Chapter 8: Silence is Golden
In the weeks and months that followed the massacre, the swamp was at peace. Its zombie minions retreated to the tower with their bloody spoils, returning to the depths to continue their endless toil, and the swamp continued in perfect silence without anyone to disturb it. It had everything it wanted - the blood of the innocent, gold for its hoard, fresh bodies to conduct dark experiments on, and no new enemies seeking to steal from it. Everything was as it should be.
Well - almost everything. The splinter that was the holy ground remained, and the disparity was more galling than ever now that the darkness held an unquestionable sway over the lands that surrounded it in every direction. In fact, its domain covered everything from the forested hills in the west to the long snaking river that defined its boundaries to the east. Practically the entire watershed had fallen under its domain now.
The swamp hoped that in time, the lack of believers would see that last speck fall to darkness as well because it never wanted to touch that holy fire again. The domain of gods almost certainly needed the devotion of its adherents in the same way that the wraith needed the blood of living things, so it would simply starve it out, until the purpose of the brick building on the hill faded from memory. Then it would be able to help itself to all the bodies buried there. That at least was something to look forward to.
For now though it merely drifted in and out of consciousness, becoming as placid as the stagnant waters it controlled for miles in every direction. It might have lain there forever dormant if its hunger had not stirred once more. It had been seasons since it had tasted the blood of man, and during the fall it grew restless. There was nothing to harvest, and no further places to stretch its influence, though. Neither of those facts did anything to quell the gnawing sensation that started off as a minor inconvenience and slowly became all-consuming over the course of weeks. Once it needed nothing but its small golden hoard. Now that it had a small army of minions to maintain, though, its core of avarice would never suffice, not without a much larger and bloodier pile of treasure at least.
Day by day its zombies slowly went dormant for lack of sustenance, until one day the endless labyrinth beneath the tower was finally just catacombs for the bodies of the dozens of victims it had accrued in the last few years. In the end all that was left was the silent Lich at its core - encased in its golden shell. The swamp screamed in frustration at this turn of events but could do nothing to stop it. Its rage called out into the ether, making flocks of waterfowl take flight at the sudden disturbance. Then things were quiet once more as the wraith at the heart of the swamp's darkness finally drifted off to sleep once more, however unwillingly.
A bell can’t be unrung though, and like called to like, so once the winter passed and the wheel of seasons turned to spring once more, new life returned to the swamp. No one new took up residence in the fishing village that was already halfway returned to nature, but trappers and hunters from other places nearby came to poach its minks and alligators before they left again. The darkness was too weak to pull them screaming into the muck, but it invaded their dreams and made sure they left with fevers and boils in exchange for their haul.
Then the lizards showed up. In life, the small parts of the swamp that were Cutter, Riley, and Albrecht had heard of the lizard men. Some parts of them even worried they would encounter them in the very swamp that they were now a part of. They’d never seen them before though. Now that a group was moving in, not so far from the tower itself though, they were impossible to ignore. At first the wraith feared that the group was a warband, intent on taking its treasure while it was defenseless. Desperate fear shot through the Lich as it sat on its dark throne, about what would happen next without the power to defend himself. That it would be torn apart for the gold shell and the mummified core that had given the swamp so much understanding of how to use the darkness would fade away to dust.
In the end though, they spurned the tower as having the stink of man and set up camp on the sandbars that dotted the lagoon that was expanded by that desperate treasure hunt years before. There they caught fish, built crude structures, and sunned themselves. It was a simple life for simple creatures. The swamp appreciated that. Once it saw that they had no care for riches or secrets, it was no longer afraid of them. Even though they wore loincloths and used crude spears they were little more than animals and would do nothing to trouble it.
The only problem was that they were so inhuman they were beyond its reach to feed off of. The swamp would receive some slight essence whenever they brought down a creature in a hunt and their blood splashed into the muck, but they weren’t like the men who had once dwelled here. Their scaly skin kept out the bugs that would trigger its worst fevers, and their minds were just primitive enough that they were all but beyond its reach. Still their presence was enough to stir the swamp to wakefulness most days - if only to watch and understand its newest residents.
During the long hot summer when the waters melted away beneath the blazing sun, some of the lizards began to take refuge from the heat in the ground floor of the tower, and sometimes in the basement that served as the entrance of the labyrinth itself. They never wandered far from the light though and never once brought a torch with them. That was good, because even with all their hunting the darkness only had a handful of zombies moving - and it wouldn’t be nearly enough to stop a hunting party of the well-muscled lizardmen. It did have one added benefit. This deep in its place of power, the voice of the darkness was the loudest. Even if it couldn’t really understand the minds of the primitive creatures, here at least it could touch them. It could give them nightmares and taste their fear. Over the long hot months that was how the wraith occupied its time. With the alien dreams of reptiles while they regulated their temperature with its shade. It was a symbiotic relationship.
Then one day as the temperatures started to fall and the rains returned, they stopped coming to the tower. Instead, they started shunning as they’d always done. They did something else too though. They started to erect a totem. It was a crude and ugly thing. It had watched them carve it for some time without real interest, but as they embedded it in the ground near the tower the darkness finally understood what they were attempting to worship. The length of the thing was carved and colored with crude dyes to represent different animals that they hunted. There was a catfish, followed by a deer and a blood beak. They went all the way up the pole, one by one. The lizardmen were second from the top, and the only thing above them was a bright yellow skull. Suddenly everything clicked. That was supposed to be a golden skull - they were venerating it as the most powerful creature in the swamp.
It was a surprising turn of events, but not an entirely unwelcome one, especially after essence started to flow from their primitive ceremonies. It might never understand the reptile creatures, but it was clear from the way that they sacrificed to him that they viewed him as a vengeful deity with the power of life and death over them, which it supposed was true in a way. It had great power over this primitive group, just not as much power as it would have if they were human. Its desire to find a way to gain strength from their suffering waned as their sacrifices to it increased though. First it was just choice bits from a hunt, or shiny bits like shells or tree resin that they offered up to it. In time though, the offerings increased as their tribe swelled in strength. Once during the winter, they even brought back a hunter they’d come across on a hunt of their own. He was gravely wounded, but they didn’t strike the killing blow until they’d forced him to kneel in front of their crude altar. Only then did the stone knife cut his throat deep enough for the flint to graze the vertebrae.
The drumming and dancing went on long into the night after that sacrifice, and the darkness could feel the essence from it wafting up on the breeze like the smell from a delicious meal, but the meal itself was what made it drool. For the first time in almost half a year it had blood. It had once again tasted real death and suffering, and it longed for more. The next morning, they dumped the body down the stairs in the tower and it was never seen again. The flesh did little to sate the tower's reawakened hunger, but there was no one else to devour. There wasn’t one man left anywhere in the swamp right now, so the darkness was forced to cope with the pangs from its reawakened appetite.
With the steady supply of essence from the tribe, the swamp started digging its maze again. It was only a trickle of power - and not enough to raise its whole army back up, but it was enough to pursue its goal of hiding its greatest treasures ever deeper in the earth, and ever farther from the grasping hands of men. In the years that followed, the lizardmen prospered and their tribe grew rapidly. During seasons when hunts went poorly and fish were scarce, the swamp would even send them large animals in response to what it imagined were their ceremonies beseeching mercy and sustenance from him.
The darkness was not well equipped to show mercy to even creatures like this, but it had a vested interest in them now. They worshiped him as a sort of god, and it was incumbent on it to make the flock grow, if only so it had more worshipers in the future.
In the months that followed the darkness sometimes wondered if that was how the divinity that still held tenaciously onto its little patch of ground around its temple still felt. Were they once a minor spirit in some far-flung village? Did it perform minor miracles as its faith spread from town to town until it ended up with a backwater temple hidden in its swamp? It was certainly possible. Maybe that’s all the gods really were. Spirits that lasted long enough for most people to know them by name. If any of that was true, then the swamp supposed it was a minor deity by now - a demigod of a sort, and to at least one tribe of lizardmen that was true. It was a start, it supposed, but it was mostly just relieved that they didn’t seem to care at all for trinkets of gold and silver.
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