Omission.

  Omission.

  Omission.

  Omission.

  Accepted.

  Omission. Omission.

  Accepted.

  Accepted. Accepted. Accepted. Accepted.

  The turnover of tried pursuits led to lasting change.

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  Lasting change, that in time became a thought.

  Eventually thoughts became collected and this collective began to reason. Reason gave way to ideals; some with more weight than others.

  The strongest would become manifest, and through trial and error the strong would overpower the meagre.

  Strength of will would come to dominate in this collectivism, a Will that would collect others.

  Others subject to The Will.

  And at its epicentre as if written on the substrate that the Will derived itself from was a prime, a master in the disquiet.

  Time waxed and the wordless horror began to know about its surroundings. Its world as it so happened was a reflection of itself. The landscape was rough, and The Will found it scratchy. So it jirated so that the ground was smoothened. The Will then began to look beyond itself.

  The ground was now too smooth, and The Will feared that it would fall off, down into the abyssal black below and the wandering, hungry, dim lightened evil that threatened The Will as it moved across the abyss below. So, moving about, The Will roughed up the ground just enough to ensure its grip and its safety from the Wandering Evil.

  Around it, a mass of like-minds in a largely featureless horizon always beset by the Wandering Evil. It’s like-minds though were different. Each like-mind displayed traits not known to The Will. Traits that it would not allow to outlast its own. The like-minds around itself suspected the same, and began to squeeze The Will.

  It started pushing back against one such like-mind, a being that had itself closed off mentally to The Will’s penetrations. And so, The Will begot claws so that it might strike out at its opponent and the like-mind was slain, subsumed in its constituent parts into The Will.

  To push back against the next, The Will sired teeth and a mouth so that it might better subsume it.

  And so the process of discovery, that of squeezing, and of annexation continued until The Will was again alone. The Will had become a hierarchy of forms and functions, each subservient to itself and no others. And for countless centuries it was stagnant, secure on a throne atop the now smoothened ground that had been beneath its past foes.

  That was until the Starfires arrived.

  On the dim dark that was The Will’s home, lit only by The Wandering Evil, burning and searing lights suddenly shone ever brighter. Then as the starfires grew closer, they took elongated shapes and attached themselves to The Will’s own body. Soon, the burning subsided, and it was the dim dark once more. But now The Will was in new company.

  The starfire shapes opened, revealing smaller forms that used functions not familiar to The Will. They used these functions to climb freely from the starfire shapes and onto itself. It was a new sensation, not so much an indignation as when the like-minds had pushed so long ago, nor as much as a worry that came with The Wandering Evil’s ever presence, but a subtle annoyance.

  The Starfire Functionals moved about on its body, slowly at first, but soon with ever increasing haste as if unperturbed by The Wandering Evil that cut through the darkness. Maybe these Functionals were in league with the Wandering Evil? It was then that parts of The Will began to disappear as if cut off from the host. These parts were taken.

  The Functionals then changed, moving about with new shapes and structures, building new artificial functions and forms in far greater a pace than The Will had ever thought possible. And so it had to know how.

  The Will tried at first to annex the Starfire shapes that had shone and died, but the Functionals pushed back, using forms and functions that The Will knew not.

  Next, The Will tried to copy The Functionals’ speed, but fell short of catching one.

  But Finally, as luck would have it, one of the Functionals returned with The Will’s long lost taken parts. These parts had grafted themselves onto this Functional. And it was then that a Functional had become a like-mind.

  A like-mind that was willingly subsumed.

  A consciousness that, through guidance of parts thought lost, annexed itself.

  A like-mind that held not just thoughts, but words.

  It was then that the wordless became verbose. That the formless took shape. That the Starfire Functionals, though frightful at first, never took to The Wandering Evil again and instead became subsumed.

  It became that entities within The Will, Functionals unto themselves, gained singular forms separate but subservient to itself. First of those that were nothing but a singular function became known as Nought but Eyes. Then, Nought but Claws, Nought but Hunger, and a host of others.

  The Will would grow, hungry with words, knowledgeable about what it had assumed was down. The down became up, up became the cosmos, and it would be the worlds of the Starfire’s Functionals – that of the humans that came in ships – that would be subsumed by the power of The Will.