Tenebroum

Chapter 30: Tainted Waters

In the darkness of the bedrock beneath the swamp, hours became days and days became weeks as the two struggled against each other in a test of wills that resounded through the whole region. The River dragon would lay there quiescent for days at a time before bursting out with sudden unexpected attacks that were as deadly as any undertow. Their clashes caused sudden thunderstorms to spring to life where there had been only overcast skies, and blights to spring into existence where there had once been healthy fields. The amount of essence being burned took almost as much of a toll on the combatants as it did on the world around them, though.

Sometimes these outbursts lasted for only a single moment, like a lightning strike as she threw everything she had into a single fierce attack, and others lasted for week after week as she beat against his barriers with all the patience of crashing waves as she sought to erode his wards rather than shatter them. She proved to be a canny opponent, but in spite of almost losing several times, the Lich managed to retain control of her prison. It was only after the fifth storm surge, though, the Lich knew that it had won.

The Dragon had tremendous power at its disposal, but it was separated from the river and had no way to replenish that power from where the Lich had trapped it, so day by day and outburst by frantic outburst, it grew weaker. Not so weak that the Lich dared to turn its back on it, though. It could feel the binding circle shivering underneath the opposing forces at times as it got so hot from the strain that it boiled the surrounding water.

One of the heads in its library pointed out that without that water to cool it, the apparatus would have long since melted to slag. It was a little irony that the Lich would have to address in the future. It had come too far to leave its fate to the merest of chances. The idea that its unwelcome visitor might have been a creature of any other element, and that it would have to face oblivion as a result, ate at it more than words could say.

Some months later, when the river dragon was no more than a corpse lying weakly in a few inches of remaining water, the swamp was finally able to look at the world again, but beyond starting its laboratories and returning their undead slaves to life, the swamp didn’t care. The opportunity was here. Kelvun could scheme and the goblins could fight and die, but neither one of them could help it to take control of a river and the titanic flows of energy that made their way through it.

The first thing the swamp did when it was safe to look away from the dragon was to have a second ring built around the first, in case it should fail. That much was child’s play, and the forges were relit at once. The second part was much more delicate though.

It was going to weave a second cholerium sieve and use it to see if it could keep the river dragon from expiring completely. After all, that was what the elemental wanted. The swamp could see her eyes begging for death when the woman stared at him from her position on the floor, but even if the Lich’s servants now had a chance of killing her, it would never waste such an opportunity for mere bloodshed. She was more valuable than that.

From here, it could taste the subtle pollution that already flowed through the Oroza. It was dilute enough that it wouldn’t even sicken one man in ten thousand, but it was there, and already the river spirits were choking on it in the same way that a freshwater marsh would as the tides shifted, and the salt overwhelmed whole sections of bog.

Soon the river dragon faced the same treatment, on a vastly accelerated scale, as the swamp began to fill her dwindling pool of water with fresh poison. In small quantities, she just lay there and tried to ignore it, but as the potency increased she once again stirred to life, this time howling with pain and rage at what it was doing.

“A monster like you does not deserve to live,” she screamed, slashing the barrier with her newfound energy.

She sought to use the energy to give her one more chance to tear the Lich’s head off, but that was not to be. It counted on this impulse, and was giving her just enough power to think she had a chance, but every mote of essence she burned to power her attacks lodged a little more of his poison in her soul.

After several more weeks of constant struggle, she finally succumbed to the cholerium and slipped into a coma. The powerful river spirit had trapped itself in the body of a slowly rotting corpse, and it was so lost that even full immersion in the waters of its home might not be enough to ever let it wake up again.

The Lich considered building her a vessel like he’d made for Krulm’venor, but it quickly decided that it would be pointless. Something as proud and angry as the river dragon would never bend the knee, so there was little point in holding it in captivity.

It would have to be yoked to a larger purpose or devoured in total. There was no third option. The possibilities flashed through the mages of his library back and forth, but most had never even imagined that an elemental spirit could get this large, so their ideas were less than useless.

The Lich considered devouring her and integrating her soul into his maelstrom, but she was more powerful than any single soul it had ever consumed before, and the results would be unpredictable at best. The Lich wasn’t even sure what it would want if its thoughts and desires shifted to a point halfway closer to the water elemental. Would it want to stop poisoning the river? Would it become the river? It was impossible to say.

Ultimately, there was only one vessel that it owned that could hope to channel such power: the swamp dragon. The Lich had already been reinforcing that ancient skeleton to deal with the fury of the goblin essence that was being used as tendons and ligaments in the newer version. The Lich had planned to use it to fight creatures such as the river dragon as they sought to stop it from seizing control of the river. It was ironic that instead of using it to slay the river dragon, the two would be melded together to become one.

It turned out that stitching her into place at the heart of the monstrosity was easy enough. Adding enough countermeasures to ensure her control was somewhat harder. In the end, he bound the corpse hand and foot in ornaments of gold and onyx. The gold was an unfortunate choice that had to be borrowed from its hoard, but the Lich had to ensure that water could not corrode the fine lines and delicate inscriptions that went in to their creation. A single misstep could free the monster bent on its death. In the end the jewelry served two crucial purposes though. It not only forced the creature to obey its new master, but it prevented it from leaving the body and trying to flee into some distant corner of the Oroza.

The river dragon remained in a stupor during the long months that the new rib cage of bronze was forged and bolted to the stumps of bone that remained from the original swamp dragon. It was only when the thing made the long crawl from where it had been repaired deep in a swampy lagoon back to the river on a stormy night that the water spirit woke up once more.

“Wh-what have you done!” the tortured spirit silently screamed beneath the water while it took stock of its predicament.

“I have given you a body to match the shape of your soul,” the Lich taunted. “Do you like it?”

“I am not meant to be chained to flesh!” The elemental roared. The sound of its suffering wasn’t enough to breach the surface of the water, but it was enough to wake up every mortal with a sense of self-preservation for miles in every direction. For a moment, each of them rightly feared for their lives. Most went back to sleep, sure it was a dream, but for the river dragon, the nightmare would never end.

It was true, of course. That was the awful part. A creature of pure elemental majesty should never have tied herself to something physical. She’d made a terrible mistake in trying to face a threat beyond her comprehension, and she would pay for that mistake.

“You wore the body of a dead woman, so you could leave the river and challenge a master of death,” the Lich gloated. “It is little surprise that you lost, and now you will suffer the consequences of defeat.”

“I will never serve you!” the river dragon tried to thrash and break her new body of metal and bone, but the wards glowed brightly as they were invoked to keep her from hurting herself.

“Your service is not optional,” the Lich responded. “Starting tonight, you will do exactly what I require. You will prowl the dark water that you used to serve, you will devour the other spirits called Oroza that you used to share the river with, and you will bring me back their essence to fuel my other experiments until the whole of the river is a graveyard, and you are the last of your kind.”

The river dragon’s only response was a wordless scream of pain and tears of rage. “Please, have mercy! Don’t make me do this,” she sobbed, as she started to swim downriver. There wasn’t an ounce of compassion in the Lich’s soul though, and the only thing that filled its heart as it watched her go was triumph. Boundless, overflowing triumph.

She hated her orders with every ounce of her being, but she could do nothing to stop herself from fulfilling them. She might secretly hope that some bigger fish would be able to destroy her, just as she had helped to destroy the original swamp dragon, but that was unlikely. She was a master of water, fitted into a creature built to slay her kind. Even a god of the ocean, if there was such a thing, would be hard-pressed to fight her in her current form.

The swamp dragon had always been fearsome, but now it was a killing machine that would cleave a bloody path down river. It had the rage of whole goblin tribes, the strength of two dozen lizard men, and both of those things were powered by the ethereal heart of a captured water dragon that was wrapped in layers of runes and enchantments that made it utterly obedient.

It was the finest work that Lich had ever done, but it knew before too long it would dream up some new dark servant that would make the dragon pale in comparison. It only needed inspiration, because it had all the time in the world.

After basking in its triumph, the Lich finally turned back to its other servants. It had been almost a year since it had started its fight with the river spirit, and in that time other matters had surely developed that required its attention.