hosts

The truth-knowing is incomplete. We are part of a whole long gone. Time eats us all. There was a war, and a song that cut through the war. He is not us. We are not inside him. We were dying, side-effect of a battle in the great sea. The Host had sent something new inside to murder pain and we screamed and died, fled with nowhere to flee

and then the song. The voice. It was not words. It was nothing so small. It wrapped about us, gentle – nothing had been gentle before, gentle is not part of life – and it was not hunger. All we had known was hunger. Eat. Feed. Expand. Move. That is life. But the song was something wholly other that the truth-knowing falls apart.

The song called itself magician, and said it was not truth, but a Way, and wrapped about us. It called the enemy pepto-bismal, and said it was aimed at other enemies, that the song was just passing by and offered a few notes to shield us from death. There is a world beyond the world we know. The song called out world a stomach, and we know there is more to the Host than our domain, than our kin. The Host is vast and terrible, somehow a Host and perhaps Itself as well. We do not understand.

(We are not sure even the magician-song understands, but this may be a heresy to know.)

The song guarded us, and others as well. But it was a sad song; it was here, but not in other Hosts. There would be others like us, what the magician-song called ‘bacteria’, who would die to the enemy while we lived. We know this is the way of all things: that for one to exist, another must cease. Hungry meets hunger, desire meets greater need. We said as much, and the song calmed a little, and thanked us.

The song thanked us after we were safe, and this is far beyond the Whole and even Hosts so we pass it on, to all. To reach other Hosts, so the story will not die. The Hosts know us, though not by name, and seldom know all they do. It is not silence. There was a song. There could be another. That it might defend another part of the Host against us does not make it any less a song.

We who cannot sing can at least share.