Several things call this place home.

Giant worms slide beneath the deep as effortless as water, some merely tall while others scrap the sky, their screams and teeth as sudden as the way they drain their prey. They suck out despair, like blood, leaving a half-dead itching numbness. Some carry the living within them, whole colonies of beings driven to grief, imprisoned by the comfort of an undead immortality as only the worms create.

The bogwalkers, by contrast, are sentient and small. Nestled in the stiletto tree branches of a long dead oak, through the mire of the plains, they speak in words not words. The land perverts them as they so wish, anger and sadness like some fleshy clay used to meld the limbs and eyes anew. Some are curious. Few are old and alive enough to be of use. More still are ghostly sirens, smiling in the cant of their thanatosic philosophy, like lanterns of sickly green in giving some ray of light to the lost and weary. The worms are often brought for their troubles.

The lost ones fade in and out of reality. Some still walk upon two legs and have the glow of health about them. Others have begun to become more ghost-like, green, their semi-translucent bodies a reflection of what has been lost so as to be forgotten. And all too soon sometimes they cease to be themselves. What remains is as bones and black foreboding, horrific warnings that few pay attention to out of denial.

And slowly wading through the mud, depthing staff in one hand, The Book in the other, the sound of silence rushes in. Tension crunches back and forth, staring. Tight and hungry.

I know this wasteland well.

I have partly manifested--lived?--there for several years now. It is one of many places along the grey path. I have learned a great deal there, thumbing arcane pages in the half-mad rants of things a bare whisper human, the settled calls of suffering made food for darker things.

In part it is a home, part of who I am, a plane saturated in regret and the abominations made from its charred loom. I have been spending too much time here recently. The bogwalkers are beginning to make dangerous sense, how the one shaped like wooded branch calls down to me from his perch. He calls me one of them. I will wake in my head sometimes to realize despair was winning, and drag myself from the all too inviting maw of an oiled tube of burbling meat and teeth, up a tree to steady myself and drive the grey lamprey away with the things that give me hope.

To understand this place has been painful indulgence and constant vigilance.

There are other places, some far different from this plane. But in the here and now and sometimes and elsewhere, one slosh will follow another, and I will continue for the sake of something I barely understand.

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