(Scars do not appear to be cause of death –shock ... - Bad Request

everse.
The visceral senses come first. There's the iron tang of blood in my throat
and the dry, foul must of decay on my tongue as the saliva begins to trickle
back into my mouth. There's the smell of week-old flesh: sour, rank like a
butcher's shop where the poor sod had lain dead for a week and his goods
lie spoiled and crusted with fat white maggots and sour with mold in that
time. After that, splintered wood presses against my flesh as the vertigo
clears and I can feel up from down. Warm blood fills my cold limbs. My
muscles ache, stiffened with rigor mortis. Then there's the buzzing of flies
that accompany the hundred itches crawling over my flesh, and the lurid
orange-yellow glow of fickle light.
I groaned, and with a clink of armor, a slight breeze stirred against my flesh.
The feel of six hundred tiny feet tickling my skin floated away with a chorus
of buzzing.
"Dak'kon?" I croaked. The light, pitched rattle of his armor was distinctive.
"You live," he intoned flatly, neither pleased nor disappointed.
"In a manner of speaking," I coughed and slid off the table, twisting this way
and that, trying to flex my fingers. It would still be a few minutes before I
could form a proper fist. "The gas... what-"
A familiar, annoying chirp answered me, "Stiff-as-nails tried to go in and
save you. Guy got a whiff of the stuff, so when he went down I had to drag
him the hell out of there. Got to a nice, secluded corner far away, too.
Could've died if I hadn't stuffed him full of clot charms."
My vision was still blurry, but Dak'kon didn't even twitch at Morte's telling.
"How many clot charms-"
Morte paused, as if hesitant to say, "Eeeeeh... six. And let me tell ya, putting
them on his tongue without any hands is trouble enough. I'd rather not think
too much about that."
Neither did I. Those things were expensive, but as long as they had saved a
life they did their job.
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