This material realm is so undeniably fragile…

  It was a fitting first impression given the state of the space the unwoman was greeted by. Her vessel was something she'd pulled from the final, screaming thoughts of the now-dead summoning team that had been calling out to an old enemy. The unfortunate mortals had no way of knowing that Y???????u??u????????s????o????'????G???????r??a?a????w??a??th??????y???e??? (as they thought to call it) had perished— insomuch as any pseudo-creature from beyond these transient cosmos could truly perish. The unwoman felt an unconscious delight as she recalled the duel which was far closer to a calamity from the perspectives of mortals. As novel as the concept of time may be, she was all too familiar with the trifecta of cause-effect-consequence. In the most rudimentary terms, the unwoman might be inferred as that creature's daughter, considering that much of her strength was born from its death. The unwoman was after all, little more than borrowed energy now encapsulated in a freshly forged vessel of recycled stardust in the simulacrum of the human form.

  Experiencing the forces of time, gravity and space upon her vessel was something of a heady experience for her freshly-created body and the vast portion of her mind within. Though vast said portion may be, the unwoman had the entirely displeasurable sensation of severance from the remainder of her being. This vessel of flesh was only a singular portion of her, a lesser aspect of all that she was. Such an incomplete reflection of herself was unworthy of bearing her true name— not that anything so mundane as a name could ever envelope a being such as… Herself? Itself? Her mother? No… her Primogenitor, the root essence of all that this crude vessel presently was; all that remained separated from her now by the dimensional rift gaping wide behind her like a wound between worlds.

  Behind this crude vessel that was her. Her body. She… was confined to it. Her consciousness had edges now, a boundary she could cross at will but in doing so left her uniquely detached. She didn't care for that sensation and so withdrew to explore within these new boundaries. She drew her first breath and didn't much care for that either. She allowed her blossoming awareness to expand, to fill her alien body and gather up the flood of esoteric information being relayed to her. She had entirely new senses, human senses, each one assailing her mind in a confusing jumbled mystery just begging to be unraveled.

  The easiest to make sense of was sight. Her surroundings would have taken her breath away had she been inclined to take another breath after her first. Sigils, circles and familiar lines of otherworldly contours daubed the floor and walls. She received the impression that this was a welcoming ritual of sorts. A primitive attempt to make this alien realm less hostile to new arrivals. Sight alone was not enough to fully comprehend, so she allowed her mind to slip past its new boundaries, devouring the symbolic meanings and geometric truths within those homey trappings. The meanings were as she suspected: summoning her kind, beckoning them come, creating a point of crossing between sundered dimensions. The artistry was all mathematic in nature, the familiar arithmetic and numeric simplicity appealed to her kind's sensibilities.

  Not everything was so agreeable. The unwoman's expanded mind rolled across a layer of death as a thick fog might billow over a lifeless town. She moved her vessel's eyes with her wandering mind, absorbing her new habitat with a wary glance. Humans surrounded her, or more accurately their remains. The unwoman found herself wondering if it was appropriate to term the inanimate sacks of mangled, leaky flesh as humans or simply bodies. Was an empty vessel so intrinsically linked to what it might contain? She thought not, but lacked the expertise to make such an assertion definitively.

  One such body, brutalized and dismembered though it was, bore a curious resemblance to her own vessel. The formerly human body (now dubiously termed as such) seemed a delicate thing of slender proportions. The unwoman concluded that her vessel was either a clone or a copy of what that carcass had looked like in life. Though the corpse's lack of glowing golden-feathered wings was a notable dissimilarity between the two, one the unwoman pondered at the significance of. In her brief time on this plane of existence she'd already been presented with enough information to pursue indefinitely.

  The unwoman's expanded consciousness brushed against minds, not entirely unlike her own though distinctly alien in nature, and they recoiled from her. Her primogenitor had interacted with human minds and imparted that knowledge into its creation, yet the unwoman struggled to draw parallels between her present circumstances and the knowledge at her disposal. These humans were not as those others had been.

  She withdrew into her own flesh, feeling suddenly blinded by her narrowed awareness. The previously foreign concept of physical motion came autonomously to the unwoman, her vessel acting on her desires instead of any formal instruction. Her human feet touched the blood-coated floor and suddenly, she was walking! Touch, she decided, was a marvelous thing. It was a miraculous sensation, as was the flood of negative feedback that accompanied her movements. She wanted motion and it came, autonomously, instinctively, reflexively!

  A human body, she rightly concluded, was a truly wondrous machine.

  She turned a corner and her pathetically narrow field of vision finally detected what her extra-sensory perceptions already had. Two live humans of sturdy composition, each one flooded with vital energies. The pair were irregular, asymmetric even more so than the examples of former humans surrounding the unwoman's vessel. While she was familiar with the dichotomy of humanity (what they termed as masculine and feminine), however seeing it so plainly was disconcerting. The male was head and shoulders taller than the smaller female, which sported bright coloration in the hair and secondary layer of skin.

  Any further examinations were interrupted by a blast of superheated flames engulfing the unwoman's vessel. PAIN! Real, physical tangible pain slammed into her consciousness. The alien sensation was enough to shock her into stupor momentarily.

  The unwoman expanded her mind one more, now willfully embracing detachment from her agonizing vessel. She could esense the powers at play, the mustering barrage soon to assail her. The power conjured next was several magnitudes greater, but the unwoman was wary now that her initial surprise had worn off.

  The attack was an explosive discharge of stored energy. Had her assailants been subtler about accumulating the raw power needed, they might have caught the unwoman by surprise once again. However, they'd made the mistake of showing her how the power was gathered, converted and inevitably, released. Cause. Effect. Consequence.

  She redirected the gullible current of negatively-charged ions into a more agreeable direction away from her. What she hadn't spared a thought for, was where all that energy went after she'd deflected it.

  The rift between realities—already a dangerously unstable and temperamental anomaly in this material dimension—fell into itself and vanished. The severance she'd experienced from her native realm savagely worsened into a near-crippling sensation of incalculable isolation. This place had no energy, no waves of power, no currents of thought except those made by these humans around her. There was so much nothing surrounding her it was suffocating. The vastness of her mind rebelled at the simple fact of this dimension. There was nothing and it was everywhere.

  She screamed an ungodly, inhuman, alien shriek that split the air with the force of an explosion, throwing her attackers away.

  The unwoman fell to the metal decking, her vessel's strength failing her. She was still in danger! More pain could be coming for her! Her vessel's instinctive intuition was gone now and she lay where she'd fallen unable to move. Helpless.

  How anything could exist in such an empty and desolate dimension was incomprehensible! The portion of her mind trapped within this prison of flesh she'd unwittingly made subdivided further, each tendril of thought searching for anything amidst all that nothing. Her search faltered, some limitation of this reality kept her mind from spanning any distance it pleased. She had never experienced something like this, there was simply a distance she could not bypass or penetrate. The sensation was immediately likened to the general substance pressing against her vessel, a flat surface that stopped whatever touched it.

  Shifting her attention from a desperate outward expansion, the unwoman ceased throwing her will against the confines of this dimension, focusing within its boundaries instead. There was nothing! This entire dimension she'd trapped herself in was populated by her assailants and absolutely nothing else.

  "Looks like the fight's gone out of her. What now?"

  "We kick the problem upstairs to our employer. His circus, his brand new tiger."

  Noises. Meaningless noises intruded on the omnipresent nothing and all too quickly were consumed. There was simply too much she didn't understand about her current foolhardy endeavor for her to blunder about making discoveries along the way. A guide or tutelary would expedite her comprehension of the unprecedented situation the unwoman found herself in.

  As novel as she'd initially found the sensation, the unwoman was beginning to realize how limiting time was. She could only exist in one anchored state, something that seemed preposterous prior to her arrival. The inability to be present in multiple states at once was a hindrance that felt entirely artificial to her; it was pointlessly counterproductive to the acquisition of knowledge, and as the unwoman promptly decided, existence as a whole. Regrettably when this time-slaved dimension was conceived, she had not been present to object. Time passed in a dull, monotone metronome until her interest was suddenly piqued.

  New humans were created. No that wasn't right… more accurately the space around her grew drastically and she realized that the material dimension was much larger than she'd initially detected. Than she could detect. Amidst the nothingness that surrounded her there were souls and mass and minds and still a great deal of nothing. Thousands of human minds were exposed to her for a measure of seconds before that new space was concealed from her detection once more.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  There were thirteen additions to her pocket dimension (a good number), the vital energies of their beings all paled in comparison to the initial pair. They presented the unwoman with a plethora of new sounds, physical mediums and written markings. Of all the methods employed to reach her, the one she was most fascinated by was an elaborate series of hand and finger movements. Communication with such fragile beings was a barrier she must overcome in order to attain forward progress. Fortunately her vessel was highly intuitive, she desired to make sounds as the humans did and the unwoman's flesh obliged. While she was able to mimic most effortlessly, it was painfully obvious there was no true comprehension behind her actions except in the field of mathematics.

  More time passed and the closet reality opened once again, adding a new soul to the equation. This mortal was different, human in substance yet ripened by suffering. A strong weave of vital energies left unchecked by a weak mind and sabotaged by circumstance. This hapless succulent was little more than a supple resource to be fed upon.

  <"Observe."> Virile abhuman male commanded in noise and mind. He repeated the command in a slow, insistent pulse until the unwoman comprehended his general desire.

  A single probe of consciousness expanded from the male, entrapping the succulent mind before her. The contest of wills was short-lived, little more than token resistance before a single mind dominated the two bodies. The probe of consciousness frayed into millions of psionic threads, individual split ends combing through the flesh puppet's immaterial psyche then plunging into the collocated portions of its physical brain. It was a fascinating process, combining and compiling scattered sensations captured in times past— a human mind reduced to nothing more than a data repository with attached energy reserve. The process was laborious, each core sampling targeted clusters of something so small it escaped even her unnatural perceptions. After the ninth repetition, the demonstrations stopped.

  <"Emulate."> The male commanded, again in an insistent monotonous pulse until she garnered his meaning.

  Creating the probe and splitting her will was trivial, little more than a variation of autonomous action. Her efforts were ungently steered towards a specific region of the forlorn man's physical brain. With undue care, she bored into the proffered mind and took her first sampling.

  Noise paired with meaning flooded into the bottomless chasm of her mind! The information reshaped her understanding of human speech on a conceptual level, forcing her to reevaluate everything she'd thought she knew to be fundamental of physical communication. Words shaped understanding which altered perception which fostered interpretation and molded the human experience! These slaves of flesh and time could accomplish nothing without the words to describe or articulate or simply be beyond an animalistic state of primal impressions.

  She was an eldritch facsimile of the human form but she had truly captured nothing of their complexity. Words were knowledge, immortal without being invulnerable. Knowledge she could rationalize, contextualize and most importantly, she could devour.

  A single delicate thread of consciousness became a hundred glutinous mouths, then a thousand, and like a swarm in frenzied bloodlust every single disparate portion of her alien mind bored into her target to feed. The light of a human soul winked out in an instant under the uncontrolled force of her enraptured gluttony.

  A moment later the dormant husk left behind erupted in a hail of bone and flesh— the strain of her undivided attentions too much for the human form to endure. Frantically she scattered her mental probe and its thousand duplicates after the fleshly chunks of mangled, charred cranial tissues.

  Useless meat! The connections were broken. Knowledge lost in a moment of weakness. Fleshlings break so easily, such a fragile vessel for so much knowledge. Preposterous! Her insatiable craving for information had been tapped only to be denied! This dimension was maddening in its weakness. The unwoman turned her ravenous probes upon the remaining humans in her vicinity-

  Physical pain forced her questing mind back into its transitory vessel. This time there was anathema secreted within, a vile soul-blazing agony with those two crushing steely grips as they tensed to tear her vessel in uneven halves. The cursed anathema savaged her vessel like a poison, until the raw agony centered her mind upon nothing but that wracking sensation. Reluctantly, she cloistered her mind and dampened her radiant soul. She shut down as much as she could to endure the fires tearing inside of her.

  The display was educational. It brought prominence to another more distressing concern, her severance from the remainder of her being. In essence, she was alone without even herself for guidance or wisdom. Without a rift, a means of communicating to her native plane, there was no way of knowing if the fraction of her mind anchored to her vessel would be able to rejoin with her primary consciousness, potentially rendering everything it learned in the interim moot. There was also the question of what exactly would happen to her fractal consciousness in the event of her vessel's destruction or compromise. The unwoman found that thought uniquely disquieting. Curiously, her distressing revelation made the agony of her pseudoflesh seem lesser.

  The unwoman found herself looking not with her mind but though her fleshling eyes to the giant of a man poised to tear her vessel apart. These beings and their reality were so fragile, she must be more careful. Her hunger was not forgotten, merely restrained… for the moment.

  "Good. Now, You, talk." The male said, tone somewhere between a snarl and a purr.

  "And what do you wish me to say, Virile Fleshling?" The unwoman replied autonomously, marveling at her newfound comprehension of linguistics. Her voice was pleasing to her ears, yet the mortals around her recoiled from her scathing elocution.

  "Why are you here?" The male demanded, uncowed as the lesser mortals were.

  "Your dimension is remarkably fragile, as are you fleshling creatures. I would cut back the secrets of time, materia and all this reality has to offer so as to further my own knowledge for reasons my own, thus becoming as you term a god. I need to physically be here to accomplish my objective."

  All eyes in the room turned to their seeming leader, making her idly wonder if humans determined hierarchy by physical size. Dampened though her senses were, she sensed the two metahuman souls whelming into readiness. From her lopsided understanding of conversation, the unwoman suspected that she'd have to let this silence run its course.

  Without a word, the unwoman faintly pulsed two emotive states she'd absorbed from her sacrifice. The first was unfamiliar to her, cooperation. The second she knew and despised, submission.

  "I'll kick this upstairs." The atypically large male said.

  The unwoman observed no kicking, yet a palpable air of excitement radiated off the lesser humans around her. She swiftly learned that these humans were skilled educators and after a swift primer on physical existence and what it meant, the unwoman's deep pool of knowledge was plumbed with shallow inquiries. She discovered their purpose was to create a dossier on her, and once the lesser humans began asking of her aspects, domains of expertise and past history with mortals, she became progressively less cooperative and more transactional.

  Once the dialog was little more than the exchange of questions for questions, the lesser humans ceased probing for the unwoman's identity and resumed educating her. In time, this too because a subtle line of investigation into who she was and, as she had before, the unwoman began withholding information until she had received knowledge of equal worth. When it was abundantly clear that she would offer no more, the lesser mortals began parsing her words to ensure nothing was lost in the subtleties of language. Once the educators were satisfied that they had interpreted her will correctly they all departed, leaving her with the sturdy guards.

  The concept of guarding was familiar to her, what she was less certain of was what these mere mortals were supposed to be guarding her from. She'd attempted to query the large one about this, but no answer was forthcoming.

  A new human man entered the chamber she now knew to be sealed off from the rest of the material universe. The man was unimpressive in body and vital energies, although what she could sense of his mind was calculating and cunning. Idly, the unwoman played her mind and eyes over this new man as he drew nearer, then she felt a terribly formidable presence looming over the man.

  This new human wasn't sturdy in soul as her guards were, yet there was a massive and almost fraternal awareness following his actions. Another being such as the unwoman was watching over this human, yet unlike her this being was an ancient deity in scope of both power and mind. Old instincts pressed to the fore and the unwoman swiftly withdrew her reaching mind, hoping to avoid drawing the attention of the titanic presence.

  She was already too late.

  The fleshling reality she was still acclimating too faded into oblivion as the deity turned a sliver of its prescience unto her vessel. To be held under this being's scrutiny made even time's ceaseless march halt, its omnipresence filled her perception so completely that there was nothing but it. No thought, no light, not even time. It was the pinnacle of her kind's existence, and she was all too aware that it was weighing her continuation with an air of idle boredom. Though she would never know what it saw in her, it reached a conclusion in which she was permitted to exist a while longer.

  Dimensional normality reasserted itself as the deity's attention moved elsewhere, her fleeting existence dismissed as nothing of note. Everything was as it had been, and the humans seemed oblivious to the deity's momentary, eternal oversight.

  "So you're our latest guest? Have you got you reality-legs steady yet?" The warded man inquired.

  The question had her glancing to her guards for confirmation. The questions were both moot as far as she could tell. Was she still expected to answer what any being with functional eyes or the faintest capacity for soul sight would already know? The large male gave an affirmative nod, the essence of his soul masked by the omnipresent fraternal presence. The unwoman took two steady steps towards the warded man by way of confirmation.

  "I am indeed your guest presently." She answered factually. "I also have steadied legs."

  The warded human bared his teeth. The unwoman understood this was how humans showed pleasure, though this was the first time she'd seen the expression in practice with her own eyes. She returned the expression identically, making the warded human's smile crumble— which she also copied flawlessly.

  "You'll need to work on that. Anyway, on to the meat and potatoes. My super-freaks here seem to think that you and I can work out a little business arrangement. One where you don't get poofed and no more of my staff get turned into gibbering idiots. I'd like to have something good come of all this mess. Now all we've got to do is scratch each other's backs and everyone gets what they want. How's that sound?"

  In truth, she'd understood little of the exchange. The sound of the mortal's words and his voice was irritating, though she suspected that was not the true essence of his question.

  "You wish to form a covenant of mutual benefit?" She summarized.

  "Of a sorts, but before we get into the nitty-gritty details we should both make sure we know what we're looking to get out of this. Do you know what that is?"

  "I wish to study your fragile dimension of existence and…" She attempted to collocate a past communion with her present self for the precise terminology unmuddied by empathic translation, and failed utterly to bypass time's ceaseless march. Secondarily, she was forced to recall the events from her eidetic but entirely underdeveloped memory— the process was entirely displeasing. "…Mingle with the locals."

  The warded man gave her a wide and unwelcoming smile before sticking out a hand. She understood this to be a powerful binding ritual for sealing contracts among humans.

  "I do believe we can do business."

  The unwoman tentatively allowed the warded man's dainty fist to clasp her hand and shake it. The sensation of physically touching a human was uniquely unpleasant, but she endured it out of necessity.

  "Welcome to Titan's Crest. Miss…"

  "You may address this illustrious vessel as Bim."