Prompt #3: Lost
The problem with coming into awareness, alone, becomes a complete lack of context.
It wandered, forest green and blue sky and loamy ground, and in senses those who would call themselves the ‘Spoken' might call aetheric It saw the trailing lines of something, of unnamed forces and flows, the beating rivers of life. It assigned no special meaning or interest to these sensations; indeed, It assigned nothing at all to them. The problem with awareness was that without a point of comparison you were left rather in the dark. A child Hyur could see their parent and, when comparing that parent to a house could readily decide some fairly fundamental differences even if they didn’t have the words for them yet.
This was a problem for things like It, though It wasn’t aware of its inherent Thingness or its Likeness to Other Things yet. Awareness burgeoned often slowly, and while blessed with a certain longevity by whatever chance aetheric event sparked them, it often took a very long time for an it to look into a puddle of water and take that first furtive thought that often enough translated to “Rhalgr's taint, that’s me!”
Paraphrased of course.
It’s personal puddle took the form of a pair of somewhat toughened hands scooping It up, just in time to avoid a mauling by a particularly angry boar stampeding through the brush. It was fairly displeased by this turn of events and was also rather hungry and thus irate. So when it bit into this rude interloper and received a rather viciously snarled “Ow, you little RUNT!” Bellowed at It for its trouble, It was rather disconcerted to hear not sound but words, or at least the meaning those words contained.
It squirmed about to peer at its rescuer, a large hyur with dark brown hair and toughened by travel and with piercing, flint green eyes. And It saw a tiny little wolf, or maybe a stray dog, brown and black in coloration and growling viciously after having bit Milo's hand and—
It had what could be a realization around the same time Milo (what an odd concept, a name, and what an odd sound!) did that they had just experienced one another’s experience as a deluge of alien sensation. Disconcerting for Milo yes, but revolutionary for It. The spark that started a fire, the nucleus that turned the lake to clear crystal ice, the brief eddy that begat the hurricane in its soul as It met and understood another fully aware person and, in turn, realised itself to be one too.
“Rhalgr's balls,” He thought, in the strange way a little canine thinks, “I'm Me.”
Later He might consider the whole idea of context, being as lent to sudden flights of abstract nonsense as his friend and partner was. You can only be lost, for instance, when you have the potential or lack of potential to be found.
Himself, deciding that thought was stupid, went back to watching Milo be beaten up by a Monk.