Wheeling Gull Isle a tall ship and a star to steer her by

NOTE: Coelacanth has two sets of infected puncture wounds: one at her nape and one at the juncture of her left shoulder and withers.

The flicker of life within the tiny Groenendael burned so low it was a wonder it did not snuff out completely. She did not stir, aside from the irregular fluttering of her thin flanks, and even when she was freed of detritus due to Parthenos’ and Komodo’s efforts, she lay like a cooling corpse in the swirling sands. Hypothermia had already set in thick and she had almost certainly aspirated an unknown quantity of seawater. She was malnourished, exhausted, and littered with purulent punctures that told tales of harsh treatment and neglect — and when the angakkuq’s great crown thrust insistently against the abscesses he could not see, the resulting pain sent a jolt of electricity through her emaciated musculature.

A twitch of limbs heralded the flicker’s eruption into a frail spark — gamine limbs twitched, twitched again, and then exploded into a violent flurry of movement.

Abruptly, the skeletal creature was on her paws, but the weakness of her body betrayed her. She swayed. Wobbled. Her hindquarters gave out and she splayed in the sand, hooking her sharply tapered muzzle to the side as she glared feebly at her perceived aggressors with suspicious Neptune eyes. Unheard, a growl seethed in her throat, but the bridge of her muzzle wrinkled and her velveteen flews lifted in a feeble expression of warning. Somewhere behind the bars of her feralized mind, something stirred at the sight of the Earthstalker — but she merely hunched in on herself, anxiously licking her lips as she listed to the right and just barely kept from toppling over with a desperate stab of one spindly foreleg.