The Serpent's Coil

The air in Elder Willow's lodge was thick with the scent of dried herbs and the quiet hum of ancient knowledge. Sunlight, filtered through hides, painted shifting patterns on the packed earth floor. Sky Eyes sat cross-legged, her gaze fixed on the elder's weathered hands as they traced unseen lines on a piece of cured rawhide. The rawhide was not a map of the land as she knew it, with its familiar rivers and rolling hills, but a tapestry of symbols, a language spoken by the earth itself, a language she was only beginning to decipher.

"This is not merely a sickness of the body, child," Elder Willow’s voice was a low murmur, like pebbles smoothed by a river’s flow. "It is a sickness of the spirit. A wound that festers, unseen, unacknowledged."

Sky Eyes felt a familiar tremor run through her, a resonance with the elder’s words that echoed the unease that had settled upon her like a shroud. The bison, their movements growing erratic, their coats dulling, were not just animals suffering. They were the pulse of the plains, and their pain was the plains’ pain.