Lake Lewisia #1086

“In my day,” his father complained, “you had to be willing to commit to slicing your palm with a ritual dagger for this sort of thing.” The teen nodded absently, concentration on the little sterile lancet he pressed to his finger just long enough to make a fat bead of blood well up. His father might not have considered him grown enough for blood pacts, but the teen thought that it took another kind of maturity to move on from pointless pain and valorized suffering to prove oneself.

---

LL#1086