You are what you eat. It’s an everyday phrase, known by all, accepted by all. It is, unknown to all, patently untrue. The unforeseen and unfortunate truth is this: You are what eats you. This I will prove by telling the story of what ate me, of my home, located beyond this Earth, beyond this galaxy, beyond this very universe.
I was born more than 8,000,000,000,000 years ago – by terrestrial counting – in an ultraterrestrial hell, a cosmos of lunacy itself. It was a world of more than three spacial dimensions, infinitely immense and infinitesimally minute simultaneously, with a sky like death – coloured as dessicated flesh, with a sun like a ruptured eye wreathed in clouds not unlike atrophied arteries – stretched taut over a blighted surface of cancerous green-black liquid mould.
My people – obscenely non-human entities with ten pairs of digitigrade legs, an external six-lobed brain, three seven-chambered hearts, and four gilled lungs – had no concept of burial, so we left our dead exposed to the elements, their prone bodies marked by tetrahedral headstones driven through their thoraxes, allowing them to putrify into puddles of the foulest oily film. There was little life beyond our own kind in residence on the world, ensuring we had little to eat, so we often had to compete with the crystal behemoth-moths for the right to consume our own deceased, steering clear of their razor-edged probosci to avoid of the fate of our potential nourishment.
This was an insufferable existence, made the least bit bearable only by the opiate microbes which released intoxicating pheromones each dimless night, until the day finally came when our black stars come into proper alignment, opening a rift through the maelstrom of transspace which emptied out into this familiar multiverse. Curiously, fearlessly, I strode into the glow of the gateway and was transported to this Earth.
In the end, I took refuge in the body of a human male to survive (consuming his entrails so as to free up living space within his abdominal cavity) and quickly acclimated myself to human existence. Yet I can never adopt wholly the human psyche; my genesis in that chaos universe has fully seen to that.
