There is a man running through the woods. He can not keep it up for much longer, surely. Glancing back, he wishes he never had. Suddenly, a tree root that seems to have sprang from dust trips him, and as he is falling, intense feelings of horror and helplessness fall over him like a black cape. "I have more time, you can not take me!", it is all that escapes his lips before he is swept into oblivion.
He awakes suddenly. At first he is relieved. Perhaps the beast had been no more than a dream. But that illusion is quickly dispelled. His head is throbbing with pain. He raises a hand slowly, and feels a warm liquid dripping from his head. Blood? He opens his eyes and sees nothing but pitch darkness. Is he blind, or is he in darkness? It doesn't matter. He cannot see. He groans, his parched throat cracking from the pain. He can feel tongues of flame licking eagerly at his flesh, and his hands form into claws. He falls to the ground, wracked with pain.
Everlasting pain. It is all to expect from the Hell he has been in for an endless eternity, or so it seems. Suddenly he is in a white room, siting in a chair, alone. There are varius wires and tubes sticking from his arms, legs, chest, and head. There appears to be a large one-way reflective window covering one wall, he tries to say, "What the...?", but, instead it comes out as a kind of hiss, for there were tubes in his throat. Thinking, "Where am I?", he tries getting up from the chair. Bad descision. He is immediately stricken with a pain not comparable to anything he has experienced in his entire life. Falling from the pain, he is plunged into his dark Hell once again.
The deeper he fell, the softer the pain sung. He woke up in the same spot he had been, or as he found out later, has always been--the woods. He had no idea how long he had been there, though by the way an array of grass, dirt, bugs, and fungi had been growing on his upper half, plus the immense crater he left on the raw ground, he imagined years. "Yes," he thought. It WAS years. 7, in fact. The town he visited after exiting the woods was very much different than he could barely remember. The very first building he entered seemed to be a tavern, as there were many people conversing in tables drinking fine mugs of beer, speaking of gossip, laughter, and, more to his ear, warnings. "Don't let the Mudman get you," he heard one man at the left-side corner of the table with his index finger pointed at the man across from him. "When he rises, he will take his first victim by the throat, drag him to Everleaf forest, and invoke his worst fears for the entire day--that's how he feeds! When spotted, you have to kill him as quickly and harshly as you can. He is reincarnated, but he spawns on the other half of the world where he was killed."
The gossiper paused and stared at the man, who realized he was still covered in mud, bugs, and various grass life without any effort of wiping any off his body, except for his face. The two men's eyes shot open. The gossiper yelled "The mudman! Kill him before he strikes!"
