The hound knew little aside from the burning pain at its neck and feet; they seared, they burnt, and it never ended. It was a constant agony. The hound paced to and fro fitfully, in the beginning, it had screamed and howled and wailed at the greenish flames. Now, it had grown somehow numb, still feeling the flames, but its brain rewired itself to tolerate them after so long. That didn't take away the sense in its mind that they were excruciating.
It was not the only hound to be plagued so, it dwelled in an entire pack of those like it. Other hounds, just as tortured by their infected bodies as it was, and just as angered by intruders upon their territory. The hound fought tooth and nail every strange aggressor it happened on, poisoning them with its sickness, pleased that its biggest thorn in its sided could be used for its own benefit. The giant carrion-eaters, thick, yellowy worms, it could do nothing about them. They would remain. They could be ignored.
A new scent on the wind made its hackles rise, and while its head pulsed with a frenzied migraine which did not leave, it followed the rest of its kind—it used to be a simple darkhound, they all had, before this vileness permeated their beings—to the area of interest. There between the trees trod something tall and two-legged, the hound did not recognize what it was. It hardly mattered, it wasn't supposed to come near.
The hound, snarling and drooling, leapt forward and bit into a forelimb with all of its might, and was dismayed to find itself quite easily shaken off. The foreign entity was massive and coarsely pelted. Through the haze of madness in its vision the hound could see cranial horns pointed downward. A broad bovine snout showed a curling lip.
It held a stick-like object, and swung it repeatedly at the hound and its brethren. It narrowly missed the hound's ears. Suddenly enraged, the hound tore at a piece of hanging flesh, only to find it come off like a loose piece of shed fur.
Bewildered, the hound spat the flesh—fur?—onto the ground, the others were doing their jobs attacking the intruder, and the hound, set to rejoin them, barked in outrage again—
When one of the hounds fell at the newcomer's feet. It had been a sharp and swift movement, sickening, stinking green blood poured out of a wound inflicted on the fallen hound's throat. The runes carved into its sides by supernatural forces dimmed.
The hound experienced a spark of fear, a fear for its life or what remained of it, for the first time since it had learned to go on with its disease.