In the sunken misery of the Punishment Fields, where justice and cruelty are indistinguishable, the land itself had long stopped caring for the cries of the dying. Here, prisoners were not buried—they were displayed in rusted cages suspended just above the muck, left to rot beneath open sky as a warning. Day and night, crows pecked at their limbs, and swarms of centipedes feasted upon their open wounds. When the bodies finally fell, the mud welcomed them with greedy gulps.

At the edge of this desolation lived a common swamp toad—small, unremarkable, and unnoticed. It lived among the decay, eating flies fattened on blood, gnats that danced in clouds around unwashed limbs, and worms that burrowed through cooling flesh. But it watched. It watched as suffering changed the nature of things. It watched how torment reshaped the screams of men, turned insects violent, and made the soil grow slick and black with hate.

Over time, the toad began to change.

It grew fatter, not just from the abundance of carrion-fed prey, but from something else—from the invisible weight of suffering. Each meal carried the taste of fear, hatred, hopelessness. As it fed, it absorbed more than flesh—it devoured emotion, grief, rage. The rot within the swamp was no longer around it; it was inside it, reshaping its being.

The warts on its back grew into sacs—bubbling, pulsing cysts filled with noxious vapor. Its croak became a guttural echo, like the final death rattle of a dying prisoner. Its tongue, once sticky and quick, grew barbs and paralytic slime. The toad itself became a vessel of unspent screams and unwept tears.

When it finally emerged from the filth years later, it had become something else entirely—something horrid.

Now known only as the Miasma Toad, the creature exudes a cloud of maddening vapor—drawn from the emotions it’s devoured over decades. Victims within the mist experience nightmarish hallucinations of their worst regrets and sins, moments before suffocating in their panic. The toad feasts upon their fallen bodies, bloated with psychotropic bile and silent satisfaction.

Though it cannot speak, its actions tell a story: one of a beast shaped by man’s cruelty, grown powerful on emotional rot, now returning that torment tenfold to the world.

And it still lurks in the Punishment Fields, surrounded by the quiet churn of the mud and the stench of grief, waiting for more sorrow to hatch in the shadows of its warts.