Stavanger Bay and miles to go before i sleep

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The golden-hearted angler kept to himself as he worked, searching out particular objects that would be useful to the fledging Witch Doctor. Having borne the brunt of his siblings’ abuse, Szymon was more familiar with the Witch Doctors than most — he had suffered their healing rituals more often than he wished to remember, particularly after The Drop when he had injured his eye. Several days before, he had managed to kill two seabirds — one brown, one grey — and had saved their feathers and skulls. Although he did not know exactly what was to be done with such things, he remembered the Witch Doctors keeping a variety of skulls, feathers, skins, and other such odd items for purposes that he was not privy to. Among the things he’d hoarded away were three odd pieces of driftwood that seemed to resemble certain shapes: a bowl, a twisted and warped thing that from some angles may have resembled a wolf, and a knotted, gnarled piece that looked like a staff.

While Doe and Skellige worked on digging caches, Szymon worked to widen their perimeter, marking what items he could with visual cues as well as scent marks. He rubbed himself against a fallen log near the eastern perimeter, leaving tufts of his fur within the rotting wood — and spun, lashing at it with his blunt claws. The white wood beneath the brown bark was eye-catching, and he lifted his leg to mark the area with his scent. When faced with an object that could not be physically marked in such a way — a large boulder or something to that effect — he left the territory proper to snare a marmot, fangs crushing the creature’s spine and killing it instantly. The flesh he would give to Doe and to Skellige, but he would keep the skin for himself and use the blood to mark the Depths’ borders with garish smears that would catch both the eye and the nose.

Trotting back toward his brother and the Witch Doctor, Szymon held his body low as was his wont, tail twitching incessantly as usual. His shoulders arched above the slope of his neck as he made several trips — with him he brought the warm corpse of the marmot, nosing it toward the Leviathan with a low, sonorous rumble of greeting; the bowl, staff, and tiny driftwood wolf; the two seabird skulls; and a mouthful of feathers that he spat out rather unceremoniously with a low, guttural chuff toward Doe.

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