Can you tell me about the symbolism part?? I didn't get much of it except that Tod was the wolf Dennis shot and in the end Tod just left him and Dennis offed himself.
Why was that old man shouting at Dennis? Why didn't he just tell him about the wolf in the beginning??
Dennis was the shepherd — tasked to protect the innocent.
But he abandoned the sheep → became the sheep → then the lamb that fell.
The “lamb” is a biblical image: the innocent, pure, the sacrificed.
Dennis is both the shepherd who failed and the sacrificial lamb who willingly surrenders himself to a beast in disguise.
The title is brutal irony:
He fell because he chose devotion over truth.
He traded all protection (the sheep) for an unnatural love — a predator’s snare.
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Final Conclusion
It’s an allegory for how evil preys on the lonely and the good-hearted.
Dennis needed love so badly he ignored every warning: the animals’ fear, the farmer’s rule, the blood illusions, the unnatural eyes.
The Skinwalker myth says: You are safe as long as you never let it in.
But Dennis invited it — fed it, loved it, killed for it.
So the final prey was not the sheep, not the deer — it was Dennis’s soul.
When he stepped over that cliff, he fell from the world of the living — and the monster never needed to push him.
He fell for love that was never love — only hunger.
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Also, if you make research of a sheep and a coyote, the coyote tricks the innocent sheep into the trap. So which means that Todd didn't die or ended his life, he used the sheep's blood to the cliff which made Dennis think Todd ended his life, making the sheep fall into the coyotes trap.
OMG THANK YOU SO SO MUCH
this was saur good. yaoi aside all da symbolism was immaculate and their dynamic is something i love reading about and incorporating into my own work and this is definitely something i would read in da form of a novel. i love love love psychological horror and even better if it’s queer in any form. this was lovely