[div style="width: 48%; line-height: 14px; text-align: justify; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;"]Christ, this was more work than he thought.

Vale's request of Zjarr was to smith a true-to-size statue of a crow. An art piece, and the first he had ever done for a customer. It was a fairly stark contrast from the weapons and shields he was used to designing and forging regularly, but since his joining Tanglewood, he had more than enough materials to accommodate this order as well. He could make more than one, even — a three-eyed one, two regulars, maybe even a larger bird of prey, like a vulture. That was fitting, wasn't it? If he had the supplies and the time for it, there was no reason not to.

The husky quickly realized, however, that materials and time weren't the pressing issue here. Muse was. Hours flew by with his sketchbook wide open, a graphite pencil laying on top of it, and not a single line being drawn. Flamey was the real artist here, not Zjarr. All he could do was try to salvage what he had remembered back from when he and Flamey were still one entity and go from there. It was even more unfortunate given the circumstances that Flamey forced him into. Zjarr had stopped by the Forge after closing a deal to drop off his weapons, sketchbook in tow, and asked for the ghost's assistance. In short, he was told to go fuck off and to figure it out all for himself. Ungrateful, stupid fuckin' bitch.

One broken bottle haphazardly flung against the wall later, Zjarr departed off to his new home in Tanglewood, where he had taken up residence in a small cottage within their town. It was in this compact home that he stood in now, eyelids heavy from forcing himself to stay awake and get something done, anything. The pencil felt like a sack of bricks on his paw, and within minutes he found himself tossing it back onto the empty sketchbook with an exasperated huff, eyes wandering over to the feral crow that was temporarily being housed with Tanglewood's Ignibuses for the duration of the demon's commission. Vale had left it with him to use as a reference, and he accepted the offer to house it.

But so far he found the thing to be perfectly useless, and all he could do now was tense his muscles and resist the overwhelming urge to snap its neck whenever it looked in his direction. Stupid fuckin' bird.

[member=23389]Lanyu Ignibus[/member]

[div style="width: 48%; line-height: 14px; text-align: justify; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;"]The canine had returned his focus to his sketchbook when he heard the crow begin to caw deplorably, which was doing no favors for his already irritated mood. Zjarr's eyes softened when he glanced over at the bird, fully prepared to release it from its confines and tear it into bloody, gory pieces, and saw little Lanyu poking her paw between the bars of the cages. Of course he couldn't be upset. Not when the children were around, him at least.

He offered the young pup a faint smile as she flopped onto his weary paws, and he ran a calloused digit across the top of her head in a display of brief affection. "Course ya can, kiddo," the husky replied, his voice soft so not to stir the other shepherd pups in the other room from their slumber. He quite liked this cottage that they had settled into within the town of Tanglewood primarily for the existence of walls — no longer did he worry about waking his children with the clanking of metal upon metal or the clamor of a heated argument with Flamey, which more or less sounded like an argument with himself or the wall since Flamey refused to show himself to anyone else but Zjarr. The cottage was a lot more private, and he valued the safety that came with it. Perhaps it was a change the family truly needed.

His eyes traveled back to the bird, and his paws searched through the dimly-lit corners of the room to find the bag of peanuts he had stashed to feed it, something that Vale had visited when ve had visited him. "'m sure that Addie's hungry. Y'wanna go give her a snack?" he asked the pup, silently producing the bag in front of him for Lanyu to take. Addie, a female crow, of course — yet Zjarr often settled to objectify the things and entities that were an annoyance to him. It wasn't as though it mattered anyway; once he finished his commission, he would be free from holding this godforsaken bird, no longer taking the time to debate whether or not killing the pet of a Pittian Ardent would be a deadly offense. IF this ever gets done.

teef