Published at 1st of December 2023 10:40 am

Chapter 34 Regaining Control

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The swamp was dying.

It was a slow process that would be measured in years, but the darkness could feel it just the same. Day by day, the waters receded from the shallowest edges of its domain, and what had once been shallow lagoons or deep pits of mud slowly solidified into soil. The grasses came after that, binding all that sand and silt to the ground like a thousand, thousand little ropes that sought to restrain the darkness and separate it from the world above. No matter how slow it was, it was a process that was impossible to hide.

It wasn’t a secret, even though his figurehead Kelvun thought it was. The reason was clear. A great gouge had been cut through the whole area, and every day a little more of its dark water left to poison the Oroza. Five years ago that might have been enough to slay the darkness, or at least cripple it. Back then it had been the murky waters as much as it had been an unquiet spirit.

Now it was merely a nuisance.

The falling waters affected the flora and fauna of the region even more than the cholerium affected the animals that dwelled in the river as whole ecosystems were overrun, but none of that affected the darkness that had been incubated in its heart for so long. The boy had tried to slay the monster that had haunted his dreams, but he had succeeded only in striking at the sloughed off skin of a snake that had long since molted and metamorphized into something all the more terrible.

In time the Lich would repay the insult with interest, but for now it merely bided its time. For so long it had been a region or a place more than a person, but its lengthy duel with the river dragon had forced it to narrow its worldview to a single point for so long that it had started to identify with a body again. That statue-still body was nothing more than a gold-clad corpse, though. It was one more thing that would have to be fixed. It had labored at length to build ingenious creations like the swamp dragon, the dark messenger, and its new ferryman, but in all this time it had not improved the only corpse that really mattered in the whole dungeon: its own.

Everything that its foolish Count had done was to the good anyway, whether the lordling knew it or not. The swamp needed blood and souls more than it needed privacy or seclusion now, and as the waters receded, they were replaced with rich black earth that the farmers were flocking to. In time those farmers would have families and build villages. Those populations would grow even larger until towns erupted, each with hundreds of souls waiting to be devoured. In that sense, the darkness was sowing seeds of its own, even if it would be years or decades before its bloody harvest arrived.

The Count had apparently put out a call for all the poor and landless to move to the region, and in exchange for the hard work of taming the land they would be given tenancy for free. The darkness had neither known nor cared about the foolish and short-sighted offer until it found the offer in the dreams of hundreds, but it was interesting nonetheless. All these souls had left their homeland for a better life, and they had come like sheep to the slaughter. They brought their own gods and faiths with them, but none of them found much purchase in ground that was already owned by the darkness.

It was subverting existing faiths faster than the servants of those superstitions could even attempt to tie it down. Already the friezes that were being painted for the new temple to the river dragon Oroza depicted her as a drowning victim rather than the queen of the river that she usually was, and no one seemed to object. Why should they? They knew it to be true deep down. Especially the priestesses it had given visions to as to exactly how far she’d fallen. She was neither a swamp dragon nor a river dragon anymore. She was a leviathan, and she relentlessly hunted anything that thought of itself as the Oroza from one end of the river to the other, leaving the spiritual ecosystem of the place just as tattered and threadbare as her worshipers’ faith.

The Lich had thought that the river dragon was just the largest of the spirits in the river it had seen so far, but it had been wrong. At least according to the cult that surrounded her, she was more than that. In the vernacular of the region she was a small god, a being of local and narrow powers, that was powerful nonetheless. That meant that she was closer to what Krulm’venor had been, than the fallen wretch that the godling was now. It was an interesting idea that had provoked much discussion between the Lich and its ghastly library.

Was the only difference between the highest gods and the lowest river spirit or faded ghost merely a question of magnitude? It would have thought that there should be more to it than that, but increasingly it appeared that that might be the case.

She was a being of pure essence and water, well at least she had been. Now she wore the same decaying flesh as the rest of its servants and the chains that were both magical and spiritual in nature. She’d once been the guardian of her ecosystem, but now she was merely an attack dog for his domain.

She wouldn’t be the last though.

The same techniques that forced her to obey him were even now being tested on a skeleton of steel too strong for Krulm’venor to melt, but even when the runes were complete and understood, such a complicated work of art would take a long time to forge without the godlings help, and there was no way it would help the Lich willingly at this point. The tiny spark of life that fire spirit still had served two purposes: to bluster in rage and to scream in pain. Beyond that its lantern flickered in silence in the Lich’s innermost sanctum like the forgotten toy it was.

The darkness had moved on to other, more loyal servants. Right now it was in the midst of gathering the lizardman tribes and removing them from their habitat before the humans decided to mobilize men to purge the fierce hunters themselves. The Lich knew how that ended and had no desire to waste that strength in the embalming vats of the sprawling second floor of its dungeon.

The ferryman was taking them north, in small groups to the foot of the Wodenspine Mountains. The lake valleys they were being delivered to were a little cold for the reptiles, but the swamp had already proven to its own satisfaction that they would be able to hibernate through the winter. That wasn’t the important part. It didn’t need them to flourish there, it needed them to kill.

In the swamps the lizard men were the top of the food chain, but in those treacherous mountains they would be somewhat closer to the bottom. It was no matter. The swamp would gift them the same deathless strength that it had previously lent to The Black Teeth. They were being relocated for one purpose: to bring the Lich the corpses of true monsters that it could use as the raw material for even greater horrors. Their formidable strength alone wouldn’t be enough to bring down a manticore or a griffon, but the darkness would make sure that they survived the attempt to try again. Their tireless devotion to it through the years had earned the tribes that much. This time, their totem poles would rise in their new home and reflect all the strange creatures that they killed in its name.

There were only so many ways you could manipulate the bones and spirits of men and common beasts before they were warped beyond recognition after all, and it would need more than the zombie legions it had and the goblin tribes that were slowly being reformed under the leadership of the Dark Eye tribe for the wars that were to come. The goblins might be useful against their southern neighbor at least, though it would be a long time until the fingers of the tribes once more curled into a fist worth using against any opponent, and unless it tamed Krulm’venor once more, that fist would lack any real force.

It could feel Lindvell stirring to the west, even as Dutton eyed its neighbor enviously from across the river to the east. The enmity between Greshen and the county of Lindvell which hugged the coast were well known and long-standing, but the discovery of the region’s new gold mine in the red hills had added their other neighbor, the county of Dutton to the list. For a long time they had been the richer of the two river dominated regions. They had better soil and consequently, more people than Greshen. The poisoning of the river was affecting the other kingdom more though, if only because of the direction that the Lich drew the mana. The loss of poor share croppers to better lands merely added insult to injury.

The fool Kelvun was more obsessed with treachery in his inner circle than he was with the enemies that were beginning to gather in all directions. Ostensibly they were all stewards of the king’s lands, and wars between those lands were supposed to be rare, but if the King felt threatened by the glorious ascent of Kelvun “Goblins Bane” Garvin, then he might allow such a thing. And if a war came to pace, the Lich had no doubt that both of Greshen’s neighbors would strike at once.

Necessarily, such a war would have to be one fought between mortal powers, the Lich thought with frustration. It would be easy enough for it to field an army of the dead and crush either region, but that would draw in the church, and upset all the Lich’s plans. No, since its pet lordling was busy chasing the skirts of barmaids in Blackwater Landing, it would fall to the darkness to stop the war before it could get started.

Normally it would be all in favor of a little war. Some infighting that left thousands dead while nothing else really changed was exactly what the Lich had just done to the county with its goblin army. A new army would remove his pawn though, and with it the gold that had been promised to it, and for the darkness, that was intolerable. Something had to be done, and for better or worse, the only tool it had that could work such a miracle was a plague.

It had been cooking up several, using the gray shivers as a basis, but until recently it had been focusing on creating diseases that maximized suffering rather than contagion. That had changed. Now it wanted something that didn’t just make the afflicted pray for death, it wanted something that made sure that where one victim fell with a fever ten more would soon follow.

This would take time, so for every minute the Lich wasted on building the perfect disease that would kill off enough men to ensure another war free year or two, it increased the boy’s paranoia just a bit more in his sleep. If the Lich wasn’t going to be able to focus on what was truly important, then neither would its servant.

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