fee-yourd or fa-jourd?

The warnings from his sire in their first few moments of freedom always stuck in the back of his mind. Keep your sisters safe, keep your family safe. So he carefully trailed along after his sisters when they wandered off, as often as he could manage. Call him overprotective, neurotic. He worried for them. Couldn't help it. Especially his smallest sisters, like Gem. She was such a delicate creature, even as they approached their yearling stages.

As his sister made herself comfortable in the meagre shade of a scraggly looking elm, he decided he would break from habit and approach. A low, playful growl escaped the gangly young male as he pounced. Those great big paws landed just shy of actually smooshing his sister, and he immediately flopped over onto his mottled flank beside her. "Gem!" he crowed, a broad and unabashed grin stretched across angular features that still clung to the vestiges of puppy fat. "I was gonna ask if you wanted to play the cloud shape game, but uh," mismatched eyes lifted for the briefest of moments towards the unblemished blue of the afternoon sky.

"We'll have to think of something else." he decided instead, his mastiff companion settling down against his hip and panting in the late autumn heat. The patchwork boy grinned at his sister again, ebony dipped tail thumping lazily against the warm leaf litter.