Elisa steeled herself, straightened her stand, poised and stoic for a moment, then she ventured forth, trailing behind the booming chatterbox of a woman. A slice of mellow harmony spawned amid the fragrant leaves; a river. It flowed like time, onward, toward its destiny, welcoming stray flora that came its way. One day the placid waters would enter a great ocean, each droplet a vital part to the mighty aquatic world.<br/><br/>Had it been under normal circumstances, she would have waded in, letting the welcoming kiss of coolness settle deep within her bones, watching the eddies swirl and disappear. But it was then that she realised, in the dense cover of darkness, that the water’s surface was livened by a charring, rust-brown tinge. Her eyes travelled downstream, caressing the dapples that bring the gunk of the water to a hue so sickening. She stifled a groan when the foulness struck her nostrils and her gut trembled at the sight. A river once a ribbon of living turquoise, boldly flowing amid the green of the forest, diminished to yet another otherworldly sewage roost. No matter the chatter of the trees, they had remained steady, refreshing, now, a festering wound on the forest, the ground barren and decaying.<br/><br/>Soon, a ghastly orange grin spread upon the forest horizon, tearing through the verdant woodland. Her paced quickened, her mind flustered with horrible revelations of the dying woodlands. She expected unfettered flames, devouring hungrily, licking and lapping at the coppice, twisting and swaying in a dance without rhythm. Blackened bodies, charred bones, unsettled souls, snatched before their time. Fire tainted the earth with grey, stripping the trees of the virescent beauty, leaving their gaunt, skeletal remains rooted to the barren soil. Instead, embers emanated strangely from an unholy abomination, their twisting journey to reach the sky like pallid, gnarled hands, a desperate try to latch onto the realm.<br/><br/>An avatar of the crawling chaos… a fearful thought reverberated through her shuddering skull, the reality-tearing, flaming pandemonium, the malice and violence it exuded twisting in visible vortexes of erratic sparks. The warrens had become a landfill of snout and hoof, gristle and bone - a mountainous, twitching mass of misshapen flesh, fusing itself together in the darkness, an incoherent jumble of organ, sinew and bone, all sizzling endlessly, the steam at superheated temperatures hot enough to scour the gravestones clean, burning the ground to a crisp.<br/><br/>The valiant knight was there too?! Elisa dipped to the nearest shelf of cobbled walls, the beat of her heart barely discernible. She peaked hesitantly through the poor craftsmanship of the wall, throat lodged with a tension unlike any other. The snorting half-corpsed creature stomped its hind legs instinctively at the insignificance pestering its backside, blindly drilling hundreds of pounds’ worth of weight into surrounding ground.