Tenebroum Ch. 31-33 (Patreon)

Three more chapters for my dear, dear readers, as promised. Enjoy!

Ch. 31 - Lost in the Dark

It was hard to believe the world had changed so much in the darkness’s absence, but when it returned its focus to the world beyond its lair, it found the map practically rewritten. It wasn’t just its influence, either. The patterns of both people and mana from the Wodenspine to the Oroza had shifted more than it would have thought possible. Its shadow was still spread across the map, but all the pieces had been rearranged in its absence to the point where the game no longer looked the same.

As it ventured out into the night to gaze upon the world with fresh eyes, it saw that its territory had advanced farther than ever upriver, and the poisoned river slowly bent to its command, connecting the islands of bloodstained territory from the swamp to the capital. The swamp could touch a dozen fishing villages it had never even tasted before now, and through the traces of poison that it had lodged in the spiritual life of the river it could see the patterns of those spirits almost without trying.

As it soared over the river it inspected the life it contained, and was pleased to note that among almost all of it there was the faintest trace of death. Only a year into its plan, and already the might river was closer to the swamp than it had ever been before. It was a beautiful site. Before its protracted battle with the river dragon, the cholerium might have only sickened one in ten thousand. It wouldn’t be surprised if that number had doubled and doubled again in the meantime. Unless it further tainted the wellspring, the swamp didn’t expect the taint to grow much thicker, but that was fine. This was enough for now.

Fallravea showed fresh scars, but it was no longer in ruins. Throughout the city, rubble had been cleared, and new buildings were being erected on the foundations of the old. It was a slow process, but it was that slowness that spoke to the swamp. For the repairs to have advanced so far meant that it had withdrawn from the world for a very long time, at perhaps exactly the wrong moment. There were still wrecked blocks that it could carve out some sort of special purpose, but many of the most geomantically appropriate locations for a second lair were already being occupied by half finished row homes and trading houses. It was a terrible waste. The swamp looked throughout the city for Kelvun, but found him neither in his palace nor in the city, so it shifted its gaze to the southwest, looking for him.

In the red hills it still held sway over most of the land, but in their defeat the goblins had fractured into a dozen different tribes that warred against each other and posed no threat to the men of the region. It would take some time to put those little pieces back together, and the swamp wondered if it was even worth the effort. It still held sway over much of the region, and many of the tribes kept the yellowed skull totems even as they brandished their own. The Blood Smiles, the Dark Claws, the Dog Boys, and so many others. These were the tribes that warred with each other as their numbers slowly regrew.

None of these facts mattered as much as the new outpost of humanity that stood where the Burning Skull’s lair used to be. A mining outpost. The boy had finally done as instructed and begun efforts to mine the precious gold from the cave. As the darkness drifted effortlessly down the shaft, he found new shoring timbers and primitive tracks being laid for mining cars, even though they used donkey driven wagons for now. The efforts were crude, but the shiny ore was leaving the cave a little at a time, and the thought that some of that would eventually end up in its hoard made the darkness burst with greed.

So much so that it couldn’t help but notice how many nuggets were ending up in the miner’s tents and the overseer’s belts. As the men sat around campfires, they would roll dice and gamble little bits of food and unrefined metal with their fellows. They were drinking and laughing while played with their stolen wealth that had been filched in its caves. It would have to do something about that, of course, but today was not the day. It would not let anyone get between it and its rightful share of the gold.

The young count wasn’t here either, though the darkness could sense his presence. He’d been here recently enough that it could follow the trail across the moonlit plains toward the swamp. The darkness was neither omnipotent nor omnipresent, but at night in its own territory it might as well be. Nothing could hide from it. Certainly not a mind that the darkness had already touched.

It eventually found Kelvun camped in a river on the edge of the swamp. The young man was snoring softly in the largest tent of the group. The darkness glided past the young Count’s guards and his tent flap and walked directly into his dreams to quickly rifle through his memories.  It was surprised and even a little impressed by when it found. The pawn was actually thinking ahead, and rather than trying to manage the nonexistent roads from his new mine to the capital, he’d hired mages to build a canal through the swamp. Between that and the river they were planning to divert, they’d be able to make this rugged landscape bloom. The swamp approved of such a slow, long term plan.

More people within its domain was always better, and if thousands of people lived clustered around the swamp, then it could easily afford to make a family disappear every now and again. The bloodshed would blamed on the goblins, and not on it, so it would be all to the good.

The darkness walked through the young cretin’s mind, but besides the plans he had for what was now his kingdom, he mostly thought of women, and what the other nobles of the region thought of him. It was a shallow pool that was dirtier than the swamp water it called home, and the darkness quickly left when it determined that part of the gold that the Count was bringing back to the capital with him was intended to be delivered to it.

That was the most important thing. The darkness had gone to great lengths to give this worm that power he ached for, and now it would be paid for that work, in gold or in blood. That was all the darkness needed the lording for now. To mine its gold and populate its land with more victims. As long as he was doing those two things, it didn’t care how frivolously the lad spent his time.

Everything the darkness had seen was strange enough, but as it returned to the heart of its swamp, it was truly astounded by what it saw. What had been a tower and couple small buildings for collecting the river tolls had become a full-blown village while it had been distracted fighting for its life.

There wasn’t just the rickety piers that Kelvun had sunk when he first arrived. Now there were three piers and several small fishing vessels moored at them.  Next to those docks were fishmongers, net menders, and two separate bars. For a moment, the swamp could not comprehend so many changes, or the huts that people slumbered in behind them. Where would they have found enough earth to raise so many buildings above the water line.

That was when it noticed the canal. It wasn’t a particularly deep wound. It was only 5 feet deep and almost 15 feet wide, but cut by magic, it traveled straight through the swamp like a line to the north-west. What had once been an unimportant backwater was now the most important crossroads of the region, and it was drawing men to it like maggots to a corpse. The swamp had mixed feelings about that. Part of it wanted to snuff out every last one of these interlopers and fill the new canal in a tide of blood that would be washed out to the Oroza.

It stayed its rage as well as its minions, though.

As good as that would feel, it would be incredibly counterproductive. In truth, nothing that the lordling had done was detrimental to its plans, but the fact that the swamp had not ordered him to take these steps galled it.

It disappeared into the caverns beneath the tiny boomtown in a puff of mist and re-emerged in its own darkness. Here at least it was comfortable, and it could forget that only a few dozen feet above it were men sleeping in the feeling in perfect safety. It would teach them otherwise, eventually.

The lich stared into the dark as it considered the variables. There were too many possible plans to consider, and a million ways it could let its attention be divided if it wasn’t careful. In the end, it decided that it would have to gather the goblins back into a single fist eventually, but they were not the only minions in the region. As it surveyed the swamp, looking at the damage that the Count’s canal had wrought on the landscape, it found the lizard men were flourishing once more in the places farthest from man. The swamp would devote some attention to them, it decided, but not before the mages that had cut this scar. As soon as they completed their great work, the swamp would devour them whole. Not only would it bring more elemental knowledge to its library on a topic that was sorely lacking, but it was the only reward that seemed fair for all the hard work they’d spent defacing its home.

Yes, the goblins and the lizards would make fine servants, but the lich had its sites set on larger targets. When Grod had brought the stone fists to heel it had learned much of the monsters that had preyed on the goblins deeper in the mountains. There were no true dragons unfortunately, but there had been ogres, chimera, and wyverns, and the darkness would dearly love to make some truly monstrous creations with the parts of those creatures could provide.

All of that would require a separate entrance, though, it realized as it imagined the logistics. There was no way that it would be able to get the fresh corpse of an ogre down from the mountains, and through the small river entrance before it had completely purified. At a thought, it moved two dozen zombies from what they had been doing to a new task: building an entrance to the north-west. If the humans insisted on building a canal through the swamp, then the Lich could use it too.

At least that would be true after it built a ferryman appropriate to the task.

Item by item, the list formed its mind. Not just for the things it would need to do, but for the things it would need to do the things it needed to do, and the parts it would need to do those things. It was a long and wandering list that grew with every moment and new plans grew in its mind, but it had but to think of what needed to be done, and somewhere deep within its necropolis a servant woke from storage and started working on it. Sometimes that was a skilled fleshcrafter, but often as not it was a common drudge with simple steel tools.

All of them labored in the sightless dark for the lich. Its will would be done, no matter how many months or years it took to accomplish.

Ch. 32 - Draining the Swamp

Kelvun woke shortly after midnight with a start. Despite the warm night and the sweat stains on his night clothes, he was shivering with cold and when he lit the lamp on his bedside he could still see his breath fogging. After all this time, the darkness had finally come back to pay him a visit, and it had not been gentle. While Kelvun lay in bed paralyzed, it had felt the shadows rifling through his mind for anything of interest.

He swallowed hard, worried at what that dark spirit might have found.

It had been almost a year since the day that the fear and the pain had shot through him. One moment he was celebrating how easily they’d taken the mine, and the next he was overcome by fear and nausea as pain shot through him. He’d thought his vile master was going to kill him for his seditious thoughts, but after a few minutes, it passed like their connection was. The doctor they’d brought with him decided it was nothing more than a fever that had already been sweeping through his men, and bled him to cure it, but even though Kelvun knew that wasn’t what it was, he stayed silent.

That silence had started out perfectly natural, after all, who could he tell? Even if he had someone he could talk to, what would he tell them? I made a deal with a devil in exchange for power, and now my family is dead, and my birthright is in ruins?  There was no priest he could confess that too. Now that he was 18, they’d just execute him and install one of his cousins in his house. It wouldn’t matter if the death was a punishment for evil deeds or a mercy killing because he’d gone mad. Either way, there would be no more Garvins, and a Gerwin or a Geldin would rule over Greshan county in his place.

Kelvun would never accept such a travesty. This was his birthright, and he’d let no one steal it from him. He’d not only defended the region against the goblins and crushed them, so they could never rise again to threaten him, but he’d made a huge gold discovery that would be more than enough to finance all his future plans.

Without the dreams and the other little reminders that he was chained to a larger power, it had been easy enough for him to believe that he’d accomplished all of this himself, and after he’d lied to himself long enough it wasn’t even really a lie anymore. Everywhere he went, his people agreed - he was the hero his father never was, and had been sent by the gods to save them. Between that and the fact that there hadn’t been a single report of a new attack by goblins or  zombies, it was easy to believe that everything he thought he remembered about that grinning golden skull were just fairy stories from his childhood.

He couldn’t anymore, though, because it was back, and even after all this time, he’d been powerless to resist it, even a little bit. Kelvun wiped the sweat from his face with a sheet and then leaned forward, covering his face in his hands. It had been so tempting to believe that this was over, but that pleasant delusion was gone.

Kelvun stood and walked across the tent to where the heavy chest lay, and opened it. In the near dark, it was hard to see the lumpy bags that hid the lustrous metal, but Kelvun knew what was in those bags just as much as the spirit that had visited him tonight.

“I haven’t forgotten,” he whispered, certain the spirit hadn’t left completely. “Ten bags of gold, and one of them will ‘disappear’ when we reached the river, just as I promised.”

Even when he’d been certain the swamp had been part of some desperate fever dream, he’d still planned on tithing the river just in case. The toll income had been excellent, but the geomancers that he’d hired him to plan and dig the canal had told him that the river was ailing for reasons that they couldn’t understand. The swamp itself apparently had terrible energies about it, but they expected that to get better once the water was flowing, and it was dr—”

Kelvun cut off his thoughts forcefully there. That was the very last thing he wanted to think about. He tried never to talk about it, and to avoid thinking about it wherever possible, but tonight it would be especially bad. If the darkness that he’d sold his soul to thought that its pawn was double-crossing it, then he had no doubt that his life would be forfeit.

Kelvun repeated why he was here. First in his mind, and then out loud, as he forced his mind to believe that this and only this was the reason he’d come all this way. “I’m here to ensure the first delivery of gold bars from the Leo mine, and on the way back I decided that I wanted to see how the third phase of the canal was going.”

He said it with conviction, but his mind rebelled against it. It was all true. They’d dug a trench clear through the swamp and were gathering rivers to keep the upland stretches full, so they could use it, but that was hardly the only reason it had been built.

Kelvun gritted his teeth. Trying to focus on what he could and could not think about in light of tonight’s events was going to make it an especially long trip back to Blackwater landing.

In the morning, he reviewed the plans with the mage’s apprentices, as humiliating as that was. He hadn’t come all this way or paid so much gold to be talked down to by boys his own age. He’d paid good coin for elementalists from the Magica Collegium in Abenend, but they were off studying the leylines and weaving the spells that would make the whole thing possible, and were not to be disturbed under any circumstances.

Kelvun scowled as he studied the map again “So then these two streams and this river will be redirected to the channel here and here, he asked pointing to the map, and that will get the channel to the mine?”

He’d helped draw two of these already, and he would have though that would make them easier to read, but all the small lines the mages used just made the whole things swim before his eyes until they glazed over.

“Unfortunately, no.” One of the apprentices answered, though Kelvun couldn’t remember if it was Fredek or Lancel, and didn’t want to embarrass himself by asking again. “As my master’s missives to you have stated, given the terrain a canal all the way to your mine will not be possible, but he can—”

“And that’s why I’m here,” Kelvin interrupted. “To make it possible. I’m not paying a king's ransom for ‘most of the way.’ Do you understand that?”

“But sir… your Lordship, be reasonable,” the other one pleaded. “If you look at the lines of elevation, you will see we’re not lying. No magic can make water run up hill. The best we can do is to flood this valley and steer the canal to there. At only ten miles away, it will—”

“Still be very susceptible to attacks by goblins and bandits now and in the future,” Kelvin yelled, slamming his fist on the table. I need you to do better, or I will find someone who can!”

After that, despite his best efforts to explain himself, the meeting devolved into a shouting match, and Kelvun eventually stormed out of the tent and told his men to begin packing up. This had been half the reason for the trip, and it felt entirely wasted because these supposedly smart men couldn’t understand his vision!

Once he calmed down, and the servants had started loading the barge, he realized it was all to the good, though. Even though it hadn’t ended as he’d hoped, his annoyance would make good cover for the shadows inside of him. If he couldn’t be bothered to remember every detail of a meeting like this, then why would the darkness that watched him pay any attention at all to it.

. . .

Before the young Lord had even made it back to the landing, the dreams returned. They were hazy things filled with dread at first, as he wrestled with a woman who was also a rotting sea serpent, and he slept very poorly as a result. By the third night down river, though, those dreams had resolved into something even more vicious. He was torn to pieces by work men that bet his teeth and fingers over games of dice. At first, Kelvun worried that the swamp had discovered that he was double-crossing it, and was taking his time to torture him. It came to him only very slowly that in the dream, the pieces of him were metaphors for real theft that was going on in his mines. It was a gold rush, and it was far more lucrative to smuggle out a few nuggets than it was to break your back day after day for a few coppers.

None of this stopped Kelvun from dropping a five pound bag of gold into the river on their first night on the Oroza, but it was only when he decided that something needed to be done that he stopped. He’d meant for it to be a more solemn occasion, but in the end he’d just chucked it over the side between rounds of drinking with some of the mates.

“So if they’re really gambling away your gold then why don’t you cut off their fingers?” a sailor asked as Kelvun returned to the warmth of the candle lit cabin.

He’d be talking about his problem while they diced the night away, and he’d probably said more than he should have, but there was nothing he could do about it now.

“If I cut off the fingers of every man that cheats me, then there’d be not one man in a hundred left to wield a pickaxe to mine the gold in the first place,” Kelvun answered as he picked his drink back up and smiled.

Everyone laughed at that before they helpfully chimed in on everything he could do to stem the tide of the theft, which, if the dreams were to be believed, was abominable. Flogging, hiring more overseers, and paying better were the options that tonight’s drinking partners suggested the most, but the one that stuck with him the longest was the strangest by far.

“You could invite the priests to oversee the mine for you. They’re the real penny pinchers, they are, and they have no qualms with flogging a man until he’s seen the light.”

As odd as it seemed, eventually Kelvun decided that was the best response, if the darkness would let him get away with it. Not only would they be happy to provide some incorruptible oversight for a healthy tithe, but their influence and protection against the swamp in the future would be welcome as well.

In the end, it took Kelvun weeks to draft the letter, but that was only because he had so many balls to attend to celebrate his successful return to Fallravea. The only darkness that intervened to prevent him from writing the missive sooner was the sort that occurred in the bedrooms of all the women that wanted to personally thank him for saving the city. The shadow that haunted his dreams didn’t seem to care that it had invited the servants of the divine to shepherd the idle and wayward souls of red hills. It wasn’t the response that he would have expected, but if the dread golden eyes were busy looking at something else besides him, then he was hardly going to complain.

Ch. 33 - The Tide of Progress

The county of Greshan didn’t have a throne, per se, but if it did, Kelvin would have sat uneasily on it. It had an audience hall, but most of the important decisions were made around the table in his family’s parlor amongst the real power brokers of the city, long before they were ever aired in the grand gallery.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that many of the decisions he was forced to make over the next few months had already been decided elsewhere, and that they were only brought to him to rubber stamp. Everything was just going a bit too smoothly that autumn, he decided. The waterfront was practically back to normal, the gold being sent from the mine was more than his treasurer had forecast, and the king himself had sent a royal decree by messenger, thanking him for avenging his father and putting down the goblin menace before they could do further damage to the kingdom.

The only thing that had gone wrong is that the damnable mages he’d hired to carve his canal had just disappeared one day. It wasn’t his fault, of course. They’d finished their work and been paid of course, but according to the Magica Collegium in Abenend they’d just disappeared sometime after that. Their entire party had. They’d vanished without a trace. The collegium had blamed him of course, and weren’t happy about the situation, but he was blameless.

Kelvun’s patron might have something to do with it, of course, but if it had, he didn’t want to know. That would lead to too many unthinkable thoughts, too much worry about why the swamp might have decided they should perish, and why he might be next on the hit list. That blow never fell though, and even though it was the worries about his court that forced the young lord to winter in Fallravea, the idea that he might just disappear one day was never far from his mind.

The dreams still came through the winter, but less often, and they were less clear in what they wanted. The only one that even gave Kelvun something like a specific task, was that in the spring, the darkness wanted a temple built to honor the Oroza. That was an easy enough request that would have happened eventually even without his assistance. Many small shrines already existed up and down the river. The dreams were very clear though. It wanted a shrine to Oroza the flood-dragon, the most powerful and unpredictable of her forms.

That at least was unusual, as this far north the river was usually venerated as the gentle water bearer or the languid serpent, but Kelvun wasn’t going to argue. It mostly just left him wondering. Why would an evil spirit that dwelled in a swamp want to venerate a river goddess? Had building the canal had forced the swamp to change its ways or altered its elemental alignment somehow? So many warriors had tried to slay the undead threat for so long, when the whole time, all that needed to happen to take the wind out of its sails was to drain the damn thing.

It was a start at least, but his dark master took a back seat to his other worries. Even with the snows piled high, no one attempted to poison him during any of the midwinter balls he attended, and even on the nights where Kelvun slept alone, no one attempted to garrote him. Nonetheless, that gnawing sense of uncertainty and precariousness never left him. By the spring, he’d doubled his spymaster’s budget to make sure that everyone worth watching was being watched, but even that bore no treacherous fruit.

“Maybe the only one after you is me,” Adanna told him one frosty winter morning while they were in bed together. He’d taken advantage of the pleasant afterglow to whisper some of his doubts to her in an unguarded moment, but she didn’t see what he was worried. About.

“Well, that can’t be true,” he said, with a hollow smile as he tried to figure out whether he’d made a terrible mistake by telling her anything at all. “If that were true then how would you explain Fahraah, or Susanna, or …

“Oh, you monster,” she said with a light slap that was followed up by a kiss. Even if his imagined enemies at court weren’t real, he certainly wasn’t imagining the women that hunted him. He was the region's most eligible bachelor, and if one thing had been true since all of this had started, it was that there had been no end to the marriage offers that had been proposed by the other families of the region.

Once winter broke he would leave the city again for blackwater landing for a few weeks, just to escape them, he decided, once Adanna had finally left to get dressed. A few seconds later, he decided he should probably have her watched too. He trusted her, but jealousy could do strange things to people, and everyone was jealous of his successes lately.

It was shortly before spring that he proposed his biggest plan to date: free land for the peasants that would farm it. The nobles were against it, even after he assured them that none of their holdings would be reduced to make this land. That seemed to anger them further, which had been entirely unexpected until his advisor had explained to him the reasons why.

“Even if you increased their holdings, it would do no good,” Temonen said after he’d pulled him aside. “Their peasants will still flee for the better offer, leaving no one to work the existing lands.”

That at least made sense to Kelvun. There was a critical shortage of strong, able bodies after the carnage the goblins had caused last year. Fields were already going fallow for a lack of both plows and plowmen, but he wouldn’t let that change his mind. Not only would changing his mind after making that kind of announcement make him look weak, but there would have been no point in draining that damn swamp if he wasn’t going to be sending people to there to take advantage of the fertile land. Farmers would bring their gods and their shrines with him, and with a little luck Kelvun was sure that within a few years he could bury that giant evil with the prayers of thousands of the devout.

End the end he mollified his nobles by announcing that they would use the newly vacant land to recruit imigrants from other parts of the kingdom. They would rebuild Greshan and make it a home worth defending.

“Why should we have outsiders in are fine lands,” Duke Barrington boasted. “Rhuzens? Duttons? They’ll never be true Greshens like the rest of us.”

Even if he wou

ldn’t admit it publicly, he would privately concede that the Duke had a point, but that point didn’t matter just now. “Either we import the manpower to rebuild this great county, or we’ll forever be known as ‘that backwater that was burned to the ground by the goblins.’ Is that what you want? To be a laughingstock.”

At that moment, he took the xenophobic pride of his fellow nobles and turned it against them. No matter how much he might agree that the people of the river were better than their rivals on the sea or the plains, the last thing any of them wanted was to see their local prestige lost to a string of defeats at the hand of meet goblins. The short but violent war had made Kelvun look good, but it had made the domain, and the previous ruler of it look both feeble and ineffective. They would have to change that lest he lose the favor of the king.

In the end Kelvun commissioned several bards to spread the word of his new decree, and soon song like ‘the green hills of Greshen’ and ‘Black Earth Bliss,’ were being spread from inn to inn to go along with his tales of goblin slaying and the older tales like ‘To The Last Man.’ It would take time for this strategy to pay off, he was sure, but Greshan surely needed the new blood. The swamp receded half a mile since the canal had been cut, in all directions that weren’t abutting the river. Even without all the new land that had been reclaimed from the swamp, though, many of the villages that had been ruined in the heartland between Fallravea and the Red Hills had never been rebuilt.

If new farms and communities weren’t established to fix that, it would not only be catastrophically bad for his tax revenues in future years. It would let the lands go wild, and if that happened then who knew what monsters would occupy them. No, everyone knew it was better to handle this as quickly and decisively as possible, they just wanted him to bear all the costs. These expenses at least would be born by all the nobles of the region, though, no matter how they might feel about it.

After all of that was set in motion, Kelvun’s fears redoubled, but it wasn’t until a poison tester of his died shortly after he announced the new temple to Ozora the dragon, that he finally had something to hold on to. The doctors said that it was an acute illness, and not an allergy or a poison, but Kelvun was unconvinced, and shortly after that he made plans to relocate to Blackwater landing for the foreseeable future.

He was popular enough with the people of Fallravea, and did not fear his subjects, but the county capital also held almost all the other noble families, and one or more of them was definitely out to get him. He thought about asking the darkness for help, but decided the last thing he wanted was to owe that unknowable creature any more than he already did. If left alone he could smother it in its sleep, but giving it some new goal or intrigue might reverse all the progress that Kelvun had made so far.

Blackwater landing was safe enough. It wasn’t nearly as comfortable as Garvin manor of course, but enough money and time would fix that, and in a few months once everyone had calmed down and his spymaster Wurmnth had figured out who had tried to poison him, he could come back to be reunited with his stable of lovers. He might even find a few new ones while he was there, he decided, perking up at the prospect. A guileless country girl might be just what he needed to help him get over his brush with death.

“But what if it really was sickness,” the old fool had asked him, the night before Kelvun was to depart. “What if no one tried to poison you?”

“I’ll be back in three months, Wurmnth. Five at the very latest. And when I get back I’ll expect a very short list of names. If you don’t have one of those for me, well then I might have to make one myself. You wouldn’t like to see me pluck those from the air at random, would you?” Kelvun let the threat hang there in the air for a moment before he spoke again. “Who knows who might decide belongs on there. Afterall, I’m not half the expert that you are in these things.”

“Of course not sire,” the old spymaster said, swallowing hard.

Kelvun had clearly made his point, and that fact alone made him smile all the way to his destination.