The Brood Mother

Introducing the big baddie villain of my larger project.

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Yusta stretched her tendrils slowly, pushing into the extremities of each one in turn. She felt bloated and cranky. Her tubes were raw, probably from the ectoplasm she’d regurgitated into the outer dimensions earlier. She hadn’t bothered to clean up, now that the time was finally approaching… soon the nest would be ready, only another hundred years or so. Then, she’d release the brood.

The next few centuries after that would be busy and exhausting, but as long as she survived along with some of the brood, then Yusta would finally get to go back home and leave this shit hole of a planet behind.

She didn’t recall much of the first time she had been here, mostly memories of destroying her weaker siblings and forging her first alliances. She did remember that it had been much warmer then, dryer too. The moisture had stayed to the outsides of the land masses, and the ecture had cycled freely. Here and now, with temperature so low and moisture so ubiquitous, the ecture had pooled and stagnated in deep dense places. She had to stretch all the way into her outer dimensions in order to reach the edges of the ecture pools. She wasn’t very large, in that way. For having been the lead of her brood, Yusta was, in fact, rather small. Even pregnant, her whole body stretched into only seven dimensions comfortably, nine if she really reached.

The challenges of surviving the brood cycle, and her first adult cycle had not really prepared her for being a brood mother. Her brutality and shrewdness had served her well along with her ability to cooperate and get along. Here and now, she was alone with the beasts of the brood planet and the stirrings of her own broodlings inside of her. She had only her own wits and resourcefulness to get her through all that still needed doing.

She reminded herself that she was lucky. This planet, where she herself had been a broodling, was relatively abundant. Had she been from a different line she might have had a more suitable place to raise the brood, but just as likely she would have had to start from scratch and seed a barren place without ready sources of food. Her mothers all the way back to the first explorer to seed this planet had invested much in stabilizing the cycles. Anything it took for a stronger brood.

Her first adult cycle had been enlightening, getting to know the ways of her people. She had learned that, in some broods any leader that wasn’t a male would not do, despite a matriarchal power structure, and strong female brood leaders would have been put down by the mother before getting too powerful. Had she been from one of the barren planets without stable cycles, there would have been relatively little siblicide, as the conditions of survival alone would have passively culled many and the broodlings who cooperated to survive would have become the leaders and survivors. The were even richer broodlings planets, too, mostly in the most ancient families.

During her own brooding, Yusta had had the best of both worlds. She was strong, and at first had been underestimated due to her small size. Many of her siblings had fallen to Yusta herself, but had she not been careful with her building alliances, she could have lost in a one-on-one battle with any number of her fellow broodlings. She allied herself with others who were, like herself, powerful, but not so strong as to usurp her position as lead. And she always made sure to praise her allies publicly, offering them status as well as survival. With strong allies at her side, she made sure that she learned of any hint of mutiny as early as possible. More than once, other broodlings seeking to maintain their status among her allies would put down a threat before she even knew about it. She had gone so far as to establish rituals of fealty, making it a matter of honor that her allies not betray her. But when it did come down to a direct threat, she was swift and merciless in her dealings, publicly humiliating any sibling who had thought to usurp her as she tore tendrils off, one by one.

Her own mother, Manta, had been largely apathetic in their raising, a benefit of the relative abundance of this planet, Yusta figured. Manta had neither had to actively cull nor intervene to assure the survival of her broodlings. She simply had to wait to find out who would come out on top. Manta had fed a lot once the brood had been released and had grown large, slow, and Yusta thought, petty and stupid.

Manta had been disappointed that Duma had not been on top near the end, and Yusta suspected, had been behind his last minute grab for the lead. She still regretted the need for him to be put down. Yusta had hoped he would have been among her mates, lending his formidable strength to her own brood. If Duma had made that grab for position with any expectation of failure, he might not have been so sloppy. Yusta figured the only way he could have felt so sure of himself was if he had had Manta’s assurance of his success. But, true to her ways, Manta had not intervened when several other brothers, having been promised a place among her mates if Yusta were the one to lead them home, ganged up on Duma while he was making his stand.

Yusta pulled herself together, she had no time for distractions. There was work to do. She wondered whether the ectone that had caused her to expand enough to hold the brood inside was affecting her thoughts too, putting too many dimensions between one neural connection and the next. But, that ectone also heightened her senses and she could smell the ecture. The processed star light had concentrated in the depths of the wet masses and in pockets deep in the dry lands.

The task at hand, bring the temperature back up to a suitable range, get the ecture cycling steady again, exterminate some of the pests that had grown up on the surface, encourage the food beasts to grow large enough to be more than a snack for her young.

She remembered Manta telling their mothers line of how the previous brooding had gone during the presentation of the returning brood. She had rearranged the land masses to restrict moisture to the central areas of the land masses, and had released her brood in several places to grow semi-isolated until they could begin reaching out of the broodlings physical dimensions. She had erected barriers to keep the moisture in the main water masses from reaching the central areas by air, and had churned up those water and air masses to cycle the ecture into the atmosphere to rain down and cycle back up again, feeding the food beasts in all dimensions.

Yusta considered sticking the dry land masses back together, but that require more energy than separating them had, and would only help if she could get the ecture move and keep moving. HerShe imagined the cycle, and saw it would not work. Manta’s arrangement had stayed pretty static during the last cycle. There had to be another way.

There must be a way to access the ecture under the layers of land without burying that land underneath layers of moisture.

#scififantasy #broodmother #novelinprogress #miocene #interdimensional #cosmichorror #itsonearth #wearepests #thecircleoflife