The Collector went on the move once the goblin swarm had adequately seen to their physical needs by consuming the frostboars and taking in sleep.
By leaving the females, young and Bolg behind at the dungeon, the Collector's swarm thinned out to a total of twenty three units. Twenty two evolved champions and Thokk, the carrier unit elite. Tagging along them was the elder, though he did not possess any combat capacity to note.
Even his ability to utilize magic had been diminished for he was simply too frail to circulate large quantities of mana into his roots any longer.
Prior to the departure, the Collector noted a few curiosities. The elder had requested the Collector to utilize its flames on the frostboar meat the swarm subsisted off of, rendering it into a form that seemed to suit the taste buds of the goblins far better.
With this, a certain set of behaviors began to form. It was noted from the elder that fire was an extremely rare resource in this biome, particularly with the goblin swarm this far up north where there were precious few flammable pieces of flora to ignite.
In addition, the inclement weather made any manner of flame extremely difficult to sustain.
Thus, when fire was seen, it was seen as a rarity, and a sign of great reverence for a gift granted by an anthropomorphized concept of nature. A shard of precious warmth in a land of unforgiving cold set alight by the errant lightning strike.
But here was the Collector, an infinite source of warmth and flame that seemed to stand against the wails of winter.
The goblin swarm carved up chunks of meat and brought them with bowed heads to the Collector's aura of flame, extending both their hands out and lifting the meat as if to have it blessed by the Collector's presence.
There was something occurring here, something the Collector could not quite place, but it knew from its stored memories that this was roughly comparable to the idea of primeval worship that primitive tinkerers were often predisposed to indulge themselves in.
The Collector was not simply a 'king', an entity that stood at the top of a social hierarchy, it was increasingly beginning to step outside the hierarchy itself and become considered a 'god.'
The Collector did not care much of this. It still believed notions of social hierarchy and worship of 'gods' simply an expression of tinkering evolutionary adaptation to clump together, with this adaptation serving also to weaken them individually.
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Yet, perhaps not so.
The Collector could see that the more this mystique intensified, the more these savage tinkerers began to not only bow to it, but worship it, the greater their individual strengths would be. The greater the lengths they would be willing to traverse for the Collector.
Thus, so long as the swarm utilized this predisposition to incline themselves to be loyal to the Collector, it allowed these nonsensical parades, this 'worship', to continue.
The Collector went on the move as daylight faded and night arose.
Night, the Collector deemed, was the most opportune time to traverse without risk of threat.
For though Shadows followed set patterns of movement that followed the 'Great Storm' without actively hunting others, it was still difficult for those that lacked the capacity to sense them to avoid their paths, especially if it had been such that there were smaller storms that had attracted them.
Of course, the Shadows would not bother the Collector. This, too, roused mystique, and as the Collector traversed the icy lands once more, this time taking up a slower pace to keep the goblin swarm close behind it, it could hear with its sharp auditory systems whispers of further reverence.
That the Collector alone could break the darkness and bend it to its will.
That its kingly aura and flames would bring life and warmth to the swarm and ensure the prosperity of their females and young.
Further, that it would lead them to the Old Age.
"Tell me," asked the Collector. "What is this 'Old Age?'"
The elder, this time carried on Thokk's broad shoulder, responded. "It is the age before the Common Body set its iron rule upon the realms. When yet our kingdom still stood strong.
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Ah, my king, you who have been born anew into this land to lead us, I should have explained much earlier."
The Collector clicked the mandibles of its main skull. "You are capable of perceiving the age of this physical form?"
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"Not the body. The soul." The elder looked towards the Collector with blank, blind eyes, seeing but not seeing. "Your soul…it is very young.
Thus, it must be so that you are a king born anew into this broken world to lead us once more into greatness befitting our lineage."
The Collector had been created and birthed solely to fight whatever had been behind the anomalous warp gate above the Hivemind planet. In terms of numerical age, it was now thirteen days and fourteen hours old.
In most biological standards, this was an extremely short time, and yet, the Collector possessed enough stored knowledge implanted within its processing unit that the very concept of tinkering 'age' simply did not apply to it.
It was born knowing.
"The soul is simply an expression of latent psionic energies.
Conceivably, it is possible to determine age based upon a psionic reading investigating the breadth of information within a unit, yet, I cannot sense any psionic sensitivity within your form, nor would such a scan yield any accurate result regarding myself" said the Collector.
"I know little of what these energies your vast knowledge hold are, but my king, the soul is not simply unfeeling energy. It is much more. It is what marks us as individuals."
"Individuality is a summation of traits, psionic expressions, and neurochemical balances that comprise your conception of 'personality'. Nothing more," deemed the Collector. "Tell me instead of this capacity to read 'souls'.
Likely, you have developed a means to perceive finer details of psionic energy without possessing psionic sensitivity of your own."
"Hmm." The elder grew silent for some time as they traveled north, into the depths of the cold and winter wastes.
"How must I put it. To perceive the soul is…there is no simple method," said the elder. "There is no inborn trait within us that allows us to see it. The soul has no color, no shape, no taste, no smell, it simply…is.
In my old age, seeing lives of many different sizes and shapes and wills pass by me, I begin to understand better myself.
And because I am secure in who I am, I am better able to see who others are even with the loss of these eyes of mine."
"In summation, there is a method," corrected the Collector. The method was far more mundane than it had thought. "According to your analyses, it is that in accumulating knowledge of the world and other specimen you are capable of analyzing patterns of behavior and tendency and thus determine the 'personality' of other specimen.
Yet, this alone does not explain your capacity to perceive the age of organisms."
"Forgive me, my king, for what I am to say, but…you seemed young," said the elder. "You desire to know a great many things."
"The desire to accumulate knowledge is an intrinsic part of any organism's framework for survival. Exponentially more so with organisms that possess higher levels of intellectual capacity," stated the Collector.
Simply the desire to know should have been insufficient for the elder to deduce anything remotely resembling age.
"It is in how you desire to know. Your desire…it is pure, so very pure." The elder smiled from Thokk's shoulder. "You wish to know the world and understand it untainted by many of the emotions and experiences that weigh the vast majority of us down.
Eventually, there comes a time when we live our own lives too long, when we have too many experiences and feelings and judgements ingrained in us that we can never desire to know simply for the pure sake of knowing.
Your desire, your curiosity, however, though it is, as you say, shaped to aid our survival, still holds the curiosity of innocence to it.
In time, as you come to know more and more, I am sure that you too will begin to understand yourself, to know who you are, and then, you will start to know how others are."
The elder suddenly began to cough, violent tremors shuddering through his thin, fragile body. The Collector's senses alerted, perceiving that now that the nature of snowfall in the area had undertaken a drastic change.
Instead of flakes of white dropping at lazy pace from the sky, there was instead a downpouring of black particulates.