It took a while, staring up at it as the buildings slid by, to realize why the sky looked so odd.

It still wasn’t raining. How long had it been since it rained?

The bird men weren’t really men, or birds. They had no feathers, just a thick leather skin and flat reflective eyes.

They spoke, but the language was muffled and hard to understand. The bulbous beaks didn’t open as they spoke.

My body, exhausted with the sickness of the plague, was too weak to crane my neck to study them better.

Perhaps you went somewhere after you died after all? Then again, I was still trapped in my feeble body, still tied to it and experiencing the pain and weakness of the plague and all the stories the priests told said you were cured of illness and age in the afterlife.

The priests also talked of spirits leaving the body after death, but in that attic I watched enough children die to know that whatever it was behind their eyes that makes them a person-

That bit of them that is their soul behind their eyes-

That bit falls deeply into them when they die.

It didn’t rise up out of them. It fell deep down inside, until no one could see it any more.

If the priests were wrong about that, they were likely wrong about everything.

The bird men were dragging my feet, the heads bouncing above their bodies. Giant misshapen featherless bird heads, with flat reflective eyes and no feathers.

Clubs swung at their belts and two had cross bows on their backs. They wore long sleeved uniforms of a sort that looked like leather aprons in front.

I couldn’t move or talk or even turn my head as it bounced along the road. I felt attached to my body but not of it. As if I had to see what it saw, but had no control.

I’d learn later the guards that were tasked with the third wave of clearing the Slums came in the odd leather masks with long beak-like pouches stuffed with blessed herbs to ward off the plague carried on the bad air. Where they found a priest to bless the herbs when the priests were all locked behind the walls of the church I had no idea.

Not that the blessed herbs had saved them.

The cleanse that drug me from my sick bed to be carted to the swamps for disposal actually spread the plague back to the other sections of the city.

I was tossed into a cart as if I was no more important than a sack of clothing. I could do little more than moan with the intense pain. I ended up on my left side near the edge of the cart’s wall.

I think being loaded like that, likely saved my life, twice.

The first time, was from not suffocating when the other bodies were stacked on top of me. They added their weight to the pain crushing my chest but the only change was my wheezing changed pitch and my coughing came out more like a dog’s bark than a cough. Had I been on my back I likely would have had the air crushed out of me.

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The second time it saved me was when they offloaded our bodies into the swamp.

I was on the bottom of the cart. Which meant I was near the top of the pile in the swamp. Many of the bodies below mine were underwater completely and I heard more than one person, weak and feeble, drown as others were tossed haphazardly on top of them. I’d have been no better off had I been in their position.

I woke, if that was the word for it, in the swamps. The damp air sat heavy in my ravaged lungs and my coughs often caused me to lose consciousness. I was so weak I couldn’t move.

The wet smell of sulfur and decay would cling to my mouth and lungs. Each shallow breath seemed to leave a residue of the substance coating my lungs.

I was mostly submerged in the water. Over time the pile of bodies had either settled into the mud or the water had risen.

I could tell where the water was without moving my head to see, by how much skin was exposed to the biting insects.

I was too weak to scratch, and soon the bits of pain and semi-burning annoyance of the bites all faded together into the utter numbness that was my current state of being.

My thought were sluggish and circular, and never seemed to stay on one idea long enough to come to any decisions or conclusions.

I couldn’t move and my breathing was in such a state that I would drift into consciousness and out of it with equal ease.

The smell of the swamps was similar to the sewer smells. Rot and waste and the overwhelming smell of things breaking down. The powerful sulfur smell was carried down from the mountains and there was something else too. A green smell, life perhaps, or the algae that floated on top of the water and clung to the roots and reeds.

In the rusty sunlight, filtered by a thick canopy of leaves and lichen, the air was heavy with heat, damp, and rot.

And noise.

I’d been to the edges of the swamps before. At the time I was wrapped tightly in a protective scarf and had a foul smelling paste dabbed near my eyes to keep me free of the disease carrying insects.

The journeyman had come to the swamps to trade with some of the people who lived out here, and I had followed, more pack mule than apprentice. I don’t remember the sound being this overwhelming though.

The sounds all sort of bleed together, but there were many. Birds and insects and things being hunted.

The big swamp lizards would thrash from time to time close enough that the water they moved disturbed my rest and shifted my head in a sickening back and forth undulation with the waves.

They were either eating the dead or fighting for the right to. I couldn’t move my head to look.

I could barely move my ravaged lungs, twisting my head as much as I could to cough and clear my breathing only caused me to pass out for a period of time.

I knew that I would not wake after one of those incidents. Or that I would choke on my own froth.

Like the overlapping sounds, time seemed to stretch and settle in odd ways.

For the first time in my life, I just was.

I existed, and time seemed to forget about it. It moved on of course. The angle of the sunlight changed and the sounds changed, but I just existed as those things changed around me.

I saw things in the swamp; a horse with no saddle or rider, a swarm of insects that flowed into different shapes, a jumping deer, a tall bird that was all legs and long neck hunting fish among the reeds.

When the darkness came I saw other things. Bodies that rose from the swamp water with wet sucking sounds to shamble away in slow measured steps. Shapes and shades in the darkness that might have been men or monsters. There were strange calls and sounds, and a warmth to the air that seemed unnatural after the sun sat.

Something began burning in my chest, spreading fire down my left arm and then warmth over the rest of me.

My lungs began to burn and the ever-present itch on my exposed skin fell away to much more unpleasant feelings

Sounds merged and flowed and joined, all while moving away from me.

I had no strength in my body, but whatever it was that was me slipped away as I fell into myself, down and back as the warm waters of the swamp slapped into me and flowed over me, and I did not rise, nor inhale the water, nor have the urge to breathe.

Instead I relaxed as the muddy bottom welcomed me.