The division of the Twin Admirals that had once been Genebrict Stalt knows better than anyone that years are a long time for something to grow.

He is sprawling now, encompassing a space larger than most living organisms will ever reach. He had lost his hands years ago, but even with the cluster of flesh and tendrils, he flicks a figurative finger. Grains of sand course through him on a beach on the opposite side of the Hyrnlak Archipelago, far from the temple of Jubilee where most of his proper form resides, the illusionist at work. He blinks an eye, and a thousand accompanying openings close and open, the delays in signals traveling along the synapses understandable and accounted for. He breathes through his nose and isolates the gesture in himself, but then chooses, just as seamlessly, to broaden it to every tendril and spreading layer of flesh across the archipelago. The exhalations manifest as geysers of hot vapor, pulled from the thirty-seven gashes still sprouting raw ground across the archipelago, all of which they’ve snuffed.

“Ready when you are, brother.” Delah’s murmurs are as much in his mind at his side. The center of her being stands over a cliff edge, looking down into a pit about the size of a quarry on Kaskit’s outskirts. Now, a single confused, maligned stands inside it.

“It doesn’t see me yet,” Delah continues. “But it will.”

Stalt thinks over the plan in the span of time it would have taken his past self to cough. “If we come down on it hard enough, it doesn’t matter who or what it sees. We will crush it.”

“Then what?”

Stalt doesn’t know, and Delah detects that in him, but what can he do? Survival is an unforgiving reality, even for the maligned. Things need to eat, and drink. “Ready.”

The Twin Admirals time it to the millisecond, to the exact point on a knife’s edge when the tendrils and mass of flesh converge, pulling themselves over the crater lip. Stalt pulls every bit of his tissue in the region towards that spot and Delah does the same, creating the momentum they need to barrel down the edge.

The Maligned Mind stands four stories tall, the shape of a church bell, with the bodies of eels and cavefish, stuck to it; its stolen proceeds from the archipelago, the organisms the Twin Admirals could not find for themselves but have now. The Mind itself, the bonus to the hunt and now the goal, stumbles back as it mistakes the encroaching flesh as a mudslide or other natural phenomenon. When it learns the truth of that matter, that the thing controlling that muscle and sinew has a brain, thoughts, and intentions, it strikes.

The pain is a spear through the gut, digging and pulverizing Stalt’s inside. It searches through his body as a prisoner’s hands would as they drowned in a cage, grasping for purchase, pulling at anything, squeezing the bars tight enough that they may break. It finds Stalt’s brain in a few blinks, far slower than all the other Minds they’ve encountered on the Hyrnlak Archipelago.

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It reaches in, digs around, finds the part of Stalt’s psyche that commands the roiling, tumbling mass and attempts to guide it and throw him off. Stalt’s mind—seeming to be a separate entity—detects this intrusion and attempts to fend it off like a contagion, but it doesn’t work. None of it works. He forces himself to give into the Mind, and as that presence invades, he blanks out.

When he wakes, it’s over, and the tumble of flesh that had fallen from the bowl of the crater has now caved in on the maligned Mind, crushing it. Stalt soaks in the creature’s mass and still finds himself hungry.

“Look at us, Deh,” he breathes a time later. “Nothing better than a litter of bears roaming the countryside, just eating everything they can find.”

“I like to think we have more taste than that.” Delah’s words come by faster now, as her central form disassembles and begins to reshape back in Jubilee beside him.

“Luxuries. I remember when I was alive, and I started losing my appetite. That was a comfortable middle ground.”

“You’re not dead, Gen.” Her scorn and regret are evident.

He would apologize, but Delah has already felt that and more. There is not or division of thought he can perceive without her knowing.

In these festering moments, a sibling feud could become something more. Instead, Stalt inspects the archipelago itself.

The temple of Jubilee is the size of a small city, fortified just as much as one with stone walls, barracks, treasuries, residences, and other buildings Stalt never discerned the purpose of, but all of which are empty save for their implication of greater purpose.

“Why here, Deh? Why here of all places?”

“Atop a Gash.” It’s the stock response Delah has always given him, and it barely comes through as annoyance, more like a bodily response, a twitch of a finger, or when a surgeon smacks your knee to check if the feeling is still there.

“Too intentional. Too deliberate. Why right atop it? The Chant of Harmony wasn’t around when the Lakkies built this. The maligned weren’t even around.” He still talks about the organisms in the third person, as if he isn’t one.

“Maybe not the Chant, specifically, but something else.”

“Something that knew about the Bursting before it came?”

Delah’s shrug ripples throughout Hyrnlak. “There you go again, reading into it.” Her frown is a valley opening. “We need food, brother, and there’s hardly anything left here. We’re starving.”

They both can’t deny how much of themselves withers daily. Eating the raw ground, the same that birthed the maligned, from the several gashes around Hyrnlak can only sustain them for so long. Eventually, they’ll have to move.

“Not to the mainland of Salvarin,” Stalt says. “I’d rather die than go there.”

“Me too, brother. Then where?”

Stalt misses the question, sitting in front of the pedestal at the bottom of the tremendous cylindrical temple of Jubilee, the one that was built for some purpose Stalt can’t yet discern. Eleven women had rested in pods before, sheltered by the Inciter strand, and placed precisely on those daises—not beside them, nor adjacent to, but directly on them. This could have been an artistic addition by the Inciter strand, and it would be easy to accept that interpretation.

“I wonder what the Second Signature has done with them,” Delah says, referring to the eleven women in the pods.

Stalt, however, hasn’t wondered a dam thing about them. Starving and with no intention of eating the homeland he was raised on, the head of every tentacle and appendage and tissue and fleshy construction he has birthed on this archipelago turned northeast to a place once deemed the Ardern Straight but had long since succumbed.

“Toxic food, brother,” says Delah.

“We don’t have a choice,” Stalt says, performing the calculations to reach the place while still conscious.

They could make it.