Totem 15: King of The Mud (Patreon)

As I walked to the first of the three destroyed towns with an injured, veiled girl along with her underage brother—neither of which had their Totems yet—and behind a man that I barely knew but promised to teach me wonderful and mysterious things if I left home to follow him… I started to wonder if I had made some bad choices in life.

To be fair, I would have refused to allow Annika or Russell to follow us if it wasn't for Ash. The man could take care of himself. And, presumably, take care of us should things go badly. I hoped.

Russell was completely useless. Not that he acted like it. He walked by Annika, chest puffed out like he was king of the world. I probably wasn't that annoying at twelve years old. Either time.

Though Annika seemed to be walking okay, I had no idea what shape she was really in. I didn't think she would be able to fight for very long.

Meanwhile, I wasn't much better. I still couldn't talk to my inner goose. Yes, I had the fire trick which was, admittedly, very cool. But based on experience, I only had three or four shots in my spiritual holster before I ran dry. Not great.

If we got in a pickle, our only hope was that Ash wouldn't let us die.

Which was the exact moment when Ash turned around, looked at me, and said, "I'm going to scout ahead."

"Wait!" I said. "What if—"

In the next second, Ash turned into his Puma totem form and leapt off into the brush.

So much for that.

I turned to stare at Annika—no point. I couldn't see her eyes. However, Russell's face told me everything I needed to know.

"Did he just leave us?" the little twerp demanded, voice high with stress. He looked around the bushes on either side of the trail in renewed alarm. "This isn't some sort of trap, is it?"

"Of course it isn't," Annika said. She held a heavy stick that was pointy on one end with a gnarly knot of wood on the other. By the way she was carrying it, I think she intended to use it as a club. "I'm not turning around until I know for certain what is out there." Then, still gripping her stick-club-thing, she walked determinedly up the hill.

Russell turned and gave me stank face. "This is all your fault."

"How is this my fault?"

"If you had just married her like everyone wanted, she would've been happy as a housewife. Duh," he said, and then continued after his sister.

I threw him the bird – the Earth version – and then followed them up the wet and muddy track toward the doomed villages.

Hopefully, Ash hadn't actually left us. I suspected this was some sort of a test.

Though… I tried not to think about the fact that, when it came down to it, I didn't know Ash at all.

Hopefully he was doing some scouting as he said. Or, more likely, he was going to return just at the perfect moment of need. Gandalf style. Yeah. That sounded about right.

With a sigh, I increased my pace to follow the other two. A goose didn't allow his flock to go on without him.

The "road" (I use that word loosely) narrowed into a kind of muddy dirt track good for only single riders. Based on that, and the lack of wheel marks in general, I didn't think that the villagers had much of a trade system going on.

Sucked to be them. The days when good traders came to the village I grew up in were like Christmas. Only you got to pay outrageous fees for the presents.

Heh. It really was like Christmas.

Anyway, after another hour of travel, we finally reached the first of the destroyed villages.

It was… kind of a gruesome sight. The village was set on the hilly banks of a wide river, with a bunch of mud huts clustered together in several groups. More than three-quarters of those little buildings were burned out, which was extraordinary because they were made of mud-clay. That meant that the fire had gotten inside and consumed all the combustibles, and then raged without anyone trying to put it out.

That spoke of the mindless Deformed.

Did I mention the mud? Because the previous villagers had an excess of it. Every step I took squelched even though it hadn't rained in a couple of weeks. Puddles sat everywhere. And the streets were churned up with tracks, both human and animal.

I have a slight confession: I never really learned how to do the whole 'reading tracks in nature' thing. Of course, that hadn't been possible on Earth, and here I had grown up as a farmer's boy, not a woodsman's child. So while I took occasional walks through the woods and took potshots at squirrels with a slingshot, I never learned how to follow tracks to actual game.

So I was mildly interested when Russell bent down to study the churned-up muck like he was reading a book.

"You see anything there?" I asked.

"Tracks."

I rolled my eyes. "What do you see in the tracks?"

He pointed at a bit of mud. "Take a look at these. Human, running. A woman, I think."

If I squinted, I could sort of pretend to make out the shape of a boot. But it was hard to tell. Russell could be making it up. How the hell would he know it was made by a woman?

Except he pointed to the next track and the next, following it in a line. Again, I squinted and thought I could pick out a running stride in the mud. I think.

"Then right here it twists." Russell strode forward a few steps, gesturing excitedly. "The next tracks are ostrich, except for the toes."

Ugh. Ostrich foot with human toes. That sounded pretty Deformed.

"She deformed that quickly?" Annika asked, joining us. Her veils were so long she had to hike them up to keep from dragging them in the mud.

Russell nodded. "Looks that way."

Kind of chilling, but… I was looking around for something more important. "So, um, where are the bodies?"

"The villagers went Deformed," Russell said slowly, like I was an idiot.

I opened my mouth, but Annika got there first.

"Not the children. Anyone without a Totem would have stayed human."

"Exactly," I said smugly.

Russell shrugged. "Maybe they ran off. That man with the dog-Totem said they showed up at other villages."

"All the children got away?" I pressed.

"Maybe the Deformed ate the slow ones."

"Russell, don't be disgusting," Annika snapped.

"What? We were all thinking it."

"I wasn't," I lied, and when Annika turned her head away, I flipped Russell off again.

Russell's eyebrows knit in confusion at the Earth gesture, but my smirk let him in on the intent because he scowled.

Then I turned away, still looking around.

It wasn't just the lack of kid bodies – though I was glad I didn't see any of those – but shouldn't there have been some adults, too? Deformed sometimes turned on each other. Now that I knew about the monster cores, I sort of understood why. They were looking for power. Or maybe they were just crazy and looking for power.

But there was nothing… No livestock, no regular animals, no birds singing in the trees. Nothing but churned-up mud and the burned and broken remains of mud huts.

In fact, the closest of the huts stood not too far away from us. The fire had been so hot it had baked the clay to crappier, brittle terracotta that had then fallen in on itself.

Except… a lot of the rubble had been blown inward. And were those scorch marks on the sides of the walls?

I stepped closer, looking in.

"Seth, what are you doing?" Annika asked.

I waved for her to keep back. "I thought the fires got out of control – you know, from newly Deformed knocking into cooking fires or something – but look, this one has a thatched roof and isn't even burned?"

"There could have been a rainstorm. Look at the mud."

"I don't know—" I started to say, then caught a glimpse of something, and ended it in an unconscious hiss. Lying half in the rubble was a human arm. Male or female, I didn't know. They must have had a snake Totem because the skin was peppered with brown-gold scales.

But the most important thing was that the end of the limb was clean cut, just like it had been snipped off the body.

No Deformed could have done that. But I'm not sure what could have… other than an industrial accident of some sort.

"This track is weird," Russell called, thankfully not having followed me.

I backed out of the half-collapsed hut, grateful for an excuse. "What's weird?"

He gestured to what looked like a random pileup of mud to me. "I'd almost say this was a tail mark – you get this when an animal drags its tail behind itself. But… look at it. It's huge."

Oh. Wait.

Hadn't Ash said we were looking for spirit animals?

How big did spirit animals get anyway?

That seemed to be the magic question because in the next moment I felt a strong vibration under my feet. The collected water in all the many footprints started to tremble just like in that classic Jurassic Park movie. The first one. Maybe the fourth one, too. It had been awhile since I’d seen them.

Suddenly, in my core, my gosling's eyes opened. I felt flooded with power.

Something bad was coming.

My arms may or may not have flicked down as if in an aborted effort to fling myself into the sky.

"We have to get out of here!" I said, which was easier said than done because the vibration turned to rolling, which turned to wild bucking as the earth heaved under us.

The ground by the river rolled up and up.

A great triangular head erupted from what I thought was a grassy hill. As big as a mud hut – bigger in some cases – it had a sharp beak, an ugly wide face, and a short reptilian neck that led back to a shell I had taken as the rest of the hill.

It was the biggest goddamned snapping turtle I had ever seen in my life, with eyes that glowed a demonic red color. Just in case I hadn’t gotten the message that this was bad news.

But the real cherry on top was when it opened its mouth and I saw fire gathering within.

"Run!" I yelled.

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