89th of Gnielm, 298 EA
Peyr Myarsa
“Come come, Vilppu, Tuukka.” Kujal tottered along through the swamp, moving unhurriedly along slowly winding paths. Where he called behind him, the bushes rustled and a low groaning rumble emanated from a source unseen. “Much to do, much to do.”
He had walked long and far over the length of this swamp. It was a hunched walk by now, at his age, but he didn’t really have anywhere else to go, and so he moved from aetherline to aetherline and back again.
It was through early morning mist that he heard the call. “H- Hello? Is somebody out there? Please, I need help.”
The voice had a refined quality to it, lacking any real rasp or wheeze. Kujal approached, and the rustling of bushes followed with him.
“Oh, by the grace of Old Myarsa! Hello old codger!” The voice was calling out from a rare break in the treeline, and low to the ground. At the center of the glade, sunk down into the muck such that only her head and one of her arms was above the surface was a woman. A pale woman, middle aged, and robust from the look of her shoulders. She bore the robes of a conservator, now all sullied by her splashing about.
“I seem to have gotten stuck,” She continued, “Until just now, I was quite sure that I was going to be dragged down into the depths. I don’t feel any mud-demons, haven’t seen any around, but oh, I’m sure they’d love to see one such as me in so vulnerable a state. Quite sure, halfway swallowed into their big greedy swamp-mouth already. Quite sure.”
“No, no, we can’t be having the swamp take you.” Kujal agreed matter of factly, meandering around the side of the quagmire so as to get a better view of it’s consistency.
A beat passed without motion between them, Kujal just watching, before the conservator woman cleared her throat awkwardly, “So, would you kindly help a maid out of this boghole?”
“No, no, I don’t think we’ll be doing that either.” Kujal held that same shuffling tone. From his laden side, he pulled out a heavy moss-covered tome and began to thumb through it.
“I- I’m sorry, what do you mean?” The woman’s voice fell back into a touch of disquiet.
Before he thought to answer, Kujal found the page he was looking for. Etched into its paper there were jagged, spiraling symbols, diagrams of muck, vine, and man, and the way that the three might become one.
“Wiks R’ud”, Kujal called the words of power absentmindedly, and it floated out from the book along a line of mired energy to the soles of his feet.
“Now, chap, what’s all this about?” The woman began to tense in her hold, flinching fruitlessly against the sucking sludge. Kujal walked his waddling walk towards her, treading impossibly across moss-filled water and the slough that had captured her as though it were the most solid of ground.
“You’re going to save me, aren’t you?” The woman looked up to him with a desperate hope that only barely masked the terror burgeoning from within her.
“You’ll have your place, dearie.” Kujal pulled a trembling hand up to his wrinkled lips to give a curt whistle, and from the brush behind two crocodiles emerged. Vilppu and Tuukka were piteous creatures, taken by plant life and fungus, long having passed along their mortal coil. Moss bound their sloughing hide to their bones in place of flesh, everywhere except for their toothed snouts which had been picked to sheer yellowed bone, and from their eye sockets burst the stalks of mottlecapped mushrooms.
The woman could only scream as they slunk beneath the surface of the pond.
Kujal continued to circle the woman in slow, deliberate movements. He leafed from page to page, pulling from them pressed spores to sprinkle across her eyelids and jam into her ears.
“Cec’brol Mlewsum R’ud Yld’eag”, he chanted over and over and over again.
“Please, please don- AHGHAG!” He heard her screams go sharper, and knew that his pets had reached her. It would not be long now. In her state of shock, as her entrails were pulled out by fang and claw and swamp water flooded into the cavity, he heard her muttering to herself “Why, why, why, why, why.”
Kujal paused his chant. “We all must live, here in this place. To survive against the swamp. And for some to live, others must die. Now, die, and live again.”
The woman’s head was pulled fully below the water, and she was silent.
Kujal resumed his chant, tome in hand, and at the moment where he felt the slip from life to death beneath his feet he slammed the book shut with a final call, “Jecompterata”!
When the body reemerged, it crawled and clawed it’s way out of the pit. It was filthy with moss and mud, most of which spilled out of the bloody wound sported in it’s stomach. It stood in a shambling mockery of life, having defied the swamp its meal as any good conservator should.
The Etra Anthology 