Chapter 1: Blood Money

Chapter 1: Blood Money

Tenebroum (Noun): A place cut off from the light.

Riley ambushed Cutter while they slogged through the mud, dragging their raft higher onto the shore. He shoved a foot and a half of dull steel into his partner’s side while his hands were full of rope.

The struggle that followed was brief, and by the time Riley had finished gutting Cutter like a fish, he barely had the energy to cry out in pain. All he could do was cough up blood and lay in the mud while he tried to hold his entrails in. He didn’t even have the strength to stop Riley from rifling through his pockets for the map and whatever else he might have had on him.The original appearance of this chapter can be found at Ñøv€lß1n.

“Two shares is good, but one share is better, don’t you think, chum?” Riley asked, smiling that rotten smile as Cutter’s blood poured into the swamp water, and his world faded to black.

That should have been it for poor old Cutter. A bad end for a bad man. It wasn’t, though.

Even though he was dead, Cutter’s spirit stood over his own corpse, watching while his partner mutilated his body for a few more coins. He couldn’t do anything to stop it as Riley broke fingers to get his rings off and followed that up by bashing him in the face a couple times with the hilt of his blade to pry loose his two gold teeth.

Riley wasn’t any gentler when it came to getting rid of Cutter’s body. He just shoved the hole in his guts full of stones before dragging him into three feet of water and letting him sink into the murk of the fen’s deep mud where no one would ever see him again.

Cutter might have done the same thing, of course; waste not, want not, and all that. He would have had the good sense to wait until they’d gotten the gold out of the swamp and downriver, though. Killing anyone before you had eyes on the goods was about the dumbest thing a thief like Riley could do, but that didn’t stop him from doing it anyway.

It was enough money that he would have a hard time spending it in a lifetime, so it was worth finding, even if it took half a lifetime. Anyone might have done the same thing. Every day Riley looked for it, and every day Cutter’s spirit fed the darkness growing there, though. Every time he raged in frustration at another empty hole, the treasure sank a little lower into the earth - forever out of his reach. It was these outbursts that fed the shade of his partner. He couldn’t do anything but exist and hate. He couldn’t defend the treasure or summon minions to do it for him. All he could do was watch and feed on the frustration of the man who searched.

The murderer consulted soothsayers and arcanists. Sometimes he returned with little toys like dowsing rods and charms that did nothing. Occasionally he even brought the hedge wizards with him. The con artists spent days leading the bastard in circles, but the ones with a real gift only found a growing malignancy in those murky waters and left almost immediately, never to return. They sensed the light fading from this place as surely as the egrets that had stopped nesting here in the year since his betrayal. The dark waters and deep rushes were still full of life, but that life was changing. Ducks and cranes chose to land in other wetlands along the river, but Shoebills and Bloodbeaks were becoming more common in their place. The animals all sensed what Riley couldn’t.

The murderer didn’t notice. Instead of running from the festering darkness, he built a place to stay atop the one place he was sure the treasure wasn’t: the empty chest. It was a terrible excuse for a shack - just sticks lashed to sticks to make a place to sleep. The floor was a foot above the high water mark, and the roof was thatched well enough that it mostly kept the rain off. The shanty had a large flat rock in the center, just big enough to make a small cooking fire without burning the whole place down. It was a sign that he’d exhausted his meager savings staying in the nearby village, not that the shade cared. All it cared about was that, instead of feeding on its murderer for a few hours at a time, it could do it all day long now. Things became more vivid after that.

The murderer could only spend half his time hunting for treasure because he had to spend the other half hunting or fishing for food, but that only made things worse for him. The more he ate of the swamp, the more he became a part of the swamp. The shade could touch him now. It could slide its fingers deep into the man’s twisted little mind and fan the flames of greed so that he would never give up. In time the swamp discovered that all sorts of new torments became possible as well. It couldn’t just make him stay - it could make him suffer. Those torments turned the trickle of life force he’d been siphoning off his betrayer into a flood.

Dreams were the easiest way to hurt anyone foolish enough to dwell in its depths. The shade could invade the murderer’s dreams most nights when his defenses were lowest and force him to remember what he’d done. The swamp couldn’t remember those details anymore, but its murderer did.

Most of the time, it could only remember that look of disappointment when the murderer realized the map had been smeared into illegibility by his partner’s lifeblood. When it was in the head of his murderer, though, it could remember other things too. It could remember what it was like to have a name and hands. It could remember what it would feel like for his reanimated corpse to hold Riley’s head under the brackish water until the bubbles stopped. It could teach the murderer things too. It could teach him what it felt like to be devoured by the denizens of the fen one tiny bite at a time. These dreams were almost always rewarded with screams as the murderer bolted up from his nightmares.

The real nightmare was all around him, though, and because of that treasure, he couldn’t leave. So, day after day, he sank further into the mud and the madness, and he fed the one thing he wanted to stay buried the whole time.

After dreams came diseases. It was a harder thing to do that required the swamp to work through insects and spoiled food because it had no hands of its own. All it had was a desire to make its murderer suffer, and the best tool for that turned out to be sickness.

The first fevers came on tiny wings. Malaria. Swamp shivers. Grey fever. For over a year, the murderer had managed to avoid all of them, but in the space of a month was infected with all three, back-to-back. After that, the swamp let him recover from death’s door just enough to avoid killing him before he followed with Giardia and Goblin Guts. Every day was hell after that, and every night was worse. Not just because he couldn’t manage to keep anything down but because he was too sick to fulfill the need to hunt the swamp’s treasure, and it ate at him as badly as the diseases did. Any sane person would have left by now, but there was no sanity in Cutter’s Fen. There were only the dead and the damned.