Symeon was sitting by the fire with his legs spread, gingerly examining the featureless area heretofore hidden by his boxers. The initial shock of seeing Istroama without genitals had blunted the result of his own, more personal investigation. Said investigation had expanded to a more detailed examination, wherein Symeon had realized a further lack of both nipples and belly button. He was now working up the nerve to reach back to check one last feature.

“Nope. I’m not doin’ it. Issy! Issy, do me a solid. Do ya have a butthole?”

“A what?”

Symeon shook his head in despair. “Of course. Nevermind.”

The final leg of his exploration revealed a final but not unexpected absence.

“How does that even work? I was hungry earlier, where’s it all goin’? The human body can’t be a closed system, it makes no damn sense!” Symeon was sure he saw animal spoor and bird droppings when he was foraging earlier, as well as the death-expulsion of Flappy. “Istroama! Somethin’ we’re gonna do tomorrow is hunt us somethin’ big enough I can check it for a dong!”

Istroama, for his part, was completely unaffected by these developments. As far as he was concerned, any issues with waste could be hand-waved away with magic as an explanation. Instead, he was more interested in the gathering gloom as the vortex that was Grandmother Order began to eclipse the sun of Grandfather Chaos. He wasn’t a proponent of Order, but seeing both the elder gods at once was comforting. There was also the anticipation of when Symeon would finally notice. Istroama was of the opinion that Symeon was an untapped vein of exciting new curses and blasphemies just waiting for the right moment to spill forth.

"Ah, I need time ta ruminate on this. It’s gettin’ late anyway. I’ll take first watch, ya get your head down.” Istroama just sat there and smirked, waiting for the moment. Symeon’s words caught up to him, as he looked back and forth between the unmoved sundial and the swirling darkness that was obscuring the sun. “Huh. Ya see that? Naw, yeah, it’s not buggin’ ya at all.”

Symeon looked down at the blank area between his legs again. “I got bigger issues right now. Get some sleep.”

Istroama quickly overcame his disappointment over Symeon’s relative calm. “Sleep. Of course. Could you remind me where we stored the sleep?”

“Ah, damnit. Naw, yeah, just lie down in the shelter. Go on, lie back. Good. Slow, deep breaths. Relax yer toes, slow, slower. Relax yer…”

Symeon stopped. Istroama was asleep moments after he obligingly laid down in the A-frame, gently snoring in the gathering dark. Symeon carefully added a pair of wooden logs to the fire, and settled with his back to the flame to watch, and think.

Three hours without shelter. Three days without water. Three weeks without food. Downside, the shelter was a heap of deadwood. Upside, between Lasle nuts and Symeoncanes they had a decent amount of clean water, and the peppers and implets seemed abundant.

In terms of exposure the sun wasn’t moving, which was hard to fathom, but apparently there was some celestial body orbiting that could mimic night. Yes, that body was a swirling darkness that hurt to look at directly, but you didn’t look at the sun directly either, right? Then, there was the lack of stars. There was no light pollution to speak of, and the utter darkness of the ‘moon’ made for what should have been a spectacular night sky, but there wasn’t a single star out there.

The night was deep, time measured only by the slow disintegration of the wood on the fire. Only the gentle crackle of the flame as it touched some damp branch broke the silence. Symeon sat there with his back to the fire, feeling the heat and light dance around him in defiance of the dark and chill. When he felt sore from sitting he rose up and quietly moved around the fire, flexing his limbs with dull pops from his joints. He felt no urge to rest, instead feeling a profound warmth from the hearth behind him.

His back to the fire, for to gaze into the flame was to be blind in the night. He guarded the flame just as the flame guarded them. The warmth of the flame gently pressed against his back and became his warmth. The sparks of the flame were the sparks in his mind, he was a tongue of fire licking the starless sky with the power of consumption and change and together they were the fire...

Symeon was pulled from his reverie when the screaming started.

Istroama was awake, and from the panicked mayhem it was clear he was not a morning person. He had leapt to his feet with a blood curdling howl, and in so doing shattered the flimsy shelter into wooden fragments and clumps of moss that flew everywhere. Symeon reacted by grabbing a Symeoncane, cursing himself for not having thought of filling one with sand to suffocate any rogue flames. Luckily, the bits that landed in the fire were trivial and easily stomped out.

“Istroama! Are ya alright? Calm down, man, calm down!”

“WHAT WAS THAT?!”

“What was what? Did somethin’ bite ya? Just talk ta me.”

“I just laid down, as you suggested, and suddenly Grandmother Order has moved massively! Time! Time has passed!” Istroama pulled his knife in one swift motion, and focused on it for a moment. “Nine hours! This thing has lost nine hours of duration. If we’d been at 12 o’clock I’d have been flanked, backstabbed and flanked again! WHAT VILE SORCERY IS THIS?!”

“Whoa, whoa, easy with the knife. There’s no sorcery, it’s sleep. It’s normal.”

“Having nine hours just vanish is normal?”

“Well, maybe not nine but yesterday was a rough day. But naw, yeah, sleep is a thing. About every sixteen hours up, you gotta spend eight down or things get weird.” Symeon looked over at the Symeoncanes and Istroama Peppers. “Well, maybe weirder.”

“So you went through this ‘Sleep’ thing too?”

“Huh. Actually, no. I should be draggin’ but I feel fine. I was up all night, guess I lost track of time.”

“Well I must say I don’t approve of this sleep business at all. You’re well off avoiding it.”

“Guess so. The shelter is a wreck, so no-one’s sleepin’ in that. Still, today the plan was ta upgrade anyway, at least get some sort of platform off the ground. So let’s eat up, and get ta choppin’ some trees.”

Istroama snarled a response. “Trees. Fine. Before that, are there any other hideous secrets this form holds I should be forewarned of?”

“Well, I was kinda lookin’ forward to havin’ a laugh the first time ya had ta poop, but it turns out that isn’t on the schedule.”

------

While Symeon was pleased with Istroama using the timers on the gear as a sort of clock, they didn’t actually tell him what time it was. He was aware that about nine hours had passed before Istroama had woken up. However, in terms of actual time he only knew they settled down sometime after what passed for ‘sunset’ around these parts, and that he had sort of blissed out on watch until well after ‘sunrise’.

Regardless, it was probably morning and there was work to be done. The shelter, tragic as it was, was now scattered about the area, as well as being lightly trampled and burnt. More wood needed to be gathered for the fire, as well as for any shelter they would build, more food and water needed to be gathered. It promised to be a full day. They broke their fast with peppers, gathered their gear along with the Symeoncanes used for waste, and marched back to the river.

The main purpose for this was to dispose of the waste. There was some value in holding on to it as bait when they went to procure lunch, but the downside was having it stinking and possibly drawing attention at the campsite. The second purpose was to begin chopping wood near the river. Symeon’s thinking was that if they had to move wood, best to do it while fresh, and bringing it from the river would help establish the path through the underbrush. Overnight the vines had come back with a vengeance, requiring more hacking and slashing to clear the path to the river.

Once at the river, they pried up another Symeoncane and drank their fill. Symeon noticed some new growth in the area, fingertip sized fungal blossoms in dark red. They seemed to have largely popped up on shaded rocks in the river where so many things died yesterday. The strange knowing took hold, and in moments he knew he was looking at Immature Redcap Truffles. Not much more was on offer about them, beyond the detail that they were edible as a spice.

“Right. Istroama, we need wood. These big knives aren’t ideal, but they’re decent enough choppers as long as we’re not trying ta chop down anything huge. We cut ‘em so they fall away from us, drag ‘em out, knock off the worst of the branches and get ‘em back to camp. Not gonna lie ta ya, it’s gonna suck.”

Istroama was lost on that last idiom, but chose not to explore the matter. Being in the shadows of the trees still unnerved him somewhat, and he didn’t quite trust himself to speak. Instead he just nodded and watched as Symeon demonstrated how to bring down one of the trees with a modicum of safety. The tripartite nuts had to be dealt with, raining down like clusters of fists, the branches tumbling with bruising momentum, and of course when the tree finally toppled it could swerve toward fragile flesh with seeming maliciousness.

Still, they managed to down a pair of tall Lasle trees with a minimum of drama, and per the knowledge in Symeon’s head found the wood relatively light. Still, by the time they had reached camp they had abandoned one to carry the other together.

“Okay, so that wasn’t the best plan.”, Symeon said as they broke open some Lasle nuts for water. The contents were far sweeter than the Symeoncanes, and had a passing amount of edible innards as well. “I was hopin’ to do a bunch of stuff at once, but it’s not happenin’. We’re just gonna take trees closest to us and…”

Symeon trailed off, blinking as his manifest sprung up unbidden. The empty field now had writing in it, curt notes that were snippets of his day. ‘Defeated an Organgrinder Imp in single combat.’ ‘Awoke one Manifest.’ ‘Defeated miscellaneous animals.’ ‘Vigil of Fire.’

Below that, two sparkling squares were like cut gems on a blue velvet sheet, sliding with increasing speed toward the bottom of the field. The first was milky white like pearl, the other a lustrous blue, and both slid into two of the eight waiting indentations below.

As the white gem settled, Symeon heard a woman’s voice in his head. “Alpha Brand. First to stand against the inevitable and know glory. Time is both your grace and your yoke. Duration: 87600 Hours.”

The blue gem had already settled will before the woman’s voice had finished talking about the white one, and she immediately launched into a second enigmatic description. “Promethean. One who bears the torch, and bears the wounds.”

The voice said no more, the snippets vanished from the manifest, and were immediately replaced with the first relatively straightforward information of the experience.

Mortal.

Mana Regeneration massively increased.

Mana Output massively decreased.

Access to all aspects of magic.

Fire Aspect moderately increased.

Health Regeneration moderately increased.

“Wait. Does that say I can do magic?”