The first records of our young world were those of tears and blood;
its last records will be those of tears and blood also.
its last records will be those of tears and blood also.
The witch doctor was nothing if not savage, nothing if not the embodiment of all that crawleth upon the earth. She healed out of a desire to understand and dressed out of a desire to emulate, and she had not survived her second birth by being weak. Her body may falter, but her will knew few equals. Fuck the rocks - they would move if she willed it, or Vespera help whatever stood in her way.
I want to go home. Atatu. We go now.
She might have bent to the relief she felt at hearing his voice, but such did not reach so far as to break the feral intensity of her concentration. She fussed over the swarthy old bear like a mother hen, blocking him with her shaggy body even as he made to rise. "Sit," she huffed, nosing him with the toothy end of her snout and hardly flinching as he spattered her skull with a spray of bloody snot.
The witch doctor did not balk at blood.
The witch doctor was blood.
She eyed his oozing hip with a disapproving growl, grinding her tusks against the teeth of her mask. It would do him fewer favors than a club foot did her, and a proper poultice needed proper mud. All she saw here was rock and stone and business-formal trees eyeing her through the mask like judgmental herons. Her shaggy coat bristled impatiently.
She drew a sprig of dried yarrow from her herb satchel, pausing for a moment to weigh her options before grabbing the herb in her mouth and pulverizing it between her teeth. After a moment of vigorous chewing, the spotted mare spat the majority of the contents directly into Turhan's gaping hip wound and pressed it deeper with her chin before doing the same with the remainder to his nose. It was no match for a poultice prepared properly with hot water, but it should staunch the blood and keep his wounds from festering on the return journey. "You stand now." The bitter taste lingered in her mouth, far more offensive than the old-metal of his viscous blood, and the comical wags of her tongue were completely lost on both the diligent healer and her blind patient as she saw to the remainder of his mainly superficial wounds.
"Kenkéknem much strong, break um mountain. Mountain hit back." Whether that was meant as praise or rebuke was not entirely clear. Certainly the witch doctor would have preferred not to run pell-mell across all of Novus to exhume her mentor, but his persistence seemed as sure as sunrise, and the blessings of Vespera upon him must have been immense indeed to deliver him thusly conformed after such a calamity. "Right me fix um hip at home, no worry."
The dusty mare tilted her skull-masked head at him, squinting as though trying to place the wrongness of his appearance beyond the mash of herbs and saliva caked into his muzzle. The silence threatened to stretch, then -
"Ah! You drop cow horn."
And of cours they could go nowhere without it, for the witch doctor of all horses knew how fond he was of his garb. With somewhat less energetic effort than before, she turned her attention again to the rubble that had entrapped him.
The Witch Doctor
there are no grotesques in nature
there are no grotesques in nature
@Turhan, @Random Events
