Tenebroum

Chapter 7: Claiming the Village

One day the fishermen didn’t come home. The day started normally enough, with a crisp sunrise in reds and oranges that failed to entirely burn away the mists which lay heavily on the lagoon and the surrounding fens. Wives gave their husbands cloth-wrapped parcels for lunch and kissed them goodbye, unaware that it would be for the last time, and then the men of the village packed up their nets and crab pots and went out onto the water. Everyone went about their day like tomorrow would be the same as yesterday. It wasn’t, though. Things would never be the same again.

Even in the afternoon, when children were supposed to quit playing and come home for their chores, the docks were still empty. The skiffs and dinghies that were all this town could afford were supposed to be tied up, and the men that spent all day working them should have been heading home to their families, but they never came back.

Not one ship that left that morning was back by sunset, and the silence was deafening. By nightfall, a couple of the hunters and woodsmen returned. However, their stories made the absence of almost all the other men of the village that much more ominous.

The stories of the survivors were all slightly different, but to a man, they felt like they were being hunted that day. One old trapper said that someone unseen in the shadows of the mangroves had their eyes fixed upon him for the whole day. They tracked him just as he was tracking his own prey.

Another said that the deer they followed made it almost too easy on him before it darted into a shadowy grove that was dark enough to hide almost any evil. Something made him decide not to follow that doe any further, and he’d come home empty-handed only to find out how lucky he was to come home at all. It was only those hunters that had experienced an intuitive flash of worry or that made it back. In a single day, the sleepy village had lost a third of its people and almost all its strongest men.

They felt like they were being hunted, of course, because that’s precisely what was happening. The darkness in the swamp had grown tired of slowly losing its grasp on the dreams and the blood on its only actual inhabitants. There was only so much essence that could be collected from the web of animal and insect life that suffused its domain.

Real power - the power to raise the dead and change the weather - that required victims, and if nothing changed soon, the whole village would once again be entirely beyond its reach. That was intolerable! It would not be denied its own livestock. The swamp would have gnashed its teeth in frustration were it not entombed in a golden sarcophagus.

The light of the villagers’ faith flourished while the darkness of the swamp faded. So, for the first time in almost a year, the digging beneath the tower stopped. It was the last thing the swamp wanted, but it couldn’t be helped. It needed fresh blood more than the feeling of safety that came from escaping the light.

With as much urgency as it could muster, the zombies marched out into the murky depths of the lagoon over the following days. Every single one of them did so eventually, leaving the dark heart of the fens exposed and unprotected for the first time ever. It wasn’t concerned. The only thing that could hurt it was one tiny patch of land that it would steer well clear of. Everything else in the swamp - even people were just food waiting to be eaten, and it was starving.

Time was often elusive to the spirit of the swamp. Sometimes whole seasons could pass by without it noticing anything had changed, but the prospect of blood and flesh kept it focused on the task at hand as it formulated a plan. It could just attack the village again. It had the forces to crush such a paltry place, and the losses would be so slight as to be meaningless to it.

Then it thought again of that temple - that cursed speck of land that foiled it the last time - who knew what would happen if it attacked there again so soon. No, it decided that it was better to kill as many as it could as far from their homes as possible lest they retreat to that island of safety. Humans thought that they were safe during the day - that it could only hurt them in the night. Underwater its murky waters, it was always dark, though, and it was there that its undead minions waited patiently.

Its servants stood where fish were thickest because, after all - almost all the creatures of the swamp belonged to it too now. When one controlled every last detail, it was very easy to bait the hook, and as a consequence, every net that was cast that morning got tangled on the rotting limbs of its zombies. Some men never even managed to pull their haul onto the boat - they just fell into the dark water, which was soon stained even darker with their blood.

Those that did manage to pull a zombie into their boat didn’t fare much better. Even if they had a weapon handy, none of them managed to inflict a fatal blow before their throats were ripped out or they were strangled to death. It was a grim and silent massacre. Every last fisherman died within the same hour, but other than the swamp and its minions, nobody saw a thing. The same was true for most of the woodsmen. Only some of them realized there was something amiss before they walked into their very own ambush.

For the next week, almost everyone huddled in the safety of their homes and prayed to their goddess for protection; only a few thought to flee while they still could. The ones that fled the swamp while it was otherwise occupied were the only ones that would live to tell the tale. Without any boats, they still managed to slog through miles of mud and bog, leaving the ever-widening boundaries that the darkness controlled. They were the lucky ones - but the swamp didn’t mind. Word would spread, and the tale would attract other explorers and adventurers looking to unravel the secrets of blackwater fen.

Those that stayed thought that it was their God who was saving them from whatever had taken away nearly all of the husbands and fathers of the village, but the light’s blessing only kept the fevers at bay. Those that prayed for the return of their loved ones would soon get their wish in the darkest way possible.

The week of peace wasn’t a blessing, though. It was only ever a by-product of the time it took to get those fresh corpses back to the tower for dark and nameless rituals that would nearly double the size of its army. Beneath the tower, rituals happened every night as the swamp poured its dark magics into the corpses of its latest victims and brought them lurching to life.

Every evening a row of waterlogged corpses was laid out on the bloody septagram in the heart of the labyrinth, and every midnight a new vanguard of its servants rose to their unlife. They were unwilling and fought the process, seeking only the sweet release of death, but they had no choice. Their souls might swirl and struggle, but eventually, they were all forced to submit to their new master.

The deathly moans and inhuman chants dragged them back to their flesh, kicking and screaming; there was nothing they could do to stop it. The swamp would see them toil for decades or centuries more, but only after it forced them to murder their own friends and neighbors in the coming days. The grief and anguish of the swamp’s own servants fed it almost as much as their murders had. Even in their resistance, they nourished that which they hated most.

Once the darkness was done, though. Once its army was on the move, only the temple grounds were truly a safe haven. None of the other buildings in the village was strong enough to hold back an implacable enemy for very long. So, on the ninth night, after the men had vanished, they finally returned to the village when everyone was asleep.

As one, the swamp rose up again as a tide of rotting flesh from the water, intent on ruining the village and claiming every last soul within it for its own. All the doors were locked, and all the windows were barred, but it did little good. Once the screams started, they didn’t stop for hours. Each household called to their neighbors for help, but they were all too busy fighting their own battles to save anyone else. It was the largest tragedy the swamp had ever beheld, but the dark spirit of the fens gloried in it.

It was a night of screams and struggles where zombified corpses returned home to devour and slay their loved ones. Some families even unlocked their doors for their loved ones, making the killings that much faster. It was a vile sight that no feeling person could look upon without having their heart break.

The darkness of the swamp had no feelings, though. It was just a golden shell around the mummified remains of a broken mage. It cared only for fear and pain, and tonight it drank its fill of both. The only thing better than tasting the blood of another victim was tasting the anguish of a woman who was being strangled by the zombified corpse of what used to be her loving husband. It was deliciously wicked, and the swamp’s only regret was that it had to massacre them all in a single night rather than coming back to do this over and over again.

In the morning, there were only bloodstains and broken windows to mark its passing, along with the six survivors that had barricaded themselves inside the ancient temple on the hill. The love of their God could save them from the swamp’s evil, but it could do nothing to protect them from starvation. After a few days, they had to make a terrible choice: escape while they still had the strength to do so or starve to death waiting for help that would never come.

Those who left the temple to try to make it to a passing ship on the river for help were never seen again, and those that stayed would only have the solace that their bodies would not rise up again to serve the swamp after they died. The lights embrace could save their souls but could do nothing to save their lives.

Everyone else had been dragged away into the depths for dark and unspeakable purposes, and each of them would be reborn into an unwilling afterlife. The strong would be forged into more zombies, and the rest would be impressed into other, stranger purposes. The sheer number of resurrections it had done recently had given the wraith a great many ideas for future experiments, and it was eager to explore even more hideous blasphemies than those it had done so far.

The town had been looted within an inch of its life. What little gold and silver the simple folk had was dragged back to the swamp’s dark hoard, and any tools of iron and steel were added to the stockpiles it would need as the darkness continued to build its true home: the labyrinth. No living eyes had ever seen it, but the deeper its roots stretched into the bedrock, the more certain it was that no one would ever survive to say that they had.