Aldera (Cat, years before the Causeway)

The crew put her ashore at first light. "We don't need bad luck," the mate said, and swung her off the deck without ceremony. Aldera landed hard on rounded stones, shook off the impact, and watched the hull's shadow sweep past and away. No instructions. No backward glance. The sails filled and the ship went on without her.

The island was knife-edge rock and drowned coves, salt grass and old ash from someone's abandoned camp. Hunger here was not the terrace's mild discomfort before a scheduled meal — it was a screaming, structural fact. She tried a tide pool first: water clear as glass, shrimp too fast to catch, salt that stung worse than it satisfied. She tried a dry fissure under a juniper: shells, bird droppings, no comfort and no memory of home.

She called out anyway, the way she would have called in the dark corridors of Dún Rí, expecting an answer from habit rather than reason. The sound died against the rock.

Something answered instead — a long, level growl, low as a struck string.

The shape that came out of the mist was built like Aldera but twice her length, pelt dappled the colour of old leaves, scarred pale in places by fights Aldera had no context for. Its eyes held a flat, uncanny amber that did not blink on the usual schedule. Aldera pressed into the shadow of the rock, unsure whether to challenge it or fold.

The larger cat sat, unhurried, and studied her the way Elvira studied a failed measurement — with attention, not alarm. Then it looked away and began grooming a foreleg with exaggerated calm. No threat. Yet.

They shared the tide pool in silence for a while. Aldera missed the shrimp twice and nearly soaked herself; the larger cat plunged a foreleg once, retrieved a crab, and pushed the remains toward her with a single paw. A test, not a gift. Aldera ate what was offered, and understood the difference.

By midday they had a working arrangement rather than a friendship: how to read the sand for buried eggs, how to feint a minnow into shallow water, where rain collected in a hollow stone that never quite dried out. Aldera failed more than she succeeded. She learned anyway.

It was at the rain-hollow, both of them lapping side by side, that the older cat finally spoke in a way Aldera could log rather than merely feel.

"You're carrying a wrongness with you," it said. Not unkindly. "Not from this island. From wherever you came from. I've met it once before, a long way south of here — a place where the ground disagrees with itself. There's someone at a marsh causeway, out past the river mouth, trying to hold a line alone. She isn't managing it. If you can feel what I think you can feel, she could use you before she knows to ask."

Aldera did not fully understand what she was being told, only that it mattered, and that the shape of it matched every unnamed moment on the terrace at Dún Rí — the sundial, the east wall, the well.

"You have a name," she said. It was not a question, the way Elvira's had never quite been a question either.

"Nessa, if you need one for the record." A pause, amused. "You're already keeping one. I can tell."

That night, with nothing to write on but the memory of the day, Aldera filed her first entry, in the form the habit would keep for the rest of her life.

FIELD LOG — Aldera. No assignment. No agency of record.

Subject: self. Status: fed, uninjured beyond the paw, considerably less lost than yesterday.

Subject: Nessa (wild, unaugmented, constraint-literate by observation alone). Recognised my sensitivity without explanation from me. Recommends travel south and west to a marsh causeway where a boundary is being held by one person, insufficiently.

Recommendation: go. Filing now because filing, apparently, is what I do.

END LOG