TGB || Aftermath

    Pain.


    Intense, hot, burning pain, like nothing she'd ever experienced before shot through her veins, made her body stiffen with pure agony. Half between consciousness and sleep the young Orange Fire felt herself tossing, turning, desperate to escape the furious pain that seemed to loom over her like a dark cloud waiting to strike her with sizzling electricity, though with each movement it intensified. There was no escaping it. Her dreams - no, nightmares, so influenced she was by the physical trauma she had been dealt, were wrought with fighting, yowling, fear, blood. Everthing was hazy, dark, filled with an overwhelming sense of danger. And always they ended in fire, brilliant, crackling flames surrounding her like a secure, safe cocoon, shielding her from the darkness that threatened to take her over, drown her. And then everything would fade to blackness, no more fire, no more warmth, she was drowning in blackness, alone....


    alone.


    "Fadri..." a quiet, hoarse voice, sounding uncannily like her own choked out a single word, and instantly reality slammed the Orange-Fire full force. Where was she? She was laying in something soft, no doubt moss. Her nest? But the scent was all wrong, lacking the pungeant odor of ash and soot that had grown so familiar over the past few moons. Her muscles ached with a vengeance she didn't know quite possible, her neck felt as if it was on fire not her own. Fire. Why wasn't she in Fire-Tribe? She had so much work to do...


    Bleary, sleep-clouded eyes blinked slowly and let the world in, the shock of the sunshine streaming into the den leaving her temporarily sightless, and she let out a quiet moan as she blinked the iridescent spots away and the memories rushed back. There was a sandstorm. Then an Orange-Shadow. Fadri. And then, what felt like moments later...she was losing her grip in consciousness, the jaws of the Shadow-Triber gripping her neck, the fire to hurt, to kill flaring in her eyes...and then the fire. The release of the life-sucking grasp. A scream, then a quiet threat. Then blackness. Pure blackness, enveloping her, drowning her.


    How long she had been out, she didn't know. The memories still felt as raw and as fresh as her wound, which was covered in sticky, aromatic stuff she didn't care to identify, yet she had no recollection of ever having been brought to Light Tribe. Ugh. She sniffed the air gingerly, then let out a hoarse cough as the aroma of whatever spirit-forsaken treatment the healers had wrapped on her wound. Grudgingly, beneath many, many layers of irritation, she was grateful. She wasn't dead, which was always a relief. But frankly, at the moment, she was in too much pain to care. Too far away from home. The bitter scent of the poultice made her gag, and, never before had she felt so homesick in her life. Muttering something under her breath, she shifted position in the nest, when an electric shot of pain coursed through her body, leaving her gasping for breath and her neck numb.


    With a groan, the normally fervent Fire-Triber, so out of place in this medicinal environment, collapsed once more, her eyes clouded with pain and irritated resolution.


    "Right. I'll just...stay here then."