Feudal Phase

The Explorers

"Do we actually need to get snippers from that island?" Darter waded with caution. They and Aster were up well past their knees in silver water, with the sun burning bright on both their faces, trying to clean Aster's face of its smug expression and Darter's of its pensive nervousness. It failed to do either.

Aster, with even more force to each step than on land, straddled the bridge, always a step off on either side from deeper waters, a collapsing pit of sand, or an inconveniently placed irate snipper. Every now on then, when they did hit a snipper, and the snipper hit back, they only tensed their face and continued. "Well, we have at least two days worth of berries, and Elytron said that they'd let us cook the lyndwa they found yesterday," Aster said. "And all of that sounds awful!"

"Thanks, Aster," Darter said. "I'm glad I collected it all."

"It was a good try," Aster said, sympathetically. "And we will eat it. But I want to get some meat! Real meat! I don't know why you have such a problem with it."

"I don't have the problem. Whoever lives there is going to have the problem," Darter said. "I've been there. They're not friendly."
Aster rolled their eyes. "It's a huge island. I'm sure they get intruders all the time."

"Never."

"Never?"

"And they guard themselves with bones. Predator bones," Darter warned.

"Awesome."

"Not when they're in your back," Darter said.

"I'll just knock them blind," Aster bragged, removing their shirt and tucking it at their side. "I was going to use this to hold fish or snippers anyways." They snagged the shirt on the end of their snipper poker and began twirling it around like a white flag. Darter hesitated in the shallows.

"You said we could go wherever I wanted, because it's been a whole shift since we started living together."
Darter relented and returned to trudging, slowly, through the waters. "I don't know how you convinced me to go wherever you wanted to commemorate me taking you away from the Covena."

"Because your present is me!" Aster smiled big, exposing those still half-hearted fangs, which were, if anything, being worn down from trying to gnaw through snipper shells rather than built up like Aster had hoped. "No, and a bunch of snippers, too. We're going to eat so well, and maybe we can give a little to Elytron, too, if they behave. It'll be a big old festival to celebrate how great we are at fending for ourselves!"

"It hasn't been difficult," Darter mumbled. "But we're going to make it difficult, if we go steal someone's snippers. You have to be careful about who you make angry."

Aster snorted. "You're the one who almost drowned me yesterday so we could get to a tiny cove that just had kinshii eggs on it."
"Those eggs were good," Darter said. "You said you liked the eggs."
"I did like the eggs," Aster said, slowly. "I also liked almost being pecked in the face and then eating wet eggs almost raw on the shore! Not! Maybe next time we should go eat something that doesn't have parents that could kill us. Do you think we could find pokkabol?"

"Absolutely not," Darter said. "There's almost no pokka in the entire Big Silver. Everyone kept eating them, and now they're gone."

"The Siida have pokkabol. We could probably steal a few," Aster said. "I mean, ask nicely for a few."

"I'd steal pokka," Darter said. "Would you steal them? From under Cyspel?"
"Maybe there's another Siida Covena around here somewhere," Aster mumbled, "Filled with less scary Siida, who I don't care about."
Darter shook their head. They were close now, so that only their feet were covered. The island was even larger than it had looked at a distance, where it had already loomed over the neighboring islands. It carved upwards to something that almost but didn't quite resemble a mountain, in part because it wasn't that large and in part because mountains had a kind of natural gravitas. The island was intimidating, but it was intimidating in a way that had been planned. Someone had lovingly constructed it for some purpose, and sprinkled it with trees almost as a cover-up. It had to have been around a long time, because Aster could see huge coral structures on the banks, crawling with snippers, but they found their mind buzzing with the mere idea of someone making something this big.