begone, foul creature!

She'd tracked this seeping beast for quite a while now. After enduring the torment of the ooze, she'd taken it upon herself to hunt down whatever creatures remained afflicted on her way back home. No living being deserved to be haunted by this terrible disease. Her lung capacity still hadn't returned completely, so she relied on taking short, shallow breaths. It was highly inefficient and the inefficacy of it all was driving her nuts. Following that strange encounter with the cloaked figure who had judged her culinary skills so harshly, she was feeling more pressed than ever to develop her skills. All of them! Every single skill! Fable grunted as she hopped from the base of one tree trunk to the next. The murky water wasn't welcoming, and she was sure it would be frighteningly cold this early in the spring. The shallows didn't warm up until mid summer. She caught sight of it up ahead, slipping behind another mangrove - it was a sickly thin young doe, slick from the water, but also glistening with the ooze that streamed from its body. The deer was keeping to the shadows and still leaked some of that tell-tale substance. "I'll get you, you poor thing," she muttered, skirting around the edge of the tree as she narrowed in on her quarry.

wc 221
twc 221/1500