No Dogs Allowed

A Death Most Dreamed

(ty for reading, ur time is much appreciated :D the little star awaits you for your company)

(EDITED)

(Note to readers: Some chapters ahead may not be fixed to be in line with the new edits)

In a world of beasts and beast-alikes, you can't wait to find paths, you have to cut them out yourself.

If the world isn't made for you, then you have to remake it. If the world isn't remakable, then you have to break it up altogether and start from there. That's less "laws of living life" and more "laws of keeping your life". But that's coming from a Stirling.

It wasn't a real law that packs had to stay with each other, but you'd be putting your head on a platter if you didn't otherwise, so most packs had drawn unofficial lines of their jurisdictions throughout the world, and if you crossed it, well, just hope no one but you noticed.

That's all to take us to the Splinter.

The Splinter was a vast ridge in the earth just above San Diego and diagonal of Riverside to sit in a long line between LA and Carlsbad. It was a fracture on the map, hence the name, with spindly roads crawling out from the central shape to creep into tiny towns or dead ends. The sun came for us last and left us first. The clouds found us the fastest. The rain remained for eons. Rockslides and mudslides were good friends. Summer was bearable. Winter was a massacre.

The city was built from the cavernous walls inward and from the deep ground upward, closing its residents in bit by bit with apartment stacks, elongated billboards, towers of town homes. Grocery stores were atop banks were atop laundromats were atop smoke shops. Bridges cut the skyline into shards. Lights hung from ropes with an artificial white buzz in poor imitation of the sun. Iron pillars, stone roofs, colored brick, and hopeful people held the world up from underneath. The only way in or out were perilous bus routes and a hell of a staircase.

Nia found me after the tryout in the parking lot. Wynter and Zoe came bounding out like mad women, their injuries forgotten in favor of celebration. 

Zoe leapt into her arms. "Nia," she gasped. "We made it."

Nia's lip twitched up. "I see that."

"Oh, it was terrible," she said. "Absolutely traumatizing, I adore it."

"Terrifying," Wynter agreed behind her. "We start Monday."

Nia peered around both of them to smile at me. "You start Monday?"

I held up a hand. "If my organs heal by then, sure. And if they don't shred my file in secret."

"You two know each other?" Wynter said. At Nia's single nod, she whirled on the captain with a gaping face. "How come he's not on the Jackdaws?"

I stared at her. Nia raised a brow, glancing between us. 

"Don't know," she admitted, eyeing me.

I cleared my throat. "Timing, you know."

"Not really," Wynter said. Her brown eyes narrowed on me. "Kid is kind of out of his mind."

"In a good way," Zoe vouched.