[Creative Writing Contest] [Fiction] The Hunter

I. Newness

For a very long time, there is mostly nothing.

Sometimes there’s prey, and I chase it. I’m always hungry, but even more than the catch I hunger for the chase: the long flight, the fear, the small fragile trembling prey trying so hard to escape. My favourite are the quickest and most agile, the ones that give me a real challenge, darting and weaving in all directions until I spin dizzily back on myself and almost lose track of them completely—almost. It’s been a long, long time since my prey has ever escaped me for good.

I play with them, sometimes, between the catching and the eating. Sometimes I let them free again, just for the joy of the hunt.

But I’m always hungry. What I catch, I eat, when playtime is done.

And then—

Then there is a new thing.

I’ve never before seen a thing as new as this. Even the prey is very much like me, when you get right down to it. They are smaller and weaker, a thing to be eaten and not a thing that eats; but like me, they are a presence in the emptiness, a bright spark of thought and memory and emotion. Like me, they have a size and a boundary, a difference between what is inside them and what is outside; when I eat the prey, I put its outside inside my inside, and its boundary dissolves, and for a moment I taste all the thoughts and feelings it contained, until they dissolve too, and then it’s gone, ended, done.

Like me, the prey can move, in all the directions there are, quick or slow or in between, flying straight ahead sometimes and other times turning to move a different way. Like me, too, they are nearly always moving, nearly never still.

The new thing is still, or moving so slowly I can’t see the change. It has no mind, no life, but those things are in it somehow, concealed almost completely from my view, only shining with the faintest hum of thought, the subtlest trace of a hint of the presence of prey. It has—I don’t know what to call it. Something too new to even begin to understand. A way of being that’s so strange to me, so new and different, that none of my old familiar thoughts can wrap around it and describe its strangeness.

I see it when I’m hunting, and I almost lose track of my quarry in the shock of newness, and then the prey—goes into the new thing, somehow, like it’s been eaten, but it hasn’t ben eaten, it’s still there but I can’t reach it. It’s infuriating. It’s the most infuriating thing that’s ever happened to me. I circle the new thing, around and around, pressing close against its edges like I’m trying to eat it, not that I know how—smashing my whole self against it as hard as I can, and feeling a dizzy disorientation like being led in circles by agile prey—and the sense of where my prey went fades away until it’s indistinguishable from that muffled background hum, and I still can’t find a way inside. I don’t even know if it’s safe there. This thing did something like eating my prey, but not; it’s bigger than me, much bigger and stronger, like the way I am bigger and stronger than prey, but not; if I go inside it, will it eat me for real? I’ve never been at risk that way before and the thought unsettles me. I go far away from the new thing and find something else to hunt.

But my thoughts keep returning to that place, to the mystery, to the rage I felt when it denied me my prize. I haven’t felt rage like that in—almost as long as I can remember; not since I was much weaker and slower and stupider than I am now, and I lost my prey as often as I caught it. That time is far behind me, and the memory of anger has faded; but the new thing is more recent, and it’s still there, and I want to find a way to eat it so it can never do that to me again.

I go back.

After a long search, I find the place again. That’s a new thought, too: the thought of a place, a location where something isn’t moving, where I can find something and leave it there and return later and find it still right where it was.

There is prey there, darting, circling. I pick one and chase it. It takes longer than the other one did, to slip inside the strangeness; but it does, and I can almost, almost see how—

But when I try to follow, whatever gap it slipped through closes before I can reach it. I end up smashing into the outside again.

Another hunter approaches, chasing prey. I don’t like other hunters. I turn to leave—but I glance back, as I go, just in case this one knows something I don’t. It seems not. I see a familiar sequence, with no surprises: the chase, the escape, the confusion, the rage. I leave, and hunt elsewhere.

This happens many times.

As far as I ever roam, as long as I ever wait, there is never another thing like that one. It stays always in the same place where I first found it. I find myself remembering its location, tracking it in my thoughts even when I’m very far away, because one place is very much like another when there aren’t any things anywhere that sit still, but when there is one such thing, well, then ‘place’ starts to be a thought worth having. Directions exist, not just in reference to myself and whatever prey I happen to be chasing, but also in reference to the new thing. I can go toward the thing or away from it; I can go around it in this direction or that; I can chase prey to it, and watch them disappear beneath its mysterious surface, so impenetrable to me and so welcoming to them.

That surface is a new kind of thing: a hard thing, stronger in its stillness than I am in my motion of smashing against it. I think a new thought, to encompass this way of being: the surface is a shell. A boundary that resists disruption with more strength than I’ve ever seen anywhere else.

There are often other hunters near the shell, sometimes coming in on the chase, sometimes lurking and waiting, sometimes testing themselves against its unyielding hardness. I leave them alone and they do the same to me.

It’s a very, very long time before I see another hunter go into the shell.

I’m too far away to quite catch how the transit is accomplished, but I see the hunter approach, and sort of—fold up very small, almost to the size of prey—and then move toward the shell and pass through it somehow, slipping inside like prey do. When I come closer to look, I can’t see any gaps that even something as small as prey might have fit through. I don’t know how it’s even possible to get that small.

I try to learn, though, in the long silences between hunts. I practice until I can make myself tiny, as tiny as prey. It’s hard and uncomfortable and half the time I can’t even tell I’m doing it right, but I’m very stubborn about trying. I’ve seen it done, so I can do it, and I want to. I want to eat the thing that thwarted me—and almost more than that, I want to know what it’s like in there. How does it feel to be surrounded by strangeness? What does it look like? Is the shell filled with an unimaginable bounty of prey, so many that I’ll never stop eating again? Or does it eat them all somehow, slowly, once it has them concealed inside of it? Does it dissolve them all together to make that faint hum of life? Will it eat me too?

It’s that last thought that keeps me from trying the other hunter’s trick for so long. I don’t want to be eaten. I don’t want to be afraid, or hunted, or hurt. I want to do those things to prey, but not to experience them myself; they look like they’d be very unpleasant.

But if I don’t ever get inside that shell, I’m not ever going to find out what’s in there.

So—after a very, very long time—I try it.

I fold myself up very small and go very close to the shell and look as hard as I can for any kind of crack, any gap, any opening of any kind, that I might use to slip inside. I can’t see any. I’m discouraged at first, but then I remind myself that I’ve seen it done, so it can be done, so I can do it too, and I circle the whole thing again, searching, searching, pressing my small folded self against the surface even though I can’t see any openings anywhere—

A tiny crack opens up, and I tumble through.

It’s the most disorienting experience of my life.

From the outside, the strangeness is just that—the strangeness. One single thing, strange and new but still the same as itself. It’s not like anything else, but there’s only one of it, and it’s all of a piece, no part standing out particularly from the rest.

From the inside, it’s so much more than that, I hardly even know how to look at it all, how to separate one strangeness from another. There are so many things, and all of them so new to me, in new shapes and new textures, perceived with new senses. Prey, yes, somewhere in this cacophony there is prey, but I can’t see them anywhere because there’s so much strangeness in between. More things I have no name for than I know how to count, things even stranger and newer to me now than the shell was before I had ever seen a shell, so many of them that it all blurs together into a bright smear of noise.

I flail in confusion for what feels like a very long time, and then I smash very hard against some of the strangeness, and for the first time in the whole span of my memory, I feel pain.

At first all I know is that for all the too-bright too-loud chaos surrounding me, this feeling is brighter and louder and more awful than any of it. I keep flailing, but the movement brings more pain, and it takes me a long time to even think of stopping, and longer after that to follow through on the idea. Eventually, though, I calm my frantic movement and hold still, and stillness helps.

Now here I am, surrounded by things I don’t understand, with this awful new sensation to contend with. Flailing makes the bad thing happen. What about just moving a tiny bit, the tiniest little bit I can? What about that?

I move, just a little, slowly, cautiously. The brightloud feeling flares up again. I stop—wait—move—hurt. And then, at last, I recognize it; I wrap the old familiar thought around the new sensation. I’ve eaten so much prey, so many trembling little things, and I’ve seen them and felt them and tasted them, the way they cringed and twitched and—hurt—and now here I am, feeling what they felt.

I don’t like it.

I like it even less when I realize a moment later that maybe the strangeness is eating me, maybe this is what being eaten is like—and I feel fear, and fear makes me move and motion makes me hurt and my self-control crumbles and I flail and thrash, just like prey, just like an eaten thing, hurting myself even worse in my pain and terror, and more afraid the more I hurt, and hurting more the more I panic, and—

A long, unpleasant while later, something changes. I don’t know what the change is, but it makes everything hurt less, and that calms me, and lets me stop moving so much, and then I don’t hurt so much, and then I’m not so scared, and finally I think to try something other than movement.

This isn’t being eaten—I don’t think I’m dissolving—but it’s more like being eaten than it’s like any other thing I know of. Being eaten is… an interaction between outside and inside, an interaction across the boundary of the self. My boundary sure does feel bad and not good right now. And the folding I did to get small like prey—that’s a kind of changing my boundary. So can I fold myself like that again, and change my boundary from one that hurts into one that doesn’t?

At first, trying to fold the pain away hurts worse than just moving—but once I’ve folded a little of myself, the next time I move hurts less. I can recognize that I have a shape, and that it’s very different at the moment from the shape I feel like I should have, and I can fold and push and sort of wiggle myself into place so that the parts of the shape that feel wrong start feeling right again, and once I finish doing that, the pain goes away.

It’s an indescribable relief, to not be in pain. Any other time I’ve felt relief it’s been about catching prey after a long chase, and it’s never been as intense, as overwhelming as this. I don’t hurt. I don’t hurt. I don’t hurt at all, in any part of me, and I’m not being eaten, and I’m not being hunted, and I’m not afraid.

So, then, the thing I came here for—

I can still sense prey, a little, but I can’t tell how far away it is or how to reach it. I can only even sort of get a direction. This place is not the endless feast I dreamed of.

But all that strangeness is still here. I’m surrounded by it. Before I entered the shell, I lived in a world of nothing, but in here there’s something everywhere I look—close by, far away, in front or behind, always more things. And what things they are! There are more different ways for a thing to be than I could ever possibly have imagined. I move a little, extending part of my shape into the strangeness in front of me, and my shape changes the shape of the thing I push against, and when I pull back there is some of the thing on me and the surface of the thing has a hollow just right to fit the shape of what I put there. I fold, and change that part of myself to a new shape, and put it in this strangeness next to where the old shape still lingers, and now there is a new hollow shaped like the new part.

I put more of myself in the squishy strangeness. It has the same pleasant feeling to it as the thing that made me hurt less before. Moving inside the shell is just as strange as everything else about it, but I think I’m starting to find the trick of it: it’s like I’m always being pulled in a certain direction, but there’s a solid surface there—a ground—pushing back to keep me from moving that way forever. Maybe that’s why I smashed myself so hard when I got here. Anyway, after some experimentation, I manage to invent a new way to move: push, turn, roll, push again. I can get all of myself on the nice-feeling strangeness that way, all of the surfaces of this shape I have here, and I can fold myself to make new surfaces and then roll some more and look at all the shapes I leave behind me in the surface of the nice-feeling thing.

I’m covered in nice-feeling stuff, now, and I rub parts of myself over other parts of myself to feel what that’s like, and it’s interesting and strange and also feels nice, and I get distracted doing that and forget about how I got here, and then all of a sudden as I’m flopping and wriggling and rolling and playing there’s a part of the nice-feeling strangeness that does not feel nice at all. I pull back the part of myself that hit the small hard thing, and for a moment I can’t even remember how to fold my shape to stop the pain, I’m just very suddenly hurting and afraid with hardly any idea how I got that way—

It’s only a little pain, though, this time, in only a little part, and I fold it away and then flop into the nice-strangeness and lie mostly still. I’m shivering a little, the way prey sometimes shivers after I catch it. I don’t like that. I don’t like pain or fear or unpleasant surprises, and I don’t like acting like prey. I don’t like feeling like prey.

My hunger, from which I’ve been distracted all this time, sharpens suddenly with this new discomfort. And, not even thinking about it, propelled by long experience that says nearly all the things I’ve ever touched are food, I maneuver my strange awkward shape to try to eat the first thing I can grab.

—!

I do not like that!

The nice-strangeness might be good to feel on my surfaces but it is bad to try to eat. I try to un-eat it instead. I am not very good at un-eating things, never having had the occasion to try it before, and it takes me a little time to figure out how, and it is a very uncomfortable little time. Bad. Bad bad bad. Not the wrenching awful inescapable badness of pain or fear, but a new bad, a strange bad, something I don’t understand even as much as the very little I understand hurting.

When I am all done un-eating the strangeness and there is no more of it left in my eating parts I scrape it off of myself as much as I can and then try to move away from it. But of course there’s the pull, and I don’t know how to move except by rolling, so I’m soon covered in the stuff all over again, trying to find a place where the squishy stuff stops and a different surface begins. I remember that this stuff had a beginning, so logically it has to have an end, or at least the same beginning back again. Somewhere in here there is something that isn’t this, and all I have to do is find it.

Instead I find another small hard thing that hurts to roll on. Actually I find several. Some of them are bigger than others, and have more uncomfortable shapes. They’re hiding in the nice-touching-bad-eating-squishable-strangeness, like prey hides in the shell-place. I hope they do not have minds because if they did I would want to eat them out of spite and I bet they are even worse to eat than the squishy stuff. They don’t feel like minds, though, so I don’t try it.

As I travel across the squishy stuff, searching for a different and less treacherous surface to be on, bit by bit I get used to the way this world is. There is the squishy stuff, that I’m pulled toward, and not-the-squishy-stuff, that I’m pulled away from. Not-the-squishy-stuff isn’t nothing, but it’s very much the same as itself; it doesn’t feel very interesting to touch, and it’s sort of soothingly monotonous to look at, and I can’t see much through or past it. It obscures the squishy stuff all around me, starting a short distance away that isn’t much longer than the length of my shape, gradually enough that I can’t quite tell exactly how far I’m seeing. It’s strange. I’ve never had so much trouble seeing before. I’ve never had so much to see before; maybe that’s related. And the things there are to see, here, are different from each other in ways that aren’t like how anything outside the shell-place is different from any other outside thing.

And this isn’t even a tiny little part of the amount of strangeness I saw before I smashed into something and spent so long hurting! I wonder if I’ll ever see any of that again. I’d like to. I want to find out what all of it is like, hunt it all down and poke it and roll on it and get to know it until I understand it as well as I understand the squishy stuff and the hazy stuff. And maybe some of it will be better for eating than the squishy stuff is. I really hope some of it will be better for eating than the squishy stuff is. It would be terrible to finally reach this strange magnificent place and learn all its secrets and then never eat again because all the prey is hiding and all the other things are so bad to eat that I have to un-eat them after trying.

Finally, I see something that isn’t the squishy stuff. It looks a little more like the hazy stuff in some ways, but it isn’t hazy at all, quite the opposite; it has a shape that looks like hardness, with strong defined edges. I go up to it and poke it. Poking it hurts a little but I’m stronger now, more used to pain, and I hardly even panic for a moment. It’s tall, taller than my current shape, and broad, and sort of lumpy, and in the spirit of adventure I try to move myself onto it even though this will probably be uncomfortable.

Moving in the shell-place is hard.

I have to push against things, I can’t just be in one place and go toward another. And I have to push against things the right ways, without hurting myself, in the right directions, with the right parts, so that my shape goes all together in the direction I want. I can make it a little easier if I fold myself to change shape, but only a little.

Eventually, after much trial and error and frustration and hurt, I climb up onto the tall hard thing. Climbing is a thought I can have now, and up. These things are new to me and I’m starting to understand them. For example, I understand that now that I am up on the tall thing, if I am not very careful when I go down from it again, I will fall, and hit something, and if the something is not squishy it will hurt.

I don’t like that thought. So many things in this place can hurt me, and not even by trying, just by being the way that they are and waiting for me to poke them wrong. I’m like prey, to this place, but prey without a hunter, so small and weak and stupid and fragile that I hurt myself without outside intervention.

The frustration of feeling that way motivates me to get off the tall thing again. It’s all smeared with squishy stuff where I was lying on it. I notice that some of the smears, on the tall thing and on me, are changing: the squish is going out of them, leaving them harder but weaker, crumbly instead of squishy, so that they break apart at a touch. It doesn’t feel nearly as nice like this. The squish seems to have been an important part of the niceness.

Well, now I know that. I’m learning more in the short time I’ve been here than I have in the whole rest of my life, and about more interesting things. I can hardly imagine what I might learn next.

First, I try to climb down from the tall thing. Climbing down, strangely enough, is harder than climbing up; or maybe it’s just that in climbing up the difficulty is getting yourself to go up, and in climbing down the difficulty is in getting yourself to only go down in the exact right ways.

I almost manage it, sort of, at least halfway, and then I lose hold of the tall thing—holding things is so much harder here, you have to make your shape and their shape go together just right—and I tumble off and land in the squish. It doesn’t hurt much, but it’s disorienting, and the falling part feels the way it felt when I first came here, and the memory is sharp enough to make me tremble like prey, still afraid of hitting the ground even after I’m lying on it as flat as I can fold myself. So flat. It feels very bad right now to have any parts of me higher than any other parts.

For a while I just lie there, being flat, trying not to shiver too much.

And then—

!!

Prey!

Preypreyprey!

I don’t know which of my strange new senses alerts me—I can barely feel a thing the normal way, in my sense of the bright shine of life—but I look over away from the tall thing and there it is, a creature with a shape that’s solid the way my shape is solid, moving the way my shape moves, and the shape of it is wrapped around a self that I can almost taste just thinking about it. I lunge up out of my flatness, forgetting fear, folding myself many long grasping parts to catch and hold, and then I have it, it’s struggling and trembling the way scared things tremble, and I hardly wait a moment before I begin to eat.

It tastes—nothing like anything I’ve ever tasted before. It tastes nothing like a taste. My—my shape is eating the prey’s shape, but my self isn’t eating its self, that’s hidden somehow, wrapped up and tucked away out of sight, and as good and strange and new as this taste is, it hardly touches my hunger even a little. I eat up the whole shape of the prey until it’s almost all gone, just a little left that leaked out of the rest and fell in the squish where I don’t want it, and when I’m done its self is nowhere to be found. Gone, vanished, somewhere out of reach; gone beyond, not gone the way eaten prey is gone, no dissolution and no final taste of life, just… disappeared. I almost think I can catch a hint of a direction, a trace of a trail, but I half believe I’m just imagining it, it’s that faint.

I’m angry. I hit the squish very hard with all my many new grasping parts and bits of it fly everywhere and that’s a thing that feels good to do when angry, it turns out, but I’m still angry afterward, so I do it again. This time I miss, and a few parts hit the tall hard thing instead, and that makes me much angrier. I don’t like to hurt! Things should stop being ways that hurt me! I want interesting new things to poke that don’t hurt, and interesting new things to learn that aren’t frustrating, and prey I can eat properly!

Being angry makes me want to hit more things, and when I hit more things some of what I hit is the tall hard thing that hurt me a moment ago, and now I hurt even more and I’m even angrier and—it feels at first like there isn’t any other way I could be, any other thing I could do, than keep hitting everything in reach and getting angrier every time any of it hits back—

But in fact this is not a good thing to be doing at all. It’s only making me more hurt and more angry with no way to be less of those things as long as I keep doing it, and I would be much better off if I stopped.

It takes me a little while to have the thought, and a little longer to convince myself of it, and mustering the will to act on it takes longer still. It doesn’t feel good to try to stop being angry. It feels bad. It feels like I shouldn’t have to stop being angry, like I should be finding the thing that made me angry and eating it, hurting it, making it feel the way things that make me angry should feel. But I can’t eat the things that I’m angry about, and I can’t make them feel things because they aren’t things that can feel. So I need to do some other thing, and probably one that doesn’t involve hurting myself. Hurting myself is bad and hurts.

With this renewed clarity of purpose, I pull in my hurt parts and fold them away and stop trying to hit things. It’s slow, which I didn’t expect. I would have thought that once I decided to stop doing something I could just stop doing it. But no, I have to still myself in stages, piece by piece by piece, fighting my own anger until I finally manage to fix all my hurts without giving myself any more.

I lie flat and rest for a while after that. I’m not used to this feeling of tiredness. Have I felt it before? It’s less alien than some things I’ve experienced here, but I’ve definitely never felt this much of it at once. Being all wrapped up in a solid shape like this is exhausting.

It occurs to me to wonder if it’s even worth it, being in here with all the ways there are to get hurt and scared and tired and the prey I can’t eat. But I try to imagine going outside again, and never mind the fact that I don’t actually know how to do that, I find that I don’t want to. How could I go back to hunting prey in the vast nothing, knowing this place was here and I hadn’t finished exploring it? It’s true, sometimes I feel bad things here, but—I feel things. I like feeling things. I want to feel more things, so many more. All the things I can find, even if some of them hurt.

I feel even more determined, now. I fold myself a shape that I think will move better along the squishy ground, and it works okay, and I keep changing it as I go, finding things that work even better.

The hazy stuff is getting less hazy, so I can see farther, and the squishy stuff is getting less squishy, so it’s easier to move. I pick up speed; clearly this is a good direction to be going.

Eventually, I see something new ahead.

II. Learning

It’s flat, and shiny like the squishy stuff but differently, and it moves a little, small ripples scurrying across its flatness. I go closer to it and poke it, and it’s—the soothing feeling from before, that made the hurt less; it’s see-through, like the hazy stuff, but harder to see through because it’s murky and shiny and has those moving ripples; it’s… like the squishy stuff, but without the part that was left when the squish went away…

The ground next to the flat ripply soothing stuff is almost not squishy at all, but right next to it, they kind of mix a little, and that part is squishy. And when I poke it, it gets squishier. I poke it more, confirming the theory: when ripply-stuff (water) mixes with ground-stuff (dirt), together they make squishy-stuff (mud).

Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that spectacular? I have to sit and think about it for a little while, poking the edge between the ground and the water, because I’ve never seen anything like it before. One thing and another thing mix to become a third thing, that’s a little like one and a little like the other but also its own separate thing different from either. No wonder this place has so many things in it; when some of the things touch each other they make more things!

I notice that the mud in the water gets squishier and squishier until it’s all squish and no substance, and then it’s just like water except it still looks a little like mud. And I can poke it more and mix it more until it mostly just looks like water again.

I still have a little of a grudge against the mud from earlier, so I roll myself onto the water to try to get all the mud off of myself. Water is very bad at keeping its own shape; I’m expecting to keep on top of it somehow, but instead it flows out of my way and wraps around me and I fall right through it. It’s startling, and even though it doesn’t hurt it still makes me think of being eaten, and I panic and flail uselessly and the mud on me mixes with the water and now I can’t see through it at all, I just see mud. The falling and the feeling like I’m being eaten and the not being able to see all get mixed up together into something much worse than they would each have been by themselves.

At first when I hit the ground beneath the water I just panic more, because hitting it hurts, and hitting it again in my panicked flailing hurts more. But there’s something familiar about that, and I remember how angry I was back at the tall hard thing, and I remember how to calm myself down; and it’s different, harder, because this is fear instead of rage and fear is so much worse, but I can do it. Calm and still. Calm and still. Calm and still. It’s so hard but I can.

When I’m calm enough and still enough to not just keep hurting myself, I fold away the hurt parts, and then I fold up, making myself taller and taller until some of me pokes through the surface of the water into not-the-water. It’s an incredible relief to be able to see again, and to not feel like I’m being eaten. I reach up into the haze and fold myself more reaching-parts so I can get even higher. It feels very very good to be not covered in mud and not under water and not hurting.

I look at the mud and at the muddy water and at the water farther away that is not muddy. All of these things have hurt me except arguably the last, but it’s also the one that feels the most dangerous. The mud only hides hard things in it, but the water is dangerous to even try to move through because I’ll fall in and it’ll feel like it’s eating me and I’ll be afraid and hurt myself.

It occurs to me that I have spent a lot of time here being afraid of things eating me, and not any time actually being eaten by anything, and maybe I should stop worrying about it. But there are so many strange things here, how could I know that the next one won’t eat me? Or do something else I can’t even imagine that’s somehow worse? Maybe the water will eat me next time I fall into it. I don’t know. I need to know things.

I turn away from the ground and the mud, and toward the clearer water, and I move myself in that direction. It’s hard to stay balanced, and hard to stay mostly above the water, but I’m learning. I learn more things as I go, like how the water is easy for small or thin things to move through, but hard for broad flat things. I make myself broader and flatter, and my grasping-parts and moving-parts thinner and longer, and then most of me is lying flat on top of the water and only the long thin parts are reaching down to the ground under the water to grab it and push me along. It feels safer like this, because I can feel every moment how I’m not going under the water, how it’s staying under my broad flat shape and holding me up and not eating me even a little bit.

This is good. I like this.

It’s nice, and calm, and restful, and I’m going slowly but I don’t really mind that. I’m hungry but I’ve been hungrier than this for longer and I’m not worried about it.

The ground under the water gets lower as I move away from the place where I made mud. It’s harder and harder to fold myself long enough grasping-parts to reach. But even when I can only barely reach that far at all, my broad flat shape stays reassuringly secure in its on-topness.

The water is much clearer here, too. When I look down into it I can see almost all the way to the bottom. There are things in it, strange flat wavy things, long like my grasping-parts, and I poke them and they feel interesting to poke, and I pull on them and they break apart and I drag the broken-off part up above the water for a closer look. They look different from the mud and the water and the haze, different in a way I don’t have a name for. Seeing in the shell-place is different from seeing outside of it; they aren’t even really the same kind of sense at all, and I’m realizing now just how different they really are.

I understand brightness and darkness, sort of, because they’re a kind of moreness and lessness. But the way the wavy things are different from the other things I’ve seen is not just in how bright or how dark or how shiny or how see-through they are; it’s in this thing that isn’t more of one thing or less of another, it’s different, as different as a different shape or a different texture but not in the same way. Haze is bright and mud is dark and water is shiny and the long wavy thing is, is… the wavy thing is…

The wavy thing is green.

I’m very pleased about discovering this very new thing and making it an idea that fits in my mind, that I can think about and understand a little. Things seen the way I see things in the shell-place have colour. Are green and not-green the only colours? Is the water a different colour from the mud? It’s hard to tell because so much of the way the water looks is the way I can see through it, but I think so. Maybe there are even more colours than this! Maybe soon I’ll find a new one! I think maybe the prey I ate had colours but it’s hard to remember because I was so distracted. Next time I find prey I should look at its colours before I eat it and see if I find any new ones.

I pull myself along the surface of the water. It’s harder and I’m going slower now that the ground underneath is so very far away. Maybe there is a better way to move here. Pushing on the ground worked when the ground was mud or dirt, but now instead I’m moving over water and it’s different and might need a different approach.

Very very tentatively, I let go of the ground under the water, and I fold myself new parts for moving with. Broad flat parts, so I can push on the water with their broadness. It works, sort of. I change the shapes, and change the way I move them, and eventually I end up going pretty fast, faster than I can remember ever managing since I got here. My broad flat moving-parts are turnable, so I can push on the water with their broadness and flatness and then pull them back with their turned-sideways thinness and then push again. It’s fun, moving like this. For the first time I can remember in the shell-place, moving feels good and easy and not difficult or frustrating.

I lose track of myself a little, caught up in the feeling of moving, not really looking at anything except the water and the way my shape moves through it. It’s so good. It feels better, here, than it ever did outside, because here I can feel so many more things—the effort it takes to move my shape in the ways I want, and the way the water touches me as I move through it, and when I get going really fast the stuff above the water has a feeling to it too—and there’s something interesting about that, but I’m too busy chasing motion to stop and chase the insight instead—

—and then preypreyprey and I’m still not thinking at all, I don’t stop to look for colours or wonder how to catch its self so I can eat it properly, I just turn and move and grab and eat. The new strange taste of prey-shape is so good, and I’m so hungry, and—then it’s gone, and I’m still just as hungry as before.

I fold long sharp parts to hit the water with. There’s more prey here, too, not that it does me any good—they’re leaking part of their shapes into the water and it’s a new colour, a good colour, and I hardly care, I’m so angry—why can’t I eat! What’s the use of this place, as wonderful as it is, as many new things and good feelings as I’ve found here, if it won’t feed me?

I thrash my many long sharp grasping-parts, stirring up the water and the prey and the pieces of something-or-other all mixed up with them. It doesn’t help but I’m too angry to care. The prey is thrashing too, trembling in pain and fear, leaking the new colour from their broken shapes. Good. I’m angry and I want to make things hurt.

…I remember, though, how often flailing around like this has just ended in me hurting myself. And I remember what it feels like, to be in pain and afraid.

Of course the prey doesn’t want to be eaten, when being eaten feels like that. Of course they would hide away in the shell-place and wrap themselves up in their fragile little shell-place shapes and disappear before my self can find their self to eat it.

I have practice, now, at calming myself. I make myself go calm and still, and fold away all my new sharpness, and I look down at the thrashing leaking prey. Some of them are under the water, and I see one lose its self and stop moving, and how weak and scared and hurt they are; and I want to eat them but I can’t eat them, eating them won’t give me what I want, not really, just a fleeting moment of pleasure without any relief of my hunger, and I know what they’re feeling and how much they must not want to feel it, and…

Something happens in my mind that I don’t really understand. It feels bad but also good. And bad again, and good again, in other different ways. I want… I want to make the prey not hurt. I want it to have good feelings and not bad ones. I don’t like feeling like this, but the feeling happens anyway. I don’t know what to do about it. How do you make prey stop hurting? I can’t fold their shapes like I fold mine; I don’t know if they could do it themselves even if I showed them. I don’t know if they could think past their fear long enough to try. Thinking past fear and pain is very very hard.

Another of the prey-shapes loses hold of its self underwater. Is it the water doing that, eating them the way I was afraid it might eat me, or is it the prey? Do they do that when they’re hurt enough, or afraid enough, or broken enough? Maybe if I pick them up out of the water they won’t feel so bad. I fold myself new grasping-parts, broad gentle round ones without any sharpness, and I grab the two remaining prey as carefully as I can, and I put them on top of my broad flat shape. Water comes out of them, and more of the water-like stuff in the good new colour.

The prey-shapes with no self left can’t be hurt or afraid anymore, and they taste good even if they barely help the hunger. I pick them up and eat them. The prey on top of me shivers more, and the two of them move closer to each other and grab each other tightly, even though I can see it hurts them to move like that and be squished like that; and I can sense a faint trace of their fear, blurred and distant the way my sense of prey’s feelings is always blurred and distant inside the shell. Oh. Probably it scares them to see me eating other prey, even prey with its self already gone. Probably I could have figured that out if I’d thought of it. I’m not very good at this, am I.

I don’t like how watching the prey be scared and hurt feels good and bad. It’s confusing. I would rather have one feeling or the other, so I’d know what to do about it. But right now I am trying to make them be less scared and hurt. Yes. That is the thing I am doing. I am bad at it but I have learned a lot of things since I came to the shell-place and maybe I will learn this one too.

Can I teach them to fold their shapes? Is that a thing prey can do? I learned it from watching another hunter, but I was very curious and it took me a very long time to figure it out. But maybe if they see me do a lot of it they’ll learn it faster. And I was only curious and not hurt. I think being hurt is probably a much stronger motivation.

I look down at the prey and I fold myself two new grasping-parts to show them. They flinch and huddle closer to each other (good! bad! goodbad!) but they watch me. Slowly, so they can see the changes, I fold each new part into a different shape.

It’s hard to tell, but I don’t think they understand what I’m doing. I definitely can’t see them trying it themselves at all.

Don’t they want to stop being hurt? Maybe they’re too hurt and scared to try it. I know it’s hard to do things when you’re hurt and scared.

Or maybe…

Oh no.

No, I don’t like this idea. I don’t like it at all. I want it not to be true.

Wanting things not to be true has not, in my experience, ever stopped them.

I think maybe they don’t realize that folding their shapes like I’m showing them could make them stop hurting.

And I can only really think of one way to demonstrate that.

I don’t want to. But—I don’t want them to keep hurting, either.

I study them as closely as I can, to be sure I can get it right. One of the prey has a long part broken near the end, and I fold one of my grasping-parts very very carefully so it’s shaped just the same on the inside as well as the outside; they each have two of this part and only one of the four is broken, so I have plenty of examples. It has hard parts and soft parts and leaking parts, and I arrange them all just so, while the prey stares in fascination—are they less scared, watching this? I think they are. Good! That’s what I want! (Is it? I miss the fear - but it felt bad to see it - but it felt good to see it - this is confusing.)

Even if they’re less scared now, though, they’re still hurt and broken, and I want them not to be. And this is the only way I can think of to achieve that.

I look at them carefully to check that my new part is right, shaped all the same ways, although the colour isn’t right because I don’t know how to fold myself colours; and then I grab it with a grasping-part and break it, as close as I can to where and how the prey’s part is broken. I’ve never really done this before so it’s not exactly the same, and I think I might have gotten some of the inside shapes wrong, because it’s not squishing quite the same or leaking quite the same, but I think—I hope—it’s close enough.

And—slowly, so they can see it, not fast to get it over with, no—I fold away the hurt until it’s right again, shaped just the same as before.

They’re still scared, now, but much less. Still clinging to each other and shivering, but also staring at me, moving their seeing-parts to track what I’m doing. They have a lot of colours, all different on their different parts. Some of the colours are like the mud and some are like the haze and some are like the water.

The colour of the leaking part is the only one distinct and vivid enough for me to separate it out into its own concept: red.

I like red.

It doesn’t look like they understood my suggestion, or if they did I don’t think they’ve figured out how to try it. Was it the colour being wrong, so they couldn’t tell I was making a part like their parts, to hurt like they hurt? My shape is dark like mud; could they not see what I was doing? Do they not know I’m trying to help? I guess maybe they are scared of me and think I want to eat them, which is fair, because I do. But I want to help them, too, and I don’t know how to show them that, and even if I knew how to show them I want to, I still wouldn’t know how to solve any of the problems they have, all of which are problems I myself caused.

Maybe I can’t do this and I should just give up and eat them.

That doesn’t feel right, though. To try so hard to show them I want to help, try so hard to really help them, and then just end up eating them anyway? It feels—I don’t know. It feels not good. I think I really don’t want to do that. I think that, even more than wanting to not hurt, even more than wanting to hunt and eat, even more than all my confused wantings about what I would like the prey to feel or not feel, I don’t want to be—fake. I don’t want to start out trying to help the prey and then give up and eat it instead.

This is all very complicated.

I look around at the water, at the other things in it that aren’t me and aren’t prey. There are a lot of things. Many of them look like all the same kind of stuff, a hard kind with many thin sharp parts poking out at its edges. I think I remember breaking this stuff. Even the very smallest and thinnest pieces are staying on top of the water, not slipping through it the way small thin things usually do; when I poke them and pick them up, they’re very light.

What was the prey doing here? How did they get to this place in the middle of the deep water? They’re bad at moving around in the water; their shapes are not broad or flat, and they thrash and break and lose their selves in it. Maybe this stuff, which floats so well, was broad enough and flat enough for them to all sit on, before I broke it.

Maybe they have one problem I can solve.

I don’t know which direction to go, to find something that isn’t water; but on water I can move fast. I fold myself many many broad flat turnable parts, and I sweep them through the water, clumsy and tangled at first, but soon finding a rhythm. The prey on my back huddles and clings, and I coil a long thin grasping-part around them, to make sure they don’t fall off. I try not to squeeze too hard, but they are very fragile, and I think I hurt them a little. I hope I don’t break them even worse by accident.

I settle into a rhythm, and soon I’m moving through the water again, even faster than before. It doesn’t feel as good, when I’m too worried about the prey to lose myself in the moment. But it does feel good, still. And maybe soon I can put the prey in a place where they’ll be safe without me, and then even if I can’t make them any less hurt or scared, I can go away and stop hurting and scaring them more.

It takes time, to find a place where the ground comes up above the water. The haze around me starts to clear, and I can see farther than I ever have since I came to the shell-place. Far away above me, so far I can’t even really tell how far, there are pale things like pieces of the haze; and farther than that, a new colour, a good colour, a soft bright pretty colour.

Far away above everything, behind all the other things that there are—I think maybe I’m seeing the shell itself, the way it looks from the inside. And it is blue.

What a good thing to see. What a good place to be. A bad place too, sometimes, but sometimes very good.

I keep moving. The prey on my back have gone quiet and still, huddling into each other. I think they’re still hurt and still scared, but I don’t know what else to do about it. This is the only idea I’ve got left and it’s not really enough and it feels bad to be trying it instead of eating them but I’m doing it anyway.

When I see something sticking up out of the water, I turn toward it. Turning slows me down but not by much. It feels like hardly any time at all before I’m close enough to see it properly, and—

I’m so surprised I stop moving for a moment, and just drift forward through the water without pushing myself. It’s not any kind of ground at all! It’s a big floating thing made of the hard floating stuff, much bigger than the one I left behind in pieces, almost bigger than my whole broad flat shape. But it isn’t broad and flat the way I imagined the prey’s floating-things might be; it has a shape that is long and smooth, and I can see how it slips easily forward through the water, propelled by many small flat moving-parts all pushing at once. What a marvelous shape! I move closer, curious, forgetting for a moment about the prey on my back.

There is prey on the back of the floating-thing, too.

I lunge before I can stop myself, and the prey on my back tremble and cling to each other, and feeling their weight shift reminds me what I’m here for, and I fold in all of my grasping-parts very suddenly so that I am just a broad flat round shape floating on the water that could not grab prey even if I tried. I am not here to grab prey. I am not here to eat. Eating doesn’t work in the shell-place. It won’t help. And I’m doing something here, something hard that I have tried so hard to do, and I do not want to fail at it by being stupid and impulsive.

If the big floating thing is so full of prey, it must be a safe place for them. I pick up the prey from my back, as carefully as I can, and I go closer to the big floating thing—they’re all very scared, when they see me, but I try to ignore it—and I reach up, careful careful careful, and deposit the prey on the flat part of the floating thing where the other prey are. They flinch and huddle together but I don’t think I broke them and I think maybe not breaking them is the best I can do right now.

I hesitate, watching them. I don’t like how bad I was at making them not hurt. I want to do better, and I can’t think how. Showing them how to fold themselves didn’t work. Showing them how to fold a broken shape just like theirs into a whole one didn’t work. I don’t know how to fold colours so I can’t fix the colours and try again in case that was the problem. Maybe the other prey will have better ideas? I don’t know.

It occurs to me, though, that water soothes pain a little. That’s the first thing I ever learned about water, was that the feeling of water pouring gently over hurt parts makes them hurt less. So maybe there’s one more thing I can try.

I fold myself some broad flat grasping-parts, and pick up some water with them. Picking up water turns out to be harder than I expected, but I manage it after a few tries. I pick up the water and lift it up to the flat part of the big floating thing, and I pour it over the two scared prey. I’m aiming for the broken part, but my aim is not very good.

They shiver some more, but this time… I don’t think they’re scared? Or—I think they’re still scared, and still hurt, but there’s something else there too. A different feeling. A good feeling. I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything quite like it, but I recognize its goodness, somehow. The faint trace of it tastes a little like relief.

I like that. I like that very much.

Still, all the other prey are getting more scared the longer I stay here. I hesitate a moment longer, and then I turn around and push on the water with my many broad flat parts, and I go away from the floating thing.

I have a lot to think about.

Why does it feel bad to help prey? Why does it feel good to help prey? How did I even think of an idea as strange as helping prey? I try to remember, try to sort through the feelings, and it all just feels like a big mess. I feel like I can’t tell which things are good and which things are bad and why any of them are either. Except that it was good when I poured water on the prey and they felt good feelings. For some reason that in particular feels only good and not bad. Everything else…

I don’t like to hurt, but I hurt myself on purpose and I wanted to be doing it because it was important. I don’t like to be scared, but this place has been scaring me in all kinds of new ways since I got here, and I’m still here and I still don’t want to leave. I like eating prey—for so long the only good thing I ever did or felt or had was eating prey!—but now I can’t eat prey so I’m helping them instead? And it feels good to hurt them but it also feels bad because I know what hurting feels like—but it also feels better because I know what hurting feels like, because I know what I’m doing to them—and it feels good to help them, in ways I don’t at all understand, and it feels bad to help them in ways I understand even less—

Everything is so very, very complicated, and I don’t know what to think about any of it.

Maybe instead of thinking about my feelings I should be thinking about the things I can see and touch and—taste? Do I dare taste more things? Prey-shapes taste good and mud tastes very bad and I don’t think water tastes like much. (I try it. I was right.) But I haven’t tried the long green fragile wavy things that I found under the water.

I look for some and grab a few strands and bring them to my eating parts. I’m a little afraid they’re going to be bad like the mud was bad, but… no, I think I like them. They’re not as good as prey, not even as good as empty prey-shapes, but they’re interesting. And they make my eating parts feel like something is being done about the hunger, even though it isn’t really, and that’s more pleasant than just ignoring it. I slow down and keep pulling up green things to eat.

Now that I can think at all while I’m doing it, eating feels interesting. I have all these… parts, and I don’t even understand how they all work, and things go into them to be torn and mashed and crushed with movements that feel very natural even though they’re not really how eating works outside the shell, and then the things go farther in and I lose track of them somehow. It’s not at all the same as the dissolution of boundaries that happens when I eat prey outside the shell; the shapes of things are too solid, in here, too hard and strong, for that sort of thing to work.

It’s strange to think that the shapes of those things are still inside of me somewhere, in a place where I can’t see or taste or feel them. I wonder if they’re becoming part of my shape somehow, turning into more of the stuff I’m made of, or if they’re just going to stay there forever, separate from the me-stuff that surrounds them. Will they squish together smaller and smaller, or will I get bigger and bigger? I’m not sure which of these options I like. They’re all kind of unsettling once I think about them in detail.

Maybe thinking about things is a bad idea and I should just do things instead.

I look up at the blue of the shell. It’s darker now than it was before. I like the colour. I like colours. I like that there are so many different ways for things to be. I like red best, but even without any red, colours are still one of the best things I’ve seen.

The blue darkens and darkens, and I fold my shape so I can float in the water and stare up at it. (It’s strange to remember how scared I was of water not long ago. I feel safe in it now, maybe safer than on mud or solid ground, because I’ve learned how to move in it so well.)

New colours appear, spreading out from one side of the shell. Beautiful colours, fantastic colours. I lose myself completely in watching them. My shape still floats in the water, but I hardly feel it there; all my attention is caught up in the colours. I see blue, and red, and purple, and pink and orange and yellow—more colours than I’ve ever seen together in one place before, and nearly all of them new.

Watching the shell change colour is simultaneously the most peaceful and the most intensely enjoyable thing I’ve ever done.

There’s so much, and it’s so lovely, and there’s nothing to draw my attention away from it, nothing I have to do, nothing I have to think about. I can just be in the moment, seeing the colours, watching them change, feeling—small and strange and vast and perfect. The colours are everything, and what a thing for everything to be.

At the end of their long slow progression, the whole shell is dark, maybe the darkest thing I’ve seen yet—black—and speckled with tiny bright dots, incredibly, beautifully bright—white. It’s… I don’t know what to call it; I don’t have a way to think about the kind of thing that this is. Beautiful is a nearly new concept already. But whatever it is, it feels good.

Slowly, I come back to myself. My shape still floats, nearly motionless, spread out on top of the water. After all the slow beautiful things I’ve just seen, my thoughts feel slow and beautiful too.

This place, this shell, was here before I saw it; it is bigger than me, and more complicated. It’s probably bigger and more complicated than any other thing that has ever existed or will ever exist. Since I got here it has hurt me and scared me, made me angry, stopped me from eating the prey I crave, and it has also given me experiences stranger and more beautiful than anything I could have imagined before I saw it.

If it is the kind of thing that can eat things, it can probably eat me, and maybe someday it will; if it is the kind of thing that can be weak or powerful, it is probably more powerful than I am. And those thoughts hurt to think. It feels wrong, to exist in a world where other things are more powerful than me, where I can be hurt, where I can be scared, where I can be eaten.

But—

Even with all that, I’m glad it’s here. Even with all that, I think it is probably the best thing there is. In all its glorious strangeness, it’s given me so much to learn and touch and see and think and feel, so much more than any other thing ever could. If it wasn’t so big and so complicated, how could it have shown me all those colours? How could I have rolled in mud and learned to move through water? And even if it was just big enough to contain mud and water and beautiful shell-colours and strange elusive prey that I could give good feelings to—if it was only that big, and only that complicated, I’d have seen all of the things in it already. I’m glad it’s so big and so complicated. I want to stay here forever, and I never want to stop seeing new things. I want to know what else there is that’s as good as the shell-colours or better.

And if all that newness means that sometimes I’m scared, or hurt, or hungry, then I’ll be scared and hurt and hungry, and I like that better than hunting prey forever in a place full of nothing.

III. Trying

I float in the water, staring up at the faraway shell with its tiny twinkling lights. My hunger distracts me; I fold myself a long grasping-part to reach down into the water and pull up some green stuff to eat, and then it’s better, and as long as I’m eating the green stuff I can just look up and not feel anything but the quiet happiness of seeing something beautiful.

It’s darker now; there was light coming from the shell, and now there is much less of it. I wonder if the light will come back. I hope it does; in this darkness it’s harder to see, and I’m already starting to miss the way seeing worked in the light time. But the dark time is pretty too. I do like those twinkling lights.

All of a sudden I feel that I’ve been still for too long. I want to move. I fold my shape into something more like the long smooth floating-thing I saw, to find out if it’s better for swimming—it’s so much its own thing, this way of moving in water, it really does count as a new idea—and I push myself through the water, thinking about colour and light and the feeling of movement.

Swimming is good.

There’s something about the feeling of it—the way I move my shape, the way I touch the water and the way the water touches me, and the way it looks when I’m moving so quickly, and the ripples and waves I leave in my wake—it’s just beautiful, one of the most beautiful things there is. Hunting on the outside felt a little like this, but this feels better.

I notice, when I’ve been moving for a while, that there’s movement and pressure and resistance above the surface as well as below it. I slow down to think about that. It makes sense, really, when I consider my experience of this place; there was never really a boundary between haze and not-haze, before, and the haze just sort of gradually faded away into whatever this stuff is. But it’s strange to think of myself as being completely surrounded by substance. I’m so used to there not being anything, and now instead there are things all over the place. This—stuff that isn’t anything else, that has no taste and no shape and no colour, no lightness or darkness, no tangible form of any kind except when I move fast enough to feel it—air—it’s right here, all around me, even when I’m not thinking about it, even when I can’t tell it’s there.

Sort of unsettling, that.

But I like the way it feels when I swim fast enough to feel the air moving past me. And there’s a kind of logic to it, that in this place where so many things are, there wouldn’t be any places where things aren’t.

I grab some more green things to eat. These ones are different from the ones I remember, and I can’t decide whether I like them as much. I think the other ones were better but I like these ones just for being interestingly new. In the dark I can’t see what colour they are; maybe they’re not even green at all. Maybe they’re some new colour even more beautiful than any of the colours I’ve seen before.

It’s a little tempting to stay and wait for the light time and find out, but I don’t know how long it’s going to be and I’d hate to stay in one place just waiting and waiting and not knowing when I’m going to see the thing I’m waiting for. So instead I decide to leave this mystery behind and go looking for a more interesting one.

I swim, and eat green things, and look around at the water and the dark speckled shell. And I wonder, after a while—is it safe, now, to go under the water? Is there something interesting down there? Would it still scare me the way it did before, when I didn’t understand water or swimming and I thought it was going to eat me?

I’m hesitant, because I don’t like being scared. But I like knowing things. And I like feeling capable of things I wasn’t capable of before.

It’s hard to figure out how to go under the water when I’ve spent so much time getting good at staying on top of it. But I fold my shape slowly into one that’s not quite so flat, a long thin wiggly shape with many parts for swimming, and I dip my front end under the water and let the rest of me follow along.

It feels—scary but not scary, good and strange and new—exciting. It feels exciting.

There are more green things, and I can go down and wiggle my long wiggly shape in between them, wondering how green they really are. There are little moving things, in between the green things, that dart and flee like prey, but I can’t feel a prey-self inside them. They taste good, though, in the fleeting empty way of a shape without a self, and they’re fun to hunt. I fold my shape smaller to make it more of a challenge, and lose myself in motion for a while.

The little moving things in the water come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and ways of moving. Sometimes, if I get a good look at one before I catch it, I mimic some of its shape to see if I can swim better that way. It’s hard but it’s fun, learning on the hunt, changing my shape and how I move it and adjusting to the change and then changing it again. And their shapes are usually better at swimming than what I invented on my own, and easier to mimic than my memory of the floating-thing I saw.

Eventually, when I’m chasing a little moving thing up near the surface, I notice that the shell is lighter than I remember it being last time I looked. Is it the light time again? I let my not-prey escape, and swim up to float on top of the water.

It is lighter, and getting lighter still. I float, and watch; the colours start at an edge, just like before, though I can’t tell if it’s the same one. And these colours are different. They change from dark to light instead of light to dark, and in a different pattern. Maybe there will be a new one every time. That would be amazing.

And then—!

In the middle of the colours, where the shell is brightest, I see something rising that’s brighter than anything. Even brighter than the tiny white spots on the darkened shell; even brighter than the light of the light time. The brightest possible thing. It floats upward, traveling along the shell, bringing the colours with it.

It’s beautiful. It glows so bright, and it makes such colours—was it there when the dark time began? Did I miss it somehow? Was it hiding? I stare at it, and keep staring as it rises, and the shell brightens to a beautiful blue, and the colours fade until only the bright disk remains. It moves slowly—I’d be impatient with anything else that moved this slowly—but I want to watch it, I want to see what else it does, I want to see where it goes and what colours it makes when it gets there.

Before it’s gone much of anywhere, though, I notice… something new. It’s hard to describe. It’s almost like I can feel the light of the bright disk, feel it like a thing touching my shape—but not the same way I feel pressure or texture, a different feeling, like colour is different from brightness—it feels good. It feels…

Warm. Warm, and the water is cold.

I like this new feeling.

It’s amazing to realize that even after all this time, even after all these things, there are still more new things to feel, still more new ways a thing can be. Warm and cold are good feelings. I like warm better, but cold is good too, and cold makes warm better than warm is by itself. I fold myself out very flat so I have lots of surface to feel the warmth of the light.

Happy, warm, floating, feeling and not thinking…

—preypreyprey!!—

My shape moves faster than my thoughts do; I have the prey in my eating parts before I have time to decide whether to eat it. It squirms and struggles and leaks and crunches, and then its self escapes its shape, and as it’s slipping away I get just a hint of a taste, just enough to really feel what it would be like to eat it.

It’s amazing.

The richness! The depth, the flavour! All the thoughts and memories, the joy, the pain, the fear, the ecstasy, everything it’s ever felt or wanted, all wrapped up together—outside the shell, there’s nothing in the prey but fear, but in here, oh, in here they’ve lived. Their experience of the world is as complex as mine, or maybe even more.

For a moment I’m too stunned to move, caught up in the taste, the feeling, the knowledge that maybe if I try very hard and learn very much, someday I could eat that—I could tear the prey apart and feast on their memories, the substance of their minds, I could make it mine, own it, consume it, hurt and destroy it—I can’t think of a deeper expression of power than that. I can’t think of a more satisfying meal than that. It would be glorious, and I’m so hungry.

But—but—

That was a mind, a mind like mine. A self like mine. Thoughts and feelings like mine. Not exactly like—I am still a hunter, and this is still prey—but the thoughts are still thoughts, the feelings are still feelings, every bit as bright and real and vivid as my own.

And as ravenous as I feel, thinking of eating that—as much as I want to own the power of that destruction—I also feel… sad.

There’s so much—I don’t know what to call it, how to think of it—I don’t know what it is, not really—but whatever this thing is that makes me me, the line of self and memory, the experience of learning and growing and being, the thing I have so much more of now than I did before—the prey has that too. And like me, they grow so much more inside the shell than out of it. They see and taste and feel, they learn, they remember. All the things they’ve been and done, the very things that make their selves taste so good—I think of destroying that, and it hurts. What if I learn to eat them properly, and I catch one, and it knows something I never would have learned on my own, something it would have shown me if I’d only known how not to hurt or scare it? What if I could have made it feel good feelings, and watched it feel them, and then instead I ate it, and stopped it from ever feeling anything again?

I think…

It’s hard, to think of eating something so transcendently delicious, and then decide not to.

But I think I don’t want to eat the prey in the shell.

Not the real way, the deep way. Not right down to the last scrap of their self. I want to let their selves go wherever they go when they leave their shapes, let them disappear into that deeper hiding place. And maybe, sometime in the future, probably a very long time in the future, after I’ve learned very many things, maybe I’ll learn how to stop being so hungry, and then maybe I’ll learn where the prey goes when their shapes are too hurt to hold them, if they aren’t just being eaten by the shell, if there really is a place they vanish away to; and then I can go there, and see them and be seen by them, and show them things I know and be shown things they know, and make them feel good feelings, and watch them feel good feelings, and feel good about it.

I like that thought. It’s a good thought. I want to do that, when I’ve learned enough. The way I am now, I’d eat them before I could stop myself; I have to learn how not to do that, first, and get good at it, good enough to be safe for prey to be near without their shapes to hide in, and that, I think, will take a very long time.

The fragments of the floating-thing that carried the prey to me are still scattered in the water. I don’t like looking at them; I swim until I can’t see them anymore. And I look up at the bright disk glowing on the shell, and I think about not eating prey.

It’s not going to be enough to just decide not to, that much is obvious. Every time I see one, I’m already trying to eat it before I have time to think of doing anything else. I have to—change that, somehow, make it so that instead of the instinctive lunge I pause and wait and think and give myself time to react differently.

I remember having better self-control outside the shell, and I try to think of what might make the difference. Is it that outside the shell there’s so much less stuff, so I can see farther, and the prey is always visible to me long before I’m close enough to take it? Maybe. But I don’t know how to make myself able to see prey from farther off, I don’t even know what I might possibly do to try to change that, so that won’t help me. What else is there? Things are more complicated here in general; it’s possible to act without thinking, here, in a way that’s much harder on the outside, because so much of my mind can be occupied with the experience of existing in this environment, light and colour and pressure and temperature and texture and taste. That also seems like something I would have a hard time changing. And anyway, stop feeling all the wonderful strangeness inside the shell? What a terrible idea!

Maybe this is the wrong way to think about it. Thinking doesn’t seem to be my strong suit anyway; I’m better at doing. What can I do, to make myself safer for prey?

My mind turns back to the things that move under the water.

Hunting them is like hunting prey, and when I do it I move the way I move when hunting prey, and eat their tasty shapes the same way I do with the shapes of prey. And like swimming, it gets easier and occupies less of my attention the more I practice it.

What if I practice hunting without eating? Practice it a lot, so that the first thing I do when I catch something I could eat is hold it gently and then let it go? Could I make that sequence as automatic as the way my shape angles into a turn in the water?

Well, the best way to find out is to try it.

So I do.

It’s hard, harder than I thought, and I didn’t expect it would be easy. A few times, early on, I make a mistake. And mistakes feel good; I’m still so very hungry, and the shape-without-self of the not-prey soothes the hunger for a moment. For only a moment, but only a moment is better than no time at all.

But no matter how hard this is, being safe for prey is going to be harder. And it does get easier with practice. So I keep at it, hunt after hunt after hunt. I fold my shape smaller than it’s ever been, to make the hunt more difficult; I fold it bigger and sleeker and faster, to make the hunt easy. I catch the not-prey in my grasping-parts and hold it and let it go; and then, when I’m much better at that, I switch to something harder: catching it in my eating parts, and stopping before I hurt it, and letting it go unharmed.

That is very, very hard.

The first time I try it, I bite too hard, and the not-prey loses whatever not-self powers its movement, and I eat it because I can’t bear the waste of letting its limp and leaking shape drift away in the water. The second time, I bite too hard again, and it occurs to me that if I keep eating them when I make this mistake, it’s going to be a very enjoyable mistake to make, and that is not really what I’m going for here. I try to stop myself, but the internal argument takes too long and by the time I come to a decision it’s too late for this one already. The third time, I close on the little moving thing with the firm resolution that no matter what happens, I am not going to eat it.

And I bite too hard anyway, and—it tastes so good—

And I pull away from it and let it fall from my eating parts and watch it slip slowly downward until I can’t see it anymore in the murk and the long strands of green.

And then I find another one and do it again.

They flee from my approach, but I’m faster than they are, and stronger. They can’t escape me for long. I practice hunting not-prey until I can catch one this way without hurting it, many many hunts after I started trying; and then I practice some more, until I can do that every time, until it starts to feel easy.

I’m very tired, by this point. And very, very hungry. And the dark time has come again while I wasn’t looking. I float on the surface of the water for a while to rest, thinking back with pride on how far I’ve come since I started practicing. I still don’t know if it’s going to help, but it feels like it might, and even if it doesn’t… I’ve accomplished something here. I’ve learned something hard, something that almost felt impossible when I started trying. That’s worth feeling proud of.

The bright disk rises again, just like it did the last time. I’m still captivated by the colours, but not so much as I was when they were entirely new. I feel happy and warm and peaceful, floating there watching it.

When the last streak of pink fades from the edge of the shell, I dive under the water again and go back to practicing.

Something harder this time, I think: instead of catching the not-prey in my eating parts, I want to try lunging for it and stopping myself before I get there. I want stopping myself to be the thing that happens automatically when I lunge for something tasty.

I fail the first time I try it, and the second, and the third and the fourth and the fifth. The sixth time‚ I get distracted and bite too hard and have to let the broken not-prey go and watch it fall away, trailing the same red stuff that prey-shapes leak.

(What are these things, that move like prey and leak like prey but don’t look like prey or think like prey? All the true prey I’ve seen has had mostly the same parts in the same shapes as each other, but these not-prey with their tasty shapes are much more varied. If they looked the same as prey I’d suspect them of being empty shapes with no prey in them yet, but I’ve already learned prey can’t fold themselves like I can, so if they started out in one of these, how would they come to have the kinds of shapes I’ve seen them in? Maybe the change happens when the prey-self moves into the shape to hide, and they can’t change themselves because the way I’ve seen them is the only way a prey-shape can be.)

But I don’t want to let myself get distracted for too long. I pick another target and try again. And again, and again, and again—it’s so hard but I’m too stubborn to quit—

I slip up again. Not so badly, this time; the not-prey is intact enough to squirm away and flee on its own. But I’m annoyed enough by my failure that I go back to practicing catching-without-hurting, and I keep at it until the dark time comes, and then continue in the dark, hunting by the faint dim light of the shell-sparkles. Only when I see the glow of the bright disk shining through the water do I go back to trying lunge-and-stop.

And I fail. And I fail. And I fail and fail and fail and fail some more, but at least this time I’m getting the catch-without-hurting part right.

Am I ever going to succeed at stopping a lunge? Is all this practice even helping or am I just going to eat the next prey I see regardless? I don’t know, but I don’t have any better ideas. And maybe, if I just keep trying—

I don’t get it the next time. I don’t get it the time after that. I don’t know the numbers to count all the times I’m trying; I lose track after three or four. It’s a lot, though.

I see the bright disk sinking toward the edge between shell and land, and I stop what I’m doing to float on the water and watch the colours. They’re so good. This place has hurt me and scared me and starved me and smothered me, and right now I feel like all of that was worth it, I’d do it all over again, just to see the bright disk make its colours. Just to feel the water around me and see that long slow sliding fall, and watch the way the colours spread and move and change, and how the light glows through the haze, until the last sliver of brightness is tucked away under the ground, and after that to the moment when the last hint of purple fades out into the blue-black of the dark time.

For a moment I feel an impulse to chase those colours, and go toward the bright disk until I find where it goes when it’s not lighting up everything with its brightness. But I don’t even know if it goes to the same place every time, and the edge where the ground meets the shell looks very, very far away. I probably couldn’t get there fast enough, especially if I had to move over things that weren’t water.

It also occurs to me, as I think about it a little more, that prey doesn’t live in the water. They come on their floating things, but if they stay under the water too long they lose their selves. So probably there’s more prey in places where the ground is solid, and if I want to avoid eating them I’d better stay here where there aren’t very many.

And practice the lunge-and-stop, even though I keep failing at it.

It’s hard to get myself to leave the peaceful, restful surface and swim under the water to hunt more not-prey. It feels like it’s going to be difficult and unrewarding. But I remind myself of how it feels to think of eating shell-prey—of all the way eating them—how sad I am at the thought of destroying something so complex and beautiful. Probably most of the shell-prey have been in the shell much longer than I have. Probably they’ve seen things even more magnificent than the bright disk with its veils of colour, and if I learn how to be safe for them, sometime very far in the future they might show me those things. And I can try to show them how to fold their shapes, so they can swim like the not-prey with me. Can prey-shapes swim? I’ve never seen them do it. Maybe if I find one and don’t eat it I can show it swimming and see if it knows how, or can figure it out even without folding itself better swimming-parts. And to do that I’ll have to find prey and get close enough to it to show it things without eating it or scaring it. Which means I have to keep trying.

I swim under the water, and find some tasty-looking not-prey, and chase and lunge and—catch. And let it go. And try again.

I keep doing this for a very long time.

I lose track of how many not-prey I’ve caught and released. Then I lose track of how many times I’ve lost track. I eat green things between hunts, because it helps a little; and then I stop eating green things between hunts, because sometime in the future I might very well have to get this right without the help; and then I start again, because this is hard enough as it is. I lose track of how many times the shell has turned from light to dark and back again, and I almost forget what the shell looks like because I’m not letting myself go above the water to see it, and I’m so tired, and I keep trying, and I still can’t get it right.

At least there are no true prey down here. I’m not sure what it is about being in the water that hurts them, but clearly there’s something, because when I’ve seen them on the water they’ve always been on top of it and usually on floating things and while I’ve been in the deep parts practicing failure I haven’t seen a single one. Does it eat them, the way I thought it might, the way I was afraid it would eat me? I don’t know if that’s it but I can’t think of a likelier idea. Maybe the weight of the water presses their selves out of their shapes. Maybe it scares them so badly they flee their shapes as though they were being eaten.

Maybe I should quit trying to think about things I don’t understand and focus on my practice.

Hunt and chase and lunge and catch. Hunt and chase and lunge and catch. Am I just practicing the wrong thing? Am I teaching myself to keep following through when I should be teaching myself about stopping? Well, what else can I do other than keep trying until I get it right?

—maybe there’s something, actually. Maybe—

I find another not-prey and hunt and chase, and then… I let it get away, and I lunge at a floating strand of green-thing instead, and stop short of that.

That works. That’s something I can do. Hunt, and chase, and turn aside, and practice the stopping part without the tasty distraction in front of me.

It’s still hard. I still fail, when I forget to do the turning-aside part. But it’s better than I was doing before, by far.

Hunt and chase and turn and lunge and stop. Hunt and chase and turn and lunge and stop.

I even practice the lunge-and-stop part just by itself, a few times, but it doesn’t feel quite right without the chase behind it. Doesn’t feel like I’m practicing the right thing. So I quit that and go back to the longer sequence. Hunt and chase and turn and lunge and stop. I’m getting better at it, over time, at remembering to turn aside before the point where I get too excited and lunge at the prey. Hunt, chase, turn, lunge, stop, hunt chase turn lunge stop, hunt chase turn lunge stop…

Doing this is less exhausting when I can actually get the important part right. It’s easier to want to keep going, this way. I feel better about it. Hunt and chase and turn and lunge and stop and try again. The shell goes light and dark and light again and I miss watching its colours but I’m doing something important, down here, and I don’t want to stop doing it just yet.

Do I dare go back to trying it the harder way?

I feel tired again just thinking about it, but I can feel as tired as I like and it’s not going to stop me from biting prey until they leak out of their shapes and disappear. I have to get this right. I have to learn it so well I’ll never ever ever slip up.

I try it. Hunt and chase and turn and lunge and—

I catch that one, and let it go, and watch it swim away, and try not to feel like I will never get anything right ever again. Probably making one mistake has not turned me into a creature made entirely of failure. Probably I just need to keep working.

Still, I do the turning-aside practice again for a while before I make another attempt at the harder thing.

This time it works. I lunge and stop and watch the not-prey dart away without my ever touching it.

I’m so happy that I swim as fast as I can, right up to the surface of the water, and I burst through and somehow it’s like I’m falling into the air, up toward the shell. It only lasts for a short moment before I start falling again the other way, and my shape smacks hard against the water and there’s a great big spray of it all around me and I float there for a bit, stunned by the impact, and then fold my shape very flat for better floating and stare up at the twinkling lights on the dark shell.

This place is good. This place is good and I did a hard important thing and my whole shape wiggles when I think of how I finally managed it. And—there’s so much more trying ahead of me, trying and probably failing too, lots of it, so much, but—I did the thing. It was so so hard and I did it. And I can get better at it, and after a very long time maybe I will be good enough.

I try again.