Hushed Willows Insist on your cup of stars.

His mother's reassurance was effective at once, and Sundance allowed himself to soften. He blinked up into Ariel's smiling face, recognising the calm in his mercurial eyes so that he can feed from it, seeming to absorb the calming energy that his parent's relaxed posture emitted.

"It's okay," he told him softly. "It can't hurt us here."

And he believed him, of course. His parents always kissed away the ouchies when his brothers nipped too roughly, when the thorns of bramble bushes pricked his sensitive skin, when the stones proved too sharp for his delicate little paw pads. He could trust them, he knew, and always would.

Sundance brightened considerably, shifting to examine the adult's paw with a curious whiff as it was presented to him. It smelled damp, a scent that he often detected on early morning wanders with Olive when the grasses were wet with dew. He enjoyed those trips, and so his scruffy grey tail twitched to life as he associated this experience of "rain" with the anticipation of a new day.