Witch's Marsh my love, i treasure you.

@Ibis Apologies for the wait! <3 Forward dating this, as discussed!

He had no ambition in what he was doing, no purpose, no end. The mountains gave him distance, and stood like a wall between the balm of his family and the fever of his mind. And, like a pendulum, he swung back and forth between them. Mother would know he had left. Yet it wouldn't be too late to play the prodigal. He could go back home, it wasn't too late; he could collapse into mother, and let his tears soak her fur, and let her gentle voice speak comfort to his ears. Of any wolf, she would understand.

But to return in such a way, chipped and broken as his Patron stone... his pride could not fathom how he could face his family in such chaos - so unlike the man he had struggled so hard to be, so that he would not become the very man he was becoming, the very man he had sworn to never become.

He could not return to them. This was, perhaps, his final mistake; he had put them through too much already - and as Merrit slipped between the swamp-soaked trees, he reflected on Tulimaq. Would things have been different, if the man had never left? Or if the Raven hadn't been so scared to follow that strange Northerner out and out into the unknown? Would he have been stronger then, prepared for the world, able to mete out justice and vengeance where they were his to deliver, instead of crumbling in the face of an innocent striken by the evils, the scourge, of this world?

A noise of in the water roused him back to the present, to where he stood in this damp and murky wood, and Merrit stills. The sound was nothing bigger than a rock or a frog splashing into the deep, but he is none too careful. He makes a meticulous scan of the space between the branches, body tense incase he has not been alone after all --

he almost misses the pale silhouette, spaced a distance away. Their back is turned to him, and he cannot see their face - and the witch, the witch had been small, pale, yet her crown had been unmistakeable. A deep, damnable darkness, and Merrit narrows his eyes and sinks to the ground. The mud crawls up his belly, but his focus is elsewhere; the evening shrouds his shadowed body, and he reaches out a paw. He pauses, and with a flick, knocks a stone into the murk of the water.

Plop.