Sheepeater Cliff the earth spins, the world gets more crazy

two weeks it was since she left silvertip; four months since she had whelped her last litter; seven months since she had first noticed a sickness that lingered at the tip of her consciousness like an unspoken malaise.

just until they are born, she bid the cancer that grew under her skin and rippled outward in little veins to her brain. just until they are weaned, she begged as her skin revolted underneath her, howling for its due with a careless hunger not even she could satiate. and then they were born, and weaned, and living -- while their mother slept and wheezed and slowly came to peace with the fading of a body she had once believed was only her own.

so she had left.

she knew, in the way lesser beasts and primal, scurrying creatures of the underrealm knew, that her time on this earth had come to its close. let me die somewhere quiet and alone, where my scent might not attract wolves and my sickness might not infect others, she bargained with the ever-bolder disease that now laid siege to her lymph nodes, her stomach, her throat and eyes -- somewhere quiet and safe.

as if safety was a final right given to those on the terminal-end of life. and so, her consciousness went with her -- silvery and vestigial until she was simply a husk waiting to die, wandering along the lone razorbacked spines of grey shale and rubble.

once-astara had owned this grand notion when she found a spot quiet enough, she would simply lay her tumor-ridden bones down among the stilts of dying summer grass and the bear would come for her. she would close her eyes and he would be summoned, a form black and smoky and tinged the burnt-sienna color of the unknowable void come to claim his loyal servant to her eternal home.

three days hence, and the bear had yet to come.

gone were the hopes of the once-thief, gone were thoughts of her eldest children (how proud she was of both -- sorrowful that they should be split, but proud all the same), faded was that burning and once-neverending love for merrick.

and now, she was astara no longer -- just a rough shaped, monstrous beast straddled between the world of living and dying and cognizant of neither.