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The Skrit Na Chronicles

Skrit: First Instar

I hatch in the smoggy midmorning: a bad omen, of course. Any day is misfortunate when the great sky cannot be seen.

Immediately I am overcome by a desire to consume, to have something for mine. It is not the tragic obsession of a Taxxon that I will behold later, but it is a sort of greed. I want something to eat.

So a nursemaid comes to feed me. She limps slightly, leaning back on her twelve rearmost limbs, as she clumsily bears leaves in her front two. Instinctively, I seize them from her. I am still too small to truly be off-balance, so I do not topple: I can barely stand. But I do not want her to give them to me. I want to take them as my own. Take them from her!

Once they are mine, gloriously mine, I eat.

Around me are other children. I do not recognize them as being like the nursemaid, but smaller; neither do I recognize them as being like myself. No child understands the self. Perhaps when one does, it is no longer a child.

So we grow up as "we", scuttling for food. We gnaw through wood and hoard any leftover scraps. I am standing protectively over a leaf when another nabs it from me. Still unsure of what he is, still unsure of what I am, I stretch out a limb to take it back.

With no "me" there can be no "mine", so I do not desire it just because I had it first. Perhaps even the passage of time is irrelevant. I desire it because I can desire it: it is there for the taking.

I grip it, but he is stronger than me. I do not relent, however, and we pull until it tears. I am left with a small fraction, while he gets the majority.

I nibble on mine. He wolfs down his, then moves for mine.

The nursemaid comes with more. The others scramble for it: I back away and savor mine, caressing it with my antennae. I am not aware, of course, of any difference between my behavior and the others. But it is there.

So perhaps I am doomed, even then.

I eat and eat, and grow. We all do, though slowly. Once the joy of acquiring our food is consummate, the actual act of feeding is unimportant. But I do, as I must.

The Great Ones come in and out. While we amble from place to place, they walk with purpose. They look at only one of us at a time. When one returns, it is always to look at the same of us they saw last time, but none of us figure that out.

There is one that comes for me. Mindlessly, I react to his touches, drooling and cooing as he gently strokes me.

One day, he gives food to me. I don't understand it: he sets it down in front of me and just leaves it there.

I approach it cautiously and take it, but it brings no pleasure to me. So I grasp it, holding it out threateningly. If he wants it, he can take it from me.

He pauses for a minute, remembering (though I cannot know this) his own childhood. Then he charges at me, reaching for the food. I pull it back, while he continues coming at me. He is larger than me, but agile enough to maneuver around me. While he eventually seizes possession of it, I pull it back. It changes limbs several times, but never breaks: I always wind up with it when a rip seems imminent.

Tired but proud, I nibble on the food I have at last earned. He pats my head approvingly, though I don't understand.

Once I eat it all, I look to him for more. I do not look at him in the way I look at the nursemaid. She I know brings food, or calms us when we are ill. But this Great One, on that day, I begin to realize is here for me. And while I feel some emotion back towards him, at the moment all I want is more food. He has no more, however, and he leaves shortly thereafter.

And I miss him. "I" and "him", things I did not understand before. Instead of pining for him, though, I begin to watch the other children in the camp. Once I learn to recognize them, I will know from whom I can take things.

The one with whom I fought first is one of the biggest, but not as bright as me. The little girls seem smart, sometimes, but mostly steal each other's. I'm bigger than them, but if I take their food, who's to say they won't all go after me? I stick to taking it from the other boys. They take it back from me, of course, but none of us starve.

One day, I take a woodchip from a boy about my size, a little smaller than me. Usually, fights are between just two people at a time. But that day, another boy takes the chip back from me. I try to fight him, but the boy who had it first fights me as well, and I can't fend them both off.

In the end, only about half of it survives our assaults. The third boy eats it. But later on, when the smaller boy fights him for a leaf, he hardly puts up a fight. Maybe he's just tired from fighting me, but it seems like something else is going on. I just can't understand what.

Later in the day, the small boy seems to be breaking apart. He stands in one place as part of his body falls off. When the nursemaid comes with more food, the other boy takes more than he did before and holds onto it, as if he wants to let the frozen boy fight him for it later on.

The next morning, neither of them are there.