Caught in a Storm

Walk | Talk | Think

Luck seemed to favor her at long last as she struck out with her hind leg. Though clutched securely in the mouth of her attacker, the small wolf had apparently not anticipated much fighting back. Catching him off guard, his grip around her leg slackened as she felt it tumble out of his mouth into the mud and mire below. Pain flared from the open wounds upon her leg, stinging even worse as the driving rain water pelted her and seeped into the gashes, rivulets of red diluted blood flowing from her leg.

Injured and in pain, she was at length free, and she needed to act on it before the crazed Domovoi got a second wind and decided to try a different tactic while she struggled with her new found handicap. Gripping and praying for purchase through the mud, Ashtoreth pushed herself with a blatant wince to her feet, gingerly holding her injured hind leg aloft above the slippery ground. It was trick and precarious, particularly since even with all four paws firmly planted in the soil she could have still easily slipped, but miraculously she got to her feet and kept them, wavering a little as she widened her stance rather awkwardly and tried to balance on three legs.

With no chance of making a run for it, the lean grey wolf lowered her head and bared her teeth, hackles rising in the best stand against attack that she could muster. No doubt she looked more pathetic than dangerous sopping wet and favoring an injury, but it surprisingly seemed to do the trick. She could almost see the look of worry that ghosted through the mad wolf's eyes, a moment of sense seeming to wrap around his mind, and with frantic, scrambling motions he was gone.

All pretense of defense and fight that she had given crumbled, and her body nearly followed suit. She slumped, lowered her head and closed her eyes tightly against the pain in her leg. The immediate danger was gone, but there was no telling what damage he had done to her. It hurt far too much for her to know just by feel alone, and with the rain matting fur and blurring blood there was not much room for her to make any judgment. Every fiber of her being longed for her to crumple there upon the ground, but she resisted, knowing the safest place she could possibly be was back inside her pack's territory, curled up inside of her den or, preferably, with a healer to tend to her new wounds.

Limping and wincing with every step, Ashtoreth turned herself around, pausing briefly as she blinked her gold and purple eyes against the downpour, before she picked and direction and awkwardly hopped with slow and easy steps toward what she hoped was home.

-Exit Ashtoreth-