Ravensblood Forest before the devil knows you’re dead

Lotte has collapsed midway between the “y” in “Stavanger Bay” and the “g” in “Gyrfalcon’s Keep”.

However, since this is technically her joining thread for Teaghlaigh and I assume she will make it to Ravenblood Forest eventually, I set it in Teaghlaigh’s forum.

I am tagging @Arturo because she has heart eyes for him, but anybody is welcome, of course!

---

Fire.

Lotte, child of ice and snow, had sung of fire, alluding to the warmth of the hearth, the flickers of passion, the heady blaze of battleglory — but she had never heard it screamed by the myriad dying voices of both predator and prey. She had never felt it in an acidic lick against her skin. She had never smelled it in the burning stench of fur and flesh. And as she awoke, jolted from a dreamless sleep by all three of these things, she tasted fire upon her tongue — the ash of the ruined sequoias, the burn of venomous smoke within her lungs. She coughed, involuntarily dragging more of the putrid air into her lungs, her argent eyes swollen and streaming as she stumbled blindly through the trees. A fearsome cracking and snapping had devoured all the ambient noise to which she’d grown accustomed, and it drowned out the sound of Deirdre’s command to flee — but as Lotte wove her way unsteadily through the waking nightmare, Starbuck’s rallying cry struck the air.

Turning wildly, desperately seeking the flower dancer, Lotte was swallowed up by another fit of coughing as around her, trees crashed to the ground and filled the air with firefly-like embers. Fire was ravenous, and He closed in on the smoke-and-shadow rogue with nefarious intent, the branches of flaming trees groping greedily for her. “I got a little too close, and my eyes got burned,” Day’s words returned to her in a rush. I wonder if Deirdre was able to heal him, Lotte thought inanely, as Fire cackled and hissed and paralyzed her with fear. I don’t want to be blind! I want to see! I want to live! She was made wild by her terror, but her paws felt rooted to the spot — and it was only when a spindly branch detached from its mother and drew a line of smoking ash down the young wolf’s sensitive flank that she found herself able to move at last.

“Dagfinn!” Lotte cried out absurdly, running haphazardly through the destroyed sanctuary, “Artu — ” and the breath whooshed from her lungs in another fit of coughing and retching. The air around her was black and thick, but Lotte barely noticed it — in her nonsensical attempt to prevent the chronic ocular damage Grayday had suffered, she ran with her eyes squeezed mostly shut. Crashing through the brush, her paw pads blistered and blackened, her dove gray flanks singed and yet aglow with flickers of flame, Lotte realized that there was no way to safely reach the paprika-peppered coywolf. The way she’d attempted to take spelled certain death.

Neither, though, could she turn back.

In desperation, Arturo’s betrothed hurtled toward her love — toward Teaghlaigh. Having survived the razing of Donnelaith, she stumbled across the sand she loathed; yet just after she passed through the protective ring of black rocks at the northern side of the Blackrock Depths territory, she collapsed upon the earth in a stinking, smoking huddle and knew no more. Patches of missing fur along her back, flanks, and tail revealed angry crimson burns and blisters, and the flesh of her paw pads was visibly sloughing. Her sides rose and fell, but the plush quality of her thick pelt was reduced to threadbare bristles. Even the thick fur that formed her scarf-like ruff was sadly diminished, replacing her buxom appearance with an odd fragility.