Chapter 99

Before she could investigate further a familiar sickening stench reached her mouth and her taste buds. She gagged.

She hadn’t eaten much of anything since the fire and all she had in her stomach was some water from the river but she ended up only dry heaving. That however only aggravated the problem further as each time she inhaled her dry heaving got worse, as more of the stench kept creeping into her esophagus.

She didnt want to run away like last time but she didn’t have much of a choice. In her retreat she lamented the fact that she really thought breathing through her mouth was going to save her from the foul smell. She swiftly ran away and fortunately managed to reach a safe enough distance to elude the stink from reaching her. And eventually she got her breathing under control.

That was awful. But she did not want to give up. She still wanted to see where that smell was coming from from, it would surely aid her in making sense of this strange strange forest. However she couldn’t see how it could be done if the stench itself kept her away.

It was a conundrum.

She thought about it some and reached the conclusion that she really had only two options. One, she could gradually get used to the smell. Or two, she could find something to cover her face with that could block the smell entirely while letting her breathe.

She didn’t much like option one and she didnt even know where to begin with option two.

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She cautiously took a deeper breath and when nothing happened she let it out in a sigh. Puffs of ash flew away.

That gave her pause.

She looked around and realized that she seemed to have ended up surrounded by plenty of ash.

It was all in her fur and she was not at all happy about it. She wanted it off as quickly as possible and made her way to a patch of grass she saw a short distance away. She reached it and rolled around on the grass and tried to get as much of it off as possible. When she did, the smell came back in full force. And ended up dry heaving again.

She was annoyed. The wind was such a pain sometimes... she stopped and then realized she did not feel the wind at all. The smell only hit her when she tried to get rid of the ash from her fur.

The answer was literally right on top of her and she did not even realize it. She could be so dumb.

The ash can block out the smell.

She quickly ran back to the ash and quickly undid her cleaning and began backtracking her way to the spot she first smelled the stench. It was difficult because she couldn’t exactly track her own scent anymore with her breathing encumbered as it was but she succeeded in the end.

Lots of disturbed dirt and broken branches made it easy for her to get back to where she first detected the stench.

And precisely because she could not smell anymore she kept an especially vigilant eye out for anything strange looking. Like those white stalks poking from the ground that released the same stench or even that white root that grew down from the tree and dug into the ground. It stood to reason that if she found something familiar she would most likely find the origin point of the stink.

As she was walking and surveying the forest she walked past by what she first assumed was a tree.

She stopped and looked at the trunk more closely. She tapped it with her paw and found it was soft to the touch nothing at all like a real tree. So she looked up.

And was completely petrified.

It was absolutely not a tree at all. There was not a branch in sight.

It looked like … like a giant mushroom.