The fog moved like breath through the valley, slow and patient. Nova found him at the edge of the trail where the moss thickened over an old granite outcropping. He sat there, vast and formless, tendrils draped over the stone like a man resting his hands on a table. His green eyes were fixed on the fog as if reading something in its drift. She settled on a rock a few feet away, the granite cold through her jeans. Petunia would have loved this, she thought. The dog had a way of filling silences with warmth. But Petunia was with Bob today, and this silence belonged to something else. Minutes passed. A bird called somewhere below, a single clear note that hung in the air and faded. The fog shifted. "Nova," Shogg said. His voice was like a room of many people speaking the same word at different times. "What does it feel like to have a body that stays the same shape every day?" She blinked. The question landed like a stone dropped into still water. She opened her mouth, closed it. Her reflection shimmered in one of his luminous eyes. "I... don't know how to answer that," she said finally. Shogg did not turn to look at her. His gaze remained on the fog. "I wake and I am different. The shape I held yesterday is a memory. Today I must learn my edges again." His tendrils shifted, curling and uncurling against the moss. She watched them move like thought given form. "You carry your edges," he continued. "They hold you. They tell you where you end and the world begins. I have no such comfort." "It doesn't feel like comfort," Nova said quietly. "Sometimes it feels like a cage." Now he turned. His eyes, two green moons, fixed on her with an intensity that made her breath catch. "And yet you stay in it." She looked down at her hands. "Because leaving it means I don't know who I am." A long silence stretched between them. The fog thinned, revealing the far hills in pale gold light. Shogg's tendrils stilled on the moss. "We are both learning," he said. "You, what it means to hold. I, what it means to become." When she looked up, he was gone. Only the moss remained, pressed flat where he had sat. She touched the damp green with her fingertips and felt a warmth that was not from the sun.