The Breath Before.

I'm not a jealous person, really, I just don't care for show-offs. Especially when those show-offs make a mockery of death. And that Dari, wow. All showboating. Who can say if there's much substance to her at all? Impossible to tell - though Yia liked her at one time, maybe even loved her, so there *must* be more than what I saw. Certainly Grey and Al saw something they liked...
 
The Floggers. Phht. What a ridiculous name, I didn't see a single flogger in the whole place.
 
At least we've been able to strike a deal with the patheric excuse for a governor - pompous man, all grave-robbed goods off the poor corpses that float here, downstream of all of the Deadlands. What a shithole, frankly, but hopefully it'll prove to have enough of what we need, to prepare us for the final push before...before what, exactly, I still don't know. Before we reach Greylyn's former home, The Nest. Funny, the word "nest" used to evoke such warm imagery.
 
And that dragon - at least we'll profit from its destruction. I have this haunted sense that if we hadn't accepted the bounty, we would still have found that dragon in our path. Something about this place, the bad seems to stick to the bottom of our boot. We've been dogged this whole trip by varieties of darkness I don't care for, at all. Which isn't even to mention what seems to have gone wrong with She of the Lustrous and Bountiful Wing.
 
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I had a dream the other night. I dreamt of all the souls I'd condemned to Zhi. I stood on their corpses, a carpet of skulls and ulnas and spines, not a beautiful ossuary but in heaps like garbage. This place follows me everywhere, even into dreams. I had no choice. I really had no choice, there was no one else who could help, and time was passing and there was so much blood and ruin - I had no choice.