At first it thought it would miss the creatures. They were highly active, agile, and traveling across the plain perpendicularly to the Drounge’s course. If it had slowed down, if they had slowed down, contact could have been avoided. But they showed no inclination to accelerate or moderate their pace, and the Drounge could not. Catastrophe accompanied the Drounge the way remoras shadowed a shark.
Even so, a sliver of apathetic hope remained as it slid past first one, then another of the energetic vertebrates without making contact. They were an odd lot, the Drounge thought sluggishly. Paradoxical at best, mismatched at worst. A third member of the party trooped past without brushing against it or glancing in its lurching, pitching direction.
And then the fourth hesitated, reaching out as if feeling of the air in front of it, and grabbed a protruding wad of the Drounge’s putrefying flesh just above one oculus.
Corruption spurted from the Drounge’s fragile epidermis, surging forward to coagulate around the creature’s fingers and wrist. Its eyes bugged and it gasped in agony as the relic residue of a thousand diseases and pestilences, of a million tumors and ulcerations, shot briefly through its flesh. Cinched by solidifying putridity to the left side of the Drounge, the luckless biped found itself dragged helplessly forward.
This was an unusual but not unprecedented occurrence. The Drounge knew exactly what would happen. Attached to its humping, gelatinous body, the trapped creature would find itself hauled along until the timeless poisons in the Drounge’s system began to affect it the same way they affected every living thing. It would regain its freedom only when its pinioned limb rotted off at the wrist. Then the rest of the body would atrophy and die, most likely rotted away from within by the extreme contact it had made with the Drounge.