In the festering swamp town of Vrimble Quay, where the air smelled of pickled eel and regret, there lived a man named Thrupp who owned a tongue that wasn't his own. It wasn't stolen in the usual sense—say, carved from a debtor's mouth with a rusty shank—but rather purchased at a flea market from a woman with no teeth and a basket of writhing, glistening tongues. She'd called it a "self-winding conversationalist," and Thrupp, a lonely eel farmer with a penchant for terrible decisions, handed over three jars of his finest eel jelly for it.

  The tongue was a mechanical marvel, a clockwork contraption of brass gears and rubbery flesh, stitched together with threads of silver that pulsed faintly in the dark. It came with a little crank on its underside, which Thrupp turned three times before jamming it into his mouth. The first sensation was cold, like biting into a frozen slug, but then it hummed to life, clicking and whirring as it fused to his gums. From that moment, Thrupp didn't speak—he performed. The tongue spun tales of impossible worlds, recited poetry about sentient puddles, and occasionally sang sea shanties in a language no one in Vrimble Quay could place. It was a hit at the tavern, where the locals—mostly eel skinners and bog witches—clapped their webbed hands and bought Thrupp mugs of fermented peat juice.

  But the tongue had a mind of its own. Literally.

  One night, as Thrupp slept in his shack, the tongue detached itself, slithered across the floor on tiny articulated legs, and began whispering to the eels in their pens. By morning, the eels had organized into a choir, their slimy bodies swaying as they croaked a dirge about a drowned god named Klaxithorp. Thrupp awoke to discover his livestock glowing faintly purple and resisting harvesting.

  "We serve the Deep Speaker now," the tongue declared when he confronted it, its gears grinding smugly.

  Thrupp tried to yank it out, but the tongue had rooted itself deeper, sending tendrils of wire into his jawbone. Panicked, he ran to the flea market, only to find the toothless woman gone, replaced by a stall selling jars of pickled eyeballs that blinked at him accusingly. With no help there, Thrupp turned to the town's only other authority: Madame Gizzard, a bog witch who lived in a hut made of eel skeletons and claimed to have once arm-wrestled a cloud.

  Madame Gizzard was a towering figure, her skin a patchwork of moss and scales, with a third eye embedded in her throat that wept constantly. She listened to Thrupp's garbled pleas—half his own words, half the tongue's ranting about Klaxithorp's return—while stirring a pot of bubbling green sludge.

  "That's no ordinary tongue," she rasped, her throat-eye narrowing. "That's a fragment of the Clockwork Choir, a machine-god from Underneath. It's using you to wake something big, something that'll turn this swamp into a cathedral of rust and slime."

  Thrupp didn't like the sound of that, but the tongue did. It launched into a sermon about the glory of rust-priests and slime-altars, its voice echoing off the eel-bone walls.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Madame Gizzard grabbed it with a pair of tongs made from petrified frog legs and yanked, but the tongue fought back, snapping at her with tiny metal teeth that had sprouted overnight.

  "Fine," she growled, dropping it back into Thrupp's mouth. "We'll have to go to the source. The Underneath."

  The Underneath wasn't a place you could walk to. It existed beneath Vrimble Quay, but not in any sensible dimension. To get there, Madame Gizzard brewed a tea from eyeball jelly and eel mucus, which Thrupp drank while she chanted in a tongue-twisting dialect that made his ears bleed. The world dissolved into a kaleidoscope of dripping colors, and suddenly they were falling—Thrupp, Madame Gizzard, and the tongue—through a sky of liquid iron and clouds shaped like screaming faces.

  They landed in The Underneath, a vast cavern where the ground was a carpet of wriggling tongues, all clicking and chattering in unison. At the center stood the Clockwork Choir, a towering monstrosity of gears, pipes, and fleshy tendrils—its face a mosaic of rotating mouths that sang in discordant harmony.

  "Welcome, vessel," it boomed, its voice a symphony of grinding metal and wet slaps.

  "You've brought my herald home."

  The tongue in Thrupp's mouth cheered, detaching again and scuttling toward the Choir like a prodigal son. Thrupp tried to protest, but without the tongue, his words came out as pitiful gurgles. Madame Gizzard stepped forward, her throat-eye blazing.

  "You're not taking this swamp, rust-bucket," she snarled, pulling a femur flute from her robes. She played a tune so shrill it made the air crack, and the tongues on the ground began to explode, splattering the cavern with oil and gore.

  The Clockwork Choir roared, its mouths spinning faster, and unleashed a wave of mechanical locusts—each one a buzzing hybrid of insect and machine. Thrupp ducked as they swarmed, their tiny drills boring into the cavern walls. Madame Gizzard countered with a spell that turned her tears into acid and melted the locusts into puddles of sizzling goo. It was chaos: Thrupp flailing, the Choir bellowing hymns, and the rogue tongue now perched on a gear, conducting the madness like a deranged maestro.

  In desperation, Thrupp grabbed a fallen locust drill and lunged at the tongue. He caught it mid-sermon, pinning it to the ground as it screeched about betrayal.

  "Sorry," he mumbled, his own voice weak and rusty, "but I need my eels back."

  He cranked the drill, shredding the tongue's gears until it went limp, its silver threads snapping like overcooked noodles.

  The Clockwork Choir froze, its mouths stuttering mid-note. Without its herald, it began to collapse, gears tumbling into the tongue-carpet, which writhed in agony.

  Madame Gizzard grabbed Thrupp and blew a final note on her flute, ripping them back to Vrimble Quay in a flash of oily light. They landed in her hut, drenched in slime and panting.

  Back at his shack, Thrupp found his eels normal again—slimy, dumb, and harvestable. The purple glow vanished, and they ceased to sing of Klaxithorp. His mouth felt empty, though, and he couldn't shake the faint ticking he sometimes heard in his jaw. Madame Gizzard warned him to avoid flea markets, but Thrupp wasn't so sure. Something was thrilling about that chaos—something alive.

  Months later, a new stall appeared in the market run by a man with no ears and a basket of twitching, mechanical fingers. Thrupp hesitated, then reached for his eel jelly jars. After all, what's a story without a little twist?