Starglow Basin trastornado

all tagged welcome, some slight pp to set scene <3

they're driven tirelessly across the red sands. the trio might have been comical, some abstract commentary out of steinbeck's la perla -- were it not for the fact two of them were nearly bleeding to fucking death.

soto routs them into an ancient mouth of volcanic stone and shale where slate figureheads prop up against the sun-baked earth like gravestones. it's bare digs, but nothing here holds onto a scent. the ground's too open -- and too hard -- for blood or pawprints to linger under the zealous eye of the sun.

it's a proper hideout if soto's even seen one.

@Sangre's falling to pieces. soto marshaled the priestess to her cot first and watched like a hawk as she worked, muttering curses and all manner of vile statements under her tongue. soto knows enough to observe she's not poisoning her patients -- but he doesn't trust her either. 

that's why he took half her fucking leg.

he turns his attention @Nokht, wrapping the boy's fractured limb with the strange strips of vegetation the priestess told him to collect. his leg is like sangre's back - in absolute pieces. it might set, it might not. truthfully it's the least of soto's problems.

problem number one: where was juarez? thiago? carlos? it wasn't like any of them to disappear, and soto's left to face the grim prospect that they might not be returning.

there's an implicit understanding in the cartel surrounding unexplained absences and it goes something like this: enfrentar al jaguar. the literal translation approximates to face the jaguar but the natal tone reaches far deeper, broad strokes of linguistic poetry painting the picture of a hunted man surrounded by jungle greens, his stance square as he sees the languid predator in the thicket. hunted meets hunter; wolf meets jaguar.

the jaguar is death, and death is ever hungry for cartel supplicants.

that might make him the sole jefe; soto gropes about blindly in his mental cataloguing of everything that's happened, and decides its time to send word back home. mothership, we've landed. forces here more pugilistic than anticipated - slight casualties expected. requesting expedited reinforcements. 

but who would convey the message?

he winces as he slinks to the ground and keeps both the boy and the crone in his attention. he's exhausted; his cuts rimed with dust and filth. the scabrous wound on his neck has reopened and seeps vile liquid into the earth. soto cleans what he can, retrospectively examining every nuance of his and sangre's position.

he knows he's properly fucked.

piece of shit fucking men. she'd managed for years to elude their heavy swinging fists, and somehow found herself clocked twice in less than an hour.

she worked on a woman, that in her own estimation was a waste of her talents and time. 'sangre', as this man called her, was hardly more than visceral pulp propped up by what must have been a spinal column before a meat-cleaver got its teeth into it. qiao did what she could but frankly, given their situation and her limited resources, it wasn't much.

and that stupid halfwit wouldn't let her do any sort of spell-work. the moment she set aside a tool or changed the rhythm of her work he was upon her with bristling insistence, redirecting her to some other endless task.

superstitious son of a bitch.

qiao had no grand hopes of rescue. as far as she knew, nokht was a fellahin child. what high esteem did royalty place on the lives of pauper children? they hadn't thought highly enough of her either, given the lengthy interest accumulated by the crown's debt.  an extraction mission seemed unlikely.

like all other times her life had been inconvenienced by the unpredictable short-sightedness of men, qiao would have to rely on her own cleverness and instinct. she might include the child, but if it proved too dangerous, qiao's ultimate goal was her own skin's preservation first.

before, her ire had been aimed at the palace. now it sat and simmered threatening to bubble over; growing fat on an endless stream of spite and murmured curse-words, its unattractive eyes resting on the man that had turned her hind leg into piecemeal. an irrational portion of her still held anger for them: this was -- as the thought explained in a voice all-together too composed to be unreasonable --  indirectly their fault. if they had paid their debts, she would have been on her way. akashingo would have been an unpleasant memory -- a blessedly short footnote in the long and ponderous tome that was qiao's storied life.

qiao had lost a lot of blood.

she winced at every turn, but refused to allow him the satisfaction of seeing her agony. there was nothing here to blot the nerves or disguise the ailing body's natural defenses -- she would have to ride this immeasurable pain out the old fashioned way.

at least she wasn't sangre. that girl was unlikely to ever rise from the poorly bed soto made her.

friend is doin work things so I do have a bit of time to write!

Sangre wasn’t aware for much of any of it. The moments when she was, pain was all she knew, and then the darkness would come as a relief because there at least she didn’t have to feel it.

She figured that she was probably dead. She might have been annoyed if she wasn’t relieved because dying meant, eventually, the pain would end for good.

And still, every time she became aware of herself, the fire was still there. Hadn’t it finished already? There was nothing left. How was it still burning?

She didn’t wake up, and wouldn’t fully, for some time. But somehow her heart kept beating. Somewhat to her own chagrine, since living was a tad inconvenient when everything pretty much sucked.

He'd never seen injuries before. 

Especially none so grave as those that littered the bodies of his present company. And himself. 

All he knew were scrapes and bruises. Now he saw bone jutting from beneath mangled flesh, the meat of each of them exposed to biting air. He can taste the bloodsmell in the room and it is unlike any odour ever conceived before. 

Quietly, and through apprehensive eyes did Nokht accept his new reality. He shrunk each time the man snarled a command to the woman he'd been with, but tried to be brave despite it. 

And then the bad man came close.

First, there was panic, even if it was confined internally; the eyes were poor liars. Windows to the soul, so to speak. Well, rght now, his soul was shitting itself for the 5th consecutive time in a span of a few days. When the man reached for his leg, Nokht instictively recoiled, preparing for pain; and he would get it, albeit, not near as bad as it could've been. Though each wriggle of protest was met with a deafening snarl and shove to the hard stone, by the end of it, his fractured leg was wrapped tightly. 

Only through the translatable tongue of the coy woman did Nokht come to the realisation that he was being.. helped. Finally, though the one doing it was the least expected, and least wanted. His bedside manner was horrible, but Nokht was not even going to dream about complaining. He tried to let him work as best he could, with the pain tolerance of a... well... toddler, and even tried to utter out a small mumble of gratitude when the man stalked off to the opposite corner to lick his own wounds. 

He was polite, after all. 

The whelp reconfigured his position, found a place where his wounds screamed a little less, laid half on his side, front paws tucked to his chest. He looked to the redwoman, where he could not tell where fur began and blood ended, and to the doctor tending to her, under duress of the bad man's teeth imminently connecting with the back of her head. 

He laid his head down, and began to drift off in a matter of minutes.

sangre was tended to.

the boy drifts off. he looks like a felled guanaco. folded on his side, limbs under him.

and soto, exhaustion rimming his bloodshot eyes, watches the witch reproachfully. hatefully. reverently.

the good doctor will do her work. soto just oversees it.

it's all he can do as the minutes tick by to stay awake.

but he must not sleep.

not yet. there is work to be done if starglow basin is to be their new home.