2024-07-13 - safe and soft together |6.1|

Ah! Aaaaaaah! Being approached has become easier, in the slow weft of time since Everything Went Wrong. But Knuadth still trembles and recoils with a shrill cry at the sudden physical onslaught of vague sensations, fearing something else, losing all sense of scale from how many shifting bodies and tiny flickers of sensation seem to come at him.

The puppies are many, but they are also actually rather small. Their claws do not do more than dent the sand around him. Their tails and stubby legs bat at his shell without any harm. Rather embarrassed - especially as Mother and Shayled both seem warmly amused and entirely happy with this arrival - Knuadth slowly reaches out. But no answering minds touch his. They ignore him completely except as... landscape, the same way he thinks of sun and moon and wind and sand. How strange! But there is something equally strange and a little comforting to feel the closest flop down beside him, sheltering in the same little hollow. A togetherness not at all about minds and kinship.

He soaks in all the other strange little details - the softer barely-there brushing against his shell, the way the one pressed against him breathes quick and excited, at a pace unfamiliar to him. The odd choruses of yips and barks as the further ones move about. These are... nice. More than nice, they are even welcome. Worth taking the chance to trust.

Joy, Shayled says, and he turns the word over. Yes, maybe this is joy too.