Firestone Hot Springs come and lay your bones on the alabaster stones

Dated for February 4, 2017.

Thirty-eight days had passed since The Razing of Donnelaith.

Thirty-eight — and Lotte had counted every single one of them as the hours crept painfully by.

At first, she had been too ill to concentrate on anything except survival in its most basic form. Every breath had become a separate, individual battle, and when Lotte thought of those days — the sick, mortifying indignity of urinating, defecating, and vomiting where she lay, unable to drag herself free without assistance; of needing to ask Chusi and Arturo for help when she had contributed nothing to the Family thus far; of weeping brokenly before a stranger who evidently spoke the language of her beloved home and could comprehend her weak gibberish — she wanted to drag Dagfinn back to the Enok Tundra with her and forget these lush wilds had ever existed. Maybe she would have, if not for Arturo and Chusi.

The fire and its ensuing maladies had stolen something precious from the soot-stockinged rogue: her confidence. While it would most certainly be restored in time — she was a soturi and her naturally buoyant personality never let her stay down for long — she found it harder to look Arturo in the eye nowadays. His love for her was unmistakable, and the leaping and somersaulting of her heart made it plain that she reciprocated it fully, but Lotte couldn’t help feeling like she hadn’t done enough to actually deserve it. She’d started walking as soon as her paws were healed enough to allow it — about a week after officially becoming Chusi’s äiskä — but getting her lungs to cooperate was another thing entirely. Three weeks after the firestorm and she still hadn’t been able to sing or speak without coughing, let alone travel with her former ease. She wheezed constantly and her endurance was, as some of the cruder soturit liked to say, “shot to shit.”

Even her mind felt foggy, battered by trauma and illness, lack of nourishment due to the nausea that still came and went, and lack of sleep. Her striking colorpoint pelt was loose and ragged due to the weight she’d lost, but the matte, plush fur had mostly grown back. Still, Lotte looked — and felt — awful.

She awoke on this particular morning in an indefinable miasma of feverishness and agitation; the desire to be with Arturo sang hotly through her blood, every nerve awakened to his whereabouts.

She knew where he was — but she kept to herself.

Lotte was blissfully unaware of the telltale perfume that would broadcast her condition to the wolves around her. It seemed that all she could smell anymore was smoke — and although good sense told her that this, too, would heal with time, she was tired of waiting. She’d never been patient. The weather was warmer now, and she wanted a bath, a meal, and a jaunt outside Teaghlaigh — in that order. She made short work of the first thing, traveling south to the hot springs to soak in the heated water with a delicious sigh. Dipping her muzzle, she preened and plucked at her fur, allowing the steam to act as a veritable nebulizer.