Published at 1st of December 2023 10:40 am

Chapter 29 Deeper Currents

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It was only after the Lich poisoned the headwaters that the river turned against it. What had been benign neglect, on the part of the river towards the swamp as the water spirits ignored the poaching in their midst, quickly became something more.

There had been no reaction the day that its dark rider delivered the sieve of verdigris encrusted cholerium into the spring that was the first trickle that became the mighty flood that was the Oroza. That placidness didn’t last though. In the days and weeks that followed, as the river began to taste the poison that slowly seeped into the main channel, it rebelled.

Violent undertows rippled up and down the body as the thing became agitated. Its power was strongest in the places furthest from its heart, though, and it could do nothing to dislodge the screen that perverted every drop of water that passed through it. It did what it could to hurt the swamp in other ways, though. It tried and failed to break the chain that belted it at the Toll station, but it did manage to capsize two of the many barges that Kelvun had sent down to assist as construction on various projects intensified.

People died, but the swamp would shed no tears for them. To it, a single life was no more valuable than a drop of water flowing down the river.

The Oroza didn’t stop there, though. Even though it had ignored the Lich’s spirit-hunting constructs for almost a year, they were all dashed in a single night as larger water spirits that took the form of translucent blue sea serpents began to prowl the waters of the swamp.

Until then, the swamp had only ever seen spirits that emulated fish and eels. These were new, though. They had come from the south, near the mouth of the river, where its power was strongest.

The Lich outfitted the river dragon with wards and claws of tainted metal, lest it meet the same fate. That only extended the thing's life by a matter of weeks, though. The decades-old titan of the swamp fought in battle after battle, but each time a new storm refreshed the river’s strength, the combat would start all over again.

In the end, the broken wreckage had to crawl three miles across the muck on a moonless night to avoid total destruction. With the handful of arms it had available, it took most of the night, and by the end it was an exhausted, broken toy instead of the nightmare monstrosity it had been for so long.

The Lich raged at the turn of events, and vowed to rebuild it to be stronger than ever, but adding cords of pure rage woven from the souls of goblins would mean that the whole skeleton would need to be reinforced, and a more powerful collar to control the thing from their poor impulse control would be required. It would be a massive undertaking, and risky too, now that so many humans were in the region.

The fool of a boy, Kelvun had earth mages deep in the swamp surveying leylines for road building or some such too. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but pulling massive amounts of magic for a new project would be something that was sure to arouse their attention. The swamp was just considering how best to make them disappear when an unwelcome visitor unexpectedly entered its lair through the river entrance.

At first glance it looked to be nothing but the corpse of a drowned woman, but the way she swam through the hallways as the tidal surge carried her ever deeper into the fetid darkness while she surged with elemental power were more than enough indications that she was possessed by something far greater.

Indeed, as the first of his servants engaged her, only to be torn to pieces he saw it - the river dragon that wore the woman as a skin to walk in his tainted domain, in the same way he had used aquatic corpses to travel the river for so long. She might look like a normal woman that had been pretty enough before the river had begun to warp her flesh. The ghostly claws that drifted near her hands, though, they were powerful enough to do even its swamp dragon in.

The Lich had not been forced to deal with a threat in the heart of his own domain like this in over a decade, and the strains of panic began to rise in the symphony of souls inside it, though it was quick to push them back down. It immediately pulled back all of its minions of any value, moving its honor guard to its throne room, and feeding her only enough of his most worn-out zombies to slow the spirit down as its specters and chirurgeons retreated to other parts of the dungeon.

She might never have been here before, but even still, she walked unerringly through the maze that it had spent so many years digging. It was maddening until the Lich realized that her blind, milky eyes saw nothing, and that she was just doing as all the river spirits it had ever interacted with were doing: swimming with the currents. In this case, the current was the tide of dark mana that it pulled constantly toward itself, revealing its location for anyone with the senses to see it.

In trying to poison the river, it had revealed those dark currents to the river spirits, giving it the chance to finally see the undeath that had lurked within its waters for so long. Now it was coming for it, and the Lich had limited options.

Limited options weren’t the same as no options, though. As soon as the woman was far enough from the entrance that she wouldn’t be able to stop it, the Lich slammed the stone door shut, severing her from the river.

That stopped her swimming for half a moment as she considered her options. Tied to the river, her powers were practically limitless, but separated from it, she was only about as powerful as the Lich itself.

In the end, she pressed on, and started swimming once more towards its throne room. The Lich had been prepared for that. With every second she was delayed, its minions moved and adjusted things, shifting the throne slightly to alter her path through the door, and then opening some sluices from the swamp to let in a few inches of its polluted waters to hide all evidence of the trap that awaited her.

She came with all the force of the tide, descending through the complex, quarter mile wide labyrinth in minutes. In the end she found the Lich where it always was, ensconced in its throne, while a dozen of its embalmed warriors were arrayed around it with their dark steel shields and spears. They would offer some resistance to even a powerful spirit like this, but both the Lich and the river dragon knew that it wouldn’t be enough.

“You have tainted my waters,” it roared like a crashing wave. “Remove your cursed implement, and I will make your end swift!”

The Lich regarded the woman in his throne room with a mix of fear and anger. Even at the height of Krulm’venor’s insolence, he had never felt threatened, and it did not care for the feeling. It had not come this close to true peril since the mage had toyed with it in those experiments so long ago, and it had spent all the time between then and now making sure that this would never happen again.

“You have a poor bargaining position, river god,” the Lich rasped through a fresh zombie that stood next to it. “Even if you could kill that which cannot die, you will never be able to touch the knife I’ve lodged in your heart.”

The dragon’s only response was to roar in outrage at the truth of its statement as it surged forward on a column of water. She planned to crash right through its guards and then smash the Lich into pieces, but she never got that far. Ten feet farther into the throne room, as soon as it crossed an invisible threshold, there was suddenly a wall surrounding the woman and her wave on all sides. That the wall was invisible made it no less impenetrable for her.

“You cannot stop me!” The river dragon raged. “I am the tide and the storm!”

“No,” the Lich corrected. “You are the Oroza, the same as every other spirit I have ever dragged from the river, and any spirit can be bound if you know its true name.”

The Lich made it sound so simple, as if it was a Fait accompli, but the ring of bronze was a thing that had been built for testing and toying with Krulm’venor. His name had been effaced, and the new one had been hastily scrawled in its place. There was no guarantee that the new runes that had been carved in the place of the old would hold up to forces like this.

It was only because the Lich was cast in metal that it was able to maintain a straight face as its soul groaned under the strain. The Oroza was the tide, and it was the storm. That much was true, and all that force crashed against the walls of the circle, and with only the barest amount of leverage, the darkness had to meet that force and push back.

The binding circle wasn’t the victory that it pretended that it was. It was only a battlefield. A place where it could pit power against power. The swamp’s resources were not limitless though. Though its guards and interpreter continued to stand motionless, and the Lich sat there quietly pretending that it didn’t have a care in the world, in the background, every servant it didn’t need fell to the floor as the power was drained from it for a more important fight. In the swamp above, whole flocks of birds fell from the sky dead, and workmen that had eaten of his game fell sick or lame as the darkness drew from them. In the far away red hills, the goblins that were most attuned to the dark died sudden, silent deaths.

Even Kelvun felt dizzy for a moment as the swamp pulled every erg of power it had from every pawn it had ever touched. None of them mattered. It would deal with the consequences another day. Right now, all that mattered was its survival.

And there was no mistake about it. The very survival of the darkness was on the line. If it did not hold the water dragon back in a cage made of its own name, then the Lich would be sundered beyond repair. The darkness would still exist after that. So would the swamp that it had inhabited for so long, but it would be so much reduced that it would be no better off than the broken and caged fire godling that it kept in the corner as a trophy. Without the wizard’s mind to direct the maelstrom, it would quickly lose track of the world around it, and turn it back into the slow, limited thing it was before.

The Lich had to win. It was a fight for its very survival.

In the opening seconds that had seemed doubtful, but when the walls held, the River Dragon pulled back to regroup. Even as it struggled, the water level inside the circle began to fall. It could feel itself weakening with every blow it tried to strike.

This was no longer a duel, but an endurance match. Could the river overpower the darkness, or would the swamp outlast the raging waters and the tormented soul of the drowned woman it had used to invade the Lich’s inner sanctum?

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