"The older members of the band share their wisdom with the Dam. They no longer have younglings of their own, so they aid the paren who raise the future hunters. Slower of step, and grayer of face, the years have also given them a wealth of experience."

--Fable of the Elden.

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Rae's hands shook as she crocheted another panel for her project. After getting back to the plateau, she'd finished one item after another on her to-do list. She'd carded the wool and the cottony pod fibers she'd named boltan, spinning the fibers into wool and boltan yarn plus a yarn with both fiber types. She was currently working on dyes to color the skeins. The stalks of the pod plant were still retting, but the quality of last year's growth probably wouldn't yield much of the linen-like fiber she expected this coming year would bring. She put her forearm over her aching eyes for a moment. She'd scarcely slept in the weeks since her return, but thankfully Shadow hadn't appeared in all that time.

When she finished this last panel, she could assemble the project. Her eyes flicked up to the polished orange agate she'd carved into a pair of buttons. When she managed to get some sleep, she dreamed of the cub and awoke in tears. Desperate for rest, she started a simulacrum of Fire-eyes, putting together a felt pattern she echoed in crochet. The lowest grade fibers would stuff the doll, while the medium grade made the felt and the best into yarn and thread. Knotting off the panel, Rae started the assembly. First, she stitched the felt liner together, then put the crocheted parts together to surround the felt. Once the body and limbs were finished and stuffed, she sewed on the agate eyes. Much work was needed to decorate it, but completing the form of the cub was enough for now.

She carefully put her tools and supplies away, then picked up the life-sized toy and cradled it in her arms. Moving to her bedroll, she looked at the Jackal-thing hide in a wooden frame she'd put on a shelf. She didn't have an immediate use for the strange leather, and it was decorative all by itself. The pseudo-skeleton would probably be spookily festive when the autumn harvest time came. Sinking down to her blankets, she turned to the wall, curling up around the cat plushy and blocking out the world. Her hands stroked it as the tension in her drained away as she found a moment of peace. An alarm on her goggles woke her a few hours later.

Rae's monitoring programs prompted her to check on the kiln firing. She'd marbled the lavender and rose porcelain varieties together, making a wide array of plates, bowls, and pots on a pottery wheel. Drifting down the shaft on her board, she thought of the materials she stored down here for her projects. There was more wool, leather, and metal ores. The metal was refined into bars and turned into electronic parts. She was in the process of increasing the number of drones to expand her surveillance area and modifying the ones she brought with her to local needs. Once at her kiln ramp, her scanners determined the clay needed a few more hours to complete the firing, so she input a delay before the rack would move back up from the heat.

She returned to the surface and walked out of the dig into the sun. She paused, blinking as a vision of a withered and decomposing gryphon lay over the partly completed granite walkway to the river. Moving gingerly forward, she got close enough to nudge it with her boot, only for it to fade away before she made contact. Another damned hallucination, why was Shadow doing this to her?

'Because the Shadow doesn't like me,' a nearby voice said.

Rae whirled towards it with a gasp. She met the sapphire eyes of the black gryphon totem that had been appearing to her all along. It now had a white streak along its back from its beak to the tip of its tail. "I don't need any help," she rasped, "go away." She shook her head, muttering, "Probably not here anyway."

It approached her, raising a fore-talon to squeeze her hand firmly. 'I am here enough. And you have finally started asking the right questions. I have answers, if you want them.'

She drew her hand away. "Are you a Qard? And if so, who are you?"

'I am a Qard totem, preferentially masculine. You do know me, but the breaks in your mind have blinded you to my identity. I fear it would harm you further to learn it prematurely.'

"Who or what is the Shadow?" she asked. "What does it want from me!?"

The gryphon tilted his head. 'That is a complex subject, but the clearest answer is it's a ghost, entangled with your Bloodline. As for what it wants, it has already told you.' It ticked items off on its talons, 'It wants you kneeling at its feet in slavish worship. It wants to destroy your personality and take over your form, to reign over your family with a cruel and unforgiving fist. It wants you to suffer for a supposed crime that you didn't commit. It wants you and our kind utterly destroyed.'

Rae frowned. Most of that was contradictory. "What does all that even mean?"

The gryphon shook his head and sighed. 'When one begins to teach a child mathematics, does one begin with calculus?'

It was her turn to sigh. "No, of course not. You have to learn elementary concepts first."

'Even so,' he said, nodding. 'I can teach you the family lore lost in the Devastation. And you've never needed to use your psi powers offensively much, but to make any headway against Shadow, you must learn.'

She sat on a stack of paving stones tiredly. "Why haven't I seen it lately?"

'You were correct to call it a parasite. It can only do what you can, using your own mental energies to do it. The more exhausted and disrupted you are, the less you'll see of it. But that isn't a feasible way forward. Being as you are at the moment is merely existing, not living.'

Rae nodded, "Alright, that makes sense. But why am I afraid of the wind?"

The gryphon blinked. 'That... has nothing to do with the Shadow. It's a personal problem you must work through yourself.' He came over to sit next to the stone stack. 'Contemplating your issues would be good for you, but not at the expense of your psi training.'

She stifled a yawn. "When do we start?"

He struck her with his beak, nearly knocking her down as she flailed for balance. 'When you get some rest and are no longer dull-witted and stumbling drunk. Even if that means more energy for your unwanted passenger.'

Rae straightened up and hauled herself erect. "Fine, then. I'll see you later." She returned to the dig with as much dignity as she could muster. She checked for any pending alarms, feeling relief when there were none. She coiled around Agate, her new companion on her bedroll, and was unconscious almost immediately.

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She awoke feeling better and sat up, tucking Agate under her chin. She hadn't any notion of how to solve her problem since arriving on this planet, just knowing that she was a danger to those she cared for. The longer she stayed here, the worse she'd gotten. She knew what her problem was now and had agreed on a course of action. She rubbed her face and shook her head. The gryphon must be correct that she knew him, even though she couldn't name him, because she trusted he could help her. Actually, she had two problems; the Shadow and the break in her mind. Gryphon only promised to help with the first one, but it was up to her to solve the second. But how?

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

He'd had given her a hint, though. Rae had to go through her hangups, some of which she hadn't shared with anyone, even Jeol. 'Contemplation' could mean many things, from thinking about something, to therapy, to journaling. Her new instructor seemed uninterested in discussing those matters, and with Shadow lurking in her head, she couldn't be sure she could retain any purely mental progress. She didn't have any paper or a particular desire to make any, and simple text files could be altered and the meanings twisted. If she wrote things out on her datapad and saved the screens as locked images with time/date stamps and encrypted version tracking… That would make it difficult to interfere with, at least.

She went over to her computer and sent a camera drone upriver to Edomere to take a few images of Fire-eyes. She wanted to track his growth, but from a safe distance, so pictures and scans every couple of months would suffice. There weren't enough new felid records from the local area to add to the database yet, because she wanted to do that in batches. New plants and animals were still being discovered in the surrounding biomes, particularly the grasslands. A larger ungulate reminded her of a wildebeest, and there were better pictures of a frankly massive bovine with rhino-like skin and feet.

Rae had found a grass with a sour floral smell that she had extracted and concentrated in the sun for an item on her to-do list. Putting some in a scent ball by the riverbank had yielded no reaction from watering animals. Maybe it wasn't stinky enough? She had collected a sample of a slimy substance from the river's edge on a bench nearby that had a robust bitter funk to it. She added some sour concentrates to it until she had a rough equivalent of the river reed's bad root smell. Loading the mixture into a scent ball, she went to the riverbank, veering off to the side to anchor the ball and detail an observing drone. She washed in the current and dressed on the pebbled beach.

Turning back up the slope, she saw Gryphon lying on the stack of granite cobbles loosely holding her visor. 'You need to eat. Training your psionics will lower your mass, and you're far too skinny as it is.'

"Enjoy the view?" Rae quipped, ignoring the totem's flagrant eye-roll. She'd not topped her reserves in a while, but she hadn't been doing much, either. "Fine." She wasn't sure what annoyed her more, the fact that he felt it necessary to say, or that she'd been about to train at less than half her optimum mass. Aware of Gryphon's gaze, she melted down some scrap rock and drank it down, shuddering at the rush of warmth and energy.

'Good. We will begin with a series of exercises to establish a baseline from which to improve.' He looked up at the plateau. 'Do you see the white rock a little up the slope?' She nodded. 'Without teleporting, touch the base stones from one to the next, to the top and across the length of the plateau, and down the far side. Pick up the red rock you'll find there and teleport back with it. This exercise is timed. Go!'

"What does this have to do with…?" Gryphon lunged at her with angry eyes; his beak spread wide. Startled, she stepped back, then shook off her lethargy and ran for the first marker. At a minimum, the course would be 3 kilometers if the markers were in a straight line. Touching the first white rock, she saw the second was off to the side instead of on the most direct route to the top. She zigzagged approximately 750 meters up and the 1500 meters across to the other side.

On the descent, she teke-jumped between two markers and received a telekinetic slam in her side, causing her to tumble down the scree past the next marker. She had to backtrack to tap it, then worked through the rest of them until she got to the red final stone. It was big, but she hefted it up and translocated back to Gryphon. "Did you shove me?" She asked him as she lowered the ending stone down.

'Yes. While psi jumping to increase your speed is commendable, you should be aware of psychic attacks at all times. For now, I'll only push when you use telekinesis, but when you get faster, it could come at any point on the run. I'll also remind you that translocating is the slowest form of teleporting, albeit the safest, and sometimes speed is more important than caution.' He tapped his claws on the red block. 'What do you make of this?'

She ran her hands over it. "Is this Eternium?" Gryphon nodded. The mineral she named was from Qardos and was a hard stone with a metallic luster when polished. It was similar to hematite but in various orange, red, and purple shades. Carved on top was the symbol of a globe superimposed on a lemniscate with a star on either end. Her home was a binary star system, with a single planet that wound around both of them in turn. There was always at least one of the giant suns visible anywhere on the surface.

'This is to remind you of where we come from,' he said. 'Sometimes, I don't think you remember.'

Rae frowned at him. Of course she knew! She was there not long ago… Her mind blanked for a moment, and she rubbed her throat to soothe a phantom pain.

'Next, you'll test your physical strength using these,' he gestured to a score of metal pallet cages, each already full of several kilotons of locally cut granite.

"Where did you get those?" she asked. She certainly hadn't brought them.

'I borrowed them from a Deltian warehouse.' She gave him a disapproving look, and he shrugged. 'If they're concerned about the loss, they'll detect my energy signature on a scan and write it off against the Family accounts.' He walked to the pallets. 'How many do you think you can manage? Twenty reps, from full squats to full arm extensions when standing. No teke or I'll psi blast you, and you'll start over.'

She considered the containers of rock. "Two?"

'Make it three.'

Rae groaned. "What's with the physical training? I thought this was to learn better psionic combat?"

'A fit body improves the potential output of the mind. You may use teke to lift the weights initially to get under them. After that, it will be physical strength only. Begin.'

"At least they're made to interlock so that I can lift them as a single unit." He peered down his beak at her in an uncanny impression of an evil grin. "For now," she muttered as she assembled the cages and began. At rep twelve, the weights started to wobble when she didn't lower them evenly, and reflexively she steadied them with her mind. A stinging mental blast destroyed her concentration, driving her to her knees under her burden as collapsing pallets pelted her with granite blocks.

Half the stones had tumbled out around her, and she looked at them and then at the assembled pallets. It'd be faster to start with new ones than to pick up the mess. Gryphon blocked her path and shook his head. Rae sighed and began to fill the cages again. She lost her balance the second time, dropping them but managing not to grab them with her mind. The third time was the charm when she finished the twenty reps.

'Good. Do these exercises every day and try to improve your performance. I do have an existence that doesn't revolve around you, but while I may not always be able to be here, I will always be watching.' He fixed her with one of his blue raptor eyes.

She managed a sound between a grunt of affirmation and a groan, sprawled out on the grass and feeling her legs quiver. From the corner of her eye, she saw Gryphon input her results on a holoscreen projected from her visor.

Gryphon stretched out his wings before settling them back at his sides. 'I will grant you a brief respite. Go back to the plateau and top off again. Then retrieve one of your packs and return.'

Climbing to her feet, she jogged back to do as he asked. She'd have to write this training regimen down to inflict on young Qards if she ever made it off this rock. It wasn't until she got back to Gryphon that she started wondering what the pack was for.

She lowered herself to her knees and bowed ironically. "Yes, sempai?"

Gryphon sighed, then gestured to a broad grassy area near the plateau that stretched from the riverbank to the low plains far in the distance. 'Hidden in the grass are fifty fist-sized white stones marked with an x. Put them in the pack, keeping track of how many you have, as dumping them out to check will count against your time. Do not use your clairvoyance. The quickest way to accomplish this task is to combat teleport in a methodical search grid. Using clairvoyance will get you teleported in a random direction, height, and vector. Begin.'

Rae hefted the pack and picked out her first port point, muttering, "Ah, son of a…" as she ported away.