♛

or days, the muck had been bubbling, oozing. A vile rot, abcessed around fleshless gilded bones that had been buried so, so long — their marrow now buzzing with a wild, dangerous electricity. The Tinea Swamp had been slowly pushing her out from its deepest depths, churning angrily against her skeleton which had nearly cemented itself beneath the gnarled, resentful roots of the Baldcypress and Tupelo trees. The swamp worked diligently hard to spit her out - a foul soul they no longer wished to keep, having overstayed its welcome by centuries. 

It was then the last marsh bubble popped, and it was as if the swamp finally heaved and regurgitated. There was a small glint — the slightest glimmer — as the muck parted. A single spear-like tine, its sharpest point akin to a needle.

The ascent of her bones from the muck was slow only until the surface was finally broken, when the swamp suddenly spewed up the rest of her gilded bones which joined the circlet of her horns in a frenzy. Laying in an unarticulated pile, the muck dripped from them — weeping out of the eye sockets of her skull and oozing along the sharp line of her jawbone. The swamp seemed to breathe a sigh of relief as its depths were free of her, for now.

---

Her eviction — the start of the rebirth — was messy and careless. What followed was much more methodical: weaving back together the seams of centuries past. The crayfish were the first to converge upon the aureate pile of bones; they seemed to almost work in a hivemind, headed by a giant freshwater crayfish nearly as old as Tinea itself. It hooked its chela into a golden orbital socket, dragging the skull — her skull — from the grasp of the Swamp and over to the base of a massive Baldcypress tree. All the smaller crustaceans drug her bones, one by one, until they fell in place. 

It was as if time itself stitched her back together, the Baldcypress weeping a continuous stream of wax that pooled and hardened around her golden bones. Eventually, she was whole enough to gather those no-longer-feeble legs underneath herself, to recline at the base of the tree that helped re-birth her back into the mortal world as the crayfish crawled back to their homes among the muck.

She had spent the days as the one hidden among the trees while her body fully re-composed itself. As she laid at the base of this same century-old tree, the golden crown above her head had overflowed and poured golden ichor over her eyes and skin. It burned, and she knew she was alive. 

And as she stood up and walked from the depths of this swamp - her skin's translucency as the mingling Tinean fog - she was certain that this world was not ready for her.