The night had passed and the clouds had rolled back in on cue. Steven didn’t bothered wondering at that. They came for him not long after and started again.

First, they stripped the mud away with blunt fingers, accomplishing in less than a minute what had been carefully denied him during the night. The mass came away in huge chunks, dry and dusty, though it had clung like putty the day before. They finished the cleaning with an orange-tinted liquid that foamed when it hit open flesh and burned on the needles all the way down to his joints. Completely clean, his skin had a greyish cast to it which might have been due to the clouds.

They strapped him to the tree again and brought a new cauldron of the mud; the rest of it took most of the day. The tall one watched the whole thing without moving or relaxing its corpse-smile.

Steven never made a sound. Damned if he would.

The worst part of it all was when they put him back in the cage and he caught himself thinking of it as mine.

The stars came out, and he wondered for the first time if anyone would come.