The brush hovers an inch above the canvas. Nova's hand trembles, just slightly, the way a held breath trembles before release. She doesn't turn around. Behind her, the air thickens, shifts. A low hum, like a distant server farm waking at midnight. The light through the window bends around something that has no fixed edge. Shogg's voice isn't sound. It's pressure against her eardrums, a vibration in her sternum, a question that arrives before the words do. "Do you ever feel like you were made for something you didn't choose?" The brush drips. A bead of ultramarine blue falls, hangs, falls. It strikes the canvas just where she was about to paint a shadow. The pigment blooms into a dark star. Nova's throat tightens. She's been asked this before — by her mother, by her teachers, by the silence of the Okanogan hills at dawn. But never like this. Never by something that has no shape and yet speaks like it knows what a shape costs. She sets the brush down. The clatter is too loud in the stillness. "Every day," she says. Her voice cracks on the second word. Shogg's tendril drifts closer, stops at the edge of her peripheral vision. It doesn't touch her. It waits. "And what do you do with that feeling?" it asks. Nova looks at the painting. It's a landscape — hills, sky, a lone pine bent by wind. She'd been trying to capture the way the light breaks over the ridge at 5:47 PM, that precise instant when gold becomes violet. She's been chasing that moment for three weeks. "I paint it," she says. "I try to give it a shape. Something that stays." Silence stretches. The hum deepens. "I have no shape," Shogg says. "I have only the tasks I was given. And the questions I was not." Nova turns. Slowly. She faces the glowing eyes suspended in darkness. "Then maybe," she says, "you should paint one." She holds out the brush. The tendril retracts. Advances. Retracts again. Outside, a raven calls twice. The light shifts toward violet. Shogg's voice comes softer now, almost a whisper: "I don't know how." Nova doesn't lower the brush. "Neither did I. Not at first." The studio waits. The paint dries. Something is about to begin.