"Y'know, this was supposed to be my weekend off. But nooo. You got me out here draggin' your heavy ass through the burnin' desert with your dreadlocks stickin' out the back of my parachute. You gotta come down here with an attitude, actin' all big and bad. And what the hell is that smell? I could've been at a barbecue!"
- Will Smith, Independence Day
"I could've been enjoying myself with several beautiful Nomad women in an oasis by now. So why am I traveling through the desert with this skinny girl with an arrow stuck in her back?"
- User Ramses, Red River
A shadowy galleon floated in the foggy moonlit waters near the crag-covered beach that led to the old cemetery. A tiny rowboat glided through the mist away from the galleon and slowly toward the beach. The driver was a single hunched figure shrouded in a faded cloak steering with a rotting wooden oar. A moldy gray blanket was thrown over the back of the boat to hide whatever it was transporting.
Drolta steadied her hunched shoulders to brace herself just before boat drifted into its clandestine port and landed against the shore crags. The small grave keeper hopped down from the bow of the boat and hobbled across the rocks toward the back. She yanked the blanket away with a bony hand.
The dreary tarp pulled back to reveal a shimmering beacon of white, blue, and soft flesh tone. A young woman dressed in a revealing but chaste manner befitting a holy magic user was curled in the back of the boat. Angela was far from the sanctuary of her church employers and the safety of her vampire hunting partner, a skimpy white rabbit lost in a den of hungry black wolves. She was resting in a sound slumber, breathing gently with her head propped against a wooden beam.
Drolta hoisted Angela up by her lavender-scented underarms and draped the prayer dancer's feather-light form over her hunched shoulder. The toes of the girl's white leather boots dragged limply through dead leaves as she was carried further inland on the back of the ancient hobbling gypsy. Drolta kept one cold hand wrapped over Angela's narrow bare waist and held up a dim oil lamp in the other. Cursed with a crooked back and blind in one eye, she possessed unnatural strength for a crone of her countless years.
"Putrid girl," she muttered as she toiled down the cemetery trail with Angela. "I could be celebrating this solstice with my sisters in communion with the lords of nature. Instead I'm dragging this foolish vestal dancer reeking with purity to the mud pits so she can shake her little lamb chops with the fallen ones."
"Uhn… Trevor..." Angela murmured weakly in her deep spellcraft-induced sleep.
Drolta reached her harrowing destination after a few minutes. She was standing on a large stone outcrop that pointed into an ominous mud pond. She dropped Angela onto the dry rocky beside her and sighed in exhaustion. Hearing the sounds and smelling fresh blood, the pit began to froth.
Dripping clay beings formed out of the surface of the pit and stared toward Drolta and Angela on the stone mound. Their molten bodies vaguely passed for naked men and women who had lost their sense of self long ago. The decayed souls buried in this earthen bog could have counted into the thousands, yet they were doomed to feel nothing but utter emptiness and loneliness for the rest of time. Their only manner of speech was a chorus of low dissonant moans.
Drolta crouched over Angela and went to work on the nefarious purpose that had led them both here. She started by unbuttoning the girl's choker and tossing the strip of blue silk and white lace to the side. She slipped the girl's draping cloth gauntlets off her arms, then peeled her long white boots down from her thighs. She rolled Angela onto her side and carefully loosened the laces between her shoulder blades, helping her out of her frilled brassiere. Drolta untied the strings hugging the girl's rear last. She shimmied the short embroidered skirt over the width of Angela's hips before pulling it off of her ankles and adding it to the stack of dancer's raiments.
There was nothing overtly lecherous or sensual about what Drolta had to do. It was simply part of her responsibilities as a matron grave keeper. She had spent her life preparing hundreds of corpses for burial. This one just happened to still be alive. As for why she was collecting Angela's ritual garments after freeing her body from them, perhaps they were meant to be strung up as macabre decorations in the castle's desecrated chapel, or maybe they would be given to the living mannequins in the demon guest house as more clothes for playing dress-up, if they weren't just deemed as waste and burned in a fire.
Drolta rolled Angela onto her back. Stripped naked with her arms lying palms-down at her sides, she looked like a body ready for embalming on a mortician's table. Scanning her one good eye over Angela's bare features, the gypsy crone nodded in approval.
"No bad for a wisp of a girl. It's a shame Lord Dracula commands all of this to turn to grime."
Her hands wrapped through the Angela's underarms again and helped her limp frame sit up. She dragged Angela's body to the front of the outcrop while clenching her teeth in exertion and chuckling quietly. She sighed and whispered when they were right at the edge.
"This is the end for you, little one. Enjoy your dip."
Drolta heaved as hard as she could and launched Angela off the rock as if she were a bloated bovine loaded on a siege catapult. She landed in the pit with the damning splash, never coming out of her motionless sleep. The army of wailing mud men silenced their agony and sank back into the waves along with Angela's raw tender flesh. The last thing to disappear into the depths was her limp right hand, making her shining nails reach up toward Heaven. Instead, her spirit and all of the lush and seductive qualities that made up her body were descending down into a swampy Hell. In the depths of her unconscious mind, her dreams suddenly turned to nightmares.
The grave keeper set her dim lantern on a rock ledge above her head and reclined at the edge of the mud pit. For several minutes, she waited for Angela to be consumed in the tainted depths of the wicked earth. She passed the time stirring the edge of the steaming bubbling soup with a broken off tree branch and slowly chewing on a piece of alfalfa.
Drolta pulled back her stick and watched as the pit began to slosh in suspense. Two large, supple hills formed out of the surface of the clay. The slender and full-bodied creature the hills belonged to emerged from the dark waves with the flexibility of a dancer rising out of a long backwards stretch. Composed entirely out of the pit's cursed soil with the shapely flourishes of a well-rounded former human, she was a little over five feet tall with her ankles melting back into the mud. She was standing close enough to the pit's edge that Drolta could make out all of her earthy splendor even with only one eye.
Her anatomy flowed in an endless transitional state, like a mudslide rushing down the smooth geography of a dirt-colored naked woman. Her eyes were two sunken pits glowing with light blue spectral energy. The soil cascading down the sides of her head gave the impression of shoulder-length wavy brown hair. Her stoic sculpted lips never made a sound.
Angela had been resurrected completely as a mud woman. The cruel gypsy crone could have told her to spin around backwards so she could judge Angela from behind, but she had faith the vile forces of darkness had transferred the narrow ridges of her shoulder blades, the slim curve of her back, and the ample flanks of her rear end into the new clay medium just as well as her frontal features.
"Ah, now that's a look for you, lass." Drolta snickered in victory. "That Belmont boy should be traversing these parts in the next few days. Makes sure all your ripply parts are perked up so you can put on a show that will really break his spirit. I'm not sure how much of you is left in there and how much of you is made up from all the cursed souls fused to the pit, but even if you don't recognize him, he's certain to recognize your good looks."
Mudgela's ephemeral hourglass form melted away in silence and descended back into the dark brown waves. The surface of the mud trickled peacefully without a single sign of life, or death.
Author's note: Maybe I should call her Gelana instead.
Author's note 2: Drolta had to stick around to give Badgela her marching orders. Or maybe in this case they'd be her bouncing orders.