Three helicopters flew overhead, seemingly pulling the clouds across the sky as they went. Jake knew the sound very well and didn´t bother looking up. Instead, he looked at the road ahead of him. The tall pine trees on either side created a corridor which covered the dirt road he was on. The forest fanned out in every direction. It wasn´t old, though.

Daniel remembered fishing with his father just four months earlier at a small lake near the Czech border. It had been a tradition for years, but Daniel knew now that it couldn´t continue. His father had never been a patient man, but he possessed a strong attention to detail, which only grew stronger over the years. Making sure the fishing pole had no scratches, ensuring that the line wasn´t about to wear out. And worms, always a full box of writhing earthworms.

The unofficial center of my town was the house of the Moson family, the only one to have any believable claim to blood nobility. Among the better caste of families, a close maze of interconnected family trees, theirs was the only one envied. The reasons were never clear to be anything beyond simple human petulance. Any open animosity was absent, but the roots never died.