And so I am being executed. I was expecting to just be strung up... well hoping, really, as I'm too low on the social ladder for beheading, and anything else was likely to be mean. Did they garrote people here? It didn't look good when four guards marched me from the town; it would mean something messy in the wilderness. Just had to hope it would be quick.

We stopped at a nondescript spot, nothing to mark it in the surrounding plain. My wrists were tied already, and someone bound my ankles. They made me kneel. I waited for the spear through my belly or the blade across my throat. None of that; they just stood and I knelt, and then the dirt began giving  under my knees and I felt the damp beneath the dry surface. So that way, then; I'd heard the plain has quicksand and that some cities feed it because of reasons. I was actually glad, for all that it's said to be the worst way to die; there'd be no business with knife or strangle-cord, just gravity and the slowly flowing earth.

And so here I am. Kneeling almost naked, my knees tilting and slipping downward and the rest of me doomed to follow. The guards stand sullenly around, and I'll give them this: there's been no pokes or punches, jibes or slurs, no meanness beyond dirty looks. They must be bored silly. I'm trussed up well enough, they should just leave. The quicksand and I can take it from here.

Knees going under, groundwater soaking into my britches; my demise is slow but it's happening. Hazy sky so I'll be spared the worst of the sun. I've had a few vultures circle around but they don't stay; guess they've learned the morass won't leave them anything.

Will they push me under if I'm too long sinking? Not if this is a true Rite, and I can't see why else I'm here and not on a gallows. Most likely I'm being offered to the Powers of Earth. I'm good with that, it's the element I've always felt closest to. I pray to it now, surrendering my body and life to it, and feel a calm peace flow up into me as if from the sand itself. I close my eyes, shut out the sullen guards, tune my ears and nose to the plain's little scents and noises, let myself exist in the moment. Maybe it's only comforting instincts and brain chemicals, but whatever the ground does with my soul I feel like I'll be okay.

...What did I do? Oh, looked behind a door marked Staff Only. Dying as I lived, a nosy parker.