Chapter 6: A Trip Into Town

Chapter 6: A Trip Into Town

That was the night that everyone on the island died. Before the storm ended, Albrecht’s last few servants were torn apart by the dozen zombies that had spent the last few months toiling to dig the tunnels ever deeper. Even without any weapons of their own, the zombies still strangled the life out of almost every soul that remained on the island within minutes. It could hardly even be called a fight. The living managed to mangle or maim a corpse or two, but that did nothing to stop them from following through with their murderous orders. Only one of the apprentices managed to escape out a window before the zombies knocked down the front door, and he only waded a few hundred feet into the water before something dragged him down into the muck until his lungs filled with water.

In the morning the storm cleared, and for the first time in years there was utter silence in the area around the island as the sun rose. Not one bird dared to chirp or sing in the aftermath of the deadly transformation that had occurred. Up until now the evil that lurked in the fen had been localized and specific about one thing: protecting its bloody treasure. Even though the darkness could always be felt by those most sensitive to those things, it was a pall that was palpable now. It was a shroud over the whole area that even the villagers could feel as they made gestures to ward off evil before setting off in their boats to catch today’s supper. Ñ00v€l--ß1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter.

The evil in the fen was metastasizing, and growing at a prodigious rate as it changed into something darker and more malevolent than it had ever been before. A powerful mind was being devoured deep in its dark heart and that made it think of all sorts of things it had never considered before. Even now the wraith was using the zombies to try new experiments that the mage had imagined, but was much too moral to actually explore. New circles with darker runes were being drawn, zombies were loading corpses into barrels to see if pickling the corpses would produce heartier and stronger vessels, and all the while, the remainder of its servants retreated into the depths with makeshift tools to begin tunneling into the bedrock once more.

The swamp had an even greater treasure to protect now, and that meant burying it ever deeper, in a labyrinth so dark and fortified that no one would ever find it. That those efforts might take decades, or that the undead servants performing the work would turn to dust long before their efforts were complete, didn’t matter. The avarice of the swamp was timeless, and it would not rest until all that it coveted was safely tucked away where it could never be taken from it. It was that very urge that made it look to the small fishing village which was now well inside its territory. Those insignificant human lives that were so obsessed with fishing and eating only to raise young humans that would also learn to fish and eat were no longer just a source of suffering and sustenance, but also a source of labor for this endless project.

It had been preying on the dreams of the children and the illnesses of the infirm for months now, but flush with the dark knowledge brewing in the prison that was its phylactery, the swamp took a wider view. The dead buried in the consecrated ground of the temple at the heart of the village were beyond its reach, but everything else belonged to it, if only it reached out to grab it. The bones of the drowned, picked clean in the pond, the bodies of murder victims in shallow graves where they were never supposed to be found, and even the small coven of witches that tried to bargain with dark powers to curse their neighbors were all the property of the swamp now. Each one was a source of energy or a possible weapon to be wielded, and it studied them as intently as it could, even though its focus still drifted frequently with the weather and the phase of the moon.

The encounter gave the swamp much to think about. Until now it had thought of the small patch of land as simply beyond its reach for now, but if that was what the divine felt like, it might well always be beyond the reach of its dark influence. The holy power that pushed it back was immediate and irresistable. The darkness that lurked in the swamp couldn’t imagine any plan that would let it triumph over that power. The only weakness it seemed to have was that even if it was incredibly powerful, it was very limited in scope. Almost every part of the village, and every single home and shack was in the swamp’s reach and outside of the protection of the divine. It shouldn’t cause a problem, but it would have to figure out how to cauterize that small hilltop refuge if it couldn’t eliminate it, lest it become a constant thorn in its side.

The swamp was badly mistaken about how the people of the village would react. It did scare them when men heading to their boats found the pair of corpses hours later and ran to fetch the priest. That was hardly the end of it though. The event stirred up a hornet's nest, and even after the bodies were buried in the church yard, they had a watchman that rotated between the families to make sure that they were prepared for any evil they might find in the darkness. Worse though, was that the idea that the dead might be rising from the dead and murdering people had the effect of making almost everyone that lived there more devout. They said their prayers. They went to church. Rather than paying lip service as they’d done for so long they really started to believe.

The swamp felt it almost immediately. Only a few days later the consecrated grounds around the goddess’ temple were expanding, pushing back against the darkness and the dreams of many of the fishermen were now closed to the swamp. It was a catastrophe. Could this continue indefinitely, it wondered? Could the town grow in size and devotion so that in a year or ten the dark shadows that the wraith hid in were entirely erased by the holy light of the divine? That was a fate too terrible to contemplate. Something had to be done. Before the swamp had wanted to devour the villagers one life at a time for the next few years. It wanted to find just the right feuds and animosities to aggravate so it could enjoy the darkness welling up from the souls of both the murderers and the murdered. That was impossible now though. At its current pace, the entire village would be lost to it again within the year. It had to act immediately.

Over the next week it was as if a plague had struck the village as so many people began to fall ill. The priest kept anyone from dying, but over the next month almost every person in town was terribly sick for at least a few days. If they weren’t bedridden with a fever then they were stuck in the outhouse wishing that they were. It was a terrible time to be there, but by the end of it if anything their faith had increased, even though the swamp didn’t understand exactly how.

Its retribution was supposed to make them run in terror or succumb to sickness, instead it had somehow made them put more faith in their strange god, and as its influence grew, the swamp's domain faded and shrank. It was a frightening phenomenon that could be solved only one way: war.