[i]You wear it well.[/i] Stupid, silly sheep. He knew there was wrong in it as soon as he said it. What was all that about watching and observing, hrmm? If he was going to go and plant his hoof squarely in his mouth mere moments later? Nerves were no excuse for being hasty.

Still. He did mean it. For someone wearing the tattered remains of a dream, he looked…comfortable, as he was. Accustomed to his scars, like an old, familiar coat. Perhaps that made it at least a little okay.

As they walk, he offers up a story of his own, so the craftsman’s past might have some company. “Once, when I was very, very little, I dreamed I might join the clouds as they drifted across the sky. They looked so much like me, and wouldn’t it have been something to fly through the air with them? To hop along their puffy white hills, go tumbling into pillowy fields, explore that brand new world that was always in sight and just out of reach?”

“I didn’t try again, after jumping out a second story window. But, later, much later, I was allowed to fly in a shuttle, and they let me sit by the viewport as we entered the atmosphere. For the first time, I saw the clouds from [i]above.[/i] What was a thick blanket of solid white below was rolling hills, crested with wispy peaks. We cut an arc around a mountain of stormclouds, and they were [i]real.[/i] You look at them from the ground, and it may as well be a painted dome above your head. But up there? The clouds near you move fast, the clouds far away move slow, and it’s a real place you can fly around in. If they’d forgotten to land, I could have sat watching forever.”

Through the patchwork forest, through the criss-crossing branches and leaves of every shape, bright splashes of color peek down at the pair walking hand in hand. Whether it is cloud, star, or something else entirely, who can say?

“It’s not quite the same thing, but, there is something special about the sky, isn’t there? About upward and above?”