The Crystal Elixir

You wake up.
You smell the fetid binding of rotting cloth on flesh; of rotting flesh on cold stone.
The air is crisp and the smell of decaying plants is saturating and intoxicating. Your muscles twitch in your bed of loam. Dry branches, bones and leaves crackle and whisper against your skin.
Old wounds are still open and sore, and now your pain finds you too.
A milky and pussy mucus weeps from the crusts around your eyes. A blurry gray haze redacts and formless black and brown shapes swim to the surface of the the misty smear.
You see your companion. He is awake, on his haunches, looking at you, and grinning. The filthy lanks of his hair darken his eyes and all you see are the gray and brown tombstones in his black crescent mouth. He smells like sweat, wet rotten earth, and shit.
The forest floor is pocked with white stones, and the half light makes them look like skulls. Some of them are. The rocky welt is hedged and safe in a perimeter of Alder, Ash, Birch, and Blackthorn. These trees all look like jagged bones held at their joints with disintegrating rags, which is of course swathes of brown moss hanging from the broken knots of fallen branches.
You stand, and the air above the firmament smells like an encroaching winter. Your companion is licking the sticky red offal from the loose rock amongst the wet yellow and orange leaves, which litter the floor. The white of his eyes are now visible as he stares up at you from his prostrate position.
At the center of the clearing is the well, and next to this stony craw is a rotten bucket on a rotten rope. Laboriously you feed the bucket into the orifice and a tangy waft of gas rise to meet you from below as it breaks the surface of the water. Slowly you drag the bucket up the deep stone, it's path lubricated by a gluey brown and red slime that paints all sides of the hole in long slouching drips that ooze into the reeking darkness.
The bucket is up. It contains the sweet draught. It brims with a crystal elixir through which flesh plumes of salmon mist sway and sift. It tastes cold and sweet. It tastes like a putrid fruit, an elusive richness that hides in the shifting rippling jewel of it's volume, and you eagerly lap sip and drink from it. You pull long from it, careful neither to spill nor waste. Your companion crawls and shuffles across the crunchy inconsistent litter, never taking his grinning wild face from yours. His eyes disappear into the gloom of his filthy crown as he imbibes his fill.
As the sun crests the horizon like a void eye in the distant haze, your companion and you steal slowly and carefully from the well and it's dark gully. At the zenith of it's awful light you reach the path, and as when you sleep, you bury and worm into the forest floor with sharp sticks and sharper stones at hand. Here you lie tense, and wait for hours. You can't tell where your rotting husk and frozen bones end and where the hard packed earth and secret roots begin.
Slowly and silently your companion's face turns away from yours, and looks down upon the worn path below. Then you hear it too. Voices coming from around the bend. You will never feel full.