They send you down into the swamps of Atchafalaya to die with nothing between your teeth but contract ink and shame. There’s a lot of misery to sow across the continent, after all, and no room for a runner-up. No heaven nor any hell has ever taken kindly to an also-ran.
The cypresses here are nearly as old as you, their buttressing knees sinking into you like fangs. They tower over you, implacable, as you order, and then demand, and then rage, and at last beg.
You can’t die, of course, so there’s nothing for you to do but molder in the tepid water, choking on flaked cypress bark and burrowing deeper into the swamp with every passing year. After a few decades you let despair pull you down into sleep, like a ship going under.
Only the boldest, the most foolish, venture deep enough into the swamp to reach the vast trunk that pins you to the mud. Beneath their stumbling, haphazard feet, you usually wake like it’s the first moment of exile all over again. That agony lighting you up from the inside out, power unspooled from your belly and cut away, leaving you a husk.
They wake you by accident, those poor straying souls, and, well.
