that's how i get mine, that's how i get it

~~Andraste~~

In her time at the cliffs, Aure was now familiar enough with blood — the scent, the taste — to have dreamed of it before. It was a frequent rouge to her lips and throat and breast, as it was now, daubed up to the scarred chin as she toiled over Vercingetorix; crescented like a harvesting-moon. Everything before this moment had been wrested aside; her escape from Vonnaruil's vigilance had been something writhing and strident; her arrival had been a hastening, threaded along by the fragments of her beloved's smothering scent. She'd sent up a piercing, airy howl of urgency, of command — and they had better heed her. She could not do this alone.

It was what she did in these moments that would set the foundations for the entirety of this operation. In the mouth, blood mixed with saliva welled up and overflowed; in the dark column of his neck, the tender beneath the square of his jaw had been lain open; the wound was deep, from which blood steadily oozed. There was a good chance of stopping it, and Aure knew it'd been good of her to bring what oak leaves along that she'd scrounged up before her flurry. She was anything but cold; she was hot with agitation and fury. She was grown from the silver roots of Rhaesuial, and she would do everything within her prowess — an heiress, but ever the healer, always —

”Hoist him up,” the argent warbled, her voice snarling-low and letting no room for arguement whatsoever. The words seared themselves over her delicate shoulder to anyone who heard her. Someone had to. Needed to, because she did not have the bodily strength to chariot him on her own. Where in the name of heaven IS everyone?! The herbalist turned his head aside, so that the injury was hers to tend until they moved him; she didn’t need him choking on his own spittle, either.

Bounkola, the moment she'd sighted his devastation and this fall, had departed from all that she was from emotion — from father-of-my-children and love-of-my-life. He was a tenant, first and foremost and for-ever how long he needed these attentions. Damned if he would die before he saw their children. The skayona began to nose and sniff and pressurize what wounds she could reach as she waited without patience for assistance.

Pressure, staunch, clean. Pressure, staunch, clean. One laving of her tongue over the other, her silver brow drawn into feverished, driven concentration. Pressure, staunch, clean; pressure, staunch, clean; pressure, staunch, clean until her jaw ached. Tatters, he was in tatters — ”We need him UP! Clear a path to ze apothecary!” Her throat and breast blushed red, terrible red, as she looked to those who’d gathered; hoping her commands would rattle them out of shock or into action. He needed to be moved to someplace sanitary and she could not do this alone —