The golden scarab ship hung in the psychic-singing void, asteroids on the grand scale moaning around it, buoyed and bouncing from one another gently on the rims of great glowing teal shelf fungi. It was this psychic song that filled the heavens, whose astral blue visual harmonics blazed whitely on the scarab's crown.
Alazin, Alazin Wyrmling. The great devourer, eater of realms notional and schematic, of psychodigital superstructures like an infinite sewer, informational landscapes like future-anticipating naninte machines, and imaginary landscapes so terrible they would scar sound mortal minds forever.
Seed of the transgalactic serpent, coiled and the color of light at the unknown heart of the universe, unspeaking, its tiny spermatic spawn its senses, its attention, perhaps its thought? But they would all be called back one day, called back for this nigh-infinite knowledge to be processed. Perhaps...
Molluscs had found him, their tails stained-glass peacock feathers in green or violet and gold, their shells frescoed or mosaiced with scenes of attitude, gangs of molluscoid entertainers worn semi-ironically or images of ancient molluscoid warriors or pearly-white molluscoid saviors worn unironically, depicted lavishly in donated fragments.
A semi-rebel, its shell grafitti'd and lovingly defaced by its friends, jagged black scripts written, little muckergames played out in streaks across its gloss.
Alazin salivated, tasting the heavenly grace of the neuronal tissue woven throughout their bodies, each one like a great sweet strip of candied delicacy, he longed to gnaw on them for days and bathe in their remnant ichor, but could feel that this would be the end of his great experiment. They took him and cradled him and placed him in a room full of plush, eggshell-colored pillows hemmed in gold tassel, ceiling scaly with pores and dripping fat warm wetness.
A great antennae extruded from the golden craft, its struts quivering like saliva, and tasted the silent chorus of the shelf fungi that heaved with outward landing-strip blue flashes. Something in the ship began to quake with its power. The molluscs leaned on pitted blue crystals held in golden pincers as if by the claws of beasts submerged in the gummy blue floor, and the great thrum that stroked the bones of the ship alternated between a whine and a cascade. Finally some essential resonance or quantity was captured and the antenna was collapsed into the ship's golden scalp. Tiny animals had been gathering unnoticed and one came free of the antenna with a sucking thump, creatures little streaks of blue extruding red-pointed flagellum across the surface of the ship, assessing it for edible fungi, patiently wafting across its viewstrings like cosmic gnats.
The ship shook the mites off gently and then was suddenly encased in a three-layer lime-green impulse sheathe and was jettisoned from the asteroid field like a silent tornado, the little creatures turning to watch it go.
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A great shining beacon, a plate and four coins soft and curling, bathed in gold, with green cities writ in jagged glass through troughs and bays in their skins and pouring from their sides, hanging into space like geometric jewelry. A budding golden rose hanging like a love letter above a gas giant in pastel midnight blue. Glittering star-signs flitted like shreds of damascened glass in shoals and schools around the mothercraft, the great station in the nethervoid by giantside. The hiddenpronged scarab erupted from the void and slithered into one such school, adopting a harmonious harlequin-print formation, a fixtured caravan of molluscoid strangers.
Traversing the lovingly glowing ions of a docking bay hangar, Alazin was painted with a numbing agent and carried like a minor holy relic at the head of a group of molluscoids down a sodden-walled, smoothpaved hallway, broad for clinking flashing molluscoid tails, tall to fill infinite space. Passersby watched the bearing of the alien, one in a gossamer cloak flooding and filling the floorspace, drawing it in as the procession came hemward.
The heady scent of body-brain thrumming around him, inundating his every sense. In the molluscoid flaps that held him, so wonderfully distributed through every body present. The numbing spray was an irrelevancy, a taste. He couldn't hold out. He didn't want to. Would destruction come? But what was life without this? He dove in.
Blurbling shrieks filled the hall as he thrust himself into the molluscoid and up around inside its body; this had been deemed a far-fetched irrelevancy but it was all too real. He swam around its body, devouring neuronal tissue as he went, and with every sweet burgeoning mouthful and swallow his eye was opened. Planets cloaked in ichor-filled hallways, bronzed flues and tubings cascading into space like orbs remade as golden walnuts. Rings at intervals around planets, hurling orreries to cast conventions of starships across the cosmic depths. Suns cloaked in discs like freezing hands, warmth and power charging invisible arms that led to the planetary sunscapes and chemical forges that bled poisons and mana. The ichoroid industry, great pharmaceutical foundries devouring crystalline distillate and blood powders and starfire. Medicines, solvents, explosives, and capacitor alchemy; the molluscoids' hard-traded gifts to a greater universe. He saw hundreds of bodily forms in moments, manifold and unitary, substantial and ghostly, singular and distributed, saturnine and shining, Neptunian and stony. He saw that in almost all of them there was a brain, or at least equivalent tissue resplendent throughout the body, and he gasped at the revelation of glory: a universe filled to the brim with these delectable beings.
And then he looked in close and saw this glassy-feathered slugman whose body he was ventilating; he could feel this thing's pride in his civilization's works, its great burbling vat-foundries. Great feathertailed tankers wrought like celestial slug-dragons curving the nebula's heaven bridge. His heart, his love for slugkind, his love for nutriment, for the bled snailflesh of mindless beings bred to grace tables to be pickled and poached and barbecued. His radula carving inanimate flesh for the gathering of those whose loves he shared. His friendships, confidings, suppressed quirks, sweet respites. Alazin could not weep and there was nowhere for his emotion for this man to go, he could only vibrate hotly like a ball of anguish for his dying host, this deflating being with fading, shocked consciousness blazing with pale regret, grand rugose flesh holed and made worthless. Alazin almost let them dig him out with a sparking bident but he needed time to grieve, alone, and so he bolted from the withering body and dove down an ichordrain in a flash of silver.
This dying molluscoid, whose name was Ihhsss, would live in Alazin's heart. He would not have died in vain. This molluscman's loves, his worlds, his civilization, Alazin would pay them for what they had given, for what they had taught him in the fatal moment.
He fell from a tentacular ichorspout into a deep green pool of molluscoid runoff in a lightless basin, and floating, curled, warm, and pensive, he began to dive through his new memories. Ihhsss had been an architect of starships.
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