Heron Lake Plateau Just smell with your eyes

Raven wasn't really sure what Qui wanted from her. She caught her mate's eye and replied with a shrug, doing her best to advise him although she was still navigating the same uncharted waters herself. "Just...face it?" she replied a little uncertainly, her voice soft as her gaze followed a bird that darted through the air across their path. "Face the feelings head-on. Let yourself process them however they need to be processed. Try to stop blaming yourself in that indirect way you always do." At this, she flashed him a faint grin, nudging his shoulder lightly as she did. "It was Screech's fault they died, not yours. There was nothing either of us could have done." Until the day she died, she would blame the brother she'd disowned for Seagull and Grey Jay's deaths as well as the developmental difficulties Kite had been born with. Whether or not it was actually a result of Screech's attack never crossed her mind. The only regret she felt regarding the boy she'd raised and called her own once was that he was somehow still alive.

"And talk to me," she added a moment later as their aimless strolling took them over a high-grassed hillock dotted with spring flowers, the silence around them punctuated by the humming of bumblebees at work. "The best way to deal with infection is to lance the wound and let it drain. Like we're doing right now." Naturally, the healer saw things through a medic's perspective, but she felt it was a fitting metaphor nonetheless.