Witch's Marsh my love, i treasure you.

@Merrit

Ibis marched in a fog from place to place; she did not see the beautiful forest at the foot of the mountains, did not complain as she took to picking her way through the wetlands further on. Not a sound passed her lips as she went; she wasn't aware if @Okeanos followed her or if @Ereshkigal had ever returned, and merely kept on moving. Her desire to explore was exacerbated by the deep pangs of lonliness and loss she felt, and it felt as if no amount of distance would save her from the heartbreak she had so recently experienced. A part of her wanted to be as far from the willows as possible; maybe she thought she'd encounter someone familiar, or the path of her mothers, or some sort of clarity that would ease the pain inside of her; it was very possible the ache would never abate, and she was loath to think such a thing. She did not want to become a surly, bitter, hateful creature like the disenfranchised Mal — and in thinking of the boy and the promise she was adamantly breaking by refusing to go back to Neverwinter, Ibis' pace increased.

She toiled until the marsh was all around her. The air was rich with herbal fragrance, and the late hour didn't feel so dim or dark as the light reflected off a myriad of still water, which she drifted by with a shy glance or an inquisitive dip of her nose. At one point the smell of the water was more inticing than anything; it was tannic, almost. All manner of plant life lived throughout the bogged area but the water was full of it too, and the dead pieces steeped at the bottom of the silt-heavy ponds. Ibis gave a careful lick of the surface of one small pond and recoiled immedately. A line of green slime hung from her chin and she shook her face to be rid of it, watching the shape slip free and audibly plop back in to the water.

For a few moments her revulsion was so strong that Ibis forgot about the rest of her issues. She didn't think about Elysium and was more concerned with ridding the sage-rich taste of the pond scum from her tongue, and ran the pink muscle across the tip of her snout as if to graze the texture of the slime away using her leathery nose. It is at this point that Ibis notices a chill in the air to which she was oblivious before; the sky is dark with streaks of grey, and there is a brisk wind flowing from the north, cutting through the sour scent of the bog with a crisp, clean, wintergreen aroma. She looks heavenward but doesn't see anything too concerning, not realizing that the tendrils of winter were already seeding themselves.

@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.

Don't feel the need to match! I got carried away in notepad, hah!

Her blue eyes reflected the growing gloom overhead and she moved back, steadying herself as the wind picked up. Parts of the sky were a brilliant dark blue. There was an energy to the moment that almost did not fit, and perhaps this is what caught her attention the most. As a particularly strong gust poured across the marsh Ibis ducked away from the dimming sky and felt her whole body tense in preparation of that icy feeling, that breath of the wild across her puny self. A stillness descended. The smell of the bog reeds erupted beside her as she braced against the wind, they smelled fresh as she crushed them beneath her feet. Then the wind ceased, too. There was an emptiness that made Ibis feel more at peace than she expected; as if her sadness and the hollow feeling of her loss was suddenly at home here. There came a sound to her flank that she would have dismissed in any other moment but in this one, this precious and apparently fleeting calm, the tiny splash of the stone in to the pond was akin to someone shouting in a monastery. She rose up to her full (but unimpressive) height and turned in one fluid movement.

She felt her eyes burning as she looked to the darkness behind her, not afraid of it exactly, but aware. The marsh was home to many different forms of life but none more pervasive than the trees, and she had spent some hours previous studying the way the moss wrapped itself around the trunks or weighted down the branches, like the willows she was so fond of as a child. They did not frighten her. Neither did the thick darkness that they housed between them. A part of her resisted plunging towards the trees to investigate; she wondered too, if maybe it was her brother. It could have been Okeanos hunting for her - a thought which rooted her firmly in place. Ibis loved her brother, but in her current frame of mind she did not think she could handle his company, or any company. She scoured the darkness without moving from her place beside the slime-laden pool, but could not see anything or anyone.

But there were ripples of movement extending along the surface of one pool, and that made doubt flourish within her mind. Something must have disturbed the water; but there was no prey here now, and as far as she could tell Ibis was alone, pining away for things that were lost. She feels a lump in her throat, tastes the residual flavor of the herbal water that had initially disturbed her, having already forgotten about the strong taste and how repulsive it had been; she is distracted by the darkness among the trees and in a fit of uncharacteristic daring, she shouts to the grove: I know someone is there! Are you afraid of a little girl?

The previous few days of hurt have spoiled her voice; where once it was so light and free, now it grated on her own ears, percing and accusatory. She did not recognize it.