Duskfire Glacier down by riverside resting

gjalla watched her with all the stillness of a half-dead lioness, unmoving but ever-aware, eyes fixed not on satori’s face but on her paws—what they carried, what they did. skeptical. the pain was there, gnawing like a barbed wire coiled around her throat, but she did not speak of it. her breathing remained slow. controlled. anything to hide what she feels.

the sting of the elder flowers earned only a slight twitch of her lips, her jaw tightening for a moment. but she did not flinch. pain, she could endure. had endured. what gnawed deeper than fang or fire was the ache beneath her sternum—the helplessness. the shame. she had not died, and she was broken all the same.

“it will scar?” her voice was low, smoke on ice. not a question but phrased like one—seeking confirmation. a pity that it likely would; a fortune that a plumage of storm-cloud fur would hide it again