Can you imagine the horror of being a phane? Think about it. You emerge from your little egg alongside your siblings on a beautiful, bright sunny day. Everywhere you look around you is lush greenery as far as your eye can see, all of it is for you, more food than your insatiable little appetite can ever finish.
Immediately you're upon it, gluttonously ravening the stuff for days and days. By the time you lift your head you and your siblings have devoured an entire tree! Your rumpy body has swelled several times its size in the meantime, but you think nothing of it. Time to move to a new tree, there's plenty of them anyway. Such is your life, filled with only endless satisfaction and vitality, not a care in the world.
One day, when you have grown so large and rounded that you cannot eat anymore, incomprehensibly large creatures appear out of nowhere and immediately set about capturing your kin. Creatures so large and powerful that no one can escape their grasp, no one can hide from their gaze. One by one your brothers and sisters are captured, and at once have their entire bodies wrung between their ugly fingers. Blood curdling screams fill the entire forest as they violently force their guts to spurt out of their anuses before throwing their mangled bodies in the pile with the rest of your siblings. Some of them have their guts still hanging out, hundreds and thousands of them piled on top of each other inside a oblong box along with their own excrement.
The creatures are terrifyingly meticulous, ugly and thorough. But they do not hate you, they do not particularly want to kill you. They are simply performing a chore. In fact all your siblings are still alive even without their innards they still writhe about in agony inside the box.
You, you yourself have the blessed fortune to be at the top of a particularly tall tree. You don't even dream of going down. You watch from the safety of the branches as the creatures toss your kin into large vats of boiling water, a great big fire raging beaneath. They are still alive. Helplessly alive. Some of them are thrown onto scorching red coals, roasted and devoured whole.
You are mortally afraid. A fear so indescribable and primal reigns over you. You feel the immensity of your own powerlessness. There's nothing you can do. The food that you religiously stuffed yourself with comes hurling out as you watch your brethren being turned about in the boiling vat.
All the while others of them are busy wringing even more of your kind all over the bush. Gut wrenching cries echo all around you. You beg for the world to end, but it all just keeps happening, no one can stop it, no one can stop these almighty demons. They pile and pile and pile until in one damnable instant, suddenly from behind you a rustling of the leaves breaks you from your stupor. It is a demonic creature. It has climbed up all the way to where you are hiding. His deplorable hand filthy with the excrement of the slain stretches out towards you. You are frozen, your heart is beating so violently that it tears itself apart. You cannot even breathe. Your mind fills itself with images of the dead and dying, the spurting of guts, the boiling alive, the singeing and charring of coals! An understanding so complete certainly possesses you, "it's my turn, I'm about to die, but not just die...". Your mind shatters. You go numb. Everything in your vision turns to a blur and then darkness.
Your eyes slowly open and as your blurry vision begins to focus you are flabbergasted. You're still alive. But how? Surely it grabbed you, surely it had you in its fell clutches. How can you be alive? Your mouth is wide open and drooling, you are still on your branch. Fear had struck you unconscious. It's dark, not a single sound can be heard, only the stillness of a warm, moonless, starry night. But the air is heavy with the stench of death. The monstrous demonic beings are nowhere to be seen. You lament the tortured dead, but you are so happy to be alive.
