The Trashscarf Tales

Chapter 4: Artax! Nooooo!

Although the path was fairly level, Trashscarf soon felt as though he was somehow walking both uphill and downhill, -at the same time-. For his feet, morning-fresh though they'd been, were dragging and weary, his pack seemed to be gaining weight as quickly as he was sweating, and his breath wheezed. The air was both thick and unpleasant, and seemed devoid of any useful oxygen.

But surely he was heading somewhat downwards, for the ground beneath his feet was growing increasingly marshy, and the road became overhung by trees-- not standing in proud columns by the wayside, but half-fallen, their wide roots ripped from the sodden ground and their canopies crashed and crumpled long ago. He picked his Way cautiously underneath the looming logjam, sometimes having to climb up the rough round sides twice as tall as himself, slipping on the slimy surfaces.

He paused on top of one log and tried to look ahead, but the dark grey clouds that had loomed overhead had come down like an unpleasant deadline and now surrounded him in a growing fog. He bit his lip as he gingerly picked at some more of the black mold that was clinging everywhere.

"I've seen this before," he muttered. "Something like this..." He nervously patted his scarf, as though it were some kind of long unkempt animal pet, and finally his fingers tapped a faded cork held in a twist of copper wire.

"Angel's share?" he asked, apparently of himself. Yes, sometimes when he'd travelled through places that distilled fine spirits-- and he was always happy to visit such places and make sure the spirits on offer were of the finest-- you'd get something like this mold. Feeding on the evaporated alcohol, a sooty dust of harmless mold would coat the buildings and signs and surfaces of the city nearby.

But this wasn't the same, no, and he was already grimly sure it wasn't harmless. He wiped it off his fingers onto his coat instead of his scarf, gripped the walking stick, and pressed on.

He was glad of the stick, for as the marshiness increased and the fallen trees became little more than suppurating sponges of cellulose soup, he could poke at the way ahead and find where a footfall might follow, and where it would just sink in with a spludge.

Reality was always a little iffy around Trashscarf, and the Fractal Coast was an easy place to get lost-- but he couldn't shake a sense of some kind of feeling from the desolation around him.

To look at it, you'd probably write it off as some kind of malignant taint or dark magic afoot, and he hadn't ruled that out entirely. Had he been a proper druid, wise in the ways of nature, he'd probably have been able to talk to the mold or the trees or the land itself. As an urban subspecies, he could only tell that this was some kind of pollution, its presence giving him that weird defensive guilty feeling.

It took him a little while, in fact, to notice the absence of animals; no birds cawed or fluttered around him, and his passage stirred up only a few sluggard bugs and buggered slugs, who looked about as bad as he felt.

He plodded grimly on, but why bother? He was doomed, trapped here in this horrible place where he didn't belong, so far away from the wild rambling roads and clear skies that seemed only a memory of another life now. His strength and sureness were draining out of him as though life-sucking leeches were in the mud and murk that slowly covered him, steaming and stagnant and stinking. All was suffering and sadness and despair and death. He was going to perish all alone and forgotten out here, no one would know, no one would care, no one was even watching.

If only at least his beta reader would speak up on his behalf--! If only someone would show the slightest interest in whether he lived or died, if only someone would -listen-... but his cry for help choked in his throat in the sewage soup of the malignant mist, and he fell face first in the mire, the weight of his pack pressing down on him, sinking him slowly and solidly into the rotting marsh.

Mud went up his nose and in his mouth and in his ears and into his brain, as murk and nightmares claimed their latest victim.