothing to spike your instincts and do not appear appetizing, but when ingested, will suit your purposes perfectly well. You can taste in the very air the invisible substances available for consumption, all the elements and chemicals you breathe in and absorb.

But these are not enough on their own, not fully. Even as they let you grow, you don't feel the hunger end, only retreat for a brief time. You are growing well, your body becoming taller and taking shape as your five limbs grow. The protective carapace over your eyes simultaneously thickens and becomes translucent. Now, instead of making your way around the world on your belly guided only by the vibrations around you, the distinctive scents of different pheromones, you have a misty but discernible view of the world around you.

More importantly, your adult mouth is forming, and though your claws and tail blades are still softer and duller than your brothers', they are about halfway to being fully developed. But that deficiency doesn't matter. You are now ready to take the next step on your path to join the great hunt for prey: fighting for your meat.

Up until this stage, your full-grown elder brothers have swarmed around you and the other newborns, never moving to directly aid you, but guarding you while you find your food and showing you where to go and how to act. You have watched as they run in and out of the caverns and tunnels, coming back with bloody foam around their mouths and bits of flesh stuck on the points of their claws. To your surprise, some carry living prey with them, still squirming and making that shrill fear-noise that doesn't hurt you as badly now, and they smack you aside when you rush for it to take a bite. You never try that again; not only because you have no desire to be killed by your bigger, stronger brothers, but because giving pause allows you to sense the pheromones coming off of what they carry. You understand: these big lumps of meat aren't prey at all.

There is another one of you, curled up in that same dark, wet pouch that you only distantly remember. It will feed and grow from its womb, and one day it will burst out and join the rest of you. You move by another instinct, that tells you to follow your brothers down into the cave where you were born, and help them fasten the wombs to the walls of the cave. This is where you can leave them until they are destroyed by birth, at which point you will return to collect your new younger brothers and feast on the dead wombs' meat. It will be a process that is carried out over and over again, you sense, as surely as you sense the presence even deeper below you, the power immeasurably greater than you, from which you came and which you must now protect: the she that lives in your head alongside your brothers.

But what little help those elder brothers have deigned to give you, by contrast, ends here. Now, they crowd around you and your same-aged brothers, as you sharpen your claws and your hunting skills on each other. Your newly grown armor and bones are rammed and slashed again and again, burned by their blood as you hack them apart, but you manage to keep your still-tender innards and thin flesh intact. The others, the smaller ones who you destroy in the struggle and whose bodies you consume when the blood dries up and goes inert, are not so lucky.

No...You have no concept of luck. They were weak, and you are strong. They die, and you live, you eat. That's all there is to it.

You get to grow up. You have no way of looking at yourself, you would not even recognize your own reflection as yourself, were you ever to stop and see any surface that showed it to you. But you now look indistinguishable from your older brothers, from all your brothers, and you give off the same adult pheromones that they do. You scrape your claws on the floor, swing your tail, toss your head in something like pride, to show yourself off to them.

Your elder brothers have been emitting scents of stress, hunger, and exponentially increased excitement. Somehow, you know that this place has all at once become more than the quiet feeding ground it has been for all of your short existence. But you don't care about that. Your mind hasn't the depth to wander and wonder. All that matters is that your growth is done. You are ready.

This night you join the hunt.

It's always at night that your brothers go, under cover of darkness where the bright sunlight can't make you stand out against the pale grays and dull browns. For the first time, you join the flood of bodies rushing out of the caves, your hard-armored bodies knocking against each other and the yellow-white blood burning and surging in your veins. You haven't been running on the surface for long before you catch it in your mouth: prey-scent, the luscious mingling of meat and fear. They are all together, and the closer you get the richer the scent becomes, and it's dizzying, like nothing you have ever felt before.

Adrenaline flies through your system until you barely feel yourself in your own body. Slaver flies from your open mouth and you rip ferociously through the strange smooth stone the prey has holed itself up in for you. It's all as thick as the cave walls, but it feels even flimsier than your old cocoon in the face of your claws. Where you don't need to tear up, you scamper through; it's narrower than the tunnels and it's full of strange feelings on your feet and strange scents in your mouth, but the promise of fresh meat overrides everything else that makes up what you are. You sprint closer and closer, and the fear is rolling off of them in waves that send your base mind spinning and soaring.

There's another scent, too, that is something like your own bloodlust. But that can't be: prey does not fight like you, only squirms and struggles before death.

You are above them, and once more you burst through the barriers holding you back from your purpose, and you are falling on top of them. The air immediately explodes with sound and movement, a hundred times what your birth was. Prey is everywhere, panicky, running and swinging loud, blasting dark limbs. Your brothers run along with them, and you do too, jumping and slashing as your instincts move you. Careless of who and what falls around you, careless of the sizzling blood on the ground, careless of how the loud fire dashes your head and armored limbs and shoulders, you claw, you bite, you kill, and let the miasma of scents and high-running emotions drive you to a mad frenzy.

You don't know how, or why, but the prey you are moved to charge at next is giving off those confusing pheromones, that are both fear-scent and hunter-scent all in one, and you don't understand. Its dark limb makes it fiery and painful to approach, though you have no choice but to go for it, and it isn't making the shrill fear-noise, it is howling and roaring like a hunter, eyes blown wide and teeth fully bared, though they are smaller and duller than a newborn's, certainly no threat to anything. You and your brothers screech back at it with everything you have as you leap through the dark limb's fire onto its body. Its armor isn't like yours, it's just as weak as the flesh underneath, and the meat and the blood and the fear are all so close. Hunger is screaming inside your skull, higher and wilder than you've ever felt in your life. Your front claws sink into the meat of its chest, your second set of jaws shoots out with a yowl to pierce its throat -

And it does. But you do not feel it: two of the countless blasts from the prey's long, burning hot limb catch you directly in the mouth and unarmored throat, and you drop with a wet slop and dying gurgle to the cold ground. Despite killing you, the prey has not bested you all: your brothers pay you no mind, screeching and kicking your body aside to cover it, drown it in a sea of writhing, clawing bodies that tear it to pieces.

It does not matter to you, though. You have no final thoughts, not really, only the sharp spikes of pain and then an all-consuming darkness. But you are aware enough of one thing to go with the beginnings of deep, utmost despair in what passes for your heart: you have not fulfilled your purpose. The hunger you have chased all your life has not been sated.

You have failed, and now you die, nameless and inconsequential.