lick your wounds

Eira... It had been mentioned, though not directly to Eira, more in passing between shrewder minds, that a sensible task for the newly announced 'herd of Halyven', would be to build strength in numbers. The young filly had listened to the banter as she’d followed the comforting warmth of Roscorro out of one conversation and into the next; of course, it had never crossed her mind that eavesdropping was impolite. As the cold northern breath of night swept in around them all and the blue girl had bedded down among the warm chorus of their voices to sleep, she explained eagerly to the tiny Eriucla in her ear, that… “we will travel to the portal at first light, Fay. How thrilling to think we could be useful!” Of course, the feather-light orphan which had been her companion since the beginning of Drench, never replied and probably cared little of the tone of her captor. Her empty stomach was knotted terribly with excitement and Eira had struggled to reach the level of rest required for the intensity of the journey she was committed to beginning; but she stirred at the first hint of dawn regardless, and started too quickly out of the ivory ruins of their new home. The going was unsteady. Thrice she became disorientated, however, fought down the fear of failure and recovered the path south in fair time. Not only did fresh kind of courage stir through her mind, but confidence and adaptability were without her knowledge, feeding her mood. She found herself drawn to the quiet beauty of the strange landscape, pulled cleanly from focus by a rustle of water-logged leaves or movement by the periphery; the further they explored, the less she seemed to mind. Eira forgot altogether the dangers which lurked around her in the wilderness, but it seemed not to matter, for not four days later she arrived at her target destination. Slipping under low slung vines and clambering across the protrusion gnarled surface roots, the small, starving creature manoeuvred beneath the glare of the ominous black hole. It was the middle of the morning on the fourth day adrift, that Eira came upon another, a wolf, that provoked an initial surge of fear through her being. In an unfortunate twist of events, however, the clumsy yearling stumbled in her vain attempt to flee his terrifying impression and twisted her right foreleg in the process. “Please don’t eat me!” her thoughts begged frantically and unlike in times past, when such cognition had been pointless, the voice of her stress should have instantly filled his mind. "I am a book of snow, a spacious hand, an open meadow, a circle that waits, I belong to the earth and its winter."

- Pablo Neruda, Winter Garden