Fishblight Mire Turning away from the Abyss

The country Orkan had been traveling through hadn't done much to improve his already bleak mood, it was all dead bugs and a greater number of devoured plants and it was unbelievably depressing. The midnight wolf slowly made his way over a rise, panting heavily and struggling for balance on shaking legs, and his sense of smell was assaulted by the most horrid of smells. It was like a combination of putrefying corpses and putrefying plant matter, Orkan couldn't remember any time he had ever smelled anything so terrible and then he remembered that time.

Orkan's head dropped under the pounding rays of sun as another wave of nausea passed through his body. Standing in nearly the same stench as that night almost undid poor Orkan's mind, flashes of memory passed through his mind. Orkan retched once, growled deeply in his chest, shook his head and forced himself to continue. The rise he had come over leveled out into a stinking and rotting fen several miles long which had been the source of the stench but it was in even worse condition than a fen normally was. The bugs that had littered the ground the last several miles (whom Orkan assumed had devoured all the plant life) had eaten nearly everything in this area as well, what Orkan thought had once been reeds were eaten down to the ground and looked like odd bones sticking out the rapidly drying mud. Orkan was steeling himself for the emotionally draining journey of skirting the edges of the fen when his right forepaw sank nearly to his elbow joint, releasing a clowd of trapped feotid swamp gas directly into Orkan's muzzle. Orkan couldn't take it, he vomited.

Breathing heavily, trying to gain control of the aftershocks clenching his core muscles Orkan thought, "I'm going to die, all that work running away and I'm going to die right here on the edge of a swamp. At least I'm as far as I can get away from home.". Orkan grimaced, stood and ran his tongue around his bitter mouth, "I need something to drink.". Orkan drug his exhausted body to the edge of the closest pool he could see and dropped his muzzle into the water, it was mostly sediment and probably would've passed as mud any other day but it did clean the bitter taste of bile from Orkan's mouth. Orkan eased onto his side, lapped up some mud-water and promptly fell asleep, his body giving into the exhaustion of traveling and limited food sources.