a racking cough rattled through mahler's chest. he pushed himself upright, plagued by another spate of smaller heaves. 
spring was wet and he was ageing, both truths the man had long accepted. but to see himself sick both frightened and angered the graf. he left his den and traveled toward the furthest edge of the bypass' southern border.
another cough, this one not so great; he harrumphed the rest away and switched his tail in irritation. for days his throat had been tickled by the creeping onset of a cold. mahler had chosen to ignore it. "sehen sie, wohin ihr stolz sie geführt hat."
he muttered the words only for himself. now he must wonder if this would be a ravaging sickness that would burn only for some days and then leave. he could ill afford to be so depleted. but it did not feel this way to mahler, who had experienced the gentle jade cough before. milder. different.
he thought of going to @Iana or @Speedy, seeking their council as the healers he knew. but pride rose again, and he turned away from it. not pride, but shame, and above that, his own physician's need to study a malady alone.
with a note to @Praimfaya that he would be sequestering himself for some days in the far place he had found, a trail of crumbling conifer forest that spread into a tangled black wood, mahler added another for @Phaedra and a last for @Thade, bidding them keep their comfort. he must be sure that this was not something more dire before rejoining them; a cough was one thing, an illness quite another.
dread clenching in his gut, for mahler remembered another time and another place and another sickness eating its feverish way through children 

—perhaps for the sake of those unborn he should leave —

but the bypass was large, and mahler could keep himself solitary even if he was sought. their communications would not cease here, he suspected, and turned at last into the shadows to seek a traveling camp and the undoubtedly mouldering skin of herbs he had stored beneath the edge of a shale shelf many years ago.