An hour later in the swamps...
The trees which had been sheltering the swamp with their thick canopy of greenery and provided a perfect environment forest-dwelling monsters for so long were now turned into lifeless sticks of charcoal, no more vibrant than the old wooden lamp-posts of an old city.
The unfettered light of the burning trees illuminated the scorched ground while the smell of burning wood and flesh lingered in the air. Fire tainted the earth with grey ash, stripping the trees of the virescent beauty, leaving their gaunt, skeletal remains rooted to the now barren, lifeless soil. They seemed to reach out to the sky like gnarled hands as if desperately begging the cloudless sky to rain so that they could be whole again, but even the sky refused to aid them and the ground was cursed to remain barren and dead.
