At first there was nothing there but a soup of silt and squelching.
Pppphhhmmmmphh…
There was nothing there but minerals and muddled layers of dead whelks and snails and crabs and carapaces. It stank of death and clammy ruin; the spoiled life of mud and mire clinging on pathetically to places where it shouldn't belong.
Skkkkllloooommmppphhhhh…
There was nothing there… save for an odd hint of pressure. A gaseous bulge belched.
Sklloomph… sklimmmphh… phhmmmpphhh.
There was nothing there… until there was.
Skkiiiilllmmpppphhhhh!!
At first it slithered, but once it felt the air above, it lurch and snapped into being. Spread out like thin gruel, pooling beneath clumpy layers of the endless mire, too thin of an existence yet to clamber onto thought—but it was there. Taut and poised. It wanted something. No, it needed something. It craved it like a toothless cannibal gumming ravenously at its own limbs.
Sssssssskkkkkkkkkkkiiiiiiiii… mmmpphhhh…
Sklloomph. Fmph. Skiiiiimphnnf.
Thin layers of mud started to shimmer and shake. It was like watching candle wax drip and settle into form, collecting itself into fatty pools. Proteins came first, half-mixed building blocks of dead creatures flattened into smeared layers like some odious cake trying to bake itself into being. A Baklava of excrement and macerated pulp. A Tiramisu of shite and old dead things.
As the air popped and fizzed and drip, drip, dropped with pocks of acidic rain, a thought fizzled into existence.
Skkkkiiiiinmmmpphh..iiinnmnnnpphhhhh…
Skkkiiiiiiinmmpphhnnnnnnnnnnn!!
Skkkiiiiiinnnnnn!!
Skiiinnn!!
Skin, it thought. It needed skin. The sweet, fleshy embrace of form. It needed gelatinous cheeks and jowls of softness. The stinging patter of rain upon its vertices needed something to fall upon to give it substance. Like some meaningless sheet of sinuous pulp spread out across an abattoir killing floor. It needed angles and ridges, folds and flaps, dimples and holes where sweat could slide and grime could gather. It remembered what it felt like. Deep down, locked away inside archontic vaults, somehow—it still remembered.
With every drop of rain it found itself hideous. A puddle of revolt spread out in pathetic waves, until there was nothing left to do but to will itself into shape.
Disgust is the greatest motivator.
At first it was a thin disk. Then it felt holes forming where they shouldn't be. Eventually, it felt wrong to be anything other than a tube of sorts. No, a cylinder. A series of cylinders sprouting off from each other. Strange tentacles of mud and mire writhed together amongst the effluence. Failure after failure of form flopped in the mud. After the forth and fifth iteration, however, all that it touched seemed to give the bulk of it some semblance of orientation.
Information. Space. With every writhe and wriggle it felt the sopping landscape for what it was. It was acclimatizing, like a newborn swine that had fallen out of its mother into their own slurry. It was no longer a semi conscious puddle of fleshy bits, but instead, an assorted jumble of floppy bits that oddly worked well together. By no means was it the pinnacle of evolution, but for the first time in its existence, the shambling ruin crawled out across the mire by its own volition.
One tentacle of sludge after the other it felt its way through the darkness. Sliding, sluicing its way from the soup whence it came.
It felt… triumphant? Somewhere, somehow, in the impossible recesses of its limbic system, an iota of understanding slid back into place.
[Sludge has gained +1 Mobility]
Just as quickly as the thought coalesced to the surface, it faded back down again, belched back like bile in a shambling shuffle of writhing mud-limbs.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
For days it slithered across the hellscape. Although night and day meant nothing to it, odd sensations of warmth and plummeting depths of cold started to form throughout its journey. Warm was tight and taut, springy and filled with potential. Cold was sharp and spiky. It felt slower but more complete.
Strangely, it preferred the warmth, where its sludge tentacles would feel firmer and more consistent, and feeling its way through the swamp somehow felt more amiable.
By the third morning it had traversed its way across a fallen log, and splinters of bark became a part of it—firming up into its folds and solidifying itself even further. Logs became colonies of mussel shells, wooden planks of old carriages; crates and sunken chests; great big spongy blackrocks; odd pieces of scrimshaw, and even some stray golden cups. The sludge was resourceful in its scrappage.
Not long after slithering upon an old oaken door, it spent several hours pinned to the mud by the talons of a curious carrion crow. For what felt like the best part of a day, the bird would pin it down for a while, pecking at its silty cylindrical body, and the sludge would slither onwards undeterred. Eventually, however, another tectonic plate of emotion burst into being from the depths of its psyche. Annoyance at first, and then a hot flood of rage. Almost instinctively the sludge’s tentacles coiled and snapped, and in a flurry of jet-black feathers the crow ceased to exist. It was the sludge now. Consumed and part of its belly, if it had one.
[Sludge has gained Well Fed. Movement speed increased by 5% for 1 hour. This effect can stack with diminishing returns.]
For a while the crow still felt half alive inside of it, opening and closing its beak in desperate caws, but before long the flesh and feathers and bones of it had eroded within the silt just like the rest.
It felt hungry again.
The thin ligaments of the crow weren't enough to satiate it fully. Before long a vile serpent felt foolish enough to slide its way along its surface, and the tentacles wrapped themselves around it with ease. A painfully comfortable cycle of hunger and gratification quickly set itself into motion. Birds became snakes, snakes became warty lizards, and before long the hideous creature had slithered from the swamp into rich and bountiful grasslands ripe for the picking.
For weeks on end, hogs by far had become its favorites. Conveniently, their tusks came with the useful byproduct of creating a rampart of ossified ridges and spiky carapaces across the surface of its silty skin. They tasted mightily familiar, and the blubber of them served only to make a larger and more powerful sludge shambler.
Due to its newfound size the sludge soon found itself giving off a squelching sound as it moved. The forest birdsong grew nervous and dim as the flummph, plummph, skrrrtttttpphh, passed through, and it didn’t take long before the curious ears of a young child happened upon it.
It was delicious.
[Sludge has gained 1 Soul Fragment. Currently 1/1 available. Currently 0/1 equipped.]
It took even less time for the child’s parents to come looking with bright torches and hounds. The sludge could hear them beating bushes through its hog ears, and it could feel the vibrations in the forest floor beneath through the slithering of its cylindrical, serpentine body.
The night was chaos. Men shouted and women balked in the darkness, calling out for the young boy that had been gobbled up. For hours the sludge squelched and hid beneath the undergrowth, keeping itself as low to the muddy earth as it could, its tentacles coiled and ready to strike with the stray snap of a twig.
Eventually, the villagers had lost all hope.
To its surprise, the sludge could feel an odd pang in the core of itself as it heard the rabble slowly dissipating and traipsing back home through the forest. They’d given up, and the sludge lived to slither on undeterred. As it roiled itself from the bushy undergrowth, ready to comb the countryside for a fresh batch of curious critters to consume—a great, hefty axe came crashing down upon it.
The blade split its cylinder body clean in two, and its tentacular limbs writhed together in an effort to make sense of the moment.
“Bastard hell dog!” screamed a furious voice from behind. “You’ve eaten my boy! Whatever bastard spawn of H?l-pax you are!”
The boy's father clutched at a broad, hefty log-splitter—his knuckles bone white as the bit shimmered in the rising morning sun.
As the belly of the blade swung down once again the sludge squelched to either side. It couldn’t gather enough traction to propel itself away, and one half of it plopped over pathetically while the other splayed open in silt and mire.
The axe came down again, but this time the sludge managed to clasp a tentacle around the man’s ankle.
“Horrible vile bastard!” he spat in fury as he kicked his other foot backwards. In one fell swoop the father tripped and the axe came clattering down to the floor. The heftier half of the sludge found purchase further up the man’s leg, and as he kicked and scrambled the sludges tentacles wrapped back around themselves.
For the first time in its existence, the sludge acted on a deep, dark, gnostic intuition rather than its animal instinct.
The father kicked and screamed, pounding his fists against his own chest of mud and mire and silt and the stray enzymes of his own son.
The sludge slid into the man’s mouth. At first it pursed through his closed lips and the gaps in his teeth, but the bulk of it soon pried him wide.
Sludge poured into the man’s gaping maw, surging through his esophageal channel and pooling in his gut. It filled his lungs and permeated through the soft walls of his vital organs.
Quickly enough, it found purchase in his blood, and it swelled with pressure as the finer liquids of its being washed happily across the cortices of its newly acquired brain.
[Success! Sludge has equipped a new vessel!
Lazy Lumberjack
Human Male, 47.
STR: 15
DEX: 11
CON: 12
WIS: 8
CHA: 8
Known affixes: Lazy, Stubborn, Boastful
Unknown affixes:
Sludge integrity: 33/75. Vessel becomes unreliable at critical levels.]
Sludge opened its eyes, and for the first time in its existence it saw the world and everything in it.