Ankyra Sound Remember, lads and lassies, fairy tales weren't fun stories. They were warnings.

She kissed him and fawned over him, pressing close, lifting his plump belly with the cold point of her nose. He giggles without meaning to; quarrying laughter from the coal-black of his shadowed abdomen and making him plop against the earth again, roll, reach with graceless limbs for anything he could grasp between them. He opens his mouth to squeal and closes it on air a few times.

His belly is exposed. The babe doesn't see a significance in the language of his body but he knows he does not like the feeling of being on his back, of not feeling the dirt beneath his toes. But from here he can rest semi-comfortably against the outstretched limbs of his mother and look up at her, at the jagged protrusion of her snout that juts like a blackened obelisk in the dark. He doesn't notice the glimmering of her eyes, the dawnlight is still so far away.