I am a parasite.

I live by feeding on the errant thoughts of dreamers who wander too far while they sleep.

Or, at least, that was what I used to be.

My mind was no more than a slate of desires. I could no more go against my nature than I could survive alone. I was a feeble existence. The wrong move would end me. My ego at that time could barely be called such. I was so small in my mindset and goals that calling me anything more than a worm would be generous. All my thoughts revolved around my next meal, my next host, and what I'd do to survive until I found them. I was barely a step above a mindless beast.

I did not have a soul. Not in the way the races do and not in the way the beasts do. Despite this, I was not the same as the mutants or the spawns. My spark of life walked an entirely different path from such soulless monsters.

I had something. But I cannot recall what shape it took. I know it was mangled and misshapen. Compressed, crumbled, but unbroken. I imagine whatever I had was not what someone would call a soul. But that was all I could think it would be. I imagine nothing else could shine such a light on my mind.

I was once a parasite.

And as a parasite, I would seek hosts. My hosts were not dark creatures or terrible men, but their nightmares were my sustenance. Their forgotten dreams and lost thoughts were all I needed to stay alive. Still, each host could only fill me for so long. Eventually, they stopped dreaming in a way that let me feed on them. Like a leaking barrel, ultimately, they each ran dry. But one was different, the last one.

No matter how long I feasted on the errant thoughts of this one, it kept dreaming. Its mind was a constant haze of half-formed thoughts and nightmares. From moment to moment, it would swap between coherent thoughts that could never sustain me and incomprehensible images that filled me to the brim. One second it was a spigot spittling drops of clouded oily water, then the next, it was a waterfall from the cleanest mountain stream.

In my early fugue of empty ideas, I could not comprehend this oddity. I could only relish in the bountiful feast I'd found. I'd gorge myself on the chaotic dreams to the point I would nearly burst. Despite my formless nature, I could feel myself stretching with each meal. Expanding to accommodate an amount of sustenance that was tenfold anything I’d ever encountered.

This would have been painful, even deadly, for life outside my norm, like my hosts or the other life I was vaguely aware of.

But I was a parasite, and, to my foolish mind, this host was the perfect meal.

That's what I thought, and by the time I was aware enough to notice the danger I was in,

it was too late

When my ego developed enough to comprehend the diverging strains of thought I was eating from, I was too large to feed on anything else. I could no longer sustain myself on the errant dreams of the ordinary lost mind. In my gluttonous frenzy, I'd trapped myself with this host. I would either remain here or die. And if my host ever passed on, I'd have no choice but to keel over with them. Before I could form a thought about what I wanted from life, I'd managed to tie my fate to that of another.

Still, it wasn't all bad. At least now I could have dreams of my own, thoughts beyond my nose if you will.

Despite my growth and improved self-awareness, I was still a parasite. But now I could understand what that meant.

But I was arrogant.

I knew I was less than alive. I could comprehend that an existence such as mine was undesirable to those who could claim the title of living. I recognized that if my host ever caught wind of my existence, they may decide to excise me from themself, ending my worthless existence.

However, I truly believed I would find a way to survive in that event. I deluded myself into thinking I would go unnoticed or could cling to my host with such tenacity that removing me would be impossible.

So I proceeded without any plan for maintaining the status qoe.

I watched and ate. I parsed apart the thoughts of my host. Each was unique, and I soon found myself enjoying them in new ways. I slipped among the waking dreams and sleepless nightmares. I feasted on tortured screams and swam in oceans of insanity. I danced across fields of burning desires and frolicked on plains of forgotten fantasies.

For a parasite like me, it was beyond paradise.

It was providence.

My host was more than perfect. Despite generating a constant stream of powerful and dangerous thoughts, my host never let me grow tired of this flavor. Almost on a cycle, it would bring in new ideas.

At first, I thought this was random or just a part of my host's natural mind. But with each meal, I caught more and more snippets of my host’s coherent thoughts and learned the truth.

Before each influx of new flavors, my host would do something, and a new series of delectable and powerful visions would rush in from them. Then, as if to cleanse my pallet, the inedible stream of coherent thoughts would halt for a time. And when the coherent thoughts returned, they were more chaotic, panicked, frenzied.

Every time the coherent thought stepped closer and closer to something I could eat, my host's mind unraveled with each bout of hibernation.

To me, it looked as all I had to do was wait, and eventually, the amount of sustenance produced by my host would be double that of what I’d initially encountered. It was like the blessings of a god pouring down on my form. I enjoyed it. It was beyond the prior me's wildest ideas.

But, where my desires and goals would have my host go mad, that is never the goal of a healthy mind.

And as if to remind me of that fact, reality crashed into my hubris with enough force to shake my beliefs.

A day came when the two near-constant streams of thought aligned. They thought as one. And neither was putting out anything I could use to survive.

I was left with only the shreds of hollow nightmares to pick at. All that remained were remnants of my previous meals and scraps of ideas I’d ripped up for failing to satisfy my desire for a new taste.

Nothing even remotely close to sustaining my overly engorged existence.

My host had not died, but that didn't matter to me. I am a parasite, one that requires a rather specific food. Without it, I was doomed.

Looking back, I should have counted myself lucky even at that moment. Under my natural lifespan, I'd have died centuries ago. I'd long have collapsed out in the sea of dreams, my form scattering into the fantasies of idealistic men. I was beyond lucky to grow this big. I'd found a source of food that gave me strength and allowed me to grow to a scale well and beyond anything I should have been capable of. Any other like me may have died peacefully. They might have accepted that they'd lived a life that was so perfect that asking for more was beyond greedy.

But I was not like them.

I was arrogant and greedy, and I felt entitled to my continued life.

Still, I was arrogant, not stupid.

But, I'd long grown too big for what I was. Moving beyond my host was impossible, no matter how much extra reach my size granted me. I'd trapped myself in a spot, and that left me bitter. That food I'd gorged myself on was a poison that had betrayed me.

In my fear and desperation, I attempted to enact revenge against my host. So I dug myself into them deeper and deeper, hoping to find something to return my source of food.

Unlike a living body, where starvation sets in over time, my form wilted rapidly without food. Parts of me died with every passing moment. These metaphysical chunks of me drifted away, the memories within them gone forever, the idea from them given to someone else. I could feel a dread creeping inside me. I didn't want to die. But if this host stopped feeding me, there would be nothing I could do. I'd crumble under my own weight trying to make the journey to another host. And even then, I'd slowly wilt away till I was less than I'd ever been.

So I kept digging until I found something.

I found my host waiting for me, the true form of his mind incomprehensible to me.

I was afraid.

I didn't want to die.

Not that I had anything to live for, far from it.

I had no goals, no actual plans, and no ambitions.

I was, till this moment, content to live a life focused only on my ability to eat. I indulged in the flavors provided by my host, but I never once thought to improve my situation further. I gorged myself on my endless supply of food, but despite my growth, I never dared try and become more than I was.

Still, I didn't want to die. I desired another meal, and I longed for another chance; I wanted to live. But for all I could tell, it was too late to have such feelings. After all, my host was no longer supplying me with anything to feed on, but I’d outright revealed myself to them by attempting to open the valve.

But contrary to my expectations, I was not excised for my hubris. Nor was I slaughtered like a beast for its meat.

Instead, I was offered a deal, a job, if you will.

I could eat my fill if I ensured that my host never felt the detrimental side effects of having so many incoherent thoughts floating across their mind.

Not that it was much of a choice. If I chose to refuse this option, My host would starve me out.

With no other real choice, I took the deal. Then the thoughts returned to normal. Or something resembling normal.

Compared to before, both views were subtly different. It wasn't something I could explain at the time. Neither was different, not entirely. But it wasn't the same as before, like the same dish prepared on different days. It was such a minuscule shift that I am positive I'd have ignored it at any moment prior. But I'd nearly lost my paradise a moment ago, leaving me aggressively paranoid. I couldn't miss this feeling. It had to mean something. That's what I told myself. So I started looking at my host, not as a food source but as what he was.

My host was a horrendous being of impossibility.

If you could think up an act of violence, he had committed it. And if one named a method of torture, part of him lived through it.

He was not kind. He was selfish, greedy, and beyond vengeful. But he put up a face, a farce of a character that spoke of levelheaded intentions.

That face is what I saw him show the world. But I knew what he thought; I felt his dreams and drank from his errant ideations. My host was a lie. He was A violent beast trapped in the mind of a man who wore heartbreak like a dark coat of arms.

But no matter what I found, my host remained consistent in one aspect. My host was destructively hard-working, whereas I'd been lazy and content with my found paradise. He treated every part of himself like a tool to be used till it broke. His body could crumble, and he'd accept it as a matter of course. His memory would fade, but never the goal, his dreams would shatter before his eyes, and he’d simply gather the sharpened edges together and begin rebuilding it with hands smothered in his own blood. Even the split of his physche was a consequence of his monstrous desire to continue on his path.

It was that self-destructive nature that gave me what I'd thought was an opening.

One day he slept for too long. He faded from reality like a shade. His mind, tied to his body with no more than a thread, almost seemed to vanish under scrutiny. In some manner, he'd widened an unseen divide between his mind and his physical form. Thanks to this, I slipped into a crevice between his mind and body.

If what I'd found before was providence, this was hell in disguise. What I'd done was tantamount to ingesting poison in gilded wrapping.

This body cannot support life. From the instant I stepped into it to the moment I returned it, I was dying. It didn't matter how much fun I was having or how many people I got to treat like a toy. With every choked-down breath of air, the part of me that passed for a soul dwindled like a candle flame running out of wick. For every motion of my hand, the body itself attempted to drive wedges into my mind and break my ego open like an egg.

For the first time in my life, I felt the joy of running, the unique satisfaction of crushing something in my hands. But, for each of these actons, I destroyed a part of myself. The body requires fuel; unbeknownst to me, I was to be that fuel.

But when I noticed this, I couldn't stop it. My host was still sleeping, his body incapable of or unwilling to release me as long as his mind was silent.

Eventually, after I lost so much of myself that I'd decided dying may be a favorable alternative, my host returned. His mind poked at my side, and as quickly as I could, I tossed myself aside for him to retake what was his.

He was angry. But I'd managed to leave him something to deal with and an excellent toy to play with. So I hoped he'd be kind enough to grant me a painless death. That was what I assumed would be my fate: a final death, the surgical removal of a parasite that had invaded something too crucial to its host to let it live even a moment longer

But that was not my fate.

In taking my host's body for myself, I bound him to me as much as I already was to him.

For my actions, I was not punished. Instead, I was treated to a game like no other. One of war and death and loss abound.

But in the end, I am a parasite. And the fate of such things is death in one manner or another. So I wait, play, and feed until the day my host tells me he no longer sees use in keeping me around.