The lessening of pain made itself known much more slowly than the presence of it, a dim, cooling sensation as wounds closed and bleeding stopped. It was peaceful to lie still while her body mended, the terror of the last several hours finally beginning to fade, and the dryad felt her muscles start to unknot  

With this reduction in pain, came an increase in awareness, however, and soon Rhiannon became aware of a distant roaring. At first, she could not quite make out what this sound was; it seemed too capricious to be water and too hungry to be the wind. It was definitely starting to fade, though. Was she moving away or was it?

For what could have been moments or hours, Rhiannon faded back into comfortable blackness, lulled away from exhaustion, but some undefinable amount of time later, she realized that she wasn’t comfortable at all. She was certainly swaying but in a way too rhythmic and bouncing for her to be in the comfortable bows of a big old oak. The constant movement tugged at the still-painful gashes in the dryads side, dragging her unwillingly from blissful unawareness.

Gradually, Rhiannon came to realize that she was being carried like a child, with someone’s arms under her knees and behind her shoulders. With a small groan, she tore herself into full awareness, unwilling to let herself be taken anywhere without knowing. Her eyes adjusted slowly, but soon the dryad found herself looking up into the face of a thin young human that she had never seen before.

With a small yell, Rhia began to struggle, kicking at him with her heels and pushing at his chest to get away. Soon she squirmed her way free and found herself in the middle of a dirt road, a cloud of smoke billowing up from the clearing behind them.

“Who are you?” she demanded, the words feeling unfamiliar in her mouth for lack of using them.