Northstar Vale unzip my body

anyone who might be kicking around the healing den, looking after this little shit

She dreamt. Little of it made sense— brief lapses in time, perhaps, strung together incoherently—incoherence being the pun of the running joke in her life. Poppy—painkillers—applied to her between waking hours, where her hollow eyes played the perfect patient, accepting whatever was administered to her. The change in dressings—the potent scent of medicinal plants and blood—sharp with iron. One scent distinctly missing—Reyson’s. Understandably. She had saw the pain in his eyes despite that he had not looked to her—what had Germanicus spoken to them?

She did not know—she could not ask. Not yet. Instead, she slept, a state of dream and pained wakefulness, but it was always the fever that brought her further in murky depths, stirring her to an unconsciousness that left her unresponsive.

In her dreams she would see him—inked black—feral in his stance and voice, the deepest of rumbles when he spoke in his northern tongue to her. Pulling her to him—emerald eyes that had drawn her in from first glance, when he had led her with the wolves of ravens and mountains. Solpallur, her mind cried—did it echo in her fever with her voice? He trailed his kisses along her jawline—and then the woman he had brought with him appeared behind him—heady in her scent of him, carrying his children—it should have been her, should have been Engi! ‘Go to him, Engi. Go to Solpallur,’ Stjornuati had rumbled with humor. A joke to them, perhaps.

And she had clung to her suneater. Cried in his arms and quaked with grief, even as his forehead had found hers, unsure how to console her. “Engi, home,” she murmured aloud now, the fever causing a twitch in her paw—otherwise she remained unmoving. “Is Hrafnsvaktin still home to Engi?” It came from her lips as a keening cry then—and as she spoke them, sweat found its way upon her brow, and her eyes shot open to the world of the living—it was not the sight of the inkjet north man that greeted her, nor the sloping grey of the mountains. It was the roof and sides of the healing den—and for a moment, she found herself quieted, mourning.