Tenebroum Ch.11-14 (Patreon)

Ch. 11 - The Leftovers

True to his word, most of Kaligos’ men died fighting, but to their credit they took down several times their weight in zombies before they fell. The swamp didn’t care. All the broken pieces were just spare parts that would be repurposed for other experiments. With the tribe of lizardmen and their strange worship of it all but extinguished it wouldn’t have enough energy to fuel so many constructs in perpetuity anyway. In time they might yet grow in number again, but that would be years from now. Until then it would have to make do with less unless it could find other ways to feed its ravenous hunger.

Right now that wasn’t a problem though. Right now it was overflowing with blood and suffering, and with so many fresh test subjects, both living and dead, it was eager to try a number of experiments that it had been dreaming up during all the quiet years it had slumbered in the swamp. Yes, it decided, it would torture the living to power its terrible projects with their dead friends, and any that survived after that, it would find other uses for.

Unlike the village, there was no hurry here. Once its zombies seized control of the tower entrance, everyone else was trapped inside, and there was no troublesome divinity to get in its way. That flicker of holy light had died with Kaligos, and was at best a minor irritation compared to the painful sore that was the temple. The zombies would set his body aside anyway though - the last thing it wanted to do was reconnect with the man’s angry god in some accidental way during the resurrection process.

The wounded on the second floor fell quickly enough. They lasted only a day before they were dragged below; they would never see the sun rise again. They screamed until their throats were raw as flesh was flayed from bone and minds were broken by the darkest sights that the wraith could imagine. While all that happened the bulk of its zombies went to the surface, to gather all the corpses of the lizards that they could. They had been strong warriors in life, but they would be even stronger in death.

The lizard corpses that were mostly whole would be set aside for embalming. Properly treated, they would then be able to last a century or more, which suited the dark plans slowly taking shape in the mind of the wraith. Now that it had a mind it could plan, and those plans always led to other plans, even this one. Because the pieces of the tribe that were too maimed and mutilated to rise again were gathered too. Their tribal bonds and spiritual beliefs would be exploited as much as their rotting flesh, and their shattered parts would be stitched together into something altogether more terrible than a zombie.

In the end only the bard was allowed to run free in the endless tunnels. It became a game to the swamp - allowing him to think he was almost free before a new enemy lurched from the shadows, and scared the hapless creature down another path. The bard was utterly harmless, but the swamp had important plans for him once his mind had been completely shattered, so it was important that the pitiful man stayed utterly terrified until all was in readiness.

For days the darkest rooms underneath the tower throbbed with dark and baleful energies while the dead chanted and the living screamed. From the eldritch circles painted in blood beings that never should have existed were raised into terrible unlife, destined to spend eternity enslaved to the lich and his machinations. First came the lovers. Marko and Lizela never wanted to be parted. They’d said as much with their dying breath, so the wraith granted their wish. From two separate bodies it stitched together a single two headed, four armed monstrosity. Into that body both of their souls were pulled back from paradise screaming, and forced to power the wretched, broken creature that was the mockery of their love. It would have been tragic if anyone but the swamp was ever likely to learn of its existence.

After the lovers had a chance to despair at the abomination, the swamp set them to using their four hands and still nimble flesh to assemble the true monstrosity. This had to be done outside in the ruins of what had once been Albrecht’s manor, because the thing that they were creating was too large to navigate the tunnels under the tower. It would take weeks before it was ready for reanimation, maybe months. That didn’t matter to the swamp though - one stitch at a time the lovers would assemble the pieces of over a dozen mutilated warriors into something the world had never seen before.

Only after all this was done did the lich finally turn his gaze to the one that they had called Solovino. After two days of constant running and hiding the man was a wreck, with wild eyes that no longer seemed to focus on anything. He was not yet the soul survivor of the expedition, but he was the only one that had anything resembling a mind anymore. When the zombies that were sent to drag him to the throne room finally reached the broken bard, he put up no resistance, and all he did when the zombies picked him up and dragged him down the hall was quietly piss himself. There was no fight left in him, but that was hardly a surprise. There had been very little to begin with. The only surprise was that despite all the bruises and scrapes he’d gotten running in the dark, was that he’d managed to keep a hold on his mandolin. It had come through the whole ordeal without a scratch.

The zombies said nothing as they walked unerringly through the darkness to the very throne of the lich. Like everything else, they were just an extension of the swamp. They were just two fingers on one hand bringing them ever closer to its mouth. Whether that was because it wanted to speak to the wreck of a man, or it wanted to devour him whole had not yet been decided. Solovino was the first living soul ever to enter the throne room. It had been carved from the bedrock three levels below the tower, though there was no quick way to reach it without navigating most of the labyrinth in a wide and circuitous fashion. Besides the ritual rooms, it was the only place that was lit in the entire maze, and two burning braziers of witchfire burned in the corners of the room, casting blue-purple light that resulted in dancing shadows tinged with red, making the already bizarre room look even more nightmarish.

Even though the bard was physically present, he did not see. He did not see the squat bronze throne that held up the gilded body of the lich, or the creeping patina of corruption that ate at it, even though it had been cast barely a year ago. He also didn’t see that the gold that had once been hoarded in a pile had been put to better use. It now spread across the floor, and climbing the walls, forming a web of nameless arcane purpose that looked like the baroque decorations of a royal family gone mad, but was really a series of arcane focuses allowing the heart of the swamp to better store and direct the tides of mana it received from its terrible domain.

“Do you wish to live?” That was the question that was posed to the bard by the swamp, but it didn’t come from the mouth of the lich, for it was bound eternally into its molten sarcophagus and utterly unable to move. Instead the speaker was the fresh corpse of another human very familiar to the bard: the mage Von Wandren. In time the swamp would find another use for such a talented mind, but for now it needed to speak, and this was the only mouth that still had a set of lungs that hadn’t been put to other uses.

Solovino responded to the voice, and looked unseeingly at the speaker, but didn’t respond, so the mage repeated himself with his unnatural voice. “Do you wish to live Bard, or has life lost its luster.”

This time the bard found his voice. “Y-yes… I-I want to live. I have a family, well, a lover or two at least, and the king… I must—”

“I care not for your reasons, worm. I only ask what you would do to leave here with your heart still beating.” The voice of the dead mage sounded nothing like it had in life. That wasn’t because it was missing an arm or because it was two days dead though. It was just because the swamp no longer had the correct mannerisms or nuance to sound like a human. It was beyond all of that now.

“Anything!” the bard shouted as he finally started to realize where he was and what was happening. Even in the depths of madness, the broken parts of him still wanted to live on. “I’ll do whatever you ask Von Wanderen, I—”

“The mage is dead, and his soul is mine, dog. Make no mistake about that.” The swamp had not known that it was still capable of taking offense until the moment this pitiful creature dared to address it by the name of its broken puppet. The rage that flowed through it in that moment made the lights flicker and the lich almost snuffed the lights in the impudent bard’s eyes out by accident in its wroth, but it restrained itself at the last moment.

“I- I’m sorry my lord.” The bard bowed his head until it touched the stone floor as much to repent as to avoid looking. It had felt the shadow of death pass by it, and he did not want to feel that cold touch again. “Tell me what I must do.”

“Swear fealty to me—” The mage intoned.

“I will!” the Bard interrupted, too afraid to do anything else.

“Swear fealty to me, and wear this.” With its one remaining arm the mage held out a heavy bronze chain with a large medallion attached. It was a plain thing, that highwaymen might not even steal from their victims, but that was only on the front. The back of the medallion was covered in runes and profane symbols that completed the spell.

Solovino grabbed it and put it on immediately, afraid to do anything else. Immediately he doubled over in pain as the thing burned into his flesh. “Ahhhh! What… My lord I! What is this!” he screamed loud enough for his voice to echo through the catacombs.

It was only when he was silent that the lich’s mouthpiece began to speak once more. “The bargain is struck. I give your life, and in exchange it is mine forever more.”

“What must I d-do,” the bard asked, struggling to rise.

“You must tell my story. To everyone. Sing your songs and spread the word. There is evil here and heroes must come to defeat it.”

“I’ll s-sing the s-song of the last s-stand of the Unwritten Rule,” the Bard stammered, “But I don’t know your story my Lord. How can I write a song for a legend I don’t know?”

“You will,” the dead throat chuckled dryly. “You’ll never dream of anything but my story ever again bard. You’ll sing and dance and spread my story until you break, and even then you won’t get away from me. Enjoy what time you have left, because your soul is mine for eternity now.”

Ch. 12 - The Broken Bard of Blackwater

Once he was released back into the light of day, he was frantic. He made straight for the swamp’s borders, but he’d never really be able to escape from it. It was inside him now and his soul was as muddy as the velvet slippers he tramped through the muck with, and every bit as ruined. He fled upriver on the first barge that he could flag down, with promises that the count would pay them double for their trouble. They accepted of course, but no matter how fast they poled up river - no matter how far he ran from the terrible things he’d seen, the dreams kept coming.

At first Louven Solovino tried to ignore them, but that was a complete failure. He wasn’t strong enough to ignore a nightmare when he could taste the muddy water as he was drowned, or feel the way the fish devoured the fleshy remnants of his corpse. By the third night he was drowning himself in alcohol, which only dulled the dreams of murder and betrayal a little.

In the end, the only thing that did any good was to start telling the crew scary stories about the blackwater. That’s what he’d come to call the swamp because it had a nice ring to it. In truth he wasn’t sure it had a name. The night he told the crew about the fall of the Unwritten Rule was the first time he slept without waking up screaming since the day he escaped from the crypt of the swamp. It was still rough, without any of the flourishes he would need to add before he played it for anyone important, but it was a start. As long as he spent the day tuning his mandolin, and telling the swamps stories, then he would be able to sleep at night. He’d still have dreams about the terrible history of the swamp, of course. The swamp still had to inspire him.

As long as he did as he’d sworn, Solovino would be an observer to the terrible history of the swamp rather than a participant; he would get to watch as the small fishing village of Triesten was torn apart by the hordes of the dead, rather than be forced to relive the agony of one of the victims over and over again. It was a devil bargain, but he took it without ever once looking back. What he didn’t see was how his stories infected the minds of everyone he told them to. It was the smallest of sparks, but with each word, the influence of the golden lich that was now his master, grew. The more the bard’s words spread, the further outside of the domain that it was trapped in.

By the time Solovino reached the court of his patron, Count Garvin, he’d managed to whip up not just an impassioned ballad about how the brave warriors he’d fought beside had fought bravely he called ‘To The Last Man,’ but he’d also improved on the older song of ‘Riley’s Rotten Riches.” It had been out of favor, for some time, but now that Solvino had a new horror to link to the old tale, it seemed more relevant than ever.

In front of the court he delivered the sad news that even though the mercenary company was successful in purging the swamp of lizardmen, they were ultimately done in by another, far greater evil. The dreams made him think that some of the lizards had escaped, but that wasn’t something the count would want to hear, so Solvino glossed over it. The bard tried to tell them all about the lich, but he was surprised to find he couldn’t. All he could tell the assembled court was that the undead rose from the ground and tore them to pieces. When he was asked for more information, he could only tell them about a few of the vile creatures, but no more. Some part of himself was no longer under his complete control, and that terrified him.

The Count issued a new call to arms at once, urging brave and godly men to purge this new evil, and offering a generous purse for doing it. Why wouldn’t he? Solovino thought skeptically while he maintained his mournful expression in front of the assembled guests, he’d never have to pay up for the lizard men now, so he could spend that coin twice.

That night at the feast when he tried to sing his songs, nothing tried to strangle him, not even when he rhymed lich with witch and labyrinth with plinth. The darkness that deserted inside him now would let him sing and tell stories all he liked, but never issue a genuine warning about the terrible danger that any would-be heroes were likely to face if they actually went to defeat this foe. It was a maddening realization, and by the time he finished with his performance of ‘To The Last Man,’ he was crying actual tears, which the audience found very moving. They weren’t tears of sadness though, but tears of frustration. Even if he couldn’t see what he was doing exactly, even if he didn’t know precisely how he was spreading evil among the lords and ladies of court, he knew he was nothing more than a puppet on a string at this point.

Of course he was. That’s what he’d agreed to in exchange for his miserable little life. He knew that, he just didn’t expect the lich to be able to enforce such a bargain from almost a hundred miles away. Even from this distance though, every note of his new and improved version of ‘Riley’s Rotten Riches,’ rang with evil. Solovino wasn’t sure that it was related, because even though he’d seen many of the swamp’s memories, he still had no real idea of what order they belonged in or how they fit together. That kind of clarity probably wouldn’t come for a long time. He did know that it was the only local tale of tragedy worth telling though, and that it would be an easy thing to link it to undead horrors rising from the swamp and make them feel familiar to his audiences.

It was true though, and now the very genesis of the swamp’s evil was spreading into populations entirely outside of its domain. Most of them would shrug it off, but some get infected by that tiny splinter of evil and go home to strange dreams and a faint lust for gold. Over time they might become the swamp’s creature every bit as much as the poor fisherfolk of Triesten had been before they met an untimely end. The wraith had now found a way to spread further and faster than even the mosquitoes it had used so effectively before.

The bard wouldn’t need to worry about bad dreams tonight. He went home with a Baronetess who insisted on her own private encore. He played her every bit as well as he played his mandolin earlier in the evening, and left her even more tainted than the rest of his audience. Solovino was a spiritual leper now, and even if no one else could see that yet, he could feel it growing inside himself a little more after every performance.

He stayed at Count Garin’s court for the rest of the season, but moved north as winter turned to spring. The count had offered him a new commission, and several women of the court had made other very appealing offers, but it was time to go. Not because Solvino wanted to of course, but because there was no solace in singing to the already converted. After months of playing his songs, everyone that was vulnerable to the swamp’s message was already infected by the subtle magic of Solovino’s voice. His dreams were growing ever darker, and he was certain that the only cure was to find new audiences to sing to.

So he rode and he played. He stopped in small inns and larger taverns. He played before local barons and viscounts, and even a duchess on occasion, but he didn’t stop. He didn’t dare stop, and he couldn’t look at himself in the mirror. From the reaction he got from the ladies of every court that he stopped in, he knew that his voice was still just as clear and his face was just as handsome as ever, but he could feel the darkness growing inside himself, and on the occasion that accidentally saw his face in a stray reflection he recoiled in horror. Even if his flesh felt fine to the touch, he knew that he was rotting away. It was one more secret he feared the discovery of - that one day a beautiful lady would help him remove his shirt and scream as she found the open sores and rotting flesh that must decorate his body by now.

They never did though. They always begged him for another private show before he disappeared on the road once more.

He added new songs to his performances. Now whenever he sang about ‘Riley’s Rotten Riches,’ he sang about ‘Garin’s Goodly Gold,’ too. The swamp loved nothing more than when he tried to send brave fools to their horrible ends, and rewarded him with an almost pleasant night’s sleep whenever he did such an awful thing. Solovino didn’t stop though, even though he knew it was wrong. It was the only thing that kept the darkness at bay.

Before the ill fated trip to slay the lizard men of Blackwater Marsh he’d been like any other bard. He’d lived for wine, women, and song. Now though wine did nothing for him, women were only used to reassure himself that he wasn’t yet the monster he feared he’d become, and song had become a terrible punishment. He would have prefered that his mandolin was strung with blades rather than that he’d become the personal bard of the lich that owned him now.

He’d tried to take off that cursed medallion so many times now, but each time the motion was met with the feeling that his heart was about to explode. One time he’d even tried to do it despite that. He’d gotten good and drunk and tried to rip it off as a perverse form a suicide, but he’d only blacked out from the pain and woken up in a puddle of his own vomit. He’d tried to confess to a priest, but even entering a church or walking near a cathedral was enough to make him physically ill now.

It hadn’t even been a year since his terrible brush with death, but he didn’t even feel like the same man he once was. Some days he didn’t even feel like a person anymore. He was a monster now, and as he completed his circuit through Abendean and Black rock, before steering back towards Count Gavin’s seat of power in Fallravea, he could have sworn that he could tell if he’d sung one of his black ballads to the people he passed by on the high road just by the look in their eyes. It was a subtle thing, but more and more as he walked by strangers he could see a darkness dwelling inside them where the spark of life and joy should have been. It was disconcerting, but even in the place where those darkened souls dwelled in great numbers the sky did not fall, and village life still continued as normal.

Normal for everyone but him. He played harvest festivals all the way back to his patron to pay his way, but at each one he stopped at, they wanted to hear the older songs he was once known for. ‘The Maid, Waylaid,’ ‘A Pretty Witty Ditty,’ and other crowd pleasing favorites. The fragile smile he wore to hide the monstrosity he’d become was much too frail for such frivolity now though. No - he could feel them looking at him with concern now, but as soon as they figured out what he’d become, those looks would be replaced with outrage and pitchforks. He had to move on before that happened. He had to keep spreading the songs of his true master before all the awful things he’d done caught up with him.

Ch. 13 - Heroes All

The swamp had always known that there was a world beyond its territory. It had the dimmest memories of its time as a creature of flesh in blood before it had become something altogether more terrible, and it could feel the boundaries against its domain constricting against it painfully. It was one thing to remember though, and another thing entirely to be connected to the world outside once more. Thanks to the songs of his servant, it could suddenly peek into the lives of thousands upon thousands of new souls, and each new city that Solovino went to just made the swamp hunger for more. It had settled for scraps for far too long, and now it was time to feast.

The tiny splinter of evil that the bard lodged into the minds of his audience wasn’t enough to toy with the dreams of the corrupted, or to draw any real power from individually. Often as not those that had been tainted managed to shake themselves free of its influence after a month or two. In the end only the twisted or the greedy were truly fertile enough ground for the darkness to take root. Fortunately there were more than enough of those in the world. Week by week they added up, and soon those tiny flickering candles in the mind of a thousand strangers began to add up. They gave off enough heat that you could confuse them for a bonfire as they grew in number. Gathering essence this way wasn’t nearly as efficient as blood sacrifice or torture of course, but the soul web it had built with the shattered survivors that had accompanied the bard helped with that at least. The tortured remenents of their immortal souls enchanted a giant web of silver strands on the deepest level of the dungeon, pulling all of the stray essence into a whirlpool of power.

The same shards of evil that nourished the swamp provided early warning as well, when a group of adventurers that had heard Solovino sing, came to take Reily’s Riches for themselves. A band of something less than a dozen warriors and a mage made their way slowly downriver, with only one destination in mind: the lonely tower of Blackwater Fen. Far from being afraid or anxious, the swamp was overjoyed. It set traps, and woke servants in preparation for their arrival, and when there was nothing left to be done it merely watched and waited. This is why it had released the bard in the first place. Everything else was a side effect. All that really mattered was its ravenous hunger for the blood of the living.

Once they were inside the swamp, the wraith followed their every move, delighting in the false bravado they used to cover up their rising fear. They were ten that first night, but their scout was dragged to a watery grave on the second day. They never found her body, or the skeletal hands that had dragged her down into the muck. The useless limbs left over from zombies that were too far gone to be of any real use anymore had been planted all over the most likely approaches to the tower for miles in every direction. Against a determined foe they were useless, but against a surprised and frightened one they were terribly effective.

Nine would-be heroes made it within sight of the tower after wasting half a day looking for their drowned friend. They camped that night on a high sandbar that overlooked the crumbling edifice, and were cautious enough to set a three person watch to last the whole night. It didn’t save them.

None of the songs that the bard sang talked about dragons. He mentioned the ‘lich of gold that was a terror to behold,’ that most people took to be a metaphor, as well and zombies and lizard men, but Solovino had never seen what the wraith had done with all those lizard corpses. He didn’t know that for months zombie servants had embalmed and cured that reptile flesh before stitching the pieces into a fearsome mass and braiding all those individual souls into a singular thread of rage. The result wasn’t a real dragon of course - the lich could do such wonderful things if a beast like that were ever to fall into its clutches. The dark plays tricks on even the sanest mind though, and if you’re woken up by something with the strength of ten men ripping your companions to pieces with eight legs and several snapping mouths, what else would you call it?

Some of those warriors showed bravery, even as the swamp dragon left maimed corpses and dying adventurers in its wake, but whether they resisted or froze made no difference. They were all ripped to pieces, except those that ran. By morning none of them had reached the tower, and two of the three souls that ran for their lives were still breathing. Neither would make it back to the river.

The swamp delighted in their suffering, but even before it had decided what to do with all of the fresh meat, another group of heroes had started heading its way. It was more than the wraith had hoped for when it spared the life of that pitiful bard. Week after week and month after month, new heroes made their way to the swamp. Some sought to purge the evil that they’d heard so much about, and others only bothered for the gold. It didn’t matter. Neither group had any real success.

The second group got lost, and saw neither the dragon nor the tower before they were picked off one by one, but the third group made it inside the tower at least before they met their end. They stood no chance against the rock hard skinned of the embalmed lizard warriors or the armed and armored corpses of the previous adventurers. By now the wraith had an embarrassment of riches in both blood and treasure. Every new adventurer added to its pile of riches, as well as to its growing army. That was when it learned to make minions of the very souls of its adversaries. Soon vengeful haunts and hungry ghosts were prowling the darkness, making the swamp almost as dangerous as the tower itself.

The first group to find the swamp’s newest denizens tore each other to pieces on the second night as charges of cheating at a dice game grew out of all proportion until the evening ended with blood. These were friends - people that would normally die for each other, but tonight they had blood on their hands and a spirit riding their body urging them to seek deadly retribution for imagined slights. In the morning there was only one survivor, and he fled the swamp like his life depended on it.

Unfortunately his story spread, and tarnished the tale of easy riches waiting to be taken. After that the woefully unwary were much less common. The well prepared didn’t fare much better though. The swamp was awash in power now. So much so that it was starting to warp and change the local ley lines, and even the flow of the mighty river that hemmed it in, to the east. Once what was happening began to affect the wider world, the true powers of the region finally began to take notice.

The first person to send a real expedition was Count Garvin. Rather than merely offer rewards to adventurer’s, he raised his banners, and drew 80 men to arms under them, then he marched off to put an end to the evil on his borders. Among the men were priests, mages, and a paladin. They made it to the tower without issue, and the mages counseled him to simply collapse the ugly thing and lock the evil that festered beneath it inside forever. They could feel just how twisted the ether had become.

Leo Garvin the third was a man of action though, and wanted to cover himself in glory more than he wanted to end the evil that seeped up from the depth. He took fifteen men - the elite vanguard of his force with him into the dark, well the rest set up camp in the area around the tower. They were down there for a full night and a day before Lord Garvin and his paladin champion finally fought themselves free. They didn’t have a chance to tell anyone about the horrors they’d seen in the darkness, or about how after first being picked off one at a time, they’d been lead in circles for half a day until they were hopelessly lost and beset on all sides with the ravenous dead, because the men that they’d left behind to guard the tower were themselves under siege.

They beseeched their Lord to leave before night fell once more and the dread dragon of the swamps came again, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. Count Garvin needed at least one trophy to justify the terrible cost of this expedition, and a dragon was just the right sort of head that he could mount on his wall so that the bards would sing songs about him the rest of his days.

The night did not go well for the Lord, but it went even worse for his men. At sunset they numbered 42, but by sunrise there were only 18 still standing with three more in bandages clinging to life. They’d managed to do grievous harm to rotting chimeric beast as the armored men met each charge with shields and spears behind impromptu barricades, but even a hundred wounds didn’t stop it from killing several men with each attack before retreating into the night once more with a screaming victim or two.

As they beat a hasty retreat that morning, the Lord went back without a trophy, or even any way to carry back the bodies of his dead. The only monument to his expedition would be the number of strong men that he’d add to the undead menagerie of Blackwater fen. It was a humbling moment for such a proud man, and he would never be the same after the horrors he’d seen. The swamp would make sure of it. It was so deep into his mind now that toying with the lord’s nightmares would be child’s play.

An archmage from the magic collegium at Abenend was the next person of note to travel to the blackwater at the end of winter. He came only with a small retinue, and after a brief session of scrying he guided his party to the ruins that had once been the temple in Triesten and studied the problem from there, just beyond the reach of the swamp or its minions. This enraged the wraith more than anything else had in years, and that night the angry spirits of the swamp swarmed around the temple, making that displeasure known. Even though his apprentices trembled with fear at the sight, they stayed within the consecrated grounds and their protective circle, and so they came to no harm.

Three days later the expedition left after conducting a fairly powerful elemental ritual that called on the forces of air and water in a complex weave that not even the lich could entirely decipher. The day after they departed, a powerful storm system began to brew and the wraith could finally see the magic taking shape. They’d called a thunderstorm forth, but the swamp was hardly afraid of a little water. This too would pass, and then it would find fresh fools to feast on.

Ch. 14 - The Storm

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 as 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 swamps 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. It's great work could wait 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 head 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 filled the room now 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 sense lapsed. The necromany had devoured every part of him that mattered now. The heads of the slain mages though, they were the perfect tool to channel such power through their own  elemental powers. 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 its consecrated ground around it that had frustrated the darkness for so long.

With great effort, using up much of the power reserves 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 of 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 a mile in length, and when they reached the proper distance, they would curve around until they created a perfect circle underneath the land, and far from anyone that would seek to interfere in what in its most terrible plan to date.

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. Like everything else though, 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. 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 down river. 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 since the sea where the river emptied out, but it knew it was there. The darkness was certain that further down stream 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 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 it 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 swamps 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. 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 were 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 water logged 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 swamps 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 had once been. It sat nestled in the silt of the same spot now, 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 then 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 rivers 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.