melancholia

Morganna loved rainy days. She trounced along quite happily, bounding from one puddle to the next. Her mother would fuss and scold when she returned home, and in the coming days, if things became humid, mushroom growths would explode over the parts of her fur that had been the dampest, up in the pits of her arms and down between her toes. For now she was only sporting a few small growths at the right corner of her lips and out of her left ear. It made hearing hard, but there wasn't much new in that.

The way the trees twisted almost seemed to make a staircase to the sky... And while climbing wet trees probably wasn't advised for grip reasons alone, the girl with her ravens leading the way wouldn't be deterred. She managed to follow their hopping up at least three branches before disaster struck, a slight patch of slime sending her careening forward, overbalanced and down, down to the ground. She yelped as she made contact with the ground, she hadn't fallen from a great height, but the force of her fall had been enough to knock the mushroom loose from her ear. The glowing green ooze started to trickle from where the growth had been, and her ear burned, and rang and throbbed hard enough to bring tears to her eyes. But she shouldn't cry. She mustn't. She isn't a baby anymore.

The child grits her teeth. At least the falling rain provides some cover for her tears.