Drooping Willows Better Than Misery

Kaela listened with intrigue as the older woman answered her question and was disappointed to find that she didn’t really have one. The Voices chanted their anger, but Kaela ignored them, along with the constant pounding in her head that they always brought with them. She looked down to her leaf. Just the one… She remembered what Avari had told her before, about the leaf being poison. Maybe just one to begin? She thought, not wanting to allow herself to accidentally kill herself.

She watched as the older woman drew her own leaf into her mouth, though, and realized her leaf was smaller. Since they were the same size…

Eat. The voices urged her. She hesitantly bent her head and pinched the leaf off at the bottom, allowing it to rest on her tongue. The flavor was bitter to her, though not quite as bitter as the stick stuff had been. Her tongue began to tingle, and she leapt to her feet, landing a short distance away from Avari, bristling from head to toe. The tingling soon faded, though; replaced by a gentle throbbing in her mouth. She relaxed, crushing the delicate plant between her teeth and swallowing it. She sat again as the pleasant pulsing steadily spread throughout her, as if she could feel every heartbeat with each fiber of her body.

The steady thrum reached her toes, and Kaela gently swayed side to side, enjoying the sensation. The voices were quiet, and her head no longer hurt. It was… nice. It was something she hadn’t felt before. She didn’t quite know what to call it, since she’d never known any semblance of peace before. Her ears twitched slightly with every beat of her heart. Her eyelids began to droop until she was lazily staring at the world through half-closed optics.

She remembered Avari’s presence and her head slowly swiveled to look at her. This was her remedy for aching joints?

"Speech" Thought

For the briefest of moments Avari had to wonder whether the youth would give in and follow the lead. As she sat and waited with her own leaf set on her tongue, the tingling sensations brought about by the leaf releasing some sort of acidic substance meant to prevent insects from boring holes into it's surface, she remained entirely calm. Unlike the other, whose reaction was almost one of shock, and the older female half expected to be brought into an attack as a result. She had warned the girl though. These things were, technically, posionous.

It only took a little while for things to start moving though, though one leaf was never enough to have Avari swaying in the same way that Kaela was doing. The older woman had built up a tolerance for poisons, through chewing leaves and berries to ingesting certain waters and licking at different surfaces. She was a master of her trade, but the only way to know whether something could be toxic was through experimentation. That she had lived as long as she did was down to nothing but dumb luck and chance. Or caution.

"Is it working?" The older woman asked, knowing by sight alone that there were some effects starting to weave into the youngsters systems. There was no swaying to Avari's stance or slurring of her words. The only effect that one leaf had was exactly as she had described. It numbed the pain in her joints, and burned a little about her cheeks and tongue, but she could remember a time long ago when it would have caused the same reaction in her as it was in Kaela.

"Keep those pretty eyes open." She almost hummed her words as she blinked a few times in quick succession, beginning to feel slightly heavier as she bit down on the leaf that had been sitting on her tongue, and swallowed it back with a forceful gulp. "You'll miss all the fun if you fall asleep." What fun exactly she was not sure. In some, the leaves were known to cause hallucinations, while in others it did little more than make their heads spin. What effect it would have on Kaela? Well... suppose she was about to find out.

Kaela’s steadily palpitating ears twitched in Avari’s direction as she spoke. At first Kaela’s brain struggled to comprehend what she was saying, and her ears turned back slightly. As she began to realize what the older wolf was telling her, however, her ears stood up again and she fought to keep her eyes open. She began to grow even drowsier.

Then, as suddenly as if she’d been struck by lightning, everything became painfully clear. She noticed every detail; the fly buzzing along the ground near Avari’s paws; the gentle swaying of the dangling willow branches; the quiet hum of insects in the air. Every hair on her body was suddenly excruciatingly alert. Each touch of the breeze, each rustle of grass against her paws, each beat of her heart; all these were felt in perfect clarity from the tip of each strand of fur to the root.

But the best part: the Voices were gone.

“It feels…” she paused. She didn’t have a word for the feeling. She left her sentence off, unable to come up with anything. She turned clear blue eyes upon her teacher and stared at her. She couldn’t comprehend the extent of her joint pain if she needed something this strong.

The realization hit her that this other woman might have built up a resistance to the leaf.

She was stunned. Never had such a rational thought come to her before. Not without help.

“How do you find this?” She asked eagerly, hastily moving closer again to sniff the vine more thoroughly.

"Speech" Thought

There was just something oddly joyful to watch someone's first reactions to all manner of different leaves and toxins. Avari was at heart a teacher, the kind that wished now in her later years that she had spent more time passing on her trade to the younger generations so that they could carry her knowledge forward. This, she supposed, was about as close as she was going to get. Teaching a girl how to get her head spinning. Well it wasn't the most noble thing by any means, but Ava had done far worse things than teach others the value of a poison. Besides, she'd been sure to mention that only one leaf should be taken at a time, had she not?

What struck Ava as unusual though was the fact that Kaela almost looked more... concise after the leaves had started to take their effect, like her version of being drunk as it were, was more normal than her usual state of mind. Odd, but to each their own she supposed. She didn't honestly expect the girl to finish telling her how it felt. She herself knew that there weren't enough words in the world to describe that first-ever high.

The question poised caused a quiet laugh and the warmest of smiles as she shrugged. "The scent mostly. The area." It wasn't an easy thing to explain. She found the vines and the leaves more out of habit now than actually putting any effort into tracking them down. "Anywhere you find a willow tree, you'll probably find these vines growing along the floor nearby."