Sugar and Spice, and Everything Nice...

[Shakadyn]

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Up until now, he had smelled lilacs. Lilacs, and beneath them, the faintest scent of pregnancy. Mother Nature's deft hand had gathered the gray leaves and acorn shells of dead autumn, and had steeped them in rainwater to make a tea for the earth, to give it the energy to birth so many violet flowers. Now, he drew ever closer to a sparse but ancient wood, and the taste of newness on the air was fading into the much older, much more self-assured tang of worn machinery and spun sugar. Shakadyn tilted his head back, just to see how much of the sky had been eaten up by the canopy. Most of it. Unsurprising, considering how long these trees had languored in the smell of maple candy. In fact, it was so strong that the younger, more romantic part of his mind (a part that spent most of its time in heavily-guarded solitary confinement) suspected that a deviant gaggle of someones had ground the candy up and replaced the soil with it. Maybe they'd even swapped the water in the creeks with maple syrup, the bastards. Never mind that - could there be a factory here? How strange would that be, to see a factory surrounded by trees. Of course, it was only inevitable that he should end up here. His sweet tooth was one of his deepest, darkest secrets. Admittedly, it was a vice what favored the chocolate side of the road, and rode in an expensive, flashy car that had a hazelnut air freshener dangling from its rear-view mirror. (He was lucky that he was not one of those ordinary wolves with their ordinary digestive systems, else it would have been a deadly sin.) He was not much one for maple anything, but the truth was that he'd been straying. Far. Tainting the refined bouquet of coffee-flavored chocolate with such juvenile trappings as melted marshmallows and graham crackers. It was only a matter of time before he stooped to the level of cotton candy. The horror! He would soon have to get his fix, though perhaps not in this forest. The idea of drinking maple syrup was not very appealing, addiction or no addiction. Drip, drip, drip... Well, wasn't that interesting. Apparently, he was not the only one with sweets on the brain. He put his hands on his hips, and very well-dressed hips they were, as he had borrowed an especially roomy pinstriped suit from a boutique in Halifax. With the obvious modifications for a tail put into place, Shakadyn, being much smaller than average at five-foot-ten, fit into it easily. Well, he supposed wasn't in any particular rush (to embarrass himself in particular, looking so much like a junkie hunting for smack). He decided to lean deliberately against the tree - after checking it for spiders, of course - and wait for his fellow interlopers to crop up.

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