"Mm—!"
It wasn't the ceaseless thumping sound coming from outside that woke Jasnah.
Nor was it the howling wind pressing against the walls, nor the knocking sound of something striking repeatedly against the wall her bed was pushed against.
It was, in the end, only the pain that finally did it.
The pain dragged her up, inch by inch, out of her deep stupor.
She opened her sleep-heavy eyes slowly, and the first thing that met them was a hazy, indistinct blur, as if several layers of grey gauze had been draped, before her face.
Blinking hard, working to properly see her own surroundings, Jasnah tried at the same time to prop herself up on her elbows against the soft mattress beneath her, attempting to sit up despite the disorientation.
Unfortunately, both attempts failed.
The blur clouding her vision was so stubborn that no matter how rapidly she blinked against it, the murk refused to clear from her sight.
If she hadn't been able to tell, through sheer persistence, that her vision was in fact growing a little brighter with each try, she would genuinely have believed her eyesight had suffered some irreparable damage.
Nor could she manage to sit up, whatever the effort she put into it.
When she tried to gather her body's remaining strength into her arms, the deep soreness and numbness running through every single muscle made her let out a pained groan.
Even with her tough, well-tested will, she could not fully suppress this particular pain.
Still, it wasn't remotely the same quality of pain as the needle-sharp, piercing agony her right calf was suffering right now in comparison—this dull ache running through the rest of her was only the ordinary consequence of having lain in one position, in bed, for too long.
She gasped twice and stopped struggling completely for a moment.
She had, evidently, slept for a long stretch of time, and her mind remained somewhat foggy from it but her actual memory was recovering faster than her body currently was.
She was still alive. That much, at least, she could be entirely certain of, first and foremost.
In the last second before she'd blacked out, roaring flames and shrieking spell-light had filled her own swaying vision.
But as ten thousand tons of stone came crashing down all at once, the German Ministry Aurors' bluster and shouting, her father's voice somewhere in the chaos, that madwoman Bellatrix's crazed, echoing laughter, and the cowardly, panicked cries of those spineless Death Eaters scrambling for their lives had all fallen away together, and total darkness had descended over everything.
'How, had I survived that?'
Lying still in the unfamiliar bed, Jasnah considered the question quietly.
But she couldn't give herself a satisfying answer.
The first possibility to rule out was whether the German Ministry's own Aurors had dug her from the rubble.
The Aurors might well have saved her life in the course of their own rescue efforts but they would never, under any circumstance, have arranged a soft, comfortable bed for her, tucked a thick blanket over her with any tenderness, and then waited patiently for her to wake on her own terms.
Given everything she'd done, the Aurors' most likely course of action, once they'd hauled her back to their custody at the Ministry, would have been to wake her with the Cruciatus Curse instead.
The thought made Jasnah smile coldly to herself.
In the end, the Aurors were no different at all from her own kind—when it came to actual enemies, neither side would ever show the other any mercy.
Nor, working through the possibilities further, could it plausibly have been her father, or any of the remaining Death Eaters who had saved her life either.
Her sense of smell remained sharp, even in her current weakened state, and the surrounding air did carry the lingering scent of a man somewhere close by but not one she recognised from anywhere.
'Then who could it actually be?\
Jasnah was genuinely desperate to know the answer.
By any ordinary standard of common human decency, she understood herself to be, without illusion, a bad person but she conducted herself, even so, by certain private rules of her own.
She would erase the memory of whoever had actually saved her life and then leave them a fair sum of gold behind as payment.
Now that her mind had cleared somewhat further, the persistent thumping sound coming from outside the cabin seemed especially grating against her nerves.
And the way the wall beside her bed shuddered in response was likewise, distinctly uncomfortable to endure.
Little by little, working with patience, she began coaxing her own body back into motion, trying to make herself move as quickly as her current condition would allow.
The sharp pain in her right leg, oddly enough, gave her something to properly push against and focus through, and before very long she found she could move both her arms slowly.
Her eyesight, too, had recovered a good deal in those minutes, though it remained somewhat blurred at the edges of her vision.
"Mm—!"
Teeth clenched hard against the effort, Jasnah bore through the stabbing pain and jumping nerves in her right leg and forced herself with great difficulty, to finally sit fully upright. It was like fighting a hard-won battle—by the time she'd achieved her goal, sweat had soaked through both her temples.
'A log cabin.'
Small in its size—about the same scale as the place belonging to that naive Muggle named Fraser, where Aeschylus had stayed while carrying out his mission back in London.
The thought that leapt into her mind made Jasnah's brow furrow slightly with fresh irritation.
How ridiculous, that she'd let that failed Obscurial Aeschylus's name creep back into her head.
She gave her head a small, dismissive shake, brushing hair back from her eyes, and began instead to study the surrounding room with attention.
A pine cabin.
The four walls were built from thick pine logs, all roughly the same thickness, stacked one on top of another, the gaps between each log was packed with fern-choked earth to ensure not a single breath of the surrounding cold wind could invade the room's interior warmth.
By the door, beside a grimy, latticed casement window, stood a square table with a rough pine-board top; with the accumulated passage of years, the tabletop itself had been thoroughly stained dark with old grease, and the table's legs tilted at an uneven angle—it looked, overall, as though the table's useful days were nearly at their end.
An oil lamp hung suspended from the ceiling beam, its dim, yellowish light not even bright enough to fill a single cupped handful of fireflies.
By stark contrast, the firebox of the hearth, built from mud brick, blazed with the bright fire of vigorously burning wood, throwing warmth and light across the small room.
Jasnah looked toward the hearth a few times more, her attention was lingering there.
The hearth's flue was a crude, functional cylinder of sheet iron, bent into a right angle, one end connected to the firebox, the other running out through a rough hole cut into the pine wall to the outside air.
This particular, entirely ugly hearth wasn't genuinely worth much of her continued attention on its own merits except that the iron pot sitting on the mantel above it, steam rolling off its contents, made her gaze grow a touch keener.
With effort, Jasnah pulled her eyes away from the sight.
Hungry as she was after everything, properly understanding where she currently was, and why, mattered more than her stomach's demands.
Her gaze swept past the hearth and the small stack of gathered firewood sitting beside it, moving instead toward the far corner of the room.
That particular corner was evidently where the cabin's owner had piled his odds and ends.
An old hunting rifle aged from use hung on the wall; in the rough wooden crate beneath it sat a scattered collection of things like axes, chisels, and hand saws.
There was also a heap of animal pelts nearby, properly cleaned, dried, and tanned through, though stacked together now in a fairly disorderly fashion.
The cabin's owner wasn't much of a skilled hunter,
Jasnah concluded, after studying those particular pelts closely for a good while.
There were no hides present from anything large like bears or tigers—the only pelts visible were a modest few sewn together from musk deer skin, she realised with a small jolt that they were the very same ones currently covering her body in the bed.
Jasnah's brow furrowed again at that particular realisation.
Everything currently within her sight, taken together, confirmed one fact: she was, at this moment, a guest within a Muggle's modest "home."
The judgment left her feeling faintly uneasy.
The room itself was warm, filled throughout with the comforting smell of cooking food and the lingering trace of a strange man's scent—none of which particularly repulsed her on any physical level, but the combination did leave her feeling a small, nagging discomfort all the same.
She threw back the heavy blanket covering her, and her expression changed at once.
A wand, one that should have been resting at her bedside, had instead been brought and placed in front of her.
The wand was indeed hers, she confirmed at a glance—only, it was broken.
Picking the wand up carefully, still faintly warm to the touch, Jasnah felt a sharp thread of pain seep into her eyes at the sight of the damage.
The wand had been a gift from her own father, personally commissioned from Gregorovitch, widely acknowledged as Germany's finest working wandmaker; it was the very same wand with which she had learned her own very first spell as a child.
In the ten-some years since that first lesson, no matter how dangerous the situation she'd found herself facing, this wand—hazel wood, fitted with a unicorn tail-hair core—had always, reliably carried her through.
It had been her single most steadfast companion across everything she'd survived. And now, it had broken, in the course of this mission.
Jasnah drew a deep breath, working to push down the sudden grief rising in her heart at the loss of her closest, most trusted companion.
Saving those imprisoned at Erkstag had been her father's own proposal, in the end; she shouldn't second-guess that decision now.
Jasnah didn't especially dwell on the further question of why she'd woken up dressed in a different set of clothes, while her own original robes were nowhere currently to be found in the room.
If the Muggle who'd apparently saved her life really had dug her out from beneath a pile of collapsed stones, then her old clothes certainly wouldn't have remained fit to wear afterward.
She threw back the covers further and studied her right foot with a cool assessing expression.
Wrapped in a thick layer of bandages, with wooden splints bound on both sides, her right foot—the splints were sitting slightly askew now, probably from her own unconscious shifting during sleep—had, evidently, disturbed the setting of her broken bones somewhat, and a fresh patch of blood was now showing through the white bandage.
An injury like this wasn't worth fretting over.
What she urgently needed to work out now was how much time had passed since that night, where she was now, and—who had saved her.
Her right foot remained useless for the moment, but fortunately, her left foot and both arms remained more or less intact.
Moving with care, Jasnah climbed out of the bed, both hands braced against the square table not far from it, her left foot planted solidly on the floor to support the whole of her weight.
Through the grimy window, she could make out nothing beyond a whitish blur outside.
Slowly, with great difficulty, Jasnah made her way toward the door; standing behind it for a moment, she drew two deep breaths, and then, in one single motion, wrenched the door open wide.
The whole sky and earth's worth of wind and snow came pouring in.
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