A little while ago, she met a giant caveworm.And its zikwa owner, whom she could not tell was female or male. In her defence, it was dark. Very dark.
She had met it devouring a kin, still very much intact, head-down. It was clearly a kin and the worm was clearly very big, and a long while ago, she would have screamed and ran the heck out of there, heart beating, mouth open and hooves moving as fast as they could carry her. As fast as she could run, away from the destiny of her very own name and dream. When she met the Motherfather, she had - she had not feared death for the first time. That felt strange, but also right.
When she spoke to the Motherfather, she had spoken from the bottom of her heart. Some part of her, hiding in her mother's backyard after her...changes, had worried that she was too idealistic. But she'd said it. She'd meant it. That was the kind of kin she was.
To be frank, her thoughts had been so mundane, and she had been merely following urges through the swamp, that she had ceased to grapple with the destiny of her name in a long time. The end. The bitter end. The Swamp's common end. That's what she had said to the Motherfather.
It was face to face with this giant caveworm, eating someone's body, that she realised that it wasn't just because she hadn't been thinking about it. It was that it had entirely ceased to preoccupy her mind.
She was face to face with a caveworm right now. It was dark. It was looming, like a horror, skittering, tall. Its mandibles clicked. She didn't quite know what to say. Idly, she recalled the image of a shoulderscale, the sound of exoskeleton scraping against bone.
And yet, that was fine.
She was scared once.
That was also fine.
She did hold one small, sleepless regret in her heart - but it was fine. Her life had been literally blessed and she had created her own significance with it as she'd promised. It was an honour, and it was her legacy, whether others remembered her or not.
"Sure," she welcomed, and closed her glowing eyes.
When she opened them again, she saw nothing.
Well, 'saw' nothing - in the darkness, she'd presumed.
When she moved, her body rippled in a way she'd never felt.
When she moved her hooves, they had split in ways she couldn't imagine.
It took so long for her body to listen when she turned one whole round. It trailed, with a hard, skittering noise, and there was so much more pressure on her belly than she was used to. It was queer. She moved, aimlessly, along in the darkness, feeling the terrain move under her. The darkness was long, but as she became more familiar with this strange sensation of movement, the faster she moved along. She could feel the turns of the cave. She could sense the air shifting.
She emerged into the heat of light and realised that she had more than four legs.
It had been a strange dream. Whether or not it was significant, she didn't know. When she woke, she was sitting in her mom's backyard, lying next to a berry bush, with an embarrassing smear of grass and mud on her underbelly.
END