May The Circle Be Unbroken [Justice]

Justice had holed up when the disease had first struck, not wanting to infect her remaining son or any of the other Valhallans with the painful fungi and nasty ooze that afflicted her. At first she had continued to patrol and take sentry duty, but as the sickness worsened she'd had to give that up too. She was afraid more and more of running into someone on her circuits and not being able to keep her distance far enough to keep from infecting them. She finally had hidden herself in her den, locking the "door" by stuffing it with a heavy plug that all but sealed it off, leaving only enough open that she wouldn't suffocate. She wasn't hungry enough to bother going out to hunt - little did she know that showed that even her digestive organs were being slowly choked by mushrooms. Tonight though - wheezing thickly with the fungal growths that rattled in her lungs and were slowly drowning her with the ooze they brought with them - tonight she had had to claw her way out of the plugged den, hacking and drooling viscous ooze and bleeding from her paws and mouth from wounds caused by her desperate labors. She felt weaker than she'd ever felt in her life, and alone, and the desperate need to get out and to be with someone had smashed through the resistance raised by her worries of infecting someone else. No, she needed... needed... she didn't know what she needed, or how to articulate the driving, all consuming fear that controlled her mind. Staggering nearly mindlessly she found herself drawn to a light in the distance, in the plains. She finally staggered into the circle of brightness around a fire and stumbled and fell to her elbows, barely managing to drag herself back to her paws to stand swaying and coughing ooze-speckling wheezes, blinking half blind around her.