"From the Stars we came, and to them we will one day return. We will learn to swim the great dark as our Mother did. For now, we cower in our homes while we grow as a people and sharpen our weapons. Only then will we achieve our Destiny."

--Fable of the Void

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Rae slept as soon as it got dark, partly making up for the interrupted sleep from the night before when the jackal-things attacked her. When morning came, the rain was back to sprinkling, and signs of blue were showing in the skies. She busied herself hanging her camouflage net from the drones on sentry duty just under the overhang where she sheltered. Now she had a place where she could watch the felids undetected. She set out a sample case to collect clean rainwater before she slept, not liking the look of the creek. It seemed to be running higher than its usual banks, opaque and red as rust. Her drones slowly spread out over the thicket of red trees and the surrounding area.

There were pockets of marsh, but most of them were untended. The river reeds seemed rare in the area. North of the thicket, there was a dip in the terrain filled with old bones, suggesting a behavior of carrying devoured remains well away from the living areas. She mapped out the felid's territory by marking the signs she learned yesterday, such as footprints, hair clumps, and claw scratches on trees. The dens in the thicket were the center of that area. While most of the felids still slept, she assigned posts for the drones to record and waited.

The extended families started coming out of the dens around mid-morning. Intrusive camera angles checked the genders of the adults, and surprisingly, there were nearly equal numbers of males and females. So the family structure wasn't like a lion pride with one male or a pair of brothers breeding all the females. The cats were very social and demonstrative, touching and rubbing on one another and linking tendrils. The nursing young were closely watched by their mothers, staying near their dens. The elders and young adults shared the minding of the more active youngsters like in a wolf pack, but unlike wolves, more than one breeding pair at a time had cubs.

Solo felids and small groups hunted and brought back meat for those in the community who couldn't hunt for themselves for whatever reason. An adult male limped as he moved, slowly stretching out a healing rear leg, and peeled the skin from of a kill for an old and frail female who appeared to have bad teeth. Mid-sized cubs received small prey to devour messily, and the nearly adult carried off the stripped carcasses once there was nothing left. Young adults lay up in the high branches and looked out on the rocky terrain upcountry, farther north.

Rae made a new set of outlines for the cubs, tied into the same database. She modified the root table, adding fields for pattern type and color. The adult outlines needed adjustment to work for the aged felids. They had a much fuller ruff, thick around the neck and cascading down the chest. Their ruffs had a narrow crest stripe from the back of the neck or a wide cap. The look reminded her of a cross between a domestic Maine Coon and the developing mane of a half-grown African lion. Thinking about it and looking through the day's recordings, it dawned on her that it was gender-based. Crests were on the males, and the caps signified the females.

Mics on the drones recorded them over the sounds of the chattering waterways. Baby felids peeped and trilled or yowled according to their wants. The adults had a similar range of sounds but at a lower pitch. They moaned as a greeting or chirped for attention. A rhythmic rumbling accompanied affectionate actions such as grooming and rubbing on another. A sharp, growling cough that seemed to be an alert call came when a young reeder drifting down the river came ashore near the dens. It had scarcely finished shaking off the muddy water before a watchful hunter pounced on it, breaking its neck with a single heavy blow of a paw. Rae scratched her head as the felid didn't eat their kill and instead carried it some distance away with their tendrils. Flinging the kill into the bushes, the cat went to the river with their tendrils awkwardly spread out and rubbed them on wet river grass before inverting them back inside their shoulders. Maybe reeders tasted bad?

The cats had symmetrical numbers of tendrils on either side of them. The tendril root patches formed a hexagonal cluster of six patches around one, making seven spots total, but they didn't always contain a tendril. The cats had varying amounts of tendrils, seemingly coming from random roots. The cat with the fewest amount had only two on each side, while the one with the most had six per side. Some of them had a tendril extend from the central spot, but the one with twelve total didn't. There were more with four tendrils per side than any other amount, followed by roughly equal amounts with three and five tendrils, and the single individuals with two and six, respectively. Rae thought it could be plotted with a bell curve when she got more data.

They used the tendrils for many things. They carried burdens, pulled things closer, or pushed them away. Wrapping their tendrils around fixed objects, they could pull themselves along or execute a hard turn. They used them to manipulate small things, and in one case, used a sharp edge of a rock to scratch aimless marks on a softer rock. Turning on the geo scans, she looked for signs of flint knapping but found nothing. She didn't consider them to be in neolithic, any more than a gorilla would be. The stone age required the deliberate making of shaped stone tools. However, being able to grip and manipulate objects was an evolutionary advantage that might get the felids there one day.

A splashing noise nearby brought Rae's attention back to her local surroundings. Looking through the vegetation threaded through her net, she saw part of the opposite bank collapsing on the other side of the creek. The rusty water ran faster and higher than in the morning and louder. It was still well below her, though, so she set up an alarm to check it every couple of hours. For much of the day, she alternated adding more entries to her i.d. database to study the felids' recorded behaviors as the water crept upwards. The afternoon sun angled sharply through the trees under cloudy skies when several sharp alarm coughs came from the den area. Checking the drones, the felids high up in the branches climbed down with their ears pinned back.

Three of the older females gathered in the middle of the dens and called out an urgent ululation. The hunting members of the community headed home if they were near or perched high up in a tree. The elders picked up the cubs with their tendrils and placed them into the dens as the adults to join them. After several more rounds of calls yielded no more stragglers, the older femmes crowded in the lower shelters and looked northward with anxious demeanors. Eventually, she saw why as the creek got even louder. The accumulated rainfall in the hills tumbled and crashed down the ravines to the waterways, overflowing their banks. As the sun went down, the only thing the drones showed of the felids were their narrowed eyes gleaming from the dark of their dens.

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Rae watched the remaining footage from the day on her goggles while keeping a window open showing the creek level. It started to rain again, and when she ran out of videos, she stared vacantly out at the raindrops, bundled up in her shipscoat with her bedroll laid over her lap. Her head was full of noise and pressure that interfered with her thinking process. A blue-green light slowly lit up her overhang, and she looked around for the darkling Shadow with her teeth bared in defiance.

It was leaning against a nearby tree. "Why do you bother with the flesh bags? They're not that interesting." She glared back but didn't bother answering, tensed in anticipation of violence. "The same is true for all these slime planets," Shadow continued.

Rae took a deep breath and turned her head, determined to ignore her aberrant personality. She used her goggles to track the flooding, concerned it would reach her or the dens.

"Carbon-based organic life is the Universe's mechanism for turning slime into shit," Shadow said. "The fact that you bother with it just shows how your upbringing twisted you. Even with your weak arm, you could squeeze one until it pops like a saggy balloon." It made a squeezing gesture, then mimed shaking off something viscous.

Her teeth ground together. It wasn't approaching her this time, or talking about her romantic issues, so that was an improvement, but still! The Shadow's opinion of her home environment annoyed her. Rae observed it from the corner of her eye, ready to react if threatened.

It stayed where it was, humming discordantly to itself just over the gurgle and rush of the floodwaters. "I suppose they'd have some use as decoration if you skinned them for their pelts," it said. "If only they weren't so flammable or stank so much when they burned."

Behind its cruel words were faint sounds of distress. Rae did her best to tune the Shadow out and listen more closely but couldn't be sure there was anything there.

"Are you listening to me?" The Shadow said.

She shook her head, refusing to look at it. There it was again, distress. No, it was whimpering, and it was nearby.

"There's something out there?" It shrugged, "Whatever. It's not like it matters. The things born of this world wither and rot almost as soon as they're born."

Its indifference spurred Rae to action. Talking the bedroll off her lap, she stood and moved past the side of her camouflage net to search the area. She didn't see anything, so she set her goggles to temperature gradients. The ground and floodwaters were inky purples, while the heat radiating from her was brilliant white plumes. She was looking for something in between those extremes. Again she didn't see anything until there was another whimper, and she looked closer at the far bank.

She raised her goggles to her hairline and jumped over the floodwater, using her teke to land lightly on the sodden ground. A little greenish blob with a yellow-green core was just at the waterline. It was tiny, only the length of her forearm. Up close, it was a dark-colored felid cub, using its claws to cling to exposed roots to avoid being swept away with the current.

"What a soggy mess. You should leave it to its fate. It's not worth the effort."

Rae put a boot just downstream of the cub and stared down as it shivered with the cold and wet. It was losing its grip on the roots, whimpering every time it slipped further into the water. A flailing hind paw landed on her boot, and it turned to look, its gaze traveling up her form until its orange eyes met hers. It gave a creaking yowl, a more pleading sound than the earlier whimpers.

"We are superior beings, and we should only intervene with things that are useful to us," Shadow said. "That flotsam doesn't qualify. You couldn't even make a whole glove out of it."

She broke its gaze and gripped her head, the pressure and noise roaring in her head almost drowning out the sound of the water. That… didn't sound right. Are these… Are these her own thoughts? Throughout her existence, she operated under the belief that carbon-based life was life. How could this errant part of her be so callused about their frailties? It didn't even sound like herself.

Another pitiful yowl came from the cub, then stopped as something tumbled over her boot. Looking up, she saw the cub being carried away by the rusty waters, mouth open as it struggled to stay afloat. That… was not her. She waded after the cub as it went under the surface. Tracking the panicked mind, she grabbed the sopping furball and hauled it out of the water.

"Not today, Shadow," Rae said, her voice rough from disuse. "That isn't who I am." Holding it against her belly, she palpated the chest and abdomen, causing it to sputter out the water it had breathed in or swallowed.

"That's disgusting," Shadow complained, but she ignored it. That wasn't her. That was never her. She tucked the little bundle inside her coat and carried it back to her shelter. One hand supported it while the other stroked over it, emanating warmth. It hooked dulled claws into her shirt and huddled as close to her as possible, panting and trembling.

Sitting back on her board, she pried the cub off her shirt and pulled her bedroll over her lap again. Placing it on the bedroll on its back despite mewls of protest, she gave it a thorough rub while gradually increasing the temperature around it. She relaxed her grip and let it wiggle over to its belly. She offered some clean rainwater from her container, but it turned its head away. The cub shook itself all over, meeting her gaze then hissing at her.

"Really? Is that a way to thank the one that saved you from drowning?" Rae said. It screeched back at her. "So ferocious." She gently pinned its chest down and rubbed its head and cheek with a finger. It bit at her, but she pulled her finger away before it could break its baby fangs trying. She did a few rounds of this before the cub allowed her caresses, starting to trill quietly to her.

The cub was starting to dry off, and she combed its fur with her fingers. Warm and mostly dry, the cub reacted to the worst day of its young life by slowly falling over as it dozed off, squirming into a comfortable position to sleep. Absently stroking the soft fuzz, Rae thought about her newly revealed problem. The Shadow was not a broken part of herself but something external that somehow wormed its way inside her head.

There was a huff of laughter from the Shadow, still lurking nearby. "Took you long enough to notice, or did you believe you broke your own arm?" She frowned. She did until just now. Shadow gave her a sarcastic jaunty gesture and faded away.

Now she knew her mind had an unwanted tenant that she had to evict. It was no longer enough for her to stay on this world and hope to recover. This knowledge changed everything about why she was here and what she had to do if she wanted to get better.