5/25/2026, 10:28 PM
Thread is backdated to 5/10/2026. Bao is staying in Jakten whilst healing, after Nyra found her on Jakten's borders severely wounded!
![[Image: 3cffdc614f8365755a476c0de39c8db0.jpg]](https://i.pinimg.com/1200x/3c/ff/dc/3cffdc614f8365755a476c0de39c8db0.jpg)
Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes.
3-3-3 OC
3-3-3 OC
SpeechEmotional Actions Thoughts
Mist drifted low across the mountain paths, curling between Bao’s legs like pale fingers as she limped carefully through Jakten’s territory. The air smelled of wet stone, pine sap, and glacial water — sharp enough to sting her nose each time she breathed too deeply. Somewhere below, hidden beneath layers of silver fog, she could hear the constant rush of waterfalls feeding the great lake at the mountain’s base.
Everything here felt unreal.
Not hostile. Not welcoming, either.
Just… ancient.
Bao moved slowly along the edge of a narrow trail, favoring her back right leg despite Eldritch’s work. The fracture had been set cleanly, wrapped in herbs and strange-smelling poultices that still clung to her fur. Her ribs no longer screamed with every inhale, though dull aches pulsed beneath the newly closed lacerations along her side and shoulder. Even her cheek — torn open badly enough that she’d thought she might lose the eye beside it — had been tended and cleaned until only tender scar tissue remained.
She still looked like something dragged from the mouth of death.
Her body felt foreign beneath all the healing.
The white wolf paused near a stream spilling down dark rocks, watching icy water vanish into the mist below. Her reflection wavered in the current — silver-white fur matted unevenly around healing wounds, ankle feathers dampened by fog, black-striped tail twitching irritably behind her.
Nyra had brought her here.
That alone still unsettled her.
Bao lowered herself carefully onto a flat stone beside the stream, sucking in a sharp breath as pain pulled along her ribs. Eldritch had warned her not to wander too far yet, but laying still inside dens while strangers moved around her had begun to feel unbearable. She needed air. Needed distance from the smell of medicine and blood and pity.
Especially pity.
Her ears flicked at the distant cry of some mountain bird overhead.
The vale below was barely visible through the heavy mist, but she could make out silhouettes of towering trees swaying softly beneath the clouds. The entire territory seemed drowned in fog and quiet magic, the kind that made her fur stand slightly on end without knowing why. Water breathed everywhere here — in streams, in hidden falls, in the lake below that fed the cold air rolling up the mountainside.
Bao hated how peaceful it was.
Peace made room for thinking.
And thinking brought back teeth sinking into flesh. Crushing jaws around her leg. Snow stained red beneath her body while she fought simply to stay standing.
Her claws flexed unconsciously against the stone.
Still alive.
Somehow.
A bitter sound left her throat — not quite a laugh.
Annoying,she muttered to herself.
The wind shifted then, carrying warmer air up from the lower forests. It brushed through her thick fur and tugged softly at the scars scattered across her body, the glowing marks beneath pale fur shimmering faintly for a moment in the dim mountain light.
Bao lifted her head toward the clouds hanging over the peaks.
She didn’t belong here. She knew that much.
But for now, wrapped in fog and glacier-water air, held together by Eldritch’s careful work and Nyra’s interference, she remained standing. Barely.
And for the moment, barely was enough.
But she knew, deep down, she had to leave, her sides were rounded more, slowly, carefully, her sides burned with silent pain from wounds being stretched by the slowly approaching fatness to her. She was a healer, she knew very well what was happening, and she hated it, she didn't want it, them, but..there, was no real way to stop it either.
