Book One – Chapter 19

Yu left the room. He fled.

He walked staring at the floor, watching his talons stutter across the stone; one, two, three, one more, and more, and more, and seven, and he was out of the sickbay, through the first door, then through the second, and then the corridor spilled him into the common room. His body folded into the first chair within reach. There he sat, unmoving, staring at the table before him. Freezing and appeasing and ceasing to be present altogether.

Yu did not consciously go for the common room. None of this was conscious. None of this was choice. It was not escape but displacement. His body was hauled forward by command as much as compulsion. His storm-torn mind was in shreds. Impulses fought in him like beasts in a cage. One pushed him toward the kitchen, because that was where duty waited. Another clawed to drag him upstairs, to the bathroom or his room, to the false safety of locks and private places. The rawest screamed to throw him out of the guild, onto the platform and down the stairs, threatening to chase him through the Albweiss night until his body broke, so that he would run as fast and far as he could get. But his body obeyed none. Instead, his limbs gave in to a more ancient instinct. It was the greatest of primordial terror that claimed him; the fear of being alone.
    

Survival presents many faces. All beings carry instincts to hunt or to fight, to flee and to hide, or to freeze when all other is denied. All who live are shaped by these patterns, and follow them to varying degrees. Some learn, through strength of mind and discipline of body, to resist. Others exist only through their expression.

Beneath these instincts lies something else. Go further back than that part of the mind that marks a singular consciousness as an individual, and further than the reflexes imprinted upon such an existence at birth, and further still than the marrow-deep changes that, for generations, shaped what would become the habits of a species, and you will find more. There is a layer beyond lineage. Beneath the generational shaping of flesh and mind that is instinct, there lies something deeper still. Another stratum, far older, far darker: an inheritance shared by all beings.