Twenty days after their confrontation with Asteroth, Winterwing looped an arm through Emily’s and tugged her down the hallway towards the kitchen. Emily allowed herself to be led along, but gave an exaggerated sigh when they reached their destination, sitting at the island bar that housed workspace and the sink rather than at the table proper.

“I swear all anyone does around here is eat,” she complained.

“Not much else to do,” he shrugged, and began pulling items from the fridge.

“You’re still molting,” she observed. Perhaps, as he bent over, she had seen the handful of feathers he could not reach in disorder on his back.

“I notice you’re not.”

“Doesn’t get that cold on the delta, I guess,” she said. “I don’t think I ever saw the river freeze,” and then, after a moment’s pause, “I wonder if it’s even still there.”

“Do you miss it?”

Emily leaned to one side, then the other, as if she could gauge the weight of her thoughts by doing so, “Probably less than you think. Not much to miss.”

She watched him with mild disinterest, until she realized that there was no logic to the things he was grabbing, and any meal made of the growing pile would have been wholly unappetizing.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I remembered something,” he said. He pulled a pair of plates from the cupboard, and on the one designated for himself, piled on some leftovers from the night before, stowed the plate in the microwave, and set it to warm.

He then put the leftovers away in the fridge, and turned to the pile of random items, grabbing one of the kitchen knives from the block, and methodically cut a bite sized piece off everything. Fruits, veggies, breads, cheeses. Anything too complex to be a singular isolated flavor was put away untouched, but everything else lost a small chunk of itself, which was placed on the second plate.

“Dabs was a picky eater when she was small,” Winterwing explained.

“This isn’t like that,” Emily protested, “I’m not being picky.”

He held a finger up, “Let me finish. She had problems with textures. Still does, really. Anything sort of slimy.” He paused for a moment, knife hovering above a head of cauliflower. He had not intended to think too much about the act. He realized how long it had been, how long it had really been, since Dabble had been around to complain about anything at all.

He continued separating bites from the pile, put everything else away, and set the second plate in front of Emily. “What you’re describing to me is a sensory overload. Maybe this isn’t the same but we can go about this the same way. If we can find something you like it will make eating easier. Even if it’s just a couple things that’s got to be better for you than nothing at all.”

She did not leave or stop him, but did scowl at the collection of food before her. He tried to misdirect her attention to something else.

“You ever heard of Pochard’s Fifteen?” he asked, setting down a glass of water for the both of them, and then sitting beside her with his plate of leftovers.

“No,” she answered.

“Maybe he didn’t exist on your side. You’d recognize them if you saw them, the white paintings parallel lines that go from one side to the other?”

“Oh those things,” Emily said.

Winterwing laughed lightly, “Yeah, that’s what everyone says about them.”

“Interesting to know he inflicted those on more than one reality.”

He tapped the counter next to her untouched plate, and she rolled her eyes, and theatrically picked up a tomato for a bite. She did not grimace at the taste, at least.

“Someone studied those, and found that they mimic patterns of waves on water that people find most pleasing. Too many means the water’s too rough, too few and it feels stagnant.”

She did not seem moved by the idea, “They decided that from a bunch of black lines someone painted?”

“It’s a theory of why people like them.”

“People like them?”

“Well, someone must or you wouldn’t have heard of them,” he shrugged, picking at his own lunch. “It’s an interesting theory, though. They think its hardwired into us, to like those lines. Even that abstracted, something remembers. Everywhere there was flowing water, there was us.”

She went silent form here, letting him babble, but began working systematically through the plate he’d prepared, and separating what was tolerable from what wasn’t. The ‘wasn’t’ side grew much quicker, but it was still a wider selection of acceptable things than what she had been eating before. Mostly fresh things, fruits and vegetables, though some of the thawed and canned items also passed scrutiny. Anything with dairy was rejected outright, and the meats, which he could not fault her for.

“You can track yourself back to them, sometimes,” he continued as he watched her work through the piles. “My mother collaborated on a project that was able to pinpoint her family to a river basin that dried up when the climate froze. There isn’t as much left behind as there should be, its been buried and trampled and scattered intentionally, but there’s pieces of it still there. They had language, but we’ve never found any writing. But they must have had words, because they’re us.”

“Ah,” Emily said, flatly. “The swamp people. I’m being tortured with a history lesson now, too.”

“Miredal,” he corrected. “They were mostly small groups that moved with the seasons along the water, maybe between twenty and fifty, though there’s some spots that look like they were starting to organize into larger communities.”

He let that sit in the air for a while, pondering what such a place would have looked like, via fractured memory of illustrated diagrams. There was always swathes of green that were rare to find anywhere on Puckworld now.

“They had families,” he said. “You can sometimes find burial sites where they were placed together.”

“This is the research you did?” Emily asked. “For that thing you wanted to write?”

“Well, that’s the work of a couple hundred experts collected by other people for me to read.”

“When did you have time for all that?”

“I suppose when you eschew most of your social life, it frees you up for curiosities.”

“Why?” she asked. “Its all dead. None of it matters.”

“Because sometimes it’s just nice to think what we could have done if someone hadn’t landed on us and torn apart the planet.”

She shook her head, “But they did, you’re talking about a fantasy.”

“I’m talking about the things that were stolen from us, that they stole from you.”

She pulled away a little from the counter. “What difference do you think it makes to me that twelve thousand or whatever years ago someone collected berries? Do you think I want that?”

“It’s not about berries,” Winterwing said. “Or any of the rest of it. It’s what we could have done if someone hadn’t told us what we were going to do for them. We have a writing system built from the Saurian script because we never completed one of our own, and all the nuance of our language before was intentionally buried. We have giant cities because the Saurians taught us to build giant cities and put us there, not because we wanted to be.”

Emily groaned audibly.

“You’re really just totally unmoved by the idea that your life might have been better without any Saurian interference? You of all people?” Winterwing asked.

She looked at him sharply, “That’s not a fair question.”

“No?”

“No, because that’s not how it would work. Taking away the Saurians doesn’t mean my life is better, it means that everything from that point on is completely different. The city I grew up in didn’t exist and my parents didn’t meet,” she said. “You can’t just take something big like that out and expect everything else to be the same but better.”

“It’s a thought experiment, you don’t have to go implement it,” he said, with just a hint of exasperation.

“No Saurians, you’re never here and I’m never there. Maybe whoever got to live that life would be better off, but that’s not us.”

They sat and ate in silence, as Winterwing found himself stymied. He was not used to encountering complete incuriosity. Where Emily found little use for history, he had spent the previous years mired in academia, where he studied his own field, but also interfaced with others. Sharing little bits of discovered knowledge was how he understood most social interactions. It was probably why Tanya seemed to tolerate him at all—he spoke in her currency, if not in her specific denominations.

Emily did, however, notice the shift in his mood. She softened, leaning towards him, and said “The fantasy sounds nice.”

And when Winterwing gave her a suspicious look, unsure if she were speaking ironically, she gestured as if to make him hurry.

“Go on, tell me about the river basin.”