Naaghai Lowlands [m] triple dog dare

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if u want! <3

Why was she here?
The clouds snake over the stars and hide them from view. The ground sprawls from reeds and marshes into rocky, barren wasteland. There are scents on the wind and none of them belong to who she searches for.
Her stomach aches terribly. Her eyes burn; her leg snarls with a shooting pain from wrist to shoulder that thunders down her spine. And yet she does not stop.
Why was she here? Why could she not have given up?
The woman's careworn face lingers in her mind, the one from Kvarsheim. She could have been desperate and begged for a place with her, could have hidden among the ranks. She could have gone home, could have crawled back to Akavir — could have lied to his face and told him she had been simply scouting, that she needed time to think. Could have, could have, and yet she didn't. Did not want to. Her heart throbs in her chest and bangs against her ribcage.
Why was she here?
Why hadn't the pretty face faded into her memory like the others? Like the men?
Why could she not accept no closure as closure?
Why was she searching for someone who did not wish to be found?
Was she this pathetic? This desperate, this hopeless? Or was it determination? Or perhaps it was none of those things. Perhaps it was love; perhaps it was something else. But there were no more answers to be found in the long faded remnants of scent, of staying tethered to a place that holds no promise or future, of waiting and hoping — wishing.
She must find out for herself if there is anything that remains of the @Silvertongue she guarded so fiercely within her heart.

coyotes. the useless leg atrophied. coyotes, snuffling. grunting. but their teeth did not touch her. instead, fieldmice. tubers. water. cactus pulp. her pelt thinned. her bones became nothing. and the leg began to blacken. what life the coyotes restored was quickly endangered once more as infection lit her body to fire. but the coyotes had moved on after bringing her to a meadow profuse with the dying stems of summer flowers. silvertongue watched the shadows shift from evening into night. as the stars glittered in slow revelation, she lay beneath them, trying not to glance at the suppurating lines of red and oozing black which had reached now to her flank. no more. no more. let her go. silvertongue had ceased thinking of name. of faces. she had lost the luxury fierce and countless days ago.

Limping, pacing, wandering; the search is futile and the night only grows longer. Wren shudders with the bite of wind. Why is she here? How long has she been—
A scent. One that now flooded her senses with a foray of emotion. Silvertongue, and it is recent. She has been here.
What frightens her is the irony tinge of blood.
Running now, running, or more like hobbling upon her own bum leg. Her lungs fill with that scent, that beautiful scent she had gone so long without, and she clutches it to her heart; damn the consequences, damn it all; she is here.
Until a trail of ugly, bubbling red-black appears in the withered grass. She follows, stiffly, fearfully, and it took her eyes a good few seconds to register what was in front of her.
She all but shrieks. Silver?

it was a face she should have known, a voice she should have recognized. there was awareness on the still, staring face, but it lapsed back into the patient voidlike expression of one waiting for death. silver. "plata," she rasped, "tia plata." by everything, she was exhausted by the concept of emotion, by speaking to answer. she could feel the fever baking inside the thin oven of her flesh and desperately grabbed for it, wanting to drag the heat up and over her face. mouth gaped, jaws parting to say something else, but it crumpled wordlessly on her tongue and she did not attempt again. for now, silvertongue was mercifully separated from the pain of consciousness, awareness, memory; each breath was her focus entire.

Plata.
Silvertongue raked in and out of this plane of existence; her eyes are heavy. Panic began to surge and in what should have been an emotional reunion was instead now Wren being whisked into instinctive autopilot as her love lays close to death.
I'm here, Silver, it's me, tears spring at the corners of Wren's eyes as she bends down, brushing at the hollow cheek. I'm gonna help you, okay, baby? I'm gonna-- fuck. Just, just, stay with me, alright? Yeah? Stay awake. Keep your eyes open.
This was bad. This was — terrible, and here they were with no one else there to help, to tell her what to do, how to fix this. It had not crossed her mind in full that Silvertongue could die up until now; a whimsical, almost impossible fear now wedged into a grim reality.
What would Eshe have done? Or Arlette; what had she seen them do? Terror broils beneath her skin, inside her chest. Plants. She needed — plants, herbs, but what the fuck grows in the desert in November?
What was she going to do about that leg?

acceptance was a tragedy and a necessity. silvertongue had accepted that crowfeather could not love her as she loved him. she had not accepted that his heart belonged to germanicus of all foul souls in the world. silvertongue had accepted that her death would come at the hand of germanicus and his feral little brats. she had not accepted being abandoned to wither and die and convulse without dignity under crowfeather's very eyes. now she had accepted a new dying, begged for it, but nothing stopped the body's life-preservation. she accepted waiting. she did not accept being saved. and all this, tucked beneath the staring, fading face; let wren gather her close, drag her along, and silvertongue would not resist, face upturned toward the sun as she begged it again and again to take her.

Mature Content Warning

This thread has been marked as mature. By reading and/or participating in this thread, you acknowledge that you are of age or have permission from your parents to do so.

The participants have indicated the following reason(s) for this warning: gore, implied amputation w/ ooc permission

staying somewhat vague w/ this in order to keep it in line with something semi-realistic LOL. please let me know if u'd like me to change anything!

Wren had begun to gather that she was now faced with two options.
One was to simply keep her comfortable, to say all of the things she never said when they had been together; to keep her warm and wait for the infection to swarm and steal her away; slowly, agonizingly.
The other was a crude procedure she did not know she had in her to complete. She is no masterful healer, no professional. But there is a vague hope, flowering, that perhaps it would work; that perhaps, despite the circumstances, it would save her. And there, too, is a possibility that she would never be forgiven for doing so.
Two options. It took Wren all of a moment to be swayed. Love is a selfish thing.
She needed — something to help her. To ease the pain; to prevent shock. To pluck roots from the ground and pry open the dry lips, and with this she waited until there were, she thought, no visible signs of pain.
To put teeth upon her lover. To cut through beloved muscle and marrow. To have to squeeze shut her eyes to prevent salt from bursting into the wound. To taste blood; her blood.
But what else was she to do?
It is done as quickly as she can manage to do so.
Blood loss, she knew, could drive her to a merciless end within hours to minutes. Water. She needed to clean it; she needed to stop the bleeding, somehow. Hoisting the riverwolf as gingerly as she can over her shoulders, Wren drags the willowed body toward the stream that cuts from valley into desert. It is cold; bitterly so; maybe, just maybe, that would work in her favor. Flowerbuds yanked from a hearty bush, pressed to the site. Mud, too, slathered. She holds the beloved face between her paws and says over and over that she is sorry, even if it isn't understood nor heard.
I love you, I love you, I love you.

wren's work was more precise than she realized, supported by the desperate and complete love they shared. in the long hours that followed, silvertongue slept, in fitful spurts that trickled to longer swathes, and then the black satin of a medicated slumber. there was no pain, no agony, no regrets, no fears; indeed, the tiniest part of silvertongue which remained conscious felt that she had died, and the relief brought an adrenaline which poured through her flesh and woke her. muzzy, mouth tasting of bitter herbs; alive, alive, and then the anguish set in, and her soft, hoarse cries would bring wren to see staring eyes, her paw hovered and trembling in awe and shock over where her leg had been. gasping in spanish words and garbled common.

While Silvertongue slept, Wren did not.
Hourly through the last remnants of night and into dawn, she rose to check the wound; to reapply the coats of mud and clay which acted as a tourniquet, to chew plants and smother the area where once a leg had been. She kept her warm; kept her clean, tenderly washed the dust and oxidized crimson from the fibers of both the beloved's pelt and her own. She caught small prey, what little she could muster while not straying too far; two voles, a quail; all for when her lover's stomach eventually demanded it. She fed water in tiny drops, pearlets from the curve of leaves.
She knew not what to expect when Silvertongue awoke, if she awoke. What would be said between them; if there would be malice or relief. She did not know, did not, could not, but there was no space in her mind for fear or apprehension regardless.
She was still here.
The shrieking startles her away from staring, red-eyed, at the riverbed which now glitters with sunlight, and her gaze tears over to her lover — the agonizing realization has come to her. And there is nothing Wren can do. She opens her trembling arms in the offering of an embrace while her eyes gleam with wordless sorrow.

anger. resentment. rage. surprise. sorrow. anguish. incredulity. shock. thoughtfulness. pain. adoration. her breath, racing, running, galloping, slowing; silvertongue was dragged through each stage of grief in a bodily way, twice in fact; doused in hellfire; dumped into heaven; dragged through a nirvana of awareness; until it was over and she lay limp and exhausted and tearstained in wren's arms. how? why? when? and too formless, voidless, to ask anything or say anything else. to surrender; too tired to even give up. but at last the dry mouth spoke; "por que es tan importante para ti que estoy viva?"

There was little that Wren understood in the native tongue; bits and pieces, similarities with the language of her father. She knew them and she heard them, the words she could pick out; why — important — I am alive? There was even less of it that she spoke, but even still, she gathers her tongue in her mouth and chokes out the one phrase she did know, egregious accent and all: Porque te amo.
Te amo. The strongest, deepest, most sincere form of the phrase in the Spanish language.
Love is patient and unwavering. Love is selfish. Love is soft and it is harsh. There is a man, or was; there is strife and there is anguish; so much, so much has stood in her way. And for some godforsaken reason, Wren lays before her with soft underbelly exposed whether Silvertongue wanted it or not.
She had waited.
She squeezes her eyes shut and rests her chin between the round-tipped ears, the same way she always had. You don't have to say it back.

love destroyed. love debilitated. love forsook. love forgot. silvertongue did not speak yet, only reached up a shaking paw to cradle the side of wren's face. "te amo," answered without hesitation as the glassblue eyes cleared for the first time in days. she did not know how to feel outside of this statement; she did not know how to do more than breathe as pain washed through her stretched and thirsted skin. silvertongue knew if she focused on it, she would die inside more; she kept wren within her eyes then, unable to say more, grappling with the way she wanted to scream, the way she wanted to black to nothing, the way she wanted, she wanted, she wanted; i want to go home to riverclan. but the jaws did not part again, and slowly the eyes closed as a small sigh relaxed silvertongue in whatever she could exchange for peace.

It was heard as much as it was felt.
Wren scoops as much of the tattered body as she can into her arms and holds her against her chest; holds with an unspoken security, and for the first time she thought of how brilliant it felt to do so again.
She feels the muscles tense and Silvertongue's body still and clench with pain, and Wren finds it within herself to reach for the readied pile of scavenged herbs: from it, she gathers poppy seeds. Those she had more than enough experience with. Take some of these, she whispers softly. they'll help a little.
She settles back down with one paw rested upon her shoulder, allows herself to feel the coarse fur at her nape, and decides that Silvertongue is still just as untouchably beautiful.

the seeds, lipped; swallowed. so much parched skin and blood in her mouth these days; it was a wonder she tasted the bitterness at all. she sighed and sank gratefully into inkblack, but not before her eyes flung wide on the edge of a tortured breath; "i want to go home to riverclan." not crowfeather, perhaps, but — there were more in riverclan than he. and silvertongue, for the first time in memory, wanted her children. she slept.

<333333 beautiful thread as always

Home; home, to Riverclan.
Swiftcurrent waited for Wren. She could not go there; could not go home. Could not even think of the bittersalt eyes belonging to Akavir when she had last seen him.
We'll go together, if that's what you want, to Riverclan. To wherever Silvertongue was, wherever she wanted. That was where home was, now.
If not Riverclan, then elsewhere. A new home. Either way, Wren would be there when Silvertongue awoke, and she promises it in the gentlest of nothings.