Slitherer of the Marsh

Bodies like strange islands spotted the murky water of an ancient marsh with still air hovering as mist above the pungent ponds. Moonlit night revealed two figures carrying a long, heavy weight between them, through the knee-deep lows of the watery graveyard as their footsteps splashed and slogged.

That place, locate deep in the woods south of Nīwulā Valley, had been a place to bury the unknown and the unwanted for so long it had almost become tradition. Despite that the men did not stay for rituals or last words. The milky mist lied heavy over the land, and no one knew exactly what lied in the depths of the place, above or below water. It was commonly agreed that it was better to not find out.

Scarcely had the two men left their quarry and turned back, when the thing rose from the water and froze them in their tracks. Water itself seemed to sink back into the earth, reaching only half way up the first man's legs now. The man didn't care, for all he could see was the beast before him.

Panicked footsteps running recklessly away became drowned in the numbness of the man's own terror. He wasn't sure if it was a snake or a lizard, and the more he looked the less he knew. At first he saw the scales. Black scales, green scales, even ones with every shade of the blue-green ocean. They ebbed and flowed seamlessly into one another and out again in an almost hypnotizing fashion, all across its body.

But it was more than that. The very edges of the serpent's form melted into and out of the water around it, pulled in from somewhere below it and flowing as droplets back into the water along its sides. As if the murky, pungent water of the marsh was as much part of it as it was the creature's habitat.

The thing, whatever it was, released a sound somewhere in between a hiss and a series of rapid clicking. As it opened its mouth, a foul breath of air brought the man to his knees in a fit of nausea.

A single moment had stretched into hours, but when the snake-like beast finally moved, time itself began to turn faster than ever. There was no time to run and even then his legs couldn't move, having frozen where they stood. The man closed his eyes and simply hoped the end would be quick. But it was not him the thing had chosen as prey.

It sunk into the water again, its very form disappearing from sight. The man expected to soon feel its fangs grab about his ankle, but that was not what happened.

Instead, somewhere in the distance echoed the horrible screams of his friend, who had left him for dead in his own effort to survive. Perhaps the movement, or the sounds had attracted the serpent's attention, but the reason mattered little.

Whatever it had been the man, already half-mad from mindless panic, took his chance to run all the way back home, not stopping even as the waters of that cursed graveyard were left far behind him.

When he finally reached the small, fetid cabin the men had called home, he was heaving desperate breaths. He would become a farmer, that he vowed to all the gods above and below in between every gasp. From that point on he would become an honest man who had no need to splash around in nameless swamps and woods which had so clearly been claimed by other things.