The current grows stronger and more wild, as if the mouth of the river were spitting us out like a piece of bad meat. The whirlpool before us in the large open lake spins and swirls with a loud, raging roar that creates a deafening white noise, as if we were standing beneath a great waterfall. Rather than being drawn straight towards it, our little boat instead shifts and lurches with a jolt to the right as the spiral current takes hold of us. The priestess waves her arms, almost tumbling over and falling off into the murk, but the wizard catches her just in time and they sit down to hold on to each other as we begin circling the orbicular torrent in the center. As we spin around the eye of the lake.

  The water here is too deep for the bad things to reach us anymore, they have long legs but not this long. The lake is very deep. The black-water stretches on far, far below. Down where nothing lives except for them, for it. Where nothing is allowed to stay except for black-water and fetid meat. Ooh! Ooh! It’s starting. Already now I hear them.

  Turning my head as we spin, I see the others. The other apes in the trees watching, they don’t throw sticks anymore or steal my fruit. Rather they opt to beat their chests rhythmically. Not even the hunt for food persists as they chant slowly, striking a fist against each side of their chest in harmonic unison like in a slow occult hymn. They remind me of the purple robed cultists from the fortress that we still never really got to explore. I stand up on my legs, stabilizing myself as best as I can on the moving boat and follow their patterns, doing my part. Ooh! Ooh! I strike my chest, first right, then left, but slower. Only one strike a second just as they do. Only one one ooh! I don’t know why we do it, but it’s what our instincts tell us to do when the sub-boss fight starts. Maybe the dungeon just thinks it’s cooler this way.

  We’ve circled the whirlpool once now and it grows faster. The chanting continues. I feel like I should be hearing some kind of dramatic music right now, heralding the coming of the thing, but all I hear is rushing water and our ape chants. Ooh! Ooh!

  All eyes are on the spiral now, on the vortex threatening to swallow any who get ensnared in the pull of the undertow. To keep them forever down where it is dark. The shadow that was seen just beneath the surface of the water rises, it grows larger and larger the closer it comes to breech. And the closer it comes, the less defined it seems to be. The more shapeless and meandering. As if a thousand worms were simply floating loosely together under the torrent. A thousand, squishy, writhing tendrils. But they’re not tendrils.

  I hear the priestess gag as it rises towards the surface, breaking the surface tension of the black-water, that seems to hold on for just a little too long, as the mass beneath breaks free. The sticky, vile bubble of black-water bursts and reveals the thing beneath. It brings with it a smell I can’t quite describe, but one that is beyond nauseating. It smells sour and wet, like a bowl of yellow puss that has been sitting out in the sun. It is rank.

  The worms- No. They’re not worms. They’re arms. Legs. Necks. Torsos. Human. Ape. Rat. Goblin. Anything, everything. Boneless sacks of waterlogged meat rise up together, all at once, as if they were sewn together into one gigantic dripping mass of flesh. All of the sinews and the fats and mismatched skin and wet, rotted fur, all of it stuck together into one long, tubular shape of a serpent. Of a creature made entirely out of undead, drowned meat. Out of everything that has ever fallen into the black-water. Into the bad water. Into the good water. No matter where, it has all been carried here where it all came together. Here where something else, something still below the swamp, something still below us ate their bones. Ate their eyes. All there is left of them, is the soggy, wet, maggot filled meat that screams.

  It screams. The faces with no eyes, that drip black water out of their sockets and the gaping, toothless mouths. All of the saggy, boneless arms flail and writhe together with the rest of the limbs as they too scream, just without words. Thousands of fingers with no fingernails left, bloody, oozing stumps of necks that squirt goo. All of it screams at once, as the wretched mass of the corpse-golem breaches the surface. Facing us, the giant, eyeless serpent roars. It too has no teeth, they too have been eaten. It has no eyes. They too have been eaten and it screams. It’s tongue flicks out of its mouth and the tongue itself is made up out of a dozen bodies more, all of them screaming and spewing black water out of their drowned, infested lungs as they exit the serpent for a brief second. It seeps out of their eyes, out of their boneless, soggy wounds.

  All of it is alive. All of them are alive. And all of them scream. All of them have been drowning forever, but none of them die. They all live on through the serpent. They are the coiled serpent emerging from the whirlpool that we still spiral around. None of them can die. None of us can ever die. The bad water takes us all and this is what it makes us. It makes us scream.

The priestess leans back the other way and retches out over the boat, a spew of rainbow colored vomit splashing into the bad water where it mixes in with all the rest of the bile already here.

All the while, the chanting of my kindred and I continued on, but it stops now as the serpent roars and the sub-boss fight begins.

I watch the trickle of rainbow vomit float by, just past us and shake my head, thinking about all the wasted food.

Razmatazz

Meat snake! Meat snake! What is your wisdom?

Meat snake: "Technicially, all snakes are made out of meat"

 

*~+---SPECIAL THANKS---+~*

Henry Morgan,  Shadowsmage, The Grey Mage, Spencer Seidel, Slime girl chapters 4 lyfes, chp2001, Shaoraka