Countdown ✓

Shadow (20 days after)

"AH!!" I shrieked, breaking the log in half. Whiteclaw flinched as pieces and splinters of wood flew past him from my overpowered jaws. I clutched my teeth tightly, embracing the burning sensation that scarred my brain.

"Stay still!"

"It hurts!" I screeched back, trembling hard. Intense pain throbbed in my calf, and though I couldn't look back, I didn't need to. I was already straining myself to not cry. My arms were quivering, and I'm sure I've broken through three sticks.

It wasn't enough.

"Another log?" Drexel huffed, pushing one in. Stella nodded, examining my unknown injury.

"Yeah, he might need to bite down on it. He's been burned badly. Look, look at this. His bone's showing too."

"MY WHAT?!" I cried out in a muffled voice, before another spasm of agony struck. I let out a painful muffled cry, cracking the new log already from my jaws. Whiteclaw jerked back as the log went concave in my jaws. Sweat poured from my face, and my jaws hurt as the crush became too strong. Stronger than I've ever bitten before. I was out of breath, pleading silently to make the suffering end. Whiteclaw crossed his arms over his chest and looked at Drexel with uncertainty.

"Told you this would happen," Drexel hissed under his breath, sitting down on his underbelly, watching Stella work on my leg to stop the bleeding. I shot him a look of hatred and annoyance, then winced.

"Why would the geyser explode like that?" Whiteclaw then asked, "It wasn't doing that before. None of them were." Drexel didn't say a word though. He too seemed speechless on this type of topic.

"Actually they have," Stella responded back, tilting her huge frilled skull, "In some other geysers. You guys just experienced your first one."

"So it's been doing this for a while?" Whiteclaw shuddered, "Well...why hasn't nobody told us about it?" Stella just looked up at him and sighed, then quickly spun her attention to my calf.

"I don't know. It's just some stupid explosion. Nothing to worry about." Whiteclaw eyed her then shrugged.

"Ugh, worried!" I growled from within the log, "I'm more so worried than all of you--Gahh!!" I crushed my jaws again, and the wood split in a dark line through its bark, like an earthquake. I felt small tears sprout on my eyes, but I closed my eyes to hold in the terror and sorrow of my own agony.

"Please stop..." I wept like a child, moving my excruciating leg around away from Stella, "Please...It hurts."

"Shadow, if I don't do anything, it'll be infected!" Stella snapped, then sighed behind my back, "If I can do anything."

"What do you mean?" I felt my heartbeat quicken when the pain subsided in a throbbing sensation, "You can't do anything?"

"It's already infected?!" Whiteclaw's eyes popped. Stella sniffed my calf, and I could feel droplets of blood slip down my leg and stain the dust from a hot wind.

"No...not yet. Though it smells like it. And it might as well have been."

This time, I dared myself to look at my wound, and quickly, I curled my head around to take a long stare.

I regretting every picture I captured with my carnivorous eyes.

My calf was bloody and red. From the backside of my knee down, my scales were steamed and blackened, as if something hot wiped its fiery hand down my calf to the bottom of my foot. Surely enough, a slim bit of my white bone, which was bloody, yet unbroken, gleamed out of the wound. It looked as if either my leg got burned up, or my calf got opened by an alligator. Either or, I wasn't pleased by the sight, and felt my stomach do a flip within my belly. Or should I say I got sick immediately from the sight. I couldn't describe how I felt, it was just awful. I turned back to Stella, panicked and disgusted, wanting to know if there was an alternative. If there was something out there to help my wound.