Everything that Was: Prequel
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The entity had been wandering for longer than his current host body allowed him to remember. He had come from a place where he existed as pure energy, but he could not remember anything about it. He had traveled from place to place, finding a suitable host in each location capable of sustaining him in the new environment. Each host was vastly different, some gaseous, some liquid, and even a few that weren’t naturally animate, but all were capable of holding his energy until he moved on. He would prefer to move from one physical form to another, but occasionally he would sense something on another field of existence, and slip into it through cracks other life forms appeared oblivious to.
How much he remembered depended on how compatible he was with his host, so some memories got left behind when he didn’t have enough room to store them. His current host was some form of slime, capable of thought but easily suppressed. The host wasn’t very compatible, so the entity could remember little beyond the basics. He could remember how he worked as an organism, although he couldn’t remember if he was normal for his species, or even if he had a species, that information had been lost long ago. He could remember he was traveling existence and seeing everything he could, finding every form of enjoyment before moving on, but if he had a purpose beyond that he couldn’t remember any more.
Along with what he was and what he was doing in this host, all he could remember was a few things he needed to remember to avoid in future hosts. There were always hosts more or less compatible with his energy patterns, but there were some hosts that were almost lethal, although he had never stayed in one long enough to find out if he could die. There was once a gaseous host he had taken made of an incredibly light element, it was so hard to hold himself together inside it he lost all sense of time, only coming to his senses when his host was breathed in by an animal and his energy was transferred into it. Once he had tried to inhabit a star, only to be overwhelmed by it’s constantly changing energy, eventually adjusting enough to make it supernova. He had lived in several planets, preferring ones with a molten core and high metal concentrations, but he had always found it hard to go back to living in smaller hosts afterwards; his greatest joy on these worlds being to manipulate the native species until he grew bored.
His host planet having no species capable of entertaining him, and being over 60% solid rock, made it unbearably dull. So he began to feel his way through the cracks in the physical world, eventually sensing energy patterns almost identical to his own. After sensing them, he immediately slipped through the crack and into the nearest host he could find, believing he had finally found beings like him, who could explain what he was, and reveal the wonders of his past long forgotten.
The night the entity came to Earth, Jared had the strangest dreams. He dreamed of being weightless, of moving through the air by thinking. He dreamed of strange creatures that seemed simultaneously alien and like he had known them his entire life. His final dream was of not so much seeing as somehow feeling family nearby, only to be pulled into an overpowering presence that refused to submit.
After his final dream Jared woke up terrified and in a cold sweat. He quickly looked around the room to remind himself he was still home, but those dreams had felt just as real, and some part of him kept nagging that they were more than dreams. After reassuring himself that he was perfectly fine, he went back to sleep. In the morning he couldn’t remember the dreams in detail, only a splitting headache and the sense that something had changed.
He considered telling the school he was sick, but he knew his mom wouldn’t go for it unless he was throwing up or couldn’t get out of bed, so he got ready for school and went down for breakfast. The headache got better as the day went by, going from excruciating to mildly annoying by homeroom, but never completely leaving. And while he always had a nagging suspicion that something wasn’t quite right, he could never find anything wrong.
