<div align="center"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Garamond;"><span class="bbc_u"><strong>ACT I. SCENE II. THE GOUGE.</strong></span></span></div><br/><br/><div align="center">(http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f258/siegfried1922/chasm.jpg)</div><br/><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Rain.<br/><br/>It soaks everything away:  Comfort.  Vitality.  Direction.  <br/><br/>And the bog squeezes in.  Over hours of tracking through it, having the rain beat down and the bog bubble up, the bog is in everything.<br/><br/>Even on one flank of the chasm in the hills, overlooking the <strong>narrow cave</strong> that is the destination of the tracks, the bog remains in you.<br/><br/>The bog is a haunting thing that makes its house in every chamber of a person.  Its reek moans in the nose, throat and lungs.  Its mire rattles its chains around clothes and limbs stained through with muck.  The weird, flatulent temperature of it stalks through the skeleton.<br/><br/>It lingers, staining the awareness with memory of slogging through it; turning the hour upon hour of what felt like walking through the intestines of a bad, gray oil painting - walking through the puke of the world - into an eternity.<br/><br/>Even half an hour into the jagged chasms, and the bog is still squatting, ectoplasmic, on every sense.<br/><br/>The terrain is different here, though.  That much is a mercy.  The trail became more definite when the abductor's massive bulk left the bog and ventured into chopped rock of the hills.  It was only the eerie precision and sullen determination of Drague's tracking that allowed you to hold to the trail through such calamitous terrain.  <br/><br/>And it led here - around to a slope opposite the cave where the tracks lead, so as to view it from safe distance before entering.<br/><br/>The cave, seen through gauzy floes of mist, still seems menacing.  A sore in the limestone cheek of the cliff, it is a narrow pocket of about twelve feet in height and six feet in width.  Its dimensions clench inwards as it enters the darkness in the stone.  A tripwire trap made of dried gut, perceptible only to Draque, is tucked like an exposed nerve in its socket. <br/><br/>It does have this much going for it:  It is not the bog.</span><br/><br/>