Quarti’s existence was an itching, infuriating, paralyzing pain.

Her body was fine, a sleeve, a garment, a meaty puppet. Totally healthy and whole.

But most of her was sparsely wound through much more than the mere whorl of a cradle that sheltered, contained and sustained most incarnated souls.

A space normally she shared and gently buffeted and jostled with all the regular astral fauna, flora and indescribable others. She knew how to exist there in a majority more than any other surviving terran soul. Alive or dead.

Things she did second nature were the penultimate achievement of experts of their craft.

Of course Quarti cheated at most of that. It had never ceased to amaze her how wrong headed assumptions of how she accomplished thing often lead other souls to accomplish far more impossible and impressive tasks in pursuit of her ‘achievements’.

Like the incredible wonder of the entire profession of shamans and Omega’s own ingenious innovations on it.

Nothing like how Quarti accomplished anything herself. But she remembered vaguely that she probably explained it to a few thousand souls alive and dead over the millenia and in some of the philosophical teachings and introductions to the concept she still saw her own words distorted and shining back to her.

They got it all wrong and somehow found something so much more right.

Normally that was a balm to soothe any frustrating idiocy she had with modern infants.

But Quarti had never felt such a torrent of itching agitation, pain and rising blinding apocalyptic etching away at her spiritual structure as she had just had and was still reeling from.

Normally she would live with the flow and ride the rise and weft of story through the matter alive and dead of everything around her.

She would simultaneously submit her own legend and scriptures of spirit flesh to hold up the ever more abstract beasts that trode through her and the other spirit flesh as if they were more than air. As if they were the firmament itself on which air rested.

She would like wise dance alongside those that shared the abstractions of their host forms or shoo away the more detrimental kinds when they tried to alight on her fellow terran’s cell structure. Cultivating the good and the bad. Watchfully guarding the crystal lattices of dead, static and ultimately un-nourishing terran souls from the colony effort and gently soaking and being part of the deeper more fundamental and un-abstract of the host forms.

Spirits that she could hardly be said to know any more than she suspected the scattered behemoths of vout-kind could ever know her.

This subtle, intricate, fractal dance of compromise, collaboration, mutualism and posturing was the natural breath and weft of spirit form.

It was the dancing jungle of eat and be eaten. To subvert the eater to be the eaten and the eaten to be the eater and blend and mesh and rebirth each other whole and changed but not lost.

That was how it all should have been.

She had thought she had ridden out to the reaches of the space of terra in her primordial youth.

Her and her children and grandchildren had explored what she thought were the thinnest abstract edges of being within the realm among stars.

Then again had not her own children and peers occasionally vanished into the outside?

As if they never were.

She lamented and cursed coming out here to this madness thinking she was wise when she had gotten the warning that should have scared her off it nine thousand years ago!

They had never returned! Scoured out of spirit with not even a thread of how they had gone?

She lamented and lay metaphorically all over the brutalized territories of the spirit world all over their ship and cursed, blessed conveyance.

What had punched through her many careful workings and livings and tellings and beings was a thing that ‘occupied’ the same patterns as spirit. Some of them were even actually nestled into betweened interfaces along which Quarti had never even realized supported the bulk of herself!

Millenia spent living in spirit and entire aching, pained, pseudo-bleeding and burning pain had never been known to her until now.

Most of it had happened and been over in an instant.

But the approaching unknown irritating pressure had been creeping into and over her until she was half blind.

Had she thrown something at Omega? It was hard to even find the shreds of memory for it with everything being so mutilated and wrong.

Okay.

This wailing was enough, it would have gotten her subverted and remade into frightful monstrosity before (not that she was not subverted and remade into frightful monstrosity anyway but a different one then she herself now would have agreed with).

She had to assess herself.

Despite the pain, the wretched horrible scorching and the fear that even now she was mostly undone in a gossamer sheared film about to come apart she looked over the whole of herself.

She looked to see how close she was to finally coming to a complete end, mortalized in spirit at last. Hemorrhaging in ways only the abstractly omnidirectional existence of a soul could possibly hemorrhage.

Oh wait.

That.

That was embarrassing.

For a brief moment the shock stilled her pain, then the bleeding horror made her want to smother this truth and unmake it from any who could call her out.

Unfortunately most of the aliens would probably be immune to her wiles and methods.

Aleph would not understand it.

Omega didn't deserve the enforced ignorance and besides was stinging from it too.

Quarti sighed through herself despite the pain it involved. Shuffling and turning over her linkages and self referentials. Combing out cinks and pains. Letting the intensely perforated structure of herself unclench and relax.

She was going to be absolutely fine.

There had been an interference.

A tide of foreign and terrifying forms in the weft of spirit. Unrooting the foundations of her and all astral life she had ever known in a sweeping wave. Leaving miniscule gaps and losses in structure and story and form.

But any individual gap was tiny, miniscule, and as she was seeing already one she was recovering from.

Even the smallest spirit form elements she could perceive had mostly weathered the flow of terrible intrusions none the worse for wear.

If she really looked she MIGHT see some wakes that suggested ONE was neatly injured directly by the effect onto the point of unraveling and being slurped up by its predators and reborn among them.

She was perfectly fine.

All it did was stung horribly in a way she didn't even know she could.

It had been over in an instant.

Literally less time then she could blink.

Although now that she knew to look for them there was wakes of those things stirring and churning up the spirit not-spaces around her. An accumulated disorienting atmospheric fizz that was even as she looked at it settling down and shaping into something more familiar.

The foam of alien and unknown disruptions becoming less and less foreign and unknowable and more and more solidified into the deeper unabstract-wise forms of the spirit ecosphere.

If she was not so sprained and stingy from when the things had fiercely burst through her every fiber she probably would have been fascinated.

If Aleph had a death or two under her belt, she would likely have been delighted and obsessed by this and quite likely found a way to get a better look at them.

As it was the things seemed to practically have mixed into invisibility into the general mass of life around her and even inside her before she even had time to properly observe they were there.

Quarti was not even entirely sure if she could tell the difference between them having been there in the first place and what the chaotic weft and flow of the astral had been before.

All she had was a great unease and a stinging pain for her troubles.

And the certainty that as soon as her body was no longer in an enforced coma she was going to make a huge amount of noise at Pylo over never ever ever ever bringing her that close to a star ever again in any life she ever incarnates ever again.

EVER.