Climbing the foothills of the Dragon's Spine was nothing compared to trudging through the endless swampland of the Mire Flats. On your second day of journeying you feel like your entire body is caked in dirt, you've battled off bugs that you could use your bow against, and you've certainly not had a decent night's sleep.
The mire willows form a dark canopy overhead so that you seem to almost be traveling through an endless, stinking cave. You are waist deep in a particularly stagnant body of water when you feel something slither against your leg. This isn't surprising, as swamp eels infest most of the waters you've traversed, but when the slithering sensation becomes an encircling grip you gasp in fright and try to kick whatever has you away.
With a rush of water you are hauled up, head over heels, out of the swamp by a strange beast with many tentacles. One rubbery gray-green appendage is wrapped tightly around your ankle. The beast is twice the size of the forest bears you've seen in the woods near Gutandor. It has no limbs (other than the tentacles) and seems to be a massive lumpy head with a monstrous, alien face covering most of its grotesque body. It regards you with three watery, yellow eyes, and sniffs the air with two huge holes set above its mouth.
The huge beast's flesh is gray and covered in stinking swamp slime and plant matter. Its gaping maw is shockingly pink and lined with hundreds of razor sharp teeth. It looks large enough to swallow you whole! Fleshy red tendrils, like thin tentacles, wriggle in the creature's mouth where a tongue might be. Many thick, gray tentacles move towards you.
You have a boot knife that you might be able to cut yourself free with. On the other hand, you remember your father warning you that if you are attacked by a bear you should play dead. Maybe this strategy would work with this monster. |