you are not unsympathetic to the plight of ants, for you were once something like a spider, yourself. you understand what it is to exist among those who can crush you on a whim, or by a simple failure to notice your presence at all. in many ways, you still do.
And you know that when you were an orphaned teenager fighting for survival, it was probably no more than whimsy that made the entity you regard as your parent (both mother and father, you call it in your native tongue) take pity on you.
It had been, so you thought, the stealer or your world’s stars, and so you made a desperate journey to plead for their return. Only, you never reached your destination. You chose the wrong path just before the end; were doomed to die with your star system, body spinning forever through an impossibly vast darkness.
Something far worse happened. A miracle. From the moment your rescuer reached out to avert your fate, you knew you could never return to the world and the people you knew. You were no longer one of them.
This ancient being raised you, protected you, loved you, saw you as a person. You were sure of that. It was happy to let you call it mother and father, and it treated you much as you once hoped your biological parents would. And yet, as you grew in power, you also grew to understand that it didn’t entirely take your existence seriously. Not, at least, in the way it would have if the regard were truly mutual. It was your mother, but you were not quite its real daughter.
It’s not the way the its focus is so often squarely on the citizens of its home realm that leads you to this conclusion. It isn’t the unending affection for life that sometimes means it spends so little time with you. It’s in how often it fails to introduce you to the things it loves. You develop an equally deep love for your people as much in spite of your parent as because of its teachings.
Still, you grieve when the elder god falls into a deep slumber and will not wake. Still, you and your siblings look for some means to rescue it.
You find it impersonating what you see as a fairly primitive species on some distant planet. “Patrick”. Limited in so many ways your father never was. And yet, despite not fully knowing who you are to him, he looks at you – at you and all your siblings – like you’re the most important beings in the universe.