Kingsfall things we lost

Paging @Karina
Early evening, 69F, light rain and thunder.

It is with great consternation that the dragon dragged himself to his home. Head hung low, and tail hung lower, his pace was slow and belabored as he returned south, once departed from the abiding landscapes of the Larkcall Lowlands. Normally, this journey would take him less than half a day. Injured – well, almost crippled, really – and the wolf needed to take several breaks throughout his travels, more than doubling the amount of time spent returning to the sequoia trees of Kingsfall.

Slowly, so slowly, he slunk to his den at the Zephyr Rill. There was no interest in contacting the rest of the pack – for all he knew, they'd no idea he left. Karpos had encouraged him to see Lachesis, the head healer, as far as he understood, but far be it from him to take any sort of advice from the youth that had handed him his own tail in a challenged Kjors himself had issued. Ears pressed backwards at the memory and he lowered himself, slithering on his belly into the comfort of the familiar nest. It seemed his excursion had not rid him of his foul mood.

Such exhaustion took ahold of him quickly, and the former alpha sunk into a dark, restless slumber, often twitching or thrashing as dreams followed one after another. It was no surprise to him that he awoke at the first sound of nearby footfalls – unable to trouble himself to turn his head so his single eye faced outward, he only twitched his nose, and called out gruffly, "Karina? Tha' you, princess?"

Thunder rumbled in the distance, threatening showers upon Kingsfall and the forests’ many inhabitants. The yearling’s periwinkle gaze lifted toward the sky, and her brow knitted in worry. The princess was not excited about the prospect of getting caught in the rain, and she was still a fair distance from the family den. Zephyr Rill, however, was right around the corner. Karina wrinkled her nose in annoyance. She despised the cold, hollow feeling of the empty den at Zephyr Rill, which wasn’t the same at all without Kjors there to warm it with his words and brighten it with his gleaming eye.  However, it seemed the nearing storm wasn’t going to give her a choice in the matter, and a fresh clap of thunder spurred her on toward the den she shared with her mentor.  Or used to share with her mentor.. Karina was beginning to lose hope that the wandering dragon would return to his roost. Perhaps he had found a prettier treasure somewhere else. Or perhaps even Karina wasn’t enough to keep him here after Karpos handed him defeat so soundly. Karina had not been present for the challenge herself, but word spreads quickly in such a tight-knit family. The Baranski princess knew well the compelling influence of shame, and when pride as mighty as a dragon’s was wounded it could be enough to drive him to abandon even his most precious treasure. The girl ducked into the den just as the first few raindrops were falling, and Kjors’ slight frame melded so well with his surroundings that his gem didn’t notice him right away. Her teacher’s voice croaking in the darkness startled her violently, and Karina inhaled sharply. “Kjors!” she breathed out, so relieved she could barely utter the man’s name.  In another breath she was at his side, curled around him as so often he had curled around her. “I thought..” she spoke in barely a whisper, voice trembling with emotion.

   

    
 

Ah, yes. It was his darling princess indeed – while his faith wavered, she had remained steady as he wandered the earth, looking for answered he knew he'd not find. The swarthy male shuffled just so, allowing a bit more room as Karina slipped onto his side of the den effortlessly. She'd grown, he noted idly, since they'd met, and as she slowly filled out into her adult form, the female was almost able to wrap around him. A curious development, he thought, but not one he was entirely opposed to. Perhaps more telling was the notion that the priestess in training had been allowed to cuddle against his blindside, with the wolf making no attempt to rectify the situation. Instead, he simply settled his head back down and uncurled his tail, allowing it to flop over the female's in a small display of affection.

"Best naw t' think too hard on it," he drawled quietly, the dragon almost completely eclipsed by the black mood that had settled over him as thickly as a wool blanket. Karina, at least, was not the focus of this foul aura – in fact, she was but the sole beacon, the lighthouse cutting through the deadly fogbank as they settled together and listened to the rain fall against the earth.

It was when the thunder rumbled, a low, resonating growl, that he finally spoke back up. "Made some stupid choices. They're days tha' th' dragon…ain' always a gift. 'er, Ah should say, Ah don' handle it jes' right," he sighed, tail twitching once at the memory of his sound defeat. All the other males of Hearthwood River would surely look down on him now – he'd not landed a single blow, handicapped from the beginning as he believed himself to be fully healed. A tragedy, really, and he started from the bottom once more. Would he ever be anything other than an underdog?

"Sorry it took so long t' git back, love. Leg's slowin' me down somethin' terrible."

An' Ah broke me own wings.

”Best not think too hard on it,” Kjors suggested, effectively confirming Karina’s fears that he had considered leaving the River for good. Distress clawed up from the pit of her stomach and grasped painfully at her heart, and it took a few deep breaths for the girl to stave her panic at the thought of losing her beloved teacher. There was a twinge of bitterness in Kjors’s tone that gave Karina the impression that he wasn’t yet sure he had made the right choice. She snuggled closer, burying her nose into the fur on the back of her companion’s neck. Breathing in the scent of her closest friend soothed the anxious yearling. She detected very little trace of the River scent after Kjo’s long absence, but that wasn’t so bad.. it meant that the scent that met her nose was purely Kjors.   Kjors spoke of his erroneous choices (chief among them in her opinion the decision to leave the territory with hardly a word) and Karina whined her dissent, too timid to express it in words. She was the Princess of Stupid Choices, and she knew that reaching for what you desire is never a stupid choice. Running away from it, as she was prone to doing.. that was the stupid thing. If one of the Mother’s blessed followers had failed his pursuit, that was simply Her way of teaching something more important. Karina had to assume that someday Kjors would need patience, determination, or even humility.. or whatever it was that his failure taught him. Even anger and disgust, as he was clearly feeling, were powerful emotions that the Mother could utilize for her work.   “You’re one of the Mother’s blessed,” Karina reminded him, “If.. something.. doesn’t work out.. it’s because it wasn’t Her plan for you.” The Mother works through circumstance and intervention, Karina recited her teacher’s words to herself. “She must have something greater planned for you,” the girl stated with the certainty of the faithful. She couldn’t imagine what that plan might be, but then again it wasn’t her job to try to figure that out.  Her job, as far as Karina could figure, was to use Her gift to take care of Her children, especially the weak, sick, and injured. The priestess’s ears shot to attention as Kjors mentioned pain in his leg, which Karina now could see that he had curled around protectively. She lifted her head to better view the leg in question. "..May I take a look?” the healer ventured, crystalline eyes searching the darkness for Kjors’s gaze.

   

    
 

The Princess wasn't wrong, he knew – he hadn't succeeded because the Mother did not wish him to. The how or why of it was not his to know, only to accept and understand it was not part of the plan. In fact, he may never come to know the methods, and that was simply something he would have to come to terms with. This knowledge did not make it any easier, however, and Kjors allowed himself a frustrated sigh as he stared into the blankness of the earthen wall. "Aye, Ah know. Bitter medicine t' swallow, all th' same. Ah, mhm, sought out an ol' acquaintance – she owed me a favor. Priestess. Ah wanted t' know…t' know if Mother was upset. With me," he sighed, shaking his head.

A foolish endeavor, really. Not only was traveling outside of Kingsfall utterly stupid while he was so injured, but he well knew the answer. (And he well knew the answer Karina might give him – newly blossomed as she was, he did not dare risk tainting her relationship with Her with his own downfall.) It did not change anything, hearing it from another wolf's lips, no matter if she had no stake in the matter at hand.

Exhaling heavily again, he finally lifted his skull and craned his neck, seeking out his jewel with his only remaining eye. After studying her for a moment, he nodded, waiting long enough for Karina to give him enough room before rolling onto his side. Leaving his belly exposed, he shifted his tail to reveal his injured limb. There was no blood or obvious trauma, but the slender leg trembled a bit where it remained tucked against his underside, as if that might ease some of the pain sparking up and down from the joint. "Twisted it," he grumbled, allowing his head to settle back against the floor of their shared nest. He trusted the princess enough not to monitor her every movement, even as he lay prone. "Then Ah went an' challenged Karpos an' tha'…definitely made it worse. An'…th' brief excursion prolly wasn' well thought out. Can't hardly walk now. But Ah jes'…"

"…needed t' get out of me own head, if only fer a lil' while."

Finding her companion’s golden eye in the dark, the yearling held Kjors’s gaze for a long moment, unsure of what his words made her feel. He had sought out a priestess, which sparked her curiosity as well as another darker, squirmier feeling. Jealousy wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to her, as she had grown up the weakling in the litter constantly trying to keep up with strong, talented brothers.. but she had never felt jealousy over something she cared about so deeply as Kjors. The princess blinked and finally looked away, reminding herself that Kjors had returned to her, his gem. To the One-Eyed Dragon, neither the Badger Woman nor the Priestess were treasures as alluring as her.  He came back to me. Karina couldn’t fathom what this other woman of faith had told Kjors, but she knew better than to ask if her mentor did not offer the information up.  Her injured companion rolled to offer up his leg for inspection, and Karina moved closer to sniff at the proffered limb. She could see little in the dim lighting of the den, but then again her eyes had never been much service to her anyway. The young healer’s tongue flicked lightly over the joint area where Kjors had verbally directed her attention, and despite his slight quiver of pain Karina detected no taste or scent of infection. The joint did feel swollen under her tongue, so much so that she would have thought that the man had torn a tendon if he hadn’t just claimed to be able to walk on it. “You.. fought.. and then traveled.. on this,”  Karina said weakly, intending for it to be a question before the words came out flat. Here he had his own medic at his disposal, whose advice could have mended a simple sprain in a matter of days, and instead he goes out on some ridiculous capriole and waits an entire moon for healing! “Getting out of his head” was no excuse.. why, she knew of a mushroom that could cure that desire, and he wouldn’t even need to leave the den! She felt dizzy as rage swelled within her for the briefest of moments, and then she exhaled the feeling away, knowing what intense shame her friend must have felt if he was compelled to run off without even bidding her farewell in person. He came back to me, she said to herself once more, knowing that yelling at him would do nothing to strengthen his certainty that he had made the correct choice in returning.    “I have something for this,” she said instead, leaving Kjors’ side for an instant to duck into her personal chamber.  Unfortunately, the best mediations to treat such an injury – arnica, scrub pine-- were limited, as they grew in the rocky, scrubby mountain foothills. She and Lachesis had been able to collect small supply when the River wolves traveled through the palisades, but most of their collection was sitting in Lachesis’s den instead of hers.  Karina scraped together what she could from her stores –white fir bark would have to do instead of scrub pine—and returned quickly to her patient. The young healer set a particularly resinous piece of bark before the man. “I think.. you  should.. ought to..” The girl swallowed, feeling very strange being the one to give the orders. “ ..Try to get into the Rill as soon as you can move.. the cold water is numbing, and it helps with the swelling.." Karina hesitated, knowing she was asking a lot. “Biting down on that tree bark will help with the pain..” There was no way around it; the medic had to go to the creek to mix the arnica poultice, and since it was toxic for her to hold it in her mouth for too long, Kjors had to be right there for her to apply it immediately.

(This post was last modified: Jul 10, 2015, 05:57 PM by Karina.)

   

    
 

"Well, was feelin' pretty good, when Ah challenged Karpos. Wasn' 'til Ah got in th' thick of it tha' Ah realized it…wasn' good," he replied, vaguely aware that sounds much more like an excuse than he was accustomed to. He certainly hadn't meant to injure himself further, it simply hadn't been his greatest need at the moment. The shame and horror had almost swallowed him right up into the earth, and for a time, he wished it had. How was a wolf to face himself like that, when he'd fallen so far from the proud, strong individual he'd once been? He had to cast the dragon out altogether – the beast had taken the injury even more gravely, it that was at all possible.

Huffing, he grunted softly as that feeling threatened to rise up from the dark pit of his chest again, ears flattening against his skull. Slowly, he drew his legs underneath his slender form. Before he moved, he eyed his princess carefully. "Karina," he grumbled, demanding her gaze, "Ah didn' make good choices lately. Bu' Ah came back, yeah? So don' think too hard on 'nythin' else." Kjors left his instruction at that, well aware she was far too smart to have dismissed whatever was racing around her head in the beginning. She'd have been an idiot if she hadn't realized he'd certainly thought about disappearing – but the important part was that he didn't, and at the end of the day, it was his jewel that he sought out, that he allowed to witness him in such a pathetic state.

After a moment, he hefted himself up onto his three good limbs. It took another few moments of concentration before he lowered his left hind, but he did, and he slowly walked towards the burbling brook with as little flinching as he could muster. The sky continued to rumble overhead, but the dragon found it to be more peaceful than anything else. Shivering at the chilly water, he lowered himself into the shallow stream. "Alright," he grumbled, one brow raised. "C'mere, love."

Kjors continued to rattle off his weak excuses, and Karina simply tuned her patient out to focus on his injury. If she thought too hard over his words she was likely to get mad all over again. He regained her attention by speaking her name rather sternly; it wasn’t his tone that caught her attention so much as the use of her name. Up to this point he had almost always said “princess” or “gem,” but rarely Karina.  The healer turned her wary gaze from the injury to meet Kjors’s golden eye. He urged her to forget his little escapade, and any doubts she’d had while he was gone, but it wasn’t so easy as that. Did he know what it was like to just wait, not knowing if what he was waiting on would ever come to pass?  Karina nodded as he spoke the same argument that had been repeating in her head, “I came back.” Her eyes darted between Kjors and his injured leg for a moment, and she opened her mouth as if to say something. She changed her mind though, and closed her mouth without uttering a sound. Finally, she mustered the courage to give him his doctor’s orders. Kjors agreed quickly, then dragged himself out to the rill, neither asking for help nor bringing the painkiller to chew on (Men, am I right?).   Karina grabbed the pine bark for him anyway along with the arnica plant and trotted after her tutor. She set the bark down once more beside the stubborn man and then went to a flat slab of rock nearby to work on her poultice. Chew, chew, chew, then spit—she allowed herself no more than three chews of arnica before spitting it onto the slab and rinsing her mouth in the creek. Even ingesting the smallest bit could make her critically ill. The occasional raindrop splashed onto her rock slab, but for now the storm seemed distant. After a few moments, Kjors beckoned to her, and with a last glance at her developing poultice she stepped over to her companion’s side. She meant to ask him about his pain, but instead she muttered, “You were gone a long time.”  It was not an accusation, the words coming out as more of a whine than anything else. “I.. waited,” she spoke once more, unsure of how to communicate what she was feeling.

   

    
 

"Suppose so," Kjors sighed heavily, knowing well what the healer spoke was truth. At first, he simply sought to regain the Mother's favor – after all, he did not understand Her will, and who better than a priestess trained to communicate with beings greater than oneself. When that endeavor turned out to be for naught, it was the madness that drove him out, the absurdity of the situation that made his paws itch with the burn of one thousand fire ants. He hadn't intended to be gone long at all, but really, what did purpose mean in all this when it was abandoned in a fit of lunacy?

Hadn't he told his companion not to think about it? The one-eyed wolf muttered under his breath, lowering his head a bit further as the thoughts swirled around his mind like an endless whirlpool. "Ah know. Ah…know. Shouldn' Ah kept y' waitin' so long," the male grumbled, the closest he would come to an apology…or an admittance that he had, in fact, missed Karina. Of course, he thought this was obvious enough. Hadn't he returned to their shared nest? Hadn't he reappeared despite the black veil hanging over him?

Of course he did. For her.

It went unsaid, he rather thought, and thankfully this notion were soon pushed to the side as he eyed the bark the medic had brought with her from inside the den. Damn. He thought he might get around the medication. Eying it warily, Kjors reached out for a tentative nibble before rearing his head back. "Am Ah…supposed t' eat tha' 'er wha'? Doesn' much seem like somethin' a wolf eats."

Kjors answered like a child being told off, grumbling his acquiescence as if agreeing with Karina would somehow appease her. Karina wrinkled her nose thoughtfully and nodded, unsure of exactly what she wanted from Kjors. It wasn’t an apology she was looking for, since he hadn’t really hurt her at all.. had he? He’d let her know he was leaving the territory for a bit, and he had warned her that he didn’t know when he would be back. Everything had gone more or less according to plan, so why couldn’t Karina stop thinking about it as her teacher suggested?  This time, Karina allowed her companion to direct her attention away from the topic at hand. Why, he was so desperate to change the subject he had even begun to nibble at the white fir bark! The faintest of smiles finally found its way to the child’s features as Kjors reared back in disgust. One small chuckle accompanied her words as she answered him. “It’s for pain, if you can stand the taste..” When she had last prescribed white fir bark to Orren, her brother had insinuated that he might prefer to be in pain. Her smile grew a little as Kjors joked about eating it. “Just chewing it should be fine, but it won’t heal you. Not like the arnica.” Karina threw a longing look over her shoulder at the half-concocted paste on her rock slab. She needed to finish it soon, before it got too runny sitting out in the rain. “Can I see?” the healer-to-be questioned, cloudy gaze falling to where Kjors’s leg rested in the rill. Thunder boomed overhead, closer this time, reminding the girl that they didn’t exactly have all the time in the world. If the swelling had lessened at all, she would have to deem the leg “good enough,” at least for now. “..Does it feel numb?” Karina asked, her slight hesitation betraying her uncertainty of her own medical advice. Perhaps lately she should have spent less time with Kjors and more with Lachesis, she conceded in hindsight. In an attempt to disguise her doubt, the young healer bounded back over to her arnica paste, craning her neck in order to smear it onto the top of her nose. Likely she looked very silly trotting back over to Kjors with the verdant paste slopped across the bridge of her muzzle.