Chapter 5: The Birth of a Necromancer

Chapter 5: The Birth of a Necromancer

Night after night the dreams eroded the mage's fixation on his own experiments, replacing it with the obsession about the rumors and the swamp. When he came to the swamp all he cared about was using its energy to cast his strange spells so that he might better understand the universe, one faltering step at a time. Now he had a new project.

He’d grown increasingly convinced that this myth and the treasure that it focused on was at the core of the power he’d drawn on so frequently. He focused on research now as much as dowsing and divination. He wasn’t just trying to find the treasure as much as he was trying to understand the truth behind the stories. Was there really a treasure, or was it just that gold fever was as easy to catch in this cursed place as the shivers were?

It wasn’t hard. For the first time in years the wraith didn’t try to hide the treasure. It wanted it to be found. It wanted Albrecht to dig deep into the soil and find the riches that hid in the very heart of darkness. It just didn’t want him to share them with anyone else, so it infected the mage with a subtle strain of paranoia. The treasure could only belong to one person after all - if an apprentice or a servant were to find it, or to help him dig for it, they would only steal the riches for themselves.

So, one day the mage made the decision to close off the whole tower to everyone else. His servants still cooked and brought firewood, but only ever to the door after that. From that day on no one saw what he was working on, though rumors began almost immediately.

For weeks the mage worked alone and in secret. Even after he chiseled the mortar from between the stones that made up the floor and pulled them aside, to reveal the dark earth, he didn’t make much progress. The soil beneath the tower wasn’t just long hidden - it was a thick clay that made any excavation a challenge. The treasure of the swamp had taken years to slowly sink down to the bedrock and it would take a great deal of effort to reach it, even though he now knew exactly where it was.

Maybe Albrecht could have done it by himself if he’d still been the ageless magician he’d been years ago when he entered the swamp, but now he was an old man - he was more frail than he’d ever been, and seemed to go a little grayer with each spell that he cast. In the last few months his cheeks had become sunken and his graying beard began to go wild. No matter how well paid his servants were, they were beginning to whisper that he hadn’t been the same since the accident and began to tell lurid stories at night about what dark bargains he must be striking with the devils of the pit.

Albrecht didn’t hear their stories, but he could see the way they looked at him whenever he actually came to the door. That was when he decided he needed help that wouldn’t betray him. The first servant he resurrected into dark servitude was one of the cook’s boys who was taken by malaria. Unlike last time, the mage didn’t use a complicated resurrection that attempted to preserve the soul. The original appearance of this chapter can be found at Ñøv€lß1n.

“Help me,” he yelled to the undead slaves that stood there waiting for their next order, silent and impassive. They began moving immediately, but they didn’t respond to him. Instead they moved to block his way even as several more pieces of gold lanced into his back, making him cry out in pain.

“Gods you’re stupid!” He yelled at the zombies, “If you aren’t going to do anything useful then get out of my way!” They didn’t though. Instead they started to walk towards him. At first they were just pushing, but after a moment they were grabbing and holding, and then carrying. The terrible servants he’d spent so much time creating weren’t even his anymore. They were answering to their true owner - the swamp. It was its darkness that brought them back from the dead and its darkness that made them move. Now they were doing just what it wanted and adding a crown jewel to its terrible collection.

“No! Stop!” He yelled as the fear leaked into his voice. This wasn’t how this was supposed to happen. He’d finally gotten what he was obsessing over and now everything was spiraling out of control. “What are you doing!”

The zombies carried him to the wall, and though he tried to set them ablaze, nothing happened. Not only would his minions not respond to his orders, but he couldn’t properly channel his own essence to catalyze his spell. Instead something else siphoned it away, and as he was pressed hard against the wall. More and more coins and trinkets were melted into spikes, and each one of those found its way into a soft part of the mage's flesh.

He was slowly being devoured by an iron maiden made of gold. He gave up on words or spells then and just screamed instead. It was a terrible agony, and since each wound stayed filled and the blows avoided vital organs none of the punctures were fatal. He didn’t stop wailing until hundreds of the little daggers had impaled him, and both of his lungs were punctured. Even his death rattle, loud and inhuman as it was didn’t reach the building his servants lived in while they waited out the storm.

Nothing could save Albrecht as the treasure consumed him. Soon hundreds of spikes were embedded in his flesh, but death still didn’t come for him. After that the pain became even worse as all of the spikes that impaled him suddenly began to heat up and melted again, forming a sarcophagus that melted around him like a second skin of molten gold. Every step in the process was agonizing, but it was meant to be.

The swamp fed on his pain as it tormented the mage and brought him closer to his death as slowly as possible. The mage felt each wound. He felt the metal heat to liquid and swallow him whole, and it was only after another minute of suffering that he finally suffocated in his permanent shell. He was no longer a person now. He was a thing.

For so long all the swamp wanted was to make sure that no one ever took its treasure - but after years it had found an even greater treasure than gold: the mind of the mage. It coveted the terrible arcane secrets he possessed, and wanted them for itself. Now it had them in the form of a grisly sarcophagus. In time the suffering occupant of the phylactery would become as much a part of the wraith that was these swamps as Cutter or the murderer, but for now it was just a trophy - a repository of knowledge that should have died with its owner.