- Jul 25, 2024
- 18
- 2
- 3
The place beyond the confines of the medicine den is distant and strange. The moor has faded into the background of Lungwortkit's memory, fixed in a state of permanent rainstorm, drizzling and grey. She can hardly remember the paleness of her mother's heaving flank. Her world is one etched in bitter herbs and mournful quiet, the borders of her landscape forged in gorse and sandy earth. The most she has glimpsed of the outside world is the wax - waning glow of the entrance and the strange scents the cats who come to visit carry in on their ragged pelts.
Today, that will change. Lungwortkit feels better than she ever knew a cat could feel; Cotton's ministrations before her sudden disappearance had done their work, and the yellowing veil of illness is lifted from her eye. She is still blind to the havoc she has unknowingly wrecked on her new home, the sickly and sagging bodies in the badger's set distant and unknown to her. To Lungwortkit, the day is good; to one who has never known anything else, the tightness in her chest is standard, as is the way she must pause and wait patiently for breath every few tail - lengths towards her goal.
Her small paws crest the lip of the medicine den's entrance, and her two - toned eye waters insistently against the brilliance of the day's sunlight. Lungwortkit coughs once, as if for punctuation, and makes her way further out into the heart of camp. The world is an assault of sensations—the bright hues that make her eye tear up, the hurricane of scents that make her sneeze, the cacophony of bird - calls and rushing wind and meows that make her flatten her tufted ears. She drinks in the open air like a starving animal, her pink - blushed muzzle cracked open to inhale the dusty scent of the moor instead of the familiar smell of medicine.
" I'm Lungwortkit, " she proclaims to the first cat who catches her eye. She has taken to her expanding vocabulary with the same hunger she takes to everything with, and she aims to show it. " What's your name? "
Today, that will change. Lungwortkit feels better than she ever knew a cat could feel; Cotton's ministrations before her sudden disappearance had done their work, and the yellowing veil of illness is lifted from her eye. She is still blind to the havoc she has unknowingly wrecked on her new home, the sickly and sagging bodies in the badger's set distant and unknown to her. To Lungwortkit, the day is good; to one who has never known anything else, the tightness in her chest is standard, as is the way she must pause and wait patiently for breath every few tail - lengths towards her goal.
Her small paws crest the lip of the medicine den's entrance, and her two - toned eye waters insistently against the brilliance of the day's sunlight. Lungwortkit coughs once, as if for punctuation, and makes her way further out into the heart of camp. The world is an assault of sensations—the bright hues that make her eye tear up, the hurricane of scents that make her sneeze, the cacophony of bird - calls and rushing wind and meows that make her flatten her tufted ears. She drinks in the open air like a starving animal, her pink - blushed muzzle cracked open to inhale the dusty scent of the moor instead of the familiar smell of medicine.
" I'm Lungwortkit, " she proclaims to the first cat who catches her eye. She has taken to her expanding vocabulary with the same hunger she takes to everything with, and she aims to show it. " What's your name? "
