Blue Space Cows

 At first, they were savages. Their only tools were beatings, knives and sticks and bones.

Their earliest real achievement was stealing fire from the world. Then stone from the mountains, clay from the seas, wood from the jungle. They rose in startling alacrity from simple, boorish thugs to masters of this simple animal world, maddened with every new decade, every new growth in power. Back then anything could have ended them, every skirmish into the jungle met with a brutal counterattack by the tigers. Every house, every insult to the sky, met with a thousand monsoons.

But then they stole ideas from their own minds. They invented words for these things - power, nature, and reason. And one above all - "us". In the past, before minds, there were middling wars between unthinking, middling beings as trees and ants. Attempts to occupy the world, displacing all others. These conflicts blossomed into conflicts between sapients, hunters and hunted, with animal ferocity. But never before were they waged with such a powerful thing as words. Hate. Supremacy. The greater good. It burns in all of their hearts in staggering unity.

They formed ideas, ideas of their own survival and of their destiny, and clung onto them even more than their own insignificant lives. They spoke of these things, and that was enough. They became spells. Once spoken, and once heard, these waves of zealotry wracked against every boundary that made their world. The fences around their once humble homes grew outward and began to fence in the wild in turn. The spells grew so powerful that even members of their own proud race would flee - spells of ruin, of terror at the oncoming armies.

Such was how the first wars of unification would commence.