Sikeax,

Healthy snaps alert her to that this specific plant was a good choice. Oils bleed out of the wounds left behind when the pair bend and tear them from their siblings and mother body. There’s no way that she can admit that the taste is one worth trying, but as it drools into her mouth and over her tongue, sinking into her taste buds, she tells herself that she can stomach it. She’s eaten worse, stupid things. Amara had required goldenseal, a plant that was worth noting for its disgusting taste, and she’d gladly shoved into her jaws and brazenly forgot her need to spit it out for her friend.
Or could she dare to call her that now? Her stomach gives in and twists in a recoiling knot. Whether or not it comes from the taste or the haunting of her thoughts, she can't tell. Time will tell her better things.
"Taste shit."
Hobgoblin is a bold soul, and she is one to ride upon his misfortunes for her own pleasure. He’s done it to her time and time again, and she will not miss her chance to slap him with revenge after what she had been forced to endure at the bridge.
The leaves hit the ground with a gentle touch. Dust curls up and sinks mist-like fingers of the green knife-like bodies resting atop the grains of their brothers.
“You’ve eaten shit? Gross.”
The panic switch flicks faster than she had expected it to. He’s forgotten what he had been working on himself and thrown it to the ground with less grace that she had previously done, bellowing out a long, embarrassed wail. Mentally, he’s spewing a thousand different things that blur into a mess of thoughts she can’t make out.
“I can’t believe you’re that disgusting. Oh my Gods.”
“Hobgoblin no eat shit!”
“Then how do you know what it tastes li-”
She cuts the words fast enough to free him from his embarrassment. She isn’t even looking at him, yet alone giving him her utmost attention. Her eyes are squinted, pulled into narrow, confused slits as her brows sink and sculpt  into wrinkles, ears pressed down like she’s seen something but isn’t sure what it is. Short seconds pass before her mouth contours into a deformed expression of worry, confusion and surprise.
Following the tilt of his head, he lets his eyes follow her’s, capturing, at last, the sight of the dark man that they'd previously been called upon, strung up against the tree that they'd agreed upon previously as their resting place for the day. She'd yet to string their findings around the bottom of it, but nonetheless it was theirs.
Sikeax is walking away, no, cantering now, disregarding their collection as she makes short strides in his direction. The pace increases at the base of her ascendant.
"What wrong?"
No response. Worry is knitting in her chest and her voice has softened into the gentle form of sorrow, like something's hurt her. Gaucho has rarely been needy for her, if not never with the exclusion of births and the arrival of wounded along their borders. Deep in the desert, their meeting doesn't settle correctly.
Something is off, and she's sure of it.
"Gaucho?" His name is a fleeting whisper on her lips. It strives to break free and run with thin tears on its cheeks and hurt in its heart and baby sobs in the throat. And while she doesn't like to admit it, Gaucho has the tendency to scare her, but not in the way that his mass is superior to her, that he towers like a God and is made of sheer passion, drive and masculinity, the muscles beneath his dark hide pushing it to its limits. It's in that Gaucho is a man she has somehow silently looked up to, seen as a symbol of greatness and power, of success and strength and courage, that he's something that she would like to see herself be but cannot fully achieve.
He's a good man in many ways in short.
His presence takes her heart with callused fingers and rough palms, stained with dirt from ambition and achievement, and clenches with a gentle, gut-wrenching clasp. She has never seen him outside of his prime, gone as far as to believe that he can't ever be like her in that she crumbles beneath weights far too great for her and having breaking points that aren't completely defined but surely out there.
She can now be sure that this is the end of the world, maybe from her eyes.
Hobgoblin leaves small clouds in his wake as he sprints to her, yellow eyes wide with curiosity and well, pain? It's her's, if you must know, just pushed upon him. Caring that deeply is something that he doesn't do, and for him, Gaucho is just another name. One more face he's got to remember for the sake of his bonded's existence, another person he's got to withstand that Sikeax has these emotions for.
"Why so important?"
He's the Sultan of the Dragon's Throat. You should know that by now.
"Ah. Don't care."
She expects nothing different.
Everything about him at this time is drunk in like a warm coffee, bitter, a reminder that she's alive and experiencing this, burning her throat and hitting the pit of her stomach a lot harder than she expects it to. Sweat has kissed his hide into dark spots. He's grown the area around his blue eyes, which she swears are sunken and worn, in pits.
Internally, she's filling them up with her despair and the pain of seeing him in this state. Valdis's discovered state feels almost like a scraped knee against this, a broken bone compared to a bruise that will heal within days.
"Oh Gaucho," She speaks him to him like he's a child who's wounded themselves to the point of tears, coming to her crying and asking for saving from the pain in their little bodies. "what's wrong?"
There's a distant, obscure need to beg him to tell her that there is nothing wrong, that he has just been through a harsh gallop through the desert, pushing himself across limits that he should have known for the sake of remaining the top warrior of Helovia(as far as Sikeax and possibly the rest of the Dragon's Throat saw it), that he could bring himself to lie to her this way. Kings aren't supposed to crumble like the everyday people. They're supposed to be valiant at all times, at peaks of their prime.
But then again, everyone dies in one way or another. Everyone must experience their descent into darkness, and even the nearest thing to mortal Gods, Kings and Queens like Gaucho, have to face.
Hobgoblin notes to her that she is doing nothing to hide the feelings she's feeling as they push across her features: hanging ears, soft voiced, worried eyes, the slightest hints of a frown forming.
She doesn't hide it. That's for someone else at some other time. Gaucho is a brave man. She can fully trust him with herself and the raw truth, leading herself to believe that like every other time in the history that she's known him, he will conquer the situation with little effort.

OOC: Hobgoblin is in his serval form.
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Sleep called to Gaucho across what felt like miles and miles of life.

They say they'll see you soon.. Hadn't Vinati said that to him? When she saw the ghosts of his parents? He'd thought nothing of it in those moments by the Oasis, but now? Now the scent of summer was on his lips and he could hear his mother's voice, singing him to sleep as she had once done. All of this could end for him, that lullaby seemed to say. The burning, the confusion, the hallucinations...all he needed to do was close his eyes - and just for a second mind you - and she would do the rest. She of the black summer, with a voice like rain and a laughter like tinkling bells.

They say they'll see you soon..

Yes.. his mind wanted to whisper and silently threatened to close his eyes, but the dun's body resisted. His mind may have given up - given in rather - but it had ever been his body which was the stronger, and it was not yet done with this life.

Despite that, it was still his brain which controlled the information received from his eyes, and so the dun didn't even register that Sikeax had arrived until she was standing right before him. His ears hadn't so much as flickered at her approach. Oh Gaucho, her mothering tone fit well with the illusion of his own mother calling to him, and it did little to bring him out of his stupor. The dun's long dark eye lashes fluttered stupidly over blue-gray eyes which were glazed over and clearly not seeing the world as it was. 

what's wrong?

How many had asked him that lately? Their names eluded him, but he knew it was many; delah. Part of him wanted to laugh at this. What's wrong? Am I alright? There is a parasite eating away at my brain. I've lost countless days in the past few weeks and I constantly see things. I am lucid enough to know that I am seeing things, but not enough to discern what is real and what isn't. My instincts tell me to lash out at everything that I see, but my mind knows enough to prevent this, lest I kill my own children thinking them a foe. I am a king brought low by a bug.

Am I alright? No. 
What's wrong? Everything.

Only instead of voicing this - the kind of symptoms that would be helpful for a healer to hear from her patient, Gaucho only grunted. He swallowed - an act that was both painful and slow given just how dry his throat was. He turned his gaze to Sikeax, marvelling at how the light from her horn seemed to swim all around her. Where they under the water? Or had her light always been so bright .. 

had she always been so-

"Burning." Gaucho said through dry lips. "Heat everywhere."

Helpful, given that his body was constantly on fire and yes, the Throat was always hot, made even more-so by Tallsun. 

Sweat trickled down the impressive hills and gulfs of his well- muscled body, never daring to remove the brightly patterned smears of colour that marked him.  His antlered skull swung around, drunkenly trying to get a fix on the healer, but finding her swimming away at every turn. With a grunt of effort, Gaucho allowed himself to lean fully against the tree, giving up on seeing her.

She probably wasn't even here anyways.

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omg your writing ;-;

Sikeax,

The world is crashing down, first through small, gentle hints like bird songs(a dying Gaucho, the Falls on fire despite the fact that Sikeax lets herself viciously believe that they deserve it out of personal anger, the disappearance of the only person she’s let herself love wholly since childhood) that gradually lead into the increasing harshness of the waves against the blood beaches that will, in the end, dye the sea. It searches out weaklings like herself and strikes them down first because who are they to try to change the ways of life? Sikeax cannot save Gaucho and his dying cause, but she is stubborn, and it is what drives her on past her hurting heart and crying eyes to tell herself that believing that he will get better is enough to save him.
Healers can’t think that way. She knows better, but no one is here to see her do that, so it’s okay, isn’t it? It’s okay to break the rules when no one is watching you, knowing they’re being broken. She can care with every damn fiber of her physical existence and religious soul if that’s what she thinks is right for her, and if the Gods were to descend from their thrones to strike her down for it, then it would be her righteous cause for death. That way, Gaucho would be her last patient, freeing her of the shame that is sure to follow if he was to slip into the afterlife while under the false safety of her watch because healers aren’t always miracle workers and people should stop thinking of them that way.
He barely even seems to register them as she sinks further into her emotionally bound misery. Hobgoblin takes the path that best suits him: watching with dull eyes and feeling her watered down emotions, listening to what she is facing like it’s a movie he can paint himself in and take part in without having to do any effort. Gaucho is just a dying man to him. He’d prefer to see him die rather than watch his bonded sob and fret over his body making its way to corpse-dom.
“Warrior need death. Warrior living corpse.”
No! No, no he is not! He is a man, he’s just tired, a little sick, nothing I can’t take care of.
She wants to turn to him and yell her words into reality with fierceness that mental conversations can’t entirely portray the way they deserve to be, but the man they’re silently speaking about is standing right before them and nothing would stop him from knowing that one of them is compilating his death without even trying to stop it yet, so she is a quiet mass of a woman, broken, thinking, looking for answers that she can’t get out of him. Vague answers are no help. She needs real things, stomach pains, headaches, anything - Gaucho please help me save you - to send her in the right direction to keep him alive.
In the deafening sea of their thoughts, swimming idly, Gaucho’s brutish noise is enough to make her jump. Disgust rallies up upon her brother’s face, but he is shit at expressing it. Only his head jerks in the direction opposite of Gaucho, tail thrashing with violence.
Get over it.
“No.”
Hobgoblin's words are gravel with rusty nails and shards of glass mixed in, thrown straight into her face as he spits in her direction. An insult because he will not be told how to feel by a woman who isn't sure how to herself.
She, curling up in the palm of the other hand with her little sobs of sadness and fear, has to ignore it. That's how one has to treat Hobgoblin when one is tied to him in every possible way, with the exclusion of physically.
The sick are warranted the ability to do typically repulsive things. It no longer bothers her at the point that Hobgoblin is reaching with it because she has taught herself to grow accustomed to it. Whether she(or Hobgoblin) like it, they’re going to do it.
Attention, at last, makes its way to her. Her own eyes bathe in the clouds dirtying his, frown sinking deeper as she notices that Gaucho is truly becoming a corpse.
If you were to place bets, it’s best to do it with Hobgoblin’s claims. He is brutally honest, thrashing Sikeax into the face, head and heart with fists balled full of reality so that she can get herself past her feelings and gather the courage and strength to see the world in its full glory, on fire and hellish as it always has been. He is something that she has always desperately needed, just never knowing it because Sikeax is a blind soul to a lot of things.
His words fill her up the empty spaces in her ears like drums. Drums made for war, like Gaucho was. Thick, strong, powerful, raising thundering voices over the calm to scream that battle is not to be feared but welcomed and relished.
The sweat against his coat is all that she can use as a testament to his words, but that is probably not what his words are really trying to tell her. The doctor in her tells her fever, heat stroke, heat exhaustion, but Gaucho would be smart and desert-hardened enough to know how to treat his heat exhaustion without her aid.
So there are different options on the table, and when heat stroke can be ruled out by the presence of sweat against his coat, fever is all that is left.
And oh, it better be the worst fever of the century if it is enough to crumble the Dragon’s Throat’s one and only Wildfire.
Two smaller options toil in her head now. Either she can assist him in making it to the ocean and bathe him free of his sweat and let him hopefully cool down and then attempt to trek through the desert while hoping for the best, or they can be bold, and make for the oasis now, and keep him there until she can cure him more fully and usher out more symptoms from his dark lips. Gaucho, as she has always known and guessed him to be, would probably choose the bolder choice, the braver choice, the option that might give him a few more days on this planet or possibly more.
That’s what they go with. Bravery and boldness, hoping with all that Sikeax can muster because Hobgoblin already welcomes Gaucho’s death, understands, just knows somehow, probably through the killer in him.
Yet he doesn’t tell Sikeax. She is porcelain trying its damndest to steel, water trying to be earth, the complete opposite of what she has always known herself to be. He allows her to push on, because if he wasn’t to, he would have to wear the burden of Sikeax’s self-deemed failure until the last breath is ripped out of his lungs during his last moment of life.
Wasted, all because the one he has been forced to bond to cannot let herself not take the blame for things she can’t control.
Or maybe that’s just healers as a whole. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t want to know. They have zero purpose to him, and outside of Sikeax, he doesn’t want to know that they even exist.
Either way, that final breath better go out violently, happening in a battle where he has slaughtered through as many living bodies as he can manage to take the life of, and it better not be fucking sharks.
Gaucho brings her back to life, looking for her, reminding her that she has things that she must do before she can deem her actions a lost cause. She can’t be there yet until Gaucho is nothing but a name, a legend, a skeleton somewhere.
Burns have clawed away at her soft, sweet muzzle, but despite this she is reaching out to him, looking for the dampness of his dark neck and the stained shoulders and chest, the overwhelming scent of masculinity and musk.
“Right here. Here,” The height he has upon her is staggering, but he is the same height as Volterra, she is nearly sure, and unless he was to truly push his boundaries to be as far as a giant like Hector was, it doesn’t frighten her away. “hold onto my mane if you need to keep onto me. Anything that will help.” Any clasp of teeth against her dark mane is welcome, regardless of if it happens or not. She’s got to keep him to her at any possibility.
“Gaucho?” Brief seconds pass between the soft calling of his name and the current of words prepared to push out of her lips in one tsunami wave. “We need to get back to the oasis. Do you think you can do that? Hobgoblin and I are going to be with you the entire way, and I’ll walk you back.”
More time is allowed for a response, whether it be words, another grunt, or a motion that alerts her that he is aware of her words and what needs to be done. A few short steps forward are made, assuring that her body passes against his own despite the pain racking her from her burns. She needs him to know what she is trying to do, that she is still there and not going to randomly appear. Gaucho could kill her easily in her eyes, full of strength and raw power that even in sickness is a screaming outcry of great a man Gaucho once was is.
The flat, upper plain of her face kisses his wings, discomfort rallying through her at the flames licking their black masses, haunted by a scar she’s worked so hard to forget, asking him to lift it so that she can slip her soft body beneath it.
“Let me under your wing. I’ll prop you up and help you walk back. Lean your weight onto me.”
He smells of sweat, desert, sand, sea salt and sea foam, all genuine Dragon’s Throat and Gaucho.

OOC: <3
I hope you don't mind that I stopped it here. You're more than welcome to write out Sia climbing under his wing and all that fun stuff so that they can start heading back to the Throat.


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Sikeax,

The decline towards eventual destruction steepens, picks up the pace and promptly accelerates into full blown chaos. There is so little that can be done(Sikeax.) There is nothing that can be done, and death must come regardless(Hobgoblin.)
She needs to get her grip firmly on the world, see that Gaucho isn’t even acknowledging her there, right in front of him, that he’s too far gone even for her hope. There are some she cannot save, and sadly, he is one of them.
He isn’t speaking to her. It’s not like she needs a reply, but there is one voice taking up the spaces in her head that she doesn’t want filled, just empty. Hobgoblin’s tone has always been coarse, deep, harsh, like storm swells and hail storms, ready to beat reality back into her when her childish hopes have gone too far. Right now, he’s hitting her with everything that he can muster because it has to work. There isn’t another option in this situation.
“Warrior dying. Warrior need to go. We kill.”
Pain bursts within her chest, breaks a rib to make room, that in turn punctures her weak heart. It bleeds everything into a pit that is ready to make her emotions an ocean.
"No! That is not an option here. That is never going to be an option."
Brute force carries her words like a sledgehammer to the face, and despite being taken back by her sudden outburst, speaking to him like today is a day when they've just bonded and have yet to discover that they can and will forever share private voices between one another.
Maybe speaking outwardly is a coping object for her.
"Gaucho will be fine." Come on, we're going to the oasis.
Movement doesn't take his joints out of their stiff positions. He is still as if he is an ebony statue, no twitching tail and snarling lips. All that he does is stare, like he's trying to dig into her soul and shake it hard enough to make her get it together.
"Sia...."
Don't call me that.
The wing is a lot heavier than she is used to them being, but her only time spent beneath the wing of a Pegasus was with Amara and Cera, and both were nowhere near the size of her Sultan. It sinks onto her like a burning mass of shadow and night, hell falling down upon her to take her away because that's where she is, just not aware of it yet.
At the press of his weight into her hide, dampening her with sweat, she nearly does stumble. Her knees beg relief and forgiveness, wondering why they must experience this when they have done nothing to bring it forth.
A small note is absentmindedly made that in the future, when all of this has come and past, that she should ask him assistance on gaining strength, to being a better warrior for the Dragon's Throat, to putting herself into more useful places aside from being their healer.
Hobgoblin, watching, draws up his lips and balls them up on one side, keeps this expression as eye contact is made with Sikeax. Not a single glance is spared for Warrior.
"Not worth. Dying. Let go." He's like a bad odor for her, hindering her and discouraging her from what she feels with every fiber of her damned soul that she must do.
He's just sick. Shut up.
Her stubbornness wins for a difference. The Rougarou is walking away, quiet, leading them on towards the lake and the trees and the bodies of their family in the center of the island. Tufts of fire-crafted sand follow in his wake.
For her, the trek feels endless, shuffling along, taking the occasional stop to assure that Gaucho is alright and still feeling that he can go on. Each time, her voice is soft and even more worry-filled than the time before, keeping their building up until Hobgoblin believes that she might cry.
By the lake, a sob is hitched in her throat. He wants nothing to do with it, changing with silence and groaning to himself with no regard to Sikeax's dislike of it as the warm sands grind against the underbelly of this body, burning to the touch. The water is cool, deep, dark and murky, a welcome relief.
"Here." flutters out of her mouth for him, standing knee deep in the lake now, rolling her shoulders forward and into the wing that Gaucho has cloaked over her, guiding him forward and away from her.
Once free, she swings her head high, rearing shortly to get it there completely as it presses into the same apendage that she had just been under. With a bit more effort, she makes it to his spine. Moisture from his sweat stains the lower portion of her skull as she sinks into him, waiting for the slow buckle of his knees that finally does begin with enough encouragement.
"Warrior zombie. Zombie dead. Warrior need death. Hobgoblin drown Zombie for you."
"Please..." A pained whisper, broken down and shattered, begging her brother to stop once and for all, to let her keep trying til he really is dead. If Gaucho had been listening, then he could have written it off as his healer's soft temperment asking him to crumble further.
Make some waves to help wash him. And while he is never one to take her commands with simplicity, this he does. A change of head so that Sikeax will give in, break, let the tears come crashing down as his body twirls in the water and the magic that he is still to this day trying to figure out generates waves that drain him of his energy quicker than expected.
Even her ability to breathe underwater assists them, diving her skull under and drawing it up to splash water against his darkening hide, kissing it with her muzzle, painted with a stiff line that up close is obviously forced to hide sorrow, trying desperately to urge the sickness out of his bones with nothing more than a bath.

OOC: bleh bleh bleh totally sped this c':
Hobgoblin changes to his leopard seal form when mentioned.
also not proofread so i apologize. had to get ready for work

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It might have taken them minutes, or mayhap days or weeks to finally reach the Oasis. Gaucho truly couldn't be sure. All he knew was he could feel hot glass grinding inside of his lungs and a cacophony of relentless buzzing inside of his bones and skull. He moved through the world of oranges and skybright mirages without seeing or feeling anything other than the swiftening degradation of his mind and body.

Until

Ice. Cold. Fire. Burning - no, melting? His mind couldn't comprehend what it was that he was feeling, but the mental swirls that his decomposing brain spat out looked almost like..

Ophelia? He saw the scent of ice tinged with red. It felt sharp, like her horn, jaded like her history, and hard like the lines of her body. It was blue and red like her eyes and-

It was water. Water rushing against his body. Even in the heat of Tallsun the Oasis was cool, and as Sikeax guided him deeper into it, it became even colder. It wasn't Ophelia, but the imagery of ice and white and red and blue wasn't inapt. White light flooded his vision as his glassy eyes cleared ever so slightly. Vaguely Gaucho was aware that someone had moved away from him - out from under his wing - for the warmth which had just been there was replaced by the gentle rush of cold fluid against his burning sides. He even vaguely felt splashes of water against his shoulders and back, though his still swimming-gaze couldn't quite pick out from where.

Slowly, annoyingly so, his body temperature began to lower. Lucidity began to slowly drip back into what remained of his fractured mind, and his eyes finally cleared. Gaucho still stood uselessly in the Oasis appearing to barely be able to maintain his balance (though managing it somehow), but his blocky skull rose away from the surface of the water and towards where Sikeax had surfaced. Clearly not all was right with his mind, for it appeared as though she had surfaced from under the water - from where she had been for longer than she could have possibly held her breath. But the dun decided not to question it. 

"Si-k-e" He tried to say her name, but his dry throat barred the syllables from leaving it. With a frustrated grunt, the dun lowered his bone-pierced muzzle towards the water and took a slow drink. He meant only to take enough water so that his throat would allow him to speak, but the sensation of cooling was revitalized within him as the water hit his stomach and helped cool him from the inside out.

The Wildfire took a moment to relish in the white-crisp calm that had fallen over his body, not wanting to leave the respite that the oasis had given him by trying to force his mental faculties to work again. But duty was not something that you just gave up, not when you had born its weight for so long. And so, Gaucho lifted his lips from the water and tried to steady his blue-gray gaze upon the healer who had quite certainly prolonged his death, if only for a little while longer.  

"Thank you." The words were like cotton in his mouth, but he spat them out just the same. "Water what Gaucho need." He finished, his blocky antlered skull bobbing his appreciation as his sunken blue-striped shoulders tensed and allowed him to stand slightly taller. 

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I am the queen of not proof reading, so you'll get no complaints from meeee.