“For aeons we have slept; cold, silent, dreamlessly across empty gulfs of starlit nothing. But our slumber stirred with the first steps taken on your travels. Why should the beginnings of a young boy’s journey trouble our empty dreams?”
     From atop their columns, two creatures spoke as one to the boy’s mind. Their words flowed voicelessly over a muddy form of speech made with clicks and bristled scraping from one of the creatures; a giant insect hovering motionless above its tall throne. Low gurgles bubbled up from somewhere within the other monstrous thing; a large emaciated frog sitting frozen, locked within its own dried out husk. The boy, staring in a form of wondrous horror could force no words from his mouth agape. He became just as motionless as these Great Things, trapped within their dark gaze, black eyes sharply reflecting his own visage. But it was not just the sight of these ever dying horrors that gave the boy pause, for after their question flowed voicelessly through his mind, he could not find an answer.
     A disquieting, pulsing buzz emitted from beneath the carapace of the giant bug, and a sloshing croak from the frog to create a semblance of laughter to the boy’s ears. “Where is your reply, boy? Have the many days and nights of travel upon your unliving mount distracted? Did the consuming darkness of north sitting Hythion and its meaningless halls steal away your thoughts without notice in its labyrinth of night? Maybe the windswept plains of Akry sent phantoms to steal the image of your goal during sleepless travel across its length, always one step out of reach of its endless horizon. Or perhaps in this marsh when the urge to finally slumber took you, both memories and dreams of your quest seeped out your ear and sank away into murky depths to be gnawed upon and passed through hidden creatures below who never blink nor see.”
     It was as a taunt these creatures were vomiting, for the boy remembered well the journey through haunted lands upon his tireless steed. The horrors of Hythion, whose land is but a maze of ever shifting shadows, thick and real; the endless travel through empty Akry, every blade of cleanly cut grass he counted on its ever repeating landscape; and now the Gray Marsh, floating within an unnatural fog of timeless decay where even death cannot fully take his prize. But for each terrible memory recalled of his passage through cursed landscapes, none stirred remembrance of why.
     The boy took a cautious step backwards noticed clearly by the bulbous eyes of the dead things, his reflection dim and broken. “Run if you recall your way back home young child, for the path taken, quickly becomes lost, to thossse whooo lingerrr.”
     With some hidden purpose those last words croaked and buzzed out slowly to become something more than mere ridicule. The boy could sense deception in their voiceless tones scrapping against his mind. It was as if they were crafted to delay him, even for meager seconds within this time-lost marsh. Heeding the creatures’ warning the boy turned with his skeletal horse to flee their cyclopean thrones. They splashed not five steps before realizing he knew not where he was heading. All about was the marsh with its spongy islands reflecting perfectly within mirrored, brackish waters. He gazed out upon stagnant waterways and oddly shaped mounds as if for the first time. This was not true, knew the boy, for had he not traveled that way from the north across great darkness and endless plains now only half remembered?
     A sickness overcame him, and his head spun with fearful thoughts. The scent of nature’s slow decay filled his panicked lungs as muscles gave out under a tainted breeze, forcing him to crumble before the thrones and their things waiting above, lifeless eyes darkly showing a face the boy once knew.
     “Fear not child, for your wasted and forgotten journey ends here below us. Rest at our feet. Sleep, and dream of things still remembered so we might drink of them to fill the quenchless void of our own slumber.”
     With tired defiance the boy forced himself to stand, somehow knowing his journey was not wasted. The monsters themselves had forgotten something they had just said. It was important that he come. So important that these creatures who may have slept for another eternity had instead awakened at the sound of his very footsteps taken from a distant land that the boy could now only recall as a dimly lit play of shadows cast by things imagined. It was with purpose that he stood before these things and their marsh, thought the boy. But who would willingly seek out such devourers of memory? No answer came, for what the boy could not remember, is that he wanted to forget.