A sea star rested, clinging to a wall with arms too long for the small body they grew out of and too thin for their own length. Its body was black as pitch, not that most would even be able to see, considering the waters they sat in were even darker, and its five limbs were covered in short, stubby cilia that writhed in spite of the utter stillness of the world around it. Surrounding it were three other starfish of varying build, none as wide as it but each quite a bit heftier regardless. Their own midnight limbs were entwined in the brittle star’s own, entangled in its grasp as they, too, stayed stock still, lending their own rudimentary nervous systems to it, letting it think even better.

And thinking was what it needed to do, now. The Deep One had gone silent, already a cause for alarm, but their absence was immediately preceded by a primal anger, the likes of which each of the stars were intimately familiar with, a feeling that was imprinted in the core of each of the four that the Deep One had mercifully liberated them from. Still, they felt it gnawing impotently on the backs of their minds, as much as any of them even had a mind at all, and when they were together, they remembered when it was the only thing they could experience. The Deep One’s anger was raw and vitriolic, it pushed its way into them and demanded they destroy an enemy they could not reach, an enemy that had skipped by them.

It was all too similar to the Hunger they had when they were created, and whatever could cause the Deep One to feel it was an insult to that which freed them from the curse. But they could not help, they were too far to have any hope of reaching the enemy, and they would not leave their umbral labyrinth even if they could. Their strength was in the darkness and they could hardly hope to combat this Rage when their own Hunger had to be quashed by another to begin with.

Luckily, the Deep One was strong, and they knew when it had defeated the enemy, they could feel the shift in Rage directed at another, to rage that had no target and fatigue that threatened to overwhelm their conjoined mind before their overlord succumbed to its well-earned rest. With its nap came an eerie stillness, however. No doubt, many of the surface-things weren’t able to stay awake where the stars were and if they could, they were probably reeling at their sudden and profound isolation. The stars were a slight bit better off; their knitting together their own individualities before the Deep One’s sleep had spared them the worst part of being made cripplingly alone: actually being alone.

The brittle star took another moment to think, ruminating on a series of events it hadn’t witnessed, using the clusters of nerves it had commandeered from the other three to do so while those very nerves were slowly melded together, using mana to bind the stars together. Once they had, the brittle star was no more, nor were the brisingida, sunflower, or chimera stars. Instead, they melded seamlessly back into the single mind of many bodies and more limbs that they’d grown so comfortable in. The idle thoughts of the brittle star seemed rather inconsequential to them, now that they were back, but they weren’t sure what more they could do with the One Beneath indisposed.

Then that line of thought was quickly abandoned, what they needed to do was obvious in this situation: exactly as they would in any other. The One Beneath had given them a role to fill, and whether or not It was incapacitated hardly changed what they were to do. They were to defend their tunnels, to rip and smash and let their ruler devour all that was left. There was no need for indecisiveness, for as long as they were them and not the stars, they would serve as commanded. They needed no name to hunt, and they peeled their ample flesh off the wall, floor, and ceiling that they had been stuck fast to fully prepared to hunt any errant surface-thing that strayed into their sable domain.

They rolled and roiled themselves into a more manageable form, moving their bonded brawn to their center of mass, pointing their mouths out, and letting their many extremities spill forth from the gaps between their fused bodies. Once more they stilled, this time with a purpose. They tasted the water around them, felt the minute currents pushing and pulling past their form, and concluded that there were no surface-things in their many halls. Knowing that, they merely picked a direction at random to undulate in.

Despite being a heaving mass of meat, they wove through the cramped corridors with surprising grace, they may have been blind, but they picked their way past the corals they’d grown fond of with ease. Even without having any sense of hearing they knew when even the smallest fish stirred many halls beneath them, and when they threatened to drift too close to their groping tendrils. Their own patrol was noiseless; they ensured that this was the case as they billowed forth, with motions as limber as they were unnatural.

They were not very far into their endless rounds before things picked up, quite a bit. They’d just appeared at an intersection between passageways, stopping to taste and to feel their liquid surroundings, when they noticed something to their side, rather nearby, too. They knew from memory that the passageways in that direction widened ever so slightly, a portion of the maze that had been shattered and rebuilt into the levels beneath by the One Beneath, but it was still part of their territory, and even if the wanderer was not an intruder, it was still a surface-thing, and that made it unwelcome in their darkness.

They increased their pace, advancing down the hall in broad surges, still silent, but now disturbing the water in their wake. Whatever it was they were tracking was fast, though, and tasted of heat and scale instead of crushing dark and endless flesh. But, while it was moving fast, they knew that they would encounter each other, for it was moving toward them. They realized that it was trying to work its way up from beneath their realm, and that it was bigger than most who intrude upon them.

They shifted their mass down another tunnel, moving directly ahead of where the unwanted thing would need to go if it wanted to ascend, and then it prepared. The jumbled patchwork of thin tendrils and hulking limbs evened out, the multiple gaping mouths were shifted to evenly cover potions of the main body. In the end, they resembled something of a sphere covered evenly with long, flexible onyx appendages sticking out from every point that a mouth wasn’t. There were no cilia, no ridges, instead they lined these tentacles with hard, sharpened points, each ready to grapple and bite into anything they touched.

Their transformation was perfectly timed, too, they could feel the water preceding their prospective victim, could taste the ash and steam as it raced towards them, and could discern the wave of warmth that it was bringing with it. A corner was rounded, and an arm whipped out, unfurling towards the surface-thing with enough force to crush bone and rend flesh. They were therefore surprised when neither of those things happened.

They were unsuccessful, their strike met nothing but the pitted limestone walls. They felt the stone shatter and fail to shatter them, and then it felt nothing more from that arm. There was a searing heat coming from the stump of where that limb had just been, however, and immediately after even more pain from the stump of a second limb. They shifted their mass, a pair of smaller tendrils coiled around the severed mass and dragged it into one of the gaping maws even while the stubs bubbled forth two new limbs.

Then they struck again, already coming under attack once more, but they learned. Nearly two dozen arms were swung towards the burning-thing, another eight flailing to the side in case it thought to be bothersome and dodge. They were successful; the thing was fast, plenty fast enough to dodge, but it was too big to dodge well, and they felt two of their attacks connect with something that wasn’t stone. Immediately, they shifted mass towards those two tendrils, forcing them to thicken and grow as quick as it could in an effort to constrict-around the burning thing, and while one was charred too badly to use, the other snaked around some portion of the thing’s body.

They consumed the cooked flesh, forcing the nub to grow once again, fighting to keep the burning-thing securely grasped. They were successful, though, even as they felt meat melting and being rendered inert and useless, they were able to send more to combat that. They were entirely confident in doing so; so long as they were in the dark, they would never want for growth, for mass. As more and more of their arms coiled around the thing, mapping out the curves and contours of its scorching frame, it began to shift once more. The thing struggled, of course, and they were alarmed when they realized that the longer it struggled, the hotter it burned.

They tried to work fast, configuring their flesh to point the largest mouth forward, and using the remainder to attempt to drag the thing in. They were unsuccessful, their mass was starting to be severed faster than they could grow, and their growth was starting to be burnt, too. They managed to fit a single appendage into their toothy maw, but the water around them was beginning to boil, and the cavities in which they consumed were vulnerable to such attacks. They bit, and the bite was successful, but it was unsuccessful immediately after.

They tasted the blood in the water with their entire body, but that seemed to be a breaking point for the burning-thing, because they then tasted nothing after having most of their limbs flash-boiled away. They consumed what mass was available, including the dregs of magical blood that came from the adversary, but then were launched backwards by a solid strike, only to immediately be beset upon once more. Cuts were opened and limbs were lost, and it felt flesh cauterize and disabled, something which they had not felt before. It was unpleasant, and so they shifted, forced to take a more defensive form.

They were partially successful, as they made their body denser, they could feel the threat of one of the slashes sheering completely through them start to lessen, but they became slow, unable to grapple or to strike. They were nonplussed, beginning to squirm backwards, but their form was not malleable enough to fit into a smaller gap, and so they began an unsuccessful dance, in which they shifted backwards slowly and were attacked rapidly for every centimeter. They continued growing denser, even as they began reaching a point where they could no longer, and the surface of their flesh was covered in tough, rocky ridges.

This was not enough to be successful, though, the burning-thing’s strikes grew harder, faster, hotter, worse. They were in no danger, yet, but their once overwhelming advantage had become nothing far too fast for their liking. They knew their battle was unsuccessful, and that they needed to retreat, and they redoubled their efforts to do so, tracing back their path in hopes that the shrinking corridors would prove too small for the burning-thing.

They were successful, after warping their body around a corner, they felt the quantity of strikes decrease immensely, and so they extended a few more appendages behind them to start crawling faster, now that the threat of losing them was lessened. The hall narrowed further, the maze becoming tighter than even they would prefer, but they felt one final cut open up in their flesh, stitch itself back together rapidly, and then come under no more assault.

After retreating further, they allowed themselves to undo the many, many changes they had made to their body, once they felt securely removed from the Burning-Thing, which had earned a name to them for its victory. Any semblance of order in the flesh almost literally dissolved, as limbs thinned and thickened or warped in weirder ways all while their body became less coherent. Their patrol was unsuccessful, but they were at least pleased knowing that the Burning-Thing was also part of the One Beneath’s forces, and could sufficiently guard places which they could not.

Still, it was a tad bit disappointing, knowing that they had been so close to success and yet were unsuccessful regardless, and they decided that their patrol could end early, since the Burning-Thing would likely tear through anything in the way anyway. They loosened their connection to their communal body, feeling nerves unknit and flesh part, feeling less and less as they faded into the background, and both enjoying and dreading the feeling of witnessing themselves unravel and become less, but it was necessary.

As they fell dormant once again, the brittle star peeled its five thin tentacles away from its three brethren, using the fleeting moments in which it had a true mind and proper memories to review the fight with the wyvern. It had been some time since the star had last encountered it, and in fact, it wasn’t even sure it was the same entity until it realized that Deep One’s edict was still in place, and that it was not to kill the creature. It was surprised that it had gained that much power, but it wasn’t overly impressed either way.

It’d be a difficult prospect to impress the brittle star at all, actually, as the last dredges of them went silent, the fight with the wyvern became less of a memory, and more of a series of instincts that it was aware it had experienced before, but couldn’t quite recall. It had gotten more than its fill of rumination that day, however, and decided to unwind some. It tasted the water around it, starting to narrow down the location of the One Who Pets for some positive attention.