ORIGIN

If things had ever been worse for Dovefeather, should could not recall. There were sick creatures nursing her wounds, things with sores on their many fingered hands, too rough and sticky. Her bones creaked as she moved, the sound of snapping echoing in her ears, but somehow her form still lurched upright. The shadows clung to Basil, and the smell of decay and rot clung to his muck-drenched form and seemed just like rose petals to her now. As long as the deepness soaked into his fur, seeking his heart, he was still alive. There was pain, yes, an eternity of agony for the both of them. That was what he had asked for, stepping into the All Mother's gardens. It was the succulent fruit she had cultivated and bore for him, and now he had supped on it until his insides rotted.

A passive thought flitted through her mind like a sleepy butterfly. It was a simple suggestion-- from the All Mother or the Bringers of Death, she didn't care to ask-- lamenting how easy it would be to cut out his eyes while he was unconscious. That was what he had wanted, wasn't it? When he awoke, the fury of his illness would drive him mad, and he would succumb to the whispers and blind her in return. If the devil in his heart did not break her every bone. A giggle broke from her jaws, and she reached up a twitching claw to her mouth and for a moment tried to tear out her own tongue. Her body gave out in that moment, the spasms returning. The All Mother was not ready for her yet, yet, yet.

When control returned to her, she found a mouse at her nose, dead as a doorknob. For whatever reason, it blinked at her with its six bleeding eyes and spared her a smile while she tore into it. Hunger was not something she felt, but if she did not eat, the All Mother would make her suffering worse. Blood soaking her paws, her belly, her face, she struggled to find her sister in the tendrils as they wrapped around her throat. A cough, a squirm, and a mewl; finally they gave her breath.

"I need a drink... By the river. I'll be alright. I'm feeling better..."

She swore to a rock that looked just like Owlfeather, touching her nose to the shrooms that gathered in a bunch around it. Her body swayed as she broke her head above the water, the current dragging her down to the river. The feline felt positively seasick by the time her delusions got her to the edge of the bank, her toes dipping into the icy sludge. Better than the water in the air, she reasoned, blinking through the puss in her eyes.

Dovefeather forced herself to drink, ignoring the prickling along her spine and the twitches that still jerked her body. The shadows could say and do what they like, but this was still the All Mother's home, and they could not take her nor Basil until the All Mother was ready to return them to the earth... And, unfortunately for the oversize mushroom, the curly furred disaster and her boyfriend were still vital keys to whatever secret the fungi needed. Such a shame.

Eridanus was... well, it had to be Eridanus, what with the massive looming trees and the general air of jungle-ness, but it generally wasn't covered in a thick, plush layer of snow. Barnett stopped at the entrance to the cave, snout wrinkling up into a grimace. "Just my luck," the numbat muttered, dipping one foot into the cover and wincing at the freeze. Tiny shoulders squaring, he trudged into the icy wastes.

It wasn't long before the silhouette of the Mother loomed on the edge of his vision like a monolith, calling to him. But there was a stream before it, and the vial of what once had been tea, long since replaced with a potent mix of hallucinogens, was running on empty. He made a beeline for where he thought it was, barely able to see past the snow's glare and the grass of the forest.

Then again, once he had a clear view of what lay by the water's edge, he almost wished he'd stayed wandering through the tunnels. "...Dove?" The kitten-turned-cat looked... awful. Deathly ill, the way rats looked after they ate the mushrooms lining Booker's tree-trunk home. Twitching like she could fly out of her skin at any moment. Barnett slowly padded towards her, eye wide, ears pitched forward in rare fear. "Sis?"

Well, she was drinking, at least, lapping at the water like she was forcing herself to do so, and the numbat crept to her side, staying just outside of paw range in case she was too far gone to see that he wasn't a danger. "Hey, Dove," Barnett murmured, soft and gentle, the voice he used with Bee. "It's Barn, 'member? What happened, huh? Ya don't look too well," he added, raising an eyebrow with a frown.

Not looking well was an understatement, but he couldn't focus on just how awful she looked, not when it started up the phantom pain behind his good eye, and reminded him of watching her freeze in the water, unable to do anything but sit and stare.

Dovefeather wheezed as her lungs filled with the water in the air, forcing the thick sludge down her throat. Her body seemed soothed by the hydration, but the taste and texture made her gag. A voice hit her ears and she started, tossing her head up to meet the sound. The forest spun around her, stars in her eyes, but she finally sorted out the source-- a small, black thing coming closer and closer to her. Sis, it called her. It knew her name.

She blinked again, washing away the blurry film over her eyes, and stared down at the creature. Shrooms grew slowly around the creature, twisting and swelling with each of its breaths. The voice was soft, slow, coming from a nearly invisble mouth, but underneath the fungi was a glistening black gem made of the rainbows the All Mother once gifted her with.

The kitten remembered.

"Barn...?"

The feline stepped forward and the ocean swept her off of her feet. The world turned into a cyclone and she hit the sludgy river with her face. Fur bristling, she struggled to stand, coughing and spitting. Her body tried to revolt, control nearly breaking from the thin grasp she had, but she focused her eyes on the familiar stentch of her brother and listened to the reds and browns that blotched her hearing.

"I'm alright... It's fine... This is normal,"

Dovefeather paused, just for a moment, looking to the rippling water at her paws. A reflection that she thought she should have seen only solid black. At some point the sludge in the Eyes must have spread through the All Mother's limbs as the toxins had in her own body.

"...and the poison in my veins will pass. The All Mother has so much more for me, she is disappointed but desperate and this too, shall pass. "

She hissed, spitting the bile from her throat on to the vines rooting her paws to the ground as she rose, finally, tail swishing. A minor slip, nothing too horrible. A simple misstep.

"It has been too long, Brother... You must be weary. Come, sit by me, share in the stories of your travels... I want to hear everything."

Barnett, foolishly, started to relax at the verbal recognition, smoothing a paw over his forehead and nodding. He barely had time to open his mouth to reply before the cat was listing to the side, dunking her face in the river, staggering back to stand and still speaking, while Barnett had scrambled closer, hands clenching and unclenching helplessly. "I am about a thousand percent certain that none of this is normal, Dove," the numbat muttered under his breath, sticking close to the kitten's side lest she fall into the water again.

He couldn't make heads nor tails of her words, feeling about as useless as the dirt below, simply listening to the cat ramble - until the next lull. "Poison? Did someone hurt you, Sis?" The thought made an itch, a boiling, start up in his chest, a need for some far-fetched sense of control. Honestly, he'd just like it if everything would stop trying to hurt his family. That seemed to be too much to ask in the caves. "Weary. Sure. Just lemme look over you, yeah? Diot's healing stuff has rubbed off on me at least a little."

Something for her symptoms, he needed to be able to offer something, and after a moment's indecision he dipped the dry cup into the water, capped it and set it aside. Tea. He could do that. Barnett turned back to Dovefeather slowly, slow enough to - hopefully - not appear as some wobbly blur in her vision. Then again, she could be hallucinating, for all he knew. "Right then. Why don't you lay down for a little bit, and I'll tell you all about it." Reaching out a tiny paw, he gently pat at one of the cat's paws; a meak attempt at reassurance.

"Well, I found a baby, out in the woods. All alone in its chrysalis. Turned out to be a wee little bird - even smaller than me, believe it or not. No bigger than my nose!" Struggling to keep his tone cheery, Barnett's gaze drifted over the kitten's coat. Had something bitten her, caused this reaction?

Dovefeather felt butterflies flutter from her lungs in the shape of laughter, the strange mushroomed gem speaking all around her. She understood him well enough, though she had the distant feeling like he was looking at her like she had two heads when she was the one tripping on hallucinations. Ah well, perhaps Barn' wasn't having a good day either. She was quick to answer his questions, fumbling away from the river's edge to lay down where she thought he deemed it safe.

The speaking in riddles seemed to stop, if only because of how much fury was in her fur, wriggling like maggots in the curls.

"Poisoned me like the Eyes, she did. Filthy shit. The All Mother have mercy on her when I come 'round, 'cause I'm going to show her just what it's like to be sick as the poison on her blade."

"She had the nerve, you know, to attack me-- not with her claws or teeth, but with a shard of metal. She stabbed Basil too, the cave forsaken worm."

She was ranting, raving, rambling to herself but the smile wasn't lost on her face. Her tongue had run over and over her missing tooth for what seemed like a week, though surely it hadn't been that long. Booker's paw was on her own and she decided to stop snickering through her face-- the bubbling sensation across the bridge of her nose was threatening to make her sneeze out more butterflies-- and she instead held them in until they buzzed like her usual bees. Surely that'd make Booker, Barnett, whoever, feel better.

"A baby bird?"

Dovefeather's ears perked up, the trees swaying in her vision but her focus on the multi-color mushroom-shifting numbat was crystal clear.

"Why, most of us just get a feather sign... You got a whole bird! How lucky. Tiny though... Oh, rats, you know, that filthy red carpet took my feather too, didn't she? Not enough to take my tooth and bite me and Bassy but she had to steal my shit too..."

"All Mother have mercy, ohh, I'm gonna mount her pelt on my wall."