Arrow Lake and he floats outside my prison window

like machinery, the two of them worked without any words shared, trading off between tasks with the ceaselessness of an assembly line. thorn took to the slack with a younger wolf's vigor, both reminding stigmata of himself when he was that age, and also serving to have him realize how useful a young wolf could be for such grunt work. he wondered if it was why his parents had had him. they didn't seem to have loved him besides when he was farmboy busy - and it stood to reason, by the way he'd turned out, that stigmata's parents weren't having children just for the sake of it.

he grunted, returning to the hole in the same stroke thorn exited.