((Wooooh this is long! Warning: may be creepy. )) The Mire You plummet into the mud and quickly sink. You claw at it, reaching for the surface, keeping your eyes and mouth tightly shut. It’s bad enough that it’s gone up your nose. Your breath is burning inside you and despite your efforts, the mud is getting in your mouth as well. It tastes of rot and is full of fine grit that sticks to your teeth. You can’t tell how deep you are; you can’t tell if your hands can reach the surface. But you touch something. A root. Is it attached to something? Is it simply floating free? You don’t have time to care. You grab it and pull. For a moment it seems like you are simply pulling it down with you. Then it goes taught. You keep pulling. Your other hand finds another root. You pull that too, and keep rising. You fight the urge to gasp, knowing there is nothing but mud around you. The first root snaps. The second is thin and you worry it will snap as well. But you keep pulling. There! Another root. A thicker one. You grab it with both hands and drag yourself up further. You are dizzy. The root gains branches and becomes thicker. Finally, your hands, your arms, and then your face break the surface. You hang there, breathing hard. The mud is still getting in your mouth but you don’t care. The air tastes just as foul as the mud, but it is air. You can feel your mind growing clearer. When you feel like you have your strength again, you pull the root again. It snaps and your face goes under again. You lash your hands around wildly, kick your legs and try to swim up, and one arm hits another root. You grab it and manage to lug your head and shoulders out of the pool. You realize you have yet to open your eyes. When you do, you see a dark tangle of stout, twisted trees with reddish bark. Long, trailing, mottled purple and yellowish vines. Short, spiky bushes with leaves so green as to be nearly black. The canopy is low and so thick you can’t tell where the sun is. Directly above the mud-pool you are escaping is a small hole in the trees, through which you can see a patch of grey sky. You try to pull yourself out all the way, but something is tangled around your ankle. You kick your leg until you feel it loosen, and then drag yourself up to the base of one of the trees. You don’t bother to wipe the mud off anything but your eyelids. Given the amount and sizes of insects around, you are probably better off staying covered. Your ankle feels scratched, and you think you can see blood mixed with the mud on it. You are exhausted from escaping the mud-pool, but you know you can’t stay put. You can see large tracks and channels through the undergrowth, and some of the smaller bugs are beginning to dive-bomb your face or burrow into the mud on your arms and legs. You swat at them, lean against the tree to stand up, and set off. The Swamp You dodge through the plants, trying to avoid anything thorny or moving. You especially avoid the little yellow flowers. You almost fell for their trap once, and you are not going near them again. The bugs are biting you. There is no way you can swat them all, so you only bat them away from your face. You step on an inert-looking blue-flowered vine and it slithers like a snake, trying to wrap itself around your foot. You trip, catch yourself, kick it away, and run on. Some of the bushes have many-colored eyes, hanging like berries, blinking and twitching and focusing on you as you pass. Others have orange chicken-claw like three-fingered hands that grab at your hair and clothes. Sometimes, the burls and lumps on the trees open into pinkish, sparse-toothed, mouths drooling milky white sap. You aren’t sure if any of this is real, or if you are hallucinating from the miasma of pollen released by the little yellow flowers. You seem to be smaller than you used to be, or maybe the plants are bigger. You don’t know what is chasing you, or even if it is the same thing that was chasing you five minutes ago. You know it roars. You know it tears at the bark of the trees. You have crossed its and your trail several times. It is chasing you in circles. Solid ground is rare. Almost anywhere you step, your foot begins to sink. You are not sure if the sharp things that pinch and cut the bottoms of your feet are rocks or crab claws. Light is rare. The only sources fluorescent green mushrooms, glowbugs, the little yellow flowers, and the occasional small hole in the canopy. Although at this point all that comes through those is starlight. At least the clouds have dispersed. You wish you could stop under one of those holes and just look up. The stars are the only trustworthy beautiful thing you have seen since falling. Frankly, almost the only trustworthy thing period. It is roaring again behind you. Not even the trees count as trustworthy. You have blisters on your hands and arms from touching their roots in the mud-pool. Do you count as trustworthy? Maybe. You are tired and hungry and weak from insect bites. Your feet hurt. But you are still running. And sometimes crawling. But that’s ok. You are still moving. Another roar from behind you. Was it louder? Is it closer? Your ears are swollen and full of mud and you can’t tell. You turn to avoid a large patch of little yellow flowers, only to see another, even bigger patch in your way. You look back. You think you can see a huge shape crashing through the trees. You are cornered. Unless you can pass the flowers. Maybe, if you take a running leap, you can go over them. That stick might help; you can use it as a vaulting pole. The pursuer roars. It is definitely closer. You take a deep breath, hold it, and run again, straight at the flowers. You plant the stick and jump. The stick breaks and you fall to the ground – on the other side of the flowers. Except your foot, which landed in the flowers. It is already going numb. You yank your leg out, stand up, and resume running as best you can. You cannot feel your foot at all, and frequently stumble and slide. You hear the pursuer roar again, a ways behind you. Maybe you can leave it behand. There is something ahead. Something grey. You can’t see it clearly, but the trees seem to be thinning. Finally, there are no trees ahead of you at all, only a wall of brambles, slithering and blinking and clawing at the air. You push your way through. You slap the claws away. You bite a vine that comes near your face and the rest retreat for a few seconds. The eye-bushes just stare. Finally you break through and fall to the ground. A mist rolls over you, and the clinging vines and biting bugs retreat. The Mistland The ground is covered in soft grey fuzz. Not grass, but maybe moss. It has no smell at all, which is a relief after the bog stench you have left behind. Nothing is moving except you and the mist. You don’t know how long you lie there before it occurs to you to stand up. You don’t really want to stand up, but your experiences in the swamp have made you distrustful of anything that seems nice. It is a little harder to stand up without something to hold or lean on, but you manage it. The landscape is flat and illuminated by a dim, seemingly source less light. What you can make out of it, anyway. The mist is so thick you can barely see 20 feet. Behind you, the wall of brambles is still. It and you are the only color you can see. You turn away from it and head deeper into the mist. You walk. It could be minutes or days. At one point you lie down on the flat, mossy ground and sleep. When you wake up, you are not any more or any less tired than when you lay down. You walk further. Maybe in the same direction, maybe not. It doesn’t seem to matter. Your foot is still numb, the soles of your feet still cut and bleeding. The smears of blood are red on the moss at first, but quickly fade. You fall a few times, but the ground is too soft to leave bruises. You walk further. There is nothing to do but walk, so you walk. And walk. There are no landmarks, so there is no way to know if you are crossing your own path. Oddly, you don’t care. Nothing seems to really matter here. Nothing happens, and everywhere is the same. It is restful, after the chaos and fear of the swamp. You find you like the quiet. You shout random words to see if they will echo. They don’t. You decide to make a right turn. Why not? There is something missing, something incomplete, but you don’t know what. You decide to walk in circles. You make the circles tighter and tighter until your numb foot slips and you fall. You laugh and resume walking in a straight line. You lie down and roll. Without a hill you can’t get any real speed. You resume walking. You decide to sit down and notice that your feet are no longer leaving red marks on the moss. The blood seeping from them is grey. Your fingertips are grey as well. This ought to be worrying. No, it is worrying. You realize you have almost forgotten where you came from before you fell into the swamp. You rack your brain and manage to come up with an image of an island, floating among the clouds. Many islands, gathered around a great tree. An enormous tree, growing up from…from what? From a cloud of mist! A circular cloud of mist, surrounded by shifting, thickly forested swamp. You must have fallen off one of the islands. Meaning… if you can find the center of this mist land, you might be able to climb the tree and return. This seems like something worth doing. But how to find the tree? You stand up and look around. As expected, you see nothing but flat mossy ground and thick swirling mist. Geometry says if you keep going straight you will eventually reach either an edge or the central tree. You are not sure you trust geometry on this. From above, it looked like the base of the tree had more than half the radius of the misty circle. If this were true, you should have wandered into it by now. You are sure you have been walking at least an hour. Though you don’t think it will do much good, you set off again, searching for the tree. You see something off to your left. You go closer and see that it is a statue of a boy cupping his hands. It is made of grey, smooth stone and is remarkably lifelike. Except the face, which is rough and broken, completely uncarved. Something is unnerving about it. You are glad to leave it behind. After an undeterminable length of time and walking, you find another statue. Despite yourself, you go up to it. It depicts a girl holding an empty basket. It is made of the same stone and again beautifully carved except for its untouched face. It looks oddly familiar, which makes it even more unnerving than the previous one. A while later, you find a third statue of the same construction. It is an old man, kneeling on the ground, holding a magnifying glass over a small circular platform. The lens appears to be real. Still later you find a fourth. A woman reading a blank book. Then a fifth. A child pouring into a dish from an empty bottle. Next to the dish is a similarly faceless statue of a cat. Then you find the second again. You search your pockets for something to put in the basket, but find nothing but dried black mud, a yellowish translucent pebble, a red-barked twig from one of the swamp trees, and two dead beetles, one large and brown and one smaller with an intricate pattern of red, yellow, and green. You give her the pebble. Somehow, it just feels right. You start to walk away and hear a small cracking sound, the first sound you have heard here that you didn’t make. You look back and the statue is gone. In its place is a tiny sapling, about 3 inches tall. Its bark is the same color as the pebble and its buds are pale pink, but with all the grey around it, it seems to glow. The mist seems to recede from it slightly. As you walk away you notice that the greyness now covers your entire hands and feet. You try to go back to the fifth, but end up at the third instead. You put the colorful beetle under his magnifying glass, then stand back and watch. Nothing happens. You turn away and hear faint cracking. In a flash, you look back just in time to see the remains of the statue crumble to dust revealing another little tree, this one with a single, multicolored flower at its top. It is beautiful. For the first time since falling, you smile. You set off to find another statue. You find the first statue. He is still creepy, but you put the brown beetle in his cupped hands. You turn around, wait for the sound, then turn back. There, where the boy stood, is a sturdy sapling with glossy brown bark. It resembles a black walnut. You leave. A brief check reveals that your arms are grey to the shoulder. You find the fifth statue. You put the twig in the bowl and press it until a few drops of sap come out. Knowing how this works now, you turn away then look back. The stone child and cat have been replaced by a pair of saplings with milk-white bark with reddish speckles. As you leave, you notice that you feel a bit stiff. You realize the greyness has spread all the way up your legs. You check under your shirt and see that it has reached above your belly button and across your chest. Finally, you find the fourth statue, the woman with the book. You take the dried mud and use it like a piece of charcoal to write a short poem in the book. The mud runs out before your inspiration does, so you finish the poem with blood from your feet. Inexplicably, it becomes red again when you use it as ink. When the poem is done, you turn around, and then look back. There, where the woman stood, is a sapling with flaky black bark and tiny, newly sprouted, blood red leaves. You smile again and walk slowly on. You are not sure where you are going, but you have a feeling you did the right thing. You are now entirely grey. You can’t see your face, but you know. It is getting harder to walk. Not because you are getting tired, but because your legs just aren’t responding right. It seems like the numbness from the flower venom might be spreading. You try to take a step, but you can’t. Instead, you fall over and lie down. You see a music box on the ground, and reach out one hand to grab it. You feel so slow and sluggish. You set the music box on your chest and open it. It makes a few sad clicks, then a bare spring pops up where the dancer would be. You try to close it, but your hand won’t move. No part of you will move. You aren’t even breathing, but you don’t feel starved for air. Rather, you feel like you are frozen in stasis. A girl approaches you. She stops when she sees you, then drops a piece of snakeskin into the music box and walks away. Next, an old man puts a heart-shaped leaf on the spring. A boy puts a blade of stiff grass next to the snakeskin. A child drops in a candy wrapper, and the cat that is following him licks your nose. A woman gives you a shell from a freshwater clam. When she has disappeared into the mist, you black out. You realize something. This land of mist is not a place to stay. Well, it sort of is, but it does no good to stay. It is a place to pass through. You cannot get hurt there, but you also cannot heal. You have nothing to fear there, nothing to be angry about or sad about, but also nothing to be happy about. You do not weaken by being there, but you also do not strengthen. It isn’t really a place at all, just a void that is good at pretending. When you awaken, you are leaning against the root of a massive tree. ((A story I wrote for some reason. Copied it to put in the style analysis website iwl.me. Apparently I write like Chuck Palahniuk. ))
I would post my ctrl-v, but its staff stuff So ill post something completly random. http://instantcena.com/
