Thunder Dome the way in

Thank you for the promotion! <3

Noctura could see her clearly in his mind's eye, a child-Asterr just as calmed and mature as she was now, attending dutifully to lessons. About what, he wasn't sure, but he could make a good guess — lessons on lore and legend, on manners and leadership, and on what was expected of her. Had they been agemates and in the same pack, would the two dark pups have been friends? Would he have proved a welcome distraction from her duties? Would he have been the "hiding" she'd been yearning for?

That was where his imagination drew the line, for he simply couldn't imagine his young self having any friends at all.

He offered her a faint smile as if to communicate that he would have been her childhood friend had it been possible, but he had no apt reply, and anyway she was smooth in changing the subject. I'd be happy to... he replied first-off, to confirm that he would respond to her request. But there was a pause, partly because he (momentarily) thought he'd found a sizeable gap through to the mountain (at another look it turned out it wasn't sizeable enough), and partly because he wasn't sure how to explain his childhood.

I remember very little of my early childhood — just that I was born with humans nearby, and that my mother was tawny and sceptical. I remember much after I was shipped across the sea, though. I was raised by my father — it was just him and me, and we were nomadic. He was extremely savage, and that was all I knew.