Wapun Meadow all time low

this is, officially, the worst day of her life. 
bleeding, smelling of urine and mire and terror, she careens through wapun meadow. it is a desperate, wheeling flight; every dozen meters she stumbles, falls, and surges upward again. the left side of her vision is blood and darkness, the rhythm of her steps uneven, stumbling; her right hind stump twitches wildly but does nothing to assist her flight. 

finally, she falls again and does not rise.

Tuathal smells her before he sees her: canine, framed by the the too-familiar choke of blood. His legs begin to shake, and he considers making quick adjustment of his course - a sharp turn to the right, to leave the blasted East behind -

Until he sees her body.

He catches himself... and he is certain she is dead. Dead, like the corpse in the snow. Dead, like Ceara. Nothing good will come of this. And yet, he closes the space between them. He trembles. The world holds still. Nothing good will come of this - and he leans in to stretch a paw toward her with eyes long shut, easing forward until he feels a touch of warmth to warmth. He gently prods - yanks away - peeks through the slightest crack - and waits.

exhaustion is an easy thing to slip into; the slowing of breath, of heart, of life. it is easy, slipping away, until it's not.

the wolfdog groans, curling in on herself in the manner of a spider, when something prods a shoulder. her body is too tired to feel nausea, to whine, to tremble, and so she only groans, squeezing her eyes shut and drawing breath. it's too much, all of it, more than she'd ever think she needed to endure.

She... she lives?

Tuathal's eyes spring open the moment the girl shuts hers, and, in some sort of primal instinct, or maybe just a neurotic response spurred on by the sheer surprise of holy moly she isn't dead, Tuathal parts his jaws with the quickest yelp and skirts away with a straight up and backwards jump.

Now that he isn't too afraid to look at her, he absolutely wishes he still was. Her bloodied rear curls inward and tucks beneath her body, concealing the wound that he supposed stained the snowbank red. Blood cakes her face, and he feels her fear, in the simple way she makes herself so very small. He wonders, what has she done... Tuathal crawls forward again.

"Hey, kid... hi..." his voice is gentle, but full of cracks. Ibis floods his mind. "...can you talk?"

the reaction, the crunch of paws on snow, she is numb to all of it. there are only the blinding pain and the exploding lights behind her eyes, the thrum of her heart. a long moment passes between his words and her response; only a shifting of her bleeding body. then, finally — "it hurts."

He holds himself in worried silence. If not for the shift of her body, he'd still think her dead. She speaks, very much alive... though he still wonders, for how long.

"Yeah, I know," he mumbles, and refuses to entertain the shadows that tear along the rim of his thoughts. He must focus on the girl. He is no healer. Shoot, that's Ceara's forte... out of the corner of his eye, he wonders if he might glimpse her ghost -- if she might arrive, might bestow him, for once, with something other than that lingering sense of guilt -- but the landscape is white, as barren as ever.

He's on his own, and he swallows. "What... mmm... shoot, I don't... where do you hurt?" uncertain if he really wants to know - and already wonders, if that healer at whatever-Gorse-head might have enough heart to take her in...

He imagines Ibis would.