...looking, and finding in this tiny mind a strangeness beyond even your imagination. In these last few moments, especially—tiny indeed, but increasingly beset by some sort of frenzy, and then suddenly loosing a great blast of incomprehensible energies powerful enough to overwhelm even your own manifold senses, utterly disorienting your consciousness. For a moment your great body is just—gone—beyond perception, as is your prey-sense, and your sense of the shape of the world around you, and even the terrible pain of the hot sick thing that digs even now at your tender insides. Just gone.

Gone, but before you can more than begin to suspect it has killed you, returning—and more; from the point of contact with the tiny alien thing expands through you a vast hot wave of sensation unlike anything you have ever known—sensation that spreads out to the most farflung extremities of your giant form, and leaves in its wake a gentle easing warmth as if the boiling vents of the deep seafloor could send their exhalations through your body, rather than merely around it. And—perhaps most astonishing of all—this wave has carried away your pain with it, and for the moment at least, that pain has not yet returned.

You have not even a hint of a concept to help you understand what has just happened; it is totally unlike anything you or any of your kin has ever experienced. And in the pleasant moments which follow, you consider: the tiny alien mind you still feel, trembling with the reverberations of its enormous shout, seems not unacquainted with such things—albeit there is, you sense, considerable surprise that one of them should have happened now. No doubt it has a concept which will help you grasp what you've felt, these last few moments. You could find it, if you looked. But—dare you trespass further? Further invade such a tiny powerful thing? You did not suspect its power before, but cannot help knowing it now. Could it trap you? Could it kill you?

Well—perhaps not; the force of its shout nearly sent its weirdly hinged shape sprawling off your body entirely; would have, had your limbs of the moment, moved not by conscious effort but by the intelligence that inheres in every part of your shape, further stabilized it. Such an odd combination of strength and weakness, this!—of power and vulnerability. Such a vast and powerful mind, in such a sharply constrained form—not, you begin to appreciate, a mere matter of choice, but rather this poor creature's one and only form, into which it is locked for life. A wonder that it should have any sort of mind at all, to say nothing of the unspeakable potency you've so recently sensed—a wonder, and a matter of terrible pity.

And yet—pity this thing though you do, it seems to feel something of the same for you, for as it has regained its composure after that great mind-blast, it has also reminded itself of its purpose in being here, atop your body. And because you are still in contact with its mind—with however much more care and trepidation than before, now that you appreciate that mind's power—you may observe all these thoughts as they occur, and you do, and in them you see the hot terrible thing that is killing you—you see that this tiny alien purposes to remove it. To relieve you of your death, and see instead that you should live. And to this end, it has resumed its slow progress toward your wound, swinging its gangling dangling appendages one and then the other to carry its body across yours, while your own body extrudes momentary limbs to aid its progress.

It does take you a little while to gather the full scope of the creature's intent, though. There is some strange interference in its thoughts, you feel—around and between and atop and beneath the task-oriented considerations, there is aught and aught of much different subject matter, and—no small surprise, this!—you realize, gradually, that it is thinking about you. Imagining many very strange sorts of interactions, the very least of which seems somewhat related to the way you are stabilizing its movement now. But—why would it need you to stabilize all its limbs? And hold them apart, at such a tension as to strain the joints that hinge its solid inner parts—and hold the whole of it up and away from any surface along which it might move? What purpose could you possibly so serve?—or by extruding a part of yourself inside the tiny alien's physicality? And such an unusually shaped limb, at that...

It is all very unclear to you, having never before known the touch of a mind like this one. But through and around and atop and below all these very strange imaginings, you sense flickers and sparks of the same energy that so bewildered you before, as it drove through you to the farthest extremities of your great form. Perhaps that is why? Perhaps this tiny mind requires such things, in order to shout as loudly as you felt it do just now?—but for what purpose would it want to do that? It surprised itself in so doing, just now—you could feel that much—and in the aftermath of having loosed that blast, it seems almost displeased with itself for having done so. And it was not aiming at anything, as you might—had you such power, hunting would be trivial; you would need simply focus it for a moment upon your prey, and then consume the vacant corpse. But this creature seems to have wasted it, or at the very least, spent it to no purpose you can gather. And why?

But further such contemplation will have to wait, for the little creature has reached the edge of your wound. You can sense that it would do—something—with the far end of the thing, that protrudes furthest into the space above the world. And you can sense that it is sure this thing it would do will help it save your life. But—it cannot reach. And if it cannot change its shape...

This will be hard. You cannot rely on the intelligence that inheres in your form, because that intelligence is unavailable in such close proximity to the thing that is killing you. You will have to think your body into the shape it must take, and to do so will make your pain that much worse. But you can do it. And if you do not, you will die. And if you die now, then you will never understand what incomprehensible manner of mind this tiny gangling creature carries within it. You will never understand the purpose behind that great strange shout of power that flew all through you. And you will never feel its like again—something which, you suddenly realize, you very much would do.

So, hard as it is, you reshape yourself nonetheless, extruding limbs which stabilize the little creature's lower extremities and midparts, and which extend themselves further from your body—enough further that its upper parts are close enough to the thing that is killing you for it to reach out and do—whatever it is that it's doing. You still don't understand that, and though this change of shape would be trivial beneath consideration were you not now compromised, in your current state it is desperately exhausting—and you need all your focus, in any case, to maintain the shape and strength of the limbs you've extruded. There is nothing to spare for contemplation; all you can do is hold yourself in shape, and wait to sense from the tiny mind that whatever it is doing, it has done.