I'll shake you from your sleep.

[earlofgrey]

In the morning when I eat bread with butter and honey and usually ignore the communal herbal pot for darker tea, sometimes with a bit of the whiskey that I brought with me in it, the others read the paper or their books. Sometimes I read too, but usually I watch the cats. There is a pride of small lions that lives around the farm. Bob and Caroline

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[owlings]

When I was on my solo, out in the woods alone for twenty-four hours with nothing but a tarp, two sandwiches, two cloves of garlic and an apple, I crossed paths with a huge black snake.

It was before dawn, and I'd left my shelter to go and change the rocks-and-sticks sigil that let my teachers know I had survived the night. There was mist clinging to the undersides of the leaves, and the air was chill with something like suspense.

I'd say about three, four feet long, he was, as thick as my wrist as the head, and gorgeous, slipping and sliding over the same rocks that I was. We saw each other too late, and both reared up in identical surprise. And like your bees, we each turned and left that particular section of forest to the other, I darting up the hill further, and he coiling himself down into the shadows. I did not speak of him as I did of everything else in my mind, to the forest - he was already known. This was his place, and it would have felt like gossiping about a king to his loyal courtiers.

But I remember the glint of his

[earlofgrey]

Oh, goodness. Lovely.