Healer Samoset Member
Posts : 49 Join date : 2015-10-21
| Subject: ☼Greed [Open] ☼ July 21st 2016, 19:53 | |
| To say the healer was afraid would be, evidently, an egregious understatement. The heat perforated the air around him like the stench of death itself, ash swirling in stinging gusts of scalding wind. He could feel it coiling in on him, shoving him back and licking hungrily at his singing fur, a gaping, delighted maw whose yawning orange teeth danced and raved around him with a malevolent fervor. He couldn't tell if his heart was thundering through his screaming chest or if it had stilled altogether; he couldn't think of much of anything at all. A logical string of considerations likely would have resembled something like, Run, Find a way around it, through it, get to water. But a pragmatic notion was too much of a luxury to be had; the flames had melted his mind itself, burned and crinkled away that confident facade he so loved to wear. He didn't like what was hiding underneath it. He never had, but it hadn't occurred to him that he had been concealing it. He had admitted it to himself, hadn't he?
He had arrived at the blossom pasture late in the morning, as per usual in accordance with his lazy sleep cycle. Low stocks had driven him into the neutral territories to search for herbs, and he was calmly pleased by the surplus. Marigold thrived in the sun lit field, tansy and yarrow and mint and poppy blooming like lambent shards among the vibrant gold. Placid enough, it seemed, the cyan sky stretching off endlessly above him, so tranquil, in fact, that he was easily compulsed to ignore his duties and lay on his belly among the shifting flowers, his thoughts wandering off to even simpler means. He had wondered how long the summer would last, if there would be something nice enough to snag from the kill pile when he returned to camp. He wondered if he'd have someone to see, or if he would be allowed to wittle his time away sorting out his newest finds. He had rested his head on his paws and glanced lackadaisically up at the bright yellow petals of a butter cup, and he remembered with a silent grin Tatsu's lovely open gaze, that warm plain in which he had derived a great deal of indulgence. Maybe, when I get back, maybe she... Maybe she'd want to talk, or take a stroll...
His meandering thoughts slowly edged off into the back of his mind as a new scent melded with the sweet fragrance of summer blooms, an acrid aroma when it intensified, a violent, smoke he had been certain he had thoroughly effaced from his pelt long ago. He pushed himself to his uneasy paws in tense bewilderment, his eyes narrowed in growing terror as he came to notice a rapidly thickening blanket of sweltering heat engulfing him, and then, on the gray, quivering horizon, a screaming, cracking, thundering wall of red flame.
He sprinted without heed or hesitation, his fur bristled in horror and his shaking body clumsy with a horror that had been born deep within his stomach, gradually rotting him away from the inside as the fire swarmed to tear away the outside. It crashed over the drought afflicted trees in a billowing wave, and the smoke was twisting down his throat, burning and expanding and choking him off from reality. His terrorized fleeing was impeded when a smoldering black tree crashed down vociferously in front of him, and he darted about in a crazed circle, searching desperately for an escape. He sank his claws into the loose soot, his blurred vision a landscape of wavering reds and orange. His breath was wracked with shaken hacking and heaving, and through his panicked focus he could make out nothing but looming shadows against a raging back drop.
And in that distorted haze he glimpsed a graying black entity, a wolf whose frightened expression was far too clear to be real, struggling feebly against the blazing underbrush. Samoset! He screeched, terrified, his tone brimming with a trust that frightened his subject nearly as much as the ensuing flames. Samoset! Please! Where are you?
"I CAN'T!" He cried out in reply, his body shuddering, the burn scar arching across his foreleg screaming with a familiar agony. He curled his body in on itself, burrowing his snout under his paws and folding his ears against his head, attempting in vain to pull himself as far away from the ring of towering flames as possible. "I CAN'T SAVE YOU AGAIN! I DON'T WANT TO SAVE YOU! I WANT TO LIVE! I DON'T WANT TO DIE! I DON'T WANT TO DIE FOR YOU!" |
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