Chapter 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 and 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 minds of a thousand strangers gave off enough heat that you could confuse them for a bonfire. 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 remnants 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 Riley’s Riches for themselves. A band of somewhat 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.’ Most people took it to be a metaphor though. He also sang about 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 - though the Lich could to do such wonderful things with it 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 skin 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 that fell 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 adventurers, 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 while 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 they, after first being picked off one at a time, had been led 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 for 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 the 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 with only 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 and 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.