Jade Fern Grove well, i might just replace you with a match stick and gasoline

in the weeks following caiaphas' attack on easthollow, she had spent most of them incapacitated and reeling. the fever that had ransacked her frame had stolen with it most of her fur -- her ears were half-rotted with flystrike, and her muzzle bespotted with caked and dried blood. she had been too sick to even shake her face, fend from the predation of deer fly and their ilk -- they had chewed up her features and ears, and worked in a ceaseless black swarm about her pocked and ugly face.

even her lamplight eyes -- once so full of fierce cunning -- were a dulled and sickly yellow.

caiaphas' recovery came at a glacial pace. she marveled at how a body she had occupied her entire life (and knew so intimately) could suddenly seem so old,  so invalid. gone were the days where she could bounce back from a cut, or dance easily out of death's reach. at one point, she had wondered if this swollen infection would be her finisher -- in the height of her unrivaled delirium, it had certainly seemed so.

she willed her body, aged and frail and lagging, to keep going. she willed her limbs, stiff now with fever and arthritis, to keep churning. she willed her eyes, sorrowed and blurred by perpetual discharge, to keep seeing. to keep eating. to keep breathing. and day by day she had gotten better with @Svalinn's care -- had he not been here to guard her, she like as not would have succumbed to her wounds or the teeth of another.

settling miserably at the brink of a stream, caiaphas hung her paws in the riffling water and reflected at how cruel it was that her mind could be sharp as ever, while her body gradually failed her.