Published at 1st of December 2023 10:40 am

Chapter 38 Spreading Plagues

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For years the Lich had been content to feast on the dreams of the simple people that dwelled in the towns and villages in its domain. A drop of anguish from the thousands it afflicted nightly added up to a tide of suffering, and it drank greedily from both the nightmares of mortals and the very specific pain of its enslaved river dragon. It was overflowing with power now. Neither of those was truly enough though. It would never be enough.

So, one day, as the armies of Dutton gathered on the east bank of the Oroza, the Lich decided that its latest creation was ready, and it unleashed it in the dead of night. It was not as mighty as its juggernaut or its river dragon, but it was more deadly than both of them combined. Unlike the vessel that contained Krulm’venor, it lacked obvious artistry, but it still represented years of painstaking work. The tiny mote was little more than a miasma - a breath of sickness. It was just a wicked little curse that it inflicted on the least of the swamp’s denizens, but in a few months it would spread over half the continent.

It started small though.

The sickness first spread across the lands and down river, affecting almost everyone to some degree as the disease that the Lich had nurtured and developed for years finally appeared. It was first noticed in the crew of boats bound for port cities like Bridigem and Tagel in the county of Dutton. Both of those cities were regional crossroads, though. They could never hope to contain the disease. Instead, they would amplify its spread.

Two weeks after the first sailor complained to his mates about not feeling too well as he went to bed early, dozens were dead and thousands were sickened while the new disease spread its tentacles down every trade road and tributary, searching for new victims. At first, it was treated as the gray shivers always was, with rest and water, but soon enough they called it something else, and boarded the victims in their homes as new cases were discovered in a desperate bid to avoid the same fate.

The Drowning.

The word and the rumors associated with it spread even faster than the illness itself. Those who caught it still ran high fevers, and their skin still turned pale and ashen, but in their final days their lips turned a distinctive blue color, and their wracking coughs began to resemble the gurgling sounds of a drowning victim as their own fluids slowly filled their lungs. It was an awful way to go, but most survived. They simply waited at death's door for several days before they managed to break free from the undertow that clawed at their soul as much as their body with its clammy hands.

Even though it was a magical sickness created by the Lich, the people of Greshen were not spared. It could only control its release from the biting flies that were common to certain river sandbars in its ever-growing domain. It couldn’t control its spread. It didn’t even want to. In due course it came to Fallravea, and burned through most of that city just as it had the rest of the region. Though the deaths there would be an order of magnitude less than in the surrounding counties, the suffering would be almost as great, because that was what the darkness desired. With the waning of the swamp and the storage of its undead minions the world had forgotten it. Its evil had been relegated to dreams and stories.

That was a mistake.

Even if it wanted to hide its existence, it still wanted the people that dwelled within its lands to fear the dark powers that lurked in the darkness each night. Not that the disease was simply a lesson in vanity of course. The Lich had thought long and hard about when to release its terrible plague, but it was the lord of Dutton that had decided on the timing. When he had begun to marshal troops to his cause and draw mercenaries to Bridigem with an eye on its gold mines it had sealed their fate. Those warriors would be some of the first to be infected in their crowded barracks while they waited for orders to cross the river, and fully half of them would die gasping for air without a single sword being unsheathed.

That this whole war had almost happened and been prevented without Kelvun ever finding out or raising his own armies was an amusing irony for the darkness. Normally it would be happy for the two neighboring regions to fight themselves to a bloody standstill, but not today. Not only was the Lord of Dutton targeting its gold, but it would be a great distraction to the ongoing building projects. The Lich needed the peoples surrounding its ever-dwindling swamp to be fruitful and multiply, not die in pointless squabbles. Those could wait.

Only those loyal few who worshipped at the temples to Oroza were completely spared of this blight because it had used the river’s own strength to fuel its foul spell. The other priests could heal it with their magic of course, but even they still feared walking into the neighborhoods where the malady had taken hold. The water bearers had no such fear though. They would journey into even the worst of the outbreaks to bury the dead and tend to the dying.

At first this charity caused some backlash as the stricken populace feared that the river goddess had something to do with the outbreak, those thoughts were quickly quelled with the right fever dreams given to the right people. The water bearers weren’t the cause, but the cure, and everyone should give thanks to the pure waters of the Oroza for that.

She was neither of course. She hadn’t been a queen for years; she’d been reduced from guardian deity to attack dog, and all the prayers that were sent to her were siphoned away by the Lich through the runes that chained her to the dead flesh she was trapped inside. None of that mattered to the Lich right now though. All that mattered was he wanted the cults in her name to grow. They would need to if it ever wanted to get the holy city to take the area seriously in a way that didn’t involve it sending templars to slay it.

The religious fanatics that worked for the gods of light took the small gods and the order of such things very seriously if the dreams from the red hill's monastery were to be believed. As dangerous as it would be to play with the one group of people still capable of slaying it, they would be necessary eventually.

The sickness had one welcome side effect that the Lich hadn’t planned on though, and that was when Krulm’venor walked into the gold mine to journey into the depths, there was no one there to see him. The Lich had made sure of that. Two days before its ferryman had delivered the godling to the landing, the whole area had been struck with a bout of the drowning so severe that they’d closed the mine until further notice.

It pained the Lich to think about delaying its portion of that delicious gold of course, but it would be compensated in other ways by its minion’s trip into the darkness. It had no idea how deep the tunnels went or what it would find down there, but it wanted to. Did dwarves still live beneath its lands? Would they be a threat? Those were important questions, but neither was the reason it had spent so many days building Krulm’venor such a work of art.

More than anything the Lich wanted to know how a demigod could fall to become a lowly spirit. There were valuable lessons there that it would require, and soon. In perhaps only a decade or two its plans would reach fruition and such pitfalls were at the forefront of its mind. The tunnels beneath Blackwater Landing were done, and the runes and blood gutters were being carved to complete them. In only a few more years all of that hard work would be finished, and its terrible mandala would be complete, but the town itself still had a long ways to go.

It was almost unique in the region, in that, despite the poor hygiene and nutrition of its residents, not a single person died to the drowning plague. There was still the smattering of deaths related to drinking and duels of course, including some that were caused by the Lich itself. As disease went though, it was a blessed place, and it was said to be holy to the Oroza even though it was palpably the opposite. Such rumors were welcome by the darkness though, and they did wonders for the growth of the city. It had grown by leaps and bounds since it had completed its year long duel with the river dragon, and was hardly recognizable.

Where once there had been only muddy streets and ramshackle buildings crowded into the shadow of the toll collector’s tower, there was now the beginning of a real city starting to take shape, and it was slowly replacing the dirty boomtown that had been here the last few years. A brick street now connected the docks on the Oroza side of the small peninsular community with the docks of the canal across town, and nearly every building along that street looked almost respectable. The constant draining of its precious swamp continued to expose more and more buildable lands, and as soon as those lands dried out, the men that flocked to Blackwater busied themselves with carving out their own little piece for themselves.

Sometimes that involved clear-cutting the dying mangroves for lumber, and sometimes that involved digging up the clay to make whole piles of bricks, but it always meant that the area was a hive of activity. It wasn’t just that the darkness didn’t recognize the seat of its own power anymore, it was that each time it looked away it didn’t recognize the new monstrosity that had replaced the older one from several months earlier. The town was just as impermanent and changing as the river it relied on, and almost as poisonous too.

Farther out the immigrants that had taken Kelvun up on his generous offer were taking larger patches of land, and taming them with the primitive human magic of controlled burns and plows. In time those farms would feast on its rich black earth, and the darkness that had been fermenting in the water for decades would take the form of fruits and vegetables that nourish a whole generation that would belong to it, and it alone. The gods could not touch what they had not nourished after all, and even though the water level fell every day, the darkness that was left behind only grew more concentrated.

A piece at a time, the mortal world was getting smaller and more crowded, but the Lich had long since learned to ignore its noisy neighbors that existed only twenty feet above its head. They were nothing but cattle, awaiting the slaughter, and it didn’t care what they did with their time so long as there were a few more of them each week. After all, it would take thousands and thousands of souls to reach its bloody goals.

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