With adults so thin on the ground, it had been so easy to slip away and the boy had been doing so more and more of late. It wasn't like he wanted to run into the strange girl he'd met in the wildwood again or anything (although he did notice her scent in the area from time to time and found himself following it before he caught himself with a scowl), but there was something more pressing that he needed to attend to today.

I had become increasingly aware over the months that sometimes their mother didn't know who they were at all. She seemed to be gone for longer and longer each time and it was often during her absence that Treyah would arrive, and use bad words, "Fucksake," he muttered under his breath with a smirk, remembering the utter look of mortification on her face the first time he had parroted the phrase back to her. The last time, their mother hadn't returned with their sister, and nobody had seen her since. Something wasn't right, and while his siblings seemed to be too slow to pick it up at all, it left the boy with an unhealthy amount of worries for one so young. What did it mean, and where had she gone?