Twisted Slough II. Caught in the burning glow.

Sloughs were gross. Java could attest to this because there was a slough near her house, and it was loaded with all sorts of gross things (like silt, and ducks, and poop, and sometimes traffic cones). This slough wasn't much different. It was fed by some of the water draining off of the nearby plateau, so it was filled with all kinds of bird-specific fluids (and at this point probably a few wolf ones); the ice crusted the shallow parts but left the deeper segments cold and exposed, and there was no way for the boy to tell the difference between them. Everything was dark with silt and half-frozen. He could power through most of the slough because of his great size, but Revui wasn't in the best condition for such an aggressive style of travel—he could only plough through so much of it before the cold of the water soaked through his winter coat and started numbing the bulk of his muscles. Soon, if he wasn't careful, he would be struggling to breathe while the frigid water worked at slowing the rest of him down.

He didn't see the pale girl as she sloshed her way along the shallows. She looked like a drifting patch of snow. Maybe a pile of ice that had broken away and slowly drifted across the deep end of the slough. Whatever she was, Revui was too focused on finding a way out of the deep portion he'd inadvertently slipped in to, and as he struggled against the loose soil his silver pelt turned graphite-black from all the nasty brown depths. This couldn't have been good for him. Being healthy and fjording through the slough was one thing, but he had gaping wounds across his body and fresh cuts to his paws to think about, and if too much of that nasty stuff got in there he was liable to give himself an infection.

When he finally touched solid ground with his paws, he gave a lurch, the ground made a gross sucking noise as if it wasn't going to give him up — and he pulled free, sloshing down against a more solid section of reeds and kicking his his hindquarters, until he was sprawling chest-first across a chunk of raised earth. He was panting pretty hard, and each inhalation smelled like sulfur—but Revui didn't notice, he was just happy to be free.