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

looked like I'd have to catch it in something that would keep it cold.
Eventually, warmth and feeling returned to my hand as my tissues thawed
and regenerated.
"Hope no one saw that," I muttered under my breath, walking away swiftly.
"Oh I did," Morte sniggered. If he went jabbering to Yvana...
I stopped in my tracks.
The portrait hung from the wall of a dark, hidden-away corner of the gallery.
Her face framed with shadows and thorny vines, the grotesque, hook-nosed
old crone stared out at me as if from a window. Her flesh was a sickly
blue-gray color; her eyes glowed red like the embers of a dying fire. Her
chin, long and sharp, jutted forward in an extreme under-bite; two yellowed
canines protruded upwards from her lower jaw, like small tusks. The smile
upon her withered, purplish lips spoke of horrible secrets.
I was able to tear my gaze away just long enough to look at the placard.
'Gray Hag of Oinos.'
"You dream again! Again!"
A chill ran up my spine, and even Morte was suddenly silent. That crude,
reptilian part of my brain was screaming to get away.
As I began to turn away from the painting, the shadows shifted in the corner
of my eye. My eyes darted back to the portrait, mouth dry, skin pebbled
with a deep and terrifying chill. That, tingling sensation arose in the back of
my mind like a building sneeze...
A distant creak echoes down the hall, a sound of old wood bending and
plants pushed and urged into growth. Everything in this maze of briars and
thorns is wreathed in a muted unreality, neither alive nor dead. It had all the
substance of a vivid dream, and the barbs of a nightmare.
The hideous old crone sqauts before me, hair as frayed and tangled as moss,
skin as gray a corpse's. She cackles, a sound like daggers being flung down
the halls, and the halls sing back. She is sheathed in screams and
nightmares, doted on by the blood-fed roots she tends, the dark mother of
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