Tied to the Trunk While the Mud Devoured Her

Camila liked walking among the oaks while the rest of the world slept through the afternoon. She used to say that the wilderness never lied, that the mountains showed themselves exactly as they were: beautiful sometimes, hostile almost always. “Nature hides nothing,” she thought as she trod through the leaf litter of the Valdebra range. “If it wants you, it embraces you; if it wants to eat you, it eats you.” And she preferred that frankness to the noise of the office.

At first she went out with a hiking group from the village, on Sundays. Then she began disappearing during the week, alone, with her backpack stuffed to the brim. After a few months, she had abandoned the marked trails and was venturing in without a destination, finding her way by the shadow of the crags or by the sun whenever it managed to slip through the canopy.

She was careful, that much was true. In her backpack she carried flint, two long ropes, warm clothes, a headlamp, a map, a knife, a first-aid kit, a flare she hoped never to use, a fully charged phone, and a canister of pepper spray. She hardly ever ran into anyone, almost never, but she was a young woman in the middle of a forest and preferred not to play the innocent.

And two more things, which were no use for survival but had become indispensable: a thick silicone dildo and a small clitoral sucker. Her “partners,” she called them. When she was certain there wasn’t a soul for miles around, she would sit with her back against a trunk and masturbate for a whole hour, discovering how good it was to moan out loud without having to smother her voice against a pillow.

That morning she chose a section of the map she had never explored. It was low-lying ground, full of pools, mud, and low-growing vegetation. She dressed accordingly: waterproof trousers, high boots with good tread, a thermal shirt, and a light vest. She rubbed repellent everywhere, even beneath her clothes, just in case. The humidity would be bad; the mosquitoes worse.

After two hours of walking, she entered a stretch where the birches grew too close together and the sunlight barely got through. The ground creaked softly beneath her boots. Every step was harder than the last. At one point the mud swallowed her entire boot, and when she took the next step, her right leg sank to the knee.

She went very still. The muck was sucking her down gently, as if it meant to. Slow pulse. She recognized the pattern: quicksand. Not the movie monster, a quieter, more domestic version, but in that place, alone and several miles from the nearest trail, the distinction was irrelevant. She pulled with all her strength. Her leg came free with an obscene squelch.

She backed up to a dry rock, sat down, and breathed. She wiped her hands with a damp rag and opened the map to mark the area. As she nibbled an energy bar, she realized the place was quiet, cool, shadowy, perfect. Maybe it was a good time for her partners.

“Let’s celebrate,” she murmured with a crooked smile.

She took the sucker from the side pocket, left the dildo propped on the rock like a soldier at attention, and pulled down her trousers. Her hands were still dirty from the mud earlier; she didn’t care. Fingers covered in muck left dark trails on her thighs and belly as she hiked up her shirt to free her tits. The sucker began tugging at her clitoris in slow pulses.

The smell of wet earth clung to her skin. The texture of the mud, viscous and cold, aroused her in a new, different way. A filthy, decisive idea crossed her mind.

Get all the way in. Let it suck you. Let it claim you.

One part of her protested: you’re horny, fuck yourself with the dildo and forget this filth. But the other part was already winning.

Strip. Get in up to your neck. Let it treat you like a sow in its sty. Come when the muck reaches your chin.

It was far too dirty to dismiss. Camila had read enough to know that you didn’t sink completely in a pool like that: the mixture was too dense, and normally you got stuck around the waist. The real danger wasn’t drowning; it was becoming trapped and being unable to get out. And that was what the ropes were for.

She switched off the sucker and left it on the rock beside the dildo. She pulled her trousers up just enough to kneel in front of the backpack. She took out the two ropes, uncoiled them, and checked the braiding. They were climbing ropes, good ones. They would hold whatever you threw at them.

“This is going to take a while. I hope it’s worth it,” she said aloud, speaking to the forest.

She tied matching knots around each wrist, double knots, pulling them tight with her teeth. She passed the other ends around the thickest trunk of the nearby birches, made four complete turns, and secured them with a knot she had learned in a caving course. She pulled hard. The rope didn’t give even an inch. She pulled again. Nothing.

She stripped completely. She folded her clothes on top of the backpack, started the stopwatch on her phone, and set it on a flat stone, the screen facing the clearing. She stood naked before the mud, wrists tied and the ropes taut behind her. She felt the cool air between her thighs, her heart racing. She moved forward.

The first step swallowed her foot to the ankle. The second reached her calf. On the third, the mud sucked her up to mid-thigh with a sharp jerk, and she let out an “aaaaah” somewhere between hysteria and arousal. She rolled her hips and the muck engulfed her to the waist. Her clitoris was submerged in the mixture, and the sensation raised gooseflesh all the way to her shoulders.

One hand on each rope, just in case. She wanted to wait and see how far she got before she started touching herself. And the mud kept rising. Slowly, yes, but rising. It passed her navel. Closed around her ribs. Caressed her tits from underneath. It didn’t stop.

“Okay, this pool has no bottom,” she told herself, her voice half-broken.

When the muck brushed her neck, she decided it was enough. She climbed backward up the ropes, arm over arm, and her muscles responded better than she had expected. She crawled out, completely naked, completely covered in greasy, dark, warm mud. She lay facedown on the bank and breathed.

“That wasn’t so hard,” she panted.

She checked the stopwatch: twenty-six minutes and thirty-four seconds since she had entered. Five minutes to climb out. More than twenty minutes before the mud covered her face.

“I’ve got time to come like a bitch.”

She felt proud, calculating, mistress of her own game. She set an alarm on her phone for exactly twenty minutes, left it near the bank on top of the backpack, and took one last look at the dildo and sucker abandoned on the rock.

“Sorry, boys. It’s not that you’re going to get dirty. It’s that if I let you go in there, I won’t get you back even with a metal detector,” she laughed.

She returned to the pool. This time without holding back.

***

The mud swallowed her again, slowly, following the ritual she already knew. When it reached her thighs, she moaned loudly, without shame. When it brushed her clitoris, she lowered one hand and opened herself, letting the thick mixture seep between her lips. She rolled her hips and felt the mud caressing her ass with an almost sticky softness.

“Goddd, this is the best wank of my life,” she murmured, speaking to no one.

She cupped both hands, scooped up a handful of thick muck, and smeared it over her tits, her shoulders, the nape of her neck. Over her throat. Her face. Her hair. She felt the gummy weight plastering the strands to her scalp, running in thick rivulets down her clavicle and chest, all the way to her belly. She laughed to herself, mouth open. The sensation was brutal.

She was already sunk to her hips. She lowered both hands. One to her cunt, the other to her ass. She rubbed mud over both holes, feeling it enter places that weren’t meant to receive earth. She didn’t care.

“I want this to fuck me,” she panted. “I want the whole forest to knock me up. I want it to turn me into its whore.”

Her mind was somewhere else. The words came out unfiltered, as if her thoughts too were dissolving into liquid. She tugged on the ropes for a moment, automatically. Firm resistance. Good. She surrendered to the fantasy.

“Make me yours. Devour me. I want to stop existing. I want to merge with you.”

The mud kissed her tits. She almost came then and there, but bit her lip and held back. She wanted the orgasm later, when there was no way out. She wanted to come with the muck entering her mouth.

She bounced her tits so they slapped against the sticky surface. The mud trapped her a little more with every movement. The quicksand climbed her sternum and closed around her neck. Her shoulders disappeared. Her arms could move only by tearing through the thickness that was devouring her without mercy.

“Ahhhh, I’m going to come,” she screamed, her chin already brushing the mud.

And then, just before she let herself go, her hands tugged on the ropes again. A reflex. One last unconscious check, that little safety protocol the body carries out on its own when the mind is somewhere else.

Something was wrong.

She felt no tension. Not even the mild resistance the trunk had offered before. She felt slackness, dead weight. The ropes were still tied to her wrists, yes, but the other ends were loose, dragging through the mud until they disappeared across the solid ground.

Camila turned her head with difficulty, her neck already almost submerged. It took her a moment to process what she was seeing.

The ends of the ropes lay on the ground beside the tree. Pieces of rope still remained around the trunk, the four turns she herself had made, now hanging loose, cut halfway up. Not frayed from rubbing. Not gnawed by an animal. Cut. Cleanly. With a very sharp blade or an axe.

The forest remained utterly silent. No footsteps. No other breathing. But someone had been there while she sank, and had left.

She tried to scream. She opened her mouth and the mud filled it at once, viscous, metallic, sour. She spat it out as best she could and began breathing through her nose, inhaling quickly, saving seconds.

The phone alarm went off. Twenty minutes. Exactly.

The sound plunged her into a strange calm, as if someone had turned down the volume of the world. Her mouth was already beneath the surface. She couldn’t scream. And even if she could, who would she call? Whoever heard her was almost certainly the same person who had cut the ropes.

The alarm kept ringing.

Time to come, Camila.

Her hands returned clumsily to her tits and cunt, forcing their way through the mass that wanted to swallow them. She felt the mud rising faster now, reaching her cheekbones, her eyes. She squeezed her eyelids shut. She shoved three fingers inside herself. She fucked herself furiously, with fear and with an absolute pleasure she didn’t understand.

Camila sinks to her forehead. Her hair slips behind her. Camila vanishes from sight. Camila comes.