When the law fails to protect the sacred wetlands, one woman seeks a darker justice—at a price she might not survive.
Writer’s Prompt
The dark cypress water parted like glass as Jenny dipped her paddle one last time. Three days of humidity, mosquito swarms, and hollow silence had broken her pride. She had thrown her coffee against the kitchen wall over Harvey Trent’s bulldozers; now, all she had left was an aching back and the cold certainty of defeat.
Then the water boiled.
A sudden, violent undercurrent gripped the cedar hull, spinning the canoe ninety degrees toward the root-tangled bank. The bow grounded against slick mud with a dull thud.
Standing beneath a canopy of weeping Spanish moss was Xenia.
Her skin was the color of roasted chicory, eyes shimmering with the luminescence of swamp fire. She didn’t ask why Jenny was there. The swamp kept no secrets from its queen.
“He paves the eastern basin at dawn,” Jenny rasped, stepping into the calf-deep mire. Her voice shook, but not from fear. “Trent took the law and bent it. I want him stopped. Permanently.”
Xenia tilted her head, a dry rattlesnake rattle clicking in her closed palm. “The swamp protects what is hers, child. But blood requires blood. A heart for the roots. An eye for the water. What will you trade?”
Jenny pulled a rusted hunting knife from her belt. She didn’t hesitate. She knew the ancient hex she had read in her grandmother’s journals—the binding of a man’s pulse to the rising tide.
“Whatever it takes,” Jenny whispered, holding out her palm.
Xenia’s lips curved into a sharp, knowing smile as she reached out. Behind them, the roar of Trent’s heavy machinery echoed faintly in the distance. The mist swallowed them whole.
Did Jenny survive the ritual, or did Harvey Trent awake to roots growing through his chest? How does the swamp claim its debt? Tell us how the story ends in the comments below.
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