Blackfeather Woods you are young and life is long

@Relmyna @Averna LOOK I'VE BEEN POISONED!! no jk just tags for your reference so you know what's goin on with dumbstara

astara had no name for the plant that had delivered her to ruin. if she had been tasked to designing a name she might have called it hateful pink, for the way it had churned in her stomach and exacted total disintegration her body and mind. never before had something cut through her so wickedly, and left so unclean a mark.

the girl had learned a lesson; to never trust a plant again.

in and out of fevered consciousness she weaved, huddled under the eldritch grove her mother had fashioned for her cubs. astara had wrestled for her tender grasp on life, and at last the hateful pink flower's toxicity had waned, and whatever incubus occupied her sweltering body had seen fit to vacate it.

she was not out of the woods physically speaking; there lingered a malign ataxia that contorted her every action at first, and her delirium was rampant in the days that followed. by the week's end she had regained most of her mobility, and the fever had departed - yet she was still weak and nervous.

she had been sleeping when maegi had arrived, but the voice jostled her from dreams and the nightcub's indigo eyes fluttered open in surprise. focusing on the melonii that had indelibly rescued her from death (maegi was deserving of undying gratitude, yet she would get little from the spidery cub), astara shifted her folded limbs out from under her and glanced upwards at her older sibling. there was no yarrow in maegi's grasp this time -- praise talos or whatever -- but it did little to buffer the suspicion that rimmed under the girl's purple gaze.