Witch's Marsh A Toad's Memory

The snow had gotten a little bit more dense in the past few hours, which should have worried Ibis but she wasn't thinking about the danger of it. There was a perpetual fog at ground-level of the marsh which seemed to creep in from the south, lending a particularly eerie vibe to everything rather than lending to the mystical vision that Ibis' mind painted. Everything looked to be grayed out, dreary, bordering on miserable—but here she was, leaping like a gay little fawn from one patch of snow to the next, barely making any sound as she went. The subtle crunch of the thinly collected snow was all that heralded her approach.

A few wolf-lengths away was a particularly large mound of white; what drew her eye towards it was the decidedly dark lump which streaked from one of the ponds, leaving a trail of algae-rich brown sludge across the white. The frog settled in place after that, maybe confused by the sight of the early snow, maybe addled by the cold. Either way, it was food. The fat lump looked like a chunk of coal, or a little meteor of brown with the trailing pond scum behind it. Gross, but edible.

Knowing that their food stores were still very thin, Ibis couldn't let the opportunity pass her by. She redirected her leaping, striding along with her body low and slinking like a cat, almost. She poised behind her target and with a brief running start, lunged for the frog—but the frog seemed to sense her coming and with a little hiccup of a croak, veered away, leaving her to collide with the very solid iceberg that was Marten.