It had been several days since his confrontation with the Wisp girl, and Sarge had grown accustomed to the silence that followed. Whether she chose to follow or not was no longer his concern. He would not ask her to join him, not after she had already lost so much.

Instead, his attention turned toward the fog-laced mountains, their slopes shrouded in an oppressive veil of eerie green mist. He had lingered at the edges, walking just outside its reach, trying to gather intel from a distance. But the mist was too thick, too suffocating, leaving him with little to go on. The only way to truly know what lay within was to enter and face it directly.

Sarge was on edge. He disliked moving without reconnaissance, without a solid plan. Yet the voice had been clear: into the mist, into the mountains. And so, that was where he would go.

For days he prepared on the border, watching, hydrating, and feeding himself properly. He doubted the food and water within the mist would be fit to consume. Now, standing tall before the impenetrable wall of green, he drew a steadying breath. He was a soldier. This was what he had been trained for, to take on the challenges others could not.

Settling the last fragments of unease in his mind, he stepped forward. Immediately the noxious air clawed at his senses. His eyes and nose burned, his mouth filled with a rancid taste. It was worse than he had expected, but he pressed on. Each step remained steady despite the relentless assault.

Whispers stirred at the edges of his mind, soft at first, then swelling louder. Inhale. Take it in. Be greedy. The disembodied murmurs unsettled him, but onward he marched.

At the base of the mountain, he finally paused. He had no idea where the rune lay, only that it was near. Would the voice guide him again, or leave him to fend for himself? Refusing to wait idly, he began to search. He overturned rocks, pried at crevices and roots, cleared away dead flora. He supposed he looked half-mad, and the thought amused him as he worked.

The whispers clawed deeper, coaxing him to draw in more of the tainted air. Despite his resistance, he caught himself gulping down a few ragged breaths. Shit.

But retreat was not an option. Not for the old soldier. There was only one path left to him: forward, ever onward.

Something was wrong, and Wisp couldn't quite place the dread. Was it just the residual guilt from their fight? Was it approaching the green cloud in which she'd screwed up her life in the first place, this time with a companion? No reason she mulled over seemed to strike the right chord, and the Wisp carried on with uncertainty that faded with each passing step. The feeling didn't fade, but her care to focus on the problem did.
As the days passed by, she moved from leader to the lead, and didn't seem to notice the change. In fact, she grew listless as they drew further from that beach; not searching each inch of the ground as she had been for months, not talking much, but finding she wasn't as afraid as she had been, either. That was a good thing! She'd already been inside the fog once, maybe it wouldn't even be able to hurt her this time (yeah right), or it wouldn't be so bad. Maybe it was just having a companion, though the rush to keep him from danger had dulled -- why was that? The more Wisp tried to focus on it, the more she found herself simply... shifting to something else, her thoughts fickle and mind hard to control.

She could not look the problem in the eyes, though she was aware of it in the back of her mind.

Sarge was twitchy in a way she just... wasn't. Should she be? Shouldn't she be afraid? Instead, she was happy to rest and gather their wits for a while. Eating whatever she could scavenge (she'd been so hungry lately, it was unlike her!), drinking when she could, largely following the wolfdogs lead in preparing for their journey. And when he delved into the mist....
She followed, without hesitation, a far cry from the panic of weeks ago.
Perhaps she'd resolved herself to this, to the potential end. Perhaps she was faking her bravado -- perhaps she didn't even notice the distinct lack of fear, loping along with Sarge without much urgency.

Inhale. She heard it too, the urging. She couldn't help but take brief, short inhales through her nose every minute or so as she moved, but she resented the voice telling her what to do. It was the wrong one, though each bid of the ghostly plea seemed to shake her resolve. Why shouldn't she? What was so bad about it here? Why was she waiting for the Dream Visitor to tell her what to do instead?
Sarge paused to start searching, but Wisp forged forward, taking her first rather clumsy steps farther up the mountain without noticing. Her sweeping gaze, unsteady, skimmed scathingly along the foothills, but she did not stop to inspect.

Faster, she urged herself, but her limbs kept the same sluggish, unsteady pace. A single stumble very nearly sent her sprawling, her paws tangling as she tried to force them faster than apparently she could currently process.

Rune Discovery : 「 Pending Success 」 

---

The mist lay thick over the landscape, a murky, stagnant shroud that softened every distant shape into a ghostly blur. Surrounding trees loomed like quiet sentinels, their golden leaves heavy with dew while the air carried the damp, earthen scent of moss and slick stone. You move carefully through the haze, blunted claws clicking audibly against the shifting rocks, your breath emerging in plumes of white in the chilly air.

It had been some time since anyone had heard from the Dream Visitor. The voice which had set you on this journey, which had up until now guided your paws and alerted you to every nearby rune and artifact had seemingly disappeared.

You were on your own.

Still - you had practice.

Somewhere near, hidden beneath stone or root, the rune stirred. The air felt heavier now; charged, as if listening. A low hum seemed to rise from the mountain itself, and though nothing yet showed itself to your eyes, you knew it was close.

Very close.

And then - the flash of a serpent's tail, ringed with tawny, hourglass-shaped bands. Where it disappears into a crevice, you feel a familiar pull...

... But you can't remember if you recognize this particular kind of snake.

If you risk it - how do you proceed?

---

I give permission to maim/kill Sarge! Deal out the consequences.

Of course. No direct assistance from the cursed entity that had sent them on this search. He let out a rough sigh, nothing to do but move forward. Now that he knew a crevice was what they needed, he began his search in earnest.

Sarge turned his attention to the mountain itself, scouring its base for any sign of what they sought. As he searched, he called out for his companion. Wisp? We have our target. Focus. We’re close. Then we can get the fuck out of this damned fog.

He hadn’t noticed Wisp stumbling about behind him, too focused on the task at hand. Time crawled by at a slug’s pace. He flexed his muscles in agitation but pressed on, sniffing along the mountain for any foreign scent, eyes sharp for cracks in the stone.

He found several, pressing his nose close and batting a paw inside without much thought. If this is how he died, so be it. Yet nothing came of it, and his frustration mounted. Crevice after crevice yielded nothing, until finally, he shoved his paw into one and felt something... scaly.

He froze, breath bated, waiting to see if he had just sealed his fate.

The air grew heavy, and Sarge caught her attention with a flurry of words. Will-o stopped, blinking with a far-off look in her clouded eyes, staring owlishly at him with still-crossed legs as she simply stood there.

Wisp, she echoed breezily, slowly, like weighing half-known words on her tongue amidst a dream, Focus.

She was... trying. She was trying! The womans lips quirked into a deep frown, and she watched Sarge as he started checking gaps in the stone. She moved to follow him, toppled flat on her chest with the whoosh of air lost from her lungs, and struggled back to her paws in a silent, dull sort of way, as if she didn't even notice. But she was trying, and she staunchly refused to take more than the barest of breaths when she needed to. It was the one thing that kept playing over and over in her mind of static: keep looking, don't breathe in, keep looking, don't breathe in, keep looking, don't breathe in, keep looking, don't breathe in......

Wisp staggered up to Sarge's most recent checking place as he poked a leg in, and pounced forward with both forepaws outstretched like a fox diving into the snow -- both limbs vanished into the darkness, and she bumped against something too and couldn't tell if it was her companions limb or something else.

Search of what? Had he caught sight of Something Special? Did he hear a message she hadn't? Wisp didn't know, but she was all in about joining him!

---

If Wisp being double dumb gets her into trouble too so be it, smack her with consequences