Chapter 4: Gazing into the Abyss

Chapter 4: Gazing into the Abyss

Time no longer made sense to the swamp. It hadn’t bothered to watch the passage of days before now. One life rarely mattered to it, and a single day never did. Instead it relied on the slow arc of seasons to make sense of the world around it, but now that was impossible. All it marked was the lines on the mage’s face and the length of the mage’s beard. Albrecht - that was the man’s name. He’d heard it a thousand times, and the swamp clung to it as the only piece of flotsam that mattered in the wreckage that was its domain.

Albrecht wasn’t a young man when he’d first entered the swamp’s domain, but after being here several years, he was finally starting to show his age in places. A new wrinkle here. A touch of gray there. That was all there was to show the passage of time while he regularly shattered the swamp’s ability to think.

Even the fact that the fishing village across the lake was now well within its domain didn’t matter nearly as much as Albrecht’s receding hairline. In time the swamp might yet devour the poor net menders and fishwives of that dismal little place, but for now all it could do was inflict the stray nightmare while its power was continually siphoned off for magical experiments that the wraith couldn’t hope to understand.

It would never have understood them if the man’s apprentice hadn’t died. Fortunately one day the warm climate proved too much for the anemia that he’d suffered from since long before he set foot in the Fen though. The swamp never would have cared about the soft, pale, boy, beyond how he’d tasted to the worms either, if the mage hadn’t decided that his apprentice would be good for one more forbidden experiment, done in secret in the attic above the sixth floor.

It was in the middle of a terrible storm, drawn in a circle of Albrecht’s own blood that a fragment of the swamp was suddenly forced behind the dull eyes of Barnabas, Albrecht’s dead apprentice. It was a jarring experience. One moment he was prowling the reeds in a bid to feel more present in the jarring mess that had become its existence, and understand the current edges of its domain. The next he was trapped in a body of slowly decaying flesh for the first time in years. At least part of him was.

Even in the tower he could still feel the swamp outside. It was like being both the troubadour on stage in an alehouse as well as being the crowd watching him play. It was disconcerting and dizzying, all at once. For the first time in years the swamp could think - he could think in words and sentences. Even though this brain was two days dead and slowly turning to mush it could still think better than acres of fetid water and a million insects.

Albrecht leaned back, in visible shock that his apprentice had opened his eyes, though he recovered quickly enough. “Barnabas - is it really you?” the mage asked, his voice full of trepidation.

“What’s that,” the mage asked, leaning forward slightly, just to the edge of his protective circle. “I command you to speak up!” Not-Barnibus took one more clumsy step. It was almost in range of its target now, and stood as close as the chain bolted to the floor would allow - that is, the distance it would have allowed if Not-Barnabas had still been attached to it.

During the night it had shattered that ankle and foot to remove the thing. That meant there was nothing to stop it when it lunged for the mages throat growling, “I’ve seeeen youurr deatthhh...”

The teeth buried deep into Albrecht’s throat for that one surprised moment that the mage’s sense of absolute safety made him let his guard down. All that Not-Barnabas had time for was to bite down before suddenly a spell ripped through it, sending it through the roof of the tower before arcing down deep into the muck below. Every rib in Not-Barnabas’ chest was shattered before it hit the ground, but even as its consciousness faded, and its trapped spirit slowly trickled out into the brackish waters of the fen, the corpse died with a smile on its face. Killing the mage would have been better of course, but that one bite was enough.

For too long Albrecht held the heart of the swamp prisoner in that tower, but now it had a card to play too. It had a taste of the man’s blood, and that was the perfect vector to slice through the wards and enchantments that the cagey old sorcerer had relied on for too long. Yes - it had been humiliating for a force of nature like it to be trapped in someone else's body, even if only for a short time, but it had been worth it. The wraith knew what powers awaited it, if only it could remove the wizard's boot from its neck, and now it had the perfect way to do just that.

The roof was repaired in a few days, and the mage’s neck healed a few weeks after that, though he would always bear the scar. What mattered though, was the future experiments. Up until now, whenever Albrecht cast one of his terrible spells he used the power of the swamp without any regard to the cost, but now every time he tried to drain essence from the true lord of the fen, it was drained from him in equal measure. This wasn’t enough to completely plug the hole in the bucket that had doomed the swamp to such a fitful and hazy existence for so long, but it was enough to make the mage try his tricks much less often. Being bedridden for days tended to have that effect on people.

That was how the swamp recovered while his nemesis faltered. Each experiment and spell grew further apart from the last one as the toll of the Mage’s body became greater, and the wraith’s influence grew.

When the wizard had arrived in the swamp, he’d seemed almost ageless, but now he was aging a year every month or two as the darkness weighed on him and infected his soul. It was in those weakened moments the swamp pushed hard into his feverish nightmares, granting horrors and insights to the man. He almost always woke from these fugue states with some new theory or principle to try now, but without really understanding that it was exactly what the swamp wanted from him. That was also when the dreams about the treasure started.

Apparently, Albrecht had heard of the treasure. The tale of Riley’s Riches, the bards called it. The swamp didn’t know the details, nor did it care to, but it knew one treasure more than any other it sorely wished to add to that collection now, and for that to happen, it would finally have to let the hoard be unearthed. This chapter made its debut appearance via N0v3lB1n.