Chapter 20 Listening to the Voices in the Grave

Trog did not scream. He did not weep. He knelt by the freshly turned earth as he finished, and then he stayed. He knelt through a shivering, fog-drenched dawn. He knelt as the midday sun beat down, sweat tracing paths through the grime on his still face. He knelt through a chilling night rain, his body shaking but his gaze unwavering, fixed on the pretty stone.

We brought him food. We spoke his name. We placed a hand on his shuddering shoulder.

“Trog. Come inside. The rain is cold.” “Trog, you must drink.” “Trog, come inside. The swamp will take you.” “Brother, they are at peace now. Let your heart find some.”

But our words hit the wall of his grief and fell away, meaningless. He was listening to the voices in the grave, to the laughter that never was, to the relentless, accusing memory of his own drowsy breath that had been the lullaby for a death sentence. We looked at him, hunched and broken in the mud, and we did not see weakness. We saw our own reflection. We knew that if it had been any one of us in that stump, we would be kneeling beside him, drowned in the same unanswerable sea of if only.

So, finally, we left him. We let the rain and the sun and the silent, patient swamp have him. We understood that some wounds must be faced alone, in the terrible quiet between the heartbeats of the world. We would wait, and tend our own silent hurts, and hope that somewhere in that desolate landscape of his mind, a path back to us might one day, slowly, begin to form.

---------------

The next morning, we found Trog face down in the churned mud between the two small graves, one hand outstretched as if still reaching for the pretty stone. He was so still, for a terrible moment we feared he had died.

But as we rushed to him, we heard the shallow, ragged pull of his breath. He had not chosen to leave. His body, starved of water and food, besieged by rain and sun, had simply given out. Exhaustion had finally overwhelmed grief.

Grub and I gently lifted him. He was frighteningly light, a bundle of cold skin and bones. We carried him back into the gloom of the stump, away from the sight of the graves, and laid him on the pile of dry moss that had been his bed. We covered him with reeds. Muddy brought a shell of water, and Snag carefully trickled a few drops between his cracked lips.

---------------------

He woke as the evening gloom thickened inside the stump. He stirred with a groan, his eyes opening slowly. They were no longer staring into a fixed, inner horror. They were clouded with pain and a deep, weary confusion. He looked around, seeing the familiar clay walls, the roof, our faces gathered around him in the firelight.

“You… brought me in?” 

“You fell,” Grub said, “The outside was done with you for a while.”

Trog’s eyes welled with tears. They traced clean lines through the mud on his cheeks. 

“Thank you. Thank you. For the… the good words. The warm support. For being… good gobby friends. I heard them. They were far away, but I heard them.”

We hug him, our own throats tight.

“We eat now,” Snag said.

 He brought out our meager evening share: a few dried fish strips, a paste of mashed tubers, a handful of sour swamp-berries.

We sat in a loose circle around the faint glow of our shielded firepit. Trog sat up, wincing, and accepted a piece of fish. He held it for a moment, then took a small bite. He chewed slowly, as if remembering how.

We ate in silence. 

When the last berry was gone, we banked the fire. No one needed to say it was time for sleep. We simply moved to our moss beds, curling into our own aches. Trog lay back down, staring at the ceiling. But this time, he was inside. He was under the roof. He was with us.

------------------

The night pressed in, full of the swamp sounds. The groaning trees, the chirring insects, the distant, liquid hoots. Inside the stump, we slept the thin, troubled sleep of the grieving.

But six feet away, in the soft, black earth near the graves, something moved. Bog was not dead.

His brain was broken. His breathing had become so slow, so shallow, that no rising chest could be seen. The cold of the mud and the shock had made his tiny body go still and stiff. To fingers checking for a pulse on a tiny, ice-cold chest, there was nothing to feel.

We wrapped him in soft moss. We put him in the hole with the others. We covered him with black dirt. And now he woke up in the dark. Deep in the cool, silent dark.

His mind did not work right. Words were gone. Thoughts were pictures that broke apart. There was only feeling. 

A sound came out of him. Not a word. A wet, muffled mmph into the dirt.

 He did not know he was buried. He did not know he was Bog. He knew only a suffocating pressure on all sides, blackness, and a deep, wrong cold in his legs that would not move.

A base instinct, older than thought, fired in the scrambled ruin of his brain: Move. Dig. Up. Seek warmth.

His arms responded, but in a jerky, uncoordinated way. His claws, meant for climbing and digging, scraped feebly at the dirt packed around his face. The claw moved again, scratching at the soft, peaty soil packed around it. It found a rootlet, thin as thread. The claw hooked, pulled. A crumb of dirt shifted near a buried nose.

 He managed to turn his head a fraction. Dirt filled his mouth, his nose. He did not cough. He simply opened his mouth in a soundless, dirt-choked gasp and kept scraping.

It was a pathetic, blind, mole-like motion. One claw scraped a handful of dirt toward his chest. The other pushed it weakly aside. His legs were dead logs, trailing behind, useless. He did not know they were his. They were just there.

His mouth, clogged with dirt, opened. A sound came out. Not a chirp. A wet, guttural aaaahk sound, like a stone being dislodged from a drain.

He dug. Like a worm. A blind, hurting worm in the hard-packed dirt. His fingers bled. His nails tore. The dirt got under his skin. He did not stop. 

It took a long time. His air was bad. His chest burned. Then, one clawing handful of dirt came away, and there was no more dirt above it. There was wet air.

The rain had softened the earth over the grave. His head, now free, lolled to the side, his cheek in the mud. One enormous, sail-like ear was folded under him, packed with dirt. The other lay flat against his skull, trembling with the effort of his breath.

He pushed his head up through the hole he had made. He dragged his chest out. His legs would not follow. They stayed in the grave, limp and twisted. He had to pull himself out with just his arms. He flopped onto the wet ground like a fish, gasping.

He lay there for a long time. Rain fell on his face. He did not blink.

Slowly, his head turned. His eyes did not see well. Everything was blurry. But he knew one shape. The big, dark shape of the stump. Home.

He began to crawl.

He could not use his legs. They dragged behind him in the mud, making two wet tracks. He pulled himself forward with his arms, his hands digging into the ground. His progress was a slow, pathetic dragging, his chin plowing a furrow in the dirt. Every few pulls, he would stop, his body trembling with the effort, and let out that wet, clicking moan.

“Hhhh… gaaa… klik… k-k-lak. Aaaah. Gob-bah. D-d-d.”

Every pull forward was a fight. His arms were thin sticks. They dug into the mud, clutching, pulling. The mud did not want to let go. It sucked at his elbows, his chest. Each time he dragged himself an inch forward, it felt like his arms might pop from their sockets.

The water got into his nose. He snorted it out, a bubbling, weak sound. He was shivering now. His whole broken body shook with cold and tired.

Things in the mud bit him. He did not see them. A water-beetle bit into his dragging foot. He couldn't move his legs, but he felt the pain. 

"Graaa... graaaa... nnnnghhh!"

He kept pulling. The beetle held on for a while, chewing, before letting go.

His claws tore. One ripped backward on a sharp rock. A little bead of dark blood welled up, then washed away in the rain. He didn't look at it.

His elbows were raw, scraped down to greenish scales that were now torn and bleeding. He left a long, smeared trail in the mud behind him, dotted with little dark spots of blood and torn-up moss from his burial wrapping.

When he finally reached the firmer ground by the stump, he stopped. He had nothing left. His arms were limp noodles. His face was in the dirt. He could smell the stump, the home smell, right there. But he could not move another inch.

All he could do was lie there, broken and breathing, a pile of wet hurt shaped like a hatchling that used to be.

From inside, soft with sleep and sorrow, came the sound of a goblin shifting on moss.

Bog’s ruined throat worked. He gathered all the air left in his broken chest and pushed out a sound. It was meant to be a cry for help, a chirp for his Dadas.

“Oooooghoooooh… g-glik… dahhda… ooooooh…”

Inside, the only one awake, Trog flinched as if struck. His head snapped up. That wasn't a frog. That wasn't the wind.

The sound came again, weaker now, a dying battery of a chirp.

  "Aaaah… klik… dada…"

Trog was moving before he knew it, scrambling for the entrance, throwing aside the moss curtain and looked down.

At the base of their home, half-sunk in the mud, was a thing.

It was green. It was small. It had enormous, dirty ears. Its eyes were open but saw nothing, milky and un-focused. Its mouth hung slack, drooling mud and saliva. From the waist down, it was limp, its legs twisted. It was caked in the fresh, black soil of the gravesite.

It was Bog. And he was alive.