The Marshwalker

The marsh stretched before me like a living ledger, inked in reed and fog. Each windless hour wrote a damp rumor across the surface, a draft that fluttered the backs of my hands and made the night taste briny and old. I moved along the boardwalk with a lamp that trembled at every sigh of wind, afraid to light the water too fully, afraid to wake what slept beneath the reeds.

I am the night watchman for the abandoned research station, a job that rewards patience and fear in equal measure. My notes are a map of echoes: footprints that vanish, calls that turn to silence, and the way the marsh seems to lean closer whenever I speak too loudly. Somewhere out there, something watches me in return, patient as a patient thing and hungry as a rumor.

The marsh does not drown men; it keeps them.

Whispers in the Reeds

The first sound arrived as a rustle, a lullaby played backward by the wind. It was like someone dragging a chain across the mud, or a throat coughing up dew. The reeds bent toward the sound and then snapped back as if startled by what they had summoned. Night birds fell silent, and for a heartbeat the marsh held its breath with me. When the wind shifted again, the whispering ceased and left only the hollow space where a voice used to be.

Some nights the murk glimmers with a pale, unearthly glow, not from stars but from something older—an eye or a scale of the swamp itself. If you listen long enough, you can hear the marsh learn your name and remind you that names are little more than holds for fear.

Tracks and Tides

By dawn the ground wore a track that did not belong to any animal I had met. The mud held footprints that pressed inward, as if the earth wanted to imprison the steps rather than reveal them. The marks curved toward the open water, a question mark drawn in brackish clay. I logged the clues with care, though each entry felt contrived, as if the marsh itself were guiding my pen toward a truth it did not want spoken.

Mud that refuses to dry, staying damp as if the night never ended.
Footprints that end where a hand could not have reached, swallowed by moss.
Drag marks looping toward the pool, like a question written in bloodless ink.
A scent of brine and iron clinging to clothes long after sunbreak.
Thread-thin strands of plant matter arranged in a circle, never quite a circle.
Rusty nails and splinters arranged in patterns that feel almost ceremonial.

The Marshwalker Revealed

On the fourth night I finally saw it, not as a beast but as a shape unmade by human hands. It rose from the water with the patience of a vigil, tall and lean, its limbs bending in angles no living body should hold. Its skin glimmered with brine and kelp, and eyes burned like coal set in marrow. The creature did not rush—every motion was a slow, deliberate negotiation with the night itself. It studied me as I stood on the plank, and for a long moment I felt the marsh surrender its old fear and grant me a terrible curiosity: what do you know of the world beyond your lamps and maps?

I turned to run, and the marsh agreed with a sigh, pulling at my ankles with a pull stronger than the current. I staggered, half-carried by mud that knew my name, and escaped into the fog just as the thing lowered its gaze and whispered back to the reeds in a language older than towns. I did not look back to see if it followed; I only noted the quiet after—the stillness of water that had learned to hold its breath again.

After the Crossing

I woke in the caretaker’s shack with mud on my boots and an empty lantern, as if the night had confiscated my courage and left me with a souvenir I could never show. The marsh kept its watchers, its names, and its dangers; the night gave back what it could not keep. Some days I tell myself the encounter was a warning, others a confession: the Marshwalker is not a thing that hunts us—it is a reminder that the marsh is patient, that the shore is only a memory, and that the dark is listening, always listening for the next trespasser and the next keeper who will vanish into the reeds.