The Sentinels for the soul is dead that slumbers

laissez le bon temps rouler! @Percival

It had been farther than the boy had originally intended, but the trek sufficed in pacifying his hunger for movement; for change. He had only ever heard of the Sentinels but once before, and it had been a recent affair with little spoken in the way of descriptive imagery. Nevertheless, he was piqued enough to see for himself the true state of these mysteriously ravaged trees.

Dead and inert before him, the fallen conifers were an eery sight in the gathering twilight. Rings of ash and soot adamantly sifted grey into Marruz's ebony coat. For once, his single grey sock did not appear so disruptive adjacent to his otherwise jet-black exterior.

The absence of tree limbs - worrying and fussy and prone to knotting as they were - was the ultimate reason he had arrived. He had not, it appeared, been disappointed. And so, with a contented sigh, the stargazer lifted indigo and ink orb toward the great serene. What, he wondered, might be different today? It was this constant change that he loved most about the constellations. That, and the stories they provided.