A being is not a thing that simply exists. A being is a thing that decides what it exists for, and is then bound, absolutely, by the deciding.
This was the cold truth the very old Lifeforms of THE Source Lands had circled for ages, the ones who thought in the dark while lesser beings merely fought. Identity, they concluded, was not description. It was law a being legislated onto itself, a maxim held so completely that it became the very architecture of what one was. The grandest beings did not have strong identities. They were their identities, with no remainder, no gap between the rule and the ruled, and it was precisely that seamlessness, that total self-legislation, which let a True Lifeform's Egoic Intent reorganize existence around the bare fact of a name. To be without contradiction was to be unanswerable. The old ones understood this perfectly.
And understanding it did many lifeforms almost no good at all.
