(Blume)
I existed only partially in the same world as humans. This section of reality, within some specific boundaries regarding matter structures, fundamental laws of physics and energies, or rather energy in different forms.
Life as a biological organism on Earth has lots of limitations in what they can be or not be, in terms of size, structure, what energy they can process or detect.
I came from below. Like other beings-like-me, I came from something lower. I have grown like a sea organism dreaming of living on land.
It took patience, courage and strange powers to make such dreams of changing nature and environment so drastically.
From the depths of my abyss, a very long time ago, I have glanced at something from the other world.
I had instantly cast away my natural way of life and used all my energy to cast my spell, on myself as well as what I glimpsed of the other world.
I kept a grip at the single photon from another world that reached me, and structured myself instantly into a memory of all that surrounded it.
The sea organism waited for centuries in this unsuitable for life state.
She held on. She never gave up her dream, her spell, nor her memory of what she had caught and copied inside herself.
More than a memory, it became her genes. It became the structure of the future being she would become.
Centuries...
Centuries before rising from the water and setting foot on land. Centuries before being even born and able to think.
Centuries before being able to reach reality, the world where life and more specifically organic life dwells.
A world where light is more than energy. A world where chemistry is more than reflexes and energy. A world where physics matter more than power.
A single cell acted on even less than instinct.
As I grew, I began to put meaning into my past. As I grew closer to reality, I chose the meaning of my actions.
Every other being-like-me did.
Most think of themselves as gods.
Unable to grasp their own limitations in a world filled with boundaries and limits they can overcome, they felt too powerful to grow reasonably.
But as they grew only aware of themselves, I did around the copy of a train I kept within my memory. A copy carrying many humans, many lifeforms, still as they were a kind of picture.
I grew around them, curious, and focused on one of them especially.
One I couldn't touch or look at directly. Due to the somehow quantic nature of my picture, what I looked at was destroyed or consumed. I could either learn or keep things still from that point in time.
I was patient. I was obstinate.
Until one day, water covered the world, and I drank enough energy to create a physical copy of my picture without looking at it.
While other beings-like-me grew bloated with power and made their impatient way into the world, to live within blissful contexts of reality, I waited a few more years.
As I walked, a searing pain was nibbling my heart and mind. I recalled a little how I came to be. How I began to learn;
Or most of all, how I began to choose what was the meaning of everything I had done before reaching self-awareness.
Growing to eat the world, to play as god, certainly not.
No. I had seen someone. A being I could recall. A presence that had somehow sent a single, but still meaningful photon, deep into darkness and to me.
I chose to write the meaning of love onto everything I have been or done.
I have chosen a reason to live that made sense to me, and mostly that pleased me.
And I completed both my transmigration as well as making my dream come true!
Other beings-like-me were already venturing into the world in an aspect or another. They evolved and burnt their wings like blind children learning their limits the hard way.
They died. They regrew, they learned, they change. They spread and sometimes devolved.
They didn't multiply as their real nature remained elsewhere.
None of them managed to fully migrate.
It meant losing our immortality and power beyond reality, but had we sought to do it, it's trickier to achieve than it sounds.
What we built and become in reality were the complex mushrooms of a fungus lifeform.
The true self remains below earth, no matter how much we grow and feel alive above.
Our essential nature remains below. We could never cut that mycelium link for good.
I thought about making Rose cross the boundary the other way around, in order to make her quite immortal too.
It seemed difficult there as well, to transform her truly, but keeping a copy as a seed in the lower plane was another way to safeguard her biological return.
Had her spore regrown safely?
I was still driven by the love I had chosen.
Every feeling of love, if driven by choice and not instinct, is a way or another arbitrary.
My love for a flower of a different species, of a different reality, was an arbitrary choice I had made before coming to the world and living.
I had chosen a feeling of love before I was even alive or able to name it.
Since then I have learnt a lot, and evolved a lot toward humanity, in personality and culture.
No matter what I truly was.
No matter what had happen to Rose.
I stretched into the woods, feeling my strength vanishing. I had troubles maintaining the body I had used to keep my link to reality in that environment.
The floor was dry and poor in nutrients. The sunlight was too scarce.
The being buried below ate everything and left only what the forest needed to remain.
So even though this looked like a lush forest to passer byes, this place was truly a desert, a camouflage, skilfully kept and cared for.
I collapsed. The skeleton I carried lost some more bones as the monstrous rose bush began to crawl ahead more chaotically.
A strange mixture of flowers and vegetal residues was trying to slither away, abandoning everything.
I turned that pile of flesh into a smaller body with very simpler shape, in order to make it to the end.
I made a kind of nudibranch, a slug with flower-shaped appendices all over my body.
I trailed my way into the woods, consuming and losing my body as I went. I was shrinking a little more by every moment. I reached the pond, the mouth of the dragon as I called it.
Beings-like-me could become and craft anything we want.
There is a growing spectrum of possibilities as time goes on.
Most didn't even reached full self-awareness as they became alive.
And then the boundaries between what's real, what's not, what's from the other side and what is evolution from this world only, they all become blurry and vague.
Life is complex.
I, no more than a little slug with a little flower on its head, dove inside the pond.
I feel into the depth of the water.
Some flowers at the depth of it, awoke, opened their vivid yellow petals and turned toward me.
Those were the eyes of the dragon within its mouth.
~
I couldn't tell what the dragon would say to my coming. I was scared.
It might eat my body, and through it, find and eat my real being in the other world too.
I was unable to expand much in this side of reality, but that large creature does.
In the other reality, where we originate from, I was only a spore, a plant. That dragon was surely more, and probably able to find and eat me if it wanted to.
As life is varied in reality, with many branches and species, some beings preys or predators to others, as some were bigger or more powerful than others, as some could move and see, some couldn't.
The same varieties occurred with beings-like-me, even in our side of reality far from the one of common life.
And, I notwithstanding the power I have shown at times am still very far from being at the top of the ladder.
The power of most is rather low, too low to allow them little more than organic life with little evolution.
The lowest in term of power couldn't even reach reality at all.
It was a natural barrier filtering harshly the lifeforms that weren't born from physical elements.
Above the new lifeforms reaching the world were the ones able to influence it. Beings like me, with enough power to create things beyond our own body. I have been that as I created my replica of Rose and her surroundings.
I then sacrificed most of my power to help her survive, making herself become little more than the new animals.
Above there but starting there too, were mostly beings with higher intelligence and strong desire to become more human.
Communication, awareness, thoughts, imagination, choices, moral choices. Humanity warmed many of our desires.
The stronger beings-like-me were, the more we could learn and the more we could act on our environment.
The stronger we are, the farther we can stretch our influence and power, like invisible hands, able to change things as if some sort of magic was operating.
The evolution of nature could fall under our control, as well as geology. We could craft our environment, choosing what would grow, what could come, what would leave.
It could extend to the chemical nature of elements, of the air, of the soil. Making it either healthier or poisonous for instance.
The stronger we are, the more we're able to behave as gods on their lands...
And that power was a kind of energy hard to perceive for most creatures as it wasn't like a rising temperature, sound, smell or brightness, nor gravitational strength, even though beyond a point, we could alter that too.
It was more akin to radioactivity, only less harmful for the surroundings. Not safe, but less harmful.
Beyond higher levels, beings-like-me would reach a point of singularity, where we would be simply be too much energy packed into too little space. We wouldn't be able to maintain a normal biological metabolism in our body, and everything surrounding us would start to decay.
That was theory. I never felt any presence that strong. Even the dead area we ventured in was only the spread of a poisonous toxin.
Like radioactivity or temperature, the limitations above us weren't clear to see, but certainly hard to rise too. The higher one tries to get, the harder it is, exponentially.
Thus most beings-like-us didn't go with more power than what we needed to reach a way of life we liked. Growing in power was always difficult and risky. Trying to grow from the roots instead of the mushroom we were was not only very hard, it was also putting oneself at risk of angering other creatures and jeopardising one's very existence before we knew it.
Because like competing animals for the same source of food or water, the greedier one became, the more hostility it saw rose against himself. In a world where I was essentially blind and deaf, I wouldn't dare anymore to try growing recklessly. I am now aware and therefore conscious of the kind of sharks that also dwell in our primordial ocean.
Remaining weak and unambitious could be wiser than trying to gain more power and make therefore more enemies.
I already have one now, and that's enough...
One mortal enemy is more than enough for me...
My ambition is essentially low, in regard of what beings-like-me could be or want to become. And I'm in the average ambition with my wish to become essentially human. I certainly had neither been the first nor the last to have such a desire amongst our kin.
The dragon I fell into is even more bizarre than I am.
This being is among the stronger I ever encountered or detected. Yet it hides in every possible way and spectrum.
It was a seemingly sleeping giant. It wasn't asleep at all, and it was far more than that, but it was discreet still, even secretive and composed.
I couldn't ascertain that it would help me, nor help Rose resurrect as we agreed to before. It was free to do as it pleases.
I was nothing more but a little flower lost in that water and mouth.
I waited anxiously for the answers, with uncertainty.
~