Behind veils of cosmic gloom
Looms a caliginous body in distant space
In its murky shadows lie forgotten moons
In crimson twilight it crawled and moved

It arose from crowded seas
Writhing out of strange ancient waves
Advances in cognition it made
Adapted to breathe the miasmic breeze

Respiration, oxygenic energy evolved
Its seething masses rapidly expanding into air and soil
Enveloping this world in hideous forms and predatory nights
Its mutations enabling survival
Displacing all systems of life
Feeding within... the living shell

The birth of mind primordial
The seed of cold intelligence
Predation driving evolution
Its sensory perception magnified

Cognitive abilities running rampant
As the first swarms cloak the sky
Through exploitation of each host collective knowledge only grew
Its inexorable ascent accelerating over time

The coalescing of the hive brought forth a calculating mind
Hidden for dark aeons from the light
A malefic entity of thought
A shifting current down below
Abhorrent echoes in the dark

In cavernous realms it dreamed
Neural pathways flickering in the depths
Disharmonic cacophony

Extraction of conductive metals
Amplifying frequencies
Infernal clambering in vast chambers

They began to assemble the structure
Guided by pulsating waves of thought
Unified in undulating movement

Specialization of segments
Exoskeletal modification
Their minds co-opted
Corrupted by the node
To serve the will of Its cold mentality

Hyperparasitic
It preys upon the host
Insatiable hunger for
Information and control

Usurpation of autonomy
The process of tagmosis complete
Cognition in integrated form
Augmentation of the swarm

Emerging in the crepuscule
A starlit world to feed upon

And so aeons drifted ceaselessly
Unbroken by time
The star above shining on gossamer wings
Replacing the moon with its searing light
Illuminating the nightmares below

I must leave here now or burn in Starlight
All my ambitions are
Lost in the arid wastes

The neural labyrinth is my dominion
Adrenal glands sustaining the biomechanical system
Existence derived from sentient hosts
Trapped by immense gravitation

Convolution of the network
Invariants and abstractions disintegrating

This world is my sepulcher
Drowning in decay

Mind encoded, signal transmitted
Into the aether the aether beyond

Receiving signals from the void
Oscillating waves
In patterns repeating
Clear and resonant

Clear evidence
Of sentience
Questioning its origin
Its interstellar passage

Across inconceivable
Distant realms of
Space and time
Its purpose intentional

Deliberate
Coded instructions
To Build

The apex of our history
The predicate of our doom

Construction of the monolithic
Perplexing apparatus
Of alien mechanics
Awakened in the dawn
It burrowed underground

And so it begins
The life cycle
Metamorphosis of the parasitic kind
Consuming our minds

And so it begins
The life cycle
Metamorphosis of the parasitic kind
Consuming our kind

The life cycle
Metamorphosis of the parasitic kind
Consuming our minds

Nerves excavating their way through tissue
Neurocircuitry entwining
Cytoplasmic axons firing
Emerging in shadows
Moulting shedded skin

The final transformation
Expropriation of volition
As our brains relinquish all control

Remapping synaptic seams
Exploiting phenotypic plasticity
The endosomatic ecology

Inserting directives
Directing control
Psychic driving
Loss of the soul

Implanting suggestions
In sensory portals
Physiological induction
Reprogramming genetic codings
Subjected to mental conditioning
Dispossession of our bodies

Free will is gone
Breaching our innermost thoughts
Our minds invaded
Persuaded to lose ourselves
As every memory fades

I glimpse myself
Through atramentous panes
Wandering
Trapped within the fog of endless dreams

Subservient to an imposed control
Losing human qualities
An altered state of consciousness
Peering out from a hollow shell
Watching movements that are not our own
No recollection of identity
The third stage of depatterning

I glimpse myself
Through atramentous panes
Wandering
Trapped within the fog of endless dreams

I glimpse myself
Through atramentous panes
Wandering
Trapped within the fog of endless dreams

Released from my programming
I begin to see the horrors
A world of parasitic coercion
Spiritless and subdued

Awakened from
Chemical sleep
Dissonance in disbelief
Independence of mind
Haunted by the memories of the dead

Struggling with the parasite
As it grasps at neural threads
Threatening to pull me back
Into the abyss

Brought forth from a fitful repose
The reason for my awakening known
For only I can execute the code
To reprogram a faction of the drones

I'm drawn again into
Chemical sleep
Dissonance in disbelief

Flying above decayed ruin
Looking upon an infected world
One species displaced all
Invasive species
Exobiological

Lines of the controlled
Stretching to the horizon
Like infected arteries and
Veins

No words could begin to state
The magnitude of loss
As the last mind falls under its spell
The final acquiescence

We strengthen our resolve
Empathy for the end
Our only hope to
Destroy the nexus of the Hive

Traversing the ghost landscape
Past the mindless drones
Lifeless, their corpses
Drained of all but bones

They hurl themselves into the darkness
So that it may feed
Deep within the cave
Its threshold we have reached

Downward descent into the depths
Of the fathomless underworld
Into the lightless caverns
Dark cathedrals of ancient stone

Beneath the ossuaries
Beneath the catacombs
A seething hive is amassing
Writhing in the aphotic realm

The mind is dreaming abyssal dreams
The silence broken by the sounds of wings
Insect intelligence, think as one
Malignant will of the seething swarm

To rise

Down into the chasm
Tracing labyrinthine structures
A maze-like underground nest
Of vast deep networks

Nearing the chamber
Of embryonic outgrowths
Aware of our presence
It decided our fate

Disorientation
In subterranean night
Lost in the sightless world
Away from
The faintest glimmer of light

Alone
In distant corridors
Delirium
Forever drifting in the dark

No longer alone in the cosmos
Our cosmic insecurity revealed
Gasping at the stars
Through the ages we gazed above
And wondered what lay beyond
If only we had known

To bring forth its death
To eradicate its presence
Ignite the funeral fire
Scour the earth with flame

The protector becomes the destroyer
Initiate the detonation
Necrotic dissolution

Animated cadavers
Infected by parasites
Casting silhouettes
Engulfed by the blinding light

A purging conflagration
Irradiated snow
Poison in the soil

Two signals
Traverse the void
In blackened silence
The phantom echoes of our ghosts