It had been a bad year, and that was underselling it. At first, Tom had mostly felt furious about everything, and he still carried that low, seething anger like an extra set of teeth. But those teeth felt like they'd cut away his old pals, his old life, his shitty, no-good brother, which had all put him somewhere he hadn't wanted to be. It should have been up to him to sort out the pieces of his life and arrange them into something serviceable again.
He didn't need them. Not really. He didn't need anybody. He should have been free to drift through the swamp (as far as that would take him) like a dandelion seed. Find his own slice of territory. Mingle with the occasional odd and friendly tribe. But things just hadn't gone his way.
One bad run in, that's all it had taken, and it had been very bad. And he was alone, and still not used to fighting on his own. Some stupid, traitorous part of him reached out for a whirl of hooves and teeth that had always danced beside him, and that part had almost gotten him killed. And they were tracking him, he knew it, and he was bitten and beat up and keeping off his back leg and he only had one eye left to begin with.
They were going to catch up with him, and there were two faint scents. One was running water. He could maybe try to lose them there. There had been a lot of rain, and the banks were high. But he was weak, and the idea of swimming with his back hoof wasn't great. The other scent was unnatural, sharp, high-pitched. The smell version of a distant, tinny scream. And he felt like it was a scent clearly labeled: Nobody come near me.
He thought maybe it might be enough to put off his pursuers, but he couldn't be sure. He needed something, anything. He placed his bets there, and headed towards the twisting promise of something unnatural.
The smell grew stronger and stronger until it choked the air, and the trees shriveled and twisted, and the ground grew sticky and foul and terrible fogs hung low and dirty and close to the ground.
Although one part of him was saying danger, the other part, probably the traitorous part that had gotten him into so much trouble to begin with, was saying, interesting. He didn't mind the way the scent burned. It was like a good pepper. It made him feel strange. Slippery. And it was, he didn't know. There was something attractive about it, too. Like it was something entirely new. And maybe there was something glimmering in it, like distant winking stars, like being caught in a dizzy laugh.
But then everything was upside down. The ground seemed to liquidate under him, and he gave a little sharp cry as his back hoof twisted again, and he found he couldn't wrest his hooves up to swim through the sucking, thick goo that had engulfed him.
Tom gritted his sharp teeth, and swore up a fierce storm of curses against every possible manifestations of gods and fates and stars and earth. And he struggled, and he was hurt, and he made his attempts until he was entirely exhausted, and then bitter and alone and out of options, he cried.
