The vision of your...mo;the2?(?) was fading as quickly as it had begun. Her cryptic message meant nothing to you, and you understood fully that it was not supposed to; that "your"(?) progenitor(????was she now?) had not come for you or even registered your presence at all. This was it, then. Neither the magnificent victory nor thrilling demise you were owed by the nature of your existence, but an unceremonious, purposeless, entirely senseless end. An end important to nothing and no one. A soggy rasp escaped your windpipes, a single weak laugh at the humor of your pointless anticlimax.

You dimly notice, as the little greything trotted away with a greasy strand of your inner works, that the wounds you had inflicted upon it had been undone at every existential level, and you realize this is what had divided the attention of the larger greything; that it had not come to steal your kill at all, but to prolong the existence of the inferior meatform for its own sake. Your fading mnemoglands twitch with memory, recalling the strange flailings of so many things between your jaws, and the impenetrable ways countless entities interfered with your fun regardless of any obvious benefit to themselves. Another wheeze of amusement creaked from your ragged orifices, the air seeping from multiple deep wounds in a chorus of garbled sighs like pudding-filled bagpipes. Funny. Funny things. So stupid. Senseless. Senseless stupid not-you's.

And yet, as both your material liquids and manifest definitions leaked out into the jellies of your surrounding realities, missing puzzle pieces haphazardly oozed into place. Frayed wires clumsily found one another. Half-realizations half-aligned, and your dwindling consciousness began to understand something.

It was as if the first thing to slough from your ripening corpse was whatever putrid snarl had clogged your repulsive dolphin heart to begin with, and with newfound lucidity, you realized how much beauty you had missed...that there was, in fact, a far richer tapestry of cruelty than the brutal destruction you had wasted your layers indulging. As they wormed free from your core, your disintegrating branches discovered such concepts as emotional manipulation. And psychological abuse. And social toxicity. You saw, now, why other creatures fought so hard to extend the lives of more than themselves. You began to grasp ideas such as inappropriate conduct. Misuse of interpersonal power dynamics. Disregard of personal boundaries. Inconsiderate demands, hurtful words, general selfishness and subtle, insidious obnoxiousness. A million ways to perpetuate a million degrees of negativity and turmoil that could only be possible through one final, tantalizing concept that still lie just beyond your grasp...something called frandsharp, or possibly lorve, which must surely be the foulest and wickedest key to it all, if only...if only...your branches would rot away just half a layer slower. If only they could drag themselves through one more meager micromembrane before you were truly gone, truly nothing at all.

You remembered, then, that there was in fact one last, healthy fragment of your biomaterial that you had still not reabsorbed.

With your last, pitiful twitch of being, you reached out to this wayward morsel for the last, desperate time. Please, you might have thought if the word were part of your vocabulary. I need more. I need to know. Come back. Reintegrate. Help your progenitor to live, that she may figure out what loov is supposed to be. With your nutrients, perhaps, she might use this secret knowledge to inflict greater horrors than ever imagined.

You waited for the infantile thing's response, waited for it to start slithering stupidly towards your waiting jaws, as it should.

You were running out of layer.

You were losing concept fast.