Chapter 1: Ch. 01 – Blood Money

He ambushed Cutter when they were slogging through the mud and pulling together to get their raft a higher up on shore. Instead of following his heave up with ho, Riley shoved a foot and a half of dull steel in his partner’s side. The struggle that followed was brief, and by the time Riley had finished gutting Cutter like a fish, he barely had the energy to cry out in pain. After that all could do was cough up blood and lay in the mud while he tried in vain to hold his entrails in. He didn’t even have the strength to stop the traitorous curr from doing a bit of preemptive grave robbing as Riley rifled through his pockets for the map and whatever other coins he might have had on him. “Two shares is good, but one share is better, don’t you think chum?” Riley asked, smiling that rotten smile as enough blood drained from Cutter’s jagged wound for the whole world to fade to black. That should have been it for poor old Cutter. He shouldn’t have been able to remember anything else after that. A bad end for a bad man. After all - no one is supposed to remember what happens after their own murder, right?

That’s not where the story ended though. Instead something that vaguely remembered being Cutter stood there over his own corpse while he was watched his partner mutilate his body for a few coins. He couldn’t do anything to stop it as Riley broke several fingers to get his rings off, and followed that up by bashing him in the face a couple times just to pry loose his two gold teeth. Even when it came to getting rid of the body he wasn’t gentle - just shoved the hole in his guts full of stones before dragging him into three feet of water and letting him sink into the murk of the fen’s deep mud where no one would ever see him again. Cutter might have done the same thing to the corpse of his partner of course - waste not, want not, and all that. He would have at least had the good sense to wait until the job was done, and they’d gotten that pile of gold out of the swamp and downriver, though. Killing anyone before you had eyes on the goods was about the dumbest thing a thief like Riley could do, but that didn’t stop him from doing it anyway. Cutter’s memories didn’t stop even after his eyes were blinded forever and his lungs filled with water though. Things just kept right on going after that. Cutter even smiled as he watched the look of horror bloom on that weasel Reilly’s face when he tried to open the blood soaked treasure map and found it hopelessly ruined. That last memory would last forever, even after the names and details of everything else dissolved in the murky water. Even after the carp and the crawfish reduced him from a feast to a skeleton a little more every day he would remember that moment of frustration and joy. 

Riley still dug for the treasure that day, just as they’d planned to do. He got close too. Painfully close. He found the traces of something buried and he dug up the empty chest that Cutter had put down there as a decoy. The look of disappointment was grand, but not as good as the raging and sputtering that followed until he broke his shovel beating the chest in frustration. If he would have only dug two feet further he would have found the bags of old imperial coins and grave goods they’d slipped off the barge when they’d stolen them from the adventurers who’d won them fair and square. He didn’t though. He stopped just short of the finish line. 

He left that day empty handed and in search of a new shovel and a better plan. If he’d left with the gold then Riley would have dragged it off to some city where he could live like a king for a few years, and the echo of the partner he’d left decaying in the bog would have faded entirely. He would have drifted away to whatever eternal reward awaited cutthroats and confidence men. He didn’t though. He left the swamp with nothing but bloody hands and a couple gold teeth for his trouble. He’d tried to steal everything but come away with almost nothing, and that thought kept the wraith of his partner right where he was, to bask in the misery of the traitor and anyone else who would come after his treasure. 

Things grew more jumbled after that, as days and nights blended together. Cutter blamed it on the mist, as he stood there at his lonely vigil, clinging to the bitterness of his betrayal like the needle of a compass. If he wasn’t going to get to spend that shiny on a lifetime of wine and women then no one else would neither. After a few weeks he wasn’t really a person anymore, or even a memory of a person really. He was too diffuse for that. He was a handful of memories mixed with a need for vengeance that slowly spread among the pools and bogs, drifting outward like a poison. 

That first day Cutter was stuck to the spot where he died, but as his blood drifted outward, and the bugs that fed on his flesh wandered further afield, he had a wider reach. The only problem was that by the time he could reach the treasure he’d so carefully buried so deep in the muck, he could barely remember how they’d managed to swipe all that gold in the first place. He knew they’d stolen it from adventurers that had pillaged it from an ancient crypt, and that he’d planted a deadhead log so Riley could ram it and sink their skiff on the way up river, but he couldn’t remember quite how he’d gotten those casks this deep into the fen. A few days later he couldn’t even remember that much. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t even a ghost anymore - he was a mist - a fog of greed that would never let anyone take the score he’d died for. 

Riley came back though, over and over again. He spent months digging and searching on boggy island after flea bitten sand bar without success. Day in and day out he traipsed through the swamp, digging new holes where old holes had filled and faded away. It was enough money that he would have a hard time spending it in a lifetime, so it was worth finding, even if it took half a lifetime to dig up. Anyone might have done the same thing. Every day he looked for it, he fed the darkness growing in the Fen though, and every time he raged in frustration at another empty hole, the treasure sank a little lower into the earth - forever out of his reach. It was these outbursts that fed the shade of his partner. He couldn’t do anything but exist and hate. He couldn’t defend the treasure or summon minions to do it for him. He could watch though, and he could feed on the frustration of the man who searched, and on his hatred of the murderer. 

The murderer consulted soothesays and arcanists. Sometimes he came back with little toys like dowsing rods and charms that did nothing. Occasionally he even brought the hedge wizards with him. The con artists spent days leading the bastard in circles, but the ones with a real gift only found a growing malevolence in those murky waters and left almost immediately never to return. They sensed the light fading from this place as surely as the egrets that had stopped nesting here in the year since his betrayal. The dark waters and deep rushes were still full of life of course, but that life was changing. Ducks and cranes chose to land in other wetlands along the river, but in their place Shoebills and Bloodbeaks started to become much more common. 

The murderer didn’t notice though. Instead of running from the festering darkness, he built a place to stay atop the one place was sure the treasure wasn’t: the empty chest. It was a terrible excuse for a shack - just sticks lashed to sticks to make a place sleep. The floor was a foot above the highwater mark, and the roof was thatched well enough that it mostly kept the rain off, with a large flat rock in the center just big enough to make a small cooking fire without burning the whole place down. It was a sign that he’d exhausted his meager savings staying in town, not that the shade cared. All it cared about was that, instead of feeding on it’s murderer for a few hours at a time it could do it all day long. Things became more vivid after that.

The murder could only spend half his time hunting for treasure, because he had to spend the other half hunting or fishing for food, but that only made things worse for him. The more he ate of the swamp, the more he became a part of the swamp. It could touch him now. It could slide its fingers deep into the man’s twisted little mind and fan the flames of greed so that he would never give up. In time the swamp was surprised to discover that all sorts of new torments became possible as well. It couldn’t just make him stay - it could torment him on levels it hadn’t known were possible. Those torments that turned the trickle of life force he’d been siphoning off his betrayer into a flood. 

Dreams were the easiest way to hurt the man that was foolish enough to dwell in its depths. The shade could invade the bastard's dreams most nights when his defenses were lowest and make him remember what he’d done to his partner. Even if the swamp couldn’t really remember the details anymore the murderer still did. Most of the time it could only remember that look of disappointment when the murderer realized the map had been smeared into illegibility by his partner’s life blood, but when he was in the head of his murderer, it could remember what it was like to have a name and hands. It could remember other things too - like what it would feel like for his reanimated corpse to hold Riley’s head under the brackish water until the bubbles stopped. It could teach the murderer things too. It could teach him what it felt like to be devoured by the denizens of the fen. These dreams were almost always rewarded with screams, as the murderer bolted up from his nightmares. 

The real nightmare was all around him though, and he was too stupid to leave. He stayed, and day after day he sank further into the mud, and the madness, feeding the one thing he wanted most of all to stay dead, because he couldn’t let go of that treasure. 

After dreams came diseases. It was a harder thing to do, that required the swamp to work through insects and spoiled food because it had no hands of its own. All it had was a desire to make its murderer suffer as long as possible, and the best tool for that turned out to be sickness. The first fevers came on tiny wings. Malaria. Swamp shivers. Grey fever. For over a year the murderer had managed to avoid all of them, but in the space of a month was infected with all three, almost back to back. After that the swamp let him recover from death's door just enough to avoid killing him before he followed with Giardia and Goblin Guts. Every day was hell after that, and every night was worse. Not just because he couldn’t manage to keep much of anything down, but because he was too sick to fulfill the need to be out there looking for the swamp’s treasure, and it ate at him as badly as the disease did. Any sane person would have left by now. 

There was no sanity in Cutter’s Fen though - only the dead and the damned. 

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