Nimbus Summit honey and gunpowder

She had languished for too long. She had healed now, she believed, a month left to herself, being tended to like a whelp.

She was a woman now, her mother had said, before pushing her out of the nest as the flames consumed it. 

Faun sucked in a breath through her teeth, eyes falling to the plants at her paws. For milk, for safe childbirth, all neatly tucked together for her to sort later on, dry underneath the sweltering summer sun. The wolfdog stared at her bundle in dismay, taking another breath to calm the irrationality that caused such a spike of paranoia.

Faun wasn’t that girl. She was a woman. And this woman would not leech any longer. She picked up the bundle again, holding it between her teeth like the flowers and ugly leaves were the most rare, most precious things in the world. And she began her slow, steady pace back towards the way she came, ignoring the quiet ache of her mostly healed rib, ignoring the tender pull of the scar along her leg, so new that she hardly knew what to do with such a thing.