Published at 1st of December 2023 10:40 am

Chapter 06 A Trip Into Town

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That was the night that everyone on the island died. Before the storm ended, Albrecht’s last few servants were torn apart by the dozen zombies that had spent the last few months toiling to dig the tunnels ever deeper. Even without any weapons of their own, the zombies still strangled the life out of almost every soul that remained on the island within minutes. It could hardly even be called a fight. The living managed to mangle or maim a corpse or two, but that did nothing to stop them from following through with their murderous orders.

Only one of the apprentices managed to escape out a window before the zombies knocked down the front door, and he only waded a few hundred feet into the water before something dragged him down into the muck until his lungs filled with water.

In the morning, the storm cleared, and for the first time in years, there was utter silence in the area around the island as the sun rose. Not one bird dared to chirp or sing in the aftermath of the deadly transformation that had occurred. Up until now, the evil that lurked in the fen had been localized and specific about one thing: protecting its bloody treasure.

Even though the darkness could always be felt by those most sensitive to those things, it was a pall that was palpable now. It was a shroud over the whole area that even the villagers could feel as they made gestures to ward off evil before setting off in their boats to catch today’s supper.

The evil in the fen was metastasizing and growing at a prodigious rate as it changed into something darker and more malevolent than it had ever been before. A powerful mind was being devoured deep in its dark heart, and that made it think of all sorts of things it had never considered before. Even now, the wraith was using the zombies to try new experiments that the mage had imagined but had been much too moral to actually explore. New circles with darker runes were being drawn, zombies were loading corpses into barrels to see if pickling the corpses would produce heartier and stronger vessels, and all the while, the remainder of its servants retreated into the depths with makeshift tools to begin tunneling into the bedrock once more.

The swamp had an even greater treasure to protect now, and that meant burying it ever deeper in a labyrinth so dark and fortified that no one would ever find it. That those efforts might take decades or that the undead servants performing the work would turn to dust long before their efforts were complete didn’t matter.

The avarice of the swamp was timeless, and it would not rest until all that it coveted was safely tucked away where it could never be taken from it. It was that very urge that made it look to the small fishing village, which was now well inside its territory. Those insignificant human lives that were so obsessed with fishing and eating only to raise young humans who would also learn to fish and eat were no longer just a source of suffering and sustenance but also a source of labor for this endless project.

It had been preying on the dreams of the children and the illnesses of the infirm for months now, but flush with the dark knowledge brewing in the prison that was its phylactery, the swamp took a wider view. The dead buried in the consecrated ground of the temple at the heart of the village were beyond its reach, but everything else belonged to it if only it reached out to grab it. The bones of the drowned, picked clean in the pond, the bodies of murder victims in shallow graves where they were never supposed to be found, and even the small coven of witches that tried to bargain with dark powers to curse their neighbors were all the property of the swamp now. Each one was a source of energy or a possible weapon to be wielded, and it studied them as intently as it could, even though its focus still drifted frequently with the weather and the phase of the moon.

Consuming the mage had drained much of its reserves, so it did nothing immediately. Instead, it simply existed, letting the fetid waters rejuvenate as day and night cycled harmlessly around its domain. It needed nothing now. In time, it would need more corpses to animate and more iron to melt into hammers and chisels for them, but there was no hurry. It didn’t know how to hurry anymore. All the swamp did was watch and wait until the moment was right.

That moment came a month later when two men argued over a beer about whose turn it was to mend the nets. The argument became a fight, and the fight led to one of them drowning in the heat of the moment not far from the village. The murderer went home like nothing had happened, while the fish started to nibble on the corpse of his victim. In only one week, the corpse would decay beyond recognition. In two weeks, there wouldn’t be enough left to animate. Tonight, though - tonight, it trudged along the bottom of the pond until it reached the shallows and walked up a sand bar, heading toward his former village.

Before he died, the corpse had been called Jeorge, and all he’d known about the swamp was that the catch was getting better but that no catch was worth staying out close to sunset. He’d been a decent man and had lived hand to mouth for all of the thirty-two years he’d been alive. Now, he was just a corpse with water in its lungs that was making its way to his cousin’s shanty one clumsy stride at a time.

No one was awake by the time it found its destination shortly after midnight, and if anyone heard Somon’s scream of horror as his own victim strangled him to death in his bed, they didn’t bother to light a lantern and investigate. The swamp enjoyed the brief thrill of joy and vengeance that shot through the dead mind of its puppet as it gave the dead man his most fervent wish.

Death within its domain was always a thrill for the swamp. Every single act of predation fed it - from a shoebill devouring an eel to a man slaying another man. Death was its banquet, and the farther its domain spread, the more those tiny acts of nature added up.

A murder like this, though - full of emotion and vengeance - that was worth more than a week of nature’s bounty, and the swamp was revitalized by it. Even as it absorbed that essence, it had to counsel itself against the wanton slaughter of the townspeople. After they were gone, there might not be anything to feast on for a long time, so it would have to devour them slowly, a single life at a time.

Murder wasn’t what tonight was about anyway, not really. Jeorge dragged Somon’s body out of the shed and back towards the rickety piers that served as the waterfront for the men who fished here. Only halfway there, though, it stopped and left the corpse on the street as it suddenly turned and tried to enter the temple grounds. The reaction was instant, and the swamp immediately regretted the experiment. It backed away as a sharp and alien pain assaulted it, but it was too late. Even though it had only barely stepped onto the consecrated ground, the zombie began to smoke almost immediately.

The swamp tried to cut its strings and end its connection to the corpse of Jeorge, but it couldn’t. It was forced to endure every last sensation as the waterlogged corpse boiled while it burned from the inside out. The swamp considered animating the corpse of Somon to drag the still-burning corpse of Jeorge to the water but decided it didn’t want to risk further contact with the holy tonight. The first incident had wiped out much of its reserves anyway, and it didn’t see the harm in sending the village a warning.

The encounter gave the swamp much to think about. Until now, it had thought of the small patch of land as simply beyond its reach for now, but if that was what the divine felt like, it might well always be beyond the reach of its dark influence. The holy power that pushed it back was immediate and irresistible. The darkness that lurked in the swamp couldn’t imagine any plan that would let it triumph over that power.

The only weakness it seemed to have was that even if it was incredibly powerful, it was very limited in scope. Almost every part of the village and every single home and shack was within the swamp’s reach and outside of the protection of the divine. It shouldn’t cause a problem, but it would have to figure out how to cauterize that small hilltop refuge if it couldn’t eliminate it, lest it become a constant thorn in its side.

The swamp was badly mistaken about how the people of the village would react. It did scare them when men heading to their boats found the pair of corpses hours later and ran to fetch the priest. That was hardly the end of it, though.

The event stirred up a hornet’s nest, and even after the bodies were buried in the churchyard, they had a watchman who rotated between the families to make sure that they were prepared for any evil they might find in the darkness. Worse, though, was that the very idea that the dead might be rising up from their own graves and murdering people was enough to make almost everyone who lived there more devout. They said their prayers. They went to church. Rather than paying lip service as they’d done for so long, they really started to believe.

The swamp felt that almost immediately. Only a few days later, the consecrated grounds around the god's temple were expanding, and pushing back against the darkness. Suddenly the dreams of most of the fishermen were now closed to the swamp. It was a catastrophe. Could this continue indefinitely, it wondered? Could the town grow in size and devotion so that in a year or ten, the dark shadows that the wraith hid in were entirely erased by the holy light of the divine? That was a fate too terrible to contemplate.

Something had to be done. Before, the swamp had wanted to devour the villagers one life at a time for the next few years. It wanted to find just the right feuds and animosities to aggravate so it could enjoy the darkness welling up from the souls of both the murderers and the murdered. That was impossible now, though. At its current pace, the entire village would be lost to it again within the year. It had to act immediately.

Over the next week, it was as if a plague had struck the village as so many people began to fall ill. The priest kept anyone from dying, but over the next month, almost every person in town was terribly sick for at least a few days. If they weren’t bedridden with a fever, then they were stuck in the outhouse wishing that they were. It was a terrible time to be there, but by the end of it, if anything, their faith had increased, even though the swamp didn’t understand exactly how.

Its retribution was supposed to make them run in terror or succumb to sickness. Instead, it had somehow made them put more faith in their strange god, and as its influence grew, the swamp’s domain faded and shrank. It was a frightening phenomenon that could be solved only one way: war.

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