He reached for his stick next, and began to peel the bark off with his fingers to the best of his ability. His nails were hard and sharp, though, so he could dig them in a little better than a human might have been able to. He was able to get most of it off, and used the knife to carefully strip off the stragglers before taking a deep breath.

Now was time for the monumental task of carving this. He wanted to smooth it out and get rid of the knots, and maybe even put some nice shapes in it. But especially, he wanted it to kind of taper at the bottom so it was easy to navigate with, and put a decent place to grab it with onto it as well. Now or never, he sighed, and started to work.

Immediately, he caught the diamond knife at a weird angle. He started to twist it and push, only to have it totally shatter. A sharp piece very nearly blinded him, catching in his eyebrow, and a few more left shallow cuts on his face and chest. He groaned loudly and grabbed the stick with his least-splintered hand, and made his way to the water to clean himself up.

Picking diamond shards out of your skin was not fun, but luckily all the pieces were pretty big as he washed them with water until the bleeding stopped. He glanced back at the stick and shrugged -- it worked well enough for now. In the meantime, he decided to give one last good shot at finding rocks for a better knife, this time at the water where the river had probably been tumbling and carving them.

Mostly though, all of them were either too smooth or too small. So he shrugged, grabbed his stick, and began the walk home -- it would be easier, now that he had this to lean on.


/exit talys