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Vriska Serket has just started hunting for her Lusus, and she isn't very good at it.
The mental powers that are her birthright as a blueblood have yet to properly manifest themselves, and thus she has relied so far on laboriously constructed traps: pitfalls, snares, tripwires to incapacitate her neighbors, her prey. She's been spending long, agonizing days trekking around their territories to set her snares before they wake, and she's sunburned and exhausted and running out of neighbors and starting to make mistakes.
And her mother is always so, so hungry.
So she goes after big game in her desperation: a huge, hulking indigo-blood a grueling three days' hike away from her hive. She knows the layout of his peak from the boasting taunts they've sent to each other, she knows just where to hunker down and wait with a snare and a poisoned knife but she doesn't know exactly how much poison will take him out without killing him. He's bigger than anyone she's ever gone after and favors hand-to-hand combat, so getting the dosage wrong would give him the opportunity to pulp her head like a sick grub but she can't afford for his corpse to spoil on the way back home.
So she guesses, and she guesses wrong.
He thrashes free from his bindings, somehow, shakes off the poison and the desperate, sloppy knife-rents she introduces to his chest-- he's higher blood than any prey she's hunted yet, she must not have used enough-- and he throws her off a cliff.
She wakes up with the worst headache she's ever had, a right arm that won't obey any of her instructions, and a trail of indigo footprints splashing away down the mountain, off into the low, deathly desert of the plains.
It's been four nights. Her mother has only ever gone hungry for a week. And he's losing so much blood anyway...
She staggers to her feet, flips up the hood of her daycloak, and sets off.
*
The thing she learns about deserts, in very short order, is that they are composed primarily of wind and sand. And the thing she learns about wind and sand is that a blood trail doesn't last nearly long enough if you don't go fast enough.
And, nursing a headache and a fucked-up arm, she is nowhere near fast enough.
The trail scatters to a blur and then nothingness in the first day, and her footprints behind her blow smooth even faster. The nighttime, which should have been a blissful reprieve from the miserable bite of the sun, is instead a punishing ordeal of frost that she had no idea that she'd have to plan for. Her arm comes back to life in a blaze of pins and needles as the rest of her body begins to shut down from exposure. And then it's nothing but wind and sand and the mountains ringing all around in the distance, the same in every direction, one burning day after one freezing night after one more burning day--
She walks towards them until she can't walk anymore, and then she crawls, and then she lies there and can't even cry because she's used up every drop of water in her body nights before.
"I'm so sorry, mom," she croaks to the endless wind, and she closes her eyes against the dawn.
*
When she opens her eyes, it's to the sight of a tall, thin girl standing at the open window, staring directly into at the setting sun. It is an image that proves prophetic, in many ways: Kanaya will never be scared of the light, or of keeping a close watch on things that burn.
But Vriska knows none of this yet. She leans up on her working elbow and rasps out, "Stop that. You're gonna fry your eyes."
The girl turns around and looks at her and her eyes are wide and gold like anyone else's, but her smile is a strange secret thing. Vriska does not know, yet, that these are the first words another troll has ever spoken to her.
"I'll Be Alright," she says, and comes over to Vriska's bedside. She reaches forth with one hand, long-fingered even at this age. "Y-You, However, Appear To Be In S-S-Significantly Greater Distress."
"If you try anything funny, your face is gonna 8e in distress, fussyfangs," Vriska blusters, baring her teeth.
The girl withdraws her hand, and her delicate eyebrows draw together. "I-I-I'm Not Going To Harm You," she says indignantly. "I-In F-F-Fact, My Intentions Are To W-Work Towards P-Precisely The O-Opposite Outcome."
"Are those even words?" Vriska wrinkles her nose. "You're weiiiiiiiird."
"And Y-Y-ou Are V--V-Very Rude," she says, but strangely enough there's no malice to it.
She's a green-blood, by the symbol on her chest: the lowest blood Vriska has spoken to since the caves, a distant memory of death and terror. She had left for the light in a pack of mountain-bound fellows, banding together in the familial comfort of like temperaments, understandable passions. Kanaya's leaf-green symbol makes her uneasy now, ready to snap, but the girl herself shows no signs of hostility. Instead she studies Vriska the way her next-crag neighbor Equius studies his manuals, as if she were a thing to be learned, or discovered, or... repaired.
Some unnameable something has kept her from going after Equius all these perigees, and it is that same something that stays her hand now. That look in this girl's yellow eyes, that strange non-hostility...
Vriska is still so very young, and her mother has never bothered to teach her the word for friend.
"I'm Vriska," she says, almost hesitantly. "Vriska Serket."
"K-Kanaya M-M-Maryam." The greenblood offers her hand, just as hesitantly. Her palm is rough against Vriska's, when Vriska manages to reach out and grasp it, but her knuckles are soft as clouds under her lips when Vriska brushes a formal hello to them. The green-blood makes a small noise, and then copies Vriska as if she's never seen it done before. Her smile is uncertain, afterward, her eyes searching, and she doesn't let go of Vriska's hand until Vriska takes it back.
"Right," Vriska says. "So now what?"
"I-I H-Had Thought That You Would Be In Need Of Sustenance After Y-Y-Your Ordeal, And So I Assembled A Variety Of Foodstuffs For You To Break Y-Y-Your Fast," Kanaya stammers, turning away, fetching a basket of bright incomprehensible colorful things and pulling something round and red from among them and oh fuck a silver knife-- but she makes no threatening gesture with it; it's only a tool.
"What the fuck is that?" Vriska asks, gesturing at the red thing, still uneasy. "Is that a plant?"
"What Else Would A Fruit Be?"
"Meat," Vriska says. "Like, real food."
"R-Real--" Kanaya cocks her head to one side, her eyes once more wide and wary. "F-Forgive Me; I D-Did Not Think To Enquire As To Your Upbringing. You Are Minded By A-A-A C-Carnivore?"
"What does that have to do with anything?"
She smiles again, that bright nervous smile with a secret tucked just so into the corner.
"Grant Me This Favor, M-Miss Serket," she says, her fingers working a small silver knife in and then out of the.... the fruit, a white-fleshed wedge rising from the whole. She brings the slice to Vriska's lips, and, warily, Vriska lets it in to her mouth.
She is three sweeps old, and she has never in her life tasted anything sweet.
"Give me that," she says, her mouth full of juice, and snatches the rest of the fruit from Kanaya's unresisting hand. Her fangs crunch through the flesh like music. "Oh my god. Oh my god, what is this????????"
"I-I-I-It's An Apple," Kanaya says.
"Get me another," Vriska commands.
Kanaya smiles.
*
Vriska's strength returns slowly; use of her injured arm even more so.
Kanaya never enquirers as to what Vriska was doing in the desert. Vriska never quite brings herself to ask how, much less why, Kanaya delivered her from it.
Kanaya's hive is as beautiful as it is weird, as unsettling as it is welcoming: elegant white curves draped in bright fabrics, huge unfiltered windows through which light pours in relentlessly and everywhere gold and rainbow ornamentation, an unfamiliar riot of brightness and color like a maelstrom, bright sprays of hemochromatic hues borne aloft forever on a frozen breeze. Kanaya herself suits it, sweet and strange, caring and morbid, proud and shy, a petal-soft foreigner with familiar stony palms who strolls the white corridors of her hive in magnificent solitude.
Her Lusus, she confides, conducts her own affairs deep underground, and hasn't been up for a few perigees now. They talk in their dreams, though, of the things that will one day be. It seems a distant relationship, to Vriska, but apparently a fond one.
"What do you feed her?" Vriska asks one night. "There's no one around for miles."
Kanaya gestures at the trees overhead, the heavy red swell fruit dancing in the cool breeze.
"The Products Of My Cultivation Are More Than Adequite For Both Our Needs," she says, "Though I Believe She Has A Special Fondness For The Apples."
"She has........ she has gr8 taste," Vriska says. "Apples are totally 8itching." Some strange emotion-- sorrow? regret?-- rises inside her and is shaken briskly off. She is Vriska Serket and her life is just the way it has to be. Already she has begun to hunger for real food, the heavy tang of blood on her tongue, the comfortable warmth of flesh in her belly.
"I Could Give You Some Seedlings To Take Home With You, Once You Have Recovered," Kanaya offers. "T-T-That Which Can Bloom In The Desert Might Be Persuaded To M-Make Its Home In Your--"
Vriska shakes her head. "No way," she laughs. "I got noooooooo room for your sissy green stuff in my mountains! It'd just clutter the place up!"
Kanaya looks away, out at the stars. "A-At Least Take A Few Apples. I Have More Than Enough To Spare."
Vriska pages through her sylladex, checking her storage capacity. She nods.
"Thanks," she says. It's the first time in her life she's ever said that, and it feels strange on her tongue. She rakes her hands through the long grass they're sitting on, first one way, then the other. "That'd 8e cool."
Kanaya only smiles, bright and sharp and white and sweet.
*
Her mother weighs more and more heavily on her mind as the nights pass by, one, two, a week, and Vriska is finally strong enough to walk all the way around the oasis twice without passing out even a little bit, and it is time to go home and find out if she's an orphan or not.
"B-Be Careful," Kanaya says. "It Is A L-Long Way Back To The Mountains, And I Am N-No C-C-Cartographer."
"Whateeeeeeeever!" Vriska says. She flicks a die into the air, catches it again, throws her new friend a wink. "One stupid desert isn't enough to get the infamous, indomitable Vriska Mindfang Serket down. Didn't you know?"
"I Didn't," Kanaya says, "But I Believe I Am Starting To Find Out."