Serpent Lake To my dismay, I have forgotten how to leave

Ah - she spooked, and Merrit offered an apologetic splay of his ears. He had not meant to startle her. But this was his only apology. She seemed to recover after her initial start, and he thought best to simply let the matter slide.

"Oh?" he hummed in response to her easy conversation. She seemed quite comfortable for one he had just met, and even more, one he had just scared. Merrit didn't know what to do with that. Actually, he didn't quite know what to do with her. He noticed she was not the picture of beauty many women might flout around. She was oddly thin, and small, and scarred up in ways that made him wonder.

When mother was alive, and Arlette had needed him, he had not felt wanting of female companionship. But since mother's passing and Arlette's ascension into the place of wife, neither had any need for him, even if his sister might have thought so.

"Years is a long time, something I would guess neither of us have many of," he remarked, "where did you live, that rainbows were such an anomaly as that?" He had only found himself in places riddled with rain. The anomaly for him had only been in the dryness of these past summer weeks.