Like a cigar pressed against paper. That's what it reminded you of, when she had burned the black wastes away and replaced it with this.

A new world.

Gray, hot, humid, so very humid. It was some kind of swamp.

"Where are we?" you asked.

"Another world," she said. "Wow, I keep forgetting how brutal it is here. Don't take your shirt off though, they have this thing against nudity. It's fine, though! It's a nice place. They know about other worlds so they're never too shocked when creatures they've never seen before show up!"

"Another world," you said, dumbly.

"Yeah. It's made of the remnants of a bunch of worlds that got destroyed, so they're used to drifts like us. Southern tombdogs have the best street food though. We just need to find out... where... we... ended up."

The ground beneath you was wet. Your feet sank into it, sloppily. Thick, fat, smooth trees with low-hanging leaves pressed in all around you. A foresty swamp. "A swamp forest?" you told her. "Are we lost?"

"Not really," she said, pulling her cloak up away from the mud. "We're going to appear somewhere that has meaning to me so we're either near Ahfdredn lands or--yeah no we gotta be near Taxholkinokxix-em I can hear water, can't you?"

You could. You followed it, though the wet ground, doing your best to not trip on the roots of the trees and end up face-first in the muck. You found a river, a broad, slow, gentle thing, soft green. The sky above you was gray and misty. The sun was white. You were uncomfortably hot. You wanted to get out of your own fur, your skin, your flesh. Be reduced to cool bones. It was so hot. Even by the river you felt hot and wet. You were breathing water. You were soaked in sweat that did nothing to relieve your heat. Your clothes clung tightly to you.

"Well, we have to just find someone who runs a rental shop. Boat rental. Won't be too hard, probably," she said.

"Probably?" you asked.

"Well I never put myself anywhere too far away from someone. Let's go!"

You went. Trudging along the edge of the river, you found yourself growing filthy, but the mud drying on you felt cooling, relaxing. The mud never seemed to stick to her yellow clothes. You walked without saying more than the occasional grunt, a sigh of exhaustion, pulling your leg out of the slime or clambering over a thick nest of roots.

Finally you found a house. You had assumed it was, anyway. A small, stubby round dome on the water's edge, made of clay, covered in a coat of fading, peeling wine-colored paint. Small, shabby docks stuck out into the river. A long boat rocked lazily in the water there, tied to the wood.

"Nice! Okay let's get us a ride," she said. You followed.

The man in the house was a dog--not like her, but on two legs, instead, taller, with splotches all over. He was wearing a thick mantle over his shoulders--how? How could he stand to dress like that in this heat? You wanted to be naked right now, for all the good it would do you. How could he wear that?

How did she manage, in those thick yellow clothes, either?

She spoke. "Hey, we're drifts, is Taxholkinokxix-em nearby?"

The dog-person said something, and you couldn't understand it, but she seemed to, and she responded.

"Great! Can you take us there?"

The person must have said yes, because twenty minutes later, here the two of you were.

On the boat.

You are filthy, and all the muck and mud is drying hard on you now, and you feel disgusting. She hardly looks like she'd exerted herself at all.

"You're going to love it," she says. "They make the best street food for real. They basically invented fast food, do you know that concept? Like where you show up and you get like, a full on meal and it's ready in a minute or two. It's great, it's so bad, it's bad for you but we can indulge once in a while, right?"

"I'm just sort of in the mood for a bath and a drink," you say. "Can we--can we do that at all?"

She pauses, thinking for a moment. "Oh! Yeah. Uhm. Yeah there are stranger inns or whatever they call them. Uh, if we get a room together people will think we're sleeping together! But you can't understand them anyway and I don't really care? So yeah okay that's no problem we can get you a bath and then we can get some absolutely horrible food that will be wonderful!"

You just nod. You've consigned yourself to going along with her, for now. What choice did you have, at this point? Your world was gone. Everything in it was gone. You try to not think about it. You look around you, at the slow pace of the water beneath you. At the distant creatures moving in the forest. The calls of unfamiliar birds, the honking of distant beasts. Another world. It's not the worst, right?

She seems excited.

You keep thinking about how nice that bath could be.