Welcome to Hive and to The Ink Well community, @viceroyklayd. Your story is a very good read, with a good build-up and a very touching ending. Nicely done.

Now that you're here, please have a look around and get to know how our community works. A few important callouts:

• We are all about quality short fiction and engagement.
• We keep a watchful eye out for spam and plagiarism, which are not tolerated.
• We ask everyone who posts in The Ink Well to read and comment on at least two other writers' work in the community for every story published.
• You can find an overview of our community and what we're about in our manifesto.
• We provide weekly writing prompts to inspire our community of fiction writers.
• You can find many writer's resources in our catalog of fiction writing tips.

And here are some resources to help you find your way around the Hive platform.

Be sure to get acquainted with @theterminal. It's one of the best sources of information on the Hive platform. They also have a Discord server and they are great at answering questions.

See the newbie's guide: https://peakd.com/@newbies-guide. Here's a collection of their posts on formatting: https://peakd.com/ccc/newbies-guide/hive-writing-and-formatting-tips

Again, welcome!