Dragoncrest Cliffs young and hungry

She didn't remember it to hurt so bad when she woke ashore, when the woman who found her brought her back from the dead somehow. She didn't remember the blood on her pawpads nor the painful cuts all over her legs, and she didn't remember how she'd gotten covered in this mysterious medicinal do that itched like hell on top of the ache. And yet all those things seemed to be very much there, as real as anything had ever been.

She did remember, though, the battle against the ocean's will. She remembered being cornered between the massive wall of rock and the furious ocean, helpless under the dark, ominous mass of grey and thunder that had caused it all. She remembered it vividly, as did she recall the first time she'd gone through it, her drop. She'd come to believe that perhaps her life was destined to end that way, crushed against a rock, drowning her way to the bottom of the ocean.. But she also liked to believe that she had fooled said destiny not once, but twice in her short lifetime. The Cairns didn't simply die without giving one hell of a fight, right? That was the whole point of running the name.

Although breathing had become easier in the next couple of days after the incident there was still no way for Julep to move a single muscle without her whole body aching. How she'd come to end up tucked in such a tiny hole was a mystery, but she was not complaining. It was lonesome and boring, but at least she was being fed and kept warm... However it'd happened she'd made a very generous friend, and Julep could be many things but ungrateful wasn't one of them. She didn't quite like the seclusion, nor the fact that she was basically a convict (she was no fool, it was obvious that more than a hotel room her little crevice was rather a premeditated jail cell), but Julep knew that she wasn't quite in condition to tackle her way out of there.

So far Julep hadn't been told much. Arlo and Portia, although polite, had barely said anything to her, and for what she knew Melchior and Hush were probably very committed full-time mutes... Not even Heda —who Julep knew to be the laird of wherever she was being held in— had shared any details about anything, and each day that passed the young Cairn girl grew more anxious. The only proof that she was even truly alive and in the real world was the very real pain she was feeling and the bloody taste of that daily piece of meat that more than nourishment was her minimum dose of social interaction with whoever was on the giving end. Usually she was okay with it. Her not-very-detailed-plan was to recover as much as she could, enough to sneak her way out of that place and back to freedom, and she wouldn't be able to explain what had overcome her, but today Julep felt different. So... Arlo, she barked half-way through that day's rabbit. How long are you gonna hold me down here? she asked her guard bluntly, whose handsome face had become the most familiar among her visitors. It had been perhaps a poorly thought move, she was aware... But she was also aware of her sanity slowly vanishing while she counted the cracks in her den's walls.

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