She had been out foraging on the moors east of Fletchersgate on a wonderful day out in the cooling Last Seed air. It had been one of the cubs she saw first.
Uh ... oh, Azuyia thought.
Sure enough, she turned around and a fifty-stone mother and two more cubs appeared a few paces away. She took a breath and closed her eyes, preparing the animal chant all Bosmer knew, when she felt the breath of the mother bear and the crushing pain through her right side. The bear had taken one swipe at Azuyia and torn through her robes to the collarbone and right shoulder, missing mostly but claws raking deeply enough. She gasped and struggled to focus on the internal signs, and she felt teeth clamp down on her right shoulder immediately. The force of the bear's bite forced her almost on her face. The pain of the bite and racing pulse knocked her wind, interrupted her chant, and it took every discipline to regain concentration.
Mother ... sister ... please let me go, she called out to the bear from the bottom of her soul.
She fell on her back and the bear stood on its hind legs over her, and let out a roar in front of the cubs.
Get ... away ... from my children ... elf, she heard the bear's voice in her head.
Azuyia was so confused with pain and heightened senses that she turned around and ran without a thought. The chant was not going to last long. She dashed straight for the closest part of the cart road leading into Fletchersgate. The wound bled badly. She could not make a salve from anything she had collected, not right there in the field, and knew the blood loss could kill her, so she pulled her robe over her head and rolled one arm firmly in her fists. Going to one knee after taking off her tunic, Azuyia pulled the scramasax out of its sheath and started the flame from her palm facing upward, held the blade over the fire as long as she could sustain it. Biting down on the arm of her robe, Azuyia held the smoking blade to her shoulder and closed her eyes through tears as it burned the wound as best as she could concentrate, then let the robe fall from her mouth, falling on her back to breathe. She repeated the process and gasped through tears as the hot metal burned her skin.
Azuyia woke up suddenly from the spot sunken in a hillock where she had wrapped up in her robes and passed out into an agonized sleep. She stood up, stumbled, and it wasn't the bear she heard coming near. She scanned the tops of the tall grass in the moonlight, and that's when she saw another observer from the high moor country that stretched for miles in all directions. It was difficult to see, but she heard its breathing and a low growl.
The wolf had circled off to her right. She could not call out to an animal again until the following day, so this one would not listen to her, and it smelled blood. Smaller summer game were not as plentiful. Azuyia had not seen any rabbits or foxes the entire day.
Azuyia limped along the trade road. The nightmares, wow, the nightmares. All abandon, all abandon, all abandon some weird man in a fur and claw waistwrapping and bloody markings from chest to forehead incanted, kicking feet up in a dance, waving both hands out to his sides while dancing in front of an obscene phosporescent temple face and surrrounded by snakedancing women in animal skull masks chanting something else. She ran to a gathering of vaguely recognizable faces, who? Who? They looked at her, standing there as if waiting for something.
Only a little bit further. Her shoulder ached and buzzed with the pain of ant bites, and stiffness had spread down the right arm. The pain had long since departed that point of wanting to cry or be anxious about what more was coming. Now Azuyia trudged slowly towards Fletchersgate's first guard post with her vision darkening at the edges and ears ringing.
Please tell me somebody help me somebody have ...
Blink. Something ... smells ... freaking GOOD. Uuuh ugh!
"Hey, heyyyy ... slowly, child," she heard a voice say in a southern accent and felt a hand press her breastbone. Azuyia blinked. She stared up at a firelit beam ceiling, a woman's face. "Take it slowly. Your body is rrecovering."
"Wha ... whaat?"
"Slowly, here."
She felt a strong hand cover the back of her head, pulling her until she was almost sitting, and then guide her head back down on a raised, firm cushion. The woman sat down next to her, a Nord, probably in her fifties with bobbed sandy hair. She wore a deep blue apron over a worn, brown workday dress with the sleeves pulled up to the elbows, had corded forearms with protruding veins.
"Here, can you rraise your hands?" She held a cup of something out.
Azuyia thought for a moment. Oh man, c'mon, up! She felt the fingers in her hands, moved them, flexing them out stiffly, then pulled them down at the wrists. "Okay ... I'm ... trying. What is this?"
"Bonebreak feverr, and the vorst I've ever seen. Yah're lucky."
The Nord woman got up and put the cup on the stool where she had been sitting, standing with her arms crossed. "The vatch brought you to me three days ago, said you passed out right there on the grround." She walked over to a low table next to a trunk across the room and gestured to a pile of fur draped on the one chair and table. "You had this across yahr shoulders still vet," she said with only a slight smile at the corners of her mouth, "and this," lifting Azuyia's sheathed scramasax in one hand as if it were a table knife, "appears to have been your arrmament for a volf-hunting expedition in that," she pointed at Azuyia, "your, let me guess, night gown?" Now the Nord woman was not smiling, and put the blade back down on the table next to the piled fur. "Mind telling me vat a kid from, vhere? A Vhiterrun potato farm is doing out on the Falkreath moor hunting volves widda a fekking knife?"
Azuyia didn't feel enough blood running through her veins to be much tiffed at this. She could get her forearms across her body enough to shift towards the cup on the stool. Just a minute, maybe a few more. She shifted on to her side and looked at the Nord. She had heard this tone in other Nords ever since she had reached Skyrim. For one, they did not like or trust magic, and so her tone was nothing new. Mind you not all these rocky bounders with the blunt speech and very often even blunter manners went out of their way to even notice a foreign novice.
"I was just," she swallowed drily, "taking a hike from the Colleg..." she almost got out.
"Oh, beautifuul! And you strriplings expect emergency crews vhen you step out for a saunter in the rreal vorld?"
"No ... ma'am ... "
The Nord walked over to the iron soup pot suspended on a rack above the fire, stirred. "Lissten, gehll," she said in what Azuyia found to be a gorgeous Nordic accent, something about the trilling to an otherwise matter-of-fact sound, "the moors may look prretty with all the flowahs and heathah, but they are deadly, full of big game just like that beah you stumbled on, and the volf," she motioned at the pelt on the table. "And cats, did you know that?"
"Yes, I've seen one before."
"Then you know," she continued stirring and added a pinch of something from a jar on the lintel into the pot, "you'd have no chance vatsoeva against one." She put the ladle on a plate, turned towards Azuyia. "Neverr, everr go back out on the moor alun. Ve've lost folk in this village becoose of that, you know?"
You would think it were prudent not to walk around a neighborhood with open handheld flame jetting up a few feet in the air, or scry your way in blinding blue light to the misplaced tundra cotton manifest some shopkeeper paid you a septim to locate across town. If nothing else, it's showing off, and Nords may be blustery people but in Azuyia's encounters with them they also don't much care for braggarts.
For a Bosmer, illness from a wound hit far less often and with less severity than for the humans. It was a genetic adapation, and part of elementary medical knowledge that the peoples of Valenwood had acquired in the densely-forested nation. The sheer variety of plant life the generations of Bosmer lived amongst, consumed, cultivated had given them an immune profile that continued to astonish Nordic physicians. For that reason, many of Azuyia's kind became doctors of one sort or the other, from restoration specialists out of Winterhold to midwives and village alchemists. If a seasonal bug or the dread cyclical plagues raged through any given area, it was the Bosmer withstood sickness the best. Thus, up to this point in her life, she still listened intently to the stories her Nord, Redguard, Breton, and Cyrodiilic colleagues told about that case of influenza that they had had for a week in childhood. Azuyia had rarely experienced much of what most Skyrim humanity accepted as a fact of life, including infection.
