[Anora Eventide]

Anora gave private smirk, "fire" was rarely a term used to describe her person. Her expression turned pristine again when she spoke.
"There is nothing to apologize for, Dimitri. Your response was not illogical."
Nonsense seemed to be the chief sin in Anora's understanding. As her foot sank in a sloppy pool of mud and algae, she replied to Dimitri's other comment.
"Since I have come to Vortex, I have done many things I did not envision doing in Daltina. This is the least worrying of them."
With a brief tug, against the mire she was free, and gingerly following after Dimitri. Though she had instigated the search, it was her habit to walk beside or fall a little behind. Her hand occasionally touched his upper arm for support in the murk as the other extended the lantern in front of them. Where the light touched the land, the water rippled orange and the reeds were striped in yellow, looking like the hide of some marvelous beast.

After a space, the fumes reached their senses. What scent of death Anora usually experienced seemed more sterile, drier, leather compared to strips of flesh. This was moist and rank, fuzzed with the sound of buzzing flies and the wet crackling of fat insects hurrying to a feast.
In the lamplight before them was a round swell in the earth, A body that flattened the grass and exuded the fetid smell of refuse and its juices in the hottest months. The initial feaster and the possessive mud had done sufficient work to obscure what manner of creature it once was, but Anora could discern that it was dark and furred.

It was too soon for this to be her hound. A dwindling whimper and a lurch in the grass confirmed this hope. Carefully, Anora tapped and weaved toward the sounds with Dimitri.

Submerged past its shoulders in a patch of gruel like earth, the hound fruitlessly beat and slid its paws down the muddy shore of the miry pit. With every thrash it sank by another degree. It stretched its neck, straining to keep its snout above the slop.
What had pressed a hound suited to the terrain to this point? Anora had little wish to find out. She was in no state to encounter what the dog had found at the end of its meal.

Oddly enough, Anora didn't wait for her companion before moving. For all her delicate poise, and insistence on opened doors and pulled out chairs, she had grown accustomed to attending to any real difficulty on her own.
Two months had done little to dampen this instinct. Rather Arium had tempered her will, as it did all its inhabitants. So when a dog was sinking in a slough, Anora planted her heels and lantern on the shore and began to reach for it.

The hound struggled and squirmed in the quag and hence his rescuers' hands. The deeper the dog sank, the more franticly its rough claws scratched against anything for leverage. It whined thinly in its throat, a pitiable sound, but Anora's look was not creased by hearing this. Flat resolve possessed her looks and that was all.

(OOC: Feel free to run with it.)