She tossed and turned in her uneasy rest; the stab and bullet wound that shattered her knee had grown dark and gave the sickly-sweet smell of infection.
She’d refused treatment. She needed to. “To accept the help of tyrants is to condone them”, as she’d argued so many times before. They’d forced some upon her, and that would be that.
Being so close to her childhood home brought welcome relief all the same. Collecting moss and mushrooms for apothecaries wasn’t the worst form of forced labour. The Sludge Guards kept her under close watch - but the false security they’d been granted by hearing the shaman’s powers were restrained had made one of them complacent.
Carefully, she timed sneaking the healing herbs she’d need to tend her wounds into her shirt, and learned quickly who had so little regard for life that they’d see her collecting materials as idle cleaning of the materials they needed. She listened patiently to their conversations while pretending to sleep, and snuck a few words out of her fellow prisoners where they dared. It had cost her new welts, bruises and scars, and there were times she praised her youth and her mate’s advice to eat more - to nourish herself, in preparation.
Here she’d wait. Bide her time, rebuild her strength, study her new bindings, whose makings seemed so strangely familiar from her days in the Earthen Ring.
“Everything that is, is alive.” She murmured to herself late in the night, fighting off sleep. She felt the Air on her skin, hands clawing at the Earth, body shuddering from Water’s midnight dew.
A million mentors’ words passed through her mind, but as she drifted off to sleep, she could think only of the Fire keeping her spirit lit - and what the Element had told her long ago.
“And where life is denied freedom, look to me for the flames of revolution.”
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