Moonstone Quarry If this is what you call love

Despite the mess it seemed to have become up in the mountains, Damien knew he had to go on and finish what he'd gone out of his way to do. Kendra was still out there, and ever since her departure she had not come back once or even send notice of her whereabouts to Blackfeather Woods. There had always been a distance between Damien and his youngest sister, but she was still, and would always be family, and Damien had a promise to keep with her.

Damien had not forgotten the deal he'd made with the mangy Dark Brother, nor had he forgotten how to find him. Murgash had been clear with his directions, so from the Dragoness' Lair the Dark Prince went west to find his way up right from the place they'd met that once.

North was where he wanted to go, to the coast where Murgash had said his pack resided. It had been a while since he'd agreed to put an eye out for Kendra, but Damien hadn't gotten any word from him either. It was a long shot, but perhaps the salty Dark Brother had some new information about his sister, and Damien was willing to go all the way to the sea if only for the slightest chance of seeing his little sister was still alive.

He descended from the Ouroboros with all the intentions to go straight up north, surrounding the rocky pit that he realized was right in his way; but a blue shining in the corner of his eyes forced him to halt before he could conclude circling the stone pit. Damien took several steps back to identify the source of the reflection, only to find that it was a wall several stories down from his actual position. He would have ignored it, he would have continued to run his way up to the coast, if it wasn't from the reminiscence of the shimmer's tone to Potema's cold eyes, only a tad brighter than that of Meldresi's own. Blue. So he jumped out of his path to climb down the quarry, feeling the loose stone beneath his paws drag him down dangerously. He made it to the lower levels safely, and from there the way to the blue-gleaming crag was easy. The stones scattered along the edge, which he found to really be the same blue of Potema's gifted eye, had a magic in them that even Damien who had no real power, could sense with only looking at them; so he took the largest one his mouth could hold carefully and turned around to climb the rocky hill back up.

But going up wasn't as easy as descending.

The first two attempts at scaling the wall were a failure, mainly because Damien couldn't find a safe path, so he decided to retrace his steps, this time uphill. Steady steps took him a few paces up, while his paws could sense the instability of the ground. He continued, forcing his paws to grasp on the rock several times that the loose rocks slid off beneath him, until one of those times was too violent for his weight to hold position. His paw slid dawn, unbalancing and sending him straight to the ground. He lost control of the situation too fast, and his body rolled down the hill inevitably. He tried to take hold of something, anything, but his paws had lost all grip. The last thing Damien remembers is his pale eyes reflected on the stone as his body tumbled past the blue stones and down the gleaming edge. Below, his bruised body was still, holding on to the bewitching gem tightly while his consciousness slipped away.

deirdre had drifted, briefly, from donnelaith alongside @Muses; together, they hunted some weak prey, and they followed its bloodscent doggedly! the thrill of the hunt when the hunter was a lovely thing, but never would deirdre think to dignify the simple necessity of what it was she and her wolves did when they hunted. it seemed the beast they chased had lost an ample amount of blood, and fur-tufts and crimson hue alike stained the trees they weaved through. she thought she could hear it now, and its labored breath--but when they broke through to a small clearing, it was no prey that they came upon together.

what she looked upon was a scarred man, his right lip appearing mangled upon her first look. deirdre came closer, slowly, dust and debris alike now settling, sent forth from the force with which she had slowed, then ceased, her sprint. from a distance, she presumed his shoulder, too, wore an injury, though as she drew nearer she observed the shape to be that of a paw. upon his dark furs it was difficult to see, but her doctors eyes could miss very little. there was something pale he held onto, she noted next, and deirdre drifted toward it to inspect if any teeth of his had broken. but there was no blood upon the blessed moonstone, she observed with relief, and so she moved to inspect the rest of him. the way that he breathed enabled deirdre to know he was not with them in body, but perhaps he could hear...

i am deirdre mayfair, of donnelaith. i have found you, and though your body does not move i am not sure if you are not present in mind. i, and my companion, are inspecting your form to see if you have suffered any breaks... this she must do first, she knew. all she needed to heal him were at home, but if she needed to drag him there--a thought that occurred to her, presently--she must be sure he did not suffer such an ailment near his ribs, lest they puncture a lung or anything within his stomach while traveling, or spine... which would be the swift end of him. we come in peace, she promised, and her eyes fell toward muses as she drew closer to the rear of the wounded stranger. it would be best to begin away from his teeth, to observe any violent involuntary--or, perhaps, voluntary--reactions he may have to her gentle probing.

You have full permission to PP the heck out of this guy lmao

What could have been hours of waiting felt like a timeless void. His breath grew colder as the rocky ground stole his warmth, and the shivering took over his core in an instinctive struggle to stay alive. Damien would have perished there, alone, cold, broken, and no one back home would even know where to look for his remains. But if Damien had come so long it would have made no sense for him to simply vanish without a real cause. No... Mephala's plans for him weren't yet over, and she sent her agents to rescue what was left of the Dark Master, her devout.

His body remained tense at first, jaws clenched strongly around the moonstone as though it was his most precious treasure. It would have been a hard task finding any internal injuries through his thick musculature, but as the sylph moved away from his core towards his limbs it became apparent that the real damage had been there.

u pick the leg!

he gave her no indication that he was conscious, but deirdre knew better than to not treat him as such. she, in her own dreamless slumber after the incident with the motherbear, sometimes could catch things from the outside world... but there were other times when she heard nothing at all, her mind working to repair itself. to narrate to him what was occurring felt like the best thing she could do for this stranger in this very moment. the girl, nearly a yearling now, drew near to breathe him in; the scents upon him were many, but not a one could be related to any wolf at all. it was likely he had crossed some waterbed to be here which would certainly confuse the scents; he simply smelled of here, and deirdre furrowed her brow with concern as she looked upward. blood stained some of the stone, and she was distracted from her train of thought--she looked back to the marked man, shivering with the cold, and peered toward muses.

we will be flipping you over to inspect the other side of you, she informed, her eyes not leaving the figure of muses. she drifted toward his shoulders, the scent of blood more evident, now. deirdre's muzzle drifted near his spine, which she pushed gently against to see if there was any damage done there. one limb seemed to twitch strangely at her prodding, but, she suspected, it was not due to his spine. in knowing that it was well intact, deirdre murmured briefly to muses to assist her with the task so that damien would not thud against the earth any more than he likely had.

the going was slow, and careful. the stranger did not react, and once he was on his other side deirdre was able to assess him further. much of him had stone embedded within his skin. his tender cheek, his shoulders, his sides, his legs... the stone had bitten him savagely as he had dragged against it. it was painful to look at, and she whispered a quiet prayer of thanks that he could not feel this then! deirdre stood near his face for a moment, looking to his closed eye--truly, he was lucky that no stone embedded itself in the soft skin around his eye, or even the eye itself. she continued to look at the rest of him. all of his wounds were superficial, except for his rear leg which hung strangely. sniffing at it, and testing the limb (very gently) with her fangs, deirdre knew it was not broken. his shoulder was dislocated; they, before leaving here, would have to set it back in place.

her eye then fell upon a peculiar part of him, and her head tilted. he had what looked to be the sun embedded on his 'healthy' shoulder, and deirdre found a name for this man. ghian, she hummed, we will work here with what we have, for now--and then, we will take you to donnelaith. it is there you must heal, for we do not know where it is you have come from. winter comes, we will not leave you here to die in the chill. my companion and i will remove the gravel from your skin once i find what it is i need to stop the wounds from bleeding. we will clean them with our tongues. it may be painful, unless the Old Ones have blessed you still with pleasant numbness, which might be the case, as he lay here with his eyes closed. keep him warm until i return--i will investigate the woods, she instructed and informed, moving to drift into the weald and leaving damien with muses for a brief time. she would not be straying far, and should muses make a peep deirdre would surely hear it.

Although her sweet voice announced every move she made, Damien's subconscious was all there was to receive the information. Even then the effect of it was so strong that it managed to relax Damien's body enough for the sylph to be able to flip his beastly mass over. It didn't come without an unconscious yelp of pain, and the distressing grunting that followed her gentle movement over his damaged skin.

ghian, she'd called him, but Damien wasn't really there to correct her. Had he been awake after the fall he would have probably tried to pull himself up and dragged his body up to shore, where he expected Murgash to aid him like he'd said he would, but he wouldn't have made it far enough in such state. Half his body had been scraped in the way down, and his leg had lost it's place with the hit. Deirdre was, from this moment on, Damien's only chance for survival.

She seemed the most liberated when hunting, her lithe body and strong legs built to move her swiftly and silently across the land as she stalked her prey. Partnered with good company, she was in high spirits, although her usual chatter had been reduced to no more than steady breathing, her concentration split evenly between the movements of her companion and the scent that they tracked. Her firm resolution broke, however, when they entered a clearing. Stumbling to a halt, her eyes widened as they seemed to have happened upon an injured wolf rather than easy prey. Stomach tensing, her tail tucked immediately, drawing towards the curve of her belly. While she knew a thing or two about gathering herbs, and what they might be applied for, she was no healer. At best, she could treat minor injuries - things that one might sustain climbing a mountain, or while hunting, but this situation was out of her league. Shocked into silence, she took a step back, and allowed Deirdre to take the helm.

Stiff legged, she dawdled behind her friend, ears pinned and face solemn. How exactly would they save him? What if his injuries were far graver than they appeared? It was troubling to think of such things, but she found comfort in Deirdre's leadership. She seemed to have an idea of what she was doing. Out of her league, the pale wolf remained silent, not contributing to the plan. She was, after all, a stranger to the lands. She wouldn't know how to efficiently find the plants they needed. In fact, she wasn't entirely sure that the plants that she knew ever grew within the lands.

At Deirdre's instruction, she swiftly set to work, crawling close to the injured male, body and tail wrapping close to his frame so that her heat might reach him. With a nod towards the white wolf, she set to work, gently loosening the debris from the wounds that were easiest to reach first. The wounds would have to be washed of dirt, gravel and bits of vegetation pulled from cuts. It was a ghastly sight, but not wholly unfamiliar; as a mountain wolf, she knew the dangers of poor footing and loose ground. A sad hum low in her throat, she alternated between cleaning, ensuring that the wolf was breathing, and keeping him warm.