At morning, the nearest obelisk was visible even with the surrounding tree cover. Aster, who had passed out on the disagreeable floor of the cabin the two of them had shackled their newfound freedoms to, perked up and looked out the window to catch the sun sheering the edge of the dark structure like some stranger running a knife along their tongue. The sun's heat blazed in through the window from around the side of the obelisk nonetheless.

Aster had never known the structure's shadow.

"Darter." Their limbs creaking with a weight they suspected they were young to know, they pushed their companion in crime awake. "Darter. Darter! You have to see this!"

Darter's gray eyes swam about in confusion before fixing Aster. With the force of a great beast rising from the riverbed, they lifted themselves and went to the window. Their face caught the light perfectly, causing the mess of spores across their face (concentrated around the center of their face, running in a line across the bridge of their long, broad nose) to glow. "What are we looking at?"

Aster huffed. "I guess nothing impresses you, because you're out here all the time."
Darter said, "I'm appreciating it. I just appreciate everything, and since you're so... Aster... I thought it had to be something dangerous, or... no, I just thought it was something dangerous."
"You're in danger of getting on my nerves," Aster warned Darter.

Darter said, "I'm in danger of starving. How's your stomach?"

Aster flinched. They could sense some imperceptible change to their body as they did so. Their hands flew first to their horns, which were still just nubs, and then to their ears, which were still just nubs. No tail. Aster tapped their stomach, tentatively, which was unexpectedly tender, but there weren't cool spikes or a second mouth or any other number of mutations there. It was just their stomach. "It's fine. I think. You caught that?"

"I think it'll be better after some food," Darter suggested. The bag Aster brought up from the Covena was unraveled back into a sheet, revealing a mess of food which had stained the bag and a few, almost unusable implements. There was a Koda-tooth knife, which Darter pretended not to see as they went for the least impacted looking food. Sander, the Siida in charge of food, at least had the good sense to keep meal in a covered bowl. "We add water, right?"

Aster tapped two fingers to their chin. "Usually we use river water, but I think that it'll be the same if we go out to Big Silver."
Darter nodded, holding the meal bowl like a newling. "I guess so. Then we can start storing fruits and meat in here, when we're done."
"Can we store things?"

"Not long."

"You don't know how to preserve things?" Aster asked, incredulous.

"Do you?"

Aster considered this. They had been taught, but they certainly hadn't learned anything. "No."

"Great," Darter said. "I guess we're going to starve together during some long dark."

"I guess so." Aster had about as much intention to starve as a bird does to fall out of the sky while it is flying.

They followed Darter out of the cabin, which was hardly separated from the outside at all, and descended back through the flower-strewn paths to Big Silver, with Darter. Darter put the bowl on the shore and began fetching water in their open hands. Aster joined, although it already seemed to them that there had to be a more productive way of doing it.

"Can I dunk the bowl?"

"If you want half our morningmeal to go into Big Silver."

"I'll eat it anyways," Aster promised. "You can have the half that doesn't."

"Or we could not dunk it," Darter suggested. They poured another handful of water in the now-moist meal. "We could've eaten it dry, too. I've eaten dry meal before. It's not bad."

"Where'd you get meal?"

"Generous donations." Darter was already taking their own advice.

Aster scooped out handfuls of meal with their own hands. It was sweet, not as good as when the Siida prepared it but made better by the satisfaction of having done it on their own terms. They licked the remains off their fingers before diving for it again. "Think we can get more donations?"

"Who do you want to beg to?"

"Definitely not the Siida. Who else is around here?"

"Groups of four on the decline. A big group I used to borrow from just metamorphosed."

"Borrow?"

Darter glanced aside.

"Borrow."
"I didn't take much."

Aster smiled. "And all of them metamorphosed at once?"

"They left together," Darter explained. "It's far off."

"Good," Aster said. "It's far off for us, too, so let's not even think about it."

"Not thinking about it now."

"Me too."
"I'm thinking about something else." Darter scrunched their eyes closed in fierce concentration.

"Same." Aster blinked, racing furiously for something else to think about. Their stomach, clearly not assuaged by the sacrifice afforded to its welfare, still burned. Aster considered lifting their stiff, caked-dry clothing, but after playing with the tips of the fabric, found themselves unwilling to move it upwards. Maybe there was some marking there of independence, some seed that would grow into something fierce when they were older. Sooner or later they would become a force to be reckoned with, and it began, today, with small choices, with little experiences that would tilt their spores towards one mutation or another. All they needed to do was glance right below the surface and see what they were in for. "What are you thinking about?"

"Food."
"I'm thinking about our house," Aster lied. "We should go clean it up."

"Clean what up?"
Aster raised a hand with a scowl on their face, stumbling back onto their feet. "It's a mess!"

"You really are Siida-raised."

"What does that mean?"
Darter only smiled.

"What does that mean?" Aster kicked sand in their direction, and Darter lifted the bowl to protect it from the onslaught. "I'll wrestle it out of you if you don't tell me, Darter!"
Darter kept smiling the whole way back. Aster planned the best way to jump them, but didn't. They placed the empty bowl in the window and said, "I'll be picking berries."

"Nuh-uh. We're cleaning this up first. Get a big stick, and we'll scrape all the moss off the ceiling," Aster said.

Darter acquiesced. There happened to be large sticks about, everywhere, but the two of them were choosy. Aster found a limber stick, just large enough to scrape the ceiling without being excessive, although the sub-branches jutting off of it in every which way were definitely unnecessary to the task at hand. Brandishing it like a weapon, they turned against Darter, who had what amounted to a log in their own hands. They weren't so much holding it as hugging it.

"Better surface," Darter said. "It will go faster."

It didn't. The ceiling was thick with moss, and though it peeled fast, the ceiling was wide across, and disposing of the moss which came off the ceiling turned out to be a chore in and of itself. Aster kept using their more nimble stick to drop moss directly on Darter, who only cast them a jokingly sullen look. The sun peaked in the sky, settling on the holes in the building like visiting birds, and Aster took in the changing scent of the house, which seemed to have at last become laced with their own.

Darter scraped the ceiling with impunity. "Can we explore after this?"

"When we finish."

"You always told me you hated chores."
"I don't like being told what to do. I'm doing this because I want our house to be nice. It means something to me. I wanted to do it. So there."

"You're forcing me to do chores," Darter pressed. "This is oppressive."

"It's not even hard. Are you fourteen?" Aster chided. Their stomach seized up again, and they dropped their stick, which just avoided Darter's head and clattered to the ground, pointing towards a dark square at the back of the room. Aster followed, their fingers settling on what looked like the only door in the house. It cracked when they kicked it. A foul odor wafted up from below, and Aster's foot, now besieged by several splinters, trembled. They pulled back, kneeling down to the hole. "Think there's something down there?"

Darter tapped two fingers to their chin.

"Should we see?"

Darter moved those fingers across their throat. That was a no.

"What happened to wanting to explore?" Aster shouldered them.

"It reeks. I think something's dead down there."

"Then we'll definitely have to clean it out," Aster said.

Darter moved one of the few items of furniture in the room besides the bed, some kind of small table, against the door with its rudimentary legs up so that the remaining bulk of the table could be devoted towards plugging the gap. "The island's nice. Let's go outside."
Aster pouted.

"You're clutching your stomach."
"Am not--" Aster looked down. They were indeed clutching their stomach.

"You'll have to look eventually."

"And we'll have to go to the basement eventually."
"We could do both."

Aster rolled their eyes.

"There's no more moss on the ceiling. We're just wasting time."

"You're mean," Aster said.

"Aster."
"Fine!" Aster kicked the table aside. "Go on, then. I hope you get what you want."

Darter seemed satisfied enough.

The pair of them descended into the dark, finding their hands awkwardly thrust into each other's, and as the musty steps seemed to whine and bend beneath them, they at last came to a point where they could see no more. Something hit the back of Aster's leg, something thick and scaled and not altogether unlike the tail of a lizard, and Aster shrieked.

Their stomach screamed, too, but it screamed in colors. Several blades of light cut across their front side, a calamity of distressed oranges and yellows that illuminated them from even under their shirt, which Darter pulled off, in the dark. The room was now at least slightly lit, if unconventionally, and Aster, their arms shaking, put their fingers down towards it, to test if the light was theirs. There were, they found, small lines in their stomach, a system of gashes that were bordered by a thin crust of spores like scar tissue. They did appear to be illuminating all of the surrounding area. Aster's nose twitched, and Darter gently directed their attention across the room.

Up against the wall, hanging there in full suspension, was another panta, surrounded by a variety of small jars (some broken) and shelves of dead things. Their multi-faceted eyes glowed with Aster's light, and a pair of mandibles opened wide in surprise.

Aster had never seen anything so alien. "Who are you," they demanded, recuperating from the shock of their own mutations. "And why are you in our house?"