summer's bounty gone sour
summer yr 21 solo healing seasonal
09-29-2024, 04:31 PM
As this was her first summer, Lore didn't know that it was currently unusually hot. She just knew that it was hot. There was a bit of discussion among the pack on how to keep their herd animals cool, which fruits to harvest when given the current weather, and how to manage some of the symptoms certain pack members were experiencing. Lore could pick up on the overall tension and she was hesitant to add any of her concerns to the mix, but the scrape she'd gotten on her tongue was still opening up occasionally. She really didn't like the taste of her own blood. It was a deep, primal hatred - the sensation that she was wounded and needed to be fixed, over and over again each time the cut opened. But in the grand scheme of things, when everyone was talking about heat stroke and bad harvests, it seemed like a tiny concern. She packed her anxiety over the scrape back inside of herself and set about trying to figure it out on her own. It couldn't be that hard, right? They had begun group healing lessons with mommy recently and gone over some basics - things like how to fix minor scrapes and bruises, just like what she figured had happened with her tongue. But the heat had also wilted so many plants. When mommy had laid out the example herbs from her stash to teach them about staunching blood flow and encouraging healing, she'd asked them to only look and not touch since they were precious right now. It was getting harder and harder to find them. Lore sighed and blew out her breath, only to taste the acrid tang of her own blood again. "Ugh..." she grumbled. Well, there were a few things Theory had talked about that she hadn't had examples of. One of which was ground up and dried seeds of a tree that wasn't supposed to bear fruit quite yet. But maybe the heat had caused it to produce early, just like all of the other crops? Lore wandered towards the edge of the orchard where her mother had said they could be found. At the edge of the scrubby forest bordering the orchard were trees that had strangely shaped, green and brown fruits called pawpaw. Some had already fallen and gone rotten like so many other different fruits in the orchard. They looked small, like they'd dropped earlier than they should have. Lore hummed as she scraped the fruit off and saved the seeds, carrying them wrapped inside of a leaf in her mouth back towards their den and Theory's healing kit. Once she was there, she laid out the seeds in a sunny spot and waited. With the heat like it was, it should only take a few days for them to dry out. --- When the seeds were ready, she ground them up with a mortar and pestle to make a fine powder. She had only been able to save two. Her tongue should have healed by now, but she kept worrying it with her teeth and so the wound kept reopening. There was only a small amount of powder and she wasn't sure if it would be enough. Lore rifled through her mother's stash and took a small amount of miscanthus grass, which she seemed to have quite a bit of compared to the other supplies, and then sat very still with the combined poultice in her mouth. It tasted horrible. Lore's eyes watered at the bitter taste but she tried to practice some of the prayers Thalia had begun to teach them. It got all twisted around in her head, the words coiling in on each other until they stopped making sense. Once she figured it had been enough time, she spit out the mixture a good ways away from the den and then buried it for good measure. She was strangely self-conscious of someone finding her little experiment gone wrong, and she wasn't sure she could handle a well-meaning lecture from either mother. The thought made her cheeks heat up from the sheer embarrassment of it all. While lost in thought, she realized that it had been a little while since she had felt the wound in her mouth bleed again. That was a good sign, it had to be! Lore resisted the urge to worry at it with her needle sharp puppy teeth, although she desperately wanted to. There was something comforting about it, even if it brought her discomfort. Mommy would call it a bad habit, probably. It was something that hurt you, but you just couldn't resist doing it. Lore thought maybe one day she'd end up with more of them if she couldn't stop herself now from reopening this little cut over and over. She stepped back to where she'd took out her mother's supplies and tried to remember exactly where everything had been before she'd messed with it. The mortar and pestle had definitely been tucked away... but the jar with the miscanthus grass had been a little easier to reach. Lore fiddled with it for a few moments until everything seemed to be perfectly back where it was, with neither mother the wiser. wc: 874 speech |