[SRP] A Leg to Stand On (Parvati + Ailbhe)

[elfstar89]

Solo RP between my Soqs Parvati and Ailbhe. Please do not post. Parvati posts in Red, Ailbhe posts in Dodger Blue.

Parvati walked peacefully in the growing twilight through the hills near the mountains. She had gone off to visit her son, who had seemed down lately. But at least the visit had gone fairly well, and he'd seemed a bit brighter by the time the visit was over. He had a happy relationship, he was still very much in love, and they still sang together. Honestly, she was quite happy for him. And he was happy to see his own mother happy in a long-term relationship of her own. And now she was coming home. Tsong Tsong was waiting for her, after all.

She smiled serenely. Her son and his childhood sweetheart were happy. The trees were flowering. The snow had mostly melted. The stars were beginning to shine in the skies. And she was on her way home to Tsong Tsong. It was a lovely evening.

And then the faint whiff of blood entered her nostrils. The unicorn came to a halt, red nostrils flaring to identify the source of the blood. Someone was hurt. It didn't smell infected. It might not be actively bleeding, it was hard to say. But it was east of her, along a cliff wall.

Turning aside, she picked her way through the stones, delicate black hooves almost dancing up the nebulous trail to the source of blood. It was probably unsafe. Lots of things were predatory. But it could also be someone in need of aid. And, even if Parvati couldn't do much for a more severe injury, she could still do something. It just might take longer, and she might need to patch them up until she could escort the patient back to where Ganesha lived. Ganesha was a good and kind boy, he'd happily help with medical problems. In the meantime...time to check on the potential patient.


Ailbhe, having stumbled out of the cave after apparently failing to complete the parameters of the game in a reasonable amount of time, an unreasonable request given her leg, leaned against a flowering apple tree as the sun set in the west. Inside, she wanted to scream and cry. Her leg was throbbing, the scenery before her looked completely unfamiliar, descending toward a western sea, and she was still lost. How she was going to get home, she had no idea. Frankly, how she was going to find a unicorn to fix her leg, even she wasn't sure. The only mercies were that she was definitely no longer being hunted, and she was no longer in the forested chasm into which she'd fallen.

Right. Small mercies. Look on the bright side. Don't dwell on the seeming impossibility of the task before her.

Then she heard it. A soft, delicate clopping of hooves on the rocky trail that wound generally westward. Hooves. Not paws, not claws. Probably nothing dangerous.

Ailbhe blinked bleary eyes. And blinked her blue eyes again, trying to make sure her eyes weren't playing tricks on her.

No. Way.

Her luck was apparently way better than she thought.

Right when she needed it, a unicorn, draped in a thick blanket, picking her way up the trail.

Sucking a breath, she called out weakly, "Hey! Miss unicorn! Can you help me?"  

[elfstar89]

Parvati came around a bend in the trail to see a flowering apple, underneath which stood one of the most feline Soquili short of a Shifter she'd ever heard of. Feline ears and tail, with occasional watery blue tiger stripes passing over her nearly snow-pale fur. Her eggplant purple silks hung limp and damp, and her sides heaved tiredly.

Parva's sapphire eyes, however, were drawn to the exhaustion in the other mare's sky blue eyes and the way she wasn't putting any weight on one of her legs, which was bent at an unusual angle.

So her nose and her instinct were right. The blood hadn't been the smell of a predator, but a patient in need of medical assistance. And this patient had called out for help.

"Stay there, I am coming!" she called back, pulling the thick wool blanket off her back. The feline mare wouldn't just need healing, she'd need to get dried off and warmed up to prevent her from getting sick. Start warming her up, drying her off, start patching her up, then decide if she was going to need Ganesha for this one.

Ailbhe smiled weakly. "Thank you, miss unicorn," she replied gratefully. A wind kicked up and Ail shivered. It probably wasn't that cold, but, combined with the wet and the exhaustion and the wet silks against her body, it felt colder than it probably should.

As the blanket was brought to her, she leaned into the dry, body-warmed wool blanket, unable to stop herself from sighing in relief. "Ohhh, that feels so good, Miss Unicorn," she murmured. "Thank you again, so much, from the bottom of my heart."  

[elfstar89]

Parvati tossed the wool blanket over the other mare, and used her muzzle to start rubbing it across the damp and chilled fur. For the first time in a while, the unicorn wished she had another Soquili or a familiar to help her dry the poor mare off. Perhaps something to consider in the future. Ganesha had his owl, maybe she might consider a bird herself. But not right now.

As the feline mare snuggled into the wool and her tail unconsciously came up to twitch the blanket around, Parva released the blanket to take a closer look at the injured leg. Broken. It looked clean, and, given how wet the other mare seemed, it was plausible she'd managed to rinse it off somewhere, in cold water. On aggregate, probably a blessing.

"My name is Parvati. I can fix your leg, but I think it may take me a few days, if I do it on my own. My son would be able to help, but it will take more than a few hours to fetch him. And I do not think you should continue moving until I have treated you a bit," she said firmly but gently. "This will hurt, but please lie down and hold your leg as straight as possible. I can try to set the bone tonight, but it will probably take me all night."

Ailbhe's tail had unconsciously begun to help twitch the edges of the blanket, pushing it around areas the unicorn's muzzle couldn't reach. No, not "Miss Unicorn." "Parvati." That was the unicorn's name. It was right to use a person's proper name.

"Ailbhe. I'm Ailbhe," she said softly, painfully and gingerly lying on the ground, bracing her leg as straight along the ground as she could. Tears welled in her blue eyes, as she tried to swallow the pain, but still emitted a muffled cry. She just couldn't help it, it hurt so much, even though she'd been as careful as she could to minimize any further stress to the leg.  

[elfstar89]

Parvati watched her patient, Ailbhe, painfully get herself into position, considering the situation carefully. No time to search for painkillers. And a bonesetting was unlikely to be painless, even with unicorn magic.

"I don't suppose you know how to meditate? No? I'll talk you through meditation. I need you to focus on a phrase or word with meaning to you, and I need you to keep repeating it to yourself until I tell you to stop. Keep it as simple, but meaningful as you can. Don't let yourself be distracted. Can you do that? Yes? Then I'll begin on the count of ten," the unicorn said, laying down on the ground next to Ailbhe.

Parva took a deep breath, focusing on part of the Rig Veda she'd learned as a filly, the passage on the relationship between soma and the sun, she used that as a focus to gather her energies:

Tvaṃ sūrye na ā bhaja tava kratvā tavotibhiḥ |
athā ... ||
Tava kratvā tavotibhirjyok paśyema sūryam |
athā ... ||

Collecting her energies as she repeated those lines softly aloud, she set her horn to Ailbhe's leg, and focused on a mental image of slowly fitting bone to bone fragment, patiently knitting the pieces back together so smoothly that no fracture remained.

Ailbhe shook her head. Meditation? She'd never heard of it, but it didn't sound too hard. Tugging the blanket tighter around her shoulders, twitching the corners to more completely cover her body with her tail, she considered passages that would work, quickly digging through any rhymes she might remember. Keep it simple? Maybe just "Oh frabjous day, callooh, callay!"

She had a few seconds beyond the ten promised to focus before she felt the horn touch her leg. And then it was all she could do to keep repeating the line of the poem to herself through the pain. Ailbhe flared her nostrils, trying to maintain focus. To not think about the pain of bone putting itself back together. Tears slid down her striped cheeks.

But she focused. The feline Soquili had lost track of how often she repeated the line to herself, "Oh frabjous day, callooh, callay!" But, as she clung to the line in her mind, she could almost hear her father saying it, as he had on the rare occasion they'd met. And that sound in her mind...it helped. The warm, dry, thick blanket...they could be his wings, wrapping gently around her shoulders, the words in her mind, spoken in her father's hazily remembered voice, her tail wrapped tightly around her flanks, it might be his tiger-y tail wrapped tightly around her. The embraces he hadn't given her as a foal, because their parents hadn't been close. If he had been involved in her childhood, would it have felt like this? Him wrapping himself around her as a filly, singing strange and silly little poems to her and her siblings?

And the pain ebbed from her mind as she meditated on the simple power of the words her father had given her as a filly. What could have been, had she been closer to her father? Could she find out, one day, once she found her way back to her original stomping grounds? It might not be the worst thing to find her father one day, ask him, find out what their relationship could be, going forward. Neither of her siblings was probably very likely to want to heal that breach; but Ailbhe...honestly, Ailbhe was curious.

And the thought kept her going through the night.  

[elfstar89]

Parvati took a few breaks through the night. All right, more than a few. It took a session to get the fragments aligned perfectly, and few tries to get each piece of bone knit back to another. At some point in the night, she'd found herself getting up, snuggling next to Ailbhe under the blanket, and resuming the healing process.

The first hints of dawn were turning the sky from the deepest indigo to a royal blue by the time she felt the last bit of bone finally affix itself securely and properly to the rest of the bones. Parvati sighed exhaustedly, repeated the mantra one more time, and snuggled closer to her patient to sleep out the rest of the night. More could be sorted out once she woke up and had a chance to check her work. But it was probably good enough for the time being.

She smiled down at the now-sleeping Ailbhe. Given how she hadn't squirmed or cried out or otherwise expressed much pain during the bonesetting, the meditation appeared to have worked. Excellent. It wasn't the only use of meditation, but it was certainly a highly valuable use. It had probably helped the poor mare fall asleep, which was another use. And Ailbhe had needed the sleep.

Parvati laid her head down tiredly, her leonine tail long since wrapped around the feline mare's tiger tail. The bone looked set, but the various cuts and scrapes would need another long session of healing. However, that would be a later thing. Sleep was a higher priority, as she'd be no good to anybody if she kept trying to heal everything in one marathon session.

Sleep...

And with that thought, Parvati drifted off into her own dream of sunlight and honey and the fluttering butterfly wings of her mate.

Ailbhe felt a warm body nestle under the blankets. A momentarily realization that it was probably the unicorn broke her concentration. Frantically, she tried to refocus on the bit of poetry and the idea of her father.

Yes, that was it. The body against hers was her father's, the weight across her body was his wings, the additional leonine tail was his tiger tail, and the voice speaking the poem in her mind's ear was his voice.

And the pain ebbed away again. It was sometime past midnight when she felt herself drifting off to sleep, dreaming of her absent father, singing her to sleep, singing of jabberwocks and bandersnatches and jubjub birds and other nonsensical words.

She woke up, warmer and dryer than she had fallen asleep, with the sun shining comfortably across her spine. Shifting her leg, Ailbhe froze. It didn't hurt anymore, or at least, not very much. It was straight again, a bit cut up, but something that was going to be easier to heal. Smiling hopefully, she nuzzled at the other mare gratefully. The unicorn looked exhausted, her black and red mane falling silkily over her features. Probably better not to wake her up just yet. If Parvati was out of energy, at least, Ailbhe could now keep up until they got to Parvati's son to ask for additional healing. And if not, Ailbhe could wait until the unicorn woke up.

Either way, Ailbhe needed to thank Parvati a few times over: For the blanket, for the healing, and for whatever strange magic the meditation-thingy had worked to ease her pain during the healing process.