Thras’Bel-Moberecht
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It woke up for the first time, not knowing it was the first time it ever woke up. It peeled itself off of the boiling hot irradiated polonium flooring of Thraxus’Birn’Shariqq and left a generous amount of skin from its back where it had melted into the metal. Thraxus’Birn’Shariqq was composed of sixty percent polonium, ten percent xenon, some percentages helium and hydrogen, promethium, neodymium, along with sodium, carbon, calcium, and whatever else went into the chemical composition of the glass rain that plagued both hemispheres of the planet at most times, no matter what direction you cut it in.
It was close to a miracle that Thraxus’Birn’Shariqq and, really, the whole of the Thalck-Arakuelus Galaxy, managed to, not just exist as planets themselves, but to actually harbor the creation of new life while being composed almost entirely of some of the most radiantly volatile elements and chemical compounds in existence. The working theory to explain this rare phenomenon of so many combined unlikelihoods coexisting without canceling each other out, and continuing to exist, was that, millions and billions of years ago, the Thalck-Arakuelus Galaxy had been a quasar to a supermassive blackhole that has since imploded, and, at a different time, the event horizon of a blackhole - in which all kinds of matter, all kinds of anything so long as it has a physical mass and can be imagined can and will inevitably come spilling out of, or pulled into, and, after throwing so many different types of lame, easily irradiated lifeforms at the galactic wall, the supermassive blackhole inevitably stumbled upon a lifeform that, upon developing the blistering radiation poisoned bumps across their body, decided that it actually wasn’t that bad.
I say that this is close to a miracle because, as anyone who has ever seen a member of the Thras’Bel-Moberecht will immediately confirm; you would never once consider calling them a miracle. That creature - who, upon waking up to the harsh unbreathable cloud of existence, decided to also offer the flesh on its back as tribute - is nothing but a fluke, an isolated mathematical infrequency.
They behaved much like an isolated mathematical infrequency, too.
And, really, who can blame them? We are all shoved into existence unwillingly, desperately holding onto the walls of blissful nothingness and refusing to let go just to ultimately find yourself belly-up and surrounded by a series of conditions that are almost comedically antithetical to your continued existence - but at least we aren’t alone.
The Thras’Bel-Moberecht don’t have the comfort of waking up to the world and having that system shock immediately countered by their mother’s soothing touch on their back. Instead, their back is peeled off by the boiling irradiated metal stones it had been sleeping unconsciously on for a day before its circulatory system realizes that its inside of something that is supposed to be alive. They wake up, alone, rip their backs open, and, subsequently, spend the rest of their lives focused on snuffing out other life.
This particular Thras’Bel-Moberecht had a parent, as all necessarily do, one that looked much like itself - its head a long, slim, rectangular prism for a head, its skin paper white, its midsection uncharacteristically wide compared to how thin it was and how thin everything else on its body, its legs and arms connected as if by screws at the far edges of its torso, its singular orifice also its singular facial feature (a black hole in the center of its head). Over time, all of the Thras’Bel-Moberecht exposed to such extreme forms of radiation will eventually notice the skin south of their head browning into a tan then into a deep mahogany, and the radiation blisters and boils start sharpening into rusty asymmetrically placed cones that will cover their entire body. Once their body can no longer respond to radiation by changing their skin, once there is no more room for another rusty cone, they will become pregnant for a ten-date.
This was how this particular Thras’Bel-Moberecht was born, after its parent had consumed enough radiation to incubate a miniature version of itself inside of its rectangular head and, in a matter of days, the baby is expelled out of its parents' single orifice - which is capable of doing everything that a human’s nine orifices can do.
It wasn’t as if its parent was mean. It didn’t choose to not be a doting parent that swooned over its child’s every move, it simply just didn’t have the framework to even begin to develop a precursory understanding of ‘love’, or of ‘family’ or of ‘caring’; it didn’t have the cool-warmth of interpersonality as a base from which you begin to conceptualize kindness in any of its greater forms. The parent of its parent also just puked its parent out onto the hot rocks of Thraxus’Birn’Shariqq and left it there, where it would mature to a full-sized, four meter tall Thras’Bel-Moberecht in the one day it takes for it to wake up.
Once the Thras’Bel-Moberecht wakes up, it doesn’t stop moving again until it dies. No one knows why, whether it is an evolutionary habit passed down from generations ago, from seeing those who stopped either get killed by another Thras’Bel-Moberecht, or because it is a biological imperative, or because it's simply an unnecessary biological function to them.
This Thras’Bel-Moberecht woke up and started walking, and, like all Thras’Bel-Moberecht, walked until it came upon a dead Thras’Bel-Moberecht. They would study the body of the dead for a moment to determine whether it was suitable for whipping or not. The ideal body for whipping was one that had been dead for at least a few days, but before the flesh had turned black; in the in-between was the sweet spot.
This one came upon a dead Thras’Bel-Moberecht after only walking for a few moments and, thankfully, it was perfect for whipping. It knelt down beside it and put one of its claw-like, circular, utilitarian-made hands between the second and the third leg-joint, and its other hand below the third, and pulled the lower-third of the leg off. Then it did the same with the mid-third of the dead Thras’Bel-Moberecht’s leg. It then began stripping the flesh of all four sides of the amputated mid-third, laying the strips out flat on the burning rock beside it, and pulling the inner, polonium-like base from its meaty encasing, which was essentially just a layer of white insulation from the radiation. Once the Thras’Bel-Moberecht leg section had been stripped and all that was left was its black-polonium base, the Thras’Bel-Moberecht would shove this interior piece into the polonium beside them, fully submerging it in the boiling rock to prepare it for whipping. It would return to the where the rest of the dead Thras’Bel-Moberecht lay, and begin stripping the flesh from the rest of its body, starting with the five leg sections left, then moving onto the six arm sections, and if that didn’t prove to be enough flesh it would strip the torso, starting with either side and working around its back. Once it was determined they had enough flesh strips, it would pull the interior from where it had been cooking and wrap the flesh strips around the top joint of the bone.
The Thras’Bel-Moberecht tested it out, whipping it against the air, the momentum turned the whip from fifteen-to-thirty-five strips into one singularly, solid piece of flesh. It then slapped against a nearby outjutting of polonium, acting as if it were a rival; it hit backwards and forwards and upwards and downwards, the whip going between states of being, and after a moment it decided that the greywhip it made was a sufficient weapon.
Then it began the final, and often longest, leg of its journey; to find a living Thras’Bel-Moberecht.
A Thras’Bel-Moberecht, once it had its greywhip, would spend the rest of its life looking for a fellow Thras’Bel-Moberecht - really, they were looking for anything that wasn’t already dead, only, what the Thras’Bel-Moberecht didn’t know, what they couldn’t possibly be told or had explained to them, was that they had been born on Thraxus’Birn’Shariqq, and the only other living creature they could ever run into on the planet would be another Thras’Bel-Moberecht that was looking for them just as much as they were looking for it.
In some cases, a Thras’Bel-Moberecht could spend an entire human lifetime walking Thraxus’Birn’Shariqq without having ever seen another; in others they would find another Thras’Bel-Moberecht immediately, having been drawn close by the sound of it practicing its greywhip technique.
This Thras’Bel-Moberecht walked for a long time, the exact length of which it had no way of knowing - there was no time on its planet, no days and no nights. Just the feeling of it slapping its feet against the burning polonium floor and peeling them back away from it. Eventually, it did find another - only, unluckily for the Thras’Bel-Moberecht, it had been spotted before it could spot the other. Before it could differentiate its own ripping footfalls from an approaching adversaries, the other had already gotten the drop on it; it heard the familiar sound of cutting air and just as it had started to react it had received a hard downward thrash against its head and upper back, swinging it around and knocking it back off of its feet. It was now facing the grey-black sky of Thraxus’Birn’Shariqq, into the circular clouds that would rain glass down at that exact spot soon, and as it lifted itself onto its hands it came face to face with the attacking Thras’Bel-Moberecht. Advancing forward goofily, in the fashion that the planet’s porous crust necessitated they move should they wish to move quickly without stepping down so hard that they shift the polonium beneath them and become lodged inside of it. It had sat there in a daze and, without knowing it or being able to vocalize it, was wishing its attacker would fall between burning polonium joints into the planet’s mantle - betting on it, even.
Much to its dismay, though, the other Thras’Bel-Moberecht did not get stuck. As quickly as its attacker had reached it had they hit him again, this time with a hard and solid weapon. It had struck against its head in a lunging swipe, almost dislocating it from the rest of its body, knocking it back down to face the rolling glass clouds. The other had popped its head into its field of vision, obstructing its view of the glass particles that had evaporated off of the polonium and formed together in the sky to return them to ground level. Then, having evidently readied its weapon, swung it down hard onto its fellow Thras’Bel-Moberecht, finishing what it had started, crushing its head and lodging corners of it partially inside of the planet’s shifting crust.
The attacking Thras’Bel-Moberecht walked away from its kill, searching for its next. Little did it know, but the cones around its body had reached their apex, unable to accept any more radiation ten days prior. It couldn’t have gotten more fifty steps away from its last kill before it was forced to its knees at the strange sensation that plagued it, something unlike anything else it had experienced in its single human-year of life. As if it the hole in its face were clogged, all of its senses fogged over and shook violently, its vision, its hearing; and then its senses parted to allow for a small, paper-white rectangle to be pushed out of itself. It looked at it there, on the planet’s floor, not recognizing what it was looking at, not understanding why it came out of it. It continued on, soon forgetting that it had ever expelled that Thras’Bel-Moberecht out of itself. A day later, when the newly born Thras’Bel-Moberecht woke up for the first time, not realizing that it was waking up for the first time, it walked fifty steps forward and immediately found a perfect candidate for turning into a greywhip.