I think they’re alive, living. I’ve seen them bleed, I’ve seen them flee from danger. There might even be language in the words coming from their mouths, if you can call them mouths. And yet when they’ve been followed to their obscure lands of origin, through chinks and cracks from the natural world into places that are wrong, it is as if they’ve forgotten how to be a people, how to be a civilization.

Their buildings, dwellings, whatever you want to call them are magnificent. Edifices built to some age-old plan and a purpose that defies understanding. But even now they clearly do not know that purpose. The beings squat in the decaying ruins, using them as little more than base shelters where once clearly much more was meant to be.

There is infrastructure, technology even, in those places. I see them use it, but it is never repaired, never extended. When it crumbles, they simply go elsewhere. I may not be able to understand much about the intricacies of their world, but I think I understand this much.

They are living beings, and they have forgotten how to live.

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