Sable woke the way she always did after Grimridge decided to remind her that pain was a language it spoke fluently: slowly, unwillingly, dragged upward through sensation before memory could fully catch her.
The first thing she felt was her shoulder, not the sharp flare of fresh injury, but the deep, grinding throb of something forced back into place and strapped there too firmly to ignore.
The second was her ribs, every breath a careful negotiation with bruised muscle and hairline damage.
The third was the heaviness behind her eyes, the residue of whatever the healer had given her to keep her conscious without letting her scream herself empty again.
The infirmary came back to her piece by piece, first through the smell of herbs and clean linen, then through the pale light falling across the familiar cracks in the ceiling, and finally through the quiet scrape of a chair close enough to tell her she was not alone.
