Crown of Thorns: The Road to the Abbey

For three nights they traveled by moonlight, the shard's gentle tug guiding them like an invisible thread woven from starlight and sorrow. They slept by day in hollow logs or under thick brambles, sharing the three sunflower seeds—cracked open one by one, their nutty sweetness a ritual of survival and story.

Rufio would crack them with his thorn-sword, paws steady despite the day's toll, and pass the halves to Rosy with a flourish that masked the flicker of doubt in his eyes: an orphan's fear that his clumsiness might one day cost more than a pratfall. "To strength," he'd say, and she'd echo it—the words a bridge over the hollow in her chest where her parents' absence echoed like wind through empty burrows.