Published at 1st of December 2023 10:40 am

Chapter 14 The Storm

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As it happened, the storm didn’t pass. The Lich had been wrong about that. Over a week, it slowly brewed before an orgy of violence in the form of wind and torrential rains burst forth.

At its worst, it raged for days. Even when the wind died off to the point where it no longer leveled trees and scoured the earth, the system continued to churn slowly above the area, continuing to rain. It lingered for weeks on and off after that. Water could not damage the swamp, but as the water level rose, the flooding redirected the whole course of the river and diluted the swamp’s power as well as its connection to the darkness that lurked beneath it.

It was a titanic work of magic, but as the tunnels flooded and the dead that served the darkness became submerged, everything slowly ground to a halt an inch at a time. The water wouldn’t hurt any of the abominations or zombies that the wraith had constructed, but letting them all slowly fall asleep to conserve energy was the obvious choice. The darkness was both timeless and eternal. Its great work could wait for an age if necessary. It could wait as long as it needed to, even until all the men that knew the song ‘The Last Man’ died old and alone in their beds.

Those mages had no idea what it was they were attempting to fight. They had attempted to purge its darkness from the world above, but they were as foolish as Albrecht had been. They couldn’t erase its influence no matter what they did. All they were doing was allowing it to spread downriver. In time the waters would fall, and it would consolidate its hold on all the new territories that it had been spread to. For now, it felt numb and detached from everything save the lands closest to the tower. Even feeling for the sparks of darkness that its pet bard had now seeded far and wide became almost impossible at times.

That worried the swamp, but it could focus on that problem once the storm cleared. For now, it would take advantage of the forces that the mages had unleashed. The wraith slowly turned its mind to one of the darkest rooms in the labyrinth: the library.

The Lich’s library contained no books, though. Instead, it held the heads of its most important victims, soaking in clay jars of preservative brine. For a long time, the room had contained only Von Wandren, but all of the mages and some of the other interesting heroes that came after now filled the room in row after row. They were spared the indignity of becoming part of its army. Instead, their souls were sealed away and only used for special occasions.

Usually, that was to reactivate a single one to ask them important questions, but today the Lich didn’t draw out a single voice from his collection; he used them as a choir. Albrecht’s affinity for elemental magics had long since lapsed. The necromancy had devoured every part of him that mattered now.

The heads of the slain mages were the perfect tool to channel such power through their own elemental affinities, though. The Lich was sure that a few of them would burn out under such tremendous strain, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that their tortured screams wove into a single voice of terrible power and slowly but surely redirected the currents. The darkness couldn’t do anything to stop the storm now or the damage it had done, but it could steer the river to make sure it destroyed the only thing that the swamp couldn’t: the cursed temple and the consecrated ground around it that had frustrated the darkness for so long.

With great effort, using up much of its power reserves that it had stored from all of the would-be heroes it had devoured, it slowly deepened some parts of the swamp while it raised others until the terrible floodwaters of the river were aimed at remnants of the fishing village it had devoured so long ago.

Two days later, before the raging flood had even started to crest, the remains of the temple were drowned in mud as the hill was practically erased by the erosion of the dark, churning waters. After that, the swamp didn’t care what happened. The last shackle placed on its domain by a deity was finally gone, and no one but the wraith would ever claim dominion over any part of the swamp again.

At the crest of the waters, the tower finally fell, collapsing in on itself. That didn’t trouble the swamp. The original tower had been built with experiments in mind that it had no interest in pursuing.

The darkness turned inward, retreating from the surface as the waters drowned its kingdom, and clung to their high-water mark for week after water-logged week. The tunnels beneath the towers spanned miles in total now. Even if they had begun as a meandering maze intent on trapping the unwary in a labyrinth from which they would never escape, it had become something more.

Now it was a summoning circle measured in miles or at least the start of one. Past the core labyrinth and the route that eventually led to the seat of its power in the Lich’s throne room on the third level, long branches extended outward. They were already almost half a mile in length, and when they reached the proper distance, they would curve around until they created a perfect circle underneath the land. No one would be able to interfere with its terrible plan when the time was right.

Even if the waters were to recede tomorrow, that plan was still many years and many lives away from fruition. The number of victims it would need would be enormous, but there was no rush. Like everything else, that was a solvable problem, and even though its plans had not involved the river before, it was easily incorporated.

The swamp wouldn’t let any mortal derail what was coming, no matter how powerful they thought they might be. No single life could hope to accrue the sheer amount of essence that the wraith had gathered in its growing whirlpool of darkness. While only two or three of the souls among the legion of lives it amassed really mattered in the grand scheme, every single one of them counted when compared to the petty and fragile lives that sought to oppose it.

So it lay there in the dark, dormant as it brooded and schemed, until almost a month later, the floodwaters fully receded. The magical typhoon had changed the whole landscape to the point that it was almost unrecognizable. All landmarks had been moved or erased, and all that was left of the tower was a pile of stones atop a hill that now overlooked the river. That was the largest change.

The course of the river had shifted almost 15 miles to the west in a large oxbow that took it through the heart of the swamp now. The river was its possession now. It was now one more treasure in its hoard.

None of these changes could affect the web of life, though, or the swamp’s place within it. Even now, as the storm surge passed, it could feel its greatly expanded kingdom slowly returning to its grasp.

Every day the land dried a little more, and every night the darkness’s awareness spread a little further. Its domain had increased in size by almost half, stretching further downriver. It could sense not just the few scattered lizardmen that had survived the bloody battle and fled further into the swamp but the two dozen tiny fishing villages that clung to the banks in what was now its domain.

Even past that, it could sense many smaller communities that were well outside of its reach because it now had a claim on the lifeblood of their community - the mighty river Oroza, and it was connected to them through it. It could not yet see the sea where the river emptied out, but it knew it was there. The darkness was certain that further downstream, it would find any number of cities that it could sink its teeth into to further its plans.

Now wasn’t the time to worry about such far-off goals, though. Now it focused on incorporating the new areas and understanding the delicate ecological balances that would begin to provide it a trickle of essence day after day, even as it used that power to slowly remove the water from its flooded depths. Only after that had happened could the dead that slept for over a month return to the unlives they hated so much and begin to dig once more.

Progress was slower than the darkness thought it would be. It was mostly composed of water, so it had assumed that water couldn’t do much to hurt it, but the pathways of stone, filled with carved runes and dotted here and there with a totem or a bronze and silver soul web, all began to tarnish and corrode as soon as the water was gone. The untreated zombies fared even worse. Many of the older ones decayed to uselessness within weeks of returning to work. The Lich cursed those human mages, swearing it would find ways to make them suffer for the swarm of minor inconveniences they had inflicted on it.

Before it could do that, though, it would have to assign its dwindling servants to clean the runes of the muddy sediments that the swamp’s waters had left behind and repair the failing soul webs lest the spirits tied to them escape completely. Zombies were not good at detailed work like cleaning, so all of that took much longer than it should have. At cleaning, they were only almost hopeless, but the detailed drudgery of heating silver and drawing the thin silver strands that were needed to repair the webs was entirely beyond them.

The Lich would have to do that itself, though it did at least send the swamp dragon into the river to capsize a small barge and bring back the drowned crew. Because neither the Lich nor the waterlogged zombies had the dexterity to make the delicate repairs, it would need fresh meat that it could puppet so that, once again, everything would be as it should.

Out of everything, the only part of the swamp’s efforts that had suffered no real ill effects from the deluge were the lizardmen and the swamp dragon. The lizardmen were naturally waterproof to a large degree, but after they’d been embalmed, there was little left inside of them to rot. They would serve as the swamp’s honor guard until the end of days, in all likelihood.

The swamp dragon shared many of the same benefits. It had weathered the flood where it spent most of its time, at the bottom of the lagoon where the fishing village it had devoured almost a year ago had once been. Now the swamp dragon sat nestled in the silt of the same spot as before, but it was now in the depths of the main channel of the river. It never moved without its master’s say-so, which was rarely, and only to catch and smash the smallest of vessels. The swamp still needed some blood, but right now, it needed to remain hidden more.

Men had sought to destroy it with water, and the swamp had no reason not to let them think that they were successful. Both the tower and the temple were all but gone now - there was no landmark left from the stories to find it and trouble it any further, which was ironic since now its seat of power was practically next to the river. Any would-be adventurers that sought it deep in the swamp now would be looking in entirely the wrong place. That was all to the good.

For what came next, it would need a much lower profile. It would be easiest if it could disappear altogether, but that would take time. It was better to let them think that the threat was gone, and the evil had been washed away than to let the kingdoms of men find out the truth: that the swamp had used their magics to take control of the river, and day by day it was claiming more lands to the south as the river’s polluted floodwaters tainted everything they touched.

Let them all be distracted by the superficial, the darkness decided, pleased with itself. Let them think that the danger was over while the roots only spread deeper. Once that decision was made, the Lich sent fresh dreams to its pet bard. It would need a new song. Something to let the kingdoms of men know that it had been vanquished and that Riley’s riches would never be found beneath the waters of the Archmage’s flood.

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