Tipsy presses her face against the cold metal, breath fogging against iron that smells of rust and old blood. The hallway beyond is narrow and dark, lit only by a guttering torch somewhere far down its throat. Shadows bend strangely in the shifting light, too fluid, too alive. She watches them for a long time, quiet, listening. The lilies on her chest sway with every thin inhale. In the dank distance, a withering breath echoes through the corridor, and a chill begins to crawl down her spine, prickling her patchwork skin.
She steps back, her breath quickening. She needs to get out, lest she wants to learn what may come to devour her if she stays.
She begins inspecting the cell; the bars don’t look strong, and nothing here looks well-made. Everything seems… temporary, careless, like the dungeon is only meant to hold her long enough for the next cruelty. Cracks burrow deep within the edges of the iron frame of bars, and with urgency and little deliberation, she strikes out. First, a kick, and the iron clangs, dust falling from the stone ceiling. Another, harder her hooves jar her whole frame, pain slicing down her shoulder, her brand burning like a sun trapped under flesh. Pain sparks up her leg, but she kicks again, on instinct alone: Get out, get out, get out!
The metal shrieks and bends, and with one final blow, it gives. The bars warp enough for her to squeeze through, scraping her skin, stealing hair, but she’s out.
The corridor yawns before her, dim and cold. On one side: an abrupt stone wall, and on the other only darkness. A low, wet noise drifts from somewhere ahead. Not recognized. Not natural. It's something breathing again, but wrong. She swallows down her own fear and forces her hooves forward; she needs to get out. At first, the hallway seems straight. Then it turns. Then another turn. Then she finds herself in a place she thinks she’s seen before, but the shadows lie, and the stone walls all look the same. She only realizes she’s in a maze when she hits the first dead end. Then the second. Then the third. Her heart pounds like it wants out of her chest as she realizes the dark god is playing with her.
Even her thoughts sound small now, as she dwells upon the third dead end thinking, but that is where is when she hears it, a wet, clicking inhale. Then a dragging sound, like something too heavy is pulling itself along stone. She turns slowly and sees it.
A creature stands in the dim, skin translucent like thin ice, stretched over bones and ropes of sinew. Its ribs move when it breathes, each one too sharp, too defined. Its fangs are enormous — too large for its mouth — so they jut from its lips at strange angles, glistening with saliva thick as syrup. Its eyes bulge, pale and unseeing, but they focus on her all the same. It opens its maw wider than it should be able to. The sound that comes out is not a roar. It is a horrible choking gurgle, like a drowning animal trying to bark. Her knees lock. Her stomach drops. She can’t move, not for a heartbeat, not for two.
Then instinct takes her.
She bolts. Hooves thunder on stone. The hallway tilts, turns, and folds back on itself. She doesn’t know where she’s going, only away, away, away.
But something follows. Its body slaps the floor, a wet drag of flesh and bone scraping tile. Every few seconds it makes that sound, a gagging, bubbling, desperate noise like it’s choking on her name. Her breath tears at her throat as she runs.
A fork in the path appears left or right. She turns right without thinking, and the walls begin to breathe. No, not breathe, they begin to pulse. Like veins pushing blood through stone. And suddenly the air smells wrong. Mud, rot, dead cypress roots, and Stagnant water begin to cloud her lungs as her steps slow. No. No no no no! Her chest constricts. Her vision warps as the stone becomes muck, thick and pulling. The torchlight fades into swamp fog, and a shadow rises from the mire ahead.
Tall. Thin. Covered in fur, matted with mud and weeds. Its skull is too large for its body, its eyes are round and milky, its jaw unhinged and re-hinged and broken again. It smells like the backwater after something dies in it and is never found. A rougarou. Not from stories and not from warnings. From nightmares carved into the children raised in the swamp. The children from her home.
It stands on two legs, its claws drip like they’re soaked in swamp water and blood. When it inhales, the air whistles between its ribs like wind through hollow reeds. She knows, deep in her marrow, that this is wrong and that this is memory turned inside out. It’s not real. But her body doesn’t care. Her body remembers being small and helpless. Afraid of something that stalked the wetlands in whispers and darkness. Its mouth opens; not slow, not wide, but unwraps, teeth unfolding like a second jaw inside the first. She stumbles back, shaking uncontrollably. Her heartbeat is a roar in her ears. She can’t breathe, she can’t think, and the walls are gone, the maze is a swamp, the creature is real, it’s real, it’s real. A scream rips out of her, raw and feral, and the rougarou lunges.
The creature hits her like a flood. There is no weight or warmth to it, only cold, the kind that sinks through flesh and bone and memory at once. Its claws rake across her shoulder, and the pain is blinding, white-hot, electric. She staggers, hooves slipping in the swamp-mire that shouldn’t be there, that shouldn’t be real, but feels real all the same. It shrieks, not like an animal or a monster but like a child drowning, breath being torn apart in a swamp, her swamp, her birthplace.
Her lungs seize. Her legs buckle. Panic rips through her brain in a snarl of instinct and terror and something far older, with the certainty she will not get up again. The rougarou’s jaws latch onto her with that impossible, unfolding mouth. Too many teeth, too sharp, sinking into her neck, her shoulder, her side, she can’t tell where pain begins or ends. Her scream chokes into a wet sound. She tries to kick. Her leg passes through it as if it’s made of smoke, but the teeth stay real. The tearing stays real. The pain is real.
This isn’t happening! It’s not real...It’s not real.. she tries to remind herself as the creature drags her down into the muck.
Cypress knees claw up from the mud like fingers. The swamp closes around her, thick as tar. She can’t breathe. She can’t move, and her heart thrashes against her ribs like something trying to claw its way out. The rougarou leans close. Its breath is lake-stagnant, sweet with rot. And it speaks with a cruel familiarity, guttural and stretched with hunger, “I missed you.”
Her breath stops. It remembers her. It followed her. She left the swamp, but the swamp did not leave her. "Shhh..." it croons again, voice shredding itself on every syllable. "Be still, don't you want to come home?"
Her mind fractures. Home. The word hits harder than the teeth sunken into her flesh. She is drowning in the memory of still black water, the night she tried to run, when reeds tangled around her ankles like hands, when the swamp whispered her name with a voice made of insects and moonlight. “No,” she gasps, but the muck fills her throat. Her lungs burn. She claws upward, hooves finding nothing, body dragged down by a weight she can’t fight. Her vision flickers. Black. Then green. Then teeth again.
“Little Tipsy,” the rougarou purrs, voice a wet rasp. “You belong to us. Born of rot and river. Don’t pretend you forgot.”
Something breaks open in her, not strength but memory. The crooked trees, the cold water, and the way she used to press her ears shut against her skull so she wouldn’t hear the swamp calling her back. “No!” she sobs, panic spiraling, voice shredding into something small and feral. “I got out! I got out!” she repeats in an effort to cling to her own sanity.
“You never left.” Its claws wrap around her neck, pulling her deeper into the mud, and the world shrinks to pressure and dark and the suffocating taste of river-bottom sludge. She can’t breathe. She can’t move. Her body spasms once, twice, and then goes still. And for one horrifying heartbeat, she almost surrenders. Almost. A flicker of light pierces the black, faint and fragile, but most surely real. Her lungs convulse as she jerks forward with blind desperation, hooves kicking, striking, thrashing, even as the creature drags her down. Its teeth tear, its claws dig, but the light grows golden, warm, alive.
“No,” she chokes. She bites down on the panic, on the voice, on the memory. A single word becomes a weapon. “NO!” She drives her legs forward with the last shards of strength she has, not through the creature but through the swamp, through the fear, through the memory trying to eat her alive. The monster shrieks, a sound sharp enough to rattle bone. The mud breaks and she surges up, exploding from the muck into blinding gold.
Stone replaces swamp, and light replaces the dark as air floods her lungs in a ragged, shaking gasp. The rougarou lunges after her, but the light sears its skin as its teeth drip like melting bone, and its scream collapses into silence as it dissolves into smoke. Tipsy crumples onto the cold floor, trembling, sobbing air back into her chest. Her shoulder burns where the brand sits, the shape of the beetle seared deep and wrong into her skin. Everything hurts: bones, breath, and memory. But she is not in the swamp, not anymore.
Above her, the golden light pours from a single doorway, the center of the maze. A place the monster can’t reach. She staggers upright, legs shaking violently, head spinning with the echo of the rougarou’s voice: I missed you... Tipsy swallows, tasting mud that isn’t there. The swamp still clings to her mind like wet vines, but she moves forward anyway.
One step. Then another. Until she walks into the light.
OOC: It's long and kind all over the place, but fun! But anyway, for some context, Tipsy grew up in a swamp and was told about the legend of the rougarou when she was a child, and turns out it was true eek! She's basically hallucinating being in the swamp again and seeing the rougaru she encountered during her childhood, bringing up some more childhood trauma of when she ran away from the swamp.
She steps back, her breath quickening. She needs to get out, lest she wants to learn what may come to devour her if she stays.
She begins inspecting the cell; the bars don’t look strong, and nothing here looks well-made. Everything seems… temporary, careless, like the dungeon is only meant to hold her long enough for the next cruelty. Cracks burrow deep within the edges of the iron frame of bars, and with urgency and little deliberation, she strikes out. First, a kick, and the iron clangs, dust falling from the stone ceiling. Another, harder her hooves jar her whole frame, pain slicing down her shoulder, her brand burning like a sun trapped under flesh. Pain sparks up her leg, but she kicks again, on instinct alone: Get out, get out, get out!
The metal shrieks and bends, and with one final blow, it gives. The bars warp enough for her to squeeze through, scraping her skin, stealing hair, but she’s out.
The corridor yawns before her, dim and cold. On one side: an abrupt stone wall, and on the other only darkness. A low, wet noise drifts from somewhere ahead. Not recognized. Not natural. It's something breathing again, but wrong. She swallows down her own fear and forces her hooves forward; she needs to get out. At first, the hallway seems straight. Then it turns. Then another turn. Then she finds herself in a place she thinks she’s seen before, but the shadows lie, and the stone walls all look the same. She only realizes she’s in a maze when she hits the first dead end. Then the second. Then the third. Her heart pounds like it wants out of her chest as she realizes the dark god is playing with her.
Even her thoughts sound small now, as she dwells upon the third dead end thinking, but that is where is when she hears it, a wet, clicking inhale. Then a dragging sound, like something too heavy is pulling itself along stone. She turns slowly and sees it.
A creature stands in the dim, skin translucent like thin ice, stretched over bones and ropes of sinew. Its ribs move when it breathes, each one too sharp, too defined. Its fangs are enormous — too large for its mouth — so they jut from its lips at strange angles, glistening with saliva thick as syrup. Its eyes bulge, pale and unseeing, but they focus on her all the same. It opens its maw wider than it should be able to. The sound that comes out is not a roar. It is a horrible choking gurgle, like a drowning animal trying to bark. Her knees lock. Her stomach drops. She can’t move, not for a heartbeat, not for two.
Then instinct takes her.
She bolts. Hooves thunder on stone. The hallway tilts, turns, and folds back on itself. She doesn’t know where she’s going, only away, away, away.
But something follows. Its body slaps the floor, a wet drag of flesh and bone scraping tile. Every few seconds it makes that sound, a gagging, bubbling, desperate noise like it’s choking on her name. Her breath tears at her throat as she runs.
A fork in the path appears left or right. She turns right without thinking, and the walls begin to breathe. No, not breathe, they begin to pulse. Like veins pushing blood through stone. And suddenly the air smells wrong. Mud, rot, dead cypress roots, and Stagnant water begin to cloud her lungs as her steps slow. No. No no no no! Her chest constricts. Her vision warps as the stone becomes muck, thick and pulling. The torchlight fades into swamp fog, and a shadow rises from the mire ahead.
Tall. Thin. Covered in fur, matted with mud and weeds. Its skull is too large for its body, its eyes are round and milky, its jaw unhinged and re-hinged and broken again. It smells like the backwater after something dies in it and is never found. A rougarou. Not from stories and not from warnings. From nightmares carved into the children raised in the swamp. The children from her home.
It stands on two legs, its claws drip like they’re soaked in swamp water and blood. When it inhales, the air whistles between its ribs like wind through hollow reeds. She knows, deep in her marrow, that this is wrong and that this is memory turned inside out. It’s not real. But her body doesn’t care. Her body remembers being small and helpless. Afraid of something that stalked the wetlands in whispers and darkness. Its mouth opens; not slow, not wide, but unwraps, teeth unfolding like a second jaw inside the first. She stumbles back, shaking uncontrollably. Her heartbeat is a roar in her ears. She can’t breathe, she can’t think, and the walls are gone, the maze is a swamp, the creature is real, it’s real, it’s real. A scream rips out of her, raw and feral, and the rougarou lunges.
The creature hits her like a flood. There is no weight or warmth to it, only cold, the kind that sinks through flesh and bone and memory at once. Its claws rake across her shoulder, and the pain is blinding, white-hot, electric. She staggers, hooves slipping in the swamp-mire that shouldn’t be there, that shouldn’t be real, but feels real all the same. It shrieks, not like an animal or a monster but like a child drowning, breath being torn apart in a swamp, her swamp, her birthplace.
Her lungs seize. Her legs buckle. Panic rips through her brain in a snarl of instinct and terror and something far older, with the certainty she will not get up again. The rougarou’s jaws latch onto her with that impossible, unfolding mouth. Too many teeth, too sharp, sinking into her neck, her shoulder, her side, she can’t tell where pain begins or ends. Her scream chokes into a wet sound. She tries to kick. Her leg passes through it as if it’s made of smoke, but the teeth stay real. The tearing stays real. The pain is real.
This isn’t happening! It’s not real...It’s not real.. she tries to remind herself as the creature drags her down into the muck.
Cypress knees claw up from the mud like fingers. The swamp closes around her, thick as tar. She can’t breathe. She can’t move, and her heart thrashes against her ribs like something trying to claw its way out. The rougarou leans close. Its breath is lake-stagnant, sweet with rot. And it speaks with a cruel familiarity, guttural and stretched with hunger, “I missed you.”
Her breath stops. It remembers her. It followed her. She left the swamp, but the swamp did not leave her. "Shhh..." it croons again, voice shredding itself on every syllable. "Be still, don't you want to come home?"
Her mind fractures. Home. The word hits harder than the teeth sunken into her flesh. She is drowning in the memory of still black water, the night she tried to run, when reeds tangled around her ankles like hands, when the swamp whispered her name with a voice made of insects and moonlight. “No,” she gasps, but the muck fills her throat. Her lungs burn. She claws upward, hooves finding nothing, body dragged down by a weight she can’t fight. Her vision flickers. Black. Then green. Then teeth again.
“Little Tipsy,” the rougarou purrs, voice a wet rasp. “You belong to us. Born of rot and river. Don’t pretend you forgot.”
Something breaks open in her, not strength but memory. The crooked trees, the cold water, and the way she used to press her ears shut against her skull so she wouldn’t hear the swamp calling her back. “No!” she sobs, panic spiraling, voice shredding into something small and feral. “I got out! I got out!” she repeats in an effort to cling to her own sanity.
“You never left.” Its claws wrap around her neck, pulling her deeper into the mud, and the world shrinks to pressure and dark and the suffocating taste of river-bottom sludge. She can’t breathe. She can’t move. Her body spasms once, twice, and then goes still. And for one horrifying heartbeat, she almost surrenders. Almost. A flicker of light pierces the black, faint and fragile, but most surely real. Her lungs convulse as she jerks forward with blind desperation, hooves kicking, striking, thrashing, even as the creature drags her down. Its teeth tear, its claws dig, but the light grows golden, warm, alive.
“No,” she chokes. She bites down on the panic, on the voice, on the memory. A single word becomes a weapon. “NO!” She drives her legs forward with the last shards of strength she has, not through the creature but through the swamp, through the fear, through the memory trying to eat her alive. The monster shrieks, a sound sharp enough to rattle bone. The mud breaks and she surges up, exploding from the muck into blinding gold.
Stone replaces swamp, and light replaces the dark as air floods her lungs in a ragged, shaking gasp. The rougarou lunges after her, but the light sears its skin as its teeth drip like melting bone, and its scream collapses into silence as it dissolves into smoke. Tipsy crumples onto the cold floor, trembling, sobbing air back into her chest. Her shoulder burns where the brand sits, the shape of the beetle seared deep and wrong into her skin. Everything hurts: bones, breath, and memory. But she is not in the swamp, not anymore.
Above her, the golden light pours from a single doorway, the center of the maze. A place the monster can’t reach. She staggers upright, legs shaking violently, head spinning with the echo of the rougarou’s voice: I missed you... Tipsy swallows, tasting mud that isn’t there. The swamp still clings to her mind like wet vines, but she moves forward anyway.
One step. Then another. Until she walks into the light.
OOC: It's long and kind all over the place, but fun! But anyway, for some context, Tipsy grew up in a swamp and was told about the legend of the rougarou when she was a child, and turns out it was true eek! She's basically hallucinating being in the swamp again and seeing the rougaru she encountered during her childhood, bringing up some more childhood trauma of when she ran away from the swamp.