She set off back to the cave, her mind aflutter with all the new things she had just witnessed.

They must be like me.

She was very excited. She couldn’t wait to see if they liked things as she did. She thought her chances were good.

They already had stuff hanging all over them!

She was so caught up in the excitement of this new reality, where there were other beings that could form thoughts that were all their own, and move them around to others. It took her until she actually saw her cave to remember why she had met them anyways.

The others had tried to eat her. Eat her. As dense, boring, and instinctual as they were, they were supposed to be her siblings. A swarm, moving as one. They had betrayed her.

She looked at the cave for a long moment.

How could you?

She already knew why. They… they didn’t mean to. Not really. They were ruled by their instincts. They would throw themselves at the food no matter how dangerous. They would always rest at the proper times, they would never break their routines of their own volition.

She felt the same urges, but she wasn’t ruled by those feelings, and it made all the difference.

She had smelled like food and so they had thought she was. It was so simple. It had fooled all of them. It would never have fooled her. Thus was the power of thinking.

Even knowing they were just following instincts didn’t make it any better. Before they had been her stupid, boring siblings that would throw their lives away, but she had always felt like one of them in the end. She knew she was different, but they were her siblings, and they would fight and hunt together. They were a group.

But that sense... that hope of belonging and safety was gone.

They felt more like some unthinking entity that could turn on her whenever the right instinct was tweaked. She had cared about them despite their issues, but they were incapable of caring about her.

It just made their differences starker. It hurt more because it showed there was nothing there. They were fundamentally different. They had tried to eat her, and they would do so again if presented with the same situation.

She so desperately wanted the truth to be different, she had deluded herself into thinking it could be.

She felt as betrayed by their failing to step up and embody her hopes as she did by the attack itself. It may not have been a fair thing but it was true.

She felt things stirring and fought them back down.

She… really didn’t want to go into that cave. Not… not yet.