Recovery

Walk | Talk | Think

The lean black and grey girl sat just outside her den, her brooding expression staring unseeing ahead. Her attention was not focused without but within, assessing the progress of her body after being given the supposed cure to the illness that had put her out of commission. She no longer shook, which was good. For a while she had felt even too weak from it to rise to her paws let alone be of any real use to anyone. Her stomach no longer roiled and threatened to empty on her, something she was grateful of. At least toward the end she had been able to put the food being left at her den on occasion into good use. And her head no longer felt heavy and dizzy. That had been the worst.

But maybe not nearly so bad as the fevered dreams that had plagued her in her sickness. Nightmares had haunted her dreams, strange sequences that felt odd and off-putting, as well as ones that made no sense at all. She had almost been able to feel them her family had looked so real and whole when they had visited her one night. They had all been there - father, mother, sister, brother - and in her delirium the girl had been willing to believe nothing had changed. She still lived with them, here of all places, and no one seemed to find it strange at all. Of course, the moment of calm dreaming had ended quite violently but even that small moment of having everyone together had caused her to remember it with a discomforting sense of longing. They may have been somewhat broken, even awkward in their association, but that family had been hers. And it was gone.

Callisto had not meant to become distracted by those thoughts brought on by her illness and sent them from her mind with a decisive blink of her silvery blue eyes, so like her mother's she now remembered. It was all fake, the visions, the conviction, the feelings. They were all gone and she was over it. No sense mourning the loss of something she had always found too bothersome to want. With a gentle rocking motion, the girl pushed herself to her spindly grey legs, taking a moment just to be sure that they held her steady, and once sure she began to walk. Without a destination in mind, she padded forward across the uneven, sloped ground, hoping to at least make a turn around the Steppe since she had stayed too long cooped up inside her den and needed to get her strength back.