She decides to run away the year she turns 14. There's nothing here for her. She knows her family won't miss her, not really - they have more mouths than they can easily feed, her half-siblings hate her, and Dad - isn't mean to her, but she can tell she makes him sad. 

She doesn't do it right away, of course. Being miserable and scared is no excuse for not having a plan.

She doesn't want to go somewhere with people. People don't like her, and she doesn't like people. She'll go into the Forest. They say monsters live in there, of course, but they call her a monster, when they think she's not listening.

She spends what feels like an eternity preparing. Months of scavenged hours spent gathering and stockpiling nuts and other dried foods. Short trips into the Forest, learning the lay of the edge region. When she can, she trails the old lady who forages in there during the long summer days, taking careful note of which plants have edible roots and berries. 

The winter before she runs away is horrible. It's colder than usual, and as the frosts arrive, her youngest half-sister catches ill and, after a horrible week of coughing, dies in the night. It's not the first time, of course, but something about losing little Imesah breaks her father's heart, and his wife's along with it. He pulls away, cold and distant - she lashes out, and Kaitiaki bears the brunt of it.

(In the privacy of her own head, Kaitiaki mourns, too. Out of all her half-siblings, Imesah had never flinched at the sound of her voice, had let Kaitiaki hold her, had giggled and gurgled in her arms...)

She sleeps as much she can get away with. Pretends she's a squirrel, sleeping through the winter, pulling inward and conserving energy. 

After what feels like an eternity, spring comes.

The butcher's sons have always been horrible to her, especially the eldest. He's quick to anger. She only has to stare at him for too long for him to decide that she needs to be put in her place. 

He doesn't know she's stronger than him, now. Has been for a year and a half, actually. But she lets him win the 'fight' anyways, screeching in pain as he rips a feather off her arm as a trophy, because all she wants from him is his copy of his father's key, and it's clutched tight in her fist, pulled from his pocket in the struggle. 

She stays curled up in the dirt until the sound of his footsteps fade, and then pops to her feet, smiling faintly. She's so close. 

That night, once everyone else been asleep for hours, Kaitiaki bundles herself up in the warmest clothes that fit her, and sneaks out, still clutching the butcher's key. (The butcher's son won't have reported it - his father has a horrible temper, and he doesn't need the key regularly, so he'll keep looking. She'll be safe.)   

Monster that she is, she can see in the dark, better than anyone but the village cats. The town is silent and empty, at this time of night. She likes it that way.

She makes her way to the butcher's shop, all locked up. It opens with a sharp click, and then she's inside, gently closing the door behind her.

As quietly as she can, she ransacks the place. She takes an axe, a vial of oil, a block of salt, 2 long knives, a few large sacks, a waterskin, several lengths of rope, and some dried meats. She also grabs his waxed apron, to use as rain-cover, and lucks out big, finding a flint and 3 silver coins in the big pocket. (She breathes a quiet sigh of relief when she finds the flint. She was ready to take her father's, but she - she's glad she doesn't have to.)

She locks the door on the way out, and leaves the key under a rock. 

The axe isn't as good as a shovel would be, but it's much better than her bare hands. She digs up the waterskin full of nuts and dried tubers that she'd buried in the fall. And then, with all her supplies clutched tight, she makes her way into the Forest.

She carefully makes her way through the thickening trees in the pre-sunrise hours. She needs to get deep enough into the Forest that nobody will find her. She isn't exactly sure how deep that needs to be (it depends on how angry the butcher is, she thinks.)

She pauses to snack on some of the dried meat - she needs the energy. But it's still pretty cold, this time of year and this early, so she needs to keep moving. "Stop to rest in the cold and you'll freeze to death," she remembers the hunter saying. 

By the time the sun starts to rise, Kaitiaki is a few miles into the Forest and still going. She's scared a couple deer and several squirrels, but she hasn't seen any monsters, yet. 

...She's starting to get tired. She needs to find a good place to take her first nap. She slows down (and eats a handful of nuts, omnomnom) and starts looking for what she needs. 

A huge tree towers above its neighbors. It's got a thick trunk, thin green leaves, and strong, sturdy branches going all the way up. It's older than anything Kaitiaki has ever seen in her life. 

It's beautiful. It's the most beautiful thing she's ever seen.

She wastes minutes just marvelling at it, circling the base, her hand touching the bark reverently. 

Ok. Time to get set up. She removes her big coat, puts down everything she's carrying besides the rope, and climbs the tree. It's not hard; she's strong, she's tall, the tree is stable, and she loves to climb.

Soon she's at the height where sunlight is peeking through the leaves, the warmth of it welcome on her skin. She ties one end of the rope around the trunk, climbs back down with its help, and then bundles up all her stuff and ties the bag to the other end of the rope.

Fifteen sweaty minutes later, she has her bag of supplies pulled up and tied to the trunk of the tree, and she's getting to work on a makeshift hammock, made out of one of the giant hanging bags the butcher used to store hides and bones. It's hard work, and she's definitely running out of steam, but she keeps herself focused. She can rest soon, once she's safe. 

It's actually kind of obnoxious to get into the hammock, but she manages it. She turns away from the sun and falls asleep, alone and free for the first time in her life. 

The sun is setting by the time Kaitiaki wakes up, which suits her just fine. She eats a bit of her food, and then packs a waterskin, the flint, and the bigger knife into a bag, and then drops herself out of her tree.

 The river can't be far from here - in the silence of the evening, she can hear it very faintly, in the direction of the setting sun. She follows it. 

The river water is very cold, but she's thirsty! She drinks her fill, then fully fills the waterskin, and starts hunting for those edible tubers she remembers learning grow near the riverbank. 

Her obsessive observation of the village forager pays off, as does the fact that she's deeper into the Forest than the people of the village usually dare to venture. The tubers are numerous and juicy-tart.

Careful not to take too many from any one area, she wanders north by east along the riverbank for almost an hour, until her bag is nearly full. She sings quietly to herself as she does, revealing in the sheer freedom of being alone. 

When she's finished filling her bag, she eats a lunch of tubers, and says a prayer of thanks to the Forest for letting her partake of its bounty. 

... but she gets lost trying to head straight from where she stopped gathering back to her tree, which makes for an increasingly stressful and panicky hour (if she can't find her stuff, she won't be able to survive out here, and she can't go home, they'll never take her back after what she's done, she's going to die out here-)

Then she takes deep breath, decides to stop being an idiot, and heads back to the river.

 From there, it's a simple matter of backtracking southwards (river to her right, it was to her left while she was harvesting) until she stops seeing the holes left by her dug out tubers, and heading back the way she came when she gets there. 

When she finally sees her tree, towering high above the surroundings, rope hanging down invitingly, the knot in her stomach melts away. She climbs up with her bounty (it's harder, carrying a full waterskin and a sack of heavy tubers, but she's strong and has excellent stamina for her age - gifts of her monstrous blood, her father used to say).

After taking a while to breathe (and to eat another small meal), she heads back down again, this time with just a spare length of rope and the knife, and starts searching the immediate area for fallen sticks and small, smooth stones. She has no desire to get lost again. 

As she gathers, she thinks.

She doesn't want to spend much time any further south of here. The risk of someone running into a villager is too high. If they catch her, they'll probably kill her. 

The river is a really good landmark - the rocks and plants along the bank have enough variation that she isn't likely to get confused about where along it she is, even without the tubers. And she can hear it from pretty far away - noticing that she couldn't hear it was part of how she knew she needed to turn around.

What she wants, at least for now, is to explore due north from her tree and make sure she won't overshoot when heading back from the river. Exploring the area will help, but what will help more is if she can leave a trail for herself, or at least a boundary. 

Once she's gathered as many sticks as she can carry in her bag (each snapped to be about the length of her arm), she pulls out the knife and starts sharpening the ends. She's not very good at it, at first, and ruins a few sticks, but she picks up the rhythm and finishes before the sun starts to rise again. 

With her bundle of stakes, she sets out north from her tree. Her monster eyes let her see about thirty paces with no light - she stops every twenty-five and drives a stake into the ground until it's about halfway in, and also stops for a minute to look around and try and find something of note. Interesting bushes here, some unusual trees there, and - oh, a berry bush!

She only eats one, just in case she's mistaken about it being a safe kind of berry - she remembers that bit of advice from the hunter, too. But it cheers her up immensely, and she spends the rest of her boundary-marking journey with her songs on her lips and a warmth in her heart. She loves it here...

The sun is peeking through the trees on her walk back, and the daytime animals of the Forest are waking up as well. She moves more carefully, trying to avoid startling anything (or letting anything Dangerous find her), and makes it back to her tree without incident. 

She falls into a rhythm - waking up, climbing down the tree, exploring the area around her for food and getting the lay of the land, heading to the river for to refill her waterskin and snack on a few tubers, gathering sticks and branches into a big pile near the base of her tree. She wants to use them to make a less precarious shelter before next month's rains start.

She also needs to learn how to hunt before she runs out of dried meat. She's getting better at sneaking up on squirrels, but she's yet to get within grabbing range before they bolt. 

Her days are busy, and she's had the occasional scare where she needed to hide from wild boar or the biggest beetle she's ever seen, but so far, things seem like they're going well.

She's on her way to the river to try out spearfishing when she notices the smell of blood. 

She follows her nose north. 

She hears it before she sees it - ragged breathing, the sound of something in pain. 

It's coming from - that set of ferns, which does seem like it has been disturbed from the other side.

She reaches out and pulls the leaves aside to get a better look.

!!!

grrrrrooooowlllllllllll SWIPE

owowowowowowow!

She cries out.

She hears a quiet sad whine, then more of that ragged, pained breathing.

Oh no, the poor thing... 

She backs away a bit, pours fresh water on her arm (shallow cuts, thankfully) and then holds her other arm over the wounds until they stop bleeding. She makes quiet soothing noises with her mouth as she does (and winces when one of them comes out as more of a screech than she intended. Normally it's fine, but...)

Then, carefully, she uses a stick to push some of the fern aside and peer inward.

The wounded feline there is both too small to be fully grown and also bigger than any cat she's ever seen with her eyes before. 

He's also bleeding from a wound on its side, and another on one of its back legs. 

She's done first aid on farm animals, before. They didn't like her much more than the people did, but she was good at wrestling with them, which was one of the only ways to bandage a wounded sheep.

The cat is hurt, pretty badly, but it doesn't seem like he's lost too much blood. Looks... probably survivable? With her help, at anyways.

She (slowly, carefully) opens her waterskin, and then pours some water (from as high up as she can hold it) into his mouth. He flinches at first, but then starts to drink.

She makes soothing noises at the poor thing, backs away slowly, and then empties the contents of her bag on the ground and hurries as fast as she can back to her tree. She needs him to trust her, and she also needs some cloth to cover the wound. 

(Climbing the tree with the claw wounds on her arm hurts horribly, but she barely notices. It's not what's important right now.) 

She returns to the creature's hidingbush about 20 minutes later, armed with a bit of spare clothing and the rest of her dried meats. She carefully offers him a piece.

(He's doing a bit worse, but still breathing.)

sniffsniffsniiiifffffffffffffffffffff CHOMP chewchewchewchewchewchew...

Okay, good, he can still eat. She sighs in relief. Now for the hard part.

She spends the next hour alternating between feeding and occasionally watering the poor cat, making her best attempt at soft soothing noises, and looking around to see if anything is coming. Each time she feeds him, she brings herself a little closer to his striking distance (slowly, carefully). 

He tenses up a few times, growling, but when she stops at the growls, he lets her continue.

After a while, she's getting her hand close enough to touch, and between snacks, he licks her, weakly.

That's as good a sign as any.  The wound on his leg isn't bleeding anymore, but the one on his side still is. And they both need to be washed. 

"Sorry. This is going to suck for both of us," she whispers to it softly.

She takes the waterskin out from the inside of her warm jacket (she'd placed it against her stomach to warm it up - cold water hurts more and doesn't clean any better), and pours it over the wounds. She's not aiming for gentle (this will hurt no matter what), or for doing a perfect job washing it out (she definitely can't do that), but even a bad job washing a wound can be the difference between life and death.

!!!! grrrowl SNArrrRL kickkickkick!!!!

But he's still too weak to stand, and she has a much better understanding of his range, now, so all he can do is flail in pain, and then look at her in confusion and anger when she finishes.

"There, there." She wishes she could pet him. She wishes she had healing herbs instead of just water and a rapidly dwindling supply of dried meat. She wishes...

...she doesn't have the time to be wishing. She feeds him a bigger chunk of dried meats, and while he's eating it, she places a long stripe of linen over the bleeding wound. There's no way for her to actually apply pressure, he'll spook and hurt them both, but just having river-cleaned linen over the wound should make the bleeding stop.

(He flinches, when she puts it on, but he doesn't knock it off, and after he finishes glaring at her for this latest indignity, he goes back to eating.)

munchmunchmunch yawwwwnnn

She breathes another sigh of relief, and then stops to think about what to do next.

...she just gave away most of her stored meat to a wild animal she's only mostly sure she can save.

That was... not the smartest thing to have done, even if the tubers are plentiful.

But... the Forest has been kind to her, kinder than her village ever was. She wants to be good to it, in return. And she'll start with this poor cat.

She was planning on learning how to catch fish in the river anyways. Now she just needs to do it faster. And she remembers a trick for it...

Her wooden fishing spear isn't especially sharp, but it'll do the trick if she can connect. She practices with the blunt end, aiming at rocks, and learns to adjust her aim for the way the water seems to bend things. 

Then, she crushes the poisonous berries into a thick paste, and places them under a rock, upstream, just like the hunter bragged about doing.

To her relief, he was right - downstream of the poison, the fish start moving slower. Her aim still isn't great, but it's good enough; she manages to skewer four of them before her spear breaks.

She brings her winnings back to her(?) cat friend(??) patient - it's dangerous to leave him undefended, and he might be lonely.

(He perks up as she approaches)

Sniffsniffsniffffff 

(...and is clearly very interested in the fish)

Sure. Fishie for kitty. 

Kaitiaki busies herself gutting the other three, which is gross but not difficult once you know how (which is why she volunteered to do it for her family, last fall).

Then she gathers fallen wood and twigs, spends a little while fighting with the flint, and eventually gets a small fire going, which she uses to cook the fish, piece by piece. (She's not great at it, but overcooked fish isn't unhealthy, it just tastes worse.)

The warmth of the fire is really nice, and she's had a stressful several hours. She ends up dozing off. 

When she wakes up several hours later, the fire is out (she vaguely remembers it being a bad idea to sleep next to an open fire, but apparently it's fine?) and her cat friend is asleep, though he stirs when she yawns and stretches. She eats the rest of her cooked fish and gives him the rest of her water to drink (he licks her hand eee).

She looks at him fondly, blinking slowly, the way the village cats did with each other when they got along. After a moment, he slow-blinks back, and something in her heart melts.

He'll need more food and water soon; she needs to think about her next steps. She can take care of those things at the same time.

Kaitiaki sits by the fire pit and carves a sharp tip on a pair of sticks, both thicker and sturdier than the spear she broke fishing earlier. She thinks about distances and safe storage places and food supplies and how long she thinks she has before the rains begin in earnest. 

When she finishes, she tells her striped friend that she'll be back soon (she doesn't know if cats can learn to listen, but she figures it won't happen if you don't try talking to them) and heads back to the river, stopping by one of the poisonous berry bushes to grab a large handful. 

It's easier, this time. She doesn't break either of her fishing spears, and she catches eight fish before she runs out of berries to slow them down with. Satisfied, she washes the berry juice out of her hands, then refills her waterskin upstream. 

She returns to feed her striped friend two of the fish (she's going to feed him most of this bunch, actually, but she thinks it's better to do it a little at a time.) She runs a bit of water over his leg wound while he eats, which earns her some annoyed growling, but he doesn't attack her or scramble out of the way, which feels like a good sign. 

She doesn't want to mess with larger wound - it stopped bleeding, as far as she can tell, and she's afraid of disturbing that. He's lost a lot of blood already. (Poor thing...)

When he finishes eating, she pours some water into her cupped hands and lets him lick it out. (dumping water on a cat is not a good way to get them to drink, and she does not want him drinking dirty groundwater!)

!!Oh, water!!

Licklicklicklick

D'awwwwwwwww. 

Once he's had enough to drink, she slow blinks at him a few more times, and says goodbye for now. She has some errands to run.

She makes her way back to her tree, climbs it (wincing when she puts too much weight on her clawed-up arm - it's doing better, but it'll take a while to fully heal), and packs up and lowers her belongings to the ground. (She needs to be nearby, in case whatever attacked her new friend comes back.)

Before she leaves, she bows to her tree. 

"Thank you for sheltering me," she whispers.

She ends up taking two trips - one to carry the supplies she came into the forest with, and another to get the best lengths of wood from her gathered pile.

When she finishes relocating all her supplies, she feeds the cat a fish, guts another for herself, and then starts working on (re)starting the fire. She wants to keep this one burning longer - a fire that's gone for a while is easier to start back up, and if she's going to be eating a lot of fish and staying in one place, it makes sense to have a dedicated spot for fire. (She vaguely remembers it being important to surround outdoor fires with a circle of stones? She doesn't remember why, but she'll try to get to it, when she has time.)

Fire: started. Hands: warmed. Fish: cooked and eaten.

Hmmm... She isn't tired enough to sleep again, and she doesn't think it makes sense to go fishing until they run out - meat goes bad unless you preserve it somehow, and she... doesn't know how to do that.

She decides to gather up more promising-looking sticks for her construction pile, and then she'll return to the fire, doing some woodcarving in eyesight of her wounded friend. (Slow blink!)

(He looks up in interest when she comes back into view)

 sniffsniffsnifff 

(and watches her for a bit, but when it becomes clear she's not bringing him more fish right now, he snorts and goes back to napping.)

She doesn't fish, but she forages for more tubers, and also chops up some of the nearby dead tree to feed her fire. Then she feeds her friend another fish, and holds out her hands full of water to let him get a drink, too. 

Then she bundles up between the feline and the fire and lets herself fall asleep, not alone anymore but still free.

The next few days pass in a high intensity blur.

She fishes a lot. (She's starting to run low on the berries, and works on spearing them without it. It's much harder.)

She starts stalking and attempting to hunt small game. (She needs a lot of practice. It's not until the third day that she gets her first catch.) 

She starts assembling the skeleton of her rain shelter. (It collapses. She cries. She starts again.)

She feeds her friend, lets him drink from her hands, and carefully checks on his wounds, which he lets her do more and more. (He's still hurt, but he's definitely recovering. By the third day, he's attempting to stand every few hours.)

(By the third evening, he's capable of standing and moving short distances! He limps over to Kaitiaki.)

Sniffsniffnuuuuzzzzle! licklick. 

!

She reaches out, tentatively, and pets him. He leans into it. 

!!!

She doesn't make any more progress on her woodwork, that evening - she falls asleep curled up against to her new best friend, body and heart full of warmth. 

In the morning, she wakes up to him licking her face. She sits up slowly (she really doesn't want to startle him!) and looks at him thoughtfully. 

"Damisa," she says, after a while. "I'll call you Damisa." 

Damisa slow-blinks at her, and then sniffs curiously at one of the fish skeletons. Food? 

Awwwww. Unfortunately, they're all out of fish.

"I need to catch some more," she tells him. "Do you want to come with me?" 

(It turns out he does! He's still hesitant when moving and limping a bit, but when she heads out towards the river, he's right behind her.)

Kaitiaki doesn't want to mess around with the berries while Damisa is around, so she spearfishes without the handicap while he drinks the fresh water and watches. (He tries wading in deeper, but the cold water on his still-healing wounds does not agree with him, so he returns to the shore.)

She tosses him a few freshly-skewered fish; he snaps them out of the air with delight. It's a delightful way to spend a few hours, and quickly becomes their morning ritual - they stay until he's full enough to start napping at the riverside and she's gotten enough extra fish for his dinner and her lunch.

Then they head back to their campsite (Kait grabbing branches and sticks on the way), where he happily sleeps by her side for several hours while she tends to fire and cuts notches in the long branches as needed for the shelter. (It's going to have to be bigger than she originally planned; it needs to fit both her and Damisa, who's still growing, as far as Kait can tell).

Once he wakes up and she's eaten lunch, they go foraging/hunting/exploring. He mostly watches, at first, but after a few days he starts using his nose to help, nuzzling Kait when he's caught the scent of berries or small game.

She loses count of how many days pass like this. It seems less important than the material changes each day brings: her shelter (nearing completion), her food stores (increasing as she stockpiles the river tubers), and her best friend (no longer limping or wincing, now starting to fish for himself).

He is on his way home with FRIEND when he hears DANGER. FRIEND doesn't seem to notice. He GROWLS. Hey, look out!

...She stops, looking at him; he's peering intently at a patch of brush, still growling, ears flattened back. Huh.

She gets her knife out. It's been dulled by the woodcarving (more precisely, by her inexpert woodcarving technique), but it's still a decent weapon. She peers into the brush, and strains her ears.

She hears... some kind of faint movement.......

Kait barely sees it before it lunges - a huge snake, bigger than any she's ever seen, with wicked fangs, coming at them from Damisa's bad side. She shouts in alarm and it strikes, aiming for his bad leg. She jumps forward and kicks its neck, knocking it away!

She's off balance, though, and as she stumbles, trying to regain her footing, the snake recovers and then bites her leg, hard

The pain is like nothing she's ever felt before. She can feel the venom pouring into her blood.

She screams.

FRIEND is HURT!!! 

He will BITE RIP KILL -

(Snarling, Damisa bites the snake clean through.)

Hands trembling, she pulls the dead snake head off her leg, biting her cheeks to avoid screaming again.

She washes the wound out with water, but the poison is already in her, and the fang wounds aren't small, either. 

She binds the wound with a strip cut off her ruined pants, and manages to limp back to the campsite with Damisa before passing out from the pain.

FRIEND is HURT... Badly, it seems.

He licks her face, repeatedly. She doesn't respond, not even to cover her face the way she does if he licks her while she's asleep.

He is WORRIED. She needs HELP.

...He will GET HELP. 

She wakes and sleeps and wakes, delirious from the pain and the poison.

- the butcher's son, beating her into the ground, stabbing his knife into her leg again and again as she screams - 

Damisa is gone. She calls his name, weakly, and when the only thing she hears is silence, sobs. (She'd thought -)

- Little Imesah, coughing and coughing and bleeding from the wound on her back leg. "Why didn't you save me, Kaitiaki?" she asks in an otherworldly voice. "Why did you let me die?" -

She's feverish. Her arms feel so heavy. Moving her leg hurts so much she almost blacks out (does black out, the first time).

- Her father's wife hits her again and again and again - 

She's pretty sure she's dying. 

(Damisa runs as fast as he can, ignoring the pain in his wounded leg. He travels several miles up the river, where he finally catches the strange, friendly scent he remembers helping Mama, last year, and follows it east.)

He will find HELP and then bring HELP to FRIEND

The friendly scent is extracting salt from hickory sticks over a low simmering fire. "Hello there, little friend, what's the trouble?"

"FRIEND is BADLY HURT! She SAVED me from an EVIL SLITHERER! She NEEDS HELP", Damisa attempts to communicate with feline body language and vocalization.

"Oh, well, that sounds serious." He pokes the fire a little bit and gets up to follow where he's led, whistling for his friend.

The HELP'S FRIEND is BIG and SCARY and VERY VERY DANGEROUS but Damisa will be BRAVE. 

(He's leading Zisel downriver, past an increasing density of harvested tubers and cleared underbrush sticks.)

Somebody's been busy.

The shelter and firepit are in a weird spot, objectively speaking - it's close to the river, but not close enough to be especially useful, and Zisel passed by several spots that would have been far better to set up camp at.  

The embers in the fire are still hot, but it's been out for a while; the shelter is clearly still a work in progress.

Inside, he'll find a teenage Aasimar girl (the feathers mark her as Plumekith), unconscious and shivering. There's a nasty-looking wound on her leg, hastily bound. 

"Well. If you like her she must be all right," Zisel tells the little tiger. "Neutralize Poison."

She's shivering a bit less now, though she's still out.

Lick lick lick LICK

...Damisa?!?!?

Her eyes flick open in surprise.

"Hello there," says Zisel. "Your friend here's very fond of you. Do you want me to have a look at that bite?"

!!! Person? She flinches and starts to brace herself, though she's in no shape to fight or be hit,

...and then she finally processes what he said and brings her hands down, staring up at him, yellow eyes open wide. "Y-yes?"

"Well, unwrap it, I can't see through the bandage and I don't put my hands on wounded creatures unless I'm a little surer they won't bite me."

????

"Did the village send you?" she asks; just because she's never seen this man before doesn't mean he can't be one of the butcher's friends.

(Her voice has a rather harsh squawking quality to it.)

She starts working on the bandage. It's slow going; her hands are trembling and weak.

"No, your little friend here came and got me." He indicates Damisa. "Handsome fellow."

She looks back at the tiger with wonder. "Oh, Damisa..."

She finishes unwrapping the bandage; the area around the bites is swollen and the wounds themselves are oozing with some kind of disgusting pus. 

"Well, that's nasty. This'll help but it won't purge the infection." He offers her a berry.

She takes the berry and holds it up to her face, looking at it suspiciously.

It looks... like a normal berry? 

She eats it.

"Who are you?"

It's the best berry she has ever had and her wounds are instantly shallower.

"My name is Zisel."

!!! She looks with surprise at her wounds. That berry - was somehow an entire meal's worth of food?

She looks up at him in an interesting mix of wonder and suspicion. "Thanks. But - how? Are you a fey?"

"Ha, no. Druid. There aren't that many of us in these woods but we aren't all dead."

Druids are real??

"Do you need an apprentice?" She blurts out, almost stumbling over her words.

"Need? No." He glances at her tiger. "But once in a while I wind up with something I don't need."

She visibly deflates at the word 'No', but then she finishes processing the sentence and stammers out "Then - will you -"

"You've already got a tiger," he says, "I may as well see you make a good druid rather than a bad one."

!!!!

She forces herself upright so she can do a pale imitation of a bow. "Thank you,"

(He ruins the solemnity of the moment by licking her face.)

"I've got a bear, myself."

A bear!!

"How'd you meet?" 

(she's looking at him like he's the coolest thing in Creation.)

"Her mama had just chased her off to go be a grownup bear and she did not much care for the idea of being a grownup bear if that meant being alone all the time."

"D'awwww... I'm glad she doesn't have to be alone."

She pets Damisa, and then winces as the motion moves her leg.

"I can get you a Remove Disease if it still looks nasty tomorrow. I don't think it's going to kill you overnight."

She nods gratefully. "Thank you, master." 

She looks at him expectantly, awaiting further instruction. 

"Druidic for that is kzo. Might as well start on that while you can't run around."

Oooh! Druidic. She repeats the sound. 'Kzo.'

Wait. "..For 'master', or for 'thank you'?"  

"For 'master'. Feels weird to be called 'master' in Hallit."

She nods, and does a little sitting bow again. "Kzo."

(If he doesn't seem like he has a teaching agenda, she'll start asking for more words in Druidic - yes, no, tiger, bear, snake, poison, tree, river...)

It turns out that Druidic is, as a secret language, rather obfuscatory - it would be hard to learn it by passive exposure alone in any readily obtained quantity, as it's got limited sounds and likely pairs of words that differ only in where the word-boundary is and a couple of inflections that can be done with either of pitch or body-language augmentations depending on context and whim. A spy attempting to learn Druidic would need a lot more time to do it in than one trying to pick up Hallit the same way. But Zisel has already diagnosed her with "druid", so she's gonna learn it.

This is the first language Kaitiaki has memories of learning, so unless it's pointed out to her, she won't properly appreciate the differences between normal and obfuscated languages until she learns another.

She finds the differences between Druidic and Hallit fascinating, and (as she starts to realize she's not going to get in trouble for asking them), has carefully-considered questions about sentence construction, tonal placement, and the body language components. She's an eager study and a quick learner.

There's also rules for transforming some of the common words into sounds that common wildshapes can make, though she doesn't technically have to learn that while she remains unable to wildshape.

She's very interested in it anyways! It's conceptually Very Neat, and it'll be useful to her Someday.

She is also getting very tired, and failing to suppress her yawns. 

Yeah, she can sleep, he'll set up not too far in case anything happens.

She thanks him again for the healing and the lessons, curls up with Damisa, and is out like a light.

He DID IT! he GOT HELP for his FRIEND and now she is HAPPY and now it's SLEEP TIME which is GREAT because he LOVES SLEEPING!!!

zzzzzz

By the time she wakes up Zisel has a (much better-chosen) campsite just barely within sight of hers.

Kaitiaki sleeps like a rock. She's feeling a lot better, in the morning, until she accidentally puts weight on her wounded leg, at which point she's in enough pain to cry out and is no longer feeling very good at all!

This results in a brown bear looking in on her in concern.

This gives her about a quarter-second of being very very sure she's going to die until she remembers that the actual real-life druid who saved her life and is teaching her has a Bear for his Animal Best Friend.

She looks up at the bear sheepishly and attempts to say "I can't walk" in Druidic. (What actually comes out is something closer to "me leg no good")

The bear breathes warm air on her and then pulls her head back to go do something else. Something about that? Maybe. She's a bear.

(Damisa relaxes. Bears are scary!!! Even though this bear is Not A Threat)

(petpetpet. Goooood Damisa.) 

Hmmm. Should she call out for Zisel? 

...maybe if he doesn't come by in a bit. For now, she can... eat some of her remaining tubers for breakfast. Omnomnom

It's gonna be more than half an hour.

After about fifteen minutes (and a failed attempt to ask Damisa to go see what he's up to - it turns out Druidic is not a magical language that lets you speak with animals. She's learning so much!) she'll call out in the direction of his campsite.

"Kzo Zisel?" 

The bear comes back again! "Hrmmmm?" she says.

Wait, is he currently in bear form?

"...Oh, is that you?"

Blink. Sniff sniff.

Huh. Presumably not, then? Maybe he went out to get something? Or maybe this is some kind of test?

Hrm.

Sheeee is just going to. Wash out her wound with her remaining water and change the bandage she has on it. (Even if it ends up getting healed via magic, it's good practice; non-magical healing is an important skill.)

(It hurts! Kind of a lot, actually. She grits her teeth and does it anyways. Lots of things hurt, in life.)

Once she's been awake for about forty-five minutes Zisel pads over, pats the bear on the neck, and peers at her. "Hello there."

Kaitiaki has finished cleaning and rebandaging her wound and is doing a bit of woodcarving! She is Visibly Relieved to see him. 

"Good morning, Kzo Zisel. ...What's your friend's name?" (She manages to mostly say this in Druidic, though she needs to grab 'good morning' from Hallit.)

"This is Norur. I've got a Cure Light Wounds for you today."

"Hi, Norur."

She shows him her wound, freshly treated. (It's definitely still infected.)

He baps her with the cure. "I've got a Remove Disease, but let's take a look and see if you need it. Can you stand?"

She wiggles her bad leg experimentally (seems fine!) and then uses her good leg to push herself up, tentatively putting weight on it. 

It's not 100% better, but she can definitely walk on it.

"Living things are pretty good at managing diseases if everything else is lined up for them - food and water and whatnot - and the disease isn't magical, which this doesn't look to be. When diseases kill it's usually because it makes it too hard to manage the food and water and such."

...She nods thoughtfully. That tracks with what she knows.

She's been spending her morning fishing with Damisa. Does Zisel object to this agenda, or have alternate advice on how to forage/hunt for the two of them? (She can catch small game occasionally, but not reliably, yet, and Damisa's leg is still healing)

"Fish is good, but you want more variety in the long run. Your little friend will want big bones to chew on and you're going to run short of tubers and get sick if you don't get more kinds of plants or move around more." And there follows a lesson on edible plants.

Foraging lessons!!! She's a very diligent student.

"Do you move around a lot? It took me a while to move my camp to where Damisa was hurt, but " she gestures vaguely at her still-growing body "I can't carry as much as I'd like to."

"Norur always hibernates in one place, but when she's up we circulate. Avoids putting too much pressure on the forest in any one spot."

She nods. "...I think I need to make myself a real backpack. And also... get better at constructing shelters?"

She shows him what she's been trying with stick-arranging and woodcarving (it's honestly really good work, for someone without any training, but she's definitely missing some important bits of non-intuitive basic info, and there's a sense of frustrated-overcompensating-for-past-mistakes that probably doubled the amount of time spent on it.) "I wanted to have something I could hang the waxed apron over to keep the water out, when the rainy season starts..."

"Makes sense. Won't be long now. Rain'll suck the heat out of you in your sleep but there's no call to fear it when you're moving, and Read Weather will warn you when it's coming once your spells come in. Come see where I slept last night."

His shelter is hidden from casual view, under the roots of a tipped-over old tree, but rain would pour right in if there were any. There's a circular depression in the leaves where Norur must have slept and a shallower long one where presumably he did. Close inspection reveals the nibbled discards of a few of the plants he just pointed out as edible and some disturbed earth where he may have dug and covered a latrine.

There's a spell for predicting weather?!? - she'll save magic questions until after; right now it is Shelter Lessons Time.

She points out some of the stuff she's noticed, just to double-check, and asks what he would have done if it was going to rain.

"If it were going to rain I'd have gone over there," point, "and hung up my cloak, like so." Demonstration.

Huh! Okay. She looks carefully at how he does it. Once he takes it down, she practices hanging the waxed apron in the same way a few times. (It's less flexible and a bit heavier, so it takes some adjusting.)

"What's your cloak made out of?"

"Norur's fur, and I keep it oiled. Rain rolls right off it."

Woah. 

She doesn't think she can learn how to do that right now, so instead she will...

(...river? Go to the river? Time to go to the River and get fish for poor starving Damisa?)

honestly it is PAST TIME to go to the river, he's been VERY PATIENT but now he's HUNGRY and FRIEND is doing confusing unimportant things with HELP.

He walks up to her and starts nudging her riverwards.

"Ah, it's been a long time since Norur was that small. You're right, little fellow. Let's go see what the river has for us."

FISH! The river has FISH!!

(Damisa catches one while Kaitiaki is working on adjusting her spearfishing technique for a weak leg, and proudly shows it to her before gobbling it up.)

!!! She crouches, ignoring the water splashing around her, and gives him SO MANY PETS. "Such a mighty hunter!!! So fast, so clever! Good work, Damisa."

yesss, FRIEND is PROUD which is CORRECT because he is AWESOME.

mmmmm, fish...

Zisel cuts himself his own spear in a jiffy out of a suitable stick nearby and demonstrates some improvements, though: "You're already doing quite well at this really."

She's clearly very happy at the praise, though very awkward about how she shows it. (It's entirely possible that she's gotten more positive reinforcement today than she has in the last few years of her life.)

She explains that she'd initially learned using the technique she'd overheard from a hunter who was passing through the village, crushing poison berries under a rock upstream to make the fish slower as they swam through it.

"I stopped doing that once I found Damisa - he's smaller than me and the fish are most of what he's been eating after he finished off my dried meat, so I wasn't sure it'd be safe for him."

"A crutch to get you started and drop when you don't need it, or mustn't need it," Zisel agrees, stabbing a carp and flipping it up into the air for Norur to catch in her mouth.

O:

Her first several fishstabs miss, on account of the New Shiny Distraction.

Then she shakes her head, clearly annoyed with herself, and stabs two in quick succession.

MORE FISH for Damisa! His FRIEND is SO good.

She presumably knows how to clean a fish since she's been eating them for a while, but she can watch Zisel do it too if she wants. Norur licks the guts off his hand.

She watches closely, then guts one of her own and asks a few questions about the differences - some of them are stylistic, but she's also been cutting away a few parts that are in fact fine to eat.

(Damisa will happily follow Norur's lead. Lick lick lick!)

And this kind of tree over here is a good way to get salt, if you want to salt anything to preserve it for later or make it taste better.

Ooooh! Source of salt! She has some already, but didn't have a way to get more. Gather gather gather.

...can he show her how to use salt to preserve food? She's never done that before, and was worried about doing it wrong and wasting precious supplies.

Sure, this isn't the time of year that's most important to do it but waiting till then wouldn't be smart. They can salt a fish. It's pretty simple really but you do need to keep it wrapped up (he likes this kind of leaf for it) so that it doesn't wind up with the salt rinsed or licked off.

Neat! And then it's just... safe to be stored like that? Presumably not forever, but for a season or so?

She has follow-up questions about food preservation and storage strategies - she had a lot of half-baked ideas for how to survive the winter that she's curious about, even if some of them are probably not going to be necessary now that she's going to be a ✨ druid ✨. (She ran away in the spring precisely because she knew preparing for winter would be the hardest part of surviving, out here - she might be young but she's not stupid,)

Sometimes mold will set in on it but you can avoid this with magic or by storing it in the right sort of place.

She nods thoughtfully. 

Now that Damisa is fed and both he and her are competent to walk long distances, maybe they should reloca -

(her stomach grumbles)

 ...eat and then relocate? She's foraged a lot in this area.

Yup. They can have a bit of fish now, it's fine raw if you don't see any worms in it, and then forage on their walk.

Neat! (Raw fish is not as good as cooked fish, but that's okay.) 

...she's able to carry all her supplies in her biggest bag, but since it's not a proper backpack, it's awkward enough to be slowing her down, some.

She'd be slow anyway with the infected leg, though hopefully that's clearing up with some circulation getting through it cleanly sans wound. They can have a leisurely walk and pick berries and greens. Does she want a deerskin backpack or does she have something else in mind?

(Her leg does indeed seem to be clearing up pretty well! She's rather hale, for a teenager or even a random adult - good endurance, perhaps?)

Berries and greens! She's enjoying the increased dietary variety, and even manages to comment on this after thinking it for the third or fourth time.

She's never made bags before and isn't sure what the considerations are, but a deerskin backpack sounds fine to her.

Then she can have one when she brings down a deer. They can make her a bow tomorrow.

!!! She nods excitedly, eyes wide. 

When they've gone a few miles inwards and Damisa is clearly getting tired, she starts pointing out places she thinks would make good campsites (both dry and rain variants, since he didn't say if it would rain or not tonight) and why she thinks so. 

She is sometimes just wrong and sometimes interestingly wrong and, once, right. She can park there and he will be over thataway.

With correction, she's rarely wrong in the exact same way twice, though of course there's many many ways to be wrong. 

She takes a minute to mentally review her lessons from earlier and then sets up her camp in her spot, looking it over with a critical eye. 

He has walked SO FAR and now it's NAP TIME.

Zisel looks it over and does not appear to have anything to say about it, which is probably a good sign.

He makes his camp Thataway, as promised, and then disappears into the trees without his bear for a minute and comes back with a dead bird and makes a fire.

WARM! He relocates for COZIER NAPS.

(Yay! good grade in campsite!)

She'll join him by the fire, cooking her unpreserved fish, and add some salt now that she knows where to get more. 

When she gets a chance, she asks about the basics of druidic magic. 

"When you first get inklings you'll notice yourself falling into a bit of a trance. Watching ants, or leaves in the wind, or the river, or something like that. If you stay with it long enough instead of snapping out as soon as you realize you're not completely alert, you can weave it into spells, any druid spell that's been cast in these woods before, and it's yours till you use it - or so long as you care to hang onto it, if it's an orison. Then it feels like you've always known how, really."

She nods thoughtfully.

She has questions about the theoretical side - mostly basic stuff like "what are orisons", but she's also interested in how the Forest remembers the spells that have been cast here and what kinds of things magic can do. (she's very clearly never seen a spell cast and is working off rumors and stories for her initial models. her village was too small to have a laundry wizard, and while the priest of Erastil came by regularly to channel, she'd been told repeatedly not to bother him.)

"What are orisons" is answerable (they're the ones you can use over and over, wasp-stings not bee-stings) but how forests remember things he does not really know either. He can list the spells he most often prepares, though, and some things he saw other druids do, back when there were more.

It's probably good for her brain to know that there are Interesting Facts that Zisel simply does not know about the forest, but it's a bit of a disconcerting revelation

Druidic practice by the fireside, then? (She'll practice sharpening sticks as they talk).

Yup. There are lots of words for fire-related things.

Then she will learn several of them!

And then it's zzzz sleeptime for the teenage druid-in-training.

mmmmm yes.... Good........

Kait is a quick study and diligent student. Her Druidic gets better quickly, as does her foraging.

Archery is proving a bit difficult - she can draw the bow back just fine, but her arrows seem to fly off course rather abruptly. 

Hmm.

Does it still happen if she's soaking wet and her feathers are plastered down to her arm a bit?

...That makes it much easier?? She frowns in thought.

"...oh. My arm feathers." 

"Might want sleeves."

That's probably easier than ripping the feathers out, even if on some dumb level she'd find it more cathartic. 

She cannibalizes one of her smaller fabric bags to make a (ugly, uncomfortable) sleeve for the relevant arm, and returns to practice. 

Her aim improves.

Then eventually she'll be able to bring down a deer and he can teach her how to skin, butcher, smoke, tan, and otherwise make use of it.

DELICIOUS! FRIEND is a MIGHTY hunter. 

(He gorges himself on his portion and then has a loooong nap.)

She's moderately less feral about it, but she's a growing young woman doing a variety of hard exercise, so she eats a fair bit too, heart warm with pride. 

(She's excited about making a backpack, but it'll take a few days for the pelt to be ready to work with.)

The next morning, when Zisel finishes preparing his spells, Kaitiaki is sitting on the ground with two rocks in front of her. One of them is glowing, as bright as a torch. 

"Ha! Well done! What got you?"

"Light filtering through the treetops," she says dreamily. 

She casts Light again, tapping the second rock. The first one winks out. She stares at them both consideringly. 

"You can only have one of those at once."

She nods. "I was trying to see if I could figure out why by looking at the shape as it goes off. But it's complicated..."

 She finds a twig, casts Light on it, and snaps it in half. 

Both of them go dark.

"What else did you prep, or did you snap out of it before you filled up?"

"I got two! This, and one that only works on very small things, which I haven't tried yet."

"Small things... Mending?"

"Oh, I could try putting the twig back together."

She tries it.

The half of the twig she's focusing on catches on fire!

"Ah. Spark."

"Ah!"

She almost drops it in surprise, but manages to blow it out instead. 

"...Useful, I suppose."

"It is! Mending you really want to save for a day when you've got a pile of things that need it and you want to spend half the afternoon catching up on them."

"Ah. It takes a while to cast, then?" Good to know.

"The one that makes water and the one that makes food safe both seem really useful, but you always have those, so I wanted to try different ones."

"I don't always have them but that makes sense."

She nods. "I'll prepare them tomorrow? And one of the others, if I can." 

"You should try them all, see which ones come up most often in your day."

She spends a lot of her free time (when she's not learning or foraging or hunting) playing with them - she has a knack for magic, and clearly loves it.

The next day, she gets:

Detect Poison - useful when looking at new berries or Forest creatures (she's not sure exactly when they stopped being monsters, in her head, but they aren't anymore), but once she's learned them it'll stop being useful.

Flare - isn't necessarily super useful, but it's fun! She spends her free time that day playing with it, trying to see if she can change the color (she can, a bit, but it really wants to be close to white), the size (no, it's a point light source), the brightness (she can make it dimmer but not brighter), the duration (no) and the direction (also no).

The one that... lets her change the color of her feathers. She thinks it's deeply silly - she plays around with the limits and then intentionally fails to catch it, just to watch it go.

"It's for camouflage," he tells her.

She shrugs. "I guess it could be good in the winter? It can't make my feathers plant green, though." (Her feathers are normally a deep navy blue - spell let her turn them white, brown, black, any number of grays, and a surprising array of metallic colors, but those were all very eye catching. 

She tries using Flare to make hunting easier, with mixed results. It's not like she really needs the help, though. 

"A lot of animals can't see colors. Your tiger there is camouflaged against green, with the stripes."

"...Huh."

Well, now she feels stupid for letting herself drop it. 

"And if you have it up when you turn into something, you can change the something's color, though if you're good with wild shaping you can do that reasonably well anyway."

She nods, looking thoughtful. 

"Do you lose color vision when you turn into something that doesn't have it?" 

"Yup. That's how I know."

That's what she thought! She smiles faintly. (She really only ever seems to smile a little, when she does.)

She starts working on her deerskin backpack.

Sewing deerskin is hard. She'll want an awl, not just a needle.

She does not have one. Can Zisel teach her how to make one?

Yup. Bit of deer bone will do.

Then she will use the deer bone to pierce the deerskin, and work on her backpack by the fire while Zisel teaches her more Druidic. 

They can keep pretty busy what with one thing and another.

The weeks pass, faster than they ever have in Kait's life. She tries all her orisons, giving herself headaches trying to hold Detect Magic too long (it's one of her favorites, and she tries to have it up whenever Zisel casts a spell).

She finishes her backpack, slowly and carefully, and it's exactly how she wants it. 

The rainy season comes and goes. She spends a lot of time with her feathers soaked, which makes her arms heavy but doesn't otherwise bother her, and uses Zisel's teachings and the wax apron to make dry shelters for her and Damisa to huddle up in. (He's getting bigger every day, well-fed by her hunting and fishing).

She drinks in knowledge of the Forest's flora (where they grow, when they bloom, what eats them) and fauna (their habits, the noises and smells they make, their place in the food chain, when to avoid them, and (when feasible) how to care for their wounds and diseases).

She's not as good at calming wild animals as Zisel is, despite her best efforts, but she's a natural at nonmagical healing, and sometimes gets to earn their trust that way. 

Spring turns to summer.

Zisel is not naturally accustomed to spending all day every day with another speaking individual and sometimes sends her on extended solo (well, with Damisa) expeditions to do this or observe that or practice some thing or other, or just spends most of the day as a bear or a bird. But when he's around he is efficiently turning her into the sort of thing that can live here on her own.

That's fine with her - as much as she looks up to Zisel and is drinking in his teachings, she's not really a people person, either. Her stints off with Damisa are delightful (she only sings when she's alone, a habit borne out of a decade of scolding and scorn). Once she picks up on why it's happening, she starts announcing, occasionally, that she wants to go off to practice something - most commonly, looking for a wounded animal with a problem to treat (she takes her medicine very seriously).

Squawk squawk says raven Zisel.

This earns him one of her rare smiles.

She's also wearing one when she comes back two days later! She waves excitedly when she spots him, which she hasn't really ever done before.

He's plucking a bird. "You're looking well."

"I can cast spells, now! The non-orison kinds. The Forest's magic is beautiful." She's practically glowing.

"Lovely! Which did you get?"

"I got Speak with Animals but I ended up dropping it for Cure Light Wounds, I ran into a huge boar with a broken leg and there was no way I could have set the wound for it to heal."

"...huh. I have to prep my cures."

"...huh." Perhaps this means the Forest agrees that a Kaitiaki is for healing its creatures.

She shrugs, and absentmindedly scritches Damisa.

YESSS scritches he LOVES scritches!!!

"I can do summonses on the fly though."

Oh! "Ah, I don't think I can do that. There was just the one thing to reach for, and I knew it was healing, it felt... warm, like Virtue, but a lot more so? ...rainy season sunlight, instead of fireside embers." (Kaitiaki uses metaphors a lot, when she's talking about magic. It's basically the only time she does.)

It's a perfectly understandable impulse, magic isn't built out of the same things as everything else. "Well, guess you're a different kind. There's kinds of everything, even druids."

Happy nodding. She likes being a Healing Druid. 

It will be autumn before he'll bring her to meet any other druids. There aren't that many in this forest, and they don't hang out much, and also her Druidic needs polish.

She'll work on it! And also on her spellcasting, and her foraging, and with Damisa. (He helps her hunt, now, and is happy to feed himself, though he still sometimes will gently nudge her towards the river when he wants some fish.)

She continues to not be very expressive, usually, but when the time comes to meet other Druids, she's practically vibrating with some combination of excitement and anxiety.

"You want to memorize all their names in advance or something?"

-she starts, then thinks about it. "...Maybe?" She shrugs awkwardly. "People don't usually like me." (And it didn't matter, usually, because most people in her life haven't been worth worrying about, not really, but she cares about this!)

"Huh. Why? Is it the feathers? I could see that if they'd never met a bird but don't even farm folk have... chickens?"

Another shrug, a bit sadder this time. "The feathers, my voice, my size..." (She's almost six feet tall, solidly built, and still growing.)

"...just because they're used to seeing something doesn't mean they think it belongs on a person." Her father's wife hated the feathers, would hit her if she didn't clean up any that fell off.

"Huh. Well, fuck 'em."

-she nods, smiling a bit. 

They have to take a big swooping route around some dangerous areas - "I might be able to walk away from a herne, but you wouldn't" - to get to the place where the druids of the forest meet up in the fall. It takes days, overland; perhaps he normally flies.

She can't wait to turn into a bird - but wait, then how would Damisa come?

She ponders this question as they walk, in the periods of silence punctured by Druidic practice (mostly her asking for words about the new flora and fauna they're seeing, in this part of the Forest). After a few hours, she asks him about the hernes.

"Would've been before you were born. Some reckless idiots - druids, but reckless idiots - decided to hit back against an interloper and turn him into a thing that'd defend the forest. He killed them all and turned out to remember enough about how they did it to repeat it, so now there's a herd of them. Sometimes they're all right, really, but they're touchy as fuck."

Kait seems to be rotating that around in her brain. 

"Do you know what the interloper had done to anger them?" she asks, after a few minutes.

"Nope, I wasn't there or I'd be dead."

She nods solemnly. It seems like a tragedy, really. (...she's really glad Zisel wasn't there.)

Back to more Druidic practice, in the form of questions about new Forest plants and creatures?

Yup. These all have names in Druidic. He will teach her the ones that he knows in Hallit too in case she ever has to talk plants with a non-druid.

Ah, right, Hallit vocabulary. (She mostly thinks in Druidic, these days.)

Eventually they arrive.

Druidic is secret so you can't know only Druidic or you will have a problem when some adventurer/woodcutter/mushroomer/herbalist/whatever crosses paths with you and they derive that the thing you are saying might mean "fuck off".

It's a pretty relaxed schedule; they're not the first to show up in the area but the other druid, a halfling sitting on a boar, just waves from a ways off and does not come over to be introduced. Zisel tells Kait their names anyway.

Her Halit is fine, for all its unused! (She reassures Zisel that she knows Druidic is secret.)

She's never seen a hafling before, but she's heard of them. She waves back, committing the names to memory, and then reassures Damisa, who is suddenly stressed out.

There is a BIG SMELLY HORNED STOMPER over there and he DOES NOT LIKE IT. Those are DANGER. (His ears are flat against his head, pointed backwards, tail thrashing back and forth.)

...FRIEND clearly sees it and is STILL RELAXED. Maybe this smelly horned stomper is... not danger? 

Excuse you, the boar is tusked.

The stag that shows up with the next guy is horned!

(The narration apologizes for Damisa's improper categorization of keratin appendages.)

(The stag bothers him less! Something about boar specifically, maybe?)

More druids! (petpetpet her Damisa).

 She will follow Zisel's lead on interaction protocols.

Zisel's slightly closer friends with the stag guy - they had the same teacher, albeit not concurrently - and this one does come over to meet Zisel's apprentice. He goes by Avocet rather than whatever he was born as, and the stag is Berry, and he wants to know what Kait is.

-she glances at Zisel uncertainly. Should she introduce herself? Let him handle it?

He gestures that she should answer Avocet (whose question was not in fact "what's your name", it was "what are you".)

She bows. "Um. I'm a Druid-in-training?" Wait, that can't be what he's asking, come on Kait, don't be stupid...

"...My father is human. He... would not tell me anything about my mother." (It was the angriest she'd ever seen him, the first time she'd asked, so she didn't ask again.)

"Huh. I have six guesses and I am less sure of each than the last. Are there more of you?" He is peering at her from various angles.

This is kind of uncomfortable but he is A Real Druid and she is an apprentice, so, "No. My father's wife and my siblings are all human."

"Huh. Do you have spell-like abilities, low-light vision, anything like that, or just feathers?"

...huh. "I can see fine when there's no light, about yea far." She points a tree about 12 paces away. "No colors, though. And..." she thinks about it for a bit. "no spell-like abilities, I don't think, but I'm stronger and faster than my siblings? By a lot, for some of them."

"Darkvision! That rules some things out. Doesn't narrow it down all the way. It's only feathers? You haven't got a tail or toe pads or anything?"

Somewhat uncomfortable headshake. "No, just the feathers." 

Or, well, hm.

"...and the voice, and the tanner's wife always said my eyes weren't right." They're a yellowish gold.

Peer peer.

"I can't guarantee you're not a mongrelfolk," he says eventually, "but I think you are an exotic sort of aasimar."

Headtilt. "...Aasimar?"

"Splash of angel upstream of you somewhere."

(Fragments of overheard conversations from when she was very young bounce around in her head, gaining new context...)

She doesn't immediately respond to this revelation. 

"Could be a mongrelfolk! They usually live underground, but, well, angels usually live in another plane altogether, sometimes things are just determined to crossbreed. Once as a boy I saw a half-lion, half-tiger."

...Kaitiaki has already gotten the thing she was looking for out of this interaction, but it is continuing, apparently. 

She's doing her best to be a Good Apprentice but she doesn't actually have anything to add, here.

Zisel actually wants to hear all about the half-lion half-tiger but they don't need Kait to be involved in that.

She is actually happy to listen to that, though she lets herself recede into the background and pet Damisa when Zisel shows interest. She's more comfortable at the edges, even here. 

In the end about twelve druids show up. One other is an apprentice, like her, a halfling boy who doesn't seem to want to talk much and does not obviously have his own animal companion.

Not talking is totally fine with her! (She does stare a fair bit, though, both at him and the other druids here.)

That's fine because a main point of this meeting is to make sure they all know what each other look like. Somebody wants to report an invasive weed. Somebody else wants to report that some townie wizard's crow familiar has been knocking up half the female crows in the forest in his downtime and they're starting to come out inbred and inappropriately interested in learning languages and recommends culling crows that answer to the following description that makes more sense if you have spent a whole fuck of a lot of time learning to distinguish crows by appearance, and maybe shooting the familiar if it comes around again. Somebody has a no-news-is-good-news update about the hernes and their patch. There's a druid missing, and they piece together a tentative story about her death (probably it was asshole adventurers between this and that day of some particular month) and an adjacent druid says he'll lean in that direction to keep the area covered in case they come back and the halfling apprentice can maybe move into the area he'll deemphasize in so doing. They all have Goodberries for supper and camp out and do group spell prep and then adjourn for the year.

Oh! She... really really likes this, actually? Group camping... sharing stories... figuring out how to tend to the Forest together...

The group spell prep is really nice, too. She's glad she got to experience that. 

And then back to Zisel's general area. If she's wondering he's expecting her to wind up parking long term in this approximate range, mostly carved out from his which is a little big, but they don't have really strict territories.

She nods. (...she doesn't ask when they'll split up or how often they'll see each other once though they do, though she is a bit anxious about these things.)

She's looking at her feathers a bit more often than she used to, and differently - more curious, less bothered. 

Seems like her business, since they're her feathers, and all. There's new plants to learn about this time of year.

New plants! Yay :)

Damisa catches a squirrel and she helps him get all the meat out. She sings him a lullaby that's definitely not in Druidic or Halit as he sleeps off the meal. 

zzzz <3

Lullabies? Lullabies for Norur also??

Yes, definitely! (She starts to reach out a hand to pet Norur, then glances at Zisel questioningly)

"That's between you and her," he says, raising an eyebrow. "If you're not sure you should be petting a bear, look at the bear, not at me."

...okay, yeah, extremely good advice, that.

She will continue to lullaby at Norur and very slowly reach out a hand towards her, watching carefully. (She's not any better at singing in this strange tonal language, but it clearly matters to her, and it's something she's familiar with it.)

Norur allows pets and drifts off to the lullaby.

She continues to sing to and pet her friends until she ends up falling asleep between the two of them.

There's lots to learn in the autumn, and then again in the winter. Druids always have the fallback of Goodberries, but there's plenty of hunting to do and some harvesting of winter plants, too, as well as whatever they preserved and successfully kept the mice out of long enough. Also it's cold. Here's how to turn fur into cold weather wear.

She's delighted by how much Goodberries make foraging a useful skill and not a matter of life or death every day, but she takes to winter foraging eagerly. She asks questions about mouse proofing and has some ideas once she's thought about it.

She's very glad for endure elements, while she works on her first set of warm weather gear. Damisa doesn't seem to need one, though he definitely loves to be close to the fire at night. 

Norur, of course, sleeps through the winter like a sensible bear.

Zisel is finally willing to let Kait see where that is, since he's going there every night to sleep on Norur.

!! She's honored and excited about this, though in her usual muted way.

(Hibernation is interesting! Norur breathes incredibly slowly, so long between breaths that she has to count her own heartbeats in between to compare it to hers and Damisa's.)

She is the best pillow. This is the best reason to have a bear, in his opinion. But Kait and Damisa should make their own arrangements, additional parties in the cave might disturb her.

She'd started work on her winter shelter around the fall equinox, finding an underground cavern that was initially a bit cramped, and painstakingly used her first level spells to slowly excavate it into a spacious home for a teenager and her huge tiger.

It's an hourlong hike in the snow between her shelter and the bear cave, but Kaitiaki doesn't mind making it, and Damisa is usually happy to accompany her. 

If you don't like making hourlong hikes in the forest in any season of the year you're probably a fake druid or at least a desert one or something.

Huh.

"Have you ever met a desert druid?" 

"No, never been to a desert. Avocet has, though."

Neat! She'll try and ask him, next year.

The winter months pass by. Kaitiaki spends even more of her time poking at magic than she did in the summer months, simply because there's less to do and less daylight. (She's getting two first circle spells every day, which gives her one to experiment with even on a goodberry day)

After the winter solstice, she starts taking a hike south every few days, back towards the area where she first met Damisa. 

Frost. Evergreen needles and bare oak branches. Winter birds. Blindingly blue sky making the snow glitter.

It takes her a while to find the right kind of stones, the ones they used to make the kinds of grave her unlucky siblings and the other dead children of the village were buried in, growing up. (Mom never got one. She might not have been dead, after all).

She doesn't mind. She's not in a hurry. She makes a note of all the ones she wants to grab, and the next time she comes down here, she uses Ant Haul to drag them into place and bring the biggest one back with her. She'll carve it in her shelter. 

The rocks go where she puts them. They are, after all, rocks.

A few days later, she carries the carved tablet with "Kaitiaki Salvus" carved on it in large Halit script back down to her grave site, and sets it in place as the headstone. She digs out a hole, big enough to be a grave but a bit too shallow, and lies down in it, thinking. 

She would have died here, if she hadn't met Damisa, or if he hadn't run to get Zisel for help. Despite her planning and he's work, she'd been a kid trying to survive in a place that killed adults regularly.

Bitten by the snake, she would have been alone and in pain for a day, or longer, and then she would have died. 

Without the snake, and if she'd been able to slip past all the under dangerous creatures of the Forest, she could have maybe survived until the winter, and then froze to death. Or starved. 

And it still would have been better than if she'd stayed.

She fills in the grave, placing the last of the stones into place.

She kneels there, thanking the Forest (no - the Green, that's what they'd called it) for the first year of her life. I won't waste it, she promises the stone and the trees and the blue of the sky and the chill winter air. 

Zisel figures she doesn't have to call herself an apprentice any more after it's been about a year and a half, though they can still hang out.

She knows that Zisel isn't a druid who cares much for ceremonies, but she always liked making up her own, so Kaitiaki designs herself a druidic graduation ritual and does it that night with a bemused (and happily full, on her fresh kill) Damisa watching. 

She's happy to keep hanging out - far less often and less regularly than they did in the really early days, but enough for her. And though she's a full druid now, it's still the case that sometimes something comes up that she isn't sure how to handle alone, or isn't sure she can. 

Sure. "A full druid" doesn't mean "has all the circles or information she needs".

And she's really happy he's got her back, and that she can help him in return, even if so far it's usually small things like investigating things at the far end of their overlapping protectorates, or helping carry heavy things that would be hard to maneuver in beast form (Kaitiaki, eating well and using her body constantly, has grown quite strong.)

The relevant date rolls around and everybody collects to have their annual meetup. Nobody new this year, nobody dead. Someone saw a zombie lynx but it got away, everybody should be alert to that in case it's infectious. A ranger came through over the summer, heading northeast, he was reasonably polite apart from having a real weakness for peaches and picking multiple trees' worth on his way through. Someone received a request from an outside contact about introducing mastodons to the area. She's in favor but said she'd check with everybody else. (The mastodons probably don't want to come in among the trees, it's a bit cramped for them, but this particular druid ventures out sometimes and wants to know if anyone has concerns about their effects on the forest.) Same person got begged for Plant Growth, a-fucking-gain, here's how to find the people who are particularly desperate for it if anyone wants to go gouge them before the harvest is in for the year.

Kaitiaki is now a Full Druid and will force allow herself to participate!

She has a lot of questions about the mastodons. What do they eat, and how much of it? What kinds of things eat them? How far do they tend to wander? Will outsiders hunt them?

Mastodons are browsers - they will nibble on shrubs and branches at the edge of the woods. (There's a thorny sort of weed that grows in that direction and annoys the locals, which is why they want some mastodons.) People can eat them but most predators that aren't very lucky and cooperative can't manage it. They have a pretty big range.

Seems reasonable. No objections from her.

Does anyone seem interested in taking up the Plant Growth requests?

Not really. You have to be third circle, which already rules out half the complement of druids here, and the remainder don't have anything they want that bad that farmers can scrape together right now. Even if you take money and go spend the money somewhere else you have to have the money in your hand and it's frankly nausea-inducing to contemplate the process they go through to mine shit like that, whether they staff the lifeless pits with slaves or convicts or undead abominations or some combination of the three, and then all the burning, renewal-less and taking trees in their prime to make the fire hotter, and then they stamp some queen's face on it and you hold it in your hand and you trade it to somebody who tries their hardest not to live in the world that exists without their kind or the world that made their coins, and they give you some cool stuff, maybe, but ick.

Besides, if you keep doing it, eventually there's more of them and they start chopping down trees in a way they would hesitate before chopping down a house-shaped neighboring place but do not at all for a forest save that the forest might eat them.

...Not wanting them grow to the point where they'll destroy the forest seems very reasonable. 

(She'd never really thought about money like that and finds it kind of odd. She's mostly thinking about how awful things were at home, during the lean years.) She keeps quiet about both these thoughts.

...is the other apprentice still around? Does he have an animal companion yet?

He's still around. No animal companion but he's got this trick with creating tiny storms on the spot to drench and buffet a creature for a moment and will tell her a story about confusing a herne with this enough that he could get away from the situation.

Oh! She's impressed and also very interested in the trick, and will hesitantly ask him questions about it / see if she can watch using detect magic until someone stops her.

Yeah, he'll show it off. He can't do it all day long but he doesn't need to save them all for emergencies.

She's never seen anything like it before - it looks very similar to a spell (unlike the thing where Zisel turns into animals, which is magic but very different from a spell), but it's also obviously not a spell. And he says he can do it more times than either of them can cast a first-circle spell... interesting. 

She thanks him for showing her.

No problem.

She chats with Zisel about it a bit, later that evening. She thinks he might be another kind of druid? With some weather magic instead of an animal friend.

"Like you, with healing spells instead of summoning ones."

She nods.

It's a beautiful clear night. She stargazes, with the other druids still up that late, until she falls asleep with her head rested on Damisa.

When she's heading back to her usual haunts the next day it's a good thing someone warned her about the zombie animals; there's an undead-smelling fox lurching around over there.

Zombies are slow, and from what she remembers they've got bad senses, but they're hard to hurt with a bow or a staff. A tiger, however... 

She's done a lot of combat practice with Damisa, and he's fully grown, now. She signals to him to circle around it. 

This dogcat is BAD. It SMELLS HORRIBLE and DOESN'T MOVE RIGHT. 

(He moves into position behind it, silently, and watches Kaitiaki intensely)

The zombie fox is stalking a mouse, for a value of stalking that does not involve a lot of stealth but has not actually alerted the mouse yet.

Okay. The plan - get the thing's attention with Flare (and a shout), then focus on avoiding getting hit until Damisa can get his claws into it, and then Cure it if it's still up - healing hurts undead, Zisel taught her that. If they do it right, it shouldn't get a chance to hurt either of them, or that poor mouse.

Damisa is in position. She stands up from the underbrush, shouts "Mockery of life, harm this land no longer!", and casts her orison, aiming it right in front of the zombie's face.

He is READY TO ATTACK but his bestfriend has NOT GIVEN THE SIGNAL so he will instead SILENTLY APPROACH until the TIME IS RIGHT.

(Stealth is a class skill for him, and in the dark, he's almost silent as he approaches.)

The zombie fox is completely unprepared for... most things that could conceivably happen to it... this thing included.

She's going to bash it with her staff to get its attention, then, and whistle loudly.

He is RIGHT BEHIND the BADWRONG dogcat because bestfriend has MASTERFULLY DISTRACTED IT and it is time to jump forward and KILL KILL KILL.

...He's not biting it, though. It smells TERRIBLE.

Puny thing, fear his Claw! And also: his Claw!

It does not fear these things because it's now fully dead.

Phew. That was nice and easy. (And they saved the little mouse!)

She gives Damisa a HUGE hug, some of the dried fishmeat she carries on her for him to snack on, and soooo many pets. Goooood kitty! Mighty hunter! The star of the show!

omnomnom YES he IS the greatest thank you for noticing!!!

She carefully washes his claws and her staff with created water, and then gathers up all the remains and makes a pyre to burn them on. It smells terrible, but she wants to make sure it burns clean through, so she sets up camp upwind and carefully feeds the fire until none of the remains are left. (She says a small prayer to the Green for the poor fox.)

Afterwards, she tries to see if she can track the way it came from - there might be more of them. And... whose 'territory' is she in right now? Might be good to warn them...

Whoever it is was presumably just at the same meeting she was and has heard that there is a concern.

She can with some work find the zombie shrew that probably infected the fox but it's got its leg trapped in a hole and probably hasn't made a lot of progress since then.

Makes sense. She will dispose of the zombie shrew in the same manner, and then head back home.

When she next meets up with Zisel, she lets him know what happened and where, just in case it helps.

"They're all over the place, I found a zombie raven and a whole nest of rats. I'm not sure if birds can spread it, but no taking chances, yeah? We'll have our work cut out for us getting them all."

Kaitiaki nods grimly. The Forest provides for them, and return, they protect the Forest. That's how it works.

She trains with Damisa on ambush variations, and on the scent of the undead. She starts preparing commune with birds at least once a day, and uses it to ask them if they've seen any zombies. (It takes a few tries to figure out how best to get across what exactly she's asking, but once she does, this works great). 

Mostly it turns out to be small things, like the fox or the shrew, and she and Damisa can dispatch those. Sometimes, they're big enough that she's not as sure, and so she takes advantage of her knowledge of the area and the fact that zombies are slow and mindless to lure them into the deep ravine that runs through her part of the Forest.

He SURE DOES NOT LIKE that the BADWRONG things are everywhere now, but he's not afraid. He and bestfriend are ON IT and together they are MIGHTY.

She tries to checks in with Zisel more often, both for practical strategic reasons and because this is stressful, and she finds even his silent company soothing. (It takes her a while to notice the latter reason, and once she does, she's not sure what to make of it.)

Eventually they're able to go a few days without spotting a zombie animal, and then a whole two weeks, and then a month but a neighbor's seen one - and if they don't slack off they'll have them routed by winter.

In the thick of it, she starts getting her second-circle spells. She's impatient to play around with them, but dealing with the zombies comes first - she asks the forest for the spell to conjure a trident made of lightning - zombies may shrug off arrows and most hits with her staff, but they have no real protection against the raw power of the elements. 

She manages to save a few living creatures mid-zombie-attack, and successfully nurses most of them back to health, including a hedgehog she spends three days carrying around in a sling as she continues her work. 

She definitely doesn't slack off - if anything, when they grow more infrequent, she starts to get antsier, preparing commune with birds more often just in case and spending her free time stockpiling food for the winter.

Eventually consensus seems to be that there are not presently any zombies in the forest. Hurrah!

She's very happy about this! Now she has time to play with her ✨ new ✨ spells ✨!!!

A week after the winter snow coats the grounds, she finds an unusually-small pair of footprints cutting through her territory, heading northwest. She follows them curiously. 

When she hears the roar of a large animal, she speeds up.

She finds... a huge boar, snarling angrily, its fur singed, looking around in confusion and anger. Signs of frantic movement in the snow, including a fair bit of blood. 

A suspicious end to the footprint trail, and - yeah, more blood dripping, right there. She whistles sharply.

A druid... she might kill them for trespassing, but the boar is definitely going to kill them otherwise. "Help me!" 

(The boar sniffs around suspiciously. She spots Kaitiaki, but she's not looking for Kaitiaki, she's looking for the horrible little pest who dared to shoot fire at her. And she smells its blood...) 

Invisible, so a wizard or sorcerer. ...and not a strong one, perhaps, if they can't handle this. "Swear to do me no harm while under my protection, and I'll escort you out of the forest safely."

(She's trying to project confidence and authority into her voice, but she's not very good at it! She sounds like a nervous teenager, give or take the squawking.)

This is just some kid??? (A big one! With a tiger! But if she's older than 18 they'll eat their hat, frog and all.)

...Beggers can't really be choosers, and if worst comes to worst, they can always run while she distracts the beast. "I swear to do you no harm while under your protection!" they call out, and then they cough, more blood spilling out onto the ground.