Nobody knows how long the dark presence lurked beneath the river, nor where it came from, nor why it decided to surface.

It's known, though, who the first victim was.

Duccio had always been a simple man. He only needed a wooden roof over his head, an ounce of rock-oil for his flame to chase away the shadows of the night, a loaf of bread and a slice of cheese to eat, and from time to time, when his pile of copper coins allowed it, a brief encounter with a woman to keep his loins content. All things considered, the life of Duccio as a loner and occasional woodcutter would have been continued with no major - or even minor - achievement, and he would have slipped into the nothingness from which he came, all those decades ago, nor grief nor relief colouring his disappearance. Forgotten by ordinary people such as you and me.

Yet that autumn day he met the Mire.

And things changed.

Yesterday had been a rainy day, and the few rays that pushed through the overcast sky did it with dull laziness, speaking of yet more rain to come. Duccio breathed in the cold, wet air. It still smelled of thunder. This was the right moment to catch a few fish, when they least expected it. With the brief pause in the bad weather, Duccio walked towards the river followed by the cautious caws of birds, saluting the sun as it peeked through clouds, its brief respite of light.

Duccio walked down to the river, making sure not to move too many rocks or make too much noise, so not to scare the fish away. Smart little creatures, the fish. Maybe a couple of them already knew Duccio was coming, with his fishing hook, to pick them up from the water and make them meet an untimely end. Maybe one or two, wiser, knew that Duccio itself was about to be taken, and had fled.

Duccio sat at last on a large, gray slab of limestone. From here he could see where fish could hide and where to toss his bait. He began by taking a few bread crumbles and tossing them into the river. They floated around and disappeared with the current.

Then he took his fishing pole - little more than a stick, a string and a small hook, really - put a small amount of bait on the hook and tossed it into the river, where it lazily floated away, carried by the current.

Now for Duccio's favourite part, which was just to relax with hands behind his back, and think no more. Fishing beat woodcutting every day of the week.

Fish would come, sooner or later.

Looking up, he scratched his beard and contemplated the sky, as much as one like our simple-minded Duccio can contemplate things. Who knows what he thought about in his last moments. Nothing profound, it’s safe to assume.

There was something that hit him as odd, though. He blinked, and shivered in his heavy clothes as the wind picked up all around it, carrying with itself… something wrong. Duccio stood there thinking for a while, trying to see what it could be. It struck him.

No noise.

The birds, the far-away rustling of leaves. Nothing.

Besides the low gurgling of the river in the background and his heavy - now heavier - breath, there was an utter silence. It stuck to him like horse glue, like the summer heat. Duccio took off his hat and looked around, trying to catch a sign. A sign that something was wrong. Not for the first time in his life Duccio berated himself for being an unlucky man. He didn't possess any inherently useful skill. He hadn't been born under the right star, so he did not possess any kind of magic to use to go to the adventure, become rich and get all the girls without paying them with his hard-earned copper pieces. Yet, for all his misfortunes, Duccio had always possessed a strong survival instinct, only sharpened by his solitary life.

If a bear was around, all the smaller animals sat in their holes, waiting for it to pass. If there was something else, some of those damn... things that from time to time ran from down the mountain, or lurked out of the holes deep in the ground, then even bears scurried back to their lairs and waited for the storm to pass.

Duccio licked his lips, taking slow, measured breaths. He slowly withdrew his fishing pole from the river, making sure to be as silent as possible. A solitary drop of sweat ran down his brow. It was cold and wet.

Duccio shivered as he dried with a flick of his wrist.

The river was not far from the village. There he would be safe, it was but a short walk. Who cared about fish. He would eat cheese today, inside his safe shack. He’d light up a dozen candles and make sure nothing followed him home. The atmosphere really was... heavy. Like there was something looking around, looking at him. Though he didn't know what or from where. It seemed to be all around him. Not like an animal, a monster, or… it was something worse. Stars helped him, was it one of those things crawled out of the Borderlands? The image of an abomination coming ten thousand miles from there just to eat Duccio up was ridiculous, but who knew what looked at him from the shadows in the trees?

Yet Duccio had been looking all the time in the wrong direction. There was nothing in the trees.

Duccio finished withdrawing hook from the river.

He saw it.

For the briefest of moments it looked like river weed stuck to the hook. Black, slick river weed.

Then Duccio's mind focused and he realized that it was not river weed at all. It was too black, it shone like rock-oil. It looked like grease.

And it moved. It moved in an unnatural, pulsating way, which reminded him of the still-beating heart of a deer he had struck once. This was a slick, black, twisted version of a heart, with little tendrils already tentatively moving towards him.

Duccio let go of the fishing pole like it burned him. The pole hit the rock, recoiled, and disappeared into the river.

Duccio didn't stop to look at what he had picked up, nor to think about taking back his fishing pole. Who cared about the fishing pole. He could make dozens of them. Back home, in front of a warm fire and away from the presence of the horrible things he didn't understand.

Already he was running up the banks, already he was thinking that whatever that oily thing was, it wouldn't have anything to do with him, when he stumbled and fell face-first into the gravel.

He stood up, looking at his foot. He must have got stuck in a root, or something like that.

It wasn't a root.

It was the black, slick grease, holding his foot to the ground. The black oozing tendril was like a ring of steel around his ankle. And it was slowly coiling around it, the hold growing stronger, thicker.

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If Duccio had kept a clear head, and had tried to extract his foot from the slick prison holding him, would his future have changed? Hard to say, and at any rate seeing that thing holding him to the ground, stronger than a snake, sent Duccio's instincts into overdrive. He withdrew the old pistol he held for emergencies. He armed it with a quick gesture of his thumb. The pistol wheezed as the tiny arcane core inside it got ready to shoot. Trembling, it pointed it at the slick tendril.

"L-let go," he said as he took aim.

The tendril seemed to hear him. It bisected. Half of it holding Duccio's ankle down, the other half slowly moving towards the pistol, towards Duccio's hand, his arm.

Duccio screamed and shoot.

The river banks shone with a brief reddish flash as the pistol discharged, and the subsequent bang, the bullet screaming through air to hit the thing holding Duccio down.

The slick tendril accepted the bullet like a beloving mother. The bullet hit the tendril, seemingly disappearing inside it, leaving it wobbling but no more than if Duccio had thrown a small rock into a puddle.

Then Duccio screamed again. The slick thing didn't leave him much time to, though. It sprang forward, opening like a fan, a spiderweb of slick, pointed hooks. It covered the pistol, it ran up to Duccio's hand, coiling around it. He felt his hand held in a cold, metal net of unwavering hooks, and he cried more out of fear than pain. Pain would come shortly, though.

The slickness kept moving up his arm, and Duccio was quickly losing mobility as, wherever they were coming from, the tendrils held him in a steel grip, stronger than actual steel.

Duccio tried to open his mouth to scream for help, and that was when the slick invader entered his mouth, quick and limber like a too-curious spider. Duccio's screams turned into gurgles, then into panicked groans as the thing invaded more and more of his mouth. It pulsed, seemingly adding more mass to the invading tentacles, coming from who knows where. Duccio felt warm tears running down his cheeks, as the tendrils pushed through his mouth, down his throat, and enter inside him, reducing any cry for help to a witless groan. He felt the pressure those slick hooks exerted inside his own body, making him feel pain in places he didn't even know existed. The creature had left him enough room to take short, panicked breaths, but nothing more.

The thing punctured him.

Duccio gurgled and tried to scream, but it was a muffled scream. Too weak to be heard.

From the inside, it pricked his muscles and flesh. It inserted itself into his arms and legs, around his chest, around his pelvis. It explored, quick and swift and writhing, like a colony of ants when their home is destroyed, scurrying around in every direction, as if the invader was trying to understand Duccio's body, from the inside.

The pressure around his ankle disappeared.

Duccio's body moved.

The tendrils, the hooks and small metal tentacles that now ran through his body moved Duccio's arms and legs about. For a couple moments, Duccio, abandoned on the riverbank, looked like a large four-legged insect, dipped in ink, writhing its legs to the sky in a vain attempt at turning over from his back.

But whatever the creature was, it learned fast.

With its second attempt, Duccio’s body was standing on his knees. With its third, it stood tentatively on one leg, and with the fourth, the creature-controlled body was making small steps forward.

Duccio's mind had now fled into a blind panic, and he saw his body reacting to the creature's commands and indomitable will. Duccio tried to resist and hold his muscles back, but he only managed to scratch the insides of his body against the multitude of hooks commanding him. Trembling, he let go. The creature made him take a few steps forward. Away from the river.

Then it made him turn back.

And then it turned again, towards the forest.

Duccio obeyed each command, because what else could he do? He smelled a vile odor and he knew he had soiled himself. Either fear or the creature had released his bowels. Cold tears descended from Duccio's eyes as the creature held him on its strings.

Duccio laughed.

It wasn't a human laugh. It was the creature moving his mouth and making his tongue dance in his mouth like a fish in its death throes. Whatever sound came from Duccio it sounded more like a panicked warble than anything coherent. Duccio found his hand, still coiled around the pistol, slowly raise and point at an undefined place. His fingers wriggled, pushed from the inside by the creature. Once again, it seemed to be more curious than anything.

The pistol shoot.

The recoil sent Duccio's arm back to hit his chest.

It then lay down at his side, the creature seemingly having lost interest.

He felt it wriggle inside himself. Thinking.

Wondering.

Maybe it would get tired, Duccio hoped. Maybe it would get tired of him and let him go, and he could go back home and cry himself to sleep.

The creature did nothing of the sort. Slowly, it turned Duccio’s body towards the gurgling river.

Away from the banks, away from his house and his cheese and bread and his pile of copper coins, away from the people who could have, if not helped him, at least seen his demise.

Duccio’s body took its first tentative step towards the dark waters.

The creature pushed his feet forward, rustling against leaves and rocks and gravel.

Duccio screamed, screamed some muffled, panicked, deeply-wounded sound, an animal's panic. He fought the creature. Little did it matter the pain as his muscles tried to contract and hold at bay the myriad of hooks digging into his flesh, his legs carried him towards the gurgling river.

Step by step.

Duccio tried to hold back. He tasted iron, and coughed a small amount of blood, coming from his ruptured insides. The hooks pushed him to the edge of the slab where he had stopped to fish, little time before.

Duccio's eyes saw his fishing pole, lazily stuck between rocks on the other side of the river.

Duccio felt the creature spread his arms wide. Like a bird about to fly.

He tried to resist, managed only to feel more pain as the creature grabbing him from the inside played him like a puppet, flexing his legs toward the river.

Duccio fell. Face-first into the tumbling waters. He saw the river coming closer and closer, and closer and closer, he felt water invading his nostrils, and then something else, something much stronger than the current, much larger and infinitely more ancient than the river coiling all around him, invading him, covering his body and his awareness, and Duccio screamed, and water and something else, something sticky and oily entered to take over the room left empty by air.

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The disappearance of Duccio wasn’t noticed, not for many days, even weeks. The man was a lonely beast, only coming to the nearest town, Ostia, to banter and get some squeaky action at the brothel. The whores were among those who missed him the less. And other people would come to get their wood somewhere else.

Nevertheless, his fishing pole was stuck in between the rocks. It was only by some mad stroke of luck that a couple weeks after Duccio's demise, it was found by a pair of hunters.

They took it for their own and thought nothing more of it.

And thus the presence of the strange oily creature remained unknown.

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Author's Note: thank you for reading! I hope you had fun. This short story came up as a character study for a story I'm working on, and from the fact I always thought slimes are incredibly scary. I mean, they are often, if not always, used in fictions as the lowest-level-possible monster, little more than a joke,  but if you stop and think about it, a slime is immune to most weapons, can recombine if sliced or punctured, and it can... uhm... enter... inside other creatures. From then on the true horror of the idea practically wrote itself.

If you enjoyed this story please let me know! This is my first venture in this site, and I hope I'll be able to enterntain you more ! Once again, thank you for reading. *Bows*