Tied to the Tree Trunk While the Mud Devoured Her

Camila liked walking among the oaks when the rest of the world was asleep. She used to say the dense woods never lied, that the mountain showed itself exactly as it was: beautiful sometimes, hostile almost always. “Nature hides nothing,” she thought as she stepped on the leaf litter of the Valdebra range. “If it wants to love you, it hugs you; if it wants to eat you, it eats you.” And she preferred that honesty to the noise of the office.

At first she went out with a hiking group from the village on Sundays. Then she started disappearing during the week, alone, with her backpack stuffed to the brim. And after a few months she had left the marked trails behind and was venturing in without a set direction, orienting herself by the shadow of the crags or by the sun when it managed to slip through the treetops.

She was careful, though. 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 charged phone, and a can of pepper spray. She didn’t usually run 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 weren’t for survival but had become indispensable: a thick silicone dildo and a small clitoral suction toy. Her “partners,” she called them. When she was sure there wasn’t a soul for miles around, she would sit against a trunk and masturbate for a whole hour, discovering how good it felt to be able to moan out loud without smothering her voice into a pillow.

That morning she chose a square on the map she had never explored before. It was low ground, full of ponds, mud, and scrubby vegetation. She dressed accordingly: waterproof pants, high boots with good soles, a thermal shirt, a thin vest. She rubbed insect repellent all the way under her clothes, just in case. The humidity would be bad; the mosquitoes worse.

After two hours of walking, she reached a stretch where the birches grew too close together and the sun barely got through. The ground crunched softly beneath her boots. Each step took more effort than the last. At one point the mud swallowed her whole boot, and when she took the next step, her right leg sank up to the knee.

She stood perfectly still. The muck sucked at her with a gentle insistence, as if it meant to. Slow pulse. She recognized the pattern: quicksand. Not the monster from the movies, a more domestic, quieter version, but in that place, alone and several kilometers from the last path, the detail was irrelevant. She pulled with all her strength. Her leg came free with an obscene slurp.

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

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

She took the suction toy out of the side pocket, set the dildo on the rock like a soldier in formation, and pulled down her pants. Her hands were dirty with the mud from earlier; she didn’t care. The fingers caked with muck left dark streaks on her thighs and belly when she lifted her shirt to free her breasts. The suction toy began tugging at her clit in slow pulses.

The smell of wet earth clung to her skin. The texture of the mud, viscous and cold, turned her on in a new way, a different way. An idea crossed her mind, filthy and absolute.

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

Part of her protested: you’re horny, just fuck yourself with the dildo and quit the nasty bullshit. But the other part was already winning.

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

It was too arousing to dismiss. Camila had read enough to know that in a pond like that you didn’t sink all the way: the mixture was too dense, usually you got stuck around the waist. The real danger wasn’t drowning, it was getting trapped and not being able to get out. And that was what the ropes were for.

She turned off the suction toy and left it on the rock beside the dildo. She hiked her pants up just enough to kneel in front of the backpack. She pulled out the two ropes, uncoiled them, and checked the braid. They were climbing ropes, good ones. They’d hold whatever you threw at them.

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

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

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

The first step swallowed her foot up to the ankle. The second to the calf. On the third, the mud yanked her down to mid-thigh with a sharp jerk, and she let out an “aaaaah” somewhere between hysteria and excitement. She shifted her hips and the muck engulfed her up to the waist. Her clit was submerged in the mixture, and that made her skin prickle all the way to her shoulders.

One hand on each rope, just in case. She wanted to see how far it would take her before she started touching herself. And the mud kept rising. Slowly, yes, but rising. It passed her navel. It surrounded her ribs. It stroked her tits from below. It didn’t stop.

“Okay, this puddle has no bottom,” she said, her voice half-broken.

When the muck brushed her neck, she judged that was enough. She climbed backward up the ropes, arm over arm, and her muscles responded better than she expected. She got out dragging herself, completely naked, completely coated in greasy, dark, warm mud. She lay face-down on the bank and breathed.

“That wasn’t so hard,” she panted.

She looked at the stopwatch: twenty-six minutes and thirty-four seconds since she’d gone in. Five to climb out. More than twenty minutes before the mud covered her face.

“Plenty of time to come like a bitch.”

She felt proud, calculating, in control 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. She took one last look at the dildo and suction toy forgotten on the rock.

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

She went back to the puddle. This time without hesitation.

***

The mud swallowed her again, slowly, with the familiar ritual. When it reached her thighs, she moaned loudly, without shame. When it brushed her clit, she lowered one hand and spread herself open, letting the thick mixture slip between her lips. She moved her hips and felt the mud stroking her ass with an almost sticky softness.

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

She cupped both hands together, scooped up a handful of thick mud, and smeared it over her tits, shoulders, nape. Over her neck. Her face. Her hair. She felt the grimy weight sticking the strands to her skull, running down in thick rivulets over her collarbone and chest, all the way to her belly. She laughed to herself, mouth open. The sensation was brutal.

She was already sunk to the hips. She lowered both hands. One to her cunt, the other to her ass. She rubbed both holes with mud, feeling it go into places that were never meant to receive dirt. She didn’t care.

“I want this to fuck me,” she panted. “To impregnate me with the whole forest. To turn me into its whore.”

Her brain was on something else. The words came out unfettered, as if her head were dissolving into liquid too. She gave the ropes a reflexive pull for a second. Firm resistance. Good. She surrendered to the fantasy.

“Make me yours. Devour me. I want to stop existing. I want to melt into you.”

The mud kissed her tits. She was almost about to come right then, but she bit her lip and held back. She wanted the orgasm later, when there would be no way out. She wanted to come with the mud 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 rose up her sternum, wrapped around her neck. Her shoulders disappeared. Her arms could only move by tearing through the thickness that was eating her without mercy.

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

And then, just before letting go, her hands pulled on the ropes again. A reflex. One last unconscious check, that little safety protocol the body performs on its own when the mind is somewhere else.

Something was wrong.

She didn’t feel tension. She didn’t even feel the gentle resistance the trunk had given before. She felt slackness, dead weight. The ropes were still tied to her wrists, yes, but the other ends had come loose, slack, dragging through the mud until they disappeared into 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 rope ends were lying on the ground beside the tree. Around the trunk there were still pieces of rope, the four turns she herself had made, now hanging loose, cut halfway through. Not frayed by rubbing. Not chewed by an animal. Cut. Clean. With a very sharp blade or an axe.

The forest was still silent. No footsteps. No чужой breathing. But someone had been there, while she was sinking, and had left.

She wanted 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 started breathing through her nose, inhaling quickly, saving seconds.

The phone alarm went off. Twenty minutes. Exactly.

The sound dropped her into a strange calm, as if someone had turned the volume of the world down. Her mouth was already below the surface. She couldn’t scream. And even if she could, who was she going to 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 went back to her tits and cunt with clumsy urgency, pushing 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 in three fingers. She fucked herself with rage, with fear, and with an absolute pleasure she didn’t understand.

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