Mud from the Feverlands, the goddess had asked of him, and so Tal set out in the middling days of Leafchange with a padded satchel of sturdy glass bottles, carefully packaged in ningo down.
It seemed right to gather it under the starry sky, though the courier hadn't really considered how hard it would be to see that sky through the foetid jungle overgrowth above. Child of Halo, he knew clean snow and brilliant ice, and the wide open spaces of Sea and Tundra except where the barren rock of the Fangs struck upwards towards the sky.
This... this swamp was new and thoroughly unpleasant for him, and he scowled as he eeled past some hanging vines that had the smell of rotting meat exuding from their pale, fleshy flowers.
"This place is fuckin' dismal," he grumbled, and the pale dragon questing ahead of him - the size of a wolfhound but with a mastiff's muscular build - snorted amusement as she picked her way through the muck.
She stopped suddenly, blunt-muzzled reptilian head lifting to scent the air, and Tal paused before gliding forward to rest a hand on her broad shoulders. The pair of them moved cautiously after the scent until a person came into view holding... a really big rat?
Tal's nose wrinkled as he straightened, scratching the roots Boreal's horns reassuringly. "Oh. Uh. Hey," he spoke up, with his usual eloquence, trying not to startle the strange... person.
It seemed right to gather it under the starry sky, though the courier hadn't really considered how hard it would be to see that sky through the foetid jungle overgrowth above. Child of Halo, he knew clean snow and brilliant ice, and the wide open spaces of Sea and Tundra except where the barren rock of the Fangs struck upwards towards the sky.
This... this swamp was new and thoroughly unpleasant for him, and he scowled as he eeled past some hanging vines that had the smell of rotting meat exuding from their pale, fleshy flowers.
"This place is fuckin' dismal," he grumbled, and the pale dragon questing ahead of him - the size of a wolfhound but with a mastiff's muscular build - snorted amusement as she picked her way through the muck.
She stopped suddenly, blunt-muzzled reptilian head lifting to scent the air, and Tal paused before gliding forward to rest a hand on her broad shoulders. The pair of them moved cautiously after the scent until a person came into view holding... a really big rat?
Tal's nose wrinkled as he straightened, scratching the roots Boreal's horns reassuringly. "Oh. Uh. Hey," he spoke up, with his usual eloquence, trying not to startle the strange... person.
