==== December 19, 2013
==== Yules
==== After the unexpected Fall at Keroon, Yules is caught in her own thinking.

Who Yules
What After the unexpected Fall at Keroon, Yules is caught in her own thinking.
When Five months and six days until the… waaaaait…
Where Serengeti Safari Weyr

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Serengeti Safari Weyr


On a night like this, sleep is the furthest thing from anyone’s mind. As moonlight filters through midnight clouds like skeins of silver, at least one rider is awake in her weyr, clutching a mug of luke-warm klah between her hands, curled up in the hollow of her dragon’s warm, unscathed neck.

Yules stares at, then through, a ridiculously oversized hat that hangs on the wall. Beneath her, Desmeth snores gently, smelling the vague stink of firestone that persists despite her having scrubbed him at least twice. Then she washed herself, and changed into new clothes. Why does it still smell of firestone?

The hair. The stink must be the hair. Yules isn’t allowed to wash that yet. Fingers start to rise to meet the place where hair isn’t anymore, but Yules stops herself before touching the ragged edge of injury. The numbweed is dealing with the pain, but it can’t do much for the memory, or the scarring the healers predict: “Given that it’s a slight score,” one kindly Healer kept saying, “Hair may grow over it again someday.” What does Yules care about hair right now? That shit wanted to eat her brain.

The memory is the worst part of it, really. Not only the memory of the pain, of the fighting, the stench of firestone used for its full purpose, but hearing the screams of dragons and riders, and later, the understanding that thirteen wingriders were not coming back from Between.

A brief shudder as it strikes Yules fully, hands clenching around the mug: it could have been Cerise she’s remembering. Or E’don. D’cen. T’ral. Kaia. And the worse knowledge, that one day it likely will be.

Behind her, Desmeth, his usually rich brown hide still tinged with grey, gets restless, and Yules deliberately turns her thoughts elsewhere. The worst of it, if she was called to choose, would be feeling Desmeth’s anguish as she visited the Healers for this damn Threadscore. His running tally of what he could have done better, what must be improved, and then as Yules even laid a hand on the railing that would take her to bed, feeling Desmeth’s need that she be next to him tonight.

When the big brown starts to shift again, Yules places the mug far enough away that tomorrow hopefully won’t bring scrubbing stained klah out of the floor, and tries to relax into the little hollow Des has cocooned her in, trying to think of other things. The perfect klah. The first time her souffle didn’t fall. Her parents. Love. Finding Desmeth. Anything that is not the horrors of tonight.

Tonight, that helps.

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