While the marsh is as still as usual, the advent of the new season has made the place entirely unbearable. With the assaulting tallsun heat, the marshes have begun to reek more than normal, and the stench is rendered too pungent to bear even for him. Their home is riddled with gnarled shadows but the mists have dispersed almost entirely and given way to the incessant hum of thousands of flies, thriving in the pestilent marshlands. Skywalker, ever the advocate of darkness and pleasant, cool weather is driven far past the reasonable borderlands of aggravation. He is furious – his tail constantly ripping through stygian clouds or flying parasites, his shoulders taut with disapproval. And the look on his already hideous face? Grim and gruesome.

With the constant flicking of his ears, he registers a sound that is neither buzzing abomination, nor moaning corpse clamoring from a watery grave. This, the shuffling of hooves, is a sound that has grown strangely scarce in their hot catacombs. Greedily, he follows the faint sound, brushing past the skeletal trees and slipping through the gossamer light that manages to find its way through the matrix of vines and bony branches, down to the swamp’s treacherous floor.

A pale figure is soon to reveal itself in the strange half-light of the sepulchral marsh; Skywalker swats a fly, to no avail, as the legions of its kin are quick to return to his shadowy pelt. Disapprovingly, his wintry eyes scavenge amongst shadows and flesh, trying to make out just exactly who this is – faintly, he recalls a face, and faintly he recalls a voice. But from where? He steps a little closer, careful to keep to the malformed, ghastly shadows: remaining unseen, remaining undone. For now.

Like rain, the face falls into memory and Skywalker places it at the side of Circuta, white and gaunt and much too conceited for his disapproving tastes. Never mind that Skywalker is bolted against the furnace of his own unquenchable haughtiness. He listens as the stranger beckons their leaders, coaxing them out from the shadows and the thick, veiling stench of corruption. He listens and he finds an impatience shivering at the nadir of the voice that summons; he wrinkles his nose in distaste, his blue eyes narrowed with contempt. Certainly, they would heed his call and come slithering like chimaeras out of the perpetual gloom of their home, no doubt the two queens would obediently answer his questions.

In the meantime…

Detaching himself from the spindly fingers of his hideout Skywalker obediently obeys as his ugly and impatient curiosity wrenches itself free from its chains and rears its head, peering at the white stranger. How starkly he stands out in the marsh, how terribly misplaced he looks, all clad in milk and pristine snow! The stygian wraith smiles, a vulgar, vulpine grin spreading like a sickness on his lips – the flies gather, as if he were a corpse but he stops and stands absolutely still. Humming uncertainly, the parasites gather themselves up into an unseemly halo around his inelegant head, crowning him with filth and decay. He sighs discontentedly, as if the stranger’s presence was something painfully unbearable.

“We all have questions, I am sure,” his voice is lilting, barely audible and his smile hangs like a stubborn corpse on his lips, “I do wonder what makes yours so terribly pressing?”

He tilts his head and a thin rivulet of light breaks through the canopy of entwined branches and vines, falling unceremoniously upon the rough ridge of his nose.

“I am curious as to how you keep yourself so hideously white? If you keep yourself in that fashion, surely there must be little time over to do some meaningful work for your family, no?”

“Please, stranger, I am Skywalker and I am deathly curious – do enlighten me.”

Entertain, is what he really means.

S K Y W A L K E R.