Tainted Wind

The wind isn't really that cold—more wet. But the cloying, damp fog clings to every surface it touches. Even coating your mouth, nose, throat, and lungs with a filmy residue as you breathe.

You hack out a throatfull of phlegm in a coughing fit.

Having finally cleared your airways, you take in a fresh, deep breath of tainted wind. It stinks, too. Like soggy milk vomit. Enough to make you gag, and once you get started...

You finally manage to stand back up, wiping the edges of your mouth with a long sleeve. You spit out the last bits as you take in your surroundings.

Or, at least the things within your immediate vicinity. Due to the incredibly thick fog, which has been thoroughly described, you can't really see much of anything.

The temperature is moderate but on the cool side, and that combined with the disgustingly damp fog makes for a fairly miserable weather day.

The ground is thick and springy and full of clods of mud and clumps of tall, strong grass. Everything is so wet, you feel as if you're cooly evaporating into the world around you.

The swamp grass pulls at your feet, making for very difficult terrain. But you can't just stand around wherever this is forever. Can you?

It starts raining.

Might as well start walking now. There's a gentle slope to the disembodied spot of wet grass you're on, so you decide up is a good direction to head. Or did you decide that? Either way, up we go.

As you trudge up the soggy hill, you can almost imagine the entire hill beneath your feet—and even deeper—below—in the deep, dark, heavy spaces where gravity lies—shifting and spinning in every direction. 

You almost stumble before you realize there is no shifting. Everything is perfectly still.

And horrendously, exhaustingly wet. You aren't entirely convinced that you're still human. Perhaps your skin has scaled and your neck grown gills, for there is little else to explain how anyone could survive this much dampness.

Wet as you are and tired as you are, you suddenly realize that all this trudging upwards might have begun to thin out the fog around you. Dammit, in fact, you're convinced you can see slightly more things around you than just what's in your immediate vicinity. Surely.

Either way, the trudging has grown slightly less wearisome. Though the wet does remain. As does the landscape remain unchanged. Minutes or miles, all sense of time and distance are lost as your dimly illuminated surroundings slowly nod by to the cadence of each step.

The thought of being on a giant, experimental treadmill is not easily dismissed as the land around you is so blank in its features it would be impossible to say whether it's repeating itself or not.

You stop for a moment, setting your feet apart and bending slightly at the knees. You focus through your feet and down into the ground. Down through the water that has just started to seep into the depressions your feet are creating. Down into the soggy mud, pasty thick. Deep below yourself, into the earth, you cast your attention.

And it looks right back at you.

You wake up sometime later, soaked and shivering and covered in mud. You know better than to think about what just happened.

So you push yourself up with great effort and start trudging up the swampy hill again, arms clutched about yourself as you shiver violently. You shake until your entire body cramps and your jaw aches from the work of keeping your teeth from clattering. But still you manage to take one step after another, slowly squelching through mud and stumbling over grass that seems to snatch at your ankles with every grueling step.

The walking began as a chore, but now you realize it's the only thing keeping you from much worse fates. The walking keeps your subconscious at bay as you learn to assign it more tasks.

Breathing has long been handled on its own, no need to worry about that. Shivering is also a task for the sleeping mind. And even walking, though difficult and painful, is so ingrained in humanity that the subconscious can take care of that too.

And all that's left is you and your thoughts, undistracted by the swirling and meandering ways of the sleeping mind.

But this damned fog just won't go away. It seeps into the edges of your consciousness as it soaks you through clothes and skin and soul. You can feel its slimy caress as it coats the outline of your very existence.

Fuck walking, fuck fog, fuck this place wherever/whatever it is. Fuck me. This is some bullshit.

You've had enough and then some by now. You're even annoyed that you're still reading at this point.

You break out into a full sprint. The fog clutches at you. Pulling at you in billowing clouds. Creating a sail behind you that drags and tugs with every stride.

Your breath is fire in your throat and lungs. And that fire burns away the slimy coating of taint inside you. It sears off the layers of grime the fog left behind. And for the first time, you feel like you can finally breathe again.

You could almost scream for joy at the feeling. But the fog is still pulling at you. And your lungs and throat, while blissfully clear of taint, are burning up along with the rest of your body.

Your heart is pounding so hard and fast that it can't possibly take much more of this. But you have no other choice than to push yourself even harder than you ever imagined you could. Past the limits you spent your life carefully verifying. Pushing yourself even further than beyond.

The wind throws back your hair. And the damp, stinky, disgusting fog slips around you. A sudden gust of wind clears out the final swirls of tainted fog as you burst onto the crest of the hill, finally getting a clear view.

Panting, heaving, and gasping for air, you look out before you and see exactly what you expected to find.