By Many Paths Enduring
Eighteenth Day of the Eleventh Month 293 AC
"What are you?" you ask, cautiously keeping a good fifty feet between you and the swarm whose powers you cannot guess at. Perhaps an unneeded precaution given that you dealt with the one it called 'The Mother of Feasts', but it is better to take such steps and not need them then the reverse.
"We are Many-in-One. We are the Breath of Change. We are The First Born who Reason," comes the rather bewildering reply. Fortunately, the swarm does not seem particularly hungry or otherwise impatient. It was apparently born from the first exhalation of Faerex after undergoing some unnamed stage of her transformation.
It is Relath who puts together the last part, however, looking faintly perturbed in spite of himself:
"Those we captured on the way here, they are kin to you, but they did not choose to remain Many-in-One, did they?"
"The Hunger was too deep in them, the flesh too strong to devour and make One-as-Many thus," the entertwined voices proclaimed in what might be regret, though whether regret at lost siblings or a lot meal you could not say.
"And what of your Hunger?" you press after a moment.
How might it be sated?
"We hunger but do not Hunger," they answer, leaving you to parse the seemingly nonsensical reply until you can finally say to have distinguished between the mental flavors of the word, the concept of hunger itself, enough to ask what you hope is the right question.
"What do you hunger for?"
Patterns shift in the depths of the swarm, as though it is trying to show you something, but whatever its purpose, it collapses into the faintly disquieting not-quite randomness of the Far Realm.
"Warmth, Structure, Existence-Enduring," you get a distinct impression of frustration sharp as steel scraping flesh, like someone trying to explain a scholarly treatise through a three-knock code, or at best Braavosi thieves' cant.
It takes a good half hour between you, Lya, and Dany, Relath having decided to sit this headache out and stay on watch, to figure out what the swarm is attempting to communicate. It requires both heat, the lowest level of undirected energy, some substance in the water from which it draws energy like most living things do from food, and
memories, though the swarm did not seem to have any conception of the difference between the recollection of a specific moment and the moment itself, until you explained it so from its perceptive it was eating space and time.
The Many-as-One seem relieved at the realization as they had some notion that Faerex would have to swim further and further, seeking out more of existence for them to feast upon until finally they would starve before she could return.
"More of Memory is made with every Moment?" they ask experimentally, trying to balance two new concepts like a rope-walker with a weighted pole in hand.
"Yes," you confirm. After some careful thought you ask, your next and perhaps most crucial, question:
"Do you make the Warmth Stop and the Patterns Degrade when you feast upon Memory?"
"No, patterns wrong, heal too little," comes the instant reply, and with that all the pieces finally come together.
In the usual run of things, if such a term could be used for beings of the Far Realm, and Illithidae feeds upon the heat of their victims, the actual flesh of their brains, and the intangible substance of their memories. For some reason the Many have to dissociate the three, they feed on heat and complex salts from the water and from living brains take only memories, still something of an imposition depending on what memory is taken, but far better than having one's skull pierced and brain slurped.
"You said they are much smaller than the norm for illithid spawn, right?" Lya asks when you share the thought. "But the others who hungered
differently became larger instead, rather than pooling their intellect? Different survival strategies for an inhospitable environment. Weak flesh, individually at least, strong mind, strong flesh, weak mind, running on instinct..." She cuts off what might otherwise have been a longer speculation. "I don't think this was an intentional work of flesh-craft by Faerex, but rather natural adaptation." She pauses for a moment, looking around. "Well... adaptation in any case, whether one should call it natural is a matter for philosophers I think."
What do you you say to the Many?
[] Offer it a new home, its dietary needs are manageable as long as it feeds by consent. There might even be a market for removing painful memories entirely.
-[] Write in explanation
[] Try to persuade it to move aside without being fed so that you can examine the lair before making any offers
-[] Write in arguments
[] Write in
OOC: I hope this is not going too slow.
