Elia and Ivel made their way back to the house as the afternoon began to cool. They found Leom and Aniya outside, training beneath a sky strewn with the grey and amber clouds of autumn — the sound of movement and impact carrying across the yard in steady rhythm.
"We're back," Ivel announced.
Aniya broke off immediately and crossed toward them, reaching out to ruffle the top of Ivel's head before he could think to move.
"How did the hunt go?" she said, grinning. "I bet you killed something."
"Just one." He swatted her hand away. "A nightcrawler."
Aniya stopped.
She looked at him the way a person looks when they are certain they have misheard something but cannot quite account for what they heard instead.
"A what?"
"A nightcrawler," he said again, quieter this time, watching her face with mild suspicion.
For a moment she was perfectly still. Then she burst out laughing — bright and unrestrained — and reached out to pat his head again with twice the enthusiasm.
"Your first monster," she said, delighted, "and it was a spawn." She leaned down, her face close to his, her features vivid with pride. "Well. Of course it was. I wouldn't expect anything less from our brother."
Ivel sighed and pushed her hand away. There was no winning against her when she got like this.
Leom approached from behind her, unhurried, and placed a hand briefly on the boy's shoulder in greeting.
"I'm glad the hunt went well," he said. "Now that you've faced one — what do you make of them? Monsters."
The question caught Ivel off guard. He had never been asked it before, had never thought to ask it of himself. He had always simply assumed they were evil, which wasn't wrong, exactly — but it wasn't quite the shape of the thought Leom seemed to be looking for.
He turned it over for a moment.
"Well," he said slowly, "some are creepy. Some are terrifying. Some are both." He paused. "But in the end, they want to kill me. So I don't see any reason not to kill them first."
He didn't say it with any particular feeling. It was simply how the world worked — a law that required no language to communicate, no tradition to pass down. It was understood by every living thing in Ardan, and by the things that came from beyond it as well. Kill or be killed. The abominations from the other realm knew this as well as anyone.
Leom studied him for a moment, then gave a single, satisfied nod — the kind that meant he had heard exactly what he needed to hear.
"Alright," he said, turning back toward the house. "Everyone inside. Dinner's nearly ready."
They ate together at the table, Leom's cooking warm and unhurried, and Ivel found himself talking through the hunt between bites — the nightcrawler, the horns, the sword, the blacksmith — while the rest of the family listened and reacted with the particular enthusiasm of people who genuinely loved this sort of thing. It was hard to explain to an outsider, Ivel supposed. But that was the family. They were all, in their own way, built for this life, and they made no effort to pretend otherwise.
After dinner, Ivel slipped outside alone.
He sat at the edge of the cliff where the land fell away toward the shore, his legs hanging over the drop, the ocean breeze moving steadily against him. Above, the moon was full and pale and quiet, its reflection spread across the water below in a long broken ribbon of silver.
He looked down at his arm. The bandages had done their work — beneath them, when he pressed gently, the wounds had already begun to clot. The flesh was knitting itself back together with the quiet efficiency he had come to expect from his body, though it still surprised him sometimes.
Wonder if it'll scar.
His eyes moved to the insignia on his arm. It was unchanged, the same as it had always been — the same strange marking his adaptation had left on him, as though staking a claim. He turned it toward the moonlight and studied it the way he had studied it a hundred times before, never quite arriving at any answer.
Had he made the right choice, shaping his core the way he had?
It was too soon to know. The question sat in him the way it always did — not loudly, not urgently, but present. A low and persistent weight. He still didn't understand why the insignia was there. He didn't understand what it meant that his adaptation had marked his body with it, or what that marking was pointing toward. He suspected the answer was the kind that only time could produce, and that didn't make the waiting any easier.
He let out a slow breath and turned his palm upward.
The eye opened.
It emerged from the center of his hand as it always did — blinking slowly, adjusting, moving in small deliberate arcs the way eyes do when they are taking stock of their surroundings. It turned toward him and held there, regarding him steadily.
Not with malice. Not with hunger. With something closer to a cool, quiet contempt.
"Creep," Ivel said.
He held its gaze and then, carefully, reached inward and took control of it — extending his awareness into it the way you might reach into deep, still water. The sensation was neither unpleasant nor painful. Just strange. Profoundly strange. Like touching something that existed just at the edge of a place he wasn't meant to know about yet.
And then he saw.
The moon above. The cliff beneath him. The ocean spreading out in every direction. And himself — sitting at the edge of it all, small against the dark, one arm extended, an eye resting open in his palm staring back at his own face.
Two perspectives at once. His own eyes and the eye's, layered over each other like two panes of glass.
"Trippy," he murmured.
He shifted the eye's gaze and looked at himself more closely. His face was still young — undeniably so. The sharpness that would come later hadn't arrived yet, though he could see faint suggestions of it beginning to form in the angles of his jaw, the set of his brow. Small changes. Nothing dramatic.
I hope I at least end up being handsome.
He sighed.
His eyes drifted upward to where his hair fell across his forehead at an angle that had long since stopped being intentional.
I really need a haircut.
He did. He genuinely did.