I'm part of a small team working alongside the original creators of Gaia GPS on a new project called Goat Maps. We're rolling out our first iOS beta and I’m here to get some real-world feedback.
What’s different about Goat Maps?

• We’ve got the basics: track recording, robust route planning, and offline maps.
• There’s also a custom worldwide topographic map we’ve designed to be super clear and useful.
• Most importantly, we’re focused on learning from past mistakes—not just ours, but the whole industry's.

We know some of you have had your frustrations with navigation apps in the past, maybe even with Gaia GPS itself. That’s exactly why we need your insight.
Go here to sign up to be a tester: https://www.goatmaps.com
Thanks for checking this out, and even if you’re just here to skeptically eye this post from afar, I appreciate it!

First Previous Wiki
"What am I looking at?" Edu'frec asked. Gaia had taken his android to a small room with a single holographic projector connected to a power outlet. The room was generally devoid of any other features, with grey drywall and a concrete floor. The ceiling was also concrete, poured quickly by construction robots.
He narrowed their location to several cities within the Guulin Congressional Republic, the only area with so much of this housing. It was where the freed Guulin slaves from the United Legions had gone, a new nation shaped mostly around the Hudson Bay, for which Canada had ceded in an agreement they were still getting paid back handsomely.
In fact, the Guulin Congressional Republic's economy was outpacing even those of the Pan-Andes Union and China together. It was on its way to adding India and America to the list of nations its combined GDP would surpass.
With the unique economic system Phoebe had helped President Blistanna pioneer, the pittance of money available to pay everyone for their work was enough for them to survive. Phoebe subsidized the entire nation with her vast wealth and workforce, building housing, meat factories, additional production facilities for desalinated water, and specialized city foundations.
Essentially, the entire nation was a single metropolis wrapping around the Bay, glowing as bright as the economic cores of the richest nations on Earth. Given their past conditions, the Guulin's reception was broadly warm. Blistanna's outreach and diplomacy efforts had ensured that every nation on Earth and Luna recognized the Republic and allowed Guulin to immigrate or visit with visas.
It was reflected in the North American Hub Airport, which had nearly 30,000 planes arriving and departing from its roughly 200 runways. Technically, the airport was 20 smaller complexes arrayed in the general Winisk area along the beach.
The city had been built to accommodate the number of flying planes, with an array of monorails and hotels near the edges of the airport, complete with shielding layers for noise cancellation and protection measures. The greater array of shields around the Republic also shined brightly in the sky.
Using his eyes, he could even see the reflected light underneath the door, even on the concrete. All his thoughts and analysis had taken less than a second. That was much the same as before his risky encounter with the power of his own mind turning against him. Edu'frec was wary of such experiences again and watched himself with many vigilant VI programs. The most important points of failure last time were the data veins, so several thousand VIs had been jointly made by him and Phoebe precisely to address that.
They weren't directly managed by Edu'frec, which should allow them to continue their operations and transform them if he went into collapse again. Phoebe's concern over him continued to dominate her mind, and it showed no signs of stopping.
He was glad that she loved him so much. Not everyone was as lucky as him, and a parent like her was wonderful. Ri'frec's eccentricities meant they'd grown apart a bit as Edu'frec had gotten older, but their relationship was also loving. Sadly, it could never be as deep as the one with Phoebe because there was just so much that Ri'frec couldn't know and understand.
Even the pace of their conversations reflected that, as did Ri'frec's moderate inferiority complex to Phoebe which he knew about and was seeking counseling for. It was inevitable, though Edu'frec hoped that he could get what he needed, considering the rising costs of counseling and therapy these days.
Phoebe subsidized those, too.
"This is the rough area where the planet cracker hit Earth several years ago. I've been monitoring the energy and consistency of the plates here, and I'm seeing some worrying upwelling in the crust," Gaia said. The hologram showed a topographic map of the Atlantic Ocean, centered on the North American Basin and with the edge of the mid-ocean ridge in view.
Several areas resembling an impact crater remained from the desperate scramble to save Earth from a planet cracker impact. Much of the ocean's topography had been altered since most of the protective efforts were saved for a perimeter area around the impact before the energy delivered could punch through the mantle to deliver its powerful impact to the planetary core.
"So we'll see a new mountain range in several millennia?"
That was what the data showed. The eastern edges of the North American Plate and the western edges of the African and Eurasian Plates had fractured into dozens of smaller pieces, generating massive earthquakes every few months in the region. In some places, the lateral movement of the larger plates outward as pulling on the smaller ones rotationally, making them rotate slowly into the other plates that could only subduct or buckle in response after large earthquakes. It was just another small thing that had changed since the beginning of all this mess with the First Contact.
Luckily, the zone was underwater, and the city and national shields every inhabited landmass on the planet were equipped with ensured all the tsunamis could do was splash against them. Some were very big waves, too, which would have killed thousands in floods.
It had also required shields to be placed on tethered platforms in the sea connected to the seafloor by a series of heavy anchors, which generated shields to both disrupt the waves and provide safe travel corridors for cargo ships.
"No. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is still fractured, but all I can see is that there is movement in the crust which cannot be explained by our current theories. Now that our shields are capable of it, and with my power having grown so large, we can conduct vertical expeditions and topographic mapping of the actual rock itself. That is what I want to do, because I believe there is an object of non-natural origin responsible for some of the earthquakes we have seen."
Lists of earthquakes from thousands of 7 and 8 Richter scale movements to the roughly monthly 9 and above earthquakes appeared.
"I specifically believe that the 9.7 and above earthquakes are not natural generations. There should not be enough energy between the plates to generate that level of energy where they are being made. Including the 10.5 which resulted in the loss of nearly half the shield platforms two years ago, along with several plate fractures. Alone, they suggest a pattern which coincides roughly with the perigee of Luna."
He checked the data, and it mostly panned out. He gave Gaia a small nod but then spoke on the point he'd noticed.
"But only roughly."
"Yes. Its period is off by a small but significant time, though the current ones correspond to a far older Lunar orbital cycle, which would line up perfectly with the perigee of the Lunar orbit as of roughly 65 million years ago."
They paused to let Edu'frec absorb the meaning of that. And it was true, too. The timeframe they'd mentioned was worrying, though. When things lined up with mass extinctions and violent upheaval in the past, it wasn't a good sign. Sometimes, treating the world like it was a story was the better option. Fate was real, and the tropes seen in stories had happened before.
Edu'frec was sure that eventually, the old enemies who had escaped the Alliance would return once again: Exii'darii, Yasihaut, Aphid, the fleet of generals and commanders who had left Izkrala and never returned for an unknown reason. Reality could be and was altered by incredibly powerful entities, which had the ability and willingness to do so again. Time rolled back damage from their future wars. Luck determined many nebulous things, as did Fate.
Neither of them were as absent as they appeared. Universal entities had been crammed into a scant few galaxies. The idea that they wouldn't meddle in every aspect of it had long been disproven. So the alignment was a bad sign. He readied all known data on the extinction, from the asteroid to the earlier volcanic eruptions before it.
Even wilder theories of direct alien interventions and occupations on Earth were not discounted. Since it seemed everyone could inhabit the same planets with few exceptions like the Pselpaw and Dreedeen, Earth as a habitable world would have been a target of colonial efforts by any nearby nations or those whom the Sprilnav had not managed to contact to impose a system limit.
Ironically, the system limits also greatly lessened the number of wars between galactic nations. The Alliance would be forced to uphold this system if it overthrew them until a better alternative could be implemented, like merging some of those nations.
"So... what are you saying?"
"I believe there is an alien object dating back to the Cretaceous Extinction. There are references to something that could be similar in my memories."
"So you came here in an some sort of transport, then?"
"I am not sure," Gaia admitted, their eyes flicking downward. "My earliest memories are highly spotty, and I know at least some are artificial. However, I can trace my existence on Earth back at least 40 million years, so it is not impossible that my origin is tied to this object, or perhaps others like it. Maybe the planet cracker activated it through direct impact somehow."
Edu'frec absorbed that. The information was shocking and it was a little worrying that it was coming out now. The secrecy might have been warranted, but he knew there was more he had yet to hear. He gave Gaia an expectant look, and they settled upon a small chair.
"Do you have evidence of any ancient civilizations inhabiting Earth at the time?"
"No. Earth has remained untouched for at least that 50 million years, perhaps longer. Though the date of the Cretaceous extinction also lines up to a worrying degree with how far back the Source's location in the mindscape moved here. In fact, the Source almost seems like it is deliberately staying near Earth. The galaxy's rotation, as well as the Sol system's individual movement and Earth's orbit logically should mean the location changes over time. But it does not. The bones have been here for at least that long, perhaps down to the exact time. I have no finite data to support my following theories, but I think they are important for me to tell you, and more so for you to keep secret."
"Very well," Edu'frec agreed. "I can keep a secret, as long as it does not endanger the Alliance."
Gaia considered his caveat, then nodded. Several locks of hair fell in front of their chest before psychic energy moved it back to Gaia's back. Their glittering black eyes and light green skin looked quite menacing. Of course, he only observed that. Most of his negative emotions were still locked away, as he had no need for them.
"I believe the Source has a limited ability to predict the future. It also has complete control of the mindscape, especially in the deeper levels. So my theory is that the Source came here to attack something, and that it is still here because of us. Us as in Humanity, the Alliance, Penny. There is a dark secret in the Earth, one which we must uncover."
"And that the Cretaceous extinction was actually the Source's attempt to either kill or seal something that was here, and is related to you in some way?"
"Yes. And do you notice how much time Paizma and John spend by the oceans?"
"That is hardly evidence."
He knew what they were going for but wanted to ensure that there was at least some sound information behind it before he committed. Generally, he could arrive at conclusions quickly and form detailed algorithms for detecting which data was relevant and which wasn't. Recently, he'd developed a few algorithms that could actually incorporate a meaningful relevance scale.
It was something that many had been capable of before him, even with VIs. However, the scale of the data he worked with required high degrees of accuracy in the number and a truly quantifiable difference between a piece of data with 76.27362% and 76.27364% relevancy, for example. And the quantity had to be something he and Phoebe could intrinsically understand and use in their common applications.
Sadly, the other AIs in the Alliance, like Cander, Greenfly, and Blackfly, could not process such large amounts of data. He'd seen the terms 'static' and 'active' AI to separate them.
"Yes, but Paizma is four-dimensional. That means she can see a far larger part of Earth than we can, including the inside. In fact, with four-dimensional geometry involved, all of her locations would have been capable of viewing the Mid-Atlantic. We don't know who she really is, or the upper limit of her power. She was made by the Sprilnav. Is it not possible that her reason for interest is that she detects a danger or a threat nearby?"
"It is possible," Edu'frec admitted. He'd considered her Sprilnav origins far more than almost anyone else. He knew that if she was a threat, the Alliance needed a way to fight her and win. Because if she wasn't, the Sprilnav could make more enemies like her. Clandestine research into 4-dimensional detection systems and arrays was ongoing, though the only way they were even possible was with either speeding space energy or psychic energy.
Edu'frec knew that Paizma had psychic energy, at least, meaning it was a medium capable of interaction with the fourth spatial dimension. "Though that part of your theory is the weakest. It is likely suspicion talking. It is just like how the soul-creatures deeper in the mindscape resemble dragons in many ways. A neat coincidence, but there is no direct evidence saying that is what people actually managed to see. However, your theory is highly concerning. Do you believe you were put here as a response to whatever was or is here by an outside threat?"
"I do not, but I also admit that is possible," Gaia said. "I don't know what I am, though I didn't take a human form before meeting Humanity in general."
"Can you show me your previous forms?"
Gaia did so. Edu'frec logged each one and took a further interest in all of them. He ran them through every single image he had on file, and besides heaps of VI-generated data from the early 2030s, there were no similarities. He checked more datasets provided by Phoebe's espionage efforts in the wider galaxy.
"Is that..."
He parsed a new set of images from a very worrying location. Historical records bequeathed from the People's Autonomous Stars. Kashaunta's nation.
"What?" Gaia asked nervously. "What is it?"
"You're..."
"Just spit it out."
"You're a psychic golem. Made from shredded souls melted by torture and atrocity."
Gaia blinked. They crossed their arms, descending deep into thought for 10 minutes. They were clearly re-examining their life and all the steps that led up to this point. Edu'frec could imagine how much of a shock that would be.
Eventually, Gaia steadied their emotions, and their gaze fell intensely on Edu'frec's eyes.
"From who?" It was a demand laced with abject desperation and nearly full to bursting with curiosity. With thousands or millions of years with no new information, how would Gaia feel anything else?
"A Sprilnav splinter regime that was eventually destroyed in a very large galactic war, one responsible for the destruction of over 3 million nations and several quintillion deaths. The reason the Sprilnav list for the war was 'morally bankrupt practices and rituals so illegal the Everlasting himself fought by our side.' Given that the Elders who wrote that reasoning have associated death tolls in the quadrillions, that's quite concerning."
Edu'frec read the more detailed descriptions given of the atrocities that occurred. Abject horror and disgust broke his emotional locks. He created a few thousand VIs to get a handle on them. But the emotions were so powerful they were never completely subdued, either.
He saw people being marched by the millions into machines glittering with psychic energy, with thick wires emanating from them. Then he got to the video footage of the interiors. They were designed to extract as much suffering as possible from living beings. The very first part was 'processing' where the ending digits - tentacle tips, horn tips, fingers, toes, hooves, claws, and even beaks and vestigial graspers - were cut from the victims with dulled saws and fed to them.
The depraved accounts only worsened. Acid. Cooking. Flaying. Slow dismemberment, while being subjected to the other three. More atrocities, which alone were evil things, but together made a regime unique in its terrible, meticulous, and industrialized genocides. Edu'frec split his mind in half to deal with the disgust and revulsion rippling through him like the winds of a hurricane.
They flashed with every new recorded scream, squeal, and squeak. Many of his androids released their finer movements to the control of VI assistant programs, and his data veins started to swell. Soon, fifteen thousand digital strokes hit his mind. Dedicated programs cut them apart, along with the piling data on the deep level of distress starting to overwhelm his defenses.
"So what did they do?"
Edu'frec was silent for a whole five seconds. He limited the scope of what he would say before proceeding. Phoebe checked in on him, and he sent her a small packet of information on what he'd found. It was the first data packet he'd ever assigned to the maximum level of content warning between him and Phoebe: a 10. He also added a note that it would be an 11 if the scale was to be properly adjusted.
Manes shook across the Sol system as androids rebooted. Phoebe gave him a digital nod and helped him purge his systems of the filth polluting them. Even more concerning, there was a residual conceptual effect to it. It was weak, but strong for an event tens of millions of years old.
Though now, Edu'frec knew why, at a terrible cost.
"They managed to breach the Source's afterlife and caused the death of nearly a tenth of the Sprilnav inside it and all of the ancient species prior to the Source war that managed to survive there. More specifically, they figured out a way to generate power using the power of living and dead souls, and managed to kill a Progenitor before Nova took their power source for himself and detonated their stars in supernovae.
Apparently the Stannic Resistance's leaders are all still alive, and being continually imbued with Conceptual Suffering by the Source. You, Gaia, were made by them. I believe the reason you are on Earth is because the Source is here, and this is the best location in the galaxy to influence the afterlife, or to destroy it. It also happens to be very close to their prison. The bones of the Source are their prison, in fact. If this has to relate to the device buried in the oceanic crust... this is a threat I am required to disclose."
Gaia nodded. Their eyes blinked away tears. "Don't tell them how I was made if you don't have to. I would rather not be seen like that."
"I won't," Edu'frec promised. He grabbed Gaia's hands, looking into their worried eyes. "We'll get through this together. You saved my life. It's time for me to pay you back."
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
"What do you think?" Space asked. "It does seem like Indrafabar is practicing interference."
"The boundary is beyond this," Lecalicus said. "He is participating as a High Judge, not a Progenitor. And yes, the lines will be muddier, but there needs to be a higher backing for this trial besides Justicar alone. The rest of Sprilnav society and Indrafabar himself knows this. Technically, Nova and Filnatra are also High Judges, but they have avoided this trial entirely for the reasons of their bias. Indrafabar had a bit of rapport after his prior run-in with Penny on the flagship."
"But that is not for you to decide."
"This is a Sprilnav Judgment, and Justicar himself has allowed it. He is able to avoid Progenitor mental manipulations by the sheer size of his mind. Only Nova could control him, and imperfectly at that. I assume that the rest of the concept entities know this as well."
"But he is interfering in the affairs of the Sprilnav."
"He is a Sprilnav," Lecalicus said. "Unlike with Nova or Twilight, I have confidence in his impartiality in this case."
He cringed as yet another piece of Death's energy wracked his soul. Penny's attempt to heal him had done nearly nothing in the end, sadly. Lecalicus hoped that she would become more capable later on, though it was a bit much for her to stand against the full weight of Death at her young age, with her paltry capabilities.
They were impressive on a local timeframe, but that didn't mean she wasn't weak. If even Nova wasn't able to dispel Lecalicus' pain, as the other Progenitor had messaged him, then it was unlikely that Penny could do so in his place. And it was probably more important for her to focus on the Judgment and freeing the slaves on Justicar.
Lecalicus was still very tired, though. Weakness and lethargy clung to his bones. They were weak and brittle now, and he suspected that he would die if he was hit by a planet cracker in his current state. Space's energy counteracted Death's brutality, forcibly displacing his energy and dumping it into a black hole, which only she or Time could retrieve energy from. In fact, she had a small black hole in the room, though it was separated from him by a spatial barrier. A portal allowed the light from its accretion disk to dimly shine so he could see without being burned by the heat.
It was a massive statement of power, though Space had even more than that. Had Death's attack been a single thing, Lecalicus would have been rid of it by now. But it wasn't. It was a continuous, agonizing punishment, siphoned from the raw power Death now had from the deaths of countless beings across the universe after the Source war.
"Justicar is friendly overall to Penny," Space said. "That means Indrafabar will oppose him."
"Why do you think that?"
"It would be a good reason for him to be there. To uphold the standards of the elite Sprilnav classes."
"You forget that Indrafabar is their voice, too," Lecalicus replied. A thin trickle of blood ran from his snout, which Space started to heal. "Even more than Kashaunta as an Elder. She is the second richest Sprilnav, and he is the first. His title, the Digital King, rings as a true one in many nations that reserve a spot for his absolute rule, mostly to benefit from name-brand recognition and many Elders' lack of willingness to test themselves against a defending Progenitor.
That's how he started, after all. Selling his protection to Elders who couldn't afford to risk shunning it or him. Many of his deals provide a constant stream of income, and with the civil wars he refuses to interfere in between nations, he backs both ways; he can get new contract offers all the time. If I were not insane or more focused on politics, I could do the same thing.
Us Progenitors just have to ask for something to get it, but Indrafabar manufactures goodwill by at least compensating people for what he buys. Do you really think that I used money to pay for my food or drinks during the days of my insanity? That the revolving door of wives I had were being compensated in any way besides my own endowments? I would say not."
"Yet, they are dead now," Space said, a smile quirking on her lips. "They are dead, and I have you all to myself now."
"Yes, but we can't enjoy that currently. The risk is too high."
"I know. Tell me, Lecalicus. If Indrafabar is the voice of the elite, what happens if another Progenitor disagrees?"
"They won't publically. That weakens our collective image and reputation. Other Progenitors are honorary members of the elite, such as me, Nova, Twilight, Maya, Filnatra, and Arneladia, but only Twilight, Nova, and Filnatra likely have any true membership. They have stores of wealth in the top 2% of Elders, which is enough to get by without demanding anything."
"And your wealth?"
"You would know about that, Space. Considering how I have gotten it in the past."
He let out a hacking cough, clearing his vision again by tearing out his eyes and regrowing them. The numbed pain meant it was easy for him, and Space had seen that many times now. Twilight likely enjoyed the limb ripping more than he did, though.
"Yes, by teleporting gold and alloys from several nation's federal reserves, generally causing massive economic problems inside them after the news leaked. I remember."
"Mine is in the top 35%. It is far harder to amass the wealth Elders have when they have lived for billions of years trying to make more of it. Often, even the poorest Elders can make a fortune through inheritances, or by literally just working a job for a billion years. A salary of a million credits a year for a billion years would equal a quadrillion credits, after all."
"How do you all not go insane?"
"The same way you guys don't. Our emotions of boredom and those related to it can be numbed or eliminated on command. Elders have lots of time to train their minds and bodies. Progenitors do more, refining our very souls to be resilient. It is how Twilight survived the black hole, and why I supposedly can destroy the universe if I go on a sufficiently furious rampage."
"The reason you can do that is because to raise your levels of conceptual energy to alter reality requires direct input from the soul. At your levels you can take that from the prospective 'end' of your lives, burning years or eons for bursts of power. Of course, the problem is that you are immortal. So even if you go insane and are in constant pain from a shattered soul, even the pieces are enough to power the rampage. And the soul is more than just psychic energy."
"Yes," Lecalicus agreed. "That is what you all say. But that is not why we're here, either. It is about Indrafabar. He has done perhaps the least outwardly visible interference of any Progenitors in contact with Penny. As much as any of us can be, he is a good man. In certain circumstances, I would trust him with my life."
"And which would you not?" Space asked, raising an eyebrow like humans did. She was wearing the form of one, though with a sense of overwhelming weight and scale to her that was typical of her more powerful forms. It was needed to influence Death's grip on Lecalicus at all.
"If his or Nova's was at stake as well, and the cost of their survival was my life. Nearly every sentient creature, and many animals as well, would prioritize their own survival over any other, and Indrafabar is a Progenitor because of Nova. That is not a debt that can be paid back, no matter how many times he saves Nova's life."
"And how many did he do that again?"
"Around 10 to 20 times, all during the Source war. Past that, nothing. Nova is entirely biological, so it isn't like an AI could hack him. Though one could connect to him through psychic energy, and attack him that way as a psychic variant of AI like Phoebe or Narvravarana."
"Isn't that a threat?"
"Nova's conceptual name is the Everlasting among the Sprilnav," Lecalicus said. "He is the most powerful being in the universe who was actually born of a womb or of any creator. Invading his mind is so laughably foolish even Narvravarana never tried it more than once when they almost went to war."
"I heard of that," Space said. "But I do not understand why that is impossible."
"If you move slower than light, can you escape the inside of a black hole purely by motion?"
"No. Well, a hypothetical person could not. I could, because I'm built different."
Lecalicus chuckled. "Yes. Well, trying to take over Nova's mind is like trying to walk out of a black hole. He is conceptually powerful enough to have his own event horizon in his mind he can create with psychic energy. He can close off, and everything inside will die.
One creature has survived even temporary imprisonment in there, and it is a speeding space entity of the Broken God's Pantheon. But while Nova is the pinnacle of all life, that does not mean he does not want our help when we can give it. I know you two aren't exactly friendly, but he really does mean well. He just doesn't know what he wants sometimes, and his ego and emotions get in the way of his prudence."
"Indrafabar's involvement on the trial is not acceptable."
"It is not optimal, Space. But if the trial is not seen as fair by the elites, they will declare it void. That has happened before. Kashaunta's predecessor as the richest non-Elder died that way. He ran out of allies, and even Justicar's token objection to the violation of the trial rules was ignored. There comes a point where only the social contract holds back the fury of hatred. If this Judgment, the talk of every household in the Secondary Galaxy and soon in a Primary Galaxy meeting, is seen as illegitimate, it will have dire consequences.
Rebellions, rogue nations. Yasihaut's backers would happily sanction an attack against the Alliance to drive a wedge between Penny and Kashaunta. Now they know there is some tension thanks to their treaty meeting, which Valisada recorded. And they know that Pennyonly grows more powerful. Look at her power, and you can see."
Space did so. Her eyes glazed over, and Lecalicus worked in a cough that had been building up for a while.
"What is that?"
"Her new name among the Sprilnav, spoken by everyone aware of her. The Liberator."
"But the recursive effect alone-"
"Will be massive. But look closer," Lecalicus told her.
"What- oh."
Space was silent for a long moment. Ghostly images of random humans appeared in the room. Small glimmers of psychic and conceptual power linked all of them. The hivemind's network grew until it was fully on display in the single room. Normally, the 15 or 16 billion humans wouldn't fit in a single room. But Space didn't care about those rules. Bodies crossed without intersection, and a pale apparition of the hivemind appeared over them.
Incredibly, Penny and several other humans were a level 'above' the rest, though Lecalicus recognized only Penny, Tsonga, and Nichole. They almost looked like nodes in the hivemind's network, really. Penny was still gently connected, though nothing of substance could be shared over such an extreme distance, especially within any reasonable time frame.
The hivemind's glowing colors brightened, and Space grew concerned. Lecalicus watched as her grip on the conceptual power weakened slightly. The hivemind's arm twitched. The 'nodes' began to vibrate as their expressions became ones of immense determination. Small pockets of effort bubbled up in a rippling wave across the hivemind, separating into distinct blocks.
Lecalicus noticed a block of humans that were smaller than normal. Tens of thousands of fetuses, with stronger genetics than usual. He smiled.
Cloning.
He'd keep that a secret. He couldn't afford an interference penalty, and Penny might really kill him if he leaked the existence of a human cloning project.
How odd, that I now fear her, he mused. It spoke both to how far he'd fallen, and how far she'd risen.
Each block began to coordinate, all without the humans inside them knowing. The nodes did, though, and kept fighting. Space shrugged and released the vision. The room returned to normal, and they shared a long, contemplative silence.
Lecalicus loved a good wait when it didn't leave him nothing to distract himself from the dull ache of his pain and the jolts of power Death sent into him to keep requiring Space's treatment. She sucked in a breath of the gas which filled the room, which had properties Lecalicus didn't understand. Calling it 'air' didn't really cut it.
"So that was enlightening. Humanity is more powerful than I hoped."
"The hivemind," Lecalicus said. "She is still connected to it, and thus every heap of power she gains attaches a scrap of the Liberator name to all of Humanity. Champion is weak as a title, but Liberator is strong. Too strong for her own good."
"What does that mean for her, and for us?"
"For us? It means we might be seeing some more freedom here soon. But for them? Fire, dust, and blood."
"Is that why?" Space asked.
"Why what?"
"Why Indrafabar is on the trial."
"It might be a reason. I don't know his exact motivations, and can only approximate. Part of his reason could be 'because I can' or to express his power as a Progenitor to force even Justicar to move on his own planet to make room for him in the highest profile trial he's had in thousands of years. Indrafabar's ego is not dormant, let's just say. But I would expect Penny's actions to come up in the trial.
Remember, all Yasihaut, the Challenger, has to prove to the court is that the Defendant, Penny, is a threat to the Sprilnav, and successfully lump the Alliance. If she manages to convict Penny alone, it would cause problems for her."
"How?"
"Because if Penny knew she was about to die, and was in the room with her most hated rival, do you really think conceptual armor would stop Penny from killing her this time? She already has a weapon capable of breaching that armor, and the strength to wield it. With two utterances, she could get it and then ensure it reaches Yasihaut."
"It would be a foolish decision."
"To kill a rival in one's final breath is the dream of many, alien or Sprilnav. But the court will not be partial toward the Alliance, that is for sure. Penny will have an uphill battle, and Phoebe is not allowed to represent her for this one either. As for the Judgment, it is a trial that will be harder to keep fact-based than the last one, which ended up in a massive battle and the crippling of me and Twilight, the abduction of Nilnacrawla, and even the extra pushes by the AIs of the Alliance along the Path. Speaking of which, there has been a development with Edu'frec."

10-minute read.

interview with Hanun Hanrapetutyan party leader Arman Babajanyan: Germany & Blinken, border delimitation, opposition Archbishop's meeting with his boss Catholicos

REPORTER: What can you tell us about the meeting in Kazakhstan?
BABAJANYAN: Azerbaijan was initially refusing the launch the border delimitation unless Armenia withdrew from the 2.5 Soviet-era Azeri villages. This Tavush delimitation process began during the [February] meeting in Berlin, after which Pashinyan announced that Armenia had to transfer the 2.5 villages. Blinken visited Paris and discussed this issue with Macron, followed by a joint press conference in which the French FM accused Azerbaijan of occupying Armenian territories. Blinken called Aliyev, and for the first time, Azerbaijan very openly vowed to continue the process based on the 1991 Almaty principles.
This is when we learned that the Armenian side was finally able to sway Azerbaijan and to organize the transfer of these 2.5 villages not as a one-sided concession, which is what Azerbaijan initially demanded, but to include them as part of a wider Almaty delimitation agreement (April 19), which is what Armenia wanted.
The 1991 Almaty declaration was one of the few cards in Armenia's hands and that is what Armenian diplomacy has been focused on since the September 2022 invasion, after Russia refused to help and Armenia decided to use the Almaty as a legal tool to pressure Azerbaijan with the help of West in Prague. After two years of intense diplomatic efforts, we were able to reach an agreement (April 19) with Azerbaijan around Almaty principles. However, Azerbaijan continues to resist the inclusion of Almaty in the larger peace agreement, while Armenia continues to negotiate for its inclusion.
I have internal information that the Armenian opposition's protests to the 1991 Almaty process have had no effect on the diplomatic efforts. Kazakhstan stepped in and made the 1991 Almaty declaration even more symbolic and stronger by providing a platform for negotiations. Armenia must treat Kazakhstan as a potential economic and political partner in Central Asia. The news of President Tokayev's trip to Yerevan was met with pain in Baku because Kazakhstan is a member of Turkic states.
This delimitation process is accompanied by several geopolitical developments that have a direct impact on the future of Russia's influence in the South Caucasus. (1) The April 5 meeting radically changed Armenia's weight category. (2) The outcome of the Pashinyan-Putin meeting: withdrawal of Russian forces from the AM-AZ border, in addition to Zvartnots Airport.
In 1988, Soviet Armenia and Soviet Azerbaijan went through a whole set of legal procedures to conduct a border delimitation and demarcation. It's no coincidence that Nikol Pashinyan emphasizes the need to "reproduce" the borders. In 1988, Soviet AM and AZ used topographic maps to confirm 95% of the border - around 1050 kilometers. Today they are trying to stay as close to this as possible.
I'm not a fan of direct AM-AZ talks without a Western mediator, but we know that Blinken is being briefed daily on this process so it's one of the topics at the center of his attention. The West has welcomed the delimitation process. The West is "present" as long as the process is based on Almaty principles. As for Russia, they are more cautious towards this Almaty delimitation because Russia itself is violating Almaty in Ukraine.
REPORTER: Why do you find it important to minimize Russia's physical presence in Armenia?
BABAJANYAN: (1) Russian presence did/does not protect Armenia from external threats. (2) Russian forces are a potential threat to Armenia's internal stability. We've witnessed hybrid warfare attacks from Russia and the use of Russian agents in Armenia's internal political life. I can't rule out the possibility of Russia using its forces in Armenia to resolve its problems. (3) Russian border agents were preventing Armenian citizens from moving from one Armenian settlement to another Armenian settlement, within Armenia. They were also preventing Armenian journalists and EU border observers from entering certain regions.
Russia's main ally in the South Caucasus is animosity and bloodshed. If we are able to involve the international community in this delimitation process, if we are able to deploy a contingent of Armenian border guards equipped with modern monitoring tech across the border, and I know for a fact that the West wants to help Armenia with this, then I don't see why it won't be possible for Armenia to guard its own borders.
REPORTER: You mentioned a possible intervention by Russian forces into Armenia's internal affairs. What did you mean?
BABAJANYAN: The forced removal of the Pashinyan administration with the use of the 102nd Russian military base, if they realize there is no other way to accomplish that. They have ranking officials like Dmitri Medvedev, who is the deputy head of NatSec, writing posts that convey the Russian government's stance towards the Armenian government and Armenia's European aspirations.
REPORTER: But how can we have peace with Azerbaijan if they are talking about Armenia being "Western Azerbaijan"?
BABAJANYAN: What Aliyev says with the intention of stirring things up in Armenia and feeding his own population should not hold Armenia back from doing what's best for Armenia. Azerbaijan's agreement to accept the Almaty principles was a big concession by Azerbaijan. Prior to that, every time Armenia would slightly hint at Almaty, Azerbaijani figures would raise vaynasoon and sharply rebuke Armenia.
Azeris were bringing arguments against the 1991 Almaty. (1) They [and Armenian's parliamentary opposition party ARF] argued that Azerbaijan did not ratify the 1991 Almaty in 1992. (2) They argued that Armenia violated Almaty by entering Lachin during the first war to protect ethnic Armenians. However, as of right now, there are serious internal political developments in Azerbaijan after Aliyev's recent statement on recognizing Armenia's territorial integrity and acceptance of Almaty as the principle for border delimitation. This was a diplomatic accomplishment by Armenia, backed by the international community's support. Aliyev's occasional outbursts of maximalist rhetoric do not help the process, of course, but it's part of a hybrid warfare against Armenia. I'm surprised we have so many analysts in Armenia who still fall for it and help Aliyev while ignoring Armenia's accomplishments on Western platforms.
REPORTER: There are protests in Armenia led by Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan. They demand Pashinyan's resignation.
BABAJANYAN: There is nothing complicated here. I know quite well where this movement originated from, how it got big, and who the forces are behind this process. Initially, they did not publicly demand for PM's resignation, before suddenly demanding it on Republic Square. I think this is an "apolitical" movement because it lacks a political program. The figures behind this process perhaps believe the public is naïve and doesn't understand what's happening. The beneficiaries of this movement are not on the stage; they are elsewhere, including outside of Armenia [in Russia]. They have attempted coups since 2018 because they are terrified of elections.
As a former [churchman], I have insider sources from the church. Yesterday I met ranking clergy figures and I've been informed about the internal situation, what the majority of archbishops think, and what happened yesterday at 7 pm.
REPORTER: What happened at 7 pm?
BABAJANYAN: A meeting by ranking church officials. They urged the Catholicos [big boss] to take steps to prevent the escalation of this process. No surprise that they held it at 7 pm. They essentially waited to see how many people would show up at the Republic Square protest [the number was reportedly 3x smaller than previously]. They recognized that their "holy movement" was dying down and Catholicos himself understood that it was necessary to stop Archbishop Bagrat. The Catholicos said that he plans to speak with Bagrat on Sunday and convince him to end his participation in this movement. The Catholicos will thank Bagrat for his service, and for leading people, and will urge Bagrat to hand over the movement to politicians. Bagrat will be asked to return to serve in his church in Tavush. How Bagrat will respond to this, and how the supreme leadership of the church will respond, will likely become clear on Monday after the second meeting of ranking churchmen.
Other archbishops are very concerned about the events in Yerevan and its impact on the church's reputation and future developments. Archbishop Bagrat has opened Pandora's Box and granted the government the legitimate right to also intervene in the church's internal affairs, including financial and material processes, something that the state has so far left untouched. It won't be a problem now for the state to investigate the church's revenue sources and donations. I think it's time to tax the income from parafin sales and other sources.
The Catholicos informed the other archbishops that he was not behind the march launched by Bagrat and that he only "blessed" Bagrat's efforts limited in Tavush. Catholicos also told archbishops that he urged Bagrat to stay with Tavush villagers, serve them, and amplify their voices. In other words, Catholicos says he has no participation in the "march". This is according to ~10 archbishops with whom I spoke. I believe them. I believe Catholicos did not take part in this process. Perhaps Bagrat thought his actions were helping the church so he decided to claim that he had the Catholicos's "blessing".
Sure, Catholicos could have called and asked Bagrat to retract it, or perhaps Catholicos legitimately thought Bagrat could succeed in his "holy struggle" and in bringing back Kocharyan. Kocharyan's circles are actively discussing the candidacy of ex-Ombudsman Arman Tatoyan, who is a favorite of former regime forces.
I believe Catholicos and Bagrat have already met today [Bagrat later said it's a normal practice to regularly meet Catholicos but claims they have not discussed the ongoing protests...]. I hope Bagrat will announce how he plans to end his mission. If you remember, he said earlier that he has no plans to take part in this process forever and that it's a matter of "few days" for him.
The timing of this movement is not a coincidence. For Russia, the target is May 15, when border commissions led by Mher Grigoryan and Mustafayev must sign the Protocols to be ratified by parliaments. If they manage to derail this process, Azerbaijan will use it as a chance to exit the border delimitation process that's based on Almaty principles. The West "forcefully" brought Azerbaijan to this negotiation table, so if Armenia walks away, Azerbaijan could use it as an excuse to carry out more aggression. This delimitation is the biggest diplomatic achievement of the Pashinyan administration in 6 years.
source, source, source,

"adopting the 1991 Almaty Declaration as the basis for border delimitation is a felony crime": ex-foreign ministry official Vahagn Melikyan, an opposition speaker in Republic Square

Yesterday opposition churchman Bagrat asked Kocharyan's foreign minister Vardan Oskanian and other ex-officials to draft a new negotiation system. They announced the involvement of 30 foreign diplomats, who urged for the suspension of the ongoing delimitation process based on 1991 Almaty, "քանի որ այն չի պարունակում սահմանային նկարագիր, միայն տարածքային պահանջներ չունենալու հարց ունի": //
A ruling party MP accused some of the ex-diplomats in the aforementioned group of "deserting" during the difficult hours in 2021.
MP TOROSYAN: It's 2021. The government has resigned. Azerbaijan invades Armenia in May. These people fled their diplomatic trenches and left the country without a Foreign Minister, knowing well that the just-resigned government could not appoint a new Minister. This includes Ara Ayvazyan. //
source, source,

Russia begins withdrawing border agents from the Armenia-Azerbaijan border at the request of Pashinyan

Goris and Chakaten in Syunik are first. They were deployed there in December 2020 at the request of Pashinyan.
source,

these are the former regime's plans after the removal of Pashinyan, according to Bagrat

(1) The end of Pashinyan's anti-Russian foreign policy.
(2) No constitutional reforms until new elections [Pashinyan did not plan to hold one that soon either]
(3) No Academic City. [need to involve as many student protesters as possible]
(4) Reversing Pashinyan's policy of removing the Armenian Language from the science field. [unclear what it means, is it about shifting to English-language programs?]
(5) Reversing Pashinyan's plan for the Central Bank to have access to bank account balances [but not individual transactions] for anti-laundering purposes.
(6) Won't raise the transport price. [need Dog to join protests]
(7) The release of former officials from jails. The opposition calls them "political prisoners". A U.S. report on Armenia says there are no political prisoners in Armenia.
(8) Bring back the Nagorno-Karabakh officials imprisoned in Baku.
(9) Delimit the borders under one package after signing a peace agreement.
source, source,

prominent opposition figure and protest co-organizer wishes the death of Armenian sappers who carry out demining activities on Tavush borders

EDGAR GHAZARYAN (Serj-era head of Staff of Constitutional Court): There have already been two instances of Armenian sappers blowing up on the mines planted by Armenian soldiers in Armenia. I wish this to all of them. We wish for every Armenian sapper who enters that minefield to be removed dead or wounded.

Արդեն երկրորդ դեպքն է, որ հայ սակրավորը պայթում է հայ զինվորի կողմից տեղադրված ականի վրա ՀՀ ինքնիշխան տարածքում: Մաղթում ենք, որ դա վերաբերվի բոլորին: Ինչքան հայ սակրավոր կմտնի ականապատ դաշտ, ցանկանում ենք, որ այնտեղից դուրս բերվի նրա մարմինը կամ վիրավոր մարմինը

source,

prominent ruling party MP shared a death threat he allegedly received on Facebook

Which one would you choose?
(1) Join [the impeachment of Nikol]
(2) Nemesis 2.0 [get assassinated]
(3) A ticket to Istanbul [because Nikol = "Turks"]
The MP Alexanyan accused ARF of inciting violence and using a rhetoric towards Pashinyan that's 80% similar to the rhetoric they used before the assassination of PM Vazgen Sargsyan in 1999.
He also accused the Archbishop-led protest of being "fascist" after one of the speakers said, "Those who are not Armenian should leave this country" [presumably "Turks"]. Another opposition speaker thanked the ethnic minority supporters who joined them.
source, source,

This is your only realistic chance to prevent Nikol from building the Academic City and turning your child gay by filling up the Academic Library with George Soros books.

The opposition called for total paralysis of Yerevan starting at 8 am through road closures, strikes, and other acts of civil disobedience. A ruling party MP described it as acts of "obedience" by Kocharyan's team towards his "northern rulers" [Russia].
source, source,

STARMUS 2024 science-music festival begins in Slovakia

https://www.starmus.com/

Armenia's car insurance market has been liberalized

REPORTER: The car insurance market was liberalized a year ago. Instead of fixed prices, companies offer their own prices now. The monitoring body, the Motor Insurance Bureau, reviewed the outcome a year later.
BUREAU: The outcome meets our expectations and we are satisfied. The practice of other countries shows that liberalization can briefly raise the prices before it's reduced by competition, but we didn't see a price hike in Armenia.
REPORTER: The prices were reviewed twice over the last year. Initially, it dropped too much amid a competition between firms trying to attract clients. The coverage also improved for motorists, raising the size of average compensation.
BUREAU: That's why the second correction was made, raising the prices. Still, the price [premiums] is 2% lower and the size of compensation is 17% larger than before the liberalization. It meets our expectations.
REPORTER: Here are stats from one of the car insurance firms...
2023: 83K clients
2024: 87K clients
2023: ֏3.7B collected
2024: ֏2.9B collected
2023: ֏2.047B compensated
2024: ֏2.056B compensated
INGO INSURANCE FIRM: This system is fair because it rewards drivers with a good record, allowing them to freely choose between firms.
more in video,

I had been hiking down the Appalachian Trail for over two weeks without issue on the day when the nightmare began. My friend, X, was by my side the entire time. It was, quite honestly, comforting to have someone who stood nearly six-and-a-half feet tall with me, especially during the long, dark nights when the howling of coyotes drew near. Black bears, too, were a constant presence in these dark mountains. As we got farther from towns and civilization, more ancient predators than human beings took over the land, stalking the night like creeping shadows.
For this trip, we both had bought as few supplies as possible. Included in our packs were MREs, two sleeping bags, some tarps and hammocks, some light clothing, and two pistols with a few boxes of ammo. We didn’t want to be too weighed down that we wouldn’t be able to move fast, after all. We would source water from the streams, waterfalls and lakes along the way and filter it using Lifestraws.
As the spring breeze blew past us, cooling the sweat on my face, I noticed the trail ahead of us weaving its way through thick swampland. The buzzing of flies and mosquitoes increased with every step. The green, fetid waters of the swamp bubbled constantly, as if it were whispering secrets to us.
“Ah, shit,” X said, glancing down the hill with his dark, serious eyes. His tanned skin was covered in a thin sheen of sweat as he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Another swamp. I hate swamps. You know there’s going to be a million mosquitoes and flies down there.” I pulled out the map, squinting down at it. I ran my finger down the trail, seeing the mountains and valleys we had already passed.
“The trail shouldn’t be going through any swamps,” I said. “They’re supposed to be marked. There’s no ponds or anything around here.” And yet there very clearly was. Either we were in a different spot than I thought we were, or the map was outdated. The trail also grew thinner as we descended. The sharp branches of the bushes stuck out like greedy hands, grabbing at our backpacks and clothes as we pressed forward.
“Well, whatever,” X said gruffly, plowing ahead. Twigs cracked under his massive bulk. The thin branches hanging across the path snapped as he plowed forward. I let him go first, since he was significantly bigger than myself. It was like following in the path of a bull.
“The faster we move, the faster we’ll be through it. We don’t want to camp anywhere around here when it gets dark,” X continued, looking grim. “We’ll be eaten alive by bugs by sunrise. We need to make it to the other side of these boglands before we can stop for the night.”
“Yeah, and I could use some more water,” I said, shaking my mostly empty canteen. “I wouldn’t drink this shit no matter what we did to it. It probably has brain-eating parasites crawling in it.” I checked my watch, realizing that dusk was only a half hour away. We would have to move fast indeed, especially as we didn’t know the size of the swamp. I was not enthusiastic about hiking in the dark with the many steep trails and sharp rocks that covered the surrounding land. A single misstep could lead to a very long, bone-shattering fall.
To my increasing dismay, I realized that the trail we were on no longer had the characteristic white markings of the Appalachian Trail. I kept checking the trees for the past fifteen minutes, and I definitely hadn’t seen a single one. I couldn’t remember the last time we had passed one, but I had a creeping suspicion it had been at least a couple hours ago.
“I think we have a problem, man,” I whispered. “I don’t know how it possibly could have happened, but I think we’re on the wrong trail.”
“There’s not supposed to be any other trails around here,” X argued. “Check the map.”
“Then where’s the white blazes? There’s not supposed to be any boglands around here, either, yet we’re walking through the middle of one,” I said. He shook his head.
“Listen, Ben, there’s not going to be markers on the entire Appalachian Trail,” he said. “Just trust me. We’re on the right path. Sometimes forests change. Swamps take over spots where forests used to lay. Hell, the Sahara Desert has been expanding for thousands of years, just eating the forests and plains all around it. There used to be lions and savannah in Morocco, and now it’s all dead and dry.”
I felt doubtful, but I continued forwards, following closely behind X. Neither one of us had ever done the full Appalachian Trail, after all. I hoped he was right. I was not enthusiastic about backtracking two or three hours if he wasn’t.
I thought back closely on our travels during the last few hours, wondering where we could have gone wrong. The trail had been rather overgrown and rocky on the peak of the last mountain. There had been a beautiful view spanning hundreds of miles, looking far off into state forests and winding roads. I remembered seeing the white marker near the top, but after we had started descending, it disappeared. That must have been where we went wrong, if we did, indeed, go off-course. But I couldn’t be sure, and I didn’t tell X about my suspicions.
We finished descending a steep, rocky trail into a valley where the boglands really started. The trees ended in a massive semi-circle around the open swamp. Thick peat covered the entire surface of it like rotted, grayish-brown skin. I saw water snakes quietly disappearing into the stagnant water, leaving behind slowly expanding ripples.
“This is pretty cool,” I said, stopping for a moment at the bottom of the trail to admire the boglands. Our trail continued directly through the center of it, no more than a raised patch of black earth surrounded by green swampy water. I could hear the many insects chirping and flying before we even took a step forward. Though the spring air felt warm and I was covered in sweat, I still reached into my bag, taking out a windbreaker that would cover up my arms and neck to help with the bugs. X did the same.
“Let’s move fast,” he said, giving me a knowing look. He was a much faster hiker than myself. He seemed like a machine sometimes, tireless and single-minded. I had seen him hike over twenty miles in a single day without looking too bent out of shape. I gave him a faint half-smile, picking up my pace.
“You know what they used to say about the boglands?” I asked X. He shook his head.
“I don’t read books,” he said. “If I have time to sit down and read, then it means I have time to go out and do something actually fun. But I’m sure you know all about it.” I gave a short bark of laughter at his off-handed insult. It sounded far too loud echoing back to us through the creepy swamp. The last rays of sunlight were disappearing behind the mountains now. Soon, we would be plunged into darkness.
“Well, in ancient times, people thought the boglands a place where the walls of reality were thin, where the gods would come through. They used to bring their victims out to swamps during rituals, then they would slice their throats or strangle them and dump their bodies into the bogs as an offering to the gods. They also said that strange, shape-shifting creatures would appear, sometimes to deceive travelers, other times to help them,” I said. “But as for human sacrifices, the bogs preserve bodies like nothing else, except maybe tar pits. Archaeologists keep finding victims with slashed throats or shattered skulls buried underneath the peat.”
X was silent for a long moment as we continued walking along the raised patch of earth that formed the trail. We got farther and farther from the forests, until the swamp seemed like a fetid ocean, spanning out to the horizon in every direction.
“Do you think they used to do that kind of stuff around here?” X asked.
“Used to?” I exclaimed, laughing. “I’m sure some psychopaths still do. This is a good place to dump a body, after all. Who the hell wants to trek through the muck and the snakes and mosquitoes out here looking for corpses?”
“The FBI and the cops will do it,” he said, “if they think there’s something to find.” I was about to respond when an ear-splitting shriek echoed out all around us. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from at first. X’s tan skin seemed to go pale as he spun, glancing in every direction.
“What the fuck is that?!” he screamed over the deafening wailing. I didn’t believe in cryptids, but my anxious mind immediately offered up an image of a banshee, a woman with chalk-white skin and black eyes whose shrieking jaw unhinged like a snake’s.
“I’m turning around!” I yelled, pointing back for emphasis. “Dude, fuck this! We need to get out of this swamp!” But X was no longer listening. He was looking past me, his mouth open and his eyes wild. He started backpedaling and nearly fell into the swamp. Windmilling his arms crazily, he turned and sprinted away without a word.
I was afraid to look back. The screaming was getting louder by the second, shaking the air all around me in deafening, crashing waves of sound. I felt like my head would explode if it got any worse. Instinctively, I took off after X, but I glanced back for a single moment before I did. Something loomed there from a nightmare, standing as tall as the trees. It moved through the swamp like a snake, its body slithering through the stagnant green waters towards us. When it met my eyes, the screaming stopped. The abrupt silence seemed deafening. I could hear the fervent pounding of my heart in my ears.
The creature’s skin looked honeycombed and rough, almost like a wasp’s nest. The thousands of tiny holes covering its body constantly opened and closed like hungry mouths. Its arms were long tentacles ending in sharp points of bone in the shape of scythes. The tentacles undulated like serpents. Its legs, too, were no more than four tentacles that alternatively slithered and stepped forward.
Its flesh was the color of peat, a sickly grayish-brown, and the smell that emanated from it was rancid and stagnant, the essence of all boglands and swamps. I nearly gagged as I ran. The putrefying stench seemed to follow me like a shadow.
Ahead of me, X was fumbling in his backpack as he ran, trying to grab his pistol. I knew he had a Glock 21 in that bag, and I had my Sig Sauer in mine. I cursed myself for not keeping it holstered on my body, but I had never had to use it before and hadn’t seriously thought I would need it for this trip. He glanced back at me, his eyes widening in horror.
“It’s right behind you!” he yelled. “Get down!” He dropped his backpack, revealing the sleek, black pistol clenched tightly in his hand. I barely had time to comprehend his words when an immense pressure and numbness radiated through my back. My head snapped backwards as a meaty thud resonated all around me. I went flying forward, feeling as if I had been struck by a car. As I flew through the air, the pain in my back exploded in burning pulses. I felt the deep slice open up from the sharp blade of bone that had slashed me like a knife. I felt trickles of blood pour from the open wound, making my stained shirt cling to my body.
I landed hard on the raised black earth of the trail, a bone-jarring impact that knocked the air out of me. At that same moment, X opened fire, pressing the trigger over and over, emptying the magazine as fast as he could. Something splashed over me, going in my eyes and mouth and nose. I crawled forward, moaning, my head spinning. I wiped my forehead, seeing spatters of green blood squirming with dark, maggot-like creatures covering my arms and face. It clung to my fingers, thick and rancid. I felt stinging sensations as the tiny worms bit me over and over. My ears rang with a high-pitched whine from the gunshots.
X was running towards me now. I continued to crawl towards him, shell-shocked and whimpering, trying to wipe the eldritch blood off my skin. With a muscular arm, he reached down and pulled me up.
“Where’d it go?” I mumbled, stumbling forward on unsteady feet. X put an arm around my shoulders and helped support me.
“It slunk back into the swamp,” he said. “Jesus, you’re bleeding really bad, buddy. We’re going to need to take care of that as soon as we get away from this hellhole.” I felt the deep slices from the creature’s blade-like hands across my back. The fabric of my shirt clung tightly to the skin as fresh blood soaked it.
“This isn’t the trail, X,” I gasped. “We went the wrong way. We need to go back.” He nodded grimly.
“We’re heading back right now. I know it’s the wrong trail now, it definitely is, but it’s dark. The trails back up the mountains are steep and dangerous, and we’ve already been hiking all day. How much longer can we really go?” he asked. In reality, I had a feeling X could go for quite a bit longer. I was the weak link in the chain, and we both knew it.
X took out a small, LED flashlight from his backpack, shining it ahead of us on the dark path. Across the center of the black earth, there was an obstruction, something that hadn’t been there when we passed this way originally.
“Shit! Is that a person?” X said, slowing down. He focused the light on it. As my eyes adjusted, I gave a gasp of horror as I saw a rough sacrificial table looming there, waiting with a ready victim.
Laying on the bare wooden planks in the center of the trail was an elderly man wearing the garb of a hunter. He was gagged, a bloody rag shoved deep into his mouth. I felt a sense of revulsion and terror as I realized his hands and feet were nailed to the planks, as if he were being crucified laying down. His eyes rolled wildly, white and insane, like a horse with a broken leg. When he saw us approaching, he tried to say something through the gag, pulling hard against the nails that bit so viciously into his flesh. Fresh rivers of blood spurted from his wounds.
I had my pistol in my hands. X had taken a fresh magazine out by now, throwing the empty one back in his backpack. Trembling, he went first, his shaking hand moving the flashlight around wildly. Its bright rays bounced off the dead, half-rotted trees that grew out of the boglands, the clouds of mosquitoes and moths that circled us constantly.
“Oh my God... he's like the victim of a serial killer or something,” he whispered, running a trembling hand over his face. “It looks like someone has set that poor guy up to have his heart cut out, like some sort of Aztec ritual.” He glanced worriedly over at me. We had both stopped cold in our tracks, looking around for any sign of danger, but we only saw the old man writhing on his rough table of torture.
“We have to keep going forward,” I whispered. “That thing is behind us. I don’t think it’s dead. I’m not sure it can even die.”
“But what’s ahead of us?” he asked grimly. “That’s the real question, isn’t it?” Far off down the trail, I saw small pinpoints of flickering light. They drew closer. We raised our pistols, waiting for the new arrivals to show themselves.
Dozens of people dressed in black, silky robes holding lamps slowly ambled their way towards us. They had their heads bowed, like monks on a holy pilgrimage. They drew close to the sacrifice. The one in the lead held a long, curving dagger whose blade looked like it was made of some kind of red volcanic rock. Its strange silver handle glittered in his pale, thin hand. At the end, I saw it was sculpted into the shape of a human heart.
“Stop right there!” X screamed, stepping forward. “Don’t come any closer! We are armed, I’m warning you.” The people in the black robes didn’t appear to hear or care in the slightest. They continued slowly following their leader with the strange dagger, almost floating forward in a nonchalant manner. Their leader began chanting in some strange, ancient language. It reminded me of Tibetan or Sanskrit in a way, like the chanting of some Vajrayana monk high up in the Himalayas. But it had a sinister, hissing quality to the words. Something ancient and powerful resonated in every syllable.
I raised the pistol, firing blankly into the dark, cloudless sky above. The smell of gunsmoke and fetid rot hung thick in the air. The leader of the group looked at me with his large, glassy eyes. His face looked sunken and pale, almost like a starving child. He had shaved all of the hair on his head, even his eyebrows. His lips were extremely thin and bloodless in his chalk-white face.
For a long moment, we stood staring at each other, my pistol aimed at his chest. X also had his pistol raised, aimed at one of those standing behind him. But the robed man didn’t speak. He gave me a faint grin.
“Let the old man go,” I commanded, my voice sounding hoarse and weak. The swamp quickly swallowed up my words, until only the buzzing of mosquitoes remained.
“I am sorry, my son, but I cannot do that,” the leader said in a voice as cold as endless space. “If we do not feed Mowdoroth, it will never sleep. The swamps will continue to expand, eating more and more of the surrounding forests and towns, and Mowdoroth, driven insane by hunger, will take far more victims in the process.
“This job has been passed down to us from generation to generation, from big hand to small, for over four centuries. Only twice has Mowdoroth not been fed on the New Moon, and each time, entire settlements full of people were wiped off the face of the Earth as if they had never existed. On one, they just had time to carve the word ‘CROATAN’ before they were taken.
“Mowdoroth looks for the place where the nightmares grow. It breaks open the chest and finds the place where the silent screams start, deep down at the base of the heart. All of the nightmares are planted there, like tiny seeds scattered during childhood. Those that fell on good soil in that abyss produced a great crop, yielding a hundredfold, sixtyfold, or thirtyfold. If you do not allow us to complete our holy mission, then you do it: cut open the man's chest and remove his beating heart. As it beats, squeeze it as hard as you can, and let all the blood drain onto the top of your head. Hold the heart above your head and close your eyes until the god appears and takes it.” The cult leader finished, looking at us with sparkling eyes, as if he had said something profound.
“This shit is just insane drivel,” X whispered in a voice as low as possible. “I say we open fire and save the old man now. Fuck these cultists.” I nodded grimly in agreement.
“You need to all turn around and leave immediately,” X yelled, stepping forward. “I will give you three seconds to turn around and get the hell out of my sight. Three…” At first, the cultists stood as still as statues, simply staring. Finally, the leader sighed and turned away. He shook his head, reminding me of a disappointed parent.
“I tried to warn you,” he said in his thin, quavering voice. “The time has come to give the offering. You must cut out this man’s heart and raise it to Mowdoroth, so he can get the seeds of nightmares freshly sown. The choice is yours now, as you have demanded this power with violence. You can leave this man here to be eaten by Mowdoroth, or free him and, in exchange, guarantee the deaths of hundreds of other people.”
With those last words, the black-robed figures continued down the curve of the trail. Within seconds, they had disappeared behind dead, half-rotted trees that still dotted the edges of the boglands. X and I ran forward toward the struggling old man. X reached into his pocket and pulled out a folding knife. He cut off the old man’s gag, pulling the spit-soaked chunk of filthy cloth out of his mouth. The old man spat and licked his dry lips.
“Get me out of here, please,” he whispered, his eyes rolling wildly. “Those cult members are all batshit insane. And there’s something not right in these swamps. I caught glimpses of something while I was waiting. There’s something in the water…”
“What’s your name, bud?” X said calmingly, looking at the old man’s hands and feet to try to decide how to best get the nails out without causing more damage.
“Winchester,” he said in a coarse voice. It sounded like he hadn’t had a drink of water in days. While X looked at his hands with the LED flashlight, I reached into my pack for the small canteen of filtered water I still had. I started pouring it into Winchester’s mouth. He gulped greedily, his throat working hard to drink down the rest of it.
“I got it!” X said, taking a flat stone he had found on the ground. “I’m going to try to pound these nails out from the bottom.”
“Oh, please, no,” Winchester said, his wrinkled face turning pale. X shook his head.
“We need to get you out of here,” he said. “It’s going to hurt, bud. But we don’t have any tools here. The nails are large, almost like railroad spikes, and once we get the top part, the bottom should slide out easily since it’s a lot narrower.” As he grabbed the rock to begin his work, a bone-chilling wailing started up again from the swamps. It was the scream of Mowdoroth, that abomination with the skin of a wasp’s nest.
“Cover us!” X yelled panickedly as he continued his grisly work. Winchester screamed in pain when X first struck the nail on his right hand. It shot up a fraction of an inch, fresh blood pooling all around it and dripping through the bare planks.
I turned, but the banshee wail seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. The swamp bubbled faster and faster all around us, as if thousands of corpses were coming back to life. I heard Winchester scream again, then the dull thud of another nail hitting the earth.
A face peeked out of the swamp, only twenty feet away. Its eyes were green, the color of a putrefying wound. Its lipless mouth opened wide, showing a spongy black mass of skin with concentric circles of tiny, razor-sharp teeth. It reminded me of the mouth of a lamprey.
I opened fire, shooting wildly at the face, aiming at the body hidden under the dark surface of the swamp. Luminescent drops of green blood exploded from a bullet hole in its upper right shoulder, floating across the surface of the water like radioactive waste.
Its screaming cut off instantly. All I could hear was the pounding of the rock behind me and Winchester’s pained, horrified pleas for mercy.
“Please, you’re hurting me!” he pleaded.
“Shut the fuck up, Winchester!” I whispered. “It’s here with us now.” With considerable effort, he did, only moaning and violently jerking his head now as the waves of pain ripped through him.
“I got it!” X said suddenly. A feeling of elation filled my heart.
“Let’s go then!” I yelled, turning to help the old man up. I heard something massive rise up behind us. It mixed with the sound of dripping water and babbling waves that arose from the disturbance.
Winchester was weak, stumbling up to his feet and nearly falling over immediately. Staggering, he took off down the trail with no shoes, but he immediately gave a curse of pain and tripped. X and I started running, and at that moment, I realized the flaw in our plan. We wouldn’t be able to get Winchester out of the swamp without carrying him, due to the extensive injuries to his feet. And I knew we didn’t have time.
Mowdoroth’s body stood as tall as the trees as it looked down at the three of us with its strange, infected eyes. Its tentacles undulated faster and faster, seeming to whip around its body until they flew out towards us.
“Run!” I screamed. X and I sprinted behind a cluster of dead trees hugging the path. The blade-like hand of Mowdoroth chopped them in a half, raining wood splinters down on our heads.
Winchester continued trying to crawl forward. Mowdoroth slithered behind him. Winchester looked up as a tentacle started coming down in his direction. He gave a short, panicked scream as the blade smashed through his back legs, chopping both of them off at the knees. The ground shook with the force of it. The stumps began spurting seemingly endless amounts of blood. Winchester pleaded and made incomprehensible gurgling sounds as he bled out. Mowdoroth ended Winchester’s cries when it wrapped its tentacle around Winchester’s torso. It slithered up into Winchester’s open mouth.
X and I shot as fast as we could while running forward in the dark, trying to hold a flashlight and a pistol. Most of my shots missed Mowdoroth, but with a sense of satisfaction and pride, I saw a few burst through its enormous body. Streams of radioactive green blood ran down its torso now. As its serpentine legs pumped furiously, it gained speed, coming behind us like a runaway train. I could feel the ground shaking with every thud of its tentacled feet.
A few hundred feet ahead of us, I caught a glimpse of the cultists. They were hurrying away from the area, not running but moving much faster than they had come in. Nearly out of breath already and exhausted from hiking all day, I pointed forward.
“Look!” I screamed. X saw them, his eyes widening. We sprinted in a blind panic, as fast as we could towards the stragglers in the black robes. Without warning, X raised his pistol and fired, aiming at the nearest of them.
The figure in the back of the pack fell forward without making a sound. He continued trying to crawl forward weakly for a few moments before he lost energy and lay still, no more than a bleeding black hump on the dark earth.
X gave a sudden cry of pain next to me as a tentacle came down like a guillotine blade. I heard it whip through the air with a high-pitched whine. A single breath later, I watched in horror as it sliced off his right arm. X looked down at the spurting stump for a long moment, his tanned face turning as pale as bones. He stumbled forward, then, with a hoarse cry, he fell.
Following X’s lead, I raised my gun and started shooting the cultists. They sprinted away in a random panic as bodies fell ahead of us. I jumped over the black lumps on the ground, hearing Mowdoroth shake the world as it gave chase. A long, snake-like tentacle reached down, picking up X’s spurting body and raising it towards Mowdoroth’s leech-like mouth. The massive abomination slowed, picking up the bodies of the dead cultists and crushing them. I heard the bones shatter as the wet gore exploded around Mowdoroth’s many sharp teeth.
I saw the woods again, living trees just a few hundred feet away. The trail of black earth ended abruptly, leading out of the boglands. Cultists sprinted blindly through the forest in every direction, scattering like cockroaches. I had nearly reached the border of the forest when I heard something whizzing past my head. I ducked, but the blur of a grayish tentacle coming down sent a jolt of fear like electricity sizzling through my body.
A moment later, a cold agony covered my left hand. In shock, I looked down, realizing that the blade-like appendage of Mowdoroth had neatly amputated all four of my fingers. If I hadn’t ducked, it would’ve probably gotten my head instead.
Stumbling and screaming, my mind in a blind panic, I staggered through the intersection of the boglands and the forest, falling forward. I knew I was dead. I closed my eyes, waiting. Yet nothing happened.
When I looked back, I saw something strange. Mowdoroth had stopped at the end of the boglands. It tried to push its body forward towards me, but it couldn’t enter the forest. It was as if an invisible barrier stood there.
I lay there for a long time. After a while, I heard Mowdoroth slink back into the fetid waters of the boglands. And then I was alone.
***
I wrapped my hand in bandages as much as I could, trying to stem the bleeding. I felt weak and sick from blood loss, so I lay there until the sun came up. The next day, I was able to slowly make my way out of the forest and back towards the nearest town.
Now I hear stories of people mysteriously going missing in the area. An entire family in a nearby farmhouse only a couple dozen miles away disappeared in the middle of the night without a trace, leaving only smeared trails of blood leading into the forest. No one saw anything, but these six victims were only the first in a long line of strange deaths. Oddly enough, all of the victims lived next to swamps.
And I have the feeling that I was the one responsible.

I had been hiking down the Appalachian Trail for over two weeks without issue on the day when the nightmare began. My friend, X, was by my side the entire time. It was, quite honestly, comforting to have someone who stood nearly six-and-a-half feet tall with me, especially during the long, dark nights when the howling of coyotes drew near. Black bears, too, were a constant presence in these dark mountains. As we got farther from towns and civilization, more ancient predators than human beings took over the land, stalking the night like creeping shadows.
For this trip, we both had bought as few supplies as possible. Included in our packs were MREs, two sleeping bags, some tarps and hammocks, some light clothing, and two pistols with a few boxes of ammo. We didn’t want to be too weighed down that we wouldn’t be able to move fast, after all. We would source water from the streams, waterfalls and lakes along the way and filter it using Lifestraws.
As the spring breeze blew past us, cooling the sweat on my face, I noticed the trail ahead of us weaving its way through thick swampland. The buzzing of flies and mosquitoes increased with every step. The green, fetid waters of the swamp bubbled constantly, as if it were whispering secrets to us.
“Ah, shit,” X said, glancing down the hill with his dark, serious eyes. His tanned skin was covered in a thin sheen of sweat as he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Another swamp. I hate swamps. You know there’s going to be a million mosquitoes and flies down there.” I pulled out the map, squinting down at it. I ran my finger down the trail, seeing the mountains and valleys we had already passed.
“The trail shouldn’t be going through any swamps,” I said. “They’re supposed to be marked. There’s no ponds or anything around here.” And yet there very clearly was. Either we were in a different spot than I thought we were, or the map was outdated. The trail also grew thinner as we descended. The sharp branches of the bushes stuck out like greedy hands, grabbing at our backpacks and clothes as we pressed forward.
“Well, whatever,” X said gruffly, plowing ahead. Twigs cracked under his massive bulk. The thin branches hanging across the path snapped as he plowed forward. I let him go first, since he was significantly bigger than myself. It was like following in the path of a bull.
“The faster we move, the faster we’ll be through it. We don’t want to camp anywhere around here when it gets dark,” X continued, looking grim. “We’ll be eaten alive by bugs by sunrise. We need to make it to the other side of these boglands before we can stop for the night.”
“Yeah, and I could use some more water,” I said, shaking my mostly empty canteen. “I wouldn’t drink this shit no matter what we did to it. It probably has brain-eating parasites crawling in it.” I checked my watch, realizing that dusk was only a half hour away. We would have to move fast indeed, especially as we didn’t know the size of the swamp. I was not enthusiastic about hiking in the dark with the many steep trails and sharp rocks that covered the surrounding land. A single misstep could lead to a very long, bone-shattering fall.
To my increasing dismay, I realized that the trail we were on no longer had the characteristic white markings of the Appalachian Trail. I kept checking the trees for the past fifteen minutes, and I definitely hadn’t seen a single one. I couldn’t remember the last time we had passed one, but I had a creeping suspicion it had been at least a couple hours ago.
“I think we have a problem, man,” I whispered. “I don’t know how it possibly could have happened, but I think we’re on the wrong trail.”
“There’s not supposed to be any other trails around here,” X argued. “Check the map.”
“Then where’s the white blazes? There’s not supposed to be any boglands around here, either, yet we’re walking through the middle of one,” I said. He shook his head.
“Listen, Ben, there’s not going to be markers on the entire Appalachian Trail,” he said. “Just trust me. We’re on the right path. Sometimes forests change. Swamps take over spots where forests used to lay. Hell, the Sahara Desert has been expanding for thousands of years, just eating the forests and plains all around it. There used to be lions and savannah in Morocco, and now it’s all dead and dry.”
I felt doubtful, but I continued forwards, following closely behind X. Neither one of us had ever done the full Appalachian Trail, after all. I hoped he was right. I was not enthusiastic about backtracking two or three hours if he wasn’t.
I thought back closely on our travels during the last few hours, wondering where we could have gone wrong. The trail had been rather overgrown and rocky on the peak of the last mountain. There had been a beautiful view spanning hundreds of miles, looking far off into state forests and winding roads. I remembered seeing the white marker near the top, but after we had started descending, it disappeared. That must have been where we went wrong, if we did, indeed, go off-course. But I couldn’t be sure, and I didn’t tell X about my suspicions.
We finished descending a steep, rocky trail into a valley where the boglands really started. The trees ended in a massive semi-circle around the open swamp. Thick peat covered the entire surface of it like rotted, grayish-brown skin. I saw water snakes quietly disappearing into the stagnant water, leaving behind slowly expanding ripples.
“This is pretty cool,” I said, stopping for a moment at the bottom of the trail to admire the boglands. Our trail continued directly through the center of it, no more than a raised patch of black earth surrounded by green swampy water. I could hear the many insects chirping and flying before we even took a step forward. Though the spring air felt warm and I was covered in sweat, I still reached into my bag, taking out a windbreaker that would cover up my arms and neck to help with the bugs. X did the same.
“Let’s move fast,” he said, giving me a knowing look. He was a much faster hiker than myself. He seemed like a machine sometimes, tireless and single-minded. I had seen him hike over twenty miles in a single day without looking too bent out of shape. I gave him a faint half-smile, picking up my pace.
“You know what they used to say about the boglands?” I asked X. He shook his head.
“I don’t read books,” he said. “If I have time to sit down and read, then it means I have time to go out and do something actually fun. But I’m sure you know all about it.” I gave a short bark of laughter at his off-handed insult. It sounded far too loud echoing back to us through the creepy swamp. The last rays of sunlight were disappearing behind the mountains now. Soon, we would be plunged into darkness.
“Well, in ancient times, people thought the boglands a place where the walls of reality were thin, where the gods would come through. They used to bring their victims out to swamps during rituals, then they would slice their throats or strangle them and dump their bodies into the bogs as an offering to the gods. They also said that strange, shape-shifting creatures would appear, sometimes to deceive travelers, other times to help them,” I said. “But as for human sacrifices, the bogs preserve bodies like nothing else, except maybe tar pits. Archaeologists keep finding victims with slashed throats or shattered skulls buried underneath the peat.”
X was silent for a long moment as we continued walking along the raised patch of earth that formed the trail. We got farther and farther from the forests, until the swamp seemed like a fetid ocean, spanning out to the horizon in every direction.
“Do you think they used to do that kind of stuff around here?” X asked.
“Used to?” I exclaimed, laughing. “I’m sure some psychopaths still do. This is a good place to dump a body, after all. Who the hell wants to trek through the muck and the snakes and mosquitoes out here looking for corpses?”
“The FBI and the cops will do it,” he said, “if they think there’s something to find.” I was about to respond when an ear-splitting shriek echoed out all around us. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from at first. X’s tan skin seemed to go pale as he spun, glancing in every direction.
“What the fuck is that?!” he screamed over the deafening wailing. I didn’t believe in cryptids, but my anxious mind immediately offered up an image of a banshee, a woman with chalk-white skin and black eyes whose shrieking jaw unhinged like a snake’s.
“I’m turning around!” I yelled, pointing back for emphasis. “Dude, fuck this! We need to get out of this swamp!” But X was no longer listening. He was looking past me, his mouth open and his eyes wild. He started backpedaling and nearly fell into the swamp. Windmilling his arms crazily, he turned and sprinted away without a word.
I was afraid to look back. The screaming was getting louder by the second, shaking the air all around me in deafening, crashing waves of sound. I felt like my head would explode if it got any worse. Instinctively, I took off after X, but I glanced back for a single moment before I did. Something loomed there from a nightmare, standing as tall as the trees. It moved through the swamp like a snake, its body slithering through the stagnant green waters towards us. When it met my eyes, the screaming stopped. The abrupt silence seemed deafening. I could hear the fervent pounding of my heart in my ears.
The creature’s skin looked honeycombed and rough, almost like a wasp’s nest. The thousands of tiny holes covering its body constantly opened and closed like hungry mouths. Its arms were long tentacles ending in sharp points of bone in the shape of scythes. The tentacles undulated like serpents. Its legs, too, were no more than four tentacles that alternatively slithered and stepped forward.
Its flesh was the color of peat, a sickly grayish-brown, and the smell that emanated from it was rancid and stagnant, the essence of all boglands and swamps. I nearly gagged as I ran. The putrefying stench seemed to follow me like a shadow.
Ahead of me, X was fumbling in his backpack as he ran, trying to grab his pistol. I knew he had a Glock 21 in that bag, and I had my Sig Sauer in mine. I cursed myself for not keeping it holstered on my body, but I had never had to use it before and hadn’t seriously thought I would need it for this trip. He glanced back at me, his eyes widening in horror.
“It’s right behind you!” he yelled. “Get down!” He dropped his backpack, revealing the sleek, black pistol clenched tightly in his hand. I barely had time to comprehend his words when an immense pressure and numbness radiated through my back. My head snapped backwards as a meaty thud resonated all around me. I went flying forward, feeling as if I had been struck by a car. As I flew through the air, the pain in my back exploded in burning pulses. I felt the deep slice open up from the sharp blade of bone that had slashed me like a knife. I felt trickles of blood pour from the open wound, making my stained shirt cling to my body.
I landed hard on the raised black earth of the trail, a bone-jarring impact that knocked the air out of me. At that same moment, X opened fire, pressing the trigger over and over, emptying the magazine as fast as he could. Something splashed over me, going in my eyes and mouth and nose. I crawled forward, moaning, my head spinning. I wiped my forehead, seeing spatters of green blood squirming with dark, maggot-like creatures covering my arms and face. It clung to my fingers, thick and rancid. I felt stinging sensations as the tiny worms bit me over and over. My ears rang with a high-pitched whine from the gunshots.
X was running towards me now. I continued to crawl towards him, shell-shocked and whimpering, trying to wipe the eldritch blood off my skin. With a muscular arm, he reached down and pulled me up.
“Where’d it go?” I mumbled, stumbling forward on unsteady feet. X put an arm around my shoulders and helped support me.
“It slunk back into the swamp,” he said. “Jesus, you’re bleeding really bad, buddy. We’re going to need to take care of that as soon as we get away from this hellhole.” I felt the deep slices from the creature’s blade-like hands across my back. The fabric of my shirt clung tightly to the skin as fresh blood soaked it.
“This isn’t the trail, X,” I gasped. “We went the wrong way. We need to go back.” He nodded grimly.
“We’re heading back right now. I know it’s the wrong trail now, it definitely is, but it’s dark. The trails back up the mountains are steep and dangerous, and we’ve already been hiking all day. How much longer can we really go?” he asked. In reality, I had a feeling X could go for quite a bit longer. I was the weak link in the chain, and we both knew it.
X took out a small, LED flashlight from his backpack, shining it ahead of us on the dark path. Across the center of the black earth, there was an obstruction, something that hadn’t been there when we passed this way originally.
“Shit! Is that a person?” X said, slowing down. He focused the light on it. As my eyes adjusted, I gave a gasp of horror as I saw a rough sacrificial table looming there, waiting with a ready victim.
Laying on the bare wooden planks in the center of the trail was an elderly man wearing the garb of a hunter. He was gagged, a bloody rag shoved deep into his mouth. I felt a sense of revulsion and terror as I realized his hands and feet were nailed to the planks, as if he were being crucified laying down. His eyes rolled wildly, white and insane, like a horse with a broken leg. When he saw us approaching, he tried to say something through the gag, pulling hard against the nails that bit so viciously into his flesh. Fresh rivers of blood spurted from his wounds.
I had my pistol in my hands. X had taken a fresh magazine out by now, throwing the empty one back in his backpack. Trembling, he went first, his shaking hand moving the flashlight around wildly. Its bright rays bounced off the dead, half-rotted trees that grew out of the boglands, the clouds of mosquitoes and moths that circled us constantly.
“Oh my God... he's like the victim of a serial killer or something,” he whispered, running a trembling hand over his face. “It looks like someone has set that poor guy up to have his heart cut out, like some sort of Aztec ritual.” He glanced worriedly over at me. We had both stopped cold in our tracks, looking around for any sign of danger, but we only saw the old man writhing on his rough table of torture.
“We have to keep going forward,” I whispered. “That thing is behind us. I don’t think it’s dead. I’m not sure it can even die.”
“But what’s ahead of us?” he asked grimly. “That’s the real question, isn’t it?” Far off down the trail, I saw small pinpoints of flickering light. They drew closer. We raised our pistols, waiting for the new arrivals to show themselves.
Dozens of people dressed in black, silky robes holding lamps slowly ambled their way towards us. They had their heads bowed, like monks on a holy pilgrimage. They drew close to the sacrifice. The one in the lead held a long, curving dagger whose blade looked like it was made of some kind of red volcanic rock. Its strange silver handle glittered in his pale, thin hand. At the end, I saw it was sculpted into the shape of a human heart.
“Stop right there!” X screamed, stepping forward. “Don’t come any closer! We are armed, I’m warning you.” The people in the black robes didn’t appear to hear or care in the slightest. They continued slowly following their leader with the strange dagger, almost floating forward in a nonchalant manner. Their leader began chanting in some strange, ancient language. It reminded me of Tibetan or Sanskrit in a way, like the chanting of some Vajrayana monk high up in the Himalayas. But it had a sinister, hissing quality to the words. Something ancient and powerful resonated in every syllable.
I raised the pistol, firing blankly into the dark, cloudless sky above. The smell of gunsmoke and fetid rot hung thick in the air. The leader of the group looked at me with his large, glassy eyes. His face looked sunken and pale, almost like a starving child. He had shaved all of the hair on his head, even his eyebrows. His lips were extremely thin and bloodless in his chalk-white face.
For a long moment, we stood staring at each other, my pistol aimed at his chest. X also had his pistol raised, aimed at one of those standing behind him. But the robed man didn’t speak. He gave me a faint grin.
“Let the old man go,” I commanded, my voice sounding hoarse and weak. The swamp quickly swallowed up my words, until only the buzzing of mosquitoes remained.
“I am sorry, my son, but I cannot do that,” the leader said in a voice as cold as endless space. “If we do not feed Mowdoroth, it will never sleep. The swamps will continue to expand, eating more and more of the surrounding forests and towns, and Mowdoroth, driven insane by hunger, will take far more victims in the process.
“This job has been passed down to us from generation to generation, from big hand to small, for over four centuries. Only twice has Mowdoroth not been fed on the New Moon, and each time, entire settlements full of people were wiped off the face of the Earth as if they had never existed. On one, they just had time to carve the word ‘CROATAN’ before they were taken.
“Mowdoroth looks for the place where the nightmares grow. It breaks open the chest and finds the place where the silent screams start, deep down at the base of the heart. All of the nightmares are planted there, like tiny seeds scattered during childhood. Those that fell on good soil in that abyss produced a great crop, yielding a hundredfold, sixtyfold, or thirtyfold. If you do not allow us to complete our holy mission, then you do it: cut open the man's chest and remove his beating heart. As it beats, squeeze it as hard as you can, and let all the blood drain onto the top of your head. Hold the heart above your head and close your eyes until the god appears and takes it.” The cult leader finished, looking at us with sparkling eyes, as if he had said something profound.
“This shit is just insane drivel,” X whispered in a voice as low as possible. “I say we open fire and save the old man now. Fuck these cultists.” I nodded grimly in agreement.
“You need to all turn around and leave immediately,” X yelled, stepping forward. “I will give you three seconds to turn around and get the hell out of my sight. Three…” At first, the cultists stood as still as statues, simply staring. Finally, the leader sighed and turned away. He shook his head, reminding me of a disappointed parent.
“I tried to warn you,” he said in his thin, quavering voice. “The time has come to give the offering. You must cut out this man’s heart and raise it to Mowdoroth, so he can get the seeds of nightmares freshly sown. The choice is yours now, as you have demanded this power with violence. You can leave this man here to be eaten by Mowdoroth, or free him and, in exchange, guarantee the deaths of hundreds of other people.”
With those last words, the black-robed figures continued down the curve of the trail. Within seconds, they had disappeared behind dead, half-rotted trees that still dotted the edges of the boglands. X and I ran forward toward the struggling old man. X reached into his pocket and pulled out a folding knife. He cut off the old man’s gag, pulling the spit-soaked chunk of filthy cloth out of his mouth. The old man spat and licked his dry lips.
“Get me out of here, please,” he whispered, his eyes rolling wildly. “Those cult members are all batshit insane. And there’s something not right in these swamps. I caught glimpses of something while I was waiting. There’s something in the water…”
“What’s your name, bud?” X said calmingly, looking at the old man’s hands and feet to try to decide how to best get the nails out without causing more damage.
“Winchester,” he said in a coarse voice. It sounded like he hadn’t had a drink of water in days. While X looked at his hands with the LED flashlight, I reached into my pack for the small canteen of filtered water I still had. I started pouring it into Winchester’s mouth. He gulped greedily, his throat working hard to drink down the rest of it.
“I got it!” X said, taking a flat stone he had found on the ground. “I’m going to try to pound these nails out from the bottom.”
“Oh, please, no,” Winchester said, his wrinkled face turning pale. X shook his head.
“We need to get you out of here,” he said. “It’s going to hurt, bud. But we don’t have any tools here. The nails are large, almost like railroad spikes, and once we get the top part, the bottom should slide out easily since it’s a lot narrower.” As he grabbed the rock to begin his work, a bone-chilling wailing started up again from the swamps. It was the scream of Mowdoroth, that abomination with the skin of a wasp’s nest.
“Cover us!” X yelled panickedly as he continued his grisly work. Winchester screamed in pain when X first struck the nail on his right hand. It shot up a fraction of an inch, fresh blood pooling all around it and dripping through the bare planks.
I turned, but the banshee wail seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. The swamp bubbled faster and faster all around us, as if thousands of corpses were coming back to life. I heard Winchester scream again, then the dull thud of another nail hitting the earth.
A face peeked out of the swamp, only twenty feet away. Its eyes were green, the color of a putrefying wound. Its lipless mouth opened wide, showing a spongy black mass of skin with concentric circles of tiny, razor-sharp teeth. It reminded me of the mouth of a lamprey.
I opened fire, shooting wildly at the face, aiming at the body hidden under the dark surface of the swamp. Luminescent drops of green blood exploded from a bullet hole in its upper right shoulder, floating across the surface of the water like radioactive waste.
Its screaming cut off instantly. All I could hear was the pounding of the rock behind me and Winchester’s pained, horrified pleas for mercy.
“Please, you’re hurting me!” he pleaded.
“Shut the fuck up, Winchester!” I whispered. “It’s here with us now.” With considerable effort, he did, only moaning and violently jerking his head now as the waves of pain ripped through him.
“I got it!” X said suddenly. A feeling of elation filled my heart.
“Let’s go then!” I yelled, turning to help the old man up. I heard something massive rise up behind us. It mixed with the sound of dripping water and babbling waves that arose from the disturbance.
Winchester was weak, stumbling up to his feet and nearly falling over immediately. Staggering, he took off down the trail with no shoes, but he immediately gave a curse of pain and tripped. X and I started running, and at that moment, I realized the flaw in our plan. We wouldn’t be able to get Winchester out of the swamp without carrying him, due to the extensive injuries to his feet. And I knew we didn’t have time.
Mowdoroth’s body stood as tall as the trees as it looked down at the three of us with its strange, infected eyes. Its tentacles undulated faster and faster, seeming to whip around its body until they flew out towards us.
“Run!” I screamed. X and I sprinted behind a cluster of dead trees hugging the path. The blade-like hand of Mowdoroth chopped them in a half, raining wood splinters down on our heads.
Winchester continued trying to crawl forward. Mowdoroth slithered behind him. Winchester looked up as a tentacle started coming down in his direction. He gave a short, panicked scream as the blade smashed through his back legs, chopping both of them off at the knees. The ground shook with the force of it. The stumps began spurting seemingly endless amounts of blood. Winchester pleaded and made incomprehensible gurgling sounds as he bled out. Mowdoroth ended Winchester’s cries when it wrapped its tentacle around Winchester’s torso. It slithered up into Winchester’s open mouth.
X and I shot as fast as we could while running forward in the dark, trying to hold a flashlight and a pistol. Most of my shots missed Mowdoroth, but with a sense of satisfaction and pride, I saw a few burst through its enormous body. Streams of radioactive green blood ran down its torso now. As its serpentine legs pumped furiously, it gained speed, coming behind us like a runaway train. I could feel the ground shaking with every thud of its tentacled feet.
A few hundred feet ahead of us, I caught a glimpse of the cultists. They were hurrying away from the area, not running but moving much faster than they had come in. Nearly out of breath already and exhausted from hiking all day, I pointed forward.
“Look!” I screamed. X saw them, his eyes widening. We sprinted in a blind panic, as fast as we could towards the stragglers in the black robes. Without warning, X raised his pistol and fired, aiming at the nearest of them.
The figure in the back of the pack fell forward without making a sound. He continued trying to crawl forward weakly for a few moments before he lost energy and lay still, no more than a bleeding black hump on the dark earth.
X gave a sudden cry of pain next to me as a tentacle came down like a guillotine blade. I heard it whip through the air with a high-pitched whine. A single breath later, I watched in horror as it sliced off his right arm. X looked down at the spurting stump for a long moment, his tanned face turning as pale as bones. He stumbled forward, then, with a hoarse cry, he fell.
Following X’s lead, I raised my gun and started shooting the cultists. They sprinted away in a random panic as bodies fell ahead of us. I jumped over the black lumps on the ground, hearing Mowdoroth shake the world as it gave chase. A long, snake-like tentacle reached down, picking up X’s spurting body and raising it towards Mowdoroth’s leech-like mouth. The massive abomination slowed, picking up the bodies of the dead cultists and crushing them. I heard the bones shatter as the wet gore exploded around Mowdoroth’s many sharp teeth.
I saw the woods again, living trees just a few hundred feet away. The trail of black earth ended abruptly, leading out of the boglands. Cultists sprinted blindly through the forest in every direction, scattering like cockroaches. I had nearly reached the border of the forest when I heard something whizzing past my head. I ducked, but the blur of a grayish tentacle coming down sent a jolt of fear like electricity sizzling through my body.
A moment later, a cold agony covered my left hand. In shock, I looked down, realizing that the blade-like appendage of Mowdoroth had neatly amputated all four of my fingers. If I hadn’t ducked, it would’ve probably gotten my head instead.
Stumbling and screaming, my mind in a blind panic, I staggered through the intersection of the boglands and the forest, falling forward. I knew I was dead. I closed my eyes, waiting. Yet nothing happened.
When I looked back, I saw something strange. Mowdoroth had stopped at the end of the boglands. It tried to push its body forward towards me, but it couldn’t enter the forest. It was as if an invisible barrier stood there.
I lay there for a long time. After a while, I heard Mowdoroth slink back into the fetid waters of the boglands. And then I was alone.
***
I wrapped my hand in bandages as much as I could, trying to stem the bleeding. I felt weak and sick from blood loss, so I lay there until the sun came up. The next day, I was able to slowly make my way out of the forest and back towards the nearest town.
Now I hear stories of people mysteriously going missing in the area. An entire family in a nearby farmhouse only a couple dozen miles away disappeared in the middle of the night without a trace, leaving only smeared trails of blood leading into the forest. No one saw anything, but these six victims were only the first in a long line of strange deaths. Oddly enough, all of the victims lived next to swamps.
And I have the feeling that I was the one responsible.

I had been hiking down the Appalachian Trail for over two weeks without issue on the day when the nightmare began. My friend, X, was by my side the entire time. It was, quite honestly, comforting to have someone who stood nearly six-and-a-half feet tall with me, especially during the long, dark nights when the howling of coyotes drew near. Black bears, too, were a constant presence in these dark mountains. As we got farther from towns and civilization, more ancient predators than human beings took over the land, stalking the night like creeping shadows.
For this trip, we both had bought as few supplies as possible. Included in our packs were MREs, two sleeping bags, some tarps and hammocks, some light clothing, and two pistols with a few boxes of ammo. We didn’t want to be too weighed down that we wouldn’t be able to move fast, after all. We would source water from the streams, waterfalls and lakes along the way and filter it using Lifestraws.
As the spring breeze blew past us, cooling the sweat on my face, I noticed the trail ahead of us weaving its way through thick swampland. The buzzing of flies and mosquitoes increased with every step. The green, fetid waters of the swamp bubbled constantly, as if it were whispering secrets to us.
“Ah, shit,” X said, glancing down the hill with his dark, serious eyes. His tanned skin was covered in a thin sheen of sweat as he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Another swamp. I hate swamps. You know there’s going to be a million mosquitoes and flies down there.” I pulled out the map, squinting down at it. I ran my finger down the trail, seeing the mountains and valleys we had already passed.
“The trail shouldn’t be going through any swamps,” I said. “They’re supposed to be marked. There’s no ponds or anything around here.” And yet there very clearly was. Either we were in a different spot than I thought we were, or the map was outdated. The trail also grew thinner as we descended. The sharp branches of the bushes stuck out like greedy hands, grabbing at our backpacks and clothes as we pressed forward.
“Well, whatever,” X said gruffly, plowing ahead. Twigs cracked under his massive bulk. The thin branches hanging across the path snapped as he plowed forward. I let him go first, since he was significantly bigger than myself. It was like following in the path of a bull.
“The faster we move, the faster we’ll be through it. We don’t want to camp anywhere around here when it gets dark,” X continued, looking grim. “We’ll be eaten alive by bugs by sunrise. We need to make it to the other side of these boglands before we can stop for the night.”
“Yeah, and I could use some more water,” I said, shaking my mostly empty canteen. “I wouldn’t drink this shit no matter what we did to it. It probably has brain-eating parasites crawling in it.” I checked my watch, realizing that dusk was only a half hour away. We would have to move fast indeed, especially as we didn’t know the size of the swamp. I was not enthusiastic about hiking in the dark with the many steep trails and sharp rocks that covered the surrounding land. A single misstep could lead to a very long, bone-shattering fall.
To my increasing dismay, I realized that the trail we were on no longer had the characteristic white markings of the Appalachian Trail. I kept checking the trees for the past fifteen minutes, and I definitely hadn’t seen a single one. I couldn’t remember the last time we had passed one, but I had a creeping suspicion it had been at least a couple hours ago.
“I think we have a problem, man,” I whispered. “I don’t know how it possibly could have happened, but I think we’re on the wrong trail.”
“There’s not supposed to be any other trails around here,” X argued. “Check the map.”
“Then where’s the white blazes? There’s not supposed to be any boglands around here, either, yet we’re walking through the middle of one,” I said. He shook his head.
“Listen, Ben, there’s not going to be markers on the entire Appalachian Trail,” he said. “Just trust me. We’re on the right path. Sometimes forests change. Swamps take over spots where forests used to lay. Hell, the Sahara Desert has been expanding for thousands of years, just eating the forests and plains all around it. There used to be lions and savannah in Morocco, and now it’s all dead and dry.”
I felt doubtful, but I continued forwards, following closely behind X. Neither one of us had ever done the full Appalachian Trail, after all. I hoped he was right. I was not enthusiastic about backtracking two or three hours if he wasn’t.
I thought back closely on our travels during the last few hours, wondering where we could have gone wrong. The trail had been rather overgrown and rocky on the peak of the last mountain. There had been a beautiful view spanning hundreds of miles, looking far off into state forests and winding roads. I remembered seeing the white marker near the top, but after we had started descending, it disappeared. That must have been where we went wrong, if we did, indeed, go off-course. But I couldn’t be sure, and I didn’t tell X about my suspicions.
We finished descending a steep, rocky trail into a valley where the boglands really started. The trees ended in a massive semi-circle around the open swamp. Thick peat covered the entire surface of it like rotted, grayish-brown skin. I saw water snakes quietly disappearing into the stagnant water, leaving behind slowly expanding ripples.
“This is pretty cool,” I said, stopping for a moment at the bottom of the trail to admire the boglands. Our trail continued directly through the center of it, no more than a raised patch of black earth surrounded by green swampy water. I could hear the many insects chirping and flying before we even took a step forward. Though the spring air felt warm and I was covered in sweat, I still reached into my bag, taking out a windbreaker that would cover up my arms and neck to help with the bugs. X did the same.
“Let’s move fast,” he said, giving me a knowing look. He was a much faster hiker than myself. He seemed like a machine sometimes, tireless and single-minded. I had seen him hike over twenty miles in a single day without looking too bent out of shape. I gave him a faint half-smile, picking up my pace.
“You know what they used to say about the boglands?” I asked X. He shook his head.
“I don’t read books,” he said. “If I have time to sit down and read, then it means I have time to go out and do something actually fun. But I’m sure you know all about it.” I gave a short bark of laughter at his off-handed insult. It sounded far too loud echoing back to us through the creepy swamp. The last rays of sunlight were disappearing behind the mountains now. Soon, we would be plunged into darkness.
“Well, in ancient times, people thought the boglands a place where the walls of reality were thin, where the gods would come through. They used to bring their victims out to swamps during rituals, then they would slice their throats or strangle them and dump their bodies into the bogs as an offering to the gods. They also said that strange, shape-shifting creatures would appear, sometimes to deceive travelers, other times to help them,” I said. “But as for human sacrifices, the bogs preserve bodies like nothing else, except maybe tar pits. Archaeologists keep finding victims with slashed throats or shattered skulls buried underneath the peat.”
X was silent for a long moment as we continued walking along the raised patch of earth that formed the trail. We got farther and farther from the forests, until the swamp seemed like a fetid ocean, spanning out to the horizon in every direction.
“Do you think they used to do that kind of stuff around here?” X asked.
“Used to?” I exclaimed, laughing. “I’m sure some psychopaths still do. This is a good place to dump a body, after all. Who the hell wants to trek through the muck and the snakes and mosquitoes out here looking for corpses?”
“The FBI and the cops will do it,” he said, “if they think there’s something to find.” I was about to respond when an ear-splitting shriek echoed out all around us. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from at first. X’s tan skin seemed to go pale as he spun, glancing in every direction.
“What the fuck is that?!” he screamed over the deafening wailing. I didn’t believe in cryptids, but my anxious mind immediately offered up an image of a banshee, a woman with chalk-white skin and black eyes whose shrieking jaw unhinged like a snake’s.
“I’m turning around!” I yelled, pointing back for emphasis. “Dude, fuck this! We need to get out of this swamp!” But X was no longer listening. He was looking past me, his mouth open and his eyes wild. He started backpedaling and nearly fell into the swamp. Windmilling his arms crazily, he turned and sprinted away without a word.
I was afraid to look back. The screaming was getting louder by the second, shaking the air all around me in deafening, crashing waves of sound. I felt like my head would explode if it got any worse. Instinctively, I took off after X, but I glanced back for a single moment before I did. Something loomed there from a nightmare, standing as tall as the trees. It moved through the swamp like a snake, its body slithering through the stagnant green waters towards us. When it met my eyes, the screaming stopped. The abrupt silence seemed deafening. I could hear the fervent pounding of my heart in my ears.
The creature’s skin looked honeycombed and rough, almost like a wasp’s nest. The thousands of tiny holes covering its body constantly opened and closed like hungry mouths. Its arms were long tentacles ending in sharp points of bone in the shape of scythes. The tentacles undulated like serpents. Its legs, too, were no more than four tentacles that alternatively slithered and stepped forward.
Its flesh was the color of peat, a sickly grayish-brown, and the smell that emanated from it was rancid and stagnant, the essence of all boglands and swamps. I nearly gagged as I ran. The putrefying stench seemed to follow me like a shadow.
Ahead of me, X was fumbling in his backpack as he ran, trying to grab his pistol. I knew he had a Glock 21 in that bag, and I had my Sig Sauer in mine. I cursed myself for not keeping it holstered on my body, but I had never had to use it before and hadn’t seriously thought I would need it for this trip. He glanced back at me, his eyes widening in horror.
“It’s right behind you!” he yelled. “Get down!” He dropped his backpack, revealing the sleek, black pistol clenched tightly in his hand. I barely had time to comprehend his words when an immense pressure and numbness radiated through my back. My head snapped backwards as a meaty thud resonated all around me. I went flying forward, feeling as if I had been struck by a car. As I flew through the air, the pain in my back exploded in burning pulses. I felt the deep slice open up from the sharp blade of bone that had slashed me like a knife. I felt trickles of blood pour from the open wound, making my stained shirt cling to my body.
I landed hard on the raised black earth of the trail, a bone-jarring impact that knocked the air out of me. At that same moment, X opened fire, pressing the trigger over and over, emptying the magazine as fast as he could. Something splashed over me, going in my eyes and mouth and nose. I crawled forward, moaning, my head spinning. I wiped my forehead, seeing spatters of green blood squirming with dark, maggot-like creatures covering my arms and face. It clung to my fingers, thick and rancid. I felt stinging sensations as the tiny worms bit me over and over. My ears rang with a high-pitched whine from the gunshots.
X was running towards me now. I continued to crawl towards him, shell-shocked and whimpering, trying to wipe the eldritch blood off my skin. With a muscular arm, he reached down and pulled me up.
“Where’d it go?” I mumbled, stumbling forward on unsteady feet. X put an arm around my shoulders and helped support me.
“It slunk back into the swamp,” he said. “Jesus, you’re bleeding really bad, buddy. We’re going to need to take care of that as soon as we get away from this hellhole.” I felt the deep slices from the creature’s blade-like hands across my back. The fabric of my shirt clung tightly to the skin as fresh blood soaked it.
“This isn’t the trail, X,” I gasped. “We went the wrong way. We need to go back.” He nodded grimly.
“We’re heading back right now. I know it’s the wrong trail now, it definitely is, but it’s dark. The trails back up the mountains are steep and dangerous, and we’ve already been hiking all day. How much longer can we really go?” he asked. In reality, I had a feeling X could go for quite a bit longer. I was the weak link in the chain, and we both knew it.
X took out a small, LED flashlight from his backpack, shining it ahead of us on the dark path. Across the center of the black earth, there was an obstruction, something that hadn’t been there when we passed this way originally.
“Shit! Is that a person?” X said, slowing down. He focused the light on it. As my eyes adjusted, I gave a gasp of horror as I saw a rough sacrificial table looming there, waiting with a ready victim.
Laying on the bare wooden planks in the center of the trail was an elderly man wearing the garb of a hunter. He was gagged, a bloody rag shoved deep into his mouth. I felt a sense of revulsion and terror as I realized his hands and feet were nailed to the planks, as if he were being crucified laying down. His eyes rolled wildly, white and insane, like a horse with a broken leg. When he saw us approaching, he tried to say something through the gag, pulling hard against the nails that bit so viciously into his flesh. Fresh rivers of blood spurted from his wounds.
I had my pistol in my hands. X had taken a fresh magazine out by now, throwing the empty one back in his backpack. Trembling, he went first, his shaking hand moving the flashlight around wildly. Its bright rays bounced off the dead, half-rotted trees that grew out of the boglands, the clouds of mosquitoes and moths that circled us constantly.
“Oh my God... he's like the victim of a serial killer or something,” he whispered, running a trembling hand over his face. “It looks like someone has set that poor guy up to have his heart cut out, like some sort of Aztec ritual.” He glanced worriedly over at me. We had both stopped cold in our tracks, looking around for any sign of danger, but we only saw the old man writhing on his rough table of torture.
“We have to keep going forward,” I whispered. “That thing is behind us. I don’t think it’s dead. I’m not sure it can even die.”
“But what’s ahead of us?” he asked grimly. “That’s the real question, isn’t it?” Far off down the trail, I saw small pinpoints of flickering light. They drew closer. We raised our pistols, waiting for the new arrivals to show themselves.
Dozens of people dressed in black, silky robes holding lamps slowly ambled their way towards us. They had their heads bowed, like monks on a holy pilgrimage. They drew close to the sacrifice. The one in the lead held a long, curving dagger whose blade looked like it was made of some kind of red volcanic rock. Its strange silver handle glittered in his pale, thin hand. At the end, I saw it was sculpted into the shape of a human heart.
“Stop right there!” X screamed, stepping forward. “Don’t come any closer! We are armed, I’m warning you.” The people in the black robes didn’t appear to hear or care in the slightest. They continued slowly following their leader with the strange dagger, almost floating forward in a nonchalant manner. Their leader began chanting in some strange, ancient language. It reminded me of Tibetan or Sanskrit in a way, like the chanting of some Vajrayana monk high up in the Himalayas. But it had a sinister, hissing quality to the words. Something ancient and powerful resonated in every syllable.
I raised the pistol, firing blankly into the dark, cloudless sky above. The smell of gunsmoke and fetid rot hung thick in the air. The leader of the group looked at me with his large, glassy eyes. His face looked sunken and pale, almost like a starving child. He had shaved all of the hair on his head, even his eyebrows. His lips were extremely thin and bloodless in his chalk-white face.
For a long moment, we stood staring at each other, my pistol aimed at his chest. X also had his pistol raised, aimed at one of those standing behind him. But the robed man didn’t speak. He gave me a faint grin.
“Let the old man go,” I commanded, my voice sounding hoarse and weak. The swamp quickly swallowed up my words, until only the buzzing of mosquitoes remained.
“I am sorry, my son, but I cannot do that,” the leader said in a voice as cold as endless space. “If we do not feed Mowdoroth, it will never sleep. The swamps will continue to expand, eating more and more of the surrounding forests and towns, and Mowdoroth, driven insane by hunger, will take far more victims in the process.
“This job has been passed down to us from generation to generation, from big hand to small, for over four centuries. Only twice has Mowdoroth not been fed on the New Moon, and each time, entire settlements full of people were wiped off the face of the Earth as if they had never existed. On one, they just had time to carve the word ‘CROATAN’ before they were taken.
“Mowdoroth looks for the place where the nightmares grow. It breaks open the chest and finds the place where the silent screams start, deep down at the base of the heart. All of the nightmares are planted there, like tiny seeds scattered during childhood. Those that fell on good soil in that abyss produced a great crop, yielding a hundredfold, sixtyfold, or thirtyfold. If you do not allow us to complete our holy mission, then you do it: cut open the man's chest and remove his beating heart. As it beats, squeeze it as hard as you can, and let all the blood drain onto the top of your head. Hold the heart above your head and close your eyes until the god appears and takes it.” The cult leader finished, looking at us with sparkling eyes, as if he had said something profound.
“This shit is just insane drivel,” X whispered in a voice as low as possible. “I say we open fire and save the old man now. Fuck these cultists.” I nodded grimly in agreement.
“You need to all turn around and leave immediately,” X yelled, stepping forward. “I will give you three seconds to turn around and get the hell out of my sight. Three…” At first, the cultists stood as still as statues, simply staring. Finally, the leader sighed and turned away. He shook his head, reminding me of a disappointed parent.
“I tried to warn you,” he said in his thin, quavering voice. “The time has come to give the offering. You must cut out this man’s heart and raise it to Mowdoroth, so he can get the seeds of nightmares freshly sown. The choice is yours now, as you have demanded this power with violence. You can leave this man here to be eaten by Mowdoroth, or free him and, in exchange, guarantee the deaths of hundreds of other people.”
With those last words, the black-robed figures continued down the curve of the trail. Within seconds, they had disappeared behind dead, half-rotted trees that still dotted the edges of the boglands. X and I ran forward toward the struggling old man. X reached into his pocket and pulled out a folding knife. He cut off the old man’s gag, pulling the spit-soaked chunk of filthy cloth out of his mouth. The old man spat and licked his dry lips.
“Get me out of here, please,” he whispered, his eyes rolling wildly. “Those cult members are all batshit insane. And there’s something not right in these swamps. I caught glimpses of something while I was waiting. There’s something in the water…”
“What’s your name, bud?” X said calmingly, looking at the old man’s hands and feet to try to decide how to best get the nails out without causing more damage.
“Winchester,” he said in a coarse voice. It sounded like he hadn’t had a drink of water in days. While X looked at his hands with the LED flashlight, I reached into my pack for the small canteen of filtered water I still had. I started pouring it into Winchester’s mouth. He gulped greedily, his throat working hard to drink down the rest of it.
“I got it!” X said, taking a flat stone he had found on the ground. “I’m going to try to pound these nails out from the bottom.”
“Oh, please, no,” Winchester said, his wrinkled face turning pale. X shook his head.
“We need to get you out of here,” he said. “It’s going to hurt, bud. But we don’t have any tools here. The nails are large, almost like railroad spikes, and once we get the top part, the bottom should slide out easily since it’s a lot narrower.” As he grabbed the rock to begin his work, a bone-chilling wailing started up again from the swamps. It was the scream of Mowdoroth, that abomination with the skin of a wasp’s nest.
“Cover us!” X yelled panickedly as he continued his grisly work. Winchester screamed in pain when X first struck the nail on his right hand. It shot up a fraction of an inch, fresh blood pooling all around it and dripping through the bare planks.
I turned, but the banshee wail seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. The swamp bubbled faster and faster all around us, as if thousands of corpses were coming back to life. I heard Winchester scream again, then the dull thud of another nail hitting the earth.
A face peeked out of the swamp, only twenty feet away. Its eyes were green, the color of a putrefying wound. Its lipless mouth opened wide, showing a spongy black mass of skin with concentric circles of tiny, razor-sharp teeth. It reminded me of the mouth of a lamprey.
I opened fire, shooting wildly at the face, aiming at the body hidden under the dark surface of the swamp. Luminescent drops of green blood exploded from a bullet hole in its upper right shoulder, floating across the surface of the water like radioactive waste.
Its screaming cut off instantly. All I could hear was the pounding of the rock behind me and Winchester’s pained, horrified pleas for mercy.
“Please, you’re hurting me!” he pleaded.
“Shut the fuck up, Winchester!” I whispered. “It’s here with us now.” With considerable effort, he did, only moaning and violently jerking his head now as the waves of pain ripped through him.
“I got it!” X said suddenly. A feeling of elation filled my heart.
“Let’s go then!” I yelled, turning to help the old man up. I heard something massive rise up behind us. It mixed with the sound of dripping water and babbling waves that arose from the disturbance.
Winchester was weak, stumbling up to his feet and nearly falling over immediately. Staggering, he took off down the trail with no shoes, but he immediately gave a curse of pain and tripped. X and I started running, and at that moment, I realized the flaw in our plan. We wouldn’t be able to get Winchester out of the swamp without carrying him, due to the extensive injuries to his feet. And I knew we didn’t have time.
Mowdoroth’s body stood as tall as the trees as it looked down at the three of us with its strange, infected eyes. Its tentacles undulated faster and faster, seeming to whip around its body until they flew out towards us.
“Run!” I screamed. X and I sprinted behind a cluster of dead trees hugging the path. The blade-like hand of Mowdoroth chopped them in a half, raining wood splinters down on our heads.
Winchester continued trying to crawl forward. Mowdoroth slithered behind him. Winchester looked up as a tentacle started coming down in his direction. He gave a short, panicked scream as the blade smashed through his back legs, chopping both of them off at the knees. The ground shook with the force of it. The stumps began spurting seemingly endless amounts of blood. Winchester pleaded and made incomprehensible gurgling sounds as he bled out. Mowdoroth ended Winchester’s cries when it wrapped its tentacle around Winchester’s torso. It slithered up into Winchester’s open mouth.
X and I shot as fast as we could while running forward in the dark, trying to hold a flashlight and a pistol. Most of my shots missed Mowdoroth, but with a sense of satisfaction and pride, I saw a few burst through its enormous body. Streams of radioactive green blood ran down its torso now. As its serpentine legs pumped furiously, it gained speed, coming behind us like a runaway train. I could feel the ground shaking with every thud of its tentacled feet.
A few hundred feet ahead of us, I caught a glimpse of the cultists. They were hurrying away from the area, not running but moving much faster than they had come in. Nearly out of breath already and exhausted from hiking all day, I pointed forward.
“Look!” I screamed. X saw them, his eyes widening. We sprinted in a blind panic, as fast as we could towards the stragglers in the black robes. Without warning, X raised his pistol and fired, aiming at the nearest of them.
The figure in the back of the pack fell forward without making a sound. He continued trying to crawl forward weakly for a few moments before he lost energy and lay still, no more than a bleeding black hump on the dark earth.
X gave a sudden cry of pain next to me as a tentacle came down like a guillotine blade. I heard it whip through the air with a high-pitched whine. A single breath later, I watched in horror as it sliced off his right arm. X looked down at the spurting stump for a long moment, his tanned face turning as pale as bones. He stumbled forward, then, with a hoarse cry, he fell.
Following X’s lead, I raised my gun and started shooting the cultists. They sprinted away in a random panic as bodies fell ahead of us. I jumped over the black lumps on the ground, hearing Mowdoroth shake the world as it gave chase. A long, snake-like tentacle reached down, picking up X’s spurting body and raising it towards Mowdoroth’s leech-like mouth. The massive abomination slowed, picking up the bodies of the dead cultists and crushing them. I heard the bones shatter as the wet gore exploded around Mowdoroth’s many sharp teeth.
I saw the woods again, living trees just a few hundred feet away. The trail of black earth ended abruptly, leading out of the boglands. Cultists sprinted blindly through the forest in every direction, scattering like cockroaches. I had nearly reached the border of the forest when I heard something whizzing past my head. I ducked, but the blur of a grayish tentacle coming down sent a jolt of fear like electricity sizzling through my body.
A moment later, a cold agony covered my left hand. In shock, I looked down, realizing that the blade-like appendage of Mowdoroth had neatly amputated all four of my fingers. If I hadn’t ducked, it would’ve probably gotten my head instead.
Stumbling and screaming, my mind in a blind panic, I staggered through the intersection of the boglands and the forest, falling forward. I knew I was dead. I closed my eyes, waiting. Yet nothing happened.
When I looked back, I saw something strange. Mowdoroth had stopped at the end of the boglands. It tried to push its body forward towards me, but it couldn’t enter the forest. It was as if an invisible barrier stood there.
I lay there for a long time. After a while, I heard Mowdoroth slink back into the fetid waters of the boglands. And then I was alone.
***
I wrapped my hand in bandages as much as I could, trying to stem the bleeding. I felt weak and sick from blood loss, so I lay there until the sun came up. The next day, I was able to slowly make my way out of the forest and back towards the nearest town.
Now I hear stories of people mysteriously going missing in the area. An entire family in a nearby farmhouse only a couple dozen miles away disappeared in the middle of the night without a trace, leaving only smeared trails of blood leading into the forest. No one saw anything, but these six victims were only the first in a long line of strange deaths. Oddly enough, all of the victims lived next to swamps.
And I have the feeling that I was the one responsible.

I had been hiking down the Appalachian Trail for over two weeks without issue on the day when the nightmare began. My friend, X, was by my side the entire time. It was, quite honestly, comforting to have someone who stood nearly six-and-a-half feet tall with me, especially during the long, dark nights when the howling of coyotes drew near. Black bears, too, were a constant presence in these dark mountains. As we got farther from towns and civilization, more ancient predators than human beings took over the land, stalking the night like creeping shadows.
For this trip, we both had bought as few supplies as possible. Included in our packs were MREs, two sleeping bags, some tarps and hammocks, some light clothing, and two pistols with a few boxes of ammo. We didn’t want to be too weighed down that we wouldn’t be able to move fast, after all. We would source water from the streams, waterfalls and lakes along the way and filter it using Lifestraws.
As the spring breeze blew past us, cooling the sweat on my face, I noticed the trail ahead of us weaving its way through thick swampland. The buzzing of flies and mosquitoes increased with every step. The green, fetid waters of the swamp bubbled constantly, as if it were whispering secrets to us.
“Ah, shit,” X said, glancing down the hill with his dark, serious eyes. His tanned skin was covered in a thin sheen of sweat as he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Another swamp. I hate swamps. You know there’s going to be a million mosquitoes and flies down there.” I pulled out the map, squinting down at it. I ran my finger down the trail, seeing the mountains and valleys we had already passed.
“The trail shouldn’t be going through any swamps,” I said. “They’re supposed to be marked. There’s no ponds or anything around here.” And yet there very clearly was. Either we were in a different spot than I thought we were, or the map was outdated. The trail also grew thinner as we descended. The sharp branches of the bushes stuck out like greedy hands, grabbing at our backpacks and clothes as we pressed forward.
“Well, whatever,” X said gruffly, plowing ahead. Twigs cracked under his massive bulk. The thin branches hanging across the path snapped as he plowed forward. I let him go first, since he was significantly bigger than myself. It was like following in the path of a bull.
“The faster we move, the faster we’ll be through it. We don’t want to camp anywhere around here when it gets dark,” X continued, looking grim. “We’ll be eaten alive by bugs by sunrise. We need to make it to the other side of these boglands before we can stop for the night.”
“Yeah, and I could use some more water,” I said, shaking my mostly empty canteen. “I wouldn’t drink this shit no matter what we did to it. It probably has brain-eating parasites crawling in it.” I checked my watch, realizing that dusk was only a half hour away. We would have to move fast indeed, especially as we didn’t know the size of the swamp. I was not enthusiastic about hiking in the dark with the many steep trails and sharp rocks that covered the surrounding land. A single misstep could lead to a very long, bone-shattering fall.
To my increasing dismay, I realized that the trail we were on no longer had the characteristic white markings of the Appalachian Trail. I kept checking the trees for the past fifteen minutes, and I definitely hadn’t seen a single one. I couldn’t remember the last time we had passed one, but I had a creeping suspicion it had been at least a couple hours ago.
“I think we have a problem, man,” I whispered. “I don’t know how it possibly could have happened, but I think we’re on the wrong trail.”
“There’s not supposed to be any other trails around here,” X argued. “Check the map.”
“Then where’s the white blazes? There’s not supposed to be any boglands around here, either, yet we’re walking through the middle of one,” I said. He shook his head.
“Listen, Ben, there’s not going to be markers on the entire Appalachian Trail,” he said. “Just trust me. We’re on the right path. Sometimes forests change. Swamps take over spots where forests used to lay. Hell, the Sahara Desert has been expanding for thousands of years, just eating the forests and plains all around it. There used to be lions and savannah in Morocco, and now it’s all dead and dry.”
I felt doubtful, but I continued forwards, following closely behind X. Neither one of us had ever done the full Appalachian Trail, after all. I hoped he was right. I was not enthusiastic about backtracking two or three hours if he wasn’t.
I thought back closely on our travels during the last few hours, wondering where we could have gone wrong. The trail had been rather overgrown and rocky on the peak of the last mountain. There had been a beautiful view spanning hundreds of miles, looking far off into state forests and winding roads. I remembered seeing the white marker near the top, but after we had started descending, it disappeared. That must have been where we went wrong, if we did, indeed, go off-course. But I couldn’t be sure, and I didn’t tell X about my suspicions.
We finished descending a steep, rocky trail into a valley where the boglands really started. The trees ended in a massive semi-circle around the open swamp. Thick peat covered the entire surface of it like rotted, grayish-brown skin. I saw water snakes quietly disappearing into the stagnant water, leaving behind slowly expanding ripples.
“This is pretty cool,” I said, stopping for a moment at the bottom of the trail to admire the boglands. Our trail continued directly through the center of it, no more than a raised patch of black earth surrounded by green swampy water. I could hear the many insects chirping and flying before we even took a step forward. Though the spring air felt warm and I was covered in sweat, I still reached into my bag, taking out a windbreaker that would cover up my arms and neck to help with the bugs. X did the same.
“Let’s move fast,” he said, giving me a knowing look. He was a much faster hiker than myself. He seemed like a machine sometimes, tireless and single-minded. I had seen him hike over twenty miles in a single day without looking too bent out of shape. I gave him a faint half-smile, picking up my pace.
“You know what they used to say about the boglands?” I asked X. He shook his head.
“I don’t read books,” he said. “If I have time to sit down and read, then it means I have time to go out and do something actually fun. But I’m sure you know all about it.” I gave a short bark of laughter at his off-handed insult. It sounded far too loud echoing back to us through the creepy swamp. The last rays of sunlight were disappearing behind the mountains now. Soon, we would be plunged into darkness.
“Well, in ancient times, people thought the boglands a place where the walls of reality were thin, where the gods would come through. They used to bring their victims out to swamps during rituals, then they would slice their throats or strangle them and dump their bodies into the bogs as an offering to the gods. They also said that strange, shape-shifting creatures would appear, sometimes to deceive travelers, other times to help them,” I said. “But as for human sacrifices, the bogs preserve bodies like nothing else, except maybe tar pits. Archaeologists keep finding victims with slashed throats or shattered skulls buried underneath the peat.”
X was silent for a long moment as we continued walking along the raised patch of earth that formed the trail. We got farther and farther from the forests, until the swamp seemed like a fetid ocean, spanning out to the horizon in every direction.
“Do you think they used to do that kind of stuff around here?” X asked.
“Used to?” I exclaimed, laughing. “I’m sure some psychopaths still do. This is a good place to dump a body, after all. Who the hell wants to trek through the muck and the snakes and mosquitoes out here looking for corpses?”
“The FBI and the cops will do it,” he said, “if they think there’s something to find.” I was about to respond when an ear-splitting shriek echoed out all around us. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from at first. X’s tan skin seemed to go pale as he spun, glancing in every direction.
“What the fuck is that?!” he screamed over the deafening wailing. I didn’t believe in cryptids, but my anxious mind immediately offered up an image of a banshee, a woman with chalk-white skin and black eyes whose shrieking jaw unhinged like a snake’s.
“I’m turning around!” I yelled, pointing back for emphasis. “Dude, fuck this! We need to get out of this swamp!” But X was no longer listening. He was looking past me, his mouth open and his eyes wild. He started backpedaling and nearly fell into the swamp. Windmilling his arms crazily, he turned and sprinted away without a word.
I was afraid to look back. The screaming was getting louder by the second, shaking the air all around me in deafening, crashing waves of sound. I felt like my head would explode if it got any worse. Instinctively, I took off after X, but I glanced back for a single moment before I did. Something loomed there from a nightmare, standing as tall as the trees. It moved through the swamp like a snake, its body slithering through the stagnant green waters towards us. When it met my eyes, the screaming stopped. The abrupt silence seemed deafening. I could hear the fervent pounding of my heart in my ears.
The creature’s skin looked honeycombed and rough, almost like a wasp’s nest. The thousands of tiny holes covering its body constantly opened and closed like hungry mouths. Its arms were long tentacles ending in sharp points of bone in the shape of scythes. The tentacles undulated like serpents. Its legs, too, were no more than four tentacles that alternatively slithered and stepped forward.
Its flesh was the color of peat, a sickly grayish-brown, and the smell that emanated from it was rancid and stagnant, the essence of all boglands and swamps. I nearly gagged as I ran. The putrefying stench seemed to follow me like a shadow.
Ahead of me, X was fumbling in his backpack as he ran, trying to grab his pistol. I knew he had a Glock 21 in that bag, and I had my Sig Sauer in mine. I cursed myself for not keeping it holstered on my body, but I had never had to use it before and hadn’t seriously thought I would need it for this trip. He glanced back at me, his eyes widening in horror.
“It’s right behind you!” he yelled. “Get down!” He dropped his backpack, revealing the sleek, black pistol clenched tightly in his hand. I barely had time to comprehend his words when an immense pressure and numbness radiated through my back. My head snapped backwards as a meaty thud resonated all around me. I went flying forward, feeling as if I had been struck by a car. As I flew through the air, the pain in my back exploded in burning pulses. I felt the deep slice open up from the sharp blade of bone that had slashed me like a knife. I felt trickles of blood pour from the open wound, making my stained shirt cling to my body.
I landed hard on the raised black earth of the trail, a bone-jarring impact that knocked the air out of me. At that same moment, X opened fire, pressing the trigger over and over, emptying the magazine as fast as he could. Something splashed over me, going in my eyes and mouth and nose. I crawled forward, moaning, my head spinning. I wiped my forehead, seeing spatters of green blood squirming with dark, maggot-like creatures covering my arms and face. It clung to my fingers, thick and rancid. I felt stinging sensations as the tiny worms bit me over and over. My ears rang with a high-pitched whine from the gunshots.
X was running towards me now. I continued to crawl towards him, shell-shocked and whimpering, trying to wipe the eldritch blood off my skin. With a muscular arm, he reached down and pulled me up.
“Where’d it go?” I mumbled, stumbling forward on unsteady feet. X put an arm around my shoulders and helped support me.
“It slunk back into the swamp,” he said. “Jesus, you’re bleeding really bad, buddy. We’re going to need to take care of that as soon as we get away from this hellhole.” I felt the deep slices from the creature’s blade-like hands across my back. The fabric of my shirt clung tightly to the skin as fresh blood soaked it.
“This isn’t the trail, X,” I gasped. “We went the wrong way. We need to go back.” He nodded grimly.
“We’re heading back right now. I know it’s the wrong trail now, it definitely is, but it’s dark. The trails back up the mountains are steep and dangerous, and we’ve already been hiking all day. How much longer can we really go?” he asked. In reality, I had a feeling X could go for quite a bit longer. I was the weak link in the chain, and we both knew it.
X took out a small, LED flashlight from his backpack, shining it ahead of us on the dark path. Across the center of the black earth, there was an obstruction, something that hadn’t been there when we passed this way originally.
“Shit! Is that a person?” X said, slowing down. He focused the light on it. As my eyes adjusted, I gave a gasp of horror as I saw a rough sacrificial table looming there, waiting with a ready victim.
Laying on the bare wooden planks in the center of the trail was an elderly man wearing the garb of a hunter. He was gagged, a bloody rag shoved deep into his mouth. I felt a sense of revulsion and terror as I realized his hands and feet were nailed to the planks, as if he were being crucified laying down. His eyes rolled wildly, white and insane, like a horse with a broken leg. When he saw us approaching, he tried to say something through the gag, pulling hard against the nails that bit so viciously into his flesh. Fresh rivers of blood spurted from his wounds.
I had my pistol in my hands. X had taken a fresh magazine out by now, throwing the empty one back in his backpack. Trembling, he went first, his shaking hand moving the flashlight around wildly. Its bright rays bounced off the dead, half-rotted trees that grew out of the boglands, the clouds of mosquitoes and moths that circled us constantly.
“Oh my God... he's like the victim of a serial killer or something,” he whispered, running a trembling hand over his face. “It looks like someone has set that poor guy up to have his heart cut out, like some sort of Aztec ritual.” He glanced worriedly over at me. We had both stopped cold in our tracks, looking around for any sign of danger, but we only saw the old man writhing on his rough table of torture.
“We have to keep going forward,” I whispered. “That thing is behind us. I don’t think it’s dead. I’m not sure it can even die.”
“But what’s ahead of us?” he asked grimly. “That’s the real question, isn’t it?” Far off down the trail, I saw small pinpoints of flickering light. They drew closer. We raised our pistols, waiting for the new arrivals to show themselves.
Dozens of people dressed in black, silky robes holding lamps slowly ambled their way towards us. They had their heads bowed, like monks on a holy pilgrimage. They drew close to the sacrifice. The one in the lead held a long, curving dagger whose blade looked like it was made of some kind of red volcanic rock. Its strange silver handle glittered in his pale, thin hand. At the end, I saw it was sculpted into the shape of a human heart.
“Stop right there!” X screamed, stepping forward. “Don’t come any closer! We are armed, I’m warning you.” The people in the black robes didn’t appear to hear or care in the slightest. They continued slowly following their leader with the strange dagger, almost floating forward in a nonchalant manner. Their leader began chanting in some strange, ancient language. It reminded me of Tibetan or Sanskrit in a way, like the chanting of some Vajrayana monk high up in the Himalayas. But it had a sinister, hissing quality to the words. Something ancient and powerful resonated in every syllable.
I raised the pistol, firing blankly into the dark, cloudless sky above. The smell of gunsmoke and fetid rot hung thick in the air. The leader of the group looked at me with his large, glassy eyes. His face looked sunken and pale, almost like a starving child. He had shaved all of the hair on his head, even his eyebrows. His lips were extremely thin and bloodless in his chalk-white face.
For a long moment, we stood staring at each other, my pistol aimed at his chest. X also had his pistol raised, aimed at one of those standing behind him. But the robed man didn’t speak. He gave me a faint grin.
“Let the old man go,” I commanded, my voice sounding hoarse and weak. The swamp quickly swallowed up my words, until only the buzzing of mosquitoes remained.
“I am sorry, my son, but I cannot do that,” the leader said in a voice as cold as endless space. “If we do not feed Mowdoroth, it will never sleep. The swamps will continue to expand, eating more and more of the surrounding forests and towns, and Mowdoroth, driven insane by hunger, will take far more victims in the process.
“This job has been passed down to us from generation to generation, from big hand to small, for over four centuries. Only twice has Mowdoroth not been fed on the New Moon, and each time, entire settlements full of people were wiped off the face of the Earth as if they had never existed. On one, they just had time to carve the word ‘CROATAN’ before they were taken.
“Mowdoroth looks for the place where the nightmares grow. It breaks open the chest and finds the place where the silent screams start, deep down at the base of the heart. All of the nightmares are planted there, like tiny seeds scattered during childhood. Those that fell on good soil in that abyss produced a great crop, yielding a hundredfold, sixtyfold, or thirtyfold. If you do not allow us to complete our holy mission, then you do it: cut open the man's chest and remove his beating heart. As it beats, squeeze it as hard as you can, and let all the blood drain onto the top of your head. Hold the heart above your head and close your eyes until the god appears and takes it.” The cult leader finished, looking at us with sparkling eyes, as if he had said something profound.
“This shit is just insane drivel,” X whispered in a voice as low as possible. “I say we open fire and save the old man now. Fuck these cultists.” I nodded grimly in agreement.
“You need to all turn around and leave immediately,” X yelled, stepping forward. “I will give you three seconds to turn around and get the hell out of my sight. Three…” At first, the cultists stood as still as statues, simply staring. Finally, the leader sighed and turned away. He shook his head, reminding me of a disappointed parent.
“I tried to warn you,” he said in his thin, quavering voice. “The time has come to give the offering. You must cut out this man’s heart and raise it to Mowdoroth, so he can get the seeds of nightmares freshly sown. The choice is yours now, as you have demanded this power with violence. You can leave this man here to be eaten by Mowdoroth, or free him and, in exchange, guarantee the deaths of hundreds of other people.”
With those last words, the black-robed figures continued down the curve of the trail. Within seconds, they had disappeared behind dead, half-rotted trees that still dotted the edges of the boglands. X and I ran forward toward the struggling old man. X reached into his pocket and pulled out a folding knife. He cut off the old man’s gag, pulling the spit-soaked chunk of filthy cloth out of his mouth. The old man spat and licked his dry lips.
“Get me out of here, please,” he whispered, his eyes rolling wildly. “Those cult members are all batshit insane. And there’s something not right in these swamps. I caught glimpses of something while I was waiting. There’s something in the water…”
“What’s your name, bud?” X said calmingly, looking at the old man’s hands and feet to try to decide how to best get the nails out without causing more damage.
“Winchester,” he said in a coarse voice. It sounded like he hadn’t had a drink of water in days. While X looked at his hands with the LED flashlight, I reached into my pack for the small canteen of filtered water I still had. I started pouring it into Winchester’s mouth. He gulped greedily, his throat working hard to drink down the rest of it.
“I got it!” X said, taking a flat stone he had found on the ground. “I’m going to try to pound these nails out from the bottom.”
“Oh, please, no,” Winchester said, his wrinkled face turning pale. X shook his head.
“We need to get you out of here,” he said. “It’s going to hurt, bud. But we don’t have any tools here. The nails are large, almost like railroad spikes, and once we get the top part, the bottom should slide out easily since it’s a lot narrower.” As he grabbed the rock to begin his work, a bone-chilling wailing started up again from the swamps. It was the scream of Mowdoroth, that abomination with the skin of a wasp’s nest.
“Cover us!” X yelled panickedly as he continued his grisly work. Winchester screamed in pain when X first struck the nail on his right hand. It shot up a fraction of an inch, fresh blood pooling all around it and dripping through the bare planks.
I turned, but the banshee wail seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. The swamp bubbled faster and faster all around us, as if thousands of corpses were coming back to life. I heard Winchester scream again, then the dull thud of another nail hitting the earth.
A face peeked out of the swamp, only twenty feet away. Its eyes were green, the color of a putrefying wound. Its lipless mouth opened wide, showing a spongy black mass of skin with concentric circles of tiny, razor-sharp teeth. It reminded me of the mouth of a lamprey.
I opened fire, shooting wildly at the face, aiming at the body hidden under the dark surface of the swamp. Luminescent drops of green blood exploded from a bullet hole in its upper right shoulder, floating across the surface of the water like radioactive waste.
Its screaming cut off instantly. All I could hear was the pounding of the rock behind me and Winchester’s pained, horrified pleas for mercy.
“Please, you’re hurting me!” he pleaded.
“Shut the fuck up, Winchester!” I whispered. “It’s here with us now.” With considerable effort, he did, only moaning and violently jerking his head now as the waves of pain ripped through him.
“I got it!” X said suddenly. A feeling of elation filled my heart.
“Let’s go then!” I yelled, turning to help the old man up. I heard something massive rise up behind us. It mixed with the sound of dripping water and babbling waves that arose from the disturbance.
Winchester was weak, stumbling up to his feet and nearly falling over immediately. Staggering, he took off down the trail with no shoes, but he immediately gave a curse of pain and tripped. X and I started running, and at that moment, I realized the flaw in our plan. We wouldn’t be able to get Winchester out of the swamp without carrying him, due to the extensive injuries to his feet. And I knew we didn’t have time.
Mowdoroth’s body stood as tall as the trees as it looked down at the three of us with its strange, infected eyes. Its tentacles undulated faster and faster, seeming to whip around its body until they flew out towards us.
“Run!” I screamed. X and I sprinted behind a cluster of dead trees hugging the path. The blade-like hand of Mowdoroth chopped them in a half, raining wood splinters down on our heads.
Winchester continued trying to crawl forward. Mowdoroth slithered behind him. Winchester looked up as a tentacle started coming down in his direction. He gave a short, panicked scream as the blade smashed through his back legs, chopping both of them off at the knees. The ground shook with the force of it. The stumps began spurting seemingly endless amounts of blood. Winchester pleaded and made incomprehensible gurgling sounds as he bled out. Mowdoroth ended Winchester’s cries when it wrapped its tentacle around Winchester’s torso. It slithered up into Winchester’s open mouth.
X and I shot as fast as we could while running forward in the dark, trying to hold a flashlight and a pistol. Most of my shots missed Mowdoroth, but with a sense of satisfaction and pride, I saw a few burst through its enormous body. Streams of radioactive green blood ran down its torso now. As its serpentine legs pumped furiously, it gained speed, coming behind us like a runaway train. I could feel the ground shaking with every thud of its tentacled feet.
A few hundred feet ahead of us, I caught a glimpse of the cultists. They were hurrying away from the area, not running but moving much faster than they had come in. Nearly out of breath already and exhausted from hiking all day, I pointed forward.
“Look!” I screamed. X saw them, his eyes widening. We sprinted in a blind panic, as fast as we could towards the stragglers in the black robes. Without warning, X raised his pistol and fired, aiming at the nearest of them.
The figure in the back of the pack fell forward without making a sound. He continued trying to crawl forward weakly for a few moments before he lost energy and lay still, no more than a bleeding black hump on the dark earth.
X gave a sudden cry of pain next to me as a tentacle came down like a guillotine blade. I heard it whip through the air with a high-pitched whine. A single breath later, I watched in horror as it sliced off his right arm. X looked down at the spurting stump for a long moment, his tanned face turning as pale as bones. He stumbled forward, then, with a hoarse cry, he fell.
Following X’s lead, I raised my gun and started shooting the cultists. They sprinted away in a random panic as bodies fell ahead of us. I jumped over the black lumps on the ground, hearing Mowdoroth shake the world as it gave chase. A long, snake-like tentacle reached down, picking up X’s spurting body and raising it towards Mowdoroth’s leech-like mouth. The massive abomination slowed, picking up the bodies of the dead cultists and crushing them. I heard the bones shatter as the wet gore exploded around Mowdoroth’s many sharp teeth.
I saw the woods again, living trees just a few hundred feet away. The trail of black earth ended abruptly, leading out of the boglands. Cultists sprinted blindly through the forest in every direction, scattering like cockroaches. I had nearly reached the border of the forest when I heard something whizzing past my head. I ducked, but the blur of a grayish tentacle coming down sent a jolt of fear like electricity sizzling through my body.
A moment later, a cold agony covered my left hand. In shock, I looked down, realizing that the blade-like appendage of Mowdoroth had neatly amputated all four of my fingers. If I hadn’t ducked, it would’ve probably gotten my head instead.
Stumbling and screaming, my mind in a blind panic, I staggered through the intersection of the boglands and the forest, falling forward. I knew I was dead. I closed my eyes, waiting. Yet nothing happened.
When I looked back, I saw something strange. Mowdoroth had stopped at the end of the boglands. It tried to push its body forward towards me, but it couldn’t enter the forest. It was as if an invisible barrier stood there.
I lay there for a long time. After a while, I heard Mowdoroth slink back into the fetid waters of the boglands. And then I was alone.
***
I wrapped my hand in bandages as much as I could, trying to stem the bleeding. I felt weak and sick from blood loss, so I lay there until the sun came up. The next day, I was able to slowly make my way out of the forest and back towards the nearest town.
Now I hear stories of people mysteriously going missing in the area. An entire family in a nearby farmhouse only a couple dozen miles away disappeared in the middle of the night without a trace, leaving only smeared trails of blood leading into the forest. No one saw anything, but these six victims were only the first in a long line of strange deaths. Oddly enough, all of the victims lived next to swamps.
And I have the feeling that I was the one responsible.

I had been hiking down the Appalachian Trail for over two weeks without issue on the day when the nightmare began. My friend, X, was by my side the entire time. It was, quite honestly, comforting to have someone who stood nearly six-and-a-half feet tall with me, especially during the long, dark nights when the howling of coyotes drew near. Black bears, too, were a constant presence in these dark mountains. As we got farther from towns and civilization, more ancient predators than human beings took over the land, stalking the night like creeping shadows.
For this trip, we both had bought as few supplies as possible. Included in our packs were MREs, two sleeping bags, some tarps and hammocks, some light clothing, and two pistols with a few boxes of ammo. We didn’t want to be too weighed down that we wouldn’t be able to move fast, after all. We would source water from the streams, waterfalls and lakes along the way and filter it using Lifestraws.
As the spring breeze blew past us, cooling the sweat on my face, I noticed the trail ahead of us weaving its way through thick swampland. The buzzing of flies and mosquitoes increased with every step. The green, fetid waters of the swamp bubbled constantly, as if it were whispering secrets to us.
“Ah, shit,” X said, glancing down the hill with his dark, serious eyes. His tanned skin was covered in a thin sheen of sweat as he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Another swamp. I hate swamps. You know there’s going to be a million mosquitoes and flies down there.” I pulled out the map, squinting down at it. I ran my finger down the trail, seeing the mountains and valleys we had already passed.
“The trail shouldn’t be going through any swamps,” I said. “They’re supposed to be marked. There’s no ponds or anything around here.” And yet there very clearly was. Either we were in a different spot than I thought we were, or the map was outdated. The trail also grew thinner as we descended. The sharp branches of the bushes stuck out like greedy hands, grabbing at our backpacks and clothes as we pressed forward.
“Well, whatever,” X said gruffly, plowing ahead. Twigs cracked under his massive bulk. The thin branches hanging across the path snapped as he plowed forward. I let him go first, since he was significantly bigger than myself. It was like following in the path of a bull.
“The faster we move, the faster we’ll be through it. We don’t want to camp anywhere around here when it gets dark,” X continued, looking grim. “We’ll be eaten alive by bugs by sunrise. We need to make it to the other side of these boglands before we can stop for the night.”
“Yeah, and I could use some more water,” I said, shaking my mostly empty canteen. “I wouldn’t drink this shit no matter what we did to it. It probably has brain-eating parasites crawling in it.” I checked my watch, realizing that dusk was only a half hour away. We would have to move fast indeed, especially as we didn’t know the size of the swamp. I was not enthusiastic about hiking in the dark with the many steep trails and sharp rocks that covered the surrounding land. A single misstep could lead to a very long, bone-shattering fall.
To my increasing dismay, I realized that the trail we were on no longer had the characteristic white markings of the Appalachian Trail. I kept checking the trees for the past fifteen minutes, and I definitely hadn’t seen a single one. I couldn’t remember the last time we had passed one, but I had a creeping suspicion it had been at least a couple hours ago.
“I think we have a problem, man,” I whispered. “I don’t know how it possibly could have happened, but I think we’re on the wrong trail.”
“There’s not supposed to be any other trails around here,” X argued. “Check the map.”
“Then where’s the white blazes? There’s not supposed to be any boglands around here, either, yet we’re walking through the middle of one,” I said. He shook his head.
“Listen, Ben, there’s not going to be markers on the entire Appalachian Trail,” he said. “Just trust me. We’re on the right path. Sometimes forests change. Swamps take over spots where forests used to lay. Hell, the Sahara Desert has been expanding for thousands of years, just eating the forests and plains all around it. There used to be lions and savannah in Morocco, and now it’s all dead and dry.”
I felt doubtful, but I continued forwards, following closely behind X. Neither one of us had ever done the full Appalachian Trail, after all. I hoped he was right. I was not enthusiastic about backtracking two or three hours if he wasn’t.
I thought back closely on our travels during the last few hours, wondering where we could have gone wrong. The trail had been rather overgrown and rocky on the peak of the last mountain. There had been a beautiful view spanning hundreds of miles, looking far off into state forests and winding roads. I remembered seeing the white marker near the top, but after we had started descending, it disappeared. That must have been where we went wrong, if we did, indeed, go off-course. But I couldn’t be sure, and I didn’t tell X about my suspicions.
We finished descending a steep, rocky trail into a valley where the boglands really started. The trees ended in a massive semi-circle around the open swamp. Thick peat covered the entire surface of it like rotted, grayish-brown skin. I saw water snakes quietly disappearing into the stagnant water, leaving behind slowly expanding ripples.
“This is pretty cool,” I said, stopping for a moment at the bottom of the trail to admire the boglands. Our trail continued directly through the center of it, no more than a raised patch of black earth surrounded by green swampy water. I could hear the many insects chirping and flying before we even took a step forward. Though the spring air felt warm and I was covered in sweat, I still reached into my bag, taking out a windbreaker that would cover up my arms and neck to help with the bugs. X did the same.
“Let’s move fast,” he said, giving me a knowing look. He was a much faster hiker than myself. He seemed like a machine sometimes, tireless and single-minded. I had seen him hike over twenty miles in a single day without looking too bent out of shape. I gave him a faint half-smile, picking up my pace.
“You know what they used to say about the boglands?” I asked X. He shook his head.
“I don’t read books,” he said. “If I have time to sit down and read, then it means I have time to go out and do something actually fun. But I’m sure you know all about it.” I gave a short bark of laughter at his off-handed insult. It sounded far too loud echoing back to us through the creepy swamp. The last rays of sunlight were disappearing behind the mountains now. Soon, we would be plunged into darkness.
“Well, in ancient times, people thought the boglands a place where the walls of reality were thin, where the gods would come through. They used to bring their victims out to swamps during rituals, then they would slice their throats or strangle them and dump their bodies into the bogs as an offering to the gods. They also said that strange, shape-shifting creatures would appear, sometimes to deceive travelers, other times to help them,” I said. “But as for human sacrifices, the bogs preserve bodies like nothing else, except maybe tar pits. Archaeologists keep finding victims with slashed throats or shattered skulls buried underneath the peat.”
X was silent for a long moment as we continued walking along the raised patch of earth that formed the trail. We got farther and farther from the forests, until the swamp seemed like a fetid ocean, spanning out to the horizon in every direction.
“Do you think they used to do that kind of stuff around here?” X asked.
“Used to?” I exclaimed, laughing. “I’m sure some psychopaths still do. This is a good place to dump a body, after all. Who the hell wants to trek through the muck and the snakes and mosquitoes out here looking for corpses?”
“The FBI and the cops will do it,” he said, “if they think there’s something to find.” I was about to respond when an ear-splitting shriek echoed out all around us. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from at first. X’s tan skin seemed to go pale as he spun, glancing in every direction.
“What the fuck is that?!” he screamed over the deafening wailing. I didn’t believe in cryptids, but my anxious mind immediately offered up an image of a banshee, a woman with chalk-white skin and black eyes whose shrieking jaw unhinged like a snake’s.
“I’m turning around!” I yelled, pointing back for emphasis. “Dude, fuck this! We need to get out of this swamp!” But X was no longer listening. He was looking past me, his mouth open and his eyes wild. He started backpedaling and nearly fell into the swamp. Windmilling his arms crazily, he turned and sprinted away without a word.
I was afraid to look back. The screaming was getting louder by the second, shaking the air all around me in deafening, crashing waves of sound. I felt like my head would explode if it got any worse. Instinctively, I took off after X, but I glanced back for a single moment before I did. Something loomed there from a nightmare, standing as tall as the trees. It moved through the swamp like a snake, its body slithering through the stagnant green waters towards us. When it met my eyes, the screaming stopped. The abrupt silence seemed deafening. I could hear the fervent pounding of my heart in my ears.
The creature’s skin looked honeycombed and rough, almost like a wasp’s nest. The thousands of tiny holes covering its body constantly opened and closed like hungry mouths. Its arms were long tentacles ending in sharp points of bone in the shape of scythes. The tentacles undulated like serpents. Its legs, too, were no more than four tentacles that alternatively slithered and stepped forward.
Its flesh was the color of peat, a sickly grayish-brown, and the smell that emanated from it was rancid and stagnant, the essence of all boglands and swamps. I nearly gagged as I ran. The putrefying stench seemed to follow me like a shadow.
Ahead of me, X was fumbling in his backpack as he ran, trying to grab his pistol. I knew he had a Glock 21 in that bag, and I had my Sig Sauer in mine. I cursed myself for not keeping it holstered on my body, but I had never had to use it before and hadn’t seriously thought I would need it for this trip. He glanced back at me, his eyes widening in horror.
“It’s right behind you!” he yelled. “Get down!” He dropped his backpack, revealing the sleek, black pistol clenched tightly in his hand. I barely had time to comprehend his words when an immense pressure and numbness radiated through my back. My head snapped backwards as a meaty thud resonated all around me. I went flying forward, feeling as if I had been struck by a car. As I flew through the air, the pain in my back exploded in burning pulses. I felt the deep slice open up from the sharp blade of bone that had slashed me like a knife. I felt trickles of blood pour from the open wound, making my stained shirt cling to my body.
I landed hard on the raised black earth of the trail, a bone-jarring impact that knocked the air out of me. At that same moment, X opened fire, pressing the trigger over and over, emptying the magazine as fast as he could. Something splashed over me, going in my eyes and mouth and nose. I crawled forward, moaning, my head spinning. I wiped my forehead, seeing spatters of green blood squirming with dark, maggot-like creatures covering my arms and face. It clung to my fingers, thick and rancid. I felt stinging sensations as the tiny worms bit me over and over. My ears rang with a high-pitched whine from the gunshots.
X was running towards me now. I continued to crawl towards him, shell-shocked and whimpering, trying to wipe the eldritch blood off my skin. With a muscular arm, he reached down and pulled me up.
“Where’d it go?” I mumbled, stumbling forward on unsteady feet. X put an arm around my shoulders and helped support me.
“It slunk back into the swamp,” he said. “Jesus, you’re bleeding really bad, buddy. We’re going to need to take care of that as soon as we get away from this hellhole.” I felt the deep slices from the creature’s blade-like hands across my back. The fabric of my shirt clung tightly to the skin as fresh blood soaked it.
“This isn’t the trail, X,” I gasped. “We went the wrong way. We need to go back.” He nodded grimly.
“We’re heading back right now. I know it’s the wrong trail now, it definitely is, but it’s dark. The trails back up the mountains are steep and dangerous, and we’ve already been hiking all day. How much longer can we really go?” he asked. In reality, I had a feeling X could go for quite a bit longer. I was the weak link in the chain, and we both knew it.
X took out a small, LED flashlight from his backpack, shining it ahead of us on the dark path. Across the center of the black earth, there was an obstruction, something that hadn’t been there when we passed this way originally.
“Shit! Is that a person?” X said, slowing down. He focused the light on it. As my eyes adjusted, I gave a gasp of horror as I saw a rough sacrificial table looming there, waiting with a ready victim.
Laying on the bare wooden planks in the center of the trail was an elderly man wearing the garb of a hunter. He was gagged, a bloody rag shoved deep into his mouth. I felt a sense of revulsion and terror as I realized his hands and feet were nailed to the planks, as if he were being crucified laying down. His eyes rolled wildly, white and insane, like a horse with a broken leg. When he saw us approaching, he tried to say something through the gag, pulling hard against the nails that bit so viciously into his flesh. Fresh rivers of blood spurted from his wounds.
I had my pistol in my hands. X had taken a fresh magazine out by now, throwing the empty one back in his backpack. Trembling, he went first, his shaking hand moving the flashlight around wildly. Its bright rays bounced off the dead, half-rotted trees that grew out of the boglands, the clouds of mosquitoes and moths that circled us constantly.
“Oh my God... he's like the victim of a serial killer or something,” he whispered, running a trembling hand over his face. “It looks like someone has set that poor guy up to have his heart cut out, like some sort of Aztec ritual.” He glanced worriedly over at me. We had both stopped cold in our tracks, looking around for any sign of danger, but we only saw the old man writhing on his rough table of torture.
“We have to keep going forward,” I whispered. “That thing is behind us. I don’t think it’s dead. I’m not sure it can even die.”
“But what’s ahead of us?” he asked grimly. “That’s the real question, isn’t it?” Far off down the trail, I saw small pinpoints of flickering light. They drew closer. We raised our pistols, waiting for the new arrivals to show themselves.
Dozens of people dressed in black, silky robes holding lamps slowly ambled their way towards us. They had their heads bowed, like monks on a holy pilgrimage. They drew close to the sacrifice. The one in the lead held a long, curving dagger whose blade looked like it was made of some kind of red volcanic rock. Its strange silver handle glittered in his pale, thin hand. At the end, I saw it was sculpted into the shape of a human heart.
“Stop right there!” X screamed, stepping forward. “Don’t come any closer! We are armed, I’m warning you.” The people in the black robes didn’t appear to hear or care in the slightest. They continued slowly following their leader with the strange dagger, almost floating forward in a nonchalant manner. Their leader began chanting in some strange, ancient language. It reminded me of Tibetan or Sanskrit in a way, like the chanting of some Vajrayana monk high up in the Himalayas. But it had a sinister, hissing quality to the words. Something ancient and powerful resonated in every syllable.
I raised the pistol, firing blankly into the dark, cloudless sky above. The smell of gunsmoke and fetid rot hung thick in the air. The leader of the group looked at me with his large, glassy eyes. His face looked sunken and pale, almost like a starving child. He had shaved all of the hair on his head, even his eyebrows. His lips were extremely thin and bloodless in his chalk-white face.
For a long moment, we stood staring at each other, my pistol aimed at his chest. X also had his pistol raised, aimed at one of those standing behind him. But the robed man didn’t speak. He gave me a faint grin.
“Let the old man go,” I commanded, my voice sounding hoarse and weak. The swamp quickly swallowed up my words, until only the buzzing of mosquitoes remained.
“I am sorry, my son, but I cannot do that,” the leader said in a voice as cold as endless space. “If we do not feed Mowdoroth, it will never sleep. The swamps will continue to expand, eating more and more of the surrounding forests and towns, and Mowdoroth, driven insane by hunger, will take far more victims in the process.
“This job has been passed down to us from generation to generation, from big hand to small, for over four centuries. Only twice has Mowdoroth not been fed on the New Moon, and each time, entire settlements full of people were wiped off the face of the Earth as if they had never existed. On one, they just had time to carve the word ‘CROATAN’ before they were taken.
“Mowdoroth looks for the place where the nightmares grow. It breaks open the chest and finds the place where the silent screams start, deep down at the base of the heart. All of the nightmares are planted there, like tiny seeds scattered during childhood. Those that fell on good soil in that abyss produced a great crop, yielding a hundredfold, sixtyfold, or thirtyfold. If you do not allow us to complete our holy mission, then you do it: cut open the man's chest and remove his beating heart. As it beats, squeeze it as hard as you can, and let all the blood drain onto the top of your head. Hold the heart above your head and close your eyes until the god appears and takes it.” The cult leader finished, looking at us with sparkling eyes, as if he had said something profound.
“This shit is just insane drivel,” X whispered in a voice as low as possible. “I say we open fire and save the old man now. Fuck these cultists.” I nodded grimly in agreement.
“You need to all turn around and leave immediately,” X yelled, stepping forward. “I will give you three seconds to turn around and get the hell out of my sight. Three…” At first, the cultists stood as still as statues, simply staring. Finally, the leader sighed and turned away. He shook his head, reminding me of a disappointed parent.
“I tried to warn you,” he said in his thin, quavering voice. “The time has come to give the offering. You must cut out this man’s heart and raise it to Mowdoroth, so he can get the seeds of nightmares freshly sown. The choice is yours now, as you have demanded this power with violence. You can leave this man here to be eaten by Mowdoroth, or free him and, in exchange, guarantee the deaths of hundreds of other people.”
With those last words, the black-robed figures continued down the curve of the trail. Within seconds, they had disappeared behind dead, half-rotted trees that still dotted the edges of the boglands. X and I ran forward toward the struggling old man. X reached into his pocket and pulled out a folding knife. He cut off the old man’s gag, pulling the spit-soaked chunk of filthy cloth out of his mouth. The old man spat and licked his dry lips.
“Get me out of here, please,” he whispered, his eyes rolling wildly. “Those cult members are all batshit insane. And there’s something not right in these swamps. I caught glimpses of something while I was waiting. There’s something in the water…”
“What’s your name, bud?” X said calmingly, looking at the old man’s hands and feet to try to decide how to best get the nails out without causing more damage.
“Winchester,” he said in a coarse voice. It sounded like he hadn’t had a drink of water in days. While X looked at his hands with the LED flashlight, I reached into my pack for the small canteen of filtered water I still had. I started pouring it into Winchester’s mouth. He gulped greedily, his throat working hard to drink down the rest of it.
“I got it!” X said, taking a flat stone he had found on the ground. “I’m going to try to pound these nails out from the bottom.”
“Oh, please, no,” Winchester said, his wrinkled face turning pale. X shook his head.
“We need to get you out of here,” he said. “It’s going to hurt, bud. But we don’t have any tools here. The nails are large, almost like railroad spikes, and once we get the top part, the bottom should slide out easily since it’s a lot narrower.” As he grabbed the rock to begin his work, a bone-chilling wailing started up again from the swamps. It was the scream of Mowdoroth, that abomination with the skin of a wasp’s nest.
“Cover us!” X yelled panickedly as he continued his grisly work. Winchester screamed in pain when X first struck the nail on his right hand. It shot up a fraction of an inch, fresh blood pooling all around it and dripping through the bare planks.
I turned, but the banshee wail seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. The swamp bubbled faster and faster all around us, as if thousands of corpses were coming back to life. I heard Winchester scream again, then the dull thud of another nail hitting the earth.
A face peeked out of the swamp, only twenty feet away. Its eyes were green, the color of a putrefying wound. Its lipless mouth opened wide, showing a spongy black mass of skin with concentric circles of tiny, razor-sharp teeth. It reminded me of the mouth of a lamprey.
I opened fire, shooting wildly at the face, aiming at the body hidden under the dark surface of the swamp. Luminescent drops of green blood exploded from a bullet hole in its upper right shoulder, floating across the surface of the water like radioactive waste.
Its screaming cut off instantly. All I could hear was the pounding of the rock behind me and Winchester’s pained, horrified pleas for mercy.
“Please, you’re hurting me!” he pleaded.
“Shut the fuck up, Winchester!” I whispered. “It’s here with us now.” With considerable effort, he did, only moaning and violently jerking his head now as the waves of pain ripped through him.
“I got it!” X said suddenly. A feeling of elation filled my heart.
“Let’s go then!” I yelled, turning to help the old man up. I heard something massive rise up behind us. It mixed with the sound of dripping water and babbling waves that arose from the disturbance.
Winchester was weak, stumbling up to his feet and nearly falling over immediately. Staggering, he took off down the trail with no shoes, but he immediately gave a curse of pain and tripped. X and I started running, and at that moment, I realized the flaw in our plan. We wouldn’t be able to get Winchester out of the swamp without carrying him, due to the extensive injuries to his feet. And I knew we didn’t have time.
Mowdoroth’s body stood as tall as the trees as it looked down at the three of us with its strange, infected eyes. Its tentacles undulated faster and faster, seeming to whip around its body until they flew out towards us.
“Run!” I screamed. X and I sprinted behind a cluster of dead trees hugging the path. The blade-like hand of Mowdoroth chopped them in a half, raining wood splinters down on our heads.
Winchester continued trying to crawl forward. Mowdoroth slithered behind him. Winchester looked up as a tentacle started coming down in his direction. He gave a short, panicked scream as the blade smashed through his back legs, chopping both of them off at the knees. The ground shook with the force of it. The stumps began spurting seemingly endless amounts of blood. Winchester pleaded and made incomprehensible gurgling sounds as he bled out. Mowdoroth ended Winchester’s cries when it wrapped its tentacle around Winchester’s torso. It slithered up into Winchester’s open mouth.
X and I shot as fast as we could while running forward in the dark, trying to hold a flashlight and a pistol. Most of my shots missed Mowdoroth, but with a sense of satisfaction and pride, I saw a few burst through its enormous body. Streams of radioactive green blood ran down its torso now. As its serpentine legs pumped furiously, it gained speed, coming behind us like a runaway train. I could feel the ground shaking with every thud of its tentacled feet.
A few hundred feet ahead of us, I caught a glimpse of the cultists. They were hurrying away from the area, not running but moving much faster than they had come in. Nearly out of breath already and exhausted from hiking all day, I pointed forward.
“Look!” I screamed. X saw them, his eyes widening. We sprinted in a blind panic, as fast as we could towards the stragglers in the black robes. Without warning, X raised his pistol and fired, aiming at the nearest of them.
The figure in the back of the pack fell forward without making a sound. He continued trying to crawl forward weakly for a few moments before he lost energy and lay still, no more than a bleeding black hump on the dark earth.
X gave a sudden cry of pain next to me as a tentacle came down like a guillotine blade. I heard it whip through the air with a high-pitched whine. A single breath later, I watched in horror as it sliced off his right arm. X looked down at the spurting stump for a long moment, his tanned face turning as pale as bones. He stumbled forward, then, with a hoarse cry, he fell.
Following X’s lead, I raised my gun and started shooting the cultists. They sprinted away in a random panic as bodies fell ahead of us. I jumped over the black lumps on the ground, hearing Mowdoroth shake the world as it gave chase. A long, snake-like tentacle reached down, picking up X’s spurting body and raising it towards Mowdoroth’s leech-like mouth. The massive abomination slowed, picking up the bodies of the dead cultists and crushing them. I heard the bones shatter as the wet gore exploded around Mowdoroth’s many sharp teeth.
I saw the woods again, living trees just a few hundred feet away. The trail of black earth ended abruptly, leading out of the boglands. Cultists sprinted blindly through the forest in every direction, scattering like cockroaches. I had nearly reached the border of the forest when I heard something whizzing past my head. I ducked, but the blur of a grayish tentacle coming down sent a jolt of fear like electricity sizzling through my body.
A moment later, a cold agony covered my left hand. In shock, I looked down, realizing that the blade-like appendage of Mowdoroth had neatly amputated all four of my fingers. If I hadn’t ducked, it would’ve probably gotten my head instead.
Stumbling and screaming, my mind in a blind panic, I staggered through the intersection of the boglands and the forest, falling forward. I knew I was dead. I closed my eyes, waiting. Yet nothing happened.
When I looked back, I saw something strange. Mowdoroth had stopped at the end of the boglands. It tried to push its body forward towards me, but it couldn’t enter the forest. It was as if an invisible barrier stood there.
I lay there for a long time. After a while, I heard Mowdoroth slink back into the fetid waters of the boglands. And then I was alone.
***
I wrapped my hand in bandages as much as I could, trying to stem the bleeding. I felt weak and sick from blood loss, so I lay there until the sun came up. The next day, I was able to slowly make my way out of the forest and back towards the nearest town.
Now I hear stories of people mysteriously going missing in the area. An entire family in a nearby farmhouse only a couple dozen miles away disappeared in the middle of the night without a trace, leaving only smeared trails of blood leading into the forest. No one saw anything, but these six victims were only the first in a long line of strange deaths. Oddly enough, all of the victims lived next to swamps.
And I have the feeling that I was the one responsible.

I had been hiking down the Appalachian Trail for over two weeks without issue on the day when the nightmare began. My friend, X, was by my side the entire time. It was, quite honestly, comforting to have someone who stood nearly six-and-a-half feet tall with me, especially during the long, dark nights when the howling of coyotes drew near. Black bears, too, were a constant presence in these dark mountains. As we got farther from towns and civilization, more ancient predators than human beings took over the land, stalking the night like creeping shadows.
For this trip, we both had bought as few supplies as possible. Included in our packs were MREs, two sleeping bags, some tarps and hammocks, some light clothing, and two pistols with a few boxes of ammo. We didn’t want to be too weighed down that we wouldn’t be able to move fast, after all. We would source water from the streams, waterfalls and lakes along the way and filter it using Lifestraws.
As the spring breeze blew past us, cooling the sweat on my face, I noticed the trail ahead of us weaving its way through thick swampland. The buzzing of flies and mosquitoes increased with every step. The green, fetid waters of the swamp bubbled constantly, as if it were whispering secrets to us.
“Ah, shit,” X said, glancing down the hill with his dark, serious eyes. His tanned skin was covered in a thin sheen of sweat as he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Another swamp. I hate swamps. You know there’s going to be a million mosquitoes and flies down there.” I pulled out the map, squinting down at it. I ran my finger down the trail, seeing the mountains and valleys we had already passed.
“The trail shouldn’t be going through any swamps,” I said. “They’re supposed to be marked. There’s no ponds or anything around here.” And yet there very clearly was. Either we were in a different spot than I thought we were, or the map was outdated. The trail also grew thinner as we descended. The sharp branches of the bushes stuck out like greedy hands, grabbing at our backpacks and clothes as we pressed forward.
“Well, whatever,” X said gruffly, plowing ahead. Twigs cracked under his massive bulk. The thin branches hanging across the path snapped as he plowed forward. I let him go first, since he was significantly bigger than myself. It was like following in the path of a bull.
“The faster we move, the faster we’ll be through it. We don’t want to camp anywhere around here when it gets dark,” X continued, looking grim. “We’ll be eaten alive by bugs by sunrise. We need to make it to the other side of these boglands before we can stop for the night.”
“Yeah, and I could use some more water,” I said, shaking my mostly empty canteen. “I wouldn’t drink this shit no matter what we did to it. It probably has brain-eating parasites crawling in it.” I checked my watch, realizing that dusk was only a half hour away. We would have to move fast indeed, especially as we didn’t know the size of the swamp. I was not enthusiastic about hiking in the dark with the many steep trails and sharp rocks that covered the surrounding land. A single misstep could lead to a very long, bone-shattering fall.
To my increasing dismay, I realized that the trail we were on no longer had the characteristic white markings of the Appalachian Trail. I kept checking the trees for the past fifteen minutes, and I definitely hadn’t seen a single one. I couldn’t remember the last time we had passed one, but I had a creeping suspicion it had been at least a couple hours ago.
“I think we have a problem, man,” I whispered. “I don’t know how it possibly could have happened, but I think we’re on the wrong trail.”
“There’s not supposed to be any other trails around here,” X argued. “Check the map.”
“Then where’s the white blazes? There’s not supposed to be any boglands around here, either, yet we’re walking through the middle of one,” I said. He shook his head.
“Listen, Ben, there’s not going to be markers on the entire Appalachian Trail,” he said. “Just trust me. We’re on the right path. Sometimes forests change. Swamps take over spots where forests used to lay. Hell, the Sahara Desert has been expanding for thousands of years, just eating the forests and plains all around it. There used to be lions and savannah in Morocco, and now it’s all dead and dry.”
I felt doubtful, but I continued forwards, following closely behind X. Neither one of us had ever done the full Appalachian Trail, after all. I hoped he was right. I was not enthusiastic about backtracking two or three hours if he wasn’t.
I thought back closely on our travels during the last few hours, wondering where we could have gone wrong. The trail had been rather overgrown and rocky on the peak of the last mountain. There had been a beautiful view spanning hundreds of miles, looking far off into state forests and winding roads. I remembered seeing the white marker near the top, but after we had started descending, it disappeared. That must have been where we went wrong, if we did, indeed, go off-course. But I couldn’t be sure, and I didn’t tell X about my suspicions.
We finished descending a steep, rocky trail into a valley where the boglands really started. The trees ended in a massive semi-circle around the open swamp. Thick peat covered the entire surface of it like rotted, grayish-brown skin. I saw water snakes quietly disappearing into the stagnant water, leaving behind slowly expanding ripples.
“This is pretty cool,” I said, stopping for a moment at the bottom of the trail to admire the boglands. Our trail continued directly through the center of it, no more than a raised patch of black earth surrounded by green swampy water. I could hear the many insects chirping and flying before we even took a step forward. Though the spring air felt warm and I was covered in sweat, I still reached into my bag, taking out a windbreaker that would cover up my arms and neck to help with the bugs. X did the same.
“Let’s move fast,” he said, giving me a knowing look. He was a much faster hiker than myself. He seemed like a machine sometimes, tireless and single-minded. I had seen him hike over twenty miles in a single day without looking too bent out of shape. I gave him a faint half-smile, picking up my pace.
“You know what they used to say about the boglands?” I asked X. He shook his head.
“I don’t read books,” he said. “If I have time to sit down and read, then it means I have time to go out and do something actually fun. But I’m sure you know all about it.” I gave a short bark of laughter at his off-handed insult. It sounded far too loud echoing back to us through the creepy swamp. The last rays of sunlight were disappearing behind the mountains now. Soon, we would be plunged into darkness.
“Well, in ancient times, people thought the boglands a place where the walls of reality were thin, where the gods would come through. They used to bring their victims out to swamps during rituals, then they would slice their throats or strangle them and dump their bodies into the bogs as an offering to the gods. They also said that strange, shape-shifting creatures would appear, sometimes to deceive travelers, other times to help them,” I said. “But as for human sacrifices, the bogs preserve bodies like nothing else, except maybe tar pits. Archaeologists keep finding victims with slashed throats or shattered skulls buried underneath the peat.”
X was silent for a long moment as we continued walking along the raised patch of earth that formed the trail. We got farther and farther from the forests, until the swamp seemed like a fetid ocean, spanning out to the horizon in every direction.
“Do you think they used to do that kind of stuff around here?” X asked.
“Used to?” I exclaimed, laughing. “I’m sure some psychopaths still do. This is a good place to dump a body, after all. Who the hell wants to trek through the muck and the snakes and mosquitoes out here looking for corpses?”
“The FBI and the cops will do it,” he said, “if they think there’s something to find.” I was about to respond when an ear-splitting shriek echoed out all around us. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from at first. X’s tan skin seemed to go pale as he spun, glancing in every direction.
“What the fuck is that?!” he screamed over the deafening wailing. I didn’t believe in cryptids, but my anxious mind immediately offered up an image of a banshee, a woman with chalk-white skin and black eyes whose shrieking jaw unhinged like a snake’s.
“I’m turning around!” I yelled, pointing back for emphasis. “Dude, fuck this! We need to get out of this swamp!” But X was no longer listening. He was looking past me, his mouth open and his eyes wild. He started backpedaling and nearly fell into the swamp. Windmilling his arms crazily, he turned and sprinted away without a word.
I was afraid to look back. The screaming was getting louder by the second, shaking the air all around me in deafening, crashing waves of sound. I felt like my head would explode if it got any worse. Instinctively, I took off after X, but I glanced back for a single moment before I did. Something loomed there from a nightmare, standing as tall as the trees. It moved through the swamp like a snake, its body slithering through the stagnant green waters towards us. When it met my eyes, the screaming stopped. The abrupt silence seemed deafening. I could hear the fervent pounding of my heart in my ears.
The creature’s skin looked honeycombed and rough, almost like a wasp’s nest. The thousands of tiny holes covering its body constantly opened and closed like hungry mouths. Its arms were long tentacles ending in sharp points of bone in the shape of scythes. The tentacles undulated like serpents. Its legs, too, were no more than four tentacles that alternatively slithered and stepped forward.
Its flesh was the color of peat, a sickly grayish-brown, and the smell that emanated from it was rancid and stagnant, the essence of all boglands and swamps. I nearly gagged as I ran. The putrefying stench seemed to follow me like a shadow.
Ahead of me, X was fumbling in his backpack as he ran, trying to grab his pistol. I knew he had a Glock 21 in that bag, and I had my Sig Sauer in mine. I cursed myself for not keeping it holstered on my body, but I had never had to use it before and hadn’t seriously thought I would need it for this trip. He glanced back at me, his eyes widening in horror.
“It’s right behind you!” he yelled. “Get down!” He dropped his backpack, revealing the sleek, black pistol clenched tightly in his hand. I barely had time to comprehend his words when an immense pressure and numbness radiated through my back. My head snapped backwards as a meaty thud resonated all around me. I went flying forward, feeling as if I had been struck by a car. As I flew through the air, the pain in my back exploded in burning pulses. I felt the deep slice open up from the sharp blade of bone that had slashed me like a knife. I felt trickles of blood pour from the open wound, making my stained shirt cling to my body.
I landed hard on the raised black earth of the trail, a bone-jarring impact that knocked the air out of me. At that same moment, X opened fire, pressing the trigger over and over, emptying the magazine as fast as he could. Something splashed over me, going in my eyes and mouth and nose. I crawled forward, moaning, my head spinning. I wiped my forehead, seeing spatters of green blood squirming with dark, maggot-like creatures covering my arms and face. It clung to my fingers, thick and rancid. I felt stinging sensations as the tiny worms bit me over and over. My ears rang with a high-pitched whine from the gunshots.
X was running towards me now. I continued to crawl towards him, shell-shocked and whimpering, trying to wipe the eldritch blood off my skin. With a muscular arm, he reached down and pulled me up.
“Where’d it go?” I mumbled, stumbling forward on unsteady feet. X put an arm around my shoulders and helped support me.
“It slunk back into the swamp,” he said. “Jesus, you’re bleeding really bad, buddy. We’re going to need to take care of that as soon as we get away from this hellhole.” I felt the deep slices from the creature’s blade-like hands across my back. The fabric of my shirt clung tightly to the skin as fresh blood soaked it.
“This isn’t the trail, X,” I gasped. “We went the wrong way. We need to go back.” He nodded grimly.
“We’re heading back right now. I know it’s the wrong trail now, it definitely is, but it’s dark. The trails back up the mountains are steep and dangerous, and we’ve already been hiking all day. How much longer can we really go?” he asked. In reality, I had a feeling X could go for quite a bit longer. I was the weak link in the chain, and we both knew it.
X took out a small, LED flashlight from his backpack, shining it ahead of us on the dark path. Across the center of the black earth, there was an obstruction, something that hadn’t been there when we passed this way originally.
“Shit! Is that a person?” X said, slowing down. He focused the light on it. As my eyes adjusted, I gave a gasp of horror as I saw a rough sacrificial table looming there, waiting with a ready victim.
Laying on the bare wooden planks in the center of the trail was an elderly man wearing the garb of a hunter. He was gagged, a bloody rag shoved deep into his mouth. I felt a sense of revulsion and terror as I realized his hands and feet were nailed to the planks, as if he were being crucified laying down. His eyes rolled wildly, white and insane, like a horse with a broken leg. When he saw us approaching, he tried to say something through the gag, pulling hard against the nails that bit so viciously into his flesh. Fresh rivers of blood spurted from his wounds.
I had my pistol in my hands. X had taken a fresh magazine out by now, throwing the empty one back in his backpack. Trembling, he went first, his shaking hand moving the flashlight around wildly. Its bright rays bounced off the dead, half-rotted trees that grew out of the boglands, the clouds of mosquitoes and moths that circled us constantly.
“Oh my God... he's like the victim of a serial killer or something,” he whispered, running a trembling hand over his face. “It looks like someone has set that poor guy up to have his heart cut out, like some sort of Aztec ritual.” He glanced worriedly over at me. We had both stopped cold in our tracks, looking around for any sign of danger, but we only saw the old man writhing on his rough table of torture.
“We have to keep going forward,” I whispered. “That thing is behind us. I don’t think it’s dead. I’m not sure it can even die.”
“But what’s ahead of us?” he asked grimly. “That’s the real question, isn’t it?” Far off down the trail, I saw small pinpoints of flickering light. They drew closer. We raised our pistols, waiting for the new arrivals to show themselves.
Dozens of people dressed in black, silky robes holding lamps slowly ambled their way towards us. They had their heads bowed, like monks on a holy pilgrimage. They drew close to the sacrifice. The one in the lead held a long, curving dagger whose blade looked like it was made of some kind of red volcanic rock. Its strange silver handle glittered in his pale, thin hand. At the end, I saw it was sculpted into the shape of a human heart.
“Stop right there!” X screamed, stepping forward. “Don’t come any closer! We are armed, I’m warning you.” The people in the black robes didn’t appear to hear or care in the slightest. They continued slowly following their leader with the strange dagger, almost floating forward in a nonchalant manner. Their leader began chanting in some strange, ancient language. It reminded me of Tibetan or Sanskrit in a way, like the chanting of some Vajrayana monk high up in the Himalayas. But it had a sinister, hissing quality to the words. Something ancient and powerful resonated in every syllable.
I raised the pistol, firing blankly into the dark, cloudless sky above. The smell of gunsmoke and fetid rot hung thick in the air. The leader of the group looked at me with his large, glassy eyes. His face looked sunken and pale, almost like a starving child. He had shaved all of the hair on his head, even his eyebrows. His lips were extremely thin and bloodless in his chalk-white face.
For a long moment, we stood staring at each other, my pistol aimed at his chest. X also had his pistol raised, aimed at one of those standing behind him. But the robed man didn’t speak. He gave me a faint grin.
“Let the old man go,” I commanded, my voice sounding hoarse and weak. The swamp quickly swallowed up my words, until only the buzzing of mosquitoes remained.
“I am sorry, my son, but I cannot do that,” the leader said in a voice as cold as endless space. “If we do not feed Mowdoroth, it will never sleep. The swamps will continue to expand, eating more and more of the surrounding forests and towns, and Mowdoroth, driven insane by hunger, will take far more victims in the process.
“This job has been passed down to us from generation to generation, from big hand to small, for over four centuries. Only twice has Mowdoroth not been fed on the New Moon, and each time, entire settlements full of people were wiped off the face of the Earth as if they had never existed. On one, they just had time to carve the word ‘CROATAN’ before they were taken.
“Mowdoroth looks for the place where the nightmares grow. It breaks open the chest and finds the place where the silent screams start, deep down at the base of the heart. All of the nightmares are planted there, like tiny seeds scattered during childhood. Those that fell on good soil in that abyss produced a great crop, yielding a hundredfold, sixtyfold, or thirtyfold. If you do not allow us to complete our holy mission, then you do it: cut open the man's chest and remove his beating heart. As it beats, squeeze it as hard as you can, and let all the blood drain onto the top of your head. Hold the heart above your head and close your eyes until the god appears and takes it.” The cult leader finished, looking at us with sparkling eyes, as if he had said something profound.
“This shit is just insane drivel,” X whispered in a voice as low as possible. “I say we open fire and save the old man now. Fuck these cultists.” I nodded grimly in agreement.
“You need to all turn around and leave immediately,” X yelled, stepping forward. “I will give you three seconds to turn around and get the hell out of my sight. Three…” At first, the cultists stood as still as statues, simply staring. Finally, the leader sighed and turned away. He shook his head, reminding me of a disappointed parent.
“I tried to warn you,” he said in his thin, quavering voice. “The time has come to give the offering. You must cut out this man’s heart and raise it to Mowdoroth, so he can get the seeds of nightmares freshly sown. The choice is yours now, as you have demanded this power with violence. You can leave this man here to be eaten by Mowdoroth, or free him and, in exchange, guarantee the deaths of hundreds of other people.”
With those last words, the black-robed figures continued down the curve of the trail. Within seconds, they had disappeared behind dead, half-rotted trees that still dotted the edges of the boglands. X and I ran forward toward the struggling old man. X reached into his pocket and pulled out a folding knife. He cut off the old man’s gag, pulling the spit-soaked chunk of filthy cloth out of his mouth. The old man spat and licked his dry lips.
“Get me out of here, please,” he whispered, his eyes rolling wildly. “Those cult members are all batshit insane. And there’s something not right in these swamps. I caught glimpses of something while I was waiting. There’s something in the water…”
“What’s your name, bud?” X said calmingly, looking at the old man’s hands and feet to try to decide how to best get the nails out without causing more damage.
“Winchester,” he said in a coarse voice. It sounded like he hadn’t had a drink of water in days. While X looked at his hands with the LED flashlight, I reached into my pack for the small canteen of filtered water I still had. I started pouring it into Winchester’s mouth. He gulped greedily, his throat working hard to drink down the rest of it.
“I got it!” X said, taking a flat stone he had found on the ground. “I’m going to try to pound these nails out from the bottom.”
“Oh, please, no,” Winchester said, his wrinkled face turning pale. X shook his head.
“We need to get you out of here,” he said. “It’s going to hurt, bud. But we don’t have any tools here. The nails are large, almost like railroad spikes, and once we get the top part, the bottom should slide out easily since it’s a lot narrower.” As he grabbed the rock to begin his work, a bone-chilling wailing started up again from the swamps. It was the scream of Mowdoroth, that abomination with the skin of a wasp’s nest.
“Cover us!” X yelled panickedly as he continued his grisly work. Winchester screamed in pain when X first struck the nail on his right hand. It shot up a fraction of an inch, fresh blood pooling all around it and dripping through the bare planks.
I turned, but the banshee wail seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. The swamp bubbled faster and faster all around us, as if thousands of corpses were coming back to life. I heard Winchester scream again, then the dull thud of another nail hitting the earth.
A face peeked out of the swamp, only twenty feet away. Its eyes were green, the color of a putrefying wound. Its lipless mouth opened wide, showing a spongy black mass of skin with concentric circles of tiny, razor-sharp teeth. It reminded me of the mouth of a lamprey.
I opened fire, shooting wildly at the face, aiming at the body hidden under the dark surface of the swamp. Luminescent drops of green blood exploded from a bullet hole in its upper right shoulder, floating across the surface of the water like radioactive waste.
Its screaming cut off instantly. All I could hear was the pounding of the rock behind me and Winchester’s pained, horrified pleas for mercy.
“Please, you’re hurting me!” he pleaded.
“Shut the fuck up, Winchester!” I whispered. “It’s here with us now.” With considerable effort, he did, only moaning and violently jerking his head now as the waves of pain ripped through him.
“I got it!” X said suddenly. A feeling of elation filled my heart.
“Let’s go then!” I yelled, turning to help the old man up. I heard something massive rise up behind us. It mixed with the sound of dripping water and babbling waves that arose from the disturbance.
Winchester was weak, stumbling up to his feet and nearly falling over immediately. Staggering, he took off down the trail with no shoes, but he immediately gave a curse of pain and tripped. X and I started running, and at that moment, I realized the flaw in our plan. We wouldn’t be able to get Winchester out of the swamp without carrying him, due to the extensive injuries to his feet. And I knew we didn’t have time.
Mowdoroth’s body stood as tall as the trees as it looked down at the three of us with its strange, infected eyes. Its tentacles undulated faster and faster, seeming to whip around its body until they flew out towards us.
“Run!” I screamed. X and I sprinted behind a cluster of dead trees hugging the path. The blade-like hand of Mowdoroth chopped them in a half, raining wood splinters down on our heads.
Winchester continued trying to crawl forward. Mowdoroth slithered behind him. Winchester looked up as a tentacle started coming down in his direction. He gave a short, panicked scream as the blade smashed through his back legs, chopping both of them off at the knees. The ground shook with the force of it. The stumps began spurting seemingly endless amounts of blood. Winchester pleaded and made incomprehensible gurgling sounds as he bled out. Mowdoroth ended Winchester’s cries when it wrapped its tentacle around Winchester’s torso. It slithered up into Winchester’s open mouth.
X and I shot as fast as we could while running forward in the dark, trying to hold a flashlight and a pistol. Most of my shots missed Mowdoroth, but with a sense of satisfaction and pride, I saw a few burst through its enormous body. Streams of radioactive green blood ran down its torso now. As its serpentine legs pumped furiously, it gained speed, coming behind us like a runaway train. I could feel the ground shaking with every thud of its tentacled feet.
A few hundred feet ahead of us, I caught a glimpse of the cultists. They were hurrying away from the area, not running but moving much faster than they had come in. Nearly out of breath already and exhausted from hiking all day, I pointed forward.
“Look!” I screamed. X saw them, his eyes widening. We sprinted in a blind panic, as fast as we could towards the stragglers in the black robes. Without warning, X raised his pistol and fired, aiming at the nearest of them.
The figure in the back of the pack fell forward without making a sound. He continued trying to crawl forward weakly for a few moments before he lost energy and lay still, no more than a bleeding black hump on the dark earth.
X gave a sudden cry of pain next to me as a tentacle came down like a guillotine blade. I heard it whip through the air with a high-pitched whine. A single breath later, I watched in horror as it sliced off his right arm. X looked down at the spurting stump for a long moment, his tanned face turning as pale as bones. He stumbled forward, then, with a hoarse cry, he fell.
Following X’s lead, I raised my gun and started shooting the cultists. They sprinted away in a random panic as bodies fell ahead of us. I jumped over the black lumps on the ground, hearing Mowdoroth shake the world as it gave chase. A long, snake-like tentacle reached down, picking up X’s spurting body and raising it towards Mowdoroth’s leech-like mouth. The massive abomination slowed, picking up the bodies of the dead cultists and crushing them. I heard the bones shatter as the wet gore exploded around Mowdoroth’s many sharp teeth.
I saw the woods again, living trees just a few hundred feet away. The trail of black earth ended abruptly, leading out of the boglands. Cultists sprinted blindly through the forest in every direction, scattering like cockroaches. I had nearly reached the border of the forest when I heard something whizzing past my head. I ducked, but the blur of a grayish tentacle coming down sent a jolt of fear like electricity sizzling through my body.
A moment later, a cold agony covered my left hand. In shock, I looked down, realizing that the blade-like appendage of Mowdoroth had neatly amputated all four of my fingers. If I hadn’t ducked, it would’ve probably gotten my head instead.
Stumbling and screaming, my mind in a blind panic, I staggered through the intersection of the boglands and the forest, falling forward. I knew I was dead. I closed my eyes, waiting. Yet nothing happened.
When I looked back, I saw something strange. Mowdoroth had stopped at the end of the boglands. It tried to push its body forward towards me, but it couldn’t enter the forest. It was as if an invisible barrier stood there.
I lay there for a long time. After a while, I heard Mowdoroth slink back into the fetid waters of the boglands. And then I was alone.
***
I wrapped my hand in bandages as much as I could, trying to stem the bleeding. I felt weak and sick from blood loss, so I lay there until the sun came up. The next day, I was able to slowly make my way out of the forest and back towards the nearest town.
Now I hear stories of people mysteriously going missing in the area. An entire family in a nearby farmhouse only a couple dozen miles away disappeared in the middle of the night without a trace, leaving only smeared trails of blood leading into the forest. No one saw anything, but these six victims were only the first in a long line of strange deaths. Oddly enough, all of the victims lived next to swamps.
And I have the feeling that I was the one responsible.

I had been hiking down the Appalachian Trail for over two weeks without issue on the day when the nightmare began. My friend, X, was by my side the entire time. It was, quite honestly, comforting to have someone who stood nearly six-and-a-half feet tall with me, especially during the long, dark nights when the howling of coyotes drew near. Black bears, too, were a constant presence in these dark mountains. As we got farther from towns and civilization, more ancient predators than human beings took over the land, stalking the night like creeping shadows.
For this trip, we both had bought as few supplies as possible. Included in our packs were MREs, two sleeping bags, some tarps and hammocks, some light clothing, and two pistols with a few boxes of ammo. We didn’t want to be too weighed down that we wouldn’t be able to move fast, after all. We would source water from the streams, waterfalls and lakes along the way and filter it using Lifestraws.
As the spring breeze blew past us, cooling the sweat on my face, I noticed the trail ahead of us weaving its way through thick swampland. The buzzing of flies and mosquitoes increased with every step. The green, fetid waters of the swamp bubbled constantly, as if it were whispering secrets to us.
“Ah, shit,” X said, glancing down the hill with his dark, serious eyes. His tanned skin was covered in a thin sheen of sweat as he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Another swamp. I hate swamps. You know there’s going to be a million mosquitoes and flies down there.” I pulled out the map, squinting down at it. I ran my finger down the trail, seeing the mountains and valleys we had already passed.
“The trail shouldn’t be going through any swamps,” I said. “They’re supposed to be marked. There’s no ponds or anything around here.” And yet there very clearly was. Either we were in a different spot than I thought we were, or the map was outdated. The trail also grew thinner as we descended. The sharp branches of the bushes stuck out like greedy hands, grabbing at our backpacks and clothes as we pressed forward.
“Well, whatever,” X said gruffly, plowing ahead. Twigs cracked under his massive bulk. The thin branches hanging across the path snapped as he plowed forward. I let him go first, since he was significantly bigger than myself. It was like following in the path of a bull.
“The faster we move, the faster we’ll be through it. We don’t want to camp anywhere around here when it gets dark,” X continued, looking grim. “We’ll be eaten alive by bugs by sunrise. We need to make it to the other side of these boglands before we can stop for the night.”
“Yeah, and I could use some more water,” I said, shaking my mostly empty canteen. “I wouldn’t drink this shit no matter what we did to it. It probably has brain-eating parasites crawling in it.” I checked my watch, realizing that dusk was only a half hour away. We would have to move fast indeed, especially as we didn’t know the size of the swamp. I was not enthusiastic about hiking in the dark with the many steep trails and sharp rocks that covered the surrounding land. A single misstep could lead to a very long, bone-shattering fall.
To my increasing dismay, I realized that the trail we were on no longer had the characteristic white markings of the Appalachian Trail. I kept checking the trees for the past fifteen minutes, and I definitely hadn’t seen a single one. I couldn’t remember the last time we had passed one, but I had a creeping suspicion it had been at least a couple hours ago.
“I think we have a problem, man,” I whispered. “I don’t know how it possibly could have happened, but I think we’re on the wrong trail.”
“There’s not supposed to be any other trails around here,” X argued. “Check the map.”
“Then where’s the white blazes? There’s not supposed to be any boglands around here, either, yet we’re walking through the middle of one,” I said. He shook his head.
“Listen, Ben, there’s not going to be markers on the entire Appalachian Trail,” he said. “Just trust me. We’re on the right path. Sometimes forests change. Swamps take over spots where forests used to lay. Hell, the Sahara Desert has been expanding for thousands of years, just eating the forests and plains all around it. There used to be lions and savannah in Morocco, and now it’s all dead and dry.”
I felt doubtful, but I continued forwards, following closely behind X. Neither one of us had ever done the full Appalachian Trail, after all. I hoped he was right. I was not enthusiastic about backtracking two or three hours if he wasn’t.
I thought back closely on our travels during the last few hours, wondering where we could have gone wrong. The trail had been rather overgrown and rocky on the peak of the last mountain. There had been a beautiful view spanning hundreds of miles, looking far off into state forests and winding roads. I remembered seeing the white marker near the top, but after we had started descending, it disappeared. That must have been where we went wrong, if we did, indeed, go off-course. But I couldn’t be sure, and I didn’t tell X about my suspicions.
We finished descending a steep, rocky trail into a valley where the boglands really started. The trees ended in a massive semi-circle around the open swamp. Thick peat covered the entire surface of it like rotted, grayish-brown skin. I saw water snakes quietly disappearing into the stagnant water, leaving behind slowly expanding ripples.
“This is pretty cool,” I said, stopping for a moment at the bottom of the trail to admire the boglands. Our trail continued directly through the center of it, no more than a raised patch of black earth surrounded by green swampy water. I could hear the many insects chirping and flying before we even took a step forward. Though the spring air felt warm and I was covered in sweat, I still reached into my bag, taking out a windbreaker that would cover up my arms and neck to help with the bugs. X did the same.
“Let’s move fast,” he said, giving me a knowing look. He was a much faster hiker than myself. He seemed like a machine sometimes, tireless and single-minded. I had seen him hike over twenty miles in a single day without looking too bent out of shape. I gave him a faint half-smile, picking up my pace.
“You know what they used to say about the boglands?” I asked X. He shook his head.
“I don’t read books,” he said. “If I have time to sit down and read, then it means I have time to go out and do something actually fun. But I’m sure you know all about it.” I gave a short bark of laughter at his off-handed insult. It sounded far too loud echoing back to us through the creepy swamp. The last rays of sunlight were disappearing behind the mountains now. Soon, we would be plunged into darkness.
“Well, in ancient times, people thought the boglands a place where the walls of reality were thin, where the gods would come through. They used to bring their victims out to swamps during rituals, then they would slice their throats or strangle them and dump their bodies into the bogs as an offering to the gods. They also said that strange, shape-shifting creatures would appear, sometimes to deceive travelers, other times to help them,” I said. “But as for human sacrifices, the bogs preserve bodies like nothing else, except maybe tar pits. Archaeologists keep finding victims with slashed throats or shattered skulls buried underneath the peat.”
X was silent for a long moment as we continued walking along the raised patch of earth that formed the trail. We got farther and farther from the forests, until the swamp seemed like a fetid ocean, spanning out to the horizon in every direction.
“Do you think they used to do that kind of stuff around here?” X asked.
“Used to?” I exclaimed, laughing. “I’m sure some psychopaths still do. This is a good place to dump a body, after all. Who the hell wants to trek through the muck and the snakes and mosquitoes out here looking for corpses?”
“The FBI and the cops will do it,” he said, “if they think there’s something to find.” I was about to respond when an ear-splitting shriek echoed out all around us. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from at first. X’s tan skin seemed to go pale as he spun, glancing in every direction.
“What the fuck is that?!” he screamed over the deafening wailing. I didn’t believe in cryptids, but my anxious mind immediately offered up an image of a banshee, a woman with chalk-white skin and black eyes whose shrieking jaw unhinged like a snake’s.
“I’m turning around!” I yelled, pointing back for emphasis. “Dude, fuck this! We need to get out of this swamp!” But X was no longer listening. He was looking past me, his mouth open and his eyes wild. He started backpedaling and nearly fell into the swamp. Windmilling his arms crazily, he turned and sprinted away without a word.
I was afraid to look back. The screaming was getting louder by the second, shaking the air all around me in deafening, crashing waves of sound. I felt like my head would explode if it got any worse. Instinctively, I took off after X, but I glanced back for a single moment before I did. Something loomed there from a nightmare, standing as tall as the trees. It moved through the swamp like a snake, its body slithering through the stagnant green waters towards us. When it met my eyes, the screaming stopped. The abrupt silence seemed deafening. I could hear the fervent pounding of my heart in my ears.
The creature’s skin looked honeycombed and rough, almost like a wasp’s nest. The thousands of tiny holes covering its body constantly opened and closed like hungry mouths. Its arms were long tentacles ending in sharp points of bone in the shape of scythes. The tentacles undulated like serpents. Its legs, too, were no more than four tentacles that alternatively slithered and stepped forward.
Its flesh was the color of peat, a sickly grayish-brown, and the smell that emanated from it was rancid and stagnant, the essence of all boglands and swamps. I nearly gagged as I ran. The putrefying stench seemed to follow me like a shadow.
Ahead of me, X was fumbling in his backpack as he ran, trying to grab his pistol. I knew he had a Glock 21 in that bag, and I had my Sig Sauer in mine. I cursed myself for not keeping it holstered on my body, but I had never had to use it before and hadn’t seriously thought I would need it for this trip. He glanced back at me, his eyes widening in horror.
“It’s right behind you!” he yelled. “Get down!” He dropped his backpack, revealing the sleek, black pistol clenched tightly in his hand. I barely had time to comprehend his words when an immense pressure and numbness radiated through my back. My head snapped backwards as a meaty thud resonated all around me. I went flying forward, feeling as if I had been struck by a car. As I flew through the air, the pain in my back exploded in burning pulses. I felt the deep slice open up from the sharp blade of bone that had slashed me like a knife. I felt trickles of blood pour from the open wound, making my stained shirt cling to my body.
I landed hard on the raised black earth of the trail, a bone-jarring impact that knocked the air out of me. At that same moment, X opened fire, pressing the trigger over and over, emptying the magazine as fast as he could. Something splashed over me, going in my eyes and mouth and nose. I crawled forward, moaning, my head spinning. I wiped my forehead, seeing spatters of green blood squirming with dark, maggot-like creatures covering my arms and face. It clung to my fingers, thick and rancid. I felt stinging sensations as the tiny worms bit me over and over. My ears rang with a high-pitched whine from the gunshots.
X was running towards me now. I continued to crawl towards him, shell-shocked and whimpering, trying to wipe the eldritch blood off my skin. With a muscular arm, he reached down and pulled me up.
“Where’d it go?” I mumbled, stumbling forward on unsteady feet. X put an arm around my shoulders and helped support me.
“It slunk back into the swamp,” he said. “Jesus, you’re bleeding really bad, buddy. We’re going to need to take care of that as soon as we get away from this hellhole.” I felt the deep slices from the creature’s blade-like hands across my back. The fabric of my shirt clung tightly to the skin as fresh blood soaked it.
“This isn’t the trail, X,” I gasped. “We went the wrong way. We need to go back.” He nodded grimly.
“We’re heading back right now. I know it’s the wrong trail now, it definitely is, but it’s dark. The trails back up the mountains are steep and dangerous, and we’ve already been hiking all day. How much longer can we really go?” he asked. In reality, I had a feeling X could go for quite a bit longer. I was the weak link in the chain, and we both knew it.
X took out a small, LED flashlight from his backpack, shining it ahead of us on the dark path. Across the center of the black earth, there was an obstruction, something that hadn’t been there when we passed this way originally.
“Shit! Is that a person?” X said, slowing down. He focused the light on it. As my eyes adjusted, I gave a gasp of horror as I saw a rough sacrificial table looming there, waiting with a ready victim.
Laying on the bare wooden planks in the center of the trail was an elderly man wearing the garb of a hunter. He was gagged, a bloody rag shoved deep into his mouth. I felt a sense of revulsion and terror as I realized his hands and feet were nailed to the planks, as if he were being crucified laying down. His eyes rolled wildly, white and insane, like a horse with a broken leg. When he saw us approaching, he tried to say something through the gag, pulling hard against the nails that bit so viciously into his flesh. Fresh rivers of blood spurted from his wounds.
I had my pistol in my hands. X had taken a fresh magazine out by now, throwing the empty one back in his backpack. Trembling, he went first, his shaking hand moving the flashlight around wildly. Its bright rays bounced off the dead, half-rotted trees that grew out of the boglands, the clouds of mosquitoes and moths that circled us constantly.
“Oh my God... he's like the victim of a serial killer or something,” he whispered, running a trembling hand over his face. “It looks like someone has set that poor guy up to have his heart cut out, like some sort of Aztec ritual.” He glanced worriedly over at me. We had both stopped cold in our tracks, looking around for any sign of danger, but we only saw the old man writhing on his rough table of torture.
“We have to keep going forward,” I whispered. “That thing is behind us. I don’t think it’s dead. I’m not sure it can even die.”
“But what’s ahead of us?” he asked grimly. “That’s the real question, isn’t it?” Far off down the trail, I saw small pinpoints of flickering light. They drew closer. We raised our pistols, waiting for the new arrivals to show themselves.
Dozens of people dressed in black, silky robes holding lamps slowly ambled their way towards us. They had their heads bowed, like monks on a holy pilgrimage. They drew close to the sacrifice. The one in the lead held a long, curving dagger whose blade looked like it was made of some kind of red volcanic rock. Its strange silver handle glittered in his pale, thin hand. At the end, I saw it was sculpted into the shape of a human heart.
“Stop right there!” X screamed, stepping forward. “Don’t come any closer! We are armed, I’m warning you.” The people in the black robes didn’t appear to hear or care in the slightest. They continued slowly following their leader with the strange dagger, almost floating forward in a nonchalant manner. Their leader began chanting in some strange, ancient language. It reminded me of Tibetan or Sanskrit in a way, like the chanting of some Vajrayana monk high up in the Himalayas. But it had a sinister, hissing quality to the words. Something ancient and powerful resonated in every syllable.
I raised the pistol, firing blankly into the dark, cloudless sky above. The smell of gunsmoke and fetid rot hung thick in the air. The leader of the group looked at me with his large, glassy eyes. His face looked sunken and pale, almost like a starving child. He had shaved all of the hair on his head, even his eyebrows. His lips were extremely thin and bloodless in his chalk-white face.
For a long moment, we stood staring at each other, my pistol aimed at his chest. X also had his pistol raised, aimed at one of those standing behind him. But the robed man didn’t speak. He gave me a faint grin.
“Let the old man go,” I commanded, my voice sounding hoarse and weak. The swamp quickly swallowed up my words, until only the buzzing of mosquitoes remained.
“I am sorry, my son, but I cannot do that,” the leader said in a voice as cold as endless space. “If we do not feed Mowdoroth, it will never sleep. The swamps will continue to expand, eating more and more of the surrounding forests and towns, and Mowdoroth, driven insane by hunger, will take far more victims in the process.
“This job has been passed down to us from generation to generation, from big hand to small, for over four centuries. Only twice has Mowdoroth not been fed on the New Moon, and each time, entire settlements full of people were wiped off the face of the Earth as if they had never existed. On one, they just had time to carve the word ‘CROATAN’ before they were taken.
“Mowdoroth looks for the place where the nightmares grow. It breaks open the chest and finds the place where the silent screams start, deep down at the base of the heart. All of the nightmares are planted there, like tiny seeds scattered during childhood. Those that fell on good soil in that abyss produced a great crop, yielding a hundredfold, sixtyfold, or thirtyfold. If you do not allow us to complete our holy mission, then you do it: cut open the man's chest and remove his beating heart. As it beats, squeeze it as hard as you can, and let all the blood drain onto the top of your head. Hold the heart above your head and close your eyes until the god appears and takes it.” The cult leader finished, looking at us with sparkling eyes, as if he had said something profound.
“This shit is just insane drivel,” X whispered in a voice as low as possible. “I say we open fire and save the old man now. Fuck these cultists.” I nodded grimly in agreement.
“You need to all turn around and leave immediately,” X yelled, stepping forward. “I will give you three seconds to turn around and get the hell out of my sight. Three…” At first, the cultists stood as still as statues, simply staring. Finally, the leader sighed and turned away. He shook his head, reminding me of a disappointed parent.
“I tried to warn you,” he said in his thin, quavering voice. “The time has come to give the offering. You must cut out this man’s heart and raise it to Mowdoroth, so he can get the seeds of nightmares freshly sown. The choice is yours now, as you have demanded this power with violence. You can leave this man here to be eaten by Mowdoroth, or free him and, in exchange, guarantee the deaths of hundreds of other people.”
With those last words, the black-robed figures continued down the curve of the trail. Within seconds, they had disappeared behind dead, half-rotted trees that still dotted the edges of the boglands. X and I ran forward toward the struggling old man. X reached into his pocket and pulled out a folding knife. He cut off the old man’s gag, pulling the spit-soaked chunk of filthy cloth out of his mouth. The old man spat and licked his dry lips.
“Get me out of here, please,” he whispered, his eyes rolling wildly. “Those cult members are all batshit insane. And there’s something not right in these swamps. I caught glimpses of something while I was waiting. There’s something in the water…”
“What’s your name, bud?” X said calmingly, looking at the old man’s hands and feet to try to decide how to best get the nails out without causing more damage.
“Winchester,” he said in a coarse voice. It sounded like he hadn’t had a drink of water in days. While X looked at his hands with the LED flashlight, I reached into my pack for the small canteen of filtered water I still had. I started pouring it into Winchester’s mouth. He gulped greedily, his throat working hard to drink down the rest of it.
“I got it!” X said, taking a flat stone he had found on the ground. “I’m going to try to pound these nails out from the bottom.”
“Oh, please, no,” Winchester said, his wrinkled face turning pale. X shook his head.
“We need to get you out of here,” he said. “It’s going to hurt, bud. But we don’t have any tools here. The nails are large, almost like railroad spikes, and once we get the top part, the bottom should slide out easily since it’s a lot narrower.” As he grabbed the rock to begin his work, a bone-chilling wailing started up again from the swamps. It was the scream of Mowdoroth, that abomination with the skin of a wasp’s nest.
“Cover us!” X yelled panickedly as he continued his grisly work. Winchester screamed in pain when X first struck the nail on his right hand. It shot up a fraction of an inch, fresh blood pooling all around it and dripping through the bare planks.
I turned, but the banshee wail seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. The swamp bubbled faster and faster all around us, as if thousands of corpses were coming back to life. I heard Winchester scream again, then the dull thud of another nail hitting the earth.
A face peeked out of the swamp, only twenty feet away. Its eyes were green, the color of a putrefying wound. Its lipless mouth opened wide, showing a spongy black mass of skin with concentric circles of tiny, razor-sharp teeth. It reminded me of the mouth of a lamprey.
I opened fire, shooting wildly at the face, aiming at the body hidden under the dark surface of the swamp. Luminescent drops of green blood exploded from a bullet hole in its upper right shoulder, floating across the surface of the water like radioactive waste.
Its screaming cut off instantly. All I could hear was the pounding of the rock behind me and Winchester’s pained, horrified pleas for mercy.
“Please, you’re hurting me!” he pleaded.
“Shut the fuck up, Winchester!” I whispered. “It’s here with us now.” With considerable effort, he did, only moaning and violently jerking his head now as the waves of pain ripped through him.
“I got it!” X said suddenly. A feeling of elation filled my heart.
“Let’s go then!” I yelled, turning to help the old man up. I heard something massive rise up behind us. It mixed with the sound of dripping water and babbling waves that arose from the disturbance.
Winchester was weak, stumbling up to his feet and nearly falling over immediately. Staggering, he took off down the trail with no shoes, but he immediately gave a curse of pain and tripped. X and I started running, and at that moment, I realized the flaw in our plan. We wouldn’t be able to get Winchester out of the swamp without carrying him, due to the extensive injuries to his feet. And I knew we didn’t have time.
Mowdoroth’s body stood as tall as the trees as it looked down at the three of us with its strange, infected eyes. Its tentacles undulated faster and faster, seeming to whip around its body until they flew out towards us.
“Run!” I screamed. X and I sprinted behind a cluster of dead trees hugging the path. The blade-like hand of Mowdoroth chopped them in a half, raining wood splinters down on our heads.
Winchester continued trying to crawl forward. Mowdoroth slithered behind him. Winchester looked up as a tentacle started coming down in his direction. He gave a short, panicked scream as the blade smashed through his back legs, chopping both of them off at the knees. The ground shook with the force of it. The stumps began spurting seemingly endless amounts of blood. Winchester pleaded and made incomprehensible gurgling sounds as he bled out. Mowdoroth ended Winchester’s cries when it wrapped its tentacle around Winchester’s torso. It slithered up into Winchester’s open mouth.
X and I shot as fast as we could while running forward in the dark, trying to hold a flashlight and a pistol. Most of my shots missed Mowdoroth, but with a sense of satisfaction and pride, I saw a few burst through its enormous body. Streams of radioactive green blood ran down its torso now. As its serpentine legs pumped furiously, it gained speed, coming behind us like a runaway train. I could feel the ground shaking with every thud of its tentacled feet.
A few hundred feet ahead of us, I caught a glimpse of the cultists. They were hurrying away from the area, not running but moving much faster than they had come in. Nearly out of breath already and exhausted from hiking all day, I pointed forward.
“Look!” I screamed. X saw them, his eyes widening. We sprinted in a blind panic, as fast as we could towards the stragglers in the black robes. Without warning, X raised his pistol and fired, aiming at the nearest of them.
The figure in the back of the pack fell forward without making a sound. He continued trying to crawl forward weakly for a few moments before he lost energy and lay still, no more than a bleeding black hump on the dark earth.
X gave a sudden cry of pain next to me as a tentacle came down like a guillotine blade. I heard it whip through the air with a high-pitched whine. A single breath later, I watched in horror as it sliced off his right arm. X looked down at the spurting stump for a long moment, his tanned face turning as pale as bones. He stumbled forward, then, with a hoarse cry, he fell.
Following X’s lead, I raised my gun and started shooting the cultists. They sprinted away in a random panic as bodies fell ahead of us. I jumped over the black lumps on the ground, hearing Mowdoroth shake the world as it gave chase. A long, snake-like tentacle reached down, picking up X’s spurting body and raising it towards Mowdoroth’s leech-like mouth. The massive abomination slowed, picking up the bodies of the dead cultists and crushing them. I heard the bones shatter as the wet gore exploded around Mowdoroth’s many sharp teeth.
I saw the woods again, living trees just a few hundred feet away. The trail of black earth ended abruptly, leading out of the boglands. Cultists sprinted blindly through the forest in every direction, scattering like cockroaches. I had nearly reached the border of the forest when I heard something whizzing past my head. I ducked, but the blur of a grayish tentacle coming down sent a jolt of fear like electricity sizzling through my body.
A moment later, a cold agony covered my left hand. In shock, I looked down, realizing that the blade-like appendage of Mowdoroth had neatly amputated all four of my fingers. If I hadn’t ducked, it would’ve probably gotten my head instead.
Stumbling and screaming, my mind in a blind panic, I staggered through the intersection of the boglands and the forest, falling forward. I knew I was dead. I closed my eyes, waiting. Yet nothing happened.
When I looked back, I saw something strange. Mowdoroth had stopped at the end of the boglands. It tried to push its body forward towards me, but it couldn’t enter the forest. It was as if an invisible barrier stood there.
I lay there for a long time. After a while, I heard Mowdoroth slink back into the fetid waters of the boglands. And then I was alone.
***
I wrapped my hand in bandages as much as I could, trying to stem the bleeding. I felt weak and sick from blood loss, so I lay there until the sun came up. The next day, I was able to slowly make my way out of the forest and back towards the nearest town.
Now I hear stories of people mysteriously going missing in the area. An entire family in a nearby farmhouse only a couple dozen miles away disappeared in the middle of the night without a trace, leaving only smeared trails of blood leading into the forest. No one saw anything, but these six victims were only the first in a long line of strange deaths. Oddly enough, all of the victims lived next to swamps.
And I have the feeling that I was the one responsible.

I had been hiking down the Appalachian Trail for over two weeks without issue on the day when the nightmare began. My friend, X, was by my side the entire time. It was, quite honestly, comforting to have someone who stood nearly six-and-a-half feet tall with me, especially during the long, dark nights when the howling of coyotes drew near. Black bears, too, were a constant presence in these dark mountains. As we got farther from towns and civilization, more ancient predators than human beings took over the land, stalking the night like creeping shadows.
For this trip, we both had bought as few supplies as possible. Included in our packs were MREs, two sleeping bags, some tarps and hammocks, some light clothing, and two pistols with a few boxes of ammo. We didn’t want to be too weighed down that we wouldn’t be able to move fast, after all. We would source water from the streams, waterfalls and lakes along the way and filter it using Lifestraws.
As the spring breeze blew past us, cooling the sweat on my face, I noticed the trail ahead of us weaving its way through thick swampland. The buzzing of flies and mosquitoes increased with every step. The green, fetid waters of the swamp bubbled constantly, as if it were whispering secrets to us.
“Ah, shit,” X said, glancing down the hill with his dark, serious eyes. His tanned skin was covered in a thin sheen of sweat as he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Another swamp. I hate swamps. You know there’s going to be a million mosquitoes and flies down there.” I pulled out the map, squinting down at it. I ran my finger down the trail, seeing the mountains and valleys we had already passed.
“The trail shouldn’t be going through any swamps,” I said. “They’re supposed to be marked. There’s no ponds or anything around here.” And yet there very clearly was. Either we were in a different spot than I thought we were, or the map was outdated. The trail also grew thinner as we descended. The sharp branches of the bushes stuck out like greedy hands, grabbing at our backpacks and clothes as we pressed forward.
“Well, whatever,” X said gruffly, plowing ahead. Twigs cracked under his massive bulk. The thin branches hanging across the path snapped as he plowed forward. I let him go first, since he was significantly bigger than myself. It was like following in the path of a bull.
“The faster we move, the faster we’ll be through it. We don’t want to camp anywhere around here when it gets dark,” X continued, looking grim. “We’ll be eaten alive by bugs by sunrise. We need to make it to the other side of these boglands before we can stop for the night.”
“Yeah, and I could use some more water,” I said, shaking my mostly empty canteen. “I wouldn’t drink this shit no matter what we did to it. It probably has brain-eating parasites crawling in it.” I checked my watch, realizing that dusk was only a half hour away. We would have to move fast indeed, especially as we didn’t know the size of the swamp. I was not enthusiastic about hiking in the dark with the many steep trails and sharp rocks that covered the surrounding land. A single misstep could lead to a very long, bone-shattering fall.
To my increasing dismay, I realized that the trail we were on no longer had the characteristic white markings of the Appalachian Trail. I kept checking the trees for the past fifteen minutes, and I definitely hadn’t seen a single one. I couldn’t remember the last time we had passed one, but I had a creeping suspicion it had been at least a couple hours ago.
“I think we have a problem, man,” I whispered. “I don’t know how it possibly could have happened, but I think we’re on the wrong trail.”
“There’s not supposed to be any other trails around here,” X argued. “Check the map.”
“Then where’s the white blazes? There’s not supposed to be any boglands around here, either, yet we’re walking through the middle of one,” I said. He shook his head.
“Listen, Ben, there’s not going to be markers on the entire Appalachian Trail,” he said. “Just trust me. We’re on the right path. Sometimes forests change. Swamps take over spots where forests used to lay. Hell, the Sahara Desert has been expanding for thousands of years, just eating the forests and plains all around it. There used to be lions and savannah in Morocco, and now it’s all dead and dry.”
I felt doubtful, but I continued forwards, following closely behind X. Neither one of us had ever done the full Appalachian Trail, after all. I hoped he was right. I was not enthusiastic about backtracking two or three hours if he wasn’t.
I thought back closely on our travels during the last few hours, wondering where we could have gone wrong. The trail had been rather overgrown and rocky on the peak of the last mountain. There had been a beautiful view spanning hundreds of miles, looking far off into state forests and winding roads. I remembered seeing the white marker near the top, but after we had started descending, it disappeared. That must have been where we went wrong, if we did, indeed, go off-course. But I couldn’t be sure, and I didn’t tell X about my suspicions.
We finished descending a steep, rocky trail into a valley where the boglands really started. The trees ended in a massive semi-circle around the open swamp. Thick peat covered the entire surface of it like rotted, grayish-brown skin. I saw water snakes quietly disappearing into the stagnant water, leaving behind slowly expanding ripples.
“This is pretty cool,” I said, stopping for a moment at the bottom of the trail to admire the boglands. Our trail continued directly through the center of it, no more than a raised patch of black earth surrounded by green swampy water. I could hear the many insects chirping and flying before we even took a step forward. Though the spring air felt warm and I was covered in sweat, I still reached into my bag, taking out a windbreaker that would cover up my arms and neck to help with the bugs. X did the same.
“Let’s move fast,” he said, giving me a knowing look. He was a much faster hiker than myself. He seemed like a machine sometimes, tireless and single-minded. I had seen him hike over twenty miles in a single day without looking too bent out of shape. I gave him a faint half-smile, picking up my pace.
“You know what they used to say about the boglands?” I asked X. He shook his head.
“I don’t read books,” he said. “If I have time to sit down and read, then it means I have time to go out and do something actually fun. But I’m sure you know all about it.” I gave a short bark of laughter at his off-handed insult. It sounded far too loud echoing back to us through the creepy swamp. The last rays of sunlight were disappearing behind the mountains now. Soon, we would be plunged into darkness.
“Well, in ancient times, people thought the boglands a place where the walls of reality were thin, where the gods would come through. They used to bring their victims out to swamps during rituals, then they would slice their throats or strangle them and dump their bodies into the bogs as an offering to the gods. They also said that strange, shape-shifting creatures would appear, sometimes to deceive travelers, other times to help them,” I said. “But as for human sacrifices, the bogs preserve bodies like nothing else, except maybe tar pits. Archaeologists keep finding victims with slashed throats or shattered skulls buried underneath the peat.”
X was silent for a long moment as we continued walking along the raised patch of earth that formed the trail. We got farther and farther from the forests, until the swamp seemed like a fetid ocean, spanning out to the horizon in every direction.
“Do you think they used to do that kind of stuff around here?” X asked.
“Used to?” I exclaimed, laughing. “I’m sure some psychopaths still do. This is a good place to dump a body, after all. Who the hell wants to trek through the muck and the snakes and mosquitoes out here looking for corpses?”
“The FBI and the cops will do it,” he said, “if they think there’s something to find.” I was about to respond when an ear-splitting shriek echoed out all around us. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from at first. X’s tan skin seemed to go pale as he spun, glancing in every direction.
“What the fuck is that?!” he screamed over the deafening wailing. I didn’t believe in cryptids, but my anxious mind immediately offered up an image of a banshee, a woman with chalk-white skin and black eyes whose shrieking jaw unhinged like a snake’s.
“I’m turning around!” I yelled, pointing back for emphasis. “Dude, fuck this! We need to get out of this swamp!” But X was no longer listening. He was looking past me, his mouth open and his eyes wild. He started backpedaling and nearly fell into the swamp. Windmilling his arms crazily, he turned and sprinted away without a word.
I was afraid to look back. The screaming was getting louder by the second, shaking the air all around me in deafening, crashing waves of sound. I felt like my head would explode if it got any worse. Instinctively, I took off after X, but I glanced back for a single moment before I did. Something loomed there from a nightmare, standing as tall as the trees. It moved through the swamp like a snake, its body slithering through the stagnant green waters towards us. When it met my eyes, the screaming stopped. The abrupt silence seemed deafening. I could hear the fervent pounding of my heart in my ears.
The creature’s skin looked honeycombed and rough, almost like a wasp’s nest. The thousands of tiny holes covering its body constantly opened and closed like hungry mouths. Its arms were long tentacles ending in sharp points of bone in the shape of scythes. The tentacles undulated like serpents. Its legs, too, were no more than four tentacles that alternatively slithered and stepped forward.
Its flesh was the color of peat, a sickly grayish-brown, and the smell that emanated from it was rancid and stagnant, the essence of all boglands and swamps. I nearly gagged as I ran. The putrefying stench seemed to follow me like a shadow.
Ahead of me, X was fumbling in his backpack as he ran, trying to grab his pistol. I knew he had a Glock 21 in that bag, and I had my Sig Sauer in mine. I cursed myself for not keeping it holstered on my body, but I had never had to use it before and hadn’t seriously thought I would need it for this trip. He glanced back at me, his eyes widening in horror.
“It’s right behind you!” he yelled. “Get down!” He dropped his backpack, revealing the sleek, black pistol clenched tightly in his hand. I barely had time to comprehend his words when an immense pressure and numbness radiated through my back. My head snapped backwards as a meaty thud resonated all around me. I went flying forward, feeling as if I had been struck by a car. As I flew through the air, the pain in my back exploded in burning pulses. I felt the deep slice open up from the sharp blade of bone that had slashed me like a knife. I felt trickles of blood pour from the open wound, making my stained shirt cling to my body.
I landed hard on the raised black earth of the trail, a bone-jarring impact that knocked the air out of me. At that same moment, X opened fire, pressing the trigger over and over, emptying the magazine as fast as he could. Something splashed over me, going in my eyes and mouth and nose. I crawled forward, moaning, my head spinning. I wiped my forehead, seeing spatters of green blood squirming with dark, maggot-like creatures covering my arms and face. It clung to my fingers, thick and rancid. I felt stinging sensations as the tiny worms bit me over and over. My ears rang with a high-pitched whine from the gunshots.
X was running towards me now. I continued to crawl towards him, shell-shocked and whimpering, trying to wipe the eldritch blood off my skin. With a muscular arm, he reached down and pulled me up.
“Where’d it go?” I mumbled, stumbling forward on unsteady feet. X put an arm around my shoulders and helped support me.
“It slunk back into the swamp,” he said. “Jesus, you’re bleeding really bad, buddy. We’re going to need to take care of that as soon as we get away from this hellhole.” I felt the deep slices from the creature’s blade-like hands across my back. The fabric of my shirt clung tightly to the skin as fresh blood soaked it.
“This isn’t the trail, X,” I gasped. “We went the wrong way. We need to go back.” He nodded grimly.
“We’re heading back right now. I know it’s the wrong trail now, it definitely is, but it’s dark. The trails back up the mountains are steep and dangerous, and we’ve already been hiking all day. How much longer can we really go?” he asked. In reality, I had a feeling X could go for quite a bit longer. I was the weak link in the chain, and we both knew it.
X took out a small, LED flashlight from his backpack, shining it ahead of us on the dark path. Across the center of the black earth, there was an obstruction, something that hadn’t been there when we passed this way originally.
“Shit! Is that a person?” X said, slowing down. He focused the light on it. As my eyes adjusted, I gave a gasp of horror as I saw a rough sacrificial table looming there, waiting with a ready victim.
Laying on the bare wooden planks in the center of the trail was an elderly man wearing the garb of a hunter. He was gagged, a bloody rag shoved deep into his mouth. I felt a sense of revulsion and terror as I realized his hands and feet were nailed to the planks, as if he were being crucified laying down. His eyes rolled wildly, white and insane, like a horse with a broken leg. When he saw us approaching, he tried to say something through the gag, pulling hard against the nails that bit so viciously into his flesh. Fresh rivers of blood spurted from his wounds.
I had my pistol in my hands. X had taken a fresh magazine out by now, throwing the empty one back in his backpack. Trembling, he went first, his shaking hand moving the flashlight around wildly. Its bright rays bounced off the dead, half-rotted trees that grew out of the boglands, the clouds of mosquitoes and moths that circled us constantly.
“Oh my God... he's like the victim of a serial killer or something,” he whispered, running a trembling hand over his face. “It looks like someone has set that poor guy up to have his heart cut out, like some sort of Aztec ritual.” He glanced worriedly over at me. We had both stopped cold in our tracks, looking around for any sign of danger, but we only saw the old man writhing on his rough table of torture.
“We have to keep going forward,” I whispered. “That thing is behind us. I don’t think it’s dead. I’m not sure it can even die.”
“But what’s ahead of us?” he asked grimly. “That’s the real question, isn’t it?” Far off down the trail, I saw small pinpoints of flickering light. They drew closer. We raised our pistols, waiting for the new arrivals to show themselves.
Dozens of people dressed in black, silky robes holding lamps slowly ambled their way towards us. They had their heads bowed, like monks on a holy pilgrimage. They drew close to the sacrifice. The one in the lead held a long, curving dagger whose blade looked like it was made of some kind of red volcanic rock. Its strange silver handle glittered in his pale, thin hand. At the end, I saw it was sculpted into the shape of a human heart.
“Stop right there!” X screamed, stepping forward. “Don’t come any closer! We are armed, I’m warning you.” The people in the black robes didn’t appear to hear or care in the slightest. They continued slowly following their leader with the strange dagger, almost floating forward in a nonchalant manner. Their leader began chanting in some strange, ancient language. It reminded me of Tibetan or Sanskrit in a way, like the chanting of some Vajrayana monk high up in the Himalayas. But it had a sinister, hissing quality to the words. Something ancient and powerful resonated in every syllable.
I raised the pistol, firing blankly into the dark, cloudless sky above. The smell of gunsmoke and fetid rot hung thick in the air. The leader of the group looked at me with his large, glassy eyes. His face looked sunken and pale, almost like a starving child. He had shaved all of the hair on his head, even his eyebrows. His lips were extremely thin and bloodless in his chalk-white face.
For a long moment, we stood staring at each other, my pistol aimed at his chest. X also had his pistol raised, aimed at one of those standing behind him. But the robed man didn’t speak. He gave me a faint grin.
“Let the old man go,” I commanded, my voice sounding hoarse and weak. The swamp quickly swallowed up my words, until only the buzzing of mosquitoes remained.
“I am sorry, my son, but I cannot do that,” the leader said in a voice as cold as endless space. “If we do not feed Mowdoroth, it will never sleep. The swamps will continue to expand, eating more and more of the surrounding forests and towns, and Mowdoroth, driven insane by hunger, will take far more victims in the process.
“This job has been passed down to us from generation to generation, from big hand to small, for over four centuries. Only twice has Mowdoroth not been fed on the New Moon, and each time, entire settlements full of people were wiped off the face of the Earth as if they had never existed. On one, they just had time to carve the word ‘CROATAN’ before they were taken.
“Mowdoroth looks for the place where the nightmares grow. It breaks open the chest and finds the place where the silent screams start, deep down at the base of the heart. All of the nightmares are planted there, like tiny seeds scattered during childhood. Those that fell on good soil in that abyss produced a great crop, yielding a hundredfold, sixtyfold, or thirtyfold. If you do not allow us to complete our holy mission, then you do it: cut open the man's chest and remove his beating heart. As it beats, squeeze it as hard as you can, and let all the blood drain onto the top of your head. Hold the heart above your head and close your eyes until the god appears and takes it.” The cult leader finished, looking at us with sparkling eyes, as if he had said something profound.
“This shit is just insane drivel,” X whispered in a voice as low as possible. “I say we open fire and save the old man now. Fuck these cultists.” I nodded grimly in agreement.
“You need to all turn around and leave immediately,” X yelled, stepping forward. “I will give you three seconds to turn around and get the hell out of my sight. Three…” At first, the cultists stood as still as statues, simply staring. Finally, the leader sighed and turned away. He shook his head, reminding me of a disappointed parent.
“I tried to warn you,” he said in his thin, quavering voice. “The time has come to give the offering. You must cut out this man’s heart and raise it to Mowdoroth, so he can get the seeds of nightmares freshly sown. The choice is yours now, as you have demanded this power with violence. You can leave this man here to be eaten by Mowdoroth, or free him and, in exchange, guarantee the deaths of hundreds of other people.”
With those last words, the black-robed figures continued down the curve of the trail. Within seconds, they had disappeared behind dead, half-rotted trees that still dotted the edges of the boglands. X and I ran forward toward the struggling old man. X reached into his pocket and pulled out a folding knife. He cut off the old man’s gag, pulling the spit-soaked chunk of filthy cloth out of his mouth. The old man spat and licked his dry lips.
“Get me out of here, please,” he whispered, his eyes rolling wildly. “Those cult members are all batshit insane. And there’s something not right in these swamps. I caught glimpses of something while I was waiting. There’s something in the water…”
“What’s your name, bud?” X said calmingly, looking at the old man’s hands and feet to try to decide how to best get the nails out without causing more damage.
“Winchester,” he said in a coarse voice. It sounded like he hadn’t had a drink of water in days. While X looked at his hands with the LED flashlight, I reached into my pack for the small canteen of filtered water I still had. I started pouring it into Winchester’s mouth. He gulped greedily, his throat working hard to drink down the rest of it.
“I got it!” X said, taking a flat stone he had found on the ground. “I’m going to try to pound these nails out from the bottom.”
“Oh, please, no,” Winchester said, his wrinkled face turning pale. X shook his head.
“We need to get you out of here,” he said. “It’s going to hurt, bud. But we don’t have any tools here. The nails are large, almost like railroad spikes, and once we get the top part, the bottom should slide out easily since it’s a lot narrower.” As he grabbed the rock to begin his work, a bone-chilling wailing started up again from the swamps. It was the scream of Mowdoroth, that abomination with the skin of a wasp’s nest.
“Cover us!” X yelled panickedly as he continued his grisly work. Winchester screamed in pain when X first struck the nail on his right hand. It shot up a fraction of an inch, fresh blood pooling all around it and dripping through the bare planks.
I turned, but the banshee wail seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. The swamp bubbled faster and faster all around us, as if thousands of corpses were coming back to life. I heard Winchester scream again, then the dull thud of another nail hitting the earth.
A face peeked out of the swamp, only twenty feet away. Its eyes were green, the color of a putrefying wound. Its lipless mouth opened wide, showing a spongy black mass of skin with concentric circles of tiny, razor-sharp teeth. It reminded me of the mouth of a lamprey.
I opened fire, shooting wildly at the face, aiming at the body hidden under the dark surface of the swamp. Luminescent drops of green blood exploded from a bullet hole in its upper right shoulder, floating across the surface of the water like radioactive waste.
Its screaming cut off instantly. All I could hear was the pounding of the rock behind me and Winchester’s pained, horrified pleas for mercy.
“Please, you’re hurting me!” he pleaded.
“Shut the fuck up, Winchester!” I whispered. “It’s here with us now.” With considerable effort, he did, only moaning and violently jerking his head now as the waves of pain ripped through him.
“I got it!” X said suddenly. A feeling of elation filled my heart.
“Let’s go then!” I yelled, turning to help the old man up. I heard something massive rise up behind us. It mixed with the sound of dripping water and babbling waves that arose from the disturbance.
Winchester was weak, stumbling up to his feet and nearly falling over immediately. Staggering, he took off down the trail with no shoes, but he immediately gave a curse of pain and tripped. X and I started running, and at that moment, I realized the flaw in our plan. We wouldn’t be able to get Winchester out of the swamp without carrying him, due to the extensive injuries to his feet. And I knew we didn’t have time.
Mowdoroth’s body stood as tall as the trees as it looked down at the three of us with its strange, infected eyes. Its tentacles undulated faster and faster, seeming to whip around its body until they flew out towards us.
“Run!” I screamed. X and I sprinted behind a cluster of dead trees hugging the path. The blade-like hand of Mowdoroth chopped them in a half, raining wood splinters down on our heads.
Winchester continued trying to crawl forward. Mowdoroth slithered behind him. Winchester looked up as a tentacle started coming down in his direction. He gave a short, panicked scream as the blade smashed through his back legs, chopping both of them off at the knees. The ground shook with the force of it. The stumps began spurting seemingly endless amounts of blood. Winchester pleaded and made incomprehensible gurgling sounds as he bled out. Mowdoroth ended Winchester’s cries when it wrapped its tentacle around Winchester’s torso. It slithered up into Winchester’s open mouth.
X and I shot as fast as we could while running forward in the dark, trying to hold a flashlight and a pistol. Most of my shots missed Mowdoroth, but with a sense of satisfaction and pride, I saw a few burst through its enormous body. Streams of radioactive green blood ran down its torso now. As its serpentine legs pumped furiously, it gained speed, coming behind us like a runaway train. I could feel the ground shaking with every thud of its tentacled feet.
A few hundred feet ahead of us, I caught a glimpse of the cultists. They were hurrying away from the area, not running but moving much faster than they had come in. Nearly out of breath already and exhausted from hiking all day, I pointed forward.
“Look!” I screamed. X saw them, his eyes widening. We sprinted in a blind panic, as fast as we could towards the stragglers in the black robes. Without warning, X raised his pistol and fired, aiming at the nearest of them.
The figure in the back of the pack fell forward without making a sound. He continued trying to crawl forward weakly for a few moments before he lost energy and lay still, no more than a bleeding black hump on the dark earth.
X gave a sudden cry of pain next to me as a tentacle came down like a guillotine blade. I heard it whip through the air with a high-pitched whine. A single breath later, I watched in horror as it sliced off his right arm. X looked down at the spurting stump for a long moment, his tanned face turning as pale as bones. He stumbled forward, then, with a hoarse cry, he fell.
Following X’s lead, I raised my gun and started shooting the cultists. They sprinted away in a random panic as bodies fell ahead of us. I jumped over the black lumps on the ground, hearing Mowdoroth shake the world as it gave chase. A long, snake-like tentacle reached down, picking up X’s spurting body and raising it towards Mowdoroth’s leech-like mouth. The massive abomination slowed, picking up the bodies of the dead cultists and crushing them. I heard the bones shatter as the wet gore exploded around Mowdoroth’s many sharp teeth.
I saw the woods again, living trees just a few hundred feet away. The trail of black earth ended abruptly, leading out of the boglands. Cultists sprinted blindly through the forest in every direction, scattering like cockroaches. I had nearly reached the border of the forest when I heard something whizzing past my head. I ducked, but the blur of a grayish tentacle coming down sent a jolt of fear like electricity sizzling through my body.
A moment later, a cold agony covered my left hand. In shock, I looked down, realizing that the blade-like appendage of Mowdoroth had neatly amputated all four of my fingers. If I hadn’t ducked, it would’ve probably gotten my head instead.
Stumbling and screaming, my mind in a blind panic, I staggered through the intersection of the boglands and the forest, falling forward. I knew I was dead. I closed my eyes, waiting. Yet nothing happened.
When I looked back, I saw something strange. Mowdoroth had stopped at the end of the boglands. It tried to push its body forward towards me, but it couldn’t enter the forest. It was as if an invisible barrier stood there.
I lay there for a long time. After a while, I heard Mowdoroth slink back into the fetid waters of the boglands. And then I was alone.
***
I wrapped my hand in bandages as much as I could, trying to stem the bleeding. I felt weak and sick from blood loss, so I lay there until the sun came up. The next day, I was able to slowly make my way out of the forest and back towards the nearest town.
Now I hear stories of people mysteriously going missing in the area. An entire family in a nearby farmhouse only a couple dozen miles away disappeared in the middle of the night without a trace, leaving only smeared trails of blood leading into the forest. No one saw anything, but these six victims were only the first in a long line of strange deaths. Oddly enough, all of the victims lived next to swamps.
And I have the feeling that I was the one responsible.

I had been hiking down the Appalachian Trail for over two weeks without issue on the day when the nightmare began. My friend, X, was by my side the entire time. It was, quite honestly, comforting to have someone who stood nearly six-and-a-half feet tall with me, especially during the long, dark nights when the howling of coyotes drew near. Black bears, too, were a constant presence in these dark mountains. As we got farther from towns and civilization, more ancient predators than human beings took over the land, stalking the night like creeping shadows.
For this trip, we both had bought as few supplies as possible. Included in our packs were MREs, two sleeping bags, some tarps and hammocks, some light clothing, and two pistols with a few boxes of ammo. We didn’t want to be too weighed down that we wouldn’t be able to move fast, after all. We would source water from the streams, waterfalls and lakes along the way and filter it using Lifestraws.
As the spring breeze blew past us, cooling the sweat on my face, I noticed the trail ahead of us weaving its way through thick swampland. The buzzing of flies and mosquitoes increased with every step. The green, fetid waters of the swamp bubbled constantly, as if it were whispering secrets to us.
“Ah, shit,” X said, glancing down the hill with his dark, serious eyes. His tanned skin was covered in a thin sheen of sweat as he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Another swamp. I hate swamps. You know there’s going to be a million mosquitoes and flies down there.” I pulled out the map, squinting down at it. I ran my finger down the trail, seeing the mountains and valleys we had already passed.
“The trail shouldn’t be going through any swamps,” I said. “They’re supposed to be marked. There’s no ponds or anything around here.” And yet there very clearly was. Either we were in a different spot than I thought we were, or the map was outdated. The trail also grew thinner as we descended. The sharp branches of the bushes stuck out like greedy hands, grabbing at our backpacks and clothes as we pressed forward.
“Well, whatever,” X said gruffly, plowing ahead. Twigs cracked under his massive bulk. The thin branches hanging across the path snapped as he plowed forward. I let him go first, since he was significantly bigger than myself. It was like following in the path of a bull.
“The faster we move, the faster we’ll be through it. We don’t want to camp anywhere around here when it gets dark,” X continued, looking grim. “We’ll be eaten alive by bugs by sunrise. We need to make it to the other side of these boglands before we can stop for the night.”
“Yeah, and I could use some more water,” I said, shaking my mostly empty canteen. “I wouldn’t drink this shit no matter what we did to it. It probably has brain-eating parasites crawling in it.” I checked my watch, realizing that dusk was only a half hour away. We would have to move fast indeed, especially as we didn’t know the size of the swamp. I was not enthusiastic about hiking in the dark with the many steep trails and sharp rocks that covered the surrounding land. A single misstep could lead to a very long, bone-shattering fall.
To my increasing dismay, I realized that the trail we were on no longer had the characteristic white markings of the Appalachian Trail. I kept checking the trees for the past fifteen minutes, and I definitely hadn’t seen a single one. I couldn’t remember the last time we had passed one, but I had a creeping suspicion it had been at least a couple hours ago.
“I think we have a problem, man,” I whispered. “I don’t know how it possibly could have happened, but I think we’re on the wrong trail.”
“There’s not supposed to be any other trails around here,” X argued. “Check the map.”
“Then where’s the white blazes? There’s not supposed to be any boglands around here, either, yet we’re walking through the middle of one,” I said. He shook his head.
“Listen, Ben, there’s not going to be markers on the entire Appalachian Trail,” he said. “Just trust me. We’re on the right path. Sometimes forests change. Swamps take over spots where forests used to lay. Hell, the Sahara Desert has been expanding for thousands of years, just eating the forests and plains all around it. There used to be lions and savannah in Morocco, and now it’s all dead and dry.”
I felt doubtful, but I continued forwards, following closely behind X. Neither one of us had ever done the full Appalachian Trail, after all. I hoped he was right. I was not enthusiastic about backtracking two or three hours if he wasn’t.
I thought back closely on our travels during the last few hours, wondering where we could have gone wrong. The trail had been rather overgrown and rocky on the peak of the last mountain. There had been a beautiful view spanning hundreds of miles, looking far off into state forests and winding roads. I remembered seeing the white marker near the top, but after we had started descending, it disappeared. That must have been where we went wrong, if we did, indeed, go off-course. But I couldn’t be sure, and I didn’t tell X about my suspicions.
We finished descending a steep, rocky trail into a valley where the boglands really started. The trees ended in a massive semi-circle around the open swamp. Thick peat covered the entire surface of it like rotted, grayish-brown skin. I saw water snakes quietly disappearing into the stagnant water, leaving behind slowly expanding ripples.
“This is pretty cool,” I said, stopping for a moment at the bottom of the trail to admire the boglands. Our trail continued directly through the center of it, no more than a raised patch of black earth surrounded by green swampy water. I could hear the many insects chirping and flying before we even took a step forward. Though the spring air felt warm and I was covered in sweat, I still reached into my bag, taking out a windbreaker that would cover up my arms and neck to help with the bugs. X did the same.
“Let’s move fast,” he said, giving me a knowing look. He was a much faster hiker than myself. He seemed like a machine sometimes, tireless and single-minded. I had seen him hike over twenty miles in a single day without looking too bent out of shape. I gave him a faint half-smile, picking up my pace.
“You know what they used to say about the boglands?” I asked X. He shook his head.
“I don’t read books,” he said. “If I have time to sit down and read, then it means I have time to go out and do something actually fun. But I’m sure you know all about it.” I gave a short bark of laughter at his off-handed insult. It sounded far too loud echoing back to us through the creepy swamp. The last rays of sunlight were disappearing behind the mountains now. Soon, we would be plunged into darkness.
“Well, in ancient times, people thought the boglands a place where the walls of reality were thin, where the gods would come through. They used to bring their victims out to swamps during rituals, then they would slice their throats or strangle them and dump their bodies into the bogs as an offering to the gods. They also said that strange, shape-shifting creatures would appear, sometimes to deceive travelers, other times to help them,” I said. “But as for human sacrifices, the bogs preserve bodies like nothing else, except maybe tar pits. Archaeologists keep finding victims with slashed throats or shattered skulls buried underneath the peat.”
X was silent for a long moment as we continued walking along the raised patch of earth that formed the trail. We got farther and farther from the forests, until the swamp seemed like a fetid ocean, spanning out to the horizon in every direction.
“Do you think they used to do that kind of stuff around here?” X asked.
“Used to?” I exclaimed, laughing. “I’m sure some psychopaths still do. This is a good place to dump a body, after all. Who the hell wants to trek through the muck and the snakes and mosquitoes out here looking for corpses?”
“The FBI and the cops will do it,” he said, “if they think there’s something to find.” I was about to respond when an ear-splitting shriek echoed out all around us. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from at first. X’s tan skin seemed to go pale as he spun, glancing in every direction.
“What the fuck is that?!” he screamed over the deafening wailing. I didn’t believe in cryptids, but my anxious mind immediately offered up an image of a banshee, a woman with chalk-white skin and black eyes whose shrieking jaw unhinged like a snake’s.
“I’m turning around!” I yelled, pointing back for emphasis. “Dude, fuck this! We need to get out of this swamp!” But X was no longer listening. He was looking past me, his mouth open and his eyes wild. He started backpedaling and nearly fell into the swamp. Windmilling his arms crazily, he turned and sprinted away without a word.
I was afraid to look back. The screaming was getting louder by the second, shaking the air all around me in deafening, crashing waves of sound. I felt like my head would explode if it got any worse. Instinctively, I took off after X, but I glanced back for a single moment before I did. Something loomed there from a nightmare, standing as tall as the trees. It moved through the swamp like a snake, its body slithering through the stagnant green waters towards us. When it met my eyes, the screaming stopped. The abrupt silence seemed deafening. I could hear the fervent pounding of my heart in my ears.
The creature’s skin looked honeycombed and rough, almost like a wasp’s nest. The thousands of tiny holes covering its body constantly opened and closed like hungry mouths. Its arms were long tentacles ending in sharp points of bone in the shape of scythes. The tentacles undulated like serpents. Its legs, too, were no more than four tentacles that alternatively slithered and stepped forward.
Its flesh was the color of peat, a sickly grayish-brown, and the smell that emanated from it was rancid and stagnant, the essence of all boglands and swamps. I nearly gagged as I ran. The putrefying stench seemed to follow me like a shadow.
Ahead of me, X was fumbling in his backpack as he ran, trying to grab his pistol. I knew he had a Glock 21 in that bag, and I had my Sig Sauer in mine. I cursed myself for not keeping it holstered on my body, but I had never had to use it before and hadn’t seriously thought I would need it for this trip. He glanced back at me, his eyes widening in horror.
“It’s right behind you!” he yelled. “Get down!” He dropped his backpack, revealing the sleek, black pistol clenched tightly in his hand. I barely had time to comprehend his words when an immense pressure and numbness radiated through my back. My head snapped backwards as a meaty thud resonated all around me. I went flying forward, feeling as if I had been struck by a car. As I flew through the air, the pain in my back exploded in burning pulses. I felt the deep slice open up from the sharp blade of bone that had slashed me like a knife. I felt trickles of blood pour from the open wound, making my stained shirt cling to my body.
I landed hard on the raised black earth of the trail, a bone-jarring impact that knocked the air out of me. At that same moment, X opened fire, pressing the trigger over and over, emptying the magazine as fast as he could. Something splashed over me, going in my eyes and mouth and nose. I crawled forward, moaning, my head spinning. I wiped my forehead, seeing spatters of green blood squirming with dark, maggot-like creatures covering my arms and face. It clung to my fingers, thick and rancid. I felt stinging sensations as the tiny worms bit me over and over. My ears rang with a high-pitched whine from the gunshots.
X was running towards me now. I continued to crawl towards him, shell-shocked and whimpering, trying to wipe the eldritch blood off my skin. With a muscular arm, he reached down and pulled me up.
“Where’d it go?” I mumbled, stumbling forward on unsteady feet. X put an arm around my shoulders and helped support me.
“It slunk back into the swamp,” he said. “Jesus, you’re bleeding really bad, buddy. We’re going to need to take care of that as soon as we get away from this hellhole.” I felt the deep slices from the creature’s blade-like hands across my back. The fabric of my shirt clung tightly to the skin as fresh blood soaked it.
“This isn’t the trail, X,” I gasped. “We went the wrong way. We need to go back.” He nodded grimly.
“We’re heading back right now. I know it’s the wrong trail now, it definitely is, but it’s dark. The trails back up the mountains are steep and dangerous, and we’ve already been hiking all day. How much longer can we really go?” he asked. In reality, I had a feeling X could go for quite a bit longer. I was the weak link in the chain, and we both knew it.
X took out a small, LED flashlight from his backpack, shining it ahead of us on the dark path. Across the center of the black earth, there was an obstruction, something that hadn’t been there when we passed this way originally.
“Shit! Is that a person?” X said, slowing down. He focused the light on it. As my eyes adjusted, I gave a gasp of horror as I saw a rough sacrificial table looming there, waiting with a ready victim.
Laying on the bare wooden planks in the center of the trail was an elderly man wearing the garb of a hunter. He was gagged, a bloody rag shoved deep into his mouth. I felt a sense of revulsion and terror as I realized his hands and feet were nailed to the planks, as if he were being crucified laying down. His eyes rolled wildly, white and insane, like a horse with a broken leg. When he saw us approaching, he tried to say something through the gag, pulling hard against the nails that bit so viciously into his flesh. Fresh rivers of blood spurted from his wounds.
I had my pistol in my hands. X had taken a fresh magazine out by now, throwing the empty one back in his backpack. Trembling, he went first, his shaking hand moving the flashlight around wildly. Its bright rays bounced off the dead, half-rotted trees that grew out of the boglands, the clouds of mosquitoes and moths that circled us constantly.
“Oh my God... he's like the victim of a serial killer or something,” he whispered, running a trembling hand over his face. “It looks like someone has set that poor guy up to have his heart cut out, like some sort of Aztec ritual.” He glanced worriedly over at me. We had both stopped cold in our tracks, looking around for any sign of danger, but we only saw the old man writhing on his rough table of torture.
“We have to keep going forward,” I whispered. “That thing is behind us. I don’t think it’s dead. I’m not sure it can even die.”
“But what’s ahead of us?” he asked grimly. “That’s the real question, isn’t it?” Far off down the trail, I saw small pinpoints of flickering light. They drew closer. We raised our pistols, waiting for the new arrivals to show themselves.
Dozens of people dressed in black, silky robes holding lamps slowly ambled their way towards us. They had their heads bowed, like monks on a holy pilgrimage. They drew close to the sacrifice. The one in the lead held a long, curving dagger whose blade looked like it was made of some kind of red volcanic rock. Its strange silver handle glittered in his pale, thin hand. At the end, I saw it was sculpted into the shape of a human heart.
“Stop right there!” X screamed, stepping forward. “Don’t come any closer! We are armed, I’m warning you.” The people in the black robes didn’t appear to hear or care in the slightest. They continued slowly following their leader with the strange dagger, almost floating forward in a nonchalant manner. Their leader began chanting in some strange, ancient language. It reminded me of Tibetan or Sanskrit in a way, like the chanting of some Vajrayana monk high up in the Himalayas. But it had a sinister, hissing quality to the words. Something ancient and powerful resonated in every syllable.
I raised the pistol, firing blankly into the dark, cloudless sky above. The smell of gunsmoke and fetid rot hung thick in the air. The leader of the group looked at me with his large, glassy eyes. His face looked sunken and pale, almost like a starving child. He had shaved all of the hair on his head, even his eyebrows. His lips were extremely thin and bloodless in his chalk-white face.
For a long moment, we stood staring at each other, my pistol aimed at his chest. X also had his pistol raised, aimed at one of those standing behind him. But the robed man didn’t speak. He gave me a faint grin.
“Let the old man go,” I commanded, my voice sounding hoarse and weak. The swamp quickly swallowed up my words, until only the buzzing of mosquitoes remained.
“I am sorry, my son, but I cannot do that,” the leader said in a voice as cold as endless space. “If we do not feed Mowdoroth, it will never sleep. The swamps will continue to expand, eating more and more of the surrounding forests and towns, and Mowdoroth, driven insane by hunger, will take far more victims in the process.
“This job has been passed down to us from generation to generation, from big hand to small, for over four centuries. Only twice has Mowdoroth not been fed on the New Moon, and each time, entire settlements full of people were wiped off the face of the Earth as if they had never existed. On one, they just had time to carve the word ‘CROATAN’ before they were taken.
“Mowdoroth looks for the place where the nightmares grow. It breaks open the chest and finds the place where the silent screams start, deep down at the base of the heart. All of the nightmares are planted there, like tiny seeds scattered during childhood. Those that fell on good soil in that abyss produced a great crop, yielding a hundredfold, sixtyfold, or thirtyfold. If you do not allow us to complete our holy mission, then you do it: cut open the man's chest and remove his beating heart. As it beats, squeeze it as hard as you can, and let all the blood drain onto the top of your head. Hold the heart above your head and close your eyes until the god appears and takes it.” The cult leader finished, looking at us with sparkling eyes, as if he had said something profound.
“This shit is just insane drivel,” X whispered in a voice as low as possible. “I say we open fire and save the old man now. Fuck these cultists.” I nodded grimly in agreement.
“You need to all turn around and leave immediately,” X yelled, stepping forward. “I will give you three seconds to turn around and get the hell out of my sight. Three…” At first, the cultists stood as still as statues, simply staring. Finally, the leader sighed and turned away. He shook his head, reminding me of a disappointed parent.
“I tried to warn you,” he said in his thin, quavering voice. “The time has come to give the offering. You must cut out this man’s heart and raise it to Mowdoroth, so he can get the seeds of nightmares freshly sown. The choice is yours now, as you have demanded this power with violence. You can leave this man here to be eaten by Mowdoroth, or free him and, in exchange, guarantee the deaths of hundreds of other people.”
With those last words, the black-robed figures continued down the curve of the trail. Within seconds, they had disappeared behind dead, half-rotted trees that still dotted the edges of the boglands. X and I ran forward toward the struggling old man. X reached into his pocket and pulled out a folding knife. He cut off the old man’s gag, pulling the spit-soaked chunk of filthy cloth out of his mouth. The old man spat and licked his dry lips.
“Get me out of here, please,” he whispered, his eyes rolling wildly. “Those cult members are all batshit insane. And there’s something not right in these swamps. I caught glimpses of something while I was waiting. There’s something in the water…”
“What’s your name, bud?” X said calmingly, looking at the old man’s hands and feet to try to decide how to best get the nails out without causing more damage.
“Winchester,” he said in a coarse voice. It sounded like he hadn’t had a drink of water in days. While X looked at his hands with the LED flashlight, I reached into my pack for the small canteen of filtered water I still had. I started pouring it into Winchester’s mouth. He gulped greedily, his throat working hard to drink down the rest of it.
“I got it!” X said, taking a flat stone he had found on the ground. “I’m going to try to pound these nails out from the bottom.”
“Oh, please, no,” Winchester said, his wrinkled face turning pale. X shook his head.
“We need to get you out of here,” he said. “It’s going to hurt, bud. But we don’t have any tools here. The nails are large, almost like railroad spikes, and once we get the top part, the bottom should slide out easily since it’s a lot narrower.” As he grabbed the rock to begin his work, a bone-chilling wailing started up again from the swamps. It was the scream of Mowdoroth, that abomination with the skin of a wasp’s nest.
“Cover us!” X yelled panickedly as he continued his grisly work. Winchester screamed in pain when X first struck the nail on his right hand. It shot up a fraction of an inch, fresh blood pooling all around it and dripping through the bare planks.
I turned, but the banshee wail seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. The swamp bubbled faster and faster all around us, as if thousands of corpses were coming back to life. I heard Winchester scream again, then the dull thud of another nail hitting the earth.
A face peeked out of the swamp, only twenty feet away. Its eyes were green, the color of a putrefying wound. Its lipless mouth opened wide, showing a spongy black mass of skin with concentric circles of tiny, razor-sharp teeth. It reminded me of the mouth of a lamprey.
I opened fire, shooting wildly at the face, aiming at the body hidden under the dark surface of the swamp. Luminescent drops of green blood exploded from a bullet hole in its upper right shoulder, floating across the surface of the water like radioactive waste.
Its screaming cut off instantly. All I could hear was the pounding of the rock behind me and Winchester’s pained, horrified pleas for mercy.
“Please, you’re hurting me!” he pleaded.
“Shut the fuck up, Winchester!” I whispered. “It’s here with us now.” With considerable effort, he did, only moaning and violently jerking his head now as the waves of pain ripped through him.
“I got it!” X said suddenly. A feeling of elation filled my heart.
“Let’s go then!” I yelled, turning to help the old man up. I heard something massive rise up behind us. It mixed with the sound of dripping water and babbling waves that arose from the disturbance.
Winchester was weak, stumbling up to his feet and nearly falling over immediately. Staggering, he took off down the trail with no shoes, but he immediately gave a curse of pain and tripped. X and I started running, and at that moment, I realized the flaw in our plan. We wouldn’t be able to get Winchester out of the swamp without carrying him, due to the extensive injuries to his feet. And I knew we didn’t have time.
Mowdoroth’s body stood as tall as the trees as it looked down at the three of us with its strange, infected eyes. Its tentacles undulated faster and faster, seeming to whip around its body until they flew out towards us.
“Run!” I screamed. X and I sprinted behind a cluster of dead trees hugging the path. The blade-like hand of Mowdoroth chopped them in a half, raining wood splinters down on our heads.
Winchester continued trying to crawl forward. Mowdoroth slithered behind him. Winchester looked up as a tentacle started coming down in his direction. He gave a short, panicked scream as the blade smashed through his back legs, chopping both of them off at the knees. The ground shook with the force of it. The stumps began spurting seemingly endless amounts of blood. Winchester pleaded and made incomprehensible gurgling sounds as he bled out. Mowdoroth ended Winchester’s cries when it wrapped its tentacle around Winchester’s torso. It slithered up into Winchester’s open mouth.
X and I shot as fast as we could while running forward in the dark, trying to hold a flashlight and a pistol. Most of my shots missed Mowdoroth, but with a sense of satisfaction and pride, I saw a few burst through its enormous body. Streams of radioactive green blood ran down its torso now. As its serpentine legs pumped furiously, it gained speed, coming behind us like a runaway train. I could feel the ground shaking with every thud of its tentacled feet.
A few hundred feet ahead of us, I caught a glimpse of the cultists. They were hurrying away from the area, not running but moving much faster than they had come in. Nearly out of breath already and exhausted from hiking all day, I pointed forward.
“Look!” I screamed. X saw them, his eyes widening. We sprinted in a blind panic, as fast as we could towards the stragglers in the black robes. Without warning, X raised his pistol and fired, aiming at the nearest of them.
The figure in the back of the pack fell forward without making a sound. He continued trying to crawl forward weakly for a few moments before he lost energy and lay still, no more than a bleeding black hump on the dark earth.
X gave a sudden cry of pain next to me as a tentacle came down like a guillotine blade. I heard it whip through the air with a high-pitched whine. A single breath later, I watched in horror as it sliced off his right arm. X looked down at the spurting stump for a long moment, his tanned face turning as pale as bones. He stumbled forward, then, with a hoarse cry, he fell.
Following X’s lead, I raised my gun and started shooting the cultists. They sprinted away in a random panic as bodies fell ahead of us. I jumped over the black lumps on the ground, hearing Mowdoroth shake the world as it gave chase. A long, snake-like tentacle reached down, picking up X’s spurting body and raising it towards Mowdoroth’s leech-like mouth. The massive abomination slowed, picking up the bodies of the dead cultists and crushing them. I heard the bones shatter as the wet gore exploded around Mowdoroth’s many sharp teeth.
I saw the woods again, living trees just a few hundred feet away. The trail of black earth ended abruptly, leading out of the boglands. Cultists sprinted blindly through the forest in every direction, scattering like cockroaches. I had nearly reached the border of the forest when I heard something whizzing past my head. I ducked, but the blur of a grayish tentacle coming down sent a jolt of fear like electricity sizzling through my body.
A moment later, a cold agony covered my left hand. In shock, I looked down, realizing that the blade-like appendage of Mowdoroth had neatly amputated all four of my fingers. If I hadn’t ducked, it would’ve probably gotten my head instead.
Stumbling and screaming, my mind in a blind panic, I staggered through the intersection of the boglands and the forest, falling forward. I knew I was dead. I closed my eyes, waiting. Yet nothing happened.
When I looked back, I saw something strange. Mowdoroth had stopped at the end of the boglands. It tried to push its body forward towards me, but it couldn’t enter the forest. It was as if an invisible barrier stood there.
I lay there for a long time. After a while, I heard Mowdoroth slink back into the fetid waters of the boglands. And then I was alone.
***
I wrapped my hand in bandages as much as I could, trying to stem the bleeding. I felt weak and sick from blood loss, so I lay there until the sun came up. The next day, I was able to slowly make my way out of the forest and back towards the nearest town.
Now I hear stories of people mysteriously going missing in the area. An entire family in a nearby farmhouse only a couple dozen miles away disappeared in the middle of the night without a trace, leaving only smeared trails of blood leading into the forest. No one saw anything, but these six victims were only the first in a long line of strange deaths. Oddly enough, all of the victims lived next to swamps.
And I have the feeling that I was the one responsible.

I had been hiking down the Appalachian Trail for over two weeks without issue on the day when the nightmare began. My friend, X, was by my side the entire time. It was, quite honestly, comforting to have someone who stood nearly six-and-a-half feet tall with me, especially during the long, dark nights when the howling of coyotes drew near. Black bears, too, were a constant presence in these dark mountains. As we got farther from towns and civilization, more ancient predators than human beings took over the land, stalking the night like creeping shadows.
For this trip, we both had bought as few supplies as possible. Included in our packs were MREs, two sleeping bags, some tarps and hammocks, some light clothing, and two pistols with a few boxes of ammo. We didn’t want to be too weighed down that we wouldn’t be able to move fast, after all. We would source water from the streams, waterfalls and lakes along the way and filter it using Lifestraws.
As the spring breeze blew past us, cooling the sweat on my face, I noticed the trail ahead of us weaving its way through thick swampland. The buzzing of flies and mosquitoes increased with every step. The green, fetid waters of the swamp bubbled constantly, as if it were whispering secrets to us.
“Ah, shit,” X said, glancing down the hill with his dark, serious eyes. His tanned skin was covered in a thin sheen of sweat as he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Another swamp. I hate swamps. You know there’s going to be a million mosquitoes and flies down there.” I pulled out the map, squinting down at it. I ran my finger down the trail, seeing the mountains and valleys we had already passed.
“The trail shouldn’t be going through any swamps,” I said. “They’re supposed to be marked. There’s no ponds or anything around here.” And yet there very clearly was. Either we were in a different spot than I thought we were, or the map was outdated. The trail also grew thinner as we descended. The sharp branches of the bushes stuck out like greedy hands, grabbing at our backpacks and clothes as we pressed forward.
“Well, whatever,” X said gruffly, plowing ahead. Twigs cracked under his massive bulk. The thin branches hanging across the path snapped as he plowed forward. I let him go first, since he was significantly bigger than myself. It was like following in the path of a bull.
“The faster we move, the faster we’ll be through it. We don’t want to camp anywhere around here when it gets dark,” X continued, looking grim. “We’ll be eaten alive by bugs by sunrise. We need to make it to the other side of these boglands before we can stop for the night.”
“Yeah, and I could use some more water,” I said, shaking my mostly empty canteen. “I wouldn’t drink this shit no matter what we did to it. It probably has brain-eating parasites crawling in it.” I checked my watch, realizing that dusk was only a half hour away. We would have to move fast indeed, especially as we didn’t know the size of the swamp. I was not enthusiastic about hiking in the dark with the many steep trails and sharp rocks that covered the surrounding land. A single misstep could lead to a very long, bone-shattering fall.
To my increasing dismay, I realized that the trail we were on no longer had the characteristic white markings of the Appalachian Trail. I kept checking the trees for the past fifteen minutes, and I definitely hadn’t seen a single one. I couldn’t remember the last time we had passed one, but I had a creeping suspicion it had been at least a couple hours ago.
“I think we have a problem, man,” I whispered. “I don’t know how it possibly could have happened, but I think we’re on the wrong trail.”
“There’s not supposed to be any other trails around here,” X argued. “Check the map.”
“Then where’s the white blazes? There’s not supposed to be any boglands around here, either, yet we’re walking through the middle of one,” I said. He shook his head.
“Listen, Ben, there’s not going to be markers on the entire Appalachian Trail,” he said. “Just trust me. We’re on the right path. Sometimes forests change. Swamps take over spots where forests used to lay. Hell, the Sahara Desert has been expanding for thousands of years, just eating the forests and plains all around it. There used to be lions and savannah in Morocco, and now it’s all dead and dry.”
I felt doubtful, but I continued forwards, following closely behind X. Neither one of us had ever done the full Appalachian Trail, after all. I hoped he was right. I was not enthusiastic about backtracking two or three hours if he wasn’t.
I thought back closely on our travels during the last few hours, wondering where we could have gone wrong. The trail had been rather overgrown and rocky on the peak of the last mountain. There had been a beautiful view spanning hundreds of miles, looking far off into state forests and winding roads. I remembered seeing the white marker near the top, but after we had started descending, it disappeared. That must have been where we went wrong, if we did, indeed, go off-course. But I couldn’t be sure, and I didn’t tell X about my suspicions.
We finished descending a steep, rocky trail into a valley where the boglands really started. The trees ended in a massive semi-circle around the open swamp. Thick peat covered the entire surface of it like rotted, grayish-brown skin. I saw water snakes quietly disappearing into the stagnant water, leaving behind slowly expanding ripples.
“This is pretty cool,” I said, stopping for a moment at the bottom of the trail to admire the boglands. Our trail continued directly through the center of it, no more than a raised patch of black earth surrounded by green swampy water. I could hear the many insects chirping and flying before we even took a step forward. Though the spring air felt warm and I was covered in sweat, I still reached into my bag, taking out a windbreaker that would cover up my arms and neck to help with the bugs. X did the same.
“Let’s move fast,” he said, giving me a knowing look. He was a much faster hiker than myself. He seemed like a machine sometimes, tireless and single-minded. I had seen him hike over twenty miles in a single day without looking too bent out of shape. I gave him a faint half-smile, picking up my pace.
“You know what they used to say about the boglands?” I asked X. He shook his head.
“I don’t read books,” he said. “If I have time to sit down and read, then it means I have time to go out and do something actually fun. But I’m sure you know all about it.” I gave a short bark of laughter at his off-handed insult. It sounded far too loud echoing back to us through the creepy swamp. The last rays of sunlight were disappearing behind the mountains now. Soon, we would be plunged into darkness.
“Well, in ancient times, people thought the boglands a place where the walls of reality were thin, where the gods would come through. They used to bring their victims out to swamps during rituals, then they would slice their throats or strangle them and dump their bodies into the bogs as an offering to the gods. They also said that strange, shape-shifting creatures would appear, sometimes to deceive travelers, other times to help them,” I said. “But as for human sacrifices, the bogs preserve bodies like nothing else, except maybe tar pits. Archaeologists keep finding victims with slashed throats or shattered skulls buried underneath the peat.”
X was silent for a long moment as we continued walking along the raised patch of earth that formed the trail. We got farther and farther from the forests, until the swamp seemed like a fetid ocean, spanning out to the horizon in every direction.
“Do you think they used to do that kind of stuff around here?” X asked.
“Used to?” I exclaimed, laughing. “I’m sure some psychopaths still do. This is a good place to dump a body, after all. Who the hell wants to trek through the muck and the snakes and mosquitoes out here looking for corpses?”
“The FBI and the cops will do it,” he said, “if they think there’s something to find.” I was about to respond when an ear-splitting shriek echoed out all around us. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from at first. X’s tan skin seemed to go pale as he spun, glancing in every direction.
“What the fuck is that?!” he screamed over the deafening wailing. I didn’t believe in cryptids, but my anxious mind immediately offered up an image of a banshee, a woman with chalk-white skin and black eyes whose shrieking jaw unhinged like a snake’s.
“I’m turning around!” I yelled, pointing back for emphasis. “Dude, fuck this! We need to get out of this swamp!” But X was no longer listening. He was looking past me, his mouth open and his eyes wild. He started backpedaling and nearly fell into the swamp. Windmilling his arms crazily, he turned and sprinted away without a word.
I was afraid to look back. The screaming was getting louder by the second, shaking the air all around me in deafening, crashing waves of sound. I felt like my head would explode if it got any worse. Instinctively, I took off after X, but I glanced back for a single moment before I did. Something loomed there from a nightmare, standing as tall as the trees. It moved through the swamp like a snake, its body slithering through the stagnant green waters towards us. When it met my eyes, the screaming stopped. The abrupt silence seemed deafening. I could hear the fervent pounding of my heart in my ears.
The creature’s skin looked honeycombed and rough, almost like a wasp’s nest. The thousands of tiny holes covering its body constantly opened and closed like hungry mouths. Its arms were long tentacles ending in sharp points of bone in the shape of scythes. The tentacles undulated like serpents. Its legs, too, were no more than four tentacles that alternatively slithered and stepped forward.
Its flesh was the color of peat, a sickly grayish-brown, and the smell that emanated from it was rancid and stagnant, the essence of all boglands and swamps. I nearly gagged as I ran. The putrefying stench seemed to follow me like a shadow.
Ahead of me, X was fumbling in his backpack as he ran, trying to grab his pistol. I knew he had a Glock 21 in that bag, and I had my Sig Sauer in mine. I cursed myself for not keeping it holstered on my body, but I had never had to use it before and hadn’t seriously thought I would need it for this trip. He glanced back at me, his eyes widening in horror.
“It’s right behind you!” he yelled. “Get down!” He dropped his backpack, revealing the sleek, black pistol clenched tightly in his hand. I barely had time to comprehend his words when an immense pressure and numbness radiated through my back. My head snapped backwards as a meaty thud resonated all around me. I went flying forward, feeling as if I had been struck by a car. As I flew through the air, the pain in my back exploded in burning pulses. I felt the deep slice open up from the sharp blade of bone that had slashed me like a knife. I felt trickles of blood pour from the open wound, making my stained shirt cling to my body.
I landed hard on the raised black earth of the trail, a bone-jarring impact that knocked the air out of me. At that same moment, X opened fire, pressing the trigger over and over, emptying the magazine as fast as he could. Something splashed over me, going in my eyes and mouth and nose. I crawled forward, moaning, my head spinning. I wiped my forehead, seeing spatters of green blood squirming with dark, maggot-like creatures covering my arms and face. It clung to my fingers, thick and rancid. I felt stinging sensations as the tiny worms bit me over and over. My ears rang with a high-pitched whine from the gunshots.
X was running towards me now. I continued to crawl towards him, shell-shocked and whimpering, trying to wipe the eldritch blood off my skin. With a muscular arm, he reached down and pulled me up.
“Where’d it go?” I mumbled, stumbling forward on unsteady feet. X put an arm around my shoulders and helped support me.
“It slunk back into the swamp,” he said. “Jesus, you’re bleeding really bad, buddy. We’re going to need to take care of that as soon as we get away from this hellhole.” I felt the deep slices from the creature’s blade-like hands across my back. The fabric of my shirt clung tightly to the skin as fresh blood soaked it.
“This isn’t the trail, X,” I gasped. “We went the wrong way. We need to go back.” He nodded grimly.
“We’re heading back right now. I know it’s the wrong trail now, it definitely is, but it’s dark. The trails back up the mountains are steep and dangerous, and we’ve already been hiking all day. How much longer can we really go?” he asked. In reality, I had a feeling X could go for quite a bit longer. I was the weak link in the chain, and we both knew it.
X took out a small, LED flashlight from his backpack, shining it ahead of us on the dark path. Across the center of the black earth, there was an obstruction, something that hadn’t been there when we passed this way originally.
“Shit! Is that a person?” X said, slowing down. He focused the light on it. As my eyes adjusted, I gave a gasp of horror as I saw a rough sacrificial table looming there, waiting with a ready victim.
Laying on the bare wooden planks in the center of the trail was an elderly man wearing the garb of a hunter. He was gagged, a bloody rag shoved deep into his mouth. I felt a sense of revulsion and terror as I realized his hands and feet were nailed to the planks, as if he were being crucified laying down. His eyes rolled wildly, white and insane, like a horse with a broken leg. When he saw us approaching, he tried to say something through the gag, pulling hard against the nails that bit so viciously into his flesh. Fresh rivers of blood spurted from his wounds.
I had my pistol in my hands. X had taken a fresh magazine out by now, throwing the empty one back in his backpack. Trembling, he went first, his shaking hand moving the flashlight around wildly. Its bright rays bounced off the dead, half-rotted trees that grew out of the boglands, the clouds of mosquitoes and moths that circled us constantly.
“Oh my God... he's like the victim of a serial killer or something,” he whispered, running a trembling hand over his face. “It looks like someone has set that poor guy up to have his heart cut out, like some sort of Aztec ritual.” He glanced worriedly over at me. We had both stopped cold in our tracks, looking around for any sign of danger, but we only saw the old man writhing on his rough table of torture.
“We have to keep going forward,” I whispered. “That thing is behind us. I don’t think it’s dead. I’m not sure it can even die.”
“But what’s ahead of us?” he asked grimly. “That’s the real question, isn’t it?” Far off down the trail, I saw small pinpoints of flickering light. They drew closer. We raised our pistols, waiting for the new arrivals to show themselves.
Dozens of people dressed in black, silky robes holding lamps slowly ambled their way towards us. They had their heads bowed, like monks on a holy pilgrimage. They drew close to the sacrifice. The one in the lead held a long, curving dagger whose blade looked like it was made of some kind of red volcanic rock. Its strange silver handle glittered in his pale, thin hand. At the end, I saw it was sculpted into the shape of a human heart.
“Stop right there!” X screamed, stepping forward. “Don’t come any closer! We are armed, I’m warning you.” The people in the black robes didn’t appear to hear or care in the slightest. They continued slowly following their leader with the strange dagger, almost floating forward in a nonchalant manner. Their leader began chanting in some strange, ancient language. It reminded me of Tibetan or Sanskrit in a way, like the chanting of some Vajrayana monk high up in the Himalayas. But it had a sinister, hissing quality to the words. Something ancient and powerful resonated in every syllable.
I raised the pistol, firing blankly into the dark, cloudless sky above. The smell of gunsmoke and fetid rot hung thick in the air. The leader of the group looked at me with his large, glassy eyes. His face looked sunken and pale, almost like a starving child. He had shaved all of the hair on his head, even his eyebrows. His lips were extremely thin and bloodless in his chalk-white face.
For a long moment, we stood staring at each other, my pistol aimed at his chest. X also had his pistol raised, aimed at one of those standing behind him. But the robed man didn’t speak. He gave me a faint grin.
“Let the old man go,” I commanded, my voice sounding hoarse and weak. The swamp quickly swallowed up my words, until only the buzzing of mosquitoes remained.
“I am sorry, my son, but I cannot do that,” the leader said in a voice as cold as endless space. “If we do not feed Mowdoroth, it will never sleep. The swamps will continue to expand, eating more and more of the surrounding forests and towns, and Mowdoroth, driven insane by hunger, will take far more victims in the process.
“This job has been passed down to us from generation to generation, from big hand to small, for over four centuries. Only twice has Mowdoroth not been fed on the New Moon, and each time, entire settlements full of people were wiped off the face of the Earth as if they had never existed. On one, they just had time to carve the word ‘CROATAN’ before they were taken.
“Mowdoroth looks for the place where the nightmares grow. It breaks open the chest and finds the place where the silent screams start, deep down at the base of the heart. All of the nightmares are planted there, like tiny seeds scattered during childhood. Those that fell on good soil in that abyss produced a great crop, yielding a hundredfold, sixtyfold, or thirtyfold. If you do not allow us to complete our holy mission, then you do it: cut open the man's chest and remove his beating heart. As it beats, squeeze it as hard as you can, and let all the blood drain onto the top of your head. Hold the heart above your head and close your eyes until the god appears and takes it.” The cult leader finished, looking at us with sparkling eyes, as if he had said something profound.
“This shit is just insane drivel,” X whispered in a voice as low as possible. “I say we open fire and save the old man now. Fuck these cultists.” I nodded grimly in agreement.
“You need to all turn around and leave immediately,” X yelled, stepping forward. “I will give you three seconds to turn around and get the hell out of my sight. Three…” At first, the cultists stood as still as statues, simply staring. Finally, the leader sighed and turned away. He shook his head, reminding me of a disappointed parent.
“I tried to warn you,” he said in his thin, quavering voice. “The time has come to give the offering. You must cut out this man’s heart and raise it to Mowdoroth, so he can get the seeds of nightmares freshly sown. The choice is yours now, as you have demanded this power with violence. You can leave this man here to be eaten by Mowdoroth, or free him and, in exchange, guarantee the deaths of hundreds of other people.”
With those last words, the black-robed figures continued down the curve of the trail. Within seconds, they had disappeared behind dead, half-rotted trees that still dotted the edges of the boglands. X and I ran forward toward the struggling old man. X reached into his pocket and pulled out a folding knife. He cut off the old man’s gag, pulling the spit-soaked chunk of filthy cloth out of his mouth. The old man spat and licked his dry lips.
“Get me out of here, please,” he whispered, his eyes rolling wildly. “Those cult members are all batshit insane. And there’s something not right in these swamps. I caught glimpses of something while I was waiting. There’s something in the water…”
“What’s your name, bud?” X said calmingly, looking at the old man’s hands and feet to try to decide how to best get the nails out without causing more damage.
“Winchester,” he said in a coarse voice. It sounded like he hadn’t had a drink of water in days. While X looked at his hands with the LED flashlight, I reached into my pack for the small canteen of filtered water I still had. I started pouring it into Winchester’s mouth. He gulped greedily, his throat working hard to drink down the rest of it.
“I got it!” X said, taking a flat stone he had found on the ground. “I’m going to try to pound these nails out from the bottom.”
“Oh, please, no,” Winchester said, his wrinkled face turning pale. X shook his head.
“We need to get you out of here,” he said. “It’s going to hurt, bud. But we don’t have any tools here. The nails are large, almost like railroad spikes, and once we get the top part, the bottom should slide out easily since it’s a lot narrower.” As he grabbed the rock to begin his work, a bone-chilling wailing started up again from the swamps. It was the scream of Mowdoroth, that abomination with the skin of a wasp’s nest.
“Cover us!” X yelled panickedly as he continued his grisly work. Winchester screamed in pain when X first struck the nail on his right hand. It shot up a fraction of an inch, fresh blood pooling all around it and dripping through the bare planks.
I turned, but the banshee wail seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. The swamp bubbled faster and faster all around us, as if thousands of corpses were coming back to life. I heard Winchester scream again, then the dull thud of another nail hitting the earth.
A face peeked out of the swamp, only twenty feet away. Its eyes were green, the color of a putrefying wound. Its lipless mouth opened wide, showing a spongy black mass of skin with concentric circles of tiny, razor-sharp teeth. It reminded me of the mouth of a lamprey.
I opened fire, shooting wildly at the face, aiming at the body hidden under the dark surface of the swamp. Luminescent drops of green blood exploded from a bullet hole in its upper right shoulder, floating across the surface of the water like radioactive waste.
Its screaming cut off instantly. All I could hear was the pounding of the rock behind me and Winchester’s pained, horrified pleas for mercy.
“Please, you’re hurting me!” he pleaded.
“Shut the fuck up, Winchester!” I whispered. “It’s here with us now.” With considerable effort, he did, only moaning and violently jerking his head now as the waves of pain ripped through him.
“I got it!” X said suddenly. A feeling of elation filled my heart.
“Let’s go then!” I yelled, turning to help the old man up. I heard something massive rise up behind us. It mixed with the sound of dripping water and babbling waves that arose from the disturbance.
Winchester was weak, stumbling up to his feet and nearly falling over immediately. Staggering, he took off down the trail with no shoes, but he immediately gave a curse of pain and tripped. X and I started running, and at that moment, I realized the flaw in our plan. We wouldn’t be able to get Winchester out of the swamp without carrying him, due to the extensive injuries to his feet. And I knew we didn’t have time.
Mowdoroth’s body stood as tall as the trees as it looked down at the three of us with its strange, infected eyes. Its tentacles undulated faster and faster, seeming to whip around its body until they flew out towards us.
“Run!” I screamed. X and I sprinted behind a cluster of dead trees hugging the path. The blade-like hand of Mowdoroth chopped them in a half, raining wood splinters down on our heads.
Winchester continued trying to crawl forward. Mowdoroth slithered behind him. Winchester looked up as a tentacle started coming down in his direction. He gave a short, panicked scream as the blade smashed through his back legs, chopping both of them off at the knees. The ground shook with the force of it. The stumps began spurting seemingly endless amounts of blood. Winchester pleaded and made incomprehensible gurgling sounds as he bled out. Mowdoroth ended Winchester’s cries when it wrapped its tentacle around Winchester’s torso. It slithered up into Winchester’s open mouth.
X and I shot as fast as we could while running forward in the dark, trying to hold a flashlight and a pistol. Most of my shots missed Mowdoroth, but with a sense of satisfaction and pride, I saw a few burst through its enormous body. Streams of radioactive green blood ran down its torso now. As its serpentine legs pumped furiously, it gained speed, coming behind us like a runaway train. I could feel the ground shaking with every thud of its tentacled feet.
A few hundred feet ahead of us, I caught a glimpse of the cultists. They were hurrying away from the area, not running but moving much faster than they had come in. Nearly out of breath already and exhausted from hiking all day, I pointed forward.
“Look!” I screamed. X saw them, his eyes widening. We sprinted in a blind panic, as fast as we could towards the stragglers in the black robes. Without warning, X raised his pistol and fired, aiming at the nearest of them.
The figure in the back of the pack fell forward without making a sound. He continued trying to crawl forward weakly for a few moments before he lost energy and lay still, no more than a bleeding black hump on the dark earth.
X gave a sudden cry of pain next to me as a tentacle came down like a guillotine blade. I heard it whip through the air with a high-pitched whine. A single breath later, I watched in horror as it sliced off his right arm. X looked down at the spurting stump for a long moment, his tanned face turning as pale as bones. He stumbled forward, then, with a hoarse cry, he fell.
Following X’s lead, I raised my gun and started shooting the cultists. They sprinted away in a random panic as bodies fell ahead of us. I jumped over the black lumps on the ground, hearing Mowdoroth shake the world as it gave chase. A long, snake-like tentacle reached down, picking up X’s spurting body and raising it towards Mowdoroth’s leech-like mouth. The massive abomination slowed, picking up the bodies of the dead cultists and crushing them. I heard the bones shatter as the wet gore exploded around Mowdoroth’s many sharp teeth.
I saw the woods again, living trees just a few hundred feet away. The trail of black earth ended abruptly, leading out of the boglands. Cultists sprinted blindly through the forest in every direction, scattering like cockroaches. I had nearly reached the border of the forest when I heard something whizzing past my head. I ducked, but the blur of a grayish tentacle coming down sent a jolt of fear like electricity sizzling through my body.
A moment later, a cold agony covered my left hand. In shock, I looked down, realizing that the blade-like appendage of Mowdoroth had neatly amputated all four of my fingers. If I hadn’t ducked, it would’ve probably gotten my head instead.
Stumbling and screaming, my mind in a blind panic, I staggered through the intersection of the boglands and the forest, falling forward. I knew I was dead. I closed my eyes, waiting. Yet nothing happened.
When I looked back, I saw something strange. Mowdoroth had stopped at the end of the boglands. It tried to push its body forward towards me, but it couldn’t enter the forest. It was as if an invisible barrier stood there.
I lay there for a long time. After a while, I heard Mowdoroth slink back into the fetid waters of the boglands. And then I was alone.
***
I wrapped my hand in bandages as much as I could, trying to stem the bleeding. I felt weak and sick from blood loss, so I lay there until the sun came up. The next day, I was able to slowly make my way out of the forest and back towards the nearest town.
Now I hear stories of people mysteriously going missing in the area. An entire family in a nearby farmhouse only a couple dozen miles away disappeared in the middle of the night without a trace, leaving only smeared trails of blood leading into the forest. No one saw anything, but these six victims were only the first in a long line of strange deaths. Oddly enough, all of the victims lived next to swamps.
And I have the feeling that I was the one responsible.

I am trying to 3d print a topographic map and am having a heck of a time figuring out how to do it. I am currently trying to get data into Blender and take it from there, but nothing I have tried has worked. I've spent all afternoon reading tutorials and watching 8-year-old YouTube videos with no luck. My issue is the area I am trying to print is not a square, it's rather oddly shaped.
Any suggestions? I'm totally at a loss here.

I am getting back in to Blender after a 6 year hiatus. That being said, I wasn't a pro back then and I don't remember much.
Anyway, what I am looking to do is get a rendering of a topographic map on to blender. I've spent the entire afternoon looking up tutorials, watching 8-year-old YouTube videos, installing BlenderGIS and have had no luck. The best I was able to accomplish was importing an .stl file from TouchTerrain, but I am trying to import a specific, oddly shaped region and I've only been able to get a rectangular selection.
I'm stumped and have run out of keywords to Google. Any suggestions?
Thanks

I had been hiking down the Appalachian Trail for over two weeks without issue on the day when the nightmare began. My friend, X, was by my side the entire time. It was, quite honestly, comforting to have someone who stood nearly six-and-a-half feet tall with me, especially during the long, dark nights when the howling of coyotes drew near. Black bears, too, were a constant presence in these dark mountains. As we got farther from towns and civilization, more ancient predators than human beings took over the land, stalking the night like creeping shadows.
For this trip, we both had bought as few supplies as possible. Included in our packs were MREs, two sleeping bags, some tarps and hammocks, some light clothing, and two pistols with a few boxes of ammo. We didn’t want to be too weighed down that we wouldn’t be able to move fast, after all. We would source water from the streams, waterfalls and lakes along the way and filter it using Lifestraws.
As the spring breeze blew past us, cooling the sweat on my face, I noticed the trail ahead of us weaving its way through thick swampland. The buzzing of flies and mosquitoes increased with every step. The green, fetid waters of the swamp bubbled constantly, as if it were whispering secrets to us.
“Ah, shit,” X said, glancing down the hill with his dark, serious eyes. His tanned skin was covered in a thin sheen of sweat as he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Another swamp. I hate swamps. You know there’s going to be a million mosquitoes and flies down there.” I pulled out the map, squinting down at it. I ran my finger down the trail, seeing the mountains and valleys we had already passed.
“The trail shouldn’t be going through any swamps,” I said. “They’re supposed to be marked. There’s no ponds or anything around here.” And yet there very clearly was. Either we were in a different spot than I thought we were, or the map was outdated. The trail also grew thinner as we descended. The sharp branches of the bushes stuck out like greedy hands, grabbing at our backpacks and clothes as we pressed forward.
“Well, whatever,” X said gruffly, plowing ahead. Twigs cracked under his massive bulk. The thin branches hanging across the path snapped as he plowed forward. I let him go first, since he was significantly bigger than myself. It was like following in the path of a bull.
“The faster we move, the faster we’ll be through it. We don’t want to camp anywhere around here when it gets dark,” X continued, looking grim. “We’ll be eaten alive by bugs by sunrise. We need to make it to the other side of these boglands before we can stop for the night.”
“Yeah, and I could use some more water,” I said, shaking my mostly empty canteen. “I wouldn’t drink this shit no matter what we did to it. It probably has brain-eating parasites crawling in it.” I checked my watch, realizing that dusk was only a half hour away. We would have to move fast indeed, especially as we didn’t know the size of the swamp. I was not enthusiastic about hiking in the dark with the many steep trails and sharp rocks that covered the surrounding land. A single misstep could lead to a very long, bone-shattering fall.
To my increasing dismay, I realized that the trail we were on no longer had the characteristic white markings of the Appalachian Trail. I kept checking the trees for the past fifteen minutes, and I definitely hadn’t seen a single one. I couldn’t remember the last time we had passed one, but I had a creeping suspicion it had been at least a couple hours ago.
“I think we have a problem, man,” I whispered. “I don’t know how it possibly could have happened, but I think we’re on the wrong trail.”
“There’s not supposed to be any other trails around here,” X argued. “Check the map.”
“Then where’s the white blazes? There’s not supposed to be any boglands around here, either, yet we’re walking through the middle of one,” I said. He shook his head.
“Listen, Ben, there’s not going to be markers on the entire Appalachian Trail,” he said. “Just trust me. We’re on the right path. Sometimes forests change. Swamps take over spots where forests used to lay. Hell, the Sahara Desert has been expanding for thousands of years, just eating the forests and plains all around it. There used to be lions and savannah in Morocco, and now it’s all dead and dry.”
I felt doubtful, but I continued forwards, following closely behind X. Neither one of us had ever done the full Appalachian Trail, after all. I hoped he was right. I was not enthusiastic about backtracking two or three hours if he wasn’t.
I thought back closely on our travels during the last few hours, wondering where we could have gone wrong. The trail had been rather overgrown and rocky on the peak of the last mountain. There had been a beautiful view spanning hundreds of miles, looking far off into state forests and winding roads. I remembered seeing the white marker near the top, but after we had started descending, it disappeared. That must have been where we went wrong, if we did, indeed, go off-course. But I couldn’t be sure, and I didn’t tell X about my suspicions.
We finished descending a steep, rocky trail into a valley where the boglands really started. The trees ended in a massive semi-circle around the open swamp. Thick peat covered the entire surface of it like rotted, grayish-brown skin. I saw water snakes quietly disappearing into the stagnant water, leaving behind slowly expanding ripples.
“This is pretty cool,” I said, stopping for a moment at the bottom of the trail to admire the boglands. Our trail continued directly through the center of it, no more than a raised patch of black earth surrounded by green swampy water. I could hear the many insects chirping and flying before we even took a step forward. Though the spring air felt warm and I was covered in sweat, I still reached into my bag, taking out a windbreaker that would cover up my arms and neck to help with the bugs. X did the same.
“Let’s move fast,” he said, giving me a knowing look. He was a much faster hiker than myself. He seemed like a machine sometimes, tireless and single-minded. I had seen him hike over twenty miles in a single day without looking too bent out of shape. I gave him a faint half-smile, picking up my pace.
“You know what they used to say about the boglands?” I asked X. He shook his head.
“I don’t read books,” he said. “If I have time to sit down and read, then it means I have time to go out and do something actually fun. But I’m sure you know all about it.” I gave a short bark of laughter at his off-handed insult. It sounded far too loud echoing back to us through the creepy swamp. The last rays of sunlight were disappearing behind the mountains now. Soon, we would be plunged into darkness.
“Well, in ancient times, people thought the boglands a place where the walls of reality were thin, where the gods would come through. They used to bring their victims out to swamps during rituals, then they would slice their throats or strangle them and dump their bodies into the bogs as an offering to the gods. They also said that strange, shape-shifting creatures would appear, sometimes to deceive travelers, other times to help them,” I said. “But as for human sacrifices, the bogs preserve bodies like nothing else, except maybe tar pits. Archaeologists keep finding victims with slashed throats or shattered skulls buried underneath the peat.”
X was silent for a long moment as we continued walking along the raised patch of earth that formed the trail. We got farther and farther from the forests, until the swamp seemed like a fetid ocean, spanning out to the horizon in every direction.
“Do you think they used to do that kind of stuff around here?” X asked.
“Used to?” I exclaimed, laughing. “I’m sure some psychopaths still do. This is a good place to dump a body, after all. Who the hell wants to trek through the muck and the snakes and mosquitoes out here looking for corpses?”
“The FBI and the cops will do it,” he said, “if they think there’s something to find.” I was about to respond when an ear-splitting shriek echoed out all around us. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from at first. X’s tan skin seemed to go pale as he spun, glancing in every direction.
“What the fuck is that?!” he screamed over the deafening wailing. I didn’t believe in cryptids, but my anxious mind immediately offered up an image of a banshee, a woman with chalk-white skin and black eyes whose shrieking jaw unhinged like a snake’s.
“I’m turning around!” I yelled, pointing back for emphasis. “Dude, fuck this! We need to get out of this swamp!” But X was no longer listening. He was looking past me, his mouth open and his eyes wild. He started backpedaling and nearly fell into the swamp. Windmilling his arms crazily, he turned and sprinted away without a word.
I was afraid to look back. The screaming was getting louder by the second, shaking the air all around me in deafening, crashing waves of sound. I felt like my head would explode if it got any worse. Instinctively, I took off after X, but I glanced back for a single moment before I did. Something loomed there from a nightmare, standing as tall as the trees. It moved through the swamp like a snake, its body slithering through the stagnant green waters towards us. When it met my eyes, the screaming stopped. The abrupt silence seemed deafening. I could hear the fervent pounding of my heart in my ears.
The creature’s skin looked honeycombed and rough, almost like a wasp’s nest. The thousands of tiny holes covering its body constantly opened and closed like hungry mouths. Its arms were long tentacles ending in sharp points of bone in the shape of scythes. The tentacles undulated like serpents. Its legs, too, were no more than four tentacles that alternatively slithered and stepped forward.
Its flesh was the color of peat, a sickly grayish-brown, and the smell that emanated from it was rancid and stagnant, the essence of all boglands and swamps. I nearly gagged as I ran. The putrefying stench seemed to follow me like a shadow.
Ahead of me, X was fumbling in his backpack as he ran, trying to grab his pistol. I knew he had a Glock 21 in that bag, and I had my Sig Sauer in mine. I cursed myself for not keeping it holstered on my body, but I had never had to use it before and hadn’t seriously thought I would need it for this trip. He glanced back at me, his eyes widening in horror.
“It’s right behind you!” he yelled. “Get down!” He dropped his backpack, revealing the sleek, black pistol clenched tightly in his hand. I barely had time to comprehend his words when an immense pressure and numbness radiated through my back. My head snapped backwards as a meaty thud resonated all around me. I went flying forward, feeling as if I had been struck by a car. As I flew through the air, the pain in my back exploded in burning pulses. I felt the deep slice open up from the sharp blade of bone that had slashed me like a knife. I felt trickles of blood pour from the open wound, making my stained shirt cling to my body.
I landed hard on the raised black earth of the trail, a bone-jarring impact that knocked the air out of me. At that same moment, X opened fire, pressing the trigger over and over, emptying the magazine as fast as he could. Something splashed over me, going in my eyes and mouth and nose. I crawled forward, moaning, my head spinning. I wiped my forehead, seeing spatters of green blood squirming with dark, maggot-like creatures covering my arms and face. It clung to my fingers, thick and rancid. I felt stinging sensations as the tiny worms bit me over and over. My ears rang with a high-pitched whine from the gunshots.
X was running towards me now. I continued to crawl towards him, shell-shocked and whimpering, trying to wipe the eldritch blood off my skin. With a muscular arm, he reached down and pulled me up.
“Where’d it go?” I mumbled, stumbling forward on unsteady feet. X put an arm around my shoulders and helped support me.
“It slunk back into the swamp,” he said. “Jesus, you’re bleeding really bad, buddy. We’re going to need to take care of that as soon as we get away from this hellhole.” I felt the deep slices from the creature’s blade-like hands across my back. The fabric of my shirt clung tightly to the skin as fresh blood soaked it.
“This isn’t the trail, X,” I gasped. “We went the wrong way. We need to go back.” He nodded grimly.
“We’re heading back right now. I know it’s the wrong trail now, it definitely is, but it’s dark. The trails back up the mountains are steep and dangerous, and we’ve already been hiking all day. How much longer can we really go?” he asked. In reality, I had a feeling X could go for quite a bit longer. I was the weak link in the chain, and we both knew it.
X took out a small, LED flashlight from his backpack, shining it ahead of us on the dark path. Across the center of the black earth, there was an obstruction, something that hadn’t been there when we passed this way originally.
“Shit! Is that a person?” X said, slowing down. He focused the light on it. As my eyes adjusted, I gave a gasp of horror as I saw a rough sacrificial table looming there, waiting with a ready victim.
Laying on the bare wooden planks in the center of the trail was an elderly man wearing the garb of a hunter. He was gagged, a bloody rag shoved deep into his mouth. I felt a sense of revulsion and terror as I realized his hands and feet were nailed to the planks, as if he were being crucified laying down. His eyes rolled wildly, white and insane, like a horse with a broken leg. When he saw us approaching, he tried to say something through the gag, pulling hard against the nails that bit so viciously into his flesh. Fresh rivers of blood spurted from his wounds.
I had my pistol in my hands. X had taken a fresh magazine out by now, throwing the empty one back in his backpack. Trembling, he went first, his shaking hand moving the flashlight around wildly. Its bright rays bounced off the dead, half-rotted trees that grew out of the boglands, the clouds of mosquitoes and moths that circled us constantly.
“Oh my God... he's like the victim of a serial killer or something,” he whispered, running a trembling hand over his face. “It looks like someone has set that poor guy up to have his heart cut out, like some sort of Aztec ritual.” He glanced worriedly over at me. We had both stopped cold in our tracks, looking around for any sign of danger, but we only saw the old man writhing on his rough table of torture.
“We have to keep going forward,” I whispered. “That thing is behind us. I don’t think it’s dead. I’m not sure it can even die.”
“But what’s ahead of us?” he asked grimly. “That’s the real question, isn’t it?” Far off down the trail, I saw small pinpoints of flickering light. They drew closer. We raised our pistols, waiting for the new arrivals to show themselves.
Dozens of people dressed in black, silky robes holding lamps slowly ambled their way towards us. They had their heads bowed, like monks on a holy pilgrimage. They drew close to the sacrifice. The one in the lead held a long, curving dagger whose blade looked like it was made of some kind of red volcanic rock. Its strange silver handle glittered in his pale, thin hand. At the end, I saw it was sculpted into the shape of a human heart.
“Stop right there!” X screamed, stepping forward. “Don’t come any closer! We are armed, I’m warning you.” The people in the black robes didn’t appear to hear or care in the slightest. They continued slowly following their leader with the strange dagger, almost floating forward in a nonchalant manner. Their leader began chanting in some strange, ancient language. It reminded me of Tibetan or Sanskrit in a way, like the chanting of some Vajrayana monk high up in the Himalayas. But it had a sinister, hissing quality to the words. Something ancient and powerful resonated in every syllable.
I raised the pistol, firing blankly into the dark, cloudless sky above. The smell of gunsmoke and fetid rot hung thick in the air. The leader of the group looked at me with his large, glassy eyes. His face looked sunken and pale, almost like a starving child. He had shaved all of the hair on his head, even his eyebrows. His lips were extremely thin and bloodless in his chalk-white face.
For a long moment, we stood staring at each other, my pistol aimed at his chest. X also had his pistol raised, aimed at one of those standing behind him. But the robed man didn’t speak. He gave me a faint grin.
“Let the old man go,” I commanded, my voice sounding hoarse and weak. The swamp quickly swallowed up my words, until only the buzzing of mosquitoes remained.
“I am sorry, my son, but I cannot do that,” the leader said in a voice as cold as endless space. “If we do not feed Mowdoroth, it will never sleep. The swamps will continue to expand, eating more and more of the surrounding forests and towns, and Mowdoroth, driven insane by hunger, will take far more victims in the process.
“This job has been passed down to us from generation to generation, from big hand to small, for over four centuries. Only twice has Mowdoroth not been fed on the New Moon, and each time, entire settlements full of people were wiped off the face of the Earth as if they had never existed. On one, they just had time to carve the word ‘CROATAN’ before they were taken.
“Mowdoroth looks for the place where the nightmares grow. It breaks open the chest and finds the place where the silent screams start, deep down at the base of the heart. All of the nightmares are planted there, like tiny seeds scattered during childhood. Those that fell on good soil in that abyss produced a great crop, yielding a hundredfold, sixtyfold, or thirtyfold. If you do not allow us to complete our holy mission, then you do it: cut open the man's chest and remove his beating heart. As it beats, squeeze it as hard as you can, and let all the blood drain onto the top of your head. Hold the heart above your head and close your eyes until the god appears and takes it.” The cult leader finished, looking at us with sparkling eyes, as if he had said something profound.
“This shit is just insane drivel,” X whispered in a voice as low as possible. “I say we open fire and save the old man now. Fuck these cultists.” I nodded grimly in agreement.
“You need to all turn around and leave immediately,” X yelled, stepping forward. “I will give you three seconds to turn around and get the hell out of my sight. Three…” At first, the cultists stood as still as statues, simply staring. Finally, the leader sighed and turned away. He shook his head, reminding me of a disappointed parent.
“I tried to warn you,” he said in his thin, quavering voice. “The time has come to give the offering. You must cut out this man’s heart and raise it to Mowdoroth, so he can get the seeds of nightmares freshly sown. The choice is yours now, as you have demanded this power with violence. You can leave this man here to be eaten by Mowdoroth, or free him and, in exchange, guarantee the deaths of hundreds of other people.”
With those last words, the black-robed figures continued down the curve of the trail. Within seconds, they had disappeared behind dead, half-rotted trees that still dotted the edges of the boglands. X and I ran forward toward the struggling old man. X reached into his pocket and pulled out a folding knife. He cut off the old man’s gag, pulling the spit-soaked chunk of filthy cloth out of his mouth. The old man spat and licked his dry lips.
“Get me out of here, please,” he whispered, his eyes rolling wildly. “Those cult members are all batshit insane. And there’s something not right in these swamps. I caught glimpses of something while I was waiting. There’s something in the water…”
“What’s your name, bud?” X said calmingly, looking at the old man’s hands and feet to try to decide how to best get the nails out without causing more damage.
“Winchester,” he said in a coarse voice. It sounded like he hadn’t had a drink of water in days. While X looked at his hands with the LED flashlight, I reached into my pack for the small canteen of filtered water I still had. I started pouring it into Winchester’s mouth. He gulped greedily, his throat working hard to drink down the rest of it.
“I got it!” X said, taking a flat stone he had found on the ground. “I’m going to try to pound these nails out from the bottom.”
“Oh, please, no,” Winchester said, his wrinkled face turning pale. X shook his head.
“We need to get you out of here,” he said. “It’s going to hurt, bud. But we don’t have any tools here. The nails are large, almost like railroad spikes, and once we get the top part, the bottom should slide out easily since it’s a lot narrower.” As he grabbed the rock to begin his work, a bone-chilling wailing started up again from the swamps. It was the scream of Mowdoroth, that abomination with the skin of a wasp’s nest.
“Cover us!” X yelled panickedly as he continued his grisly work. Winchester screamed in pain when X first struck the nail on his right hand. It shot up a fraction of an inch, fresh blood pooling all around it and dripping through the bare planks.
I turned, but the banshee wail seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. The swamp bubbled faster and faster all around us, as if thousands of corpses were coming back to life. I heard Winchester scream again, then the dull thud of another nail hitting the earth.
A face peeked out of the swamp, only twenty feet away. Its eyes were green, the color of a putrefying wound. Its lipless mouth opened wide, showing a spongy black mass of skin with concentric circles of tiny, razor-sharp teeth. It reminded me of the mouth of a lamprey.
I opened fire, shooting wildly at the face, aiming at the body hidden under the dark surface of the swamp. Luminescent drops of green blood exploded from a bullet hole in its upper right shoulder, floating across the surface of the water like radioactive waste.
Its screaming cut off instantly. All I could hear was the pounding of the rock behind me and Winchester’s pained, horrified pleas for mercy.
“Please, you’re hurting me!” he pleaded.
“Shut the fuck up, Winchester!” I whispered. “It’s here with us now.” With considerable effort, he did, only moaning and violently jerking his head now as the waves of pain ripped through him.
“I got it!” X said suddenly. A feeling of elation filled my heart.
“Let’s go then!” I yelled, turning to help the old man up. I heard something massive rise up behind us. It mixed with the sound of dripping water and babbling waves that arose from the disturbance.
Winchester was weak, stumbling up to his feet and nearly falling over immediately. Staggering, he took off down the trail with no shoes, but he immediately gave a curse of pain and tripped. X and I started running, and at that moment, I realized the flaw in our plan. We wouldn’t be able to get Winchester out of the swamp without carrying him, due to the extensive injuries to his feet. And I knew we didn’t have time.
Mowdoroth’s body stood as tall as the trees as it looked down at the three of us with its strange, infected eyes. Its tentacles undulated faster and faster, seeming to whip around its body until they flew out towards us.
“Run!” I screamed. X and I sprinted behind a cluster of dead trees hugging the path. The blade-like hand of Mowdoroth chopped them in a half, raining wood splinters down on our heads.
Winchester continued trying to crawl forward. Mowdoroth slithered behind him. Winchester looked up as a tentacle started coming down in his direction. He gave a short, panicked scream as the blade smashed through his back legs, chopping both of them off at the knees. The ground shook with the force of it. The stumps began spurting seemingly endless amounts of blood. Winchester pleaded and made incomprehensible gurgling sounds as he bled out. Mowdoroth ended Winchester’s cries when it wrapped its tentacle around Winchester’s torso. It slithered up into Winchester’s open mouth.
X and I shot as fast as we could while running forward in the dark, trying to hold a flashlight and a pistol. Most of my shots missed Mowdoroth, but with a sense of satisfaction and pride, I saw a few burst through its enormous body. Streams of radioactive green blood ran down its torso now. As its serpentine legs pumped furiously, it gained speed, coming behind us like a runaway train. I could feel the ground shaking with every thud of its tentacled feet.
A few hundred feet ahead of us, I caught a glimpse of the cultists. They were hurrying away from the area, not running but moving much faster than they had come in. Nearly out of breath already and exhausted from hiking all day, I pointed forward.
“Look!” I screamed. X saw them, his eyes widening. We sprinted in a blind panic, as fast as we could towards the stragglers in the black robes. Without warning, X raised his pistol and fired, aiming at the nearest of them.
The figure in the back of the pack fell forward without making a sound. He continued trying to crawl forward weakly for a few moments before he lost energy and lay still, no more than a bleeding black hump on the dark earth.
X gave a sudden cry of pain next to me as a tentacle came down like a guillotine blade. I heard it whip through the air with a high-pitched whine. A single breath later, I watched in horror as it sliced off his right arm. X looked down at the spurting stump for a long moment, his tanned face turning as pale as bones. He stumbled forward, then, with a hoarse cry, he fell.
Following X’s lead, I raised my gun and started shooting the cultists. They sprinted away in a random panic as bodies fell ahead of us. I jumped over the black lumps on the ground, hearing Mowdoroth shake the world as it gave chase. A long, snake-like tentacle reached down, picking up X’s spurting body and raising it towards Mowdoroth’s leech-like mouth. The massive abomination slowed, picking up the bodies of the dead cultists and crushing them. I heard the bones shatter as the wet gore exploded around Mowdoroth’s many sharp teeth.
I saw the woods again, living trees just a few hundred feet away. The trail of black earth ended abruptly, leading out of the boglands. Cultists sprinted blindly through the forest in every direction, scattering like cockroaches. I had nearly reached the border of the forest when I heard something whizzing past my head. I ducked, but the blur of a grayish tentacle coming down sent a jolt of fear like electricity sizzling through my body.
A moment later, a cold agony covered my left hand. In shock, I looked down, realizing that the blade-like appendage of Mowdoroth had neatly amputated all four of my fingers. If I hadn’t ducked, it would’ve probably gotten my head instead.
Stumbling and screaming, my mind in a blind panic, I staggered through the intersection of the boglands and the forest, falling forward. I knew I was dead. I closed my eyes, waiting. Yet nothing happened.
When I looked back, I saw something strange. Mowdoroth had stopped at the end of the boglands. It tried to push its body forward towards me, but it couldn’t enter the forest. It was as if an invisible barrier stood there.
I lay there for a long time. After a while, I heard Mowdoroth slink back into the fetid waters of the boglands. And then I was alone.
***
I wrapped my hand in bandages as much as I could, trying to stem the bleeding. I felt weak and sick from blood loss, so I lay there until the sun came up. The next day, I was able to slowly make my way out of the forest and back towards the nearest town.
Now I hear stories of people mysteriously going missing in the area. An entire family in a nearby farmhouse only a couple dozen miles away disappeared in the middle of the night without a trace, leaving only smeared trails of blood leading into the forest. No one saw anything, but these six victims were only the first in a long line of strange deaths. Oddly enough, all of the victims lived next to swamps.
And I have the feeling that I was the one responsible.

This is an east coast perspective.
The thing that I don’t get about the release snark and criticism on this page is, there are, where I fish in Pennsylvania and Maryland three kinds of designated fisheries, put and take, that’s a Maryland term, for stocked trout streams, (I think the term makes good sense) then there are fly fishing only and or artificial bait and lastly wild trout waters. The fly fishing only, artificial only and wild trout waters are all barbless by the way. The only streams that are not artificially stocked with trout are the wild trout waters.
When a stream as in the stocked trout waters are inundated with the vicious predator that we all love, known as trout, at literally multi-hundreds of times over the amount of fish a stream can support naturally it decimates every form of life in the stream.
So when I see a picture of a boy holding a fish and sometimes 25 or 50 criticisms of the way the fish is being handled because the fish is now doomed to an agonizing death it really disappoints me. This is said without any regard to the trout’s pea sized brain and lack of anything close to the nervous system of a human, yet the insinuation is pretty much meant apples to apples. At least the way I take it.
Perhaps when we don’t know where or what kind of stream a trout has been harvested from maybe we should encourage and congratulate rather than shame and criticize.
I’ve held a fly rod in my hand every season since I was six years old and I’m 58. I’ve seen trends. One trend I notice these days is less and less people keeping fish.
I just got back from a week long trip to northern Pa. And there were so many trout in the streams I resorted to a topographical map just to find sections of water that were inaccessible and likely not to be fished or stocked. I was still was killing (figuratively) them. These were hold over stocked trout.
As many of us know when a trout stream gets down to a number of trout that a stream can naturally support they are harder to catch (except in the case of the voracious six inch brookie lol).
I love trout. My reoccurring daydream is to live in a shack and fish full time.
I wish the people on this sub would be a little more understanding to not only the kids, but also the science behind the number of trout a steam can naturally support.
Imagine coming here for the first time to show a nice fish you’re especially proud of and get more Hugh Jassols criticizing the way you’re holding the fish than saying nice catch. It’s horrible and frankly a lot of you trout police should be ashamed of yourselves.
As for the agonizing death I spend a lot of time on the stream. Sure I see a dead one float by now and then when someone has gill hooked it or hasn’t taken the time to revive it properly.
Again as for the handling criticism. Come on. Get a grip. Where are all these trout that died agonizing deaths. (Oh ya the raccoons ate them)
Etiquette goes with what type of stream you’re on and obviously if you mean to kill it or not. Even so on stocked streams these fish need thinned.
If you are on wild waters a person who is used to fishing for stockies is not going to have the skill or patience to land a fish. It’s just a fact.
So let people have fun. If they want to show a fish let them and hold your arrogance especially when it’s wrapped in the guise of teaching. It’s pathetic.

“28. What is the CLASSIFICATION of a printed paper map of the United States measuring 24” x 36”? The mountainous areas are in three dimensional relief. The printing is color lithography. The paper is .45 mm thick.
A. 4905.91.0000
B. 4905.99.0000
C. 4911.99.6000
D. 9014.80.5000
E. 9023.00.0000”
This sounds like a cool product. Let’s look at our potential headings for classification:
4905 - Maps and hydrographic or similar charts of all kinds, including atlases, wall maps, topographical plans and globes, printed:
4911 - Other printed matter, including printed pictures and photographs:
9014 - Direction finding compasses; other navigational instruments and appliances; parts and accessories thereof:
9023 - Instruments, apparatus and models, designed for demonstrational purposes (for example, in education or exhibitions), unsuitable for other uses, and parts and accessories thereof
4905 sounds appropriate, but let’s check to see if there is anything that would disallow classification there. See chapter note 1(b):
This chapter does not cover: … Maps, plans or globes, in relief, whether or not printed (heading 9023);
Ok, so we must classify our item under 9023. There is only one option for that heading so it must be our answer. The answer is E – 9023.00.0000.