---

Saga rocked on the back of... someone. Sometimes it was black fur, sometimes white, sometimes silver and red. Sometimes Saga was coherent enough to pay attention and.... most times, she was not. Her wounds were great, and only between luck and the scraps of moss she told the others to shove in the gaping lacerations did she make it home at all. Had it been an option, she would've asked them to find a chunk of bark big enough to drag her, but that would not have sufficed up the mountain. As it was, she was lucky she only had to walk sparcely, when carrying her was impossible. Even then, she needed someone on each side. She shook and panted with fever before the end of the first day, halfway home, and longed for Eldritch's wisdom, too weak to go looking for herbs herself. It took two to carry her, the wounds on her undercarriage so great she could not just drape like a pelt over one.

But the smell of Jakten woke her.

The scent of Jaxxon heavy against her senses.

She shifted, tried to lift her head, but the crackle of half-scabbed, half infected wounds stopped her; a whine keening from her bruised throat, jagged with wounds and patched with moss and spiderwebs. The sound reverberated deeper, and the flex of her stomach muscles made her flinch even harder -- the even deeper wounds crossing over and over again there stretching, pulling, cracking and oozing with the same half-infected and half scabbed dilemma; wounds desperately trying to heal but dirty and foul. Her eye fluttered open, and she was reminded that there was now only one -- and, go figure, the one her Mother had already mauled. Couldn't erase that memory at least, oh no. A ragged, gaping hole was all that remained of her right eye, tattered above and below and beside and -

Saga sucked a slow breath through her teeth, dizzy with the wave of pain that followed the panic. She wanted to tell someone to call for him, for her mate, the love of her life -- but she knew it would hurt. Her gaze flickered elsewhere, around her, that single crimson orb desperate for someone who understood.

Idly, she wondered if Ezra and Amunet had made it back without fuss, and how they were. She wondered how Frigi and Calixte had been in her absence. If Nyra missed their lessons every day -- how long it would be until they could start them again, considering she would now have to compensate for her new situation.

Saga shuddered a sigh and closed the singular eye once more, trembling, silent.