Chapter 3: Taming the Swamp

Chapter 3: Taming the Swamp

The mage was alone. He came without any servants, but he practically glowed with ethereal energy. His layers of enchantments left him well beyond the reach of the wraith from the moment he first crossed into the swamp’s domain.

He was rowed out into the fen by a local fisherman who had only the tiniest stains on his soul from regularly eating the swamp’s polluted catch; it was just a hint that soon enough - a year or two at most - he would have the whole village, not just the men hidden in the fever-ridden swamps outside of it. The mage’s robes didn’t have even the faintest trace of mud or stains from work on them, and he smiled at the dangerous men like he didn’t have a care in the world.Ñ00v€l--ß1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter.

“Leaving already, are you?” he asked, “I suppose I could allow that. Sell me your slaves and the rest of your supplies, and I’ll even give you a good price. You’ll need money for the road if you’re going to get far enough away from me that I’ll never find you again.”

“Leave? We’ll be back, and with even more men than before!” the headman yelled, purpling with rage. The swamp loved anger and rippled hungrily around the violence, preparing to savor what was sure to happen next. The leader would never have the chance to yell anything again, though. In the split second it took him to reach for his sword, a lightning bolt came down from a clear blue sky and boiled his brains in his skull before he hit the water, still steaming. He was dead before he’d gotten wet and before he or the swamp had gotten even a taste of suffering.

“Anyone else?” The mage asked languidly. Everyone there stood dumbfounded, including the swamp. It recoiled from the painful flare of essence that wasn’t his own. One moment it had been expecting to feast on blood and suffering, and the next, it was burned by foreign magics - hurt in a way that it had never been hurt before. For the first time in its existence, it knew fear. “The local lord has promised me this whole area for my experiments if I purge the thieving vermin in it. As far as I’m concerned, purge means ‘to expel,’ so if you hurry, I won’t have to kill all of you. I can just—”

The headman’s second had been standing at the window of the main building, overlooking this whole exchange near the shore. He raised a crossbow, but he burst into flames before he could pull the trigger. The swamp was tempted to drink deep of that terrible suffering but held back.

The swamp could only watch as the megalithic stones eventually stopped moving. The still-living humans celebrated this with a lavish dinner. All the swamp could celebrate was that even though the mage had dealt it a grievous blow, the treasure everyone sought still lay more than a dozen feet beneath them. If raw magic like that couldn’t force it to the surface, then it was confident that no one would ever find it, and as long as it wasn’t found, the swamp would heal and recover. It would feast on victims or slowly increase its reach a little every week until it had enough blood to become strong again.

Things passed quickly after that. Lost in the fog of its weakness, the swamp couldn’t follow the small changes on the island that used to be its or the people who lived on it as they slowly improved it. One day it was just a series of ugly stones, but only a few months later, those stones had been dressed and shaped, and fired clay bricks were being placed into walls around the whole thing. The clay still belonged to the swamp, and so did the wood used to bake them, so slowly, even though the humans tried to seal it out of whatever they were building, they were unknowingly locking themselves in with it.

After almost half a year, it began to look like a tower. That’s one of the words the mage used most often, along with phrases like geomantic and ley lines. They meant nothing to the swamp. The mage had apparently discovered that the spot he now occupied was a source of great power, and he had come to harvest it. The swamp grew angry at this revelation, of course. The mage had come here to steal its powers, and there was nothing it could do to stop it. That was why it had never recovered, it decided, finally fitting the facts together. No matter how many corpses it devoured or dreams it invaded, it was trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it. Without mending that hole, it would never be full again.

It could do nothing, though, and more months passed while the tower that both was and was not the swamp began to grow in height. Three stories and then four were added. Eventually, artisans started to frequent the island, adding timber supports and ornaments that were beyond the mage’s slaves. After over a year, they finally came one last time, adding glass to the windows of the sixth story, just below the flat roof. That’s when the tower took on its final form. It was a drum tower just over 30 feet at its base and a little over half that on its highest story.

It was a massive structure that would hum with the mage’s power when he conducted one of his experiments. Those were the days the swamp feared most. Whenever that happened, there was nothing for it to drain or harvest, and the mage sucked power from the wraith to accomplish his arcane goals. Whenever that happened, the swamp lost weeks of time as the energies that let its soul exist faded into the background.

During one of these blackouts, the mage had his libraries and tools moved into his new home by a small army of servants. After that, no one new came for a long while, but dozens of men still swarmed about the mage, running his errands and doing his bidding. There was precious little the swamp could do to interfere in any of this. Indeed, it could only watch as entirely mundane cottages and, eventually, even a manor house sprung upon its island. It was practically a village in its own right now. The swamp should have been drowning in blood and power with such a feast on its doorstep, but it could only watch and wither as civilization flourished and the mage sucked it dry.