Friend-Shaped

Solaire hummed softly to himself around the handle of the basket he was carrying, a couple gardening tools occasionally rolling about inside the basket. While he wasn't quite as good at gardening yet as his aunt Gwyn was, he had been following her around ever since the first time his dad had shown him the inside of the greenhouse so he had learned a lot about how to care for plants and keep them healthy! His aunt was very particular about the important herbs that she grew within the greenhouse so he wasn't allowed to prune and take care of them on his own just yet, but he had been assigned the near by pumpkin patch as his own personal project now that he was big enough to at least roll the round, heavy squashes. Well, most of them anyway. There were some that were absolutely massive and those ones he had to get some help with, but they seemed to be pretty hard to move for even his dad so he didn't feel too bad about it.

Today he just wanted to trim back some of the old vines that hadn't flowered and weren't growing new pumpkins. An easy task for sure! However, as he got closer he noticed a sound that he had never heard before and he stopped humming so he could listen more closely. It was almost like... crunching? Was that crunching? Hurrying toward the unusual sound, he rounded one of the bigger pumpkins in the patch and came skidding to a stop when he found the culprit–an animal that looked kind of like a huge cross between a beaver and a rat, but it didn't have tail from what he could see and it's face was tall with a flat snout. Its paws were kind of like a raccoon's with the way its toes were long enough to grip the edge of the hole it had made in the pumpkin that it was currently devouring. Solaire dropped the basket, blinking and wide eyed with surprise. His presence hadn't been enough to disrupt the eating rodent, but the clatter of the basket was at least enough to earn him a slow side eye before the garden intruder went back to what he was doing as if the young wolf wasn't even there. "Whooooooah...." he said softly with awe and intrigue, sitting back on his haunches with a grin to watch the unusual creature for a bit.

"Solaire Carpathius"