Chapter 18: A Taste of Ashes
The darkness followed the rest of the Viscount’s trip with some interest, but without having its tendrils into the boy as deeply as it had slid them into the soul of its former bard, the information it received about the world further down river was intermittent and muddy as the water of the river he traveled on.
That was fine.
The swamp was still exploring its territory in that area, and continued to encounter some difficulties, even now that the floodwaters were a thing of the past and the Oroza should have assumed its new route for the foreseeable future. Day by day, the lines seemed to blur and shift. That made sense for something as dynamic as a river, but less so on the banks, where it happened with equal frequency. It was almost like something was pushing back against its slow spread, but not in the same powerful way that the consecrated ground nearby once had. Nature, it would seem, was rejecting it.
None of the mages in its library of minds was certain. The best they could come up with was the idea of shifting leylines now that its territory had become broad enough to be affected by such things, so the Lich filed away the issue for another time. As long as it could feel the villages and fishing communities scattered along its bank, that was enough for now. It was already exploring the dreams of those simple people, and learning the social webs and schisms that existed in every neighborhood. Soon enough it would aggravate them and little by little extract a bloody toll of its own as long cold grudges and dead feuds found new life.
Maybe when winter finally arrived, it would spread a new fever down the river and test just how far its influence really spread. Somewhere to the south lay Tagel - a true city. It had glimpsed its waterfront and tavern rooms through the eyes of those the bard had infected with avarice, but it would dearly love to see a plague spread through the city so that it could gain true insight into the inhabitants.
That was in the future, though. Right now, the important thing was the goblins. The Black Teeth continued to make great progress in all directions, their enemies lost ground. To the west their victories against the Dog Eaters were quickly becoming a rout, and to the east and south the Burning Skulls were taking real losses, even with their magic. Grod led his own warband now, and it was full of the most savage warriors the Black Teeth had to offer.
It didn’t hurt that the swamp had started to give Grod’s most ferocious warriors lesser gifts of their own. They would never be enough to be a threat to the swamp’s chosen leader, of course, but it wanted more blood, and it could only taste it with more connections to the creatures that were doing the killing. So, the more savage the warrior was in the Black Teeth, the more savage he would become.
It was through one of these lesser connections that the swamp first found the source of the Burning Skulls' power. In a rare losing battle where Grod had been forced to flee before a sustained barrage of fire from the massed might of several shamans, one of Grod’s warriors was slain, and that night the victorious side brought the corpse back for a celebratory dinner.
Nev was the biggest warrior that had been left behind on that scorched battlefield, so it was perfectly normal that the victorious side would want to take him back to their lair to feast on his strength. Yesterday’s battlefield was tomorrow's banquet in their eyes, and to those savage creatures, nothing tasted better than the flesh of their fallen enemies.
The darkness learned several things about that awful dinner, though. The first was that, past the smoky fumaroles and geysers that marked the heart of Burning Skull territory, there was a cave that seemed to be their true stronghold. It wasn’t a cave, though. Not like the one the Black Teeth had lived in. This one was an old mine shaft that had long been abandoned by whoever had built it.
That in itself was interesting, the darkness had seen no signs of civilization this far west, so a decades old mining site was unusual. A few of the voices in the periphery of its mind whispered that dwarves were responsible, and the darkness believed them. None of its main voices had ever met a dwarf, and it had certainly never tasted the suffering of one before, but it would like to.
What was more unusual was that on the third level of the shafts, where the old mining operations gave way to a pure goblin warren, there was gold. Even as the corpse that served as its spy was dragged down dusty tunnels, big bright veins of the stuff were in plain view, and the darkness hungered for them. There was more gold in the walls of just this one tunnel, than there currently was in its whole hoard, and it hungered to add it to its collection.
There was no doubt about it. The Burning Skulls would have to fall, and probably in time the Black Teeth would too, but only so that the Count’s men could dig this up for it. In theory, zombies would be able to do it, of course, but that would represent a fantastic amount of resources that would have to be diverted from the great work in the lowest level of the mazes. No - it would have to rely on the avarice of men to mine this, at least until after that was done. Now that it was starting to better understand the world, no more delays were acceptable.
Since the victorious warriors of the Burning Skulls had started to drag this body, the darkness had been brewing all sorts of toxins and letting all manner of diseases fester inside of it. The other tribe might get to devour one of its pawns, but that would be an act that wasn’t without cost. When they spitted the goblin corpse and began to roast it over the open flame, that changed nothing. All fire would do was blunt the impact of its malice, not eliminate it.
That was when it felt the fire.
Not the flames that licked the skin, or the heat that began to crisp and burn the grisly feast. No, that was when it felt the fire behind both of those things. There was something darker, and hotter than fire, lurking in the embers of the cook fire. It was the same flavor of magic that the shamans had wielded on the battlefield.
The darkness did nothing, except for enduring the growing pain of the fire as it tried to study the new phenomenon. Was this something like it? Another spirit that preferred fire and violence to the death and disease that the swamp favored?
It could have been anything of course, even some new goblin magic that it might never understand, but now that it was looking for it, it could feel the faint trickles of essence from the totems scattered throughout the cavern.
Yes, by the time the goblins were ready to start eating their feast and ripping into the sizzling flesh of the fallen, the darkness was sure: it had found a kindred spirit. It had no idea if they were very common or very rare, but it also had no desire to fight with it directly until it better understood what it was dealing with.
Such a loss could be costly, and the fire spirit likely had no more idea that the darkness existed than vice versa. There was a value in the element of surprise. That was a lesson that the swamp had learned again and again since the village. So, rather than risk revealing its plan and adding another dose or two of botulism to the mix, it relinquished its grip on the goblin, letting the link fade away into the aether.
There wasn’t just gold and goblins worth fighting for in the area. No - there was another spirit to learn from. Would the darkness be able to devour it? Would it want to, or would it be safer to simply find a way to snuff it out?
It didn’t have answers to these questions right now, but it didn’t matter.
What mattered was the new plan: the Burning Skulls were no longer Grod’s primary focus. They would wait until the darkness could bring other tools to bear and better understand where the fire spirit that supplied their shamans’ magic got its power.
For now, it would focus on subjugating the other tribes. First they would finish crushing the Dog Eaters, and once that was done it would focus on the Sharp Spears and the Bone Gnawers and whatever tribes lay beyond that.
The goblins would have no problems with that change in tactics. They loved nothing more than to pick on the weakest possible victim, and it was only the swamp’s constant goading that had forced them to turn their attention to the superior foe.
It was still certain that its chosen tribe could beat the Burning Skulls and their fiery magics, of course, but it would do so easier once it had crushed the surrounding tribes and formed their survivors into a terrible fist that would make short work of its fiery enemy. It was a simple plan, and one that was eagerly embraced by Grod after several nights of dreams were enough to impress the swamp’s will on it.
From that point, they only harried the Burning Skulls enough to keep them on the defensive. They trashed the scum’s ashen totems wherever they found them, while their real warbands raided their neighbor to the west over and over again until the other tribe no longer had a single mangy dog rider left to its name.
If the thing it was facing really was a spirit then it had to follow similar rules to itself, the swamp thought, complete with territory and boundaries, didn’t it? The best way to disrupt those so far from the murky embrace of its muddy waters and undead army was simple: the goblins needed to tear down every scrap that indicated the Burning Skulls ever owned a particular piece of territory, and replace it with their own grisly trophies. So, soon each skirmish to the east led to ritual defilement of any area that the other spirit’s tribe seemed to care about.
The swamp took a sick joy in this behavior, even before it felt the boundaries start to shift. A few months ago, it had only the most tenuous of footholds in the area that existed mostly in the minds of a few goblins that had drank from its polluted floodwaters. Now it had a tribe to its name and a bloodstained territory that was slowly but surely growing in all directions.
Those gains were cemented when the Dog Eaters finally fell. Not just because Grod beheaded the chieftain in front of a bloodthirsty mob drunk on victory, though, but because as soon as he did that he immediately turned around and crushed the chieftain of the Black Teeth as well. The crowd went wild at this turn of events. In the space of moments, the monster that the swamp had created had abolished two different tribes and established himself as the warboss of a new one: the Gold Skulls.