Foreshadowing

Most creatures that walk or crawl in the realms of the solid cannot remember the moment of their own birth. The physical housing of a young mind bound in flesh is too weak to form memories until it's had a chance to grow a bit, and these early thoughts are almost always blearily confused. It's almost as if a newly conscious mind needs to become accustomed to the mere idea of experiencing its surroundings before it can be bothered to keep track of the experiences. My memories on the subject are quite clear, however.

The memories distract me from the pain.

I was born a tiny, blind thing. In a small hole between rows of sprouting wheat I squirmed, gasping for breath, for food, for any pathetic hope that what desperate little life I had might continue. Born into a life of running and hiding, always fearfully scavenging for seeds and scraps of carrion left behind by larger scavengers. A weak and sickly life, but no less than I deserved, it was the life my kind were created for.

I was born as the rot in the body of the world itself. A body so pristine and pure it couldn't exist gave birth to me out of necessity, for I was the flaw that made it whole. From the first moment of my existence I spread my own perfection to everything I touched, everyone that touched me. Nothing before had ever grown like I did, nothing else spread across the world as my influence could.

I was born as my starving body ate my dying body. I remember both views. The gargantuan rotting corpse, slain yet not dead, being born above the land in the arms of the gods. Though instinct gave little thought to our future, some how I knew such a creature would provide sickly feasts for my entire family for as long as we could live within its putrid frame. I also saw the tiny creatures of fur and teeth swarming out of the nearby fields to meet my torn and dismembered self in the swamps that were to be my tomb, my home, the center of my fallen empire reborn. I saw them burrow into me before I felt it, so accustomed was I to the bites of smaller beings.

It was the pain of dying, but I was already dead. The pain of dying, is that what wracks my shapeless form even now? Am I dying, again or finally? No. This agony is worse than the deaths that I've felt. The memories help me piece it together at last.

This is the pain of being born.