They knew what they were doing. They knew damn well.

The trees had bloodlines cut around their necks. They were oozing their life's fluids onto the scorched and poisoned earth. I could feel their tissues creak as the leaves and branches desiccated themselves helplessly.

The wet rags of fur had been wolves. They smelled of salt and soot, blood and fire. Their claws had been pulled out of their paws. Their teeth had been crushed, their tongues cut.

The clothes attempted to knit themselves back around the slashed limbs of the druid; its supporting flesh, however, rotted and seeped underneath, soaking the mending fibres of the garment with dark, yellow-red fluids. Glistening gut peeked out from under the robe.

All swung from the groaning trees in the dull wafts of stale air.

But nowhere were the insects cleaning the bodies of the dead. No carrion beasts took the flesh back to the realm of the living. They knew what they were doing, because they had defiled the dead in every way: they hung limply from the circle of trees, flesh shredded, out of reach, coated with foul, sticky poison, covered with mocking glyphs. They hung there pathetically, because no beast could touch them without ingesting the poison which coated the bodies, cursing any being which would attempt to bring them back to the earth.

And they should have known I would be coming after them.

I am not going to stop until I have slaughtered every living one of them, cursed their bloody orc corpses, and am crushing the throat of their leader with my boot. And then, I will stomp it flat. Repeatedly. And then I will remove my boots, and stomp in the lumpy pile of blood. I will squish it between my toes. I will rub it over my skin. I will lick it from my hands, and then I will rub it over my skin again.

The longer I am away from the forest, the more I come to hate everything these places hold... I hate the priest who sent me. I hate the undead who plague the Paths of the Dead. I hate the orcs who defile the area. Do I hate the fools that drag me to the lair of the dragon? I don't know. I can't even think now. I am sick with hatred. I am sick with defilement.

I want to go home.

But there is no longer a home I can go to where I will not remember these things, even in my dreams... There is nothing left for me today but killing.