Redhawk Caldera You and I were fire, fire, fireworks

Happens while Fox and Peregrine are burying Derp. @Wildfire @Raven @Finley all welcome! Hope ya don't mind the powerplay, Stevie!

On the last day of February, something changed.

Nightjar's primary concerns were still the same a week after his birth: food, sleeping and shitting, in that order. He still struggled to comprehend his situation and operated primarily on instinct alone. Yet a part of his brain was solidifying a perception of his environment; the bodies comprising a single milk-generating, undulating entity in his mind were now recognized as individuals. He could almost tell father from mother, and knew the smaller "limbs" were other bodies, probably much like him, though admittedly he never so much as thought of them.

On the last day of Feburary, one of the "others" disappeared. They say children have a sixth sense about things, so although Nightjar couldn't possibly think about it or give any indication that he knew, there was a perceptible change the second that "Derp" took his last breath. Something was different and he knew what it was, his mind a cosmos of possibility and infinite understanding that completely understood the phenomenon of death and even what happened when you died, but by the time he could speak the words to describe it, his experiences would shape his mind and that small, brief connection with ever-knowing would be lost forever.

"Derp" was gone, Fox and Peregrine were gone, and the one that visited them frequently—another individual, he expertly recognized—took his mother's place. Of course, Nightjar's mind ended there and his instinct was left to take over, so although part of him recognized that Finley wasn't Fox, he didn't yet recognize that she wasn't producing milk, so he probed rudely at her stomach, mouthing her fur with every poke and whining loudly when no milk resulted.