Starblight. LOG-001.

Starblight.

LOG-001.

“Buh.”

That was the first word out of my mouth. Or maw. Or…many, many maws, actually.

Huh.

You ever feel like you’ve just…unravelled? It’s such an odd experience. You’re just in so many places at once, perceiving so many things…

Like fire. Screaming. Sporadic blasts of energy impacting parts of you as you continue to grow, all while barely aware that you even are growing.

And feeding.

By the time I woke up enough to realise I had apparently become a mass of greyish blue tentacle-like roots enveloping some kind of ball in the midst of my afternoon nap, all I could really do was stare at the wreckage of mutilated cities and torn apart settlements dotting the surface of the…

The planet.

Which I had apparently overtaken. With my roots.

A gargantuan eye, one of countless millions, glanced upwards, watching the receding blue flare of some kind of distant engine, fleeing into space as fast as it could.

There was an urge there, to reach upwards and snatch the vessel right out of the sky.

The horror at the seemingly foreign influence on my mind was enough to halt the three continent sized tentacles in their tracks, hanging in the upper atmosphere while what I could only assume was some kind of starship fled into the stars beyond.

…Fuck.

—

It’s easy to take stock when there’s no one around but you.

Somehow, at some point in between my falling asleep and waking up, I had gone from a lowly human being to some kind of planetary-scale horror, composed of near countless mouths, eyes, blades and other various things attached to a network of roots that not only burrowed beneath my host, but enveloped the surface as well.

With my host seemingly being an entire planet, of course. An inhabited planet.

Or well…a formerly inhabited planet. In the midst of my…awakening, I’d seemingly consumed just about everything around that wasn’t me.

Forests, oceans, people, all devoured to provide further nutrients to fuel my insane growth.

It didn’t exactly leave much to ponder to say the very least, save for the ruins of civilization that I could do little more than wrap around of course.

One of my first thoughts had been to try and interact with said ruins. Perhaps I could search for survivors of the massacre I had unknowingly perpetrated? Or perhaps access some kinds of records to get some semblance of an idea as to what had happened?

No dice. Even the smallest of my roots were still around the size of a bus in diameter, which naturally wasn’t all that conducive to accessing books, computers, or anything else of the sort. And as for survivors…

None. I could still remember the ominously pleasing sensation of rendering down excess biological material (whether it was plant matter or people didn’t seem to matter) into nutrients, absorbing it all in a variety of ways.

If anyone had survived the slaughter, they’d likely been on that ship. Perhaps some kind of evacuation vessel, ferrying as many as it could away from a doomed world.

Still, no immediately available survivors, which…was probably for the best, honestly. But also no access to any reading material either, save for the various glyphs of a language (or perhaps even multiple languages, judging by the sheer variety) I didn’t understand, scattered throughout cities on wrecked signs and billboards and other such things.

Which left me with nothing but my own thoughts.

…Yay.

—

Time passed…strangely. At least from the perspective of a planet-spanning root network.

It could have been days. Or weeks. Hell, perhaps even months. But one way or another, the distant remnants of clouds (what little was left of them after I’d all but devoured the atmosphere around me while in search of a snack) continued to move around before disappearing altogether, even as I did my best to stave off boredom.

Not very easy, mind you. I couldn’t exactly write. Or draw. Or amuse myself in any real way. No one to talk to. No way to vent my worries, my regrets, my doubts…

My first recreational activity was more a childish burst of anger and loneliness than anything else, punctuated by several of my larger tentacles wrapping around a skyscraper, ripping the structure from its mounts and chucking it as hard as I could.

That skyscraper was now floating somewhere in space and rapidly moving away from me, last I saw of it. Sure, I didn’t have opposable thumbs anymore, but at least my throwing arm was kind of insane now.

Still, there were only so many buildings to throw, and it felt somewhat disrespectful to the previous owners, so I gave up skyscraper throwing as a pastime and tried out singing.

I liked to think the haunting wails of an entire swarm of mouths filling the void may or may not have sounded nice after a few thousand sessions of practice, but I couldn’t possibly be sure without an outside perspective of some kind.

Of which there was none, of course.

The thought prompted several million tentacles to slump in place as yet another bout of loneliness hit me, relentlessly assaulting my mind.

I could do little but endure it alone, all while continuing to sing to the stars around me.

—

Change came suddenly, and without even a hint of notice.

The redistribution of energy, of nutrients, of mass. Growths erupting along roots, filling with fluid.

I shifted in place, adjusting to try and accommodate the almost fruit looking things suddenly decorating a significant portion of my surface vines. There must have been millions of the things, all glowing with an almost ethereal blue light.

Curious (and naturally worried), I brought forth other tendrils, eyes blinking open to inspect this strange new part of myself.

The bulbs almost seemed to pulse in response. And so time passed, again. And I found myself with a new pastime.

Namely staring at the fruits as shapes began to take form within their depths, starting as little more than spheres of root-meat, but growing as more and more of myself was given unto them.

By the time I realised the most developed of the things was shaped like a person, it was too late to do little but continue to watch as the first of many bulbs split open, the remnants of what I was now beginning to suspect was some equivalent to amniotic fluid poured out onto the ground around it, shortly followed by the being that had been suspended in it.

They…she, was a slip of a thing. Naked bluish grey flesh matched the environment (that being me of course) that surrounded her, newly born hands twitching and grasping blindly at their surroundings as the tiny sprite (relative to myself) slowly pulled herself to her feet.

In place of hair or anything remotely human looking, small tentacles, so very similar to my own, shuddered and writhed before settling around a fairly pretty face, one which scrunched up as the little one opened her eyes.

And oh if they weren’t a sight to behold. A wonderful, arctic blue, similar to some of the more luminous parts of her (and my) tendrils, contained within the endless expanse of black that made up her sclera.

That was where most of the humanoid comparisons ended, however. Her hands seemed more like they ended in claws rather than fingers with nails, and despite being naked, there were no real sexual characteristics to speak of.

To be blunt, she was as flat as a washing board, and looked more like some kind of weird alien barbie than anything else.

Still, as my first…daughter (did that mean I was a dad now?), glanced upwards and stared at the world of roots around her in awestruck, almost childlike wonder, I couldn’t help the rumble that erupted from somewhere deep within my core, prompting a gasp from my spawn as she stumbled to the side, only to be caught by a slowly rising train sized tentacle.

Her hands scrambled along my surface for support, and I did my best to try and keep the limb steady, right before gently depositing her on relatively flat ground.

Coincidentally, that’s just about when the rest of the millions of bulbs dotting my surface began to burst open with splashes of glowing fluid.

Yeah.