entanglement [ugg day 3]

Kahinta keeps her eyes on the ground, and her hand wrapped firmly around her weapon.

Every step sends a pulse of pain through the back of her head, down her neck, up to the backs of her eyes. It's getting a little hard to keep her concentration on the kaleidoscope cacophony around them, the hues of the earth that shift and repaint themselves with each battering gale. The geode sways and bumps her foot and trails the ground, a narrow path that's swept away in moments, their footsteps covered like they had never even been there at all.

Ripred, but how she wishes she could make it all burn.

She nearly loses grip of her morning star against the wind, trailing in the back again, watching as Oberon and Daemon move ahead, her tarp between them and carrying one of the dead mutts. At least it'll be something to eat when they've managed to find somewhere to settle in for a while. It's the least it can do. The head is useless, caved in and fractured fractal gems, but the rest will keep them moving for a while longer.

Ripred, but she's so angry.

A lizard. They'd tried to take her out with a lizard, and she'd almost been slow enough to let them. Everything aches, and she can feel the ache in her left thigh from how she'd had to jump back so abruptly to avoid the rake aimed at her abdomen. Her free hand thumbs at the tear in her shirt, through the waistband of her pants, to the scrape from the mutt's talon underneath, pressing hard against the raw skin and feeling the slick of her own blood thick against her fingers. She doesn't reach for her head. Each steps reminds her well enough. If she cannot hold her own against a lizard, then Kahinta won't be able to take out the next tribute that tries to strike her down, and the others won't find use for her anymore.

Oberon and Daemon are as much her shields as she is theirs, and if she lets herself wander so close to the edge again, she wouldn't put it past either of them to push her past the line if it would suit them. She doesn't trust them, not as far as she can toss them, but that doesn't mean she can't work with them until it's no longer a benefit to her game. In the meantime, she'll keep her eyes to the ground in watch for anything that's lurking beneath the surface.

---

They find calm in the chaos eventually.

The clearing is still. It feels wrong in its own way, but Kahinta can breathe without the threat of flowers taking root in her lungs and blossoming bright enough to suffocate her, so she'll take the stillness over the storm.

"Oberon, you got fire?" she asks, shrugging out of her backpack underneath her cloak and letting it drop with a thud by her foot. She opens it up quickly, hands finding firewood quick and passing it over to help with starting up some kind of flame for them to eat and drink by. It's still early enough in the day that the smoke won't be too much of a signal, and the storm should disperse it enough regardless.

Without thought, Kahinta reaches a hand up to toss her ponytail back over her shoulder only to find air. Straightening, her hand travels up the side of her neck, skimming past the damage to find a section of her ponytail lobbed off on the left.

"Shit," she mumbles, hand shaking as she moves it underneath, feeling gingerly for the gash the splits her skin wide open and finding instead a mess of hair and blood congealed to the base of her head and neck. Her face twists in pain, eyes squinted shut as she tries to peel back to find the wound, but it hurts more than she'd thought it would, more than any scrape from running too fast or climbing too high had ever felt. "Shit.

The cloak feels too heavy suddenly, and she lets it drag her down to kneel on the ground by the pond, looking at what she can see of her reflection in between the flowers that cover the surface. Her neck is all red, drops beading and hitting the water beneath her, and there's blood smeared on her face from where she'd tried to dab at the gash after the fight and carelessly swiped at her cheek after. Finger shaking, Kahinta undoes the clasp of the brooch on her throat, black fabric pooling around her and revealing the crystal ribs that hang across her chest. She can't reach back to properly clean her head, and she can't bandage it with all of her hair in the way.

How long had she been growing it? She couldn't remember the last time she'd cut it short. Ma had woven her together so perfectly in plaits for so long that she had never wanted it any other way. At least five years, maybe six, and her hair should hang straight to the small of her back in the ponytail, but she threads her fingers through the fragmented ends again and feels her eyes well up despite herself. It doesn't matter. It shouldn't matter.

It does.

Her eyes drift back sideways to the others, stopping on Daemon, and she gives a crooked grin that's too little joy and too much pain to be anything other than a grimace, try as she might.

"You mind doing me a favor and helping me cut my hair?"