Let her sleep and continue the journey in the morning

You decided to contend with the insects and let Anja sleep off her pouting. In the morning she seems sullen and tired. You try to start a cook fire, but the timbers are too damp and so you eat soggy bread and some salted meat. You talk very little and she seems limp and quiet. You even notice dark circles under her eyes.

Weary though you both may be, when she rises to join you on the trail you can't help but admire her comely face and feminine body. Her corset and short skirt barely hide her exquisite curves and you desire to give her that taste she wanted bent over a slime-covered stone. No. You need to be on your way. The Mire is not a place for loveplay.

Anja at least favors you with a smile as you set off on your way. You are heading into the deep mire and the willows form a dark canopy overhead so that you seem to almost be traveling through an endless, stinking cave. You are waist deep in a particularly stagnant body of water when Anja, who is walking some ways ahead of you, cries out and falls into the swamp. You start towards her and then stop as a huge and very strange beast with many tentacles emerges from the swamp waters. It lifts Anja up out of the water upside down and you see one rubbery gray-green appendage is wrapped tightly around her ankle.

She strains and fights against it. The beast is twice the size of the forest bears you've seen in the woods near Gutandor. It has no limbs (other than the tentacles) and seems to be a massive lumpy head with a monstrous, alien face covering most of its horrid body. She looks to you and cries out, "Run! For the trees!"

The beast's flesh is gray and covered in stinking swamp slime and plant matter. Its gaping maw is shockingly pink and lined with hundreds of razor sharp teeth. It looks large enough to swallow her whole. Fleshy red tendrils, like thin tentacles, wriggle in the creature's mouth where a tongue might be. Many thick, gray tentacles move towards her.

You begin backing away. Anja shouts something in a language you don't understand and there is a snap of magic on the tentacle. The beast cries out in pain and you see a blackened scorch on the flesh of the tentacle. She shouts again and there is another, smaller snap and scorch mark. It seizes her in several tentacles and as you run you hear her cries of pain and surprise muffled as one of these wraps around her throat.

By the time you have climbed the nearest willow tree the creature is splashing towards a small, muddy island and is carrying Anja, still struggling, in a half dozen thick tentacles. As it emerges from the water you see it stands on a pedestal of many such tentacles.

It lays Anja down in the mud and pins her there. She fights against the creature with inhuman strength, but she is weakened and overmatched. The creature easily tears away her skirt and her corset and reveals her lush, naked body dripping and discolored by swamp water. The creature roars lustily.

You take hold of your axe, sure that you could at least distract the creature into releasing Anja. Of course then it would have its full attention on you. If you wait until it is distracted you might be able to actually kill it with a sneak attack. Then again, your brain is telling you to stay in the tree. Anja is a demon. This horrible creature can't actually kill her, can it?