Tenebroum

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.

“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 mage’s magic cut through the mist and shadows that made up the wraith like the noonday sun, and it wanted nothing to do with them. So the second threw himself from the window into the shallow water to enjoy a short life amid the mud and worms, leaving only a few men that had pissed themselves and a burning building behind him. Before he hit the water, though, everyone else with a weapon met with an equally grisly fate. It was only when the gang was dead that the mage got off the boat and began to survey the island. “Yes - this will do, I think,” he said to himself, “This will do nicely.”

“What will become of us,” one of the surviving slaves asked. He was strong enough to have survived two rounds of the shivers, but he didn’t look like he would make it through a third.

“Why - you’ll work for me, and when I have no further need of you, I’ll set all of you free.” The mage said, not bothering to look at any of them. “Now unload the boats and bring the tools. We’ll need to knock some of these huts down before we can put up the circle.” The men got to work after that - knocking down many of the structures they’d built up so carefully until now. This should have pleased the swamp, but the swamp knew that nothing good could come from this new arrival. It slunk away into the shadows to feast on the corpses of the recently dead to recover its strength and keep an eye on all of the goings on from a safe distance.

The fisherman left at once, and everyone else labored for several days until the mage pronounced their preparations completed. The swamp could feel the change - like a numbness in the center of its very soul. The mage had cleared and leveled the land enough to create a broad ring on the island that only existed to safeguard the treasure. Once that was done, he’d lit a brazier. Then, he added potent incense to drive back the fetid swamp air from his ritual site before adding granite dust mixed with salt in a perfect circle while chanting, causing the whole area to thrum with geomantic power. The weather smelled of storms, but even if the swamp called to the thunderheads, there was no way the rain would come in time to stop what was coming next.

The swamp was afraid. It had stayed clear, so it wasn’t trapped inside the circle, but its treasures were. There were a few coins and pieces of jewelry in the waters surrounding its lair. Still, it was less than nothing in the face of its great golden heart, and right now, it could barely feel its sole reason for being. Was this mage really going to dig up its treasure in a single moment? Was it going to do in a day what the murderer hadn’t been able to accomplish in years? That part of his soul was frothing with rage while the rest sank into fear and despair. That’s when the ground started to move.

It started somewhere below it. Below the layers of clay that it had claimed, in the bedrock that would forever be too hard for the dark waters of the swamp to penetrate. What was once silent and still was rumbling and cracking. Then the rock began to rise higher. It was an impossibility, but it was happening just the same. The slaves fell to their knees as the earth shook, even as the mage stood there unperturbed while his chanting reached a crescendo. The rock was rising in a handful of broken spires - like teeth or claws, and the swamp could feel them tearing at its underbelly. Was it not enough to rip the treasure from its beating heart? Was it also going to pierce the clay so the infected waters could be lanced and drained before reaching the village?

The swamp recoiled in anguish as the first outcropping pierced the bloodstained soil of its domain. Like the mage that summoned it, the rock was entirely beyond its control. It was an affront to everything it had been building - a monument to frustration, but one built within mere feet of its gold. The first outcrop wasn’t the only one, either. Soon there were half a dozen, and each was a finger in the fist gripping the core of the wraith’s being. It could feel itself being damaged by the ritual. Even if the rocks hadn’t pierced the soil in such a way as to drain the swamp, they’d still pierced it in a way that was probably fatal, and there was nothing it could do.

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.