“You were a father once,” she said softly. “Before the marsh. You had a daughter.”

“Why?”

The creature flinched. A shudder ran through the reeds. For a moment, the face flickered—not a monster, but a gaunt, weeping man.

Elara was twelve, with a mop of red hair and knees scraped from climbing the blackthorn trees. She had heard the stories—how the boglodite was once a man named Caelus, a wanderer who tried to drain the marshes for farmland. The earth, the old tales said, does not like to be carved. One night, Caelus’s lantern went out. When they found his shovel the next morning, it was crusted with a slime that shone like pearls. And the thing that shambled out of the mist weeks later wore his coat, but not his face.

But children, as they always have, forget.