PORTALS EVERYWHERE. AND RUBY—SOMEWHERE.
The broom-girl sighting sent Swishy over the edge. He tried to put it out of his mind but that simply wasn’t possible. As soon as she passed over his vision he’d pretty much given up on Goldie and his Swish-mini. The dimness was substantial. He watched the reflection of his light shrink from Trey’s eyes like a deflated balloon. Even his friend was startled at the change but said nothing. There was a ton going on: snitches cawing from every other treetop, the curses pulsing through the underground roots, the oval nebulas that kept him stiff and expecting a curse explosion at any given moment. And that silhouette…it couldn’t be her, could it?
Maybe-it-was-Myst was Swishy’s initial cope, but his logic diced those hopes apart with wrathraven voracity. Myst would’ve spoken. Any edge, any upper hand, had to be rubbed in—that was the fun of power. And it just wasn’t like her to not say hi or my friend or some variation of you’ll-die-you’re-dead-without-me-you-need-me-I-am-air-I-am-life. Swishy made his thoughts loud. He projected Myst’s name and image and personal digs with a mental banner. He wanted her to laugh or take offense, to accept his bait for her attention—or her help if he were being the most honest little straw.
But nothing. No Myst, and no other known possibility.
And what the heck was with the broom? It’s not like he knew Ruby to have a broom but he begrudgingly accepted that it was within her disposition to have one. He knew exactly what she’d say about it too: A witch without a broom? Do you take me for a fraud? I am the real deal, as they say.
She flew on that broom, indulging in the evening that she herself created. Made sense but Swishy tensed. Ruby didn’t seem to pay them any special attention yet her influence was potent.
Meanwhile, the portals clung to Trey’s aura like a super sticky taffy. With every movement that Trey made, forcing himself away, the oily nebulas seemed to stick to his energy with almost physical tackiness. The edges of the ovoids stretched like a piece of gum before snapping back to place toward Trey’s body.
“This is going to be a problem,” Trey said, eyeing the nodes. “I’m a friend of darkness so don’t do me dirty, yeah?”
Swishy laughed but stopped as soon as he returned to the back of Trey’s head, reminded of his own problem: the mysterious gravitation that captured him and sent him into best friend orbit.
It was fortunate that Trey managed to free himself from most of them, and by extension Swishy.
Sometimes he lost them through the first few [Zlides], traveling to what he believed was the village’s direction, but he was forced to change course by the ever-populating number of portals. He chose to teleport skyward and then back safely to the ground, seeing if he could escape the black ether’s notice and stick them far away from him. It worked for the most part. The problem was when he gained new attachments—he’d haplessly touched shadow nodes, catching his arm or leg against them at the end of his warp.
A shadow map would’ve been helpful but of course that was a fantasy. The Straw City of today was never the one from yesterday. And the one from five minutes ago was bound to change its layout at least. Magic was the law, the way of living, and stability was the myth.
Several [Zlide] spells later and Trey failed to shake the portals away completely, but he’d made good progress. But the gumminess had a limit. Whenever Swishy saw the shadow stretch in effect, it reminded him of the everytrees. There was something to how the darkness clung to folks, read them, and flexed toward their souls.
All this portal business was like being in a land of pushy shopkeepers, insistent and smiling. Swishy floated way too close to one with a similar placement and shape to a tree hollow, its gravity tugging him in, but he managed to flail away, flinging gold dust in the process.
“My guy, you’re like a real fairy. Even down to the cartoon struggles.”
Swishy reminded himself to poke Trey in the eye, just a little bit, enough so that he teared up and learned the spirit of repentance.
Trey bent down and blew at Swishy.
A strong wind. Goldie had to work-work-work. But the Swish-mini endured.
Trey collected the blown gold flecks in the air, catching them on his fingers. It reacted against his fingerprints, the latent soul underneath.
“If we could bottle this and sell it, I’d call it the color of friendship. We’d make millions—not that you’d do anything with millions of Ching notes, but you’d have a great time making money. You love a good scheme!”
Swishy floated around the fingerprints, watching the straw dust and soul fuse and catalyze against each other. The magic was indecipherable for the moment but it gave the boy hope. His body unconsciously glowed, the scarecrow light pooling into Trey’s eyes.
“I think we might be able to work something out. If we can talk without me astral-projecting, that’d be a good start.”
A single strong up-down from Swishy.
“I can’t leave myself unattended because…you know.”
Bristles snored loudly. A flume of Swish-mini-sized bubbles came from the man’s nose and popped like grenades. Even his sleep was demonic.
“Okay, you can stop now, little motor-wing. You’re hurting my eyes.”
Swishy hadn’t realized that his up-down motions started, sped up, and took a life of their own.
“Okay let’s keep going. I can’t just warp everywhere. I might fall into a portal or get more stuck to me.”
They moved on—Trey on foot while Swishy floated within his friend’s collar, shielding himself in the clothing. As planned, the patient progress kept them away from surprise portals. But it was shocking how much they’d proliferated. Ruby’s reach was astounding. Curses that Swishy had once dispelled seemed to reenter the night, flowing underground through the everytree roots. Entities phased through to the surface and joined the portals as smoke, bolstering their chosen nebulas. [MIDNIGHT] continued to work its population magic, drawing a migration of curses toward Ruby’s stunning turns of shadow.
Guided by a torchlight of a [Zzt] handful, Trey led them to somewhat familiar territory. The lands were a mess of roots and menacing jack-o-lanterns, but they’d returned to familiar tree formations, clearings that had scarecrow footprints and boot marks. Terror kept them cautious, though, especially since the nodes of black ether underwent changes. Without a live being to target, namely Trey, the portals kept themselves busy through odd modifications, aging, changing.
Solidification set upon the blackened ovals as moonlight streaked across their surfaces, curving over the roundness. The black holes were like glass panes, reflective and shiny. Swishy thought that they looked like eggs. Eggs that could see. Eggs that oddly glued themselves to Trey and functioned as Ruby’s eyes.
“This is nuts…” Trey breathed. “And look, they’re not just watching us. They’re sensitive to everything.”
Shadowclaws flew overhead and a treetop portal stretched in their direction, almost turning into a hook. When the group left, the ovoid reverted, snapping like a rubberband back into the tree. The branch cluster bobbed, sending off leaves and twigs.
The pumpkins weighing down the trees laughed. Silently. Maybe the everytree fruits were flexed throughout their whole structure and that the jack-O-lantern expressions were sheer happenstance. Swishy didn’t think about it any further. He was comforted and that was enough. That’s what he needed.
A soft glow coursed through his straw, showing Trey—perhaps lying a little—that he was okay.
“Cool, we got this my friend. Slow and steady makes it to the village…if we can find it.”
(…)
The night was immense.
Trees had pushed out an overgrowth of branches that reached the ground, tangling in clusters. At the ends of those branches were the very everyfruits that stretched them to that extent, an odd suspended pumpkin patch that obscured routes and paths. Not to mention the portals. They floated around, messing up the layout.
The pair played a game of hot-cold, except it was changed to light-dark. Swishy’s sensitivity to his real body served as a compass for where to go next. Several clearings were left until reaching the village. This wasn’t bad under normal conditions, but the black ether night obstructed them by no small margin. One kilometer in regular life counted as a harrowing journey now.
At a point, Swishy realized that the warps had freed him from the orbit around Trey’s neck too. It was the portal force that kept him glued. All darkness pressed down harder now that there was so little of the Swish-mini to resist the draw. When Trey freed himself from the forces, Swishy also benefitted from the release. But sometimes Swishy exited the [Zlide] and reentered life right beyond the amorphous shine of a black hole.
It gave him a lot of anxiety, being helpless, yet he was attached to this form of his body. The gold, the wing, the true-to-life flight.
He’d touched a dose of his dream and refused to give it up. Mistakes were being made. Every second Swishy held out, being filled with the terror and surprises of a too-large, too-dark world, counted as a misstep, another infusion of shadowdeep trauma.
It didn’t have to be this way but he was tired of losing things. Swishy was done giving up. Compromises were a curse of their own. He started to get why the folks of the city were so greedy.
The boy was dragged into a nearby portal. He rotated that hummingbird wing with everything in him but the current dragged him along. It was like being caught in space, among stars and cosmic force.
Trey’s hand cupped him away from a portal for what had to be the dozenth time.
“I really think you should go,” Trey scolded. “That’s not your real body, right? It has to be a trick like my astral projection, yeah?”
Swishy didn’t answer, he just flew around aimlessly, waiting for a new danger to steal Trey’s attention again.
“I’m not dumb. Go home, friend. And by home I mean your body.”
But what if I can’t make another? Swishy stoked the gold-straw, flexing his determination.
“Okay be like that then. Just stick close…”
Untangling himself from the darkness proved impossible without Trey. He managed to keep steady, pretending well enough that he wasn’t being yanked out of place—but he was under constant tension, bothersome, and frankly overpowering.
Goldie was no use despite his best efforts. He strained his body; he reversed the course of his flaps; he experimented with both speed and slowness and tempo shifts. Nothing worked. The boy was bound to Trey’s body like a piece of jewelry. He stole glances at the golden cross friend, a spirit who he was told harbored hope and help, but the scarecrow just waved as he passed by, feeling it was better not to impose.
As a scarecrow who’d spent the better part of the night playing God, he decided that asking for aid would be a rude thing to do. He hadn’t worked out the interaction math in full but trusted his keenness for respect.
“I see you struggling down there. I’m not dumb.”
Swishy froze in embarrassment.
“It’s okay, I just don’t want you to hurt yourself.”
Up-down, up-down.
“I wanna know if you can get yourself back together, like if you tear or something.”
It was a good question. Swishy closed his eyes and considered the forces that pulled them along. A flash of panic shocked him, the idea that he couldn’t summon his straw back from the portal gravitation.
Swishy flew from left to right and right to left.
“I see…we sure need finesse for everything around here. To the village then, and we’ll regroup. Ruby seems charitable for now.”
The witch silhouette did a fanciful loopty-loop across a sparkling constellation.
“No way this bitch spelled her name.”
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Up-down, up-down. Swishy’s exasperation was infinite.
[Zlide]. The disintegration set upon Trey and Bristles and the aura-bound discs.
Swishy’s tiny body stared into Trey’s fragmented skin, once again executing another [Zlide]. Swishy stared and stared and stared, studying the pristine and moisturized patches of skin while also obsessing over the less perfect skin, the dryness from scabbed wounds and cold air.
Panic. He trembled uncontrollably as he gazed at all the atomizing pieces of Trey. As the Clayborne reduced to particles, Swishy feared that they were going away forever. [Zlide] was nothing new to him but the visuals kickstarted a concerning thought process.
He reached for a scoop of Trey but the atoms filtered through his fingers, lost. What is wrong with me…?
When the reconstruction part of the spell happened, all the particles reformed at once, puzzle pieces magnetically finishing the picture. Relief came over Swishy. His friend was back, whole and colossal. Trey took a self-inventory, counting the portals attached to him, and then repositioned the Bristles’ backpack. He stared down at the gravity-bound Swishy and laughed.
“I keep accumulating cargo? When all this is over, I can put pack mule on my resume.” His smiling eyes were so kind and vibrant.
But Swishy couldn’t get Trey’s previous candor out of his head. He replayed his friend’s deepest fears on a pleading loop.
I’m scared…
I need you…
I really, really, really don’t want to die…
He couldn’t stop thinking about death, dying, and how much such a thing would hurt…anybody. The boy didn’t want to say Trey, not even in his mind. For the first time in Swishy’s life, death had a complete grip on him. It warped his psyche, presenting him with dozens of hurtful scenarios.
His mind grabbed for a memory of the scarecrow cast, the gold-straw recovery tool that healed. A dreadful notion accompanied the image. What if he didn’t make it? What if I made him a casket instead? The mental picture of a straw coffin tattooed his spirit—the gold-straw cast decaying into blackwheat, encasing the image of his paled, non-alive friend.
Dread lanced through him.
The Swish-mini’s straw didn’t react to his visceral fears even though his consciousness now traveled in that little gold avatar.
But from far off in the village, he could feel the introduction of bodily changes to his main vessel. The vague sensation of blackwheat growth and heart horror was causing him to feel a phantom tightness from far off. The spiritual thread that connected him to his body went taut like a fishing line pulled from Hell, dragging his attention from the present moment of gold-fairy control.
Swishy was scared of death and of how these thoughts made his unattended body feel. Even though he knew there were changes to him, he had no sense of the scale of the bane. Knowing there was damage yet feeling no pain—he wasn’t prepared for the terror of numbness.
The anxiety of not knowing, and the doomed assumptions of the state he’d find his body in, were crushing his control over his doll.
Within his weakened form, the little travel-Swish that he was, he had no defensive options once the cursed feelings set in. Resistance was something for those who possessed mass, which was a useful note he tucked away for future reference. Though at this moment he was tortured. Faraway pain was a contender for the most unpleasant thing he’d endured. Even heart loss came with a beneficial dullness to soften the shock. This had pain on the front end while the shocking state of his body was on the back end.
A sudden thought, a silly thought, something taboo and secret that he’d never ever share:
The boy wanted for Trey, more than anything, to become a scarecrow. Coarse brown wheat. Sling-wraps around his torso and hands and head. And then his parka, jeans, and Timbs. It gave Swishy good energy to think like this. Trey had strong magic, too, and would effortlessly manage [Pile] deconstruction and [Scarecrow] reconstruction. A brother that wouldn’t die. A brother that’d last forever and ever.
Swish became guilty. The idea should’ve unsettled him as much as he was sure it’d horrify Trey. He knew that Trey wouldn’t want to be anything other than himself, to live and die as a human person, to remain in the all-too-human image of his friend on the cross.
The Scarecrow of Clayhearth was a beautiful fantasy. He was everything to Swishy. He was kindness and light, friendship and family. Trey was his future beyond the war against Ruby.
Once the city’s freedom was secured, he imagined an endless life where souls were protected and people were fed.
Everybody eats—and everybody lives.
The boy looked around at all the portals—the ones attached to Trey along with the ones waiting to swallow him in the skies and woods and ground—and he didn’t see a good kind of future at all. No future was more like it. In that moment he preemptively mourned his soon-to-be-bloodless friend.
He wobbled; he shook; he dimmed in light.
(…)
Death stayed on the boy’s mind, even as they got close to the village.
The spread of DEATH intent escaped his notice, but it was everywhere.
D-E-A-T-H letters floated in the atmosphere, sometimes drawing close to their bodies. The letters mixed and rotated. And they were giant by normal proportions. The “D” passed overhead, casting a dark shroud upon Swishy, noticing that it was about as large as Trey’s head. He could feel the weight inside the letters. His imagination supplied clinking sounds, like shifting metal weights, each letter hollow within yet packed to the edges with lead. The boy didn’t recognize this as a spell either. It was simple intent. Something that the world around refused to hide.
He knew that the life terminated at some point. The boy wasn’t naïve about the food on his plate or the snitchtalons he’d consumed. There were no illusions about the dangers he was in against the E-squad when his soul had been shaved down to a sliver. If he and Sling had run out of a straw and remained as woefully exposed souls, they were ‘dead’. Nothing could happen. The experience of the Cearth would cease.
It continued now, though, with a conversation.
“Hello,” said Ruby’s voice through the multitude of portals. “I wanted to know how you were progressing with your project.”
Trey snapped his attention around, searching for the woman. He opened his mouth to speak until noticing Swishy’s glow, deciding to bow out of whatever mother-son conversation was happening.
“I just want to fly and scarecrow.” Swishy was careful to check his sarcasm—since things had gone too far for him to play innocent—but he’d dealt with the snitchtalons enough to know that he had a hostage situation on his hands. And the hostages were many: Trey, Sling, and the others.
“My, how quickly we’ve forgotten our promises.” Her voice trailed off. The portals gleamed, a signal that she waited for an answer to this, trusting that Swishy knew better.
“And to make things right.”
“Yes, that’s your promise. Such pretty words you fed me. Did you not mean for them to be true?”
“I’ve only told you the truth, Ruby. Now let me go!” The scarecrow struggled with a sudden rush of air. A combination of wind and shadow forced his orbit around Trey’s neck. The current pulled him faster and faster, and in tighter rotations too. Everything began to blur. But one thing clarified. The magic. His path revealed its hexed trajectory, a collection of dark tethers winding and binding into the black scales of a faceless serpent.
“Oh fuck that!” [Zlide]—back to honeycombed fragments, soul vapor, and death visions.
But when they came back to solidity, several portals were fused to the edges of Trey’s aura. Ruby had affixed them to him with her presence. Somehow, someway. In the words of the citizens every day in the bazaar: Where there’s a Ruby there’s a way.
Trey did one [Zlide] upward, followed by a single one back to the ground.
It shook two portals from him but several more remained. Or rather, Swishy watched them grow upon his body, Ruby’s controlling the shadows—from the shadows, wherever she was.
A strip of darkness expanded with its putty properties, stretching over Trey’s chest like a sash and then winding around his neck.
It was Trey’s turn to continue the up-downs, less like Swishy’s, more like rapid warps, stretching the shadows to their limits, yanking the portals off his spirit.
But the gummy serpent flew around Trey’s neck, no worse for the wear. It hadn’t choked Trey yet, only hovered. Only threatened.
And that rubbery serpent was full of the worst words. He noticed that many of those matched the ones housed in his [Chasm], in both the Blackwheat version of his heart and his non-heart, too. He refused to read them and add fear fuel to the proverbial fire. But DEATH was in there somewhere. The word wouldn’t remove itself from his head. ABYSS was another—and he got the sinking feeling that the word’s bottomlessness and Trey’s neck wouldn’t mix.
The serpent—it tightened. Swishy sped around along the taut route. And the panic ratcheted his soul to fever pitch.
Trey reached for the chain with his hand but couldn’t touch it. He pulled his hand away as his finger came in contact with a cursed word: BURN. The letters fizzled into a moment of flame, searing the Clayborne’s skin.
Remnant gold dust from Swishy was scorched away from the fingerprints. The scarecrow sensed a smirk in the darkness. Ruby knew the color of friendship—and didn’t like it.
Trey shook the pain from his fingers, the mystic smokiness ebbing from the injury.
“What’s happening Ruby?” Trey called in frustration. “Leave us alone! How’d you go from my employer to shadow-strangler? This isn’t like you!”
Through the portals, Ruby’s laughter echoed. She wouldn’t be placated by flattery—and she wouldn’t fool herself either. Ruby’s next words confirmed this. “This is exactly like me. This is who I am, the winner.”
“I haven’t lost anything yet.”
“Oh Trey. You already lost when you chose a pumpkinhead over me. Pumpkins are a dime a dozen, wouldn’t you say?” Woods lifted their branches like arms, raising the deranged expressions of the everyfruit gourds. Their eyes turned toward Trey. The mouths morphed and cracked into fangs.
Swishy watched his shuddering friend. The tremors rippled the air from the Swish-mini’s perspective, a wind quake that tousled his straw.
“Yeah, I chose Swishy. But I already chose my principles. The Ruby I know didn’t steal souls.”
“I believe that stealing is a harsh word. There’s far more nuance to what’s going on here.”
“Of course…I see that.” Trey gazed around at the shadows. Swishy wasn’t sure what his consideration meant—but he was certain that his friend identified some things he understood and others he had not a single clue about.
“Seeing is believing, as they say.”
A bird burst through the portal around Trey’s head and pecked at his eyes.
“Fuck!” Trey moved his head around but took hard shots all along the side of his face. His right eye was shut and shielded by his hand—he’d protected it at the last possible moment. Z-I-P flowed around his wrist as a living bracelet.
When the bird came for another attack, Trey’s haste-boosted hand grabbed it by the face. Swishy considered that there was a point in time where Trey might’ve hesitated—and that time was long past. [ZAP] ensued, point-blank beams shooting straight through the bird.
Over the opposite shoulder, a portal swelled. The scarecrow felt the stirring of soul from the dark gate. And Trey did, too. He took that same [ZAP] and aimed it—bird in hand—at that portal. Sight unseen, he electrocuted the emerging bird, who could be heard cawing into the darkness, loudly, then with softness, as if he were falling off a never-ending cliff.
“Vicious,” Ruby laughed.
“I don’t know how to feel about your amusement.”
“Oh Trey, it’s not like I haven’t fried chicken before.”
“I see…reassuring.”
Trey tossed the first bird into the portal, then stared down the remaining nodes of black ether, worried.
Swishy was worried too. There were so many portals. Other than the ones glued to Trey’s body, there were the ones in the surroundings. Every possible surface was burdened by a Ruby gate. He wasn’t quite sure where it came from or how a human woman could access so many gates. The Myst-level flexibility was beyond bothersome. And they couldn’t even find her yet.
Where was Ruby? How could they make her stop?
Swishy looked for another glimpse of Ruby. But he couldn’t find her anywhere. Not in the moon, the stars, the dark blue skies. She was everywhere and nowhere. There was nothing to target. She assaulted them from far off but with incredible potency. It was like dealing with Myst, a version of Myst that didn’t have an ulterior motive.
D-E-A-T-H crept closer. Swishy didn’t want to check over his shoulders or in the shadows beneath him. His aura told him that the intent was real as he struggled to brighten his once glorious gold-straw.
“I will make things right! Even the curses seem to like me. I can help them and I can help you.”
“You can help me. That’s why I birthed you. That’s why you’re here.”
“I was a bird first, honestly. The egg came before the Ruby, hehe.”
“Oh, so you’re a jokester.”
“I’m a bird.”
Swishy tried to flap—couldn’t. Right. He was stuck. For now at least.
Yet he had no options in the current situation. He was a little gold avatar. His whole consciousness was stuffed into the weakest body. Swishy wasn’t supposed to have regrets about indulging in his gold, his wing. Anatomy was something that wasn’t taken for granted—you simply had that for free. Ideally, at least.
But now his weakness mattered again. There were no eyes to poke, no thorns to inflict upon his enemy. The enemy was Ruby and she…wasn’t here.
The boy’s little gold body was diminishing from the onslaught of Ruby’s surveillance. He’d gone from gold to amber, and from amber to a moderate mustardy luster. He dimmed by the second as the pursuit continued.
The serpent tightened further. Cursed words ebbed from the portals. But they were small, tiny, fine-print-like, even from the Swish-mini’s current perspective. The boy couldn’t be fooled by the smallness of the text because the shadows were the familiar and threatening quality he was used to. Those microscopic intents were harmful. Atomized bombs waiting to release a pressurized curse. That’s how he imagined them to be. Tight and volatile packages. You couldn’t touch them, breathe on them, or casually allow your aura to breach them.
There was nothing Swishy could say to change Ruby’s mind about her current aggression. She wanted something but he didn’t know what. Bargaining would’ve been an option but the stakes were too urgent. She’d come on strong—murderous in actuality—and so he needed Trey to exercise his options.
The Clayborne staved the shadows away with his [Zzt]-filled hands, intense light to keep the shadows thin around his neck.
The magic would wear out at some point, this Swishy knew.
Use the birds. He needed that from Trey, for his friend to understand. Swishy didn’t understand what he’d seen through the energy. The boy just had the inkling that now would be a good time to pull out that option. Not all birds were bad, this they’d learned, and they sure could use the teammates.
As Swishy was pulled along, he’d formed another “U”. It wasn’t as luminous as before. There were fewer sparkles. The dull embers of his supposed gold-straw were uninspiring to say the least. Even Swishy cringed from the effort.
“This again?” Trey said.
Swishy stoked himself. Yes, Trey, use the birds!
“I don’t know what that means. I can’t do puzzles under pressure.”
Swishy strategically dimmed. He aimed for annoyance, for Trey to feel the essence of his shrug.
The Clayborne groaned.
Swishy was pleased by his effective messaging.
“Do me a favor first.” Trey cupped his hand, beckoning Swishy into his palm.
The boy floated into the hand, gesturing in accent.
“Get your ass home!”
Huh? What are you—
Trey closed his forefinger and thumb over the Swish-mini, then dropped him into his mouth. Swishy was gulped down the viscous water slide of a throat. Parting words were spoken, booming and guttural.
“Back to your real body. Now. You know where to find me. Take care, homie!”
Ah, he got me…fine, I’ll listen…
Swishy stayed in the body until the last possible moment. He lingered in the sizzling and fizzling of body acids breaking him down. It was a truly fascinating experience, watching and feeling the way that humans ate. The straw became nutrients, the magic golds flowing into the bloodstream and bee-lining up toward Trey’s wounded face.
So that’s how it happens. So cool!
“Find Ruby! Figure out what she wants! I believe in you, little homie—and because of that, if you let me die I’ll haunt you!”
The darkness swelled, collecting around Trey, preparing to smother him for good.
Within Trey’s body, an explosion of magic occurred. There were familiar spells: [Soul] and [Heart Strings]. Swishy watched the blue aura blast through the boundaries of Trey’s muscles, forcing its way outside, while a cluster of golden threads unraveled and wiggled toward the heart chamber.
One more spell was activated, something, Swishy hoped, that had to do with birds.
But he couldn’t stick around to watch that play out. Time to go. The scarecrow wasn’t a scarecrow anymore, just submerged pulp. A last wave of fluid came for him and he jettisoned his soul then.
The boy’s soul broke from the tiny vessel and shot across the land with light-switch speed, slamming into his original body.
Swishy awakened, and to his non-surprise, so much of him had blackened.