Invasion

[A pleasant little ditty I wrote many, many years ago...]


We first saw your world aeons ago, but waited 50 million years, when you came down from the trees, to walk amongst you.

Such a beautiful pearl of a planet, girdled with white clouds, quite opposite in temperament from her tempestuous twin sister and her barren, cold cousin. Such beauty entranced us, as we are a race of pure and radiant beauty ourselves. Our desire enflamed, we fixed you firmly in mind. Our hunger burned, and we set about to make our acquaintance with you.

Now you know us not, though you do indeed know us, deep down, unaware of this fact. Today you sit there: conceited, egocentric, thinking yourselves to be impervious, thinking yourself to be alone in this vast Is. Which makes you all the more enticing, and all the more disgusting.

At first you knew us well, back in those days on the hot tundra. There were men among you, great men by your standards, who spotted us for what we were; men who taught you to fight back against us. Several sprung up seemingly all at once, vastly separated in areas of your globe. This caused us some consternation. A conspiracy? How could such a thing happen?

And we thrilled at the first opportunity for true sport. Though it grieved us, though it pained us, we took care of them, in time, swiftly.

You were simple prey at first. Almost not worth it. In your primordial stage, being little more than apes, we hunted you and you succumbed to us quite readily. You even did most of the work yourselves. But it was a bittersweet victory, and became very tiring very quickly. It was time for a new strategy.

We learned to vanish from your sight. In fact, we soon became quite adept at this, to the point where you ceased to remember us. That was the first part of our plan, and it was accomplished in a surprisingly short amount of time.

The second part was more ingenious. We became part of you. How easy to live with the enemy when they enemy - is you.

How it was done would take too long to cypher to your still-volving brains. But we entered into a trust with you, a noncommunicated pact, to the point where you felt you needed us - No! you felt you couldn't survive without us. Your very existence depended upon us. You accepted us as your own.

How could we have done such a thing?

You had no choice in the matter.

For we are the Eaters of Souls, the Devourers of Worlds. We roam the skies, make the galaxies our highways. What we are exactly would be difficult to explain. Think of a vastness, a cloud, so to speak, of consciousness. Still, but that limits us. We are not limitless, but have boundaries; however, those boundaries are far beyond what you can comprehend.

There is more than just the physical level of existence, the level of matter-energy equivalence. Go up a level in existence, if you can even imagine that. Actually, you all will, each and every one of you, at one point in your individual existences. But that is our exclusive domain. Whirlpools and eddies of the higher zone, we expand and engulf.

At this higher level of existence you become ... food, to us, although that analogy doesn't hold one hundred percent. It is more like a symbiotic relationship, but even that does not explain it fully. You create tendrils in our world, and such architecture sustains us and enables us to evolve.

The problem occurs when we attach to such structures. It is a push-and-pull, backward-and-forward struggle at this meeting place between both our worlds. You do indeed have more power than you are possibly aware of. In fact, we are almost at your mercy, should all illusions dissolve and camouflage tear away. But in this dance, this struggle for feeding, sometimes we get too greedy, and the host dies and is drawn towards us, where it is useless. Sometimes, mostly through a quirk in the structure, manifested as a form of discipline in your world, we cannot stay attached too long, or we can, but the connection is not strong enough to feed upon.

Sometimes our feeding is too much for the host. We become the unwitting masters of the host, and it causes the host to enter a frenzy of destruction. It is a delicate balance, this feeding of ours, a thing which still has not been mastered by as great an entity as the Ravage of the Mind.

But our mission is nearly complete. We have grown fat on your species, and have become stronger than we were for all our time in the Andromeda system, or the Tarantula system, or the Capiocan system, or the Orion system, or the - ad infinitum.

We shall leave our children with you, our spawn, to grow and take over our worlds-upon-your worlds. They will be young and not-as-wise. They will be hungry. They will not be as merciful as we have been.

- But why are you telling me this?

You must spread the message: tell all your companions that We Are Preparing to Move On. And when that rapture happens ...

- Who are you? Who shall I say is speaking unto me?

For I am known as Remorse, and that is why I am speaking to you now. I will surely be thrown into the voidless for what I have told you, only to be replaced with something even more unimaginably horrible.

- What can be done?

There was a man who went among us, speaking against us in words even you mules could understand. He taught and fought against us, and he almost succeeded in his mission.

We had him nailed to a cross.

But if you listen to his words ...