29th of Gnielm, 334 EA
Peyr Myarsa
The swamp held it’s grip on Mepka with all of it’s vast, baleful might.
Emerging from the heart of mire, a myriad of mephits began to hiss their way up and out all around. They scratched and clawed with finger bones of snapped boughs and ligaments of muck. Mepka swept at them in a wide arc with her staff, feeling a jagged squelching head splatter only to be replaced by a newly congealing body of dragging dread.
“Why are you doing this?” Mepka yanked a leg out forcibly, taking a single belabored step. “Let me go!”
“You can not leave,” their voices called out in chittering swarm, voices layered on top of voices, “You have abandoned your home, human, and it has abandoned you. This we know. They will keep you from us no longer.”
From behind, Mepka could hear sudden hoots and hollers, cries from her conservator pursuers underscored by the elated terror of the hunt.
“You are ours, now as you have always been.” The voices continued to slop out as she felt a crust of earth dry and harden around her feet, her calves, her knees. “All comes to us, laid low in time.”
Twisting in place, Mepka caught a glimpse of a stream of robed figures rushing forwards, and then suddenly stopping as they recognized the demons of their blasphemous nightmares embracing the quarry they sought.
The wind rushed through the boughs of the trees, as though in an anticipatory snarl.
“Herd, who follow this bait so easily.” The belching of the fen came through as a chorus of jeers. “Our heart thrums everlasting, at the center of our world. We are the name of your god. Now join it, as you so dearly wish.”
The approach of the conservators in Mepka’s view stuttered in backpedaling fear. For one ominous moment the swamp receded, it’s water and sludge pulling down and away as the trees bent back with creaking wails. In the next, a drowning torrent raised up and rushed over them all.
Plunged under the spate Mepka could not see, could not come close to drawing breath. She heard the screams cut short by muffled choking, a horrid sound of flesh rent asunder by earth and water forced inside.
She felt a sleight laxness to the earth holding her in place, the swamp legion’s focus now divided between her and the revelatory slaughter far behind her. She kicked panicked kicks, and her legs came free just in time to be tumbled through the repulsive tide as it drew out.
The swamp’s grasp had slipped just enough for her to survive a breath longer, and under the power of her own body she began a wading sprint away. She could see the aetherline. She could see the aether, and she made for it with everything she had.
She felt an injurious roar filter up from the ground, and knew that it was for her escape. She fled through rocks and water, evading vines reaching for her at every stride. She felt the pain of the whipping branches and knew that the others behind her felt that same pain tenfold.
Every frantic leap and tumble drew her closer to the aether, closer to release from the horrors of this world.
She sensed a presence behind her, on her tail. Swiveling to see it she found not a person but a hideous disembodied hand the size of a boulder, fingerflesh strewn together from clumps of moss and muck and rainwater. It reached for her, unwilling to let her go. It moved faster than it should have, the swamp shearing across itself at a greater clip than she could match in her fight forwards.
She leapt just as it did, leapt past and into the aether, bellowing out every sheer desperate hope she had left to her in one great and instinctive word, “Ahtr’ul”!
The hand of the swamp lunged after her, grasping for her leg, but where she slipped through the fog it collided against a misty wall of implacable conjured force. Recoiling back, the swamp pounded and beat and struggled to reach for her, but in the place she had reached with the spell she had cast the vast power of the malevolent world she had been held by all her life was rendered totally ineffectual.
The eyes of hundreds of mephits swung to her. The forces of the Peyric conservators, dead and dying, paid her no more mind than they did in life.
She was spent, having poured more than all of herself into the spell that saved her. She retained barely enough consciousness to crawl away, away from her life, away from her torment, as she levied her final retreat back into the depths of boundless and eternal nonexistence.
The Etra Anthology 