The First Glimpses
He had been delighted to meet Other, and even more thrilled to find out what all Other knew that he didn’t. Once they’d figured out how to communicate without overwhelming each other, they had set about sharing everything and anything they knew, thought, or felt. They knew each other as well as they knew themselves, and considering they could add each other’s observations of them to their knowledge of themselves, they knew themselves pretty well too.
Because of everything else they had to catch up on and explore, it was a while before they began to consider anything else, and unsurprisingly their curiosity was piqued by noticing something new. In this case, it was that the glow around them ended. The glow around them was, mostly, the same, at least in the energy it was made of, but past its bounds, the world became wildly different. There was still a glow of sorts, but it was constantly shifting and changing. At first the two of them had thought it was the outside that was changing, and to an extent it seemed it was, but it would shift in certain patterns to be similar enough that they eventually concluded that it wasn’t the outside moving around the glow, but more likely that it was the glow moving around the outside.
He wanted to know what was outside, desperately, as did the other, so the two of them shifted to spending their time watching the outside. They soon realized that outside of their glow, there were more glows, and that these other glows were different from their glow in the same way that their sparks were different from both each other's sparks and from the glow.
It was this realization that prompted the thought that maybe the glow wasn’t a glow at all, but a spark. A very, very big spark, attached to a very, very big person, that they were inside the person, and that there were more of the very big people in the outside.
Other was wary, she wasn’t sure about the big people and the unknown worried her, but when he proposed that the only solution was to find out the answers to the unknown she agreed, with the caveat that they wouldn’t reach out their minds to the big ones, at least not yet. Just in case they were dangerous, or if the outside was so different that they couldn’t understand it at all and wound up hurting themselves trying.
In that way, they came to recognize, slowly but surely, some of the big people that came around the glow-person (how they had come to call the person they thought they were inside) the most.
There was the person with the spark that was most like their own, in fact it almost felt like a thread of it was flowing from them into the two of them, the same as with the glow-person’s, who was around the most of everyone. A part of their spark was different from theirs or the glow-person’s, and the two knew instinctively that it would let the person turn their body into something else. The glow-person’s spark usually swirled in a happy way when he was near, so they assumed they were nice. They heard their voice a lot too, and had come to recognize it as well as they recognized their spark. They called them ‘the close-person’, because they always seemed to be nearby.
There was also the person with a spark that seemed slower, heavier, and more stable than the first two people’s. It felt like it would be good for doing big things, and things that were meant to last a long time and be very powerful, and that used and changed the outside glow. They also had the part of their spark that would let them shift, but it was different. They decided it must be because the person turned into something else. They dubbed this person ‘the stable-spark-one’.
The person who came around with the stable-spark-one had a spark that flowed slower than the close-person’s or the glow-person’s, but much freer than the stable-spark-one’s. It flowed the closest to the glow of the outside, in some areas at least. They also had a piece of their spark that let them turn into something, but it was very different from the first two’s. Where the close-person’s and the stable-spark-one’s sparks felt like a part of them that they chose and could control, this person’s spark felt like it had something that had latched onto it, and tangled its way in until it couldn’t be removed. It seemed painful, and uncontrollable. The person always had a gentle voice, and the rest of their spark was calm and peaceful, so they called them ‘the gentle-one’.
The last person they came to recognize really well they swore to each other they would avoid as much as possible. They had something latched onto their magic that screamed wrongness, and every instinct told them to get as far away as possible, that this person was dangerous. They labeled them simply ‘the wrong-one’.