Chapter 22: Ch. 22 – Extinguished

Even before the battle in far off Holt was finished, the rider emerged. Its head breached the surface of the muddy pool at the north-western edge of the swamp just before its mount stepped onto the muddy shore. It wasn’t the edge of the darkness’s territory, but it was the closest place that any of its undead servants could wait out the harsh light of day. In the plains there was no place to hide, and though the red hills were drenched in death, they were still inhospitable to undeath.

It didn’t matter that the pool was only two feet deep, or that on its strange mount, the dark rider was almost eight feet tall. Until moments ago, it had been nothing but a pile of bones and shadows. It was more magic than man, and scarcely counted as real according to most definitions of the word. The core was necromantic, and the steed that its messenger rode on was made of bones, but the rider wasn’t a ghost. 

It was barely a shade, and the souls that had been stitched together with so many shadows to make it, that the result was practically invisible to the eye. It had only one purpose: To move with greater speed than all the other servants of the lich put together, and even though it had emerged from its hiding place less than a minute ago and was still dripping water, it was already devouring the land beneath it a staggering pace. 

It had a goal and a limited time to achieve it. Accomplishing that was the only thing that would keep it from being consigned to oblivion when dawn broke in eight short hours and an errant ray of sunlight burned it away to nothing. 

The only sound as it moved through the night was the wind in its wake, and the click-clack of the boney steed, as it charged forward with all its might. The lich that had crafted it had no horses. It had slain a hundred adventurers, and half as many knights, but not one had ever brought a mount into its domain, so it had been forced to improvise. The result was a monstrosity of function over form, that would inspire nightmares in anyone unfortunate enough to see it. The body was formed from the large bones of a dozen different men, with more than a few animal replacements from crocodiles and other large predators to make them fit together properly and provide a sturdy place to attach the six powerful legs of the beast. 

Though the human femurs and patellas were used for the upper portions of those legs, they were simply too short for the lower limbs. There, elk bones dominated. Those longer tibias and fibias gave the thing’s legs, a spindly, spidery look that allowed it to reach farther than it otherwise would with every stride. Cloaked in shadows as they were, it would have been hard for an observer to make out most of those details. The shod hooves, by contrast, were very visible as they sparked from the force of almost every step, leaving an angry trail of flickering lights in its wake. Each leg ended in a human hand that had been drowned in molten iron. The results were nightmarish, letting the thing ride over incredibly uneven terrain without slowing, as well as letting it grip the earth so that it could push off the ground powerfully with every stride. 

Powered by magic, and the suffering of the souls bound within it, the steed was tireless, and could travel nearly twice as fast as the mundane horses its very existence mocked.  

The rider carried no weapons or armor. It used no saddle. One hand gripped the reins while its body drifted behind the steed like a flowing cape, and the other held a tarnished bronze lantern. 

As challenging as the other two constructs had been to design and build, they paled in comparison to that evil little thing. It was for that evil little lamp that its rider was leaving the bounds of its territory for the first time. It was the key to everything, but as it glittered and rattled under the starlight, it gave no clue towards its purpose, nor would it until it was time. 

It moved at speeds that humans would never know, but it still took two hours of tireless galloping for the nightmare rider to reach its destination. Even with the trip only halfway over, though, it was clear to the darkness that this servant might not be up to the task. Fingers were missing, fractures were appearing, and the boney head of the mount, an elk skull, was snorting frost with every breath. The Lich didn’t care if the thing suffered. All that mattered was that it completed its critical mission, as the shadowy rider finally dismounted and glided above the abandoned battlefield. 

The bodies of the men had been dragged inside the pitiful walls they had died defending, by their victorious allies. The goblins, though, had been slaughtered to the last, and were left to rot where they had fallen. Their bodies were cool but not yet cold, and only a few embers were all that remained of their once formidable fire magics. That would be enough, though. The wraith drifted over the battlefield, to the remains of a pyre, and then opened its hooded lantern, selected a still smoldering ember, and placed it inside. 

. . .

Now that the darkness had what it came for, it finally let the Gold Skull tribe off the leash. For weeks, it had been struggling to prevent Grod from snuffing out the last lair of the Burning Skulls. Punishments for trying to devour their last enemy within an easy march had included pain, weakness, and nightmares as normal, but eventually the swamp had been forced to add debilitating diseases to that list, temporarily crippling its tribe to hold them at bay. 

That was all over now. 

As soon as its dark rider had begun its trip, the Lich let his goblins off the leash. After that, they needed no urging. Without fire magics to call upon, and with only a few warriors left that were worthy of the name, their gold riddled warrens fell in a few brutal hours. On one side there were less than 50 Burning Skulls, and on the other side there were ten full warbands of Gold Skulls. It was a massacre. By the end of it, there wouldn’t even be enough meat to justify the hunt. That wasn’t what it was about anymore. It was about dominance. 

For the first time in generations, a single chief controlled the red hills, from the pine forests all the way to the base of the mountains. There were still other tribes to subjugate and gather past that, but Grodd had grown into a brutal chieftain thanks to the swamp’s influence, and no one would dare stand against him. 

The Gold Skulls were careful not just to purge the life of every goblin in those warrens, though. In addition to goblins, they hunted down every last totem and effigy, and defaced every image of a blackened skull they could find. Once that was done, they extinguished every fire that was still smoldering. They didn’t know why they did this, but they didn’t need to. It was a compulsion, and the goblins obeyed. In a single night, the fire spirit and the tribe that he had guided for years were all but erased, as if they’d never been at all. 

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As soon as the shadow raised the lantern up, the ember within it caught fire, and it began to burn a dull yellow. Second by second though, that color shifted, slowly turning chartreuse, lime, forest, and ultimately a dull olive color as any real light or heat was bled away from it. It was the ghost of fire, in the same way that the wraith was the ghost of a man. 

That trick had burned out two of his best mages, in weaving the magic. Just as the opposite of life wasn’t truly death, but undeath, the opposite of fire wasn’t truly water. It was stygium. Each of the elements had an anti element, the lich discovered as it researched the subject more, though for now at least he had no need for the other three. Past the veil of life and death, things got very complicated, it turned out. 

The fire spirit hadn’t actually been converted into undeath of course, though that might come later. It was just being bound in place by its antithesis. It would make the experimentation easier.

Once the color stopped shifting, all the remaining mana that was related to that lonely ember began to drift towards the lantern in a slow spiral of faintly luminescent streamers. Souls rose from the corpses of its recently deceased minions in translucent cyan streamers that were dimmer than the waning moon, and sparks and flickers jumped from the ashes of its dying fires in white’s and yellows. 

For perhaps five minutes, the dark rider was surrounded by its own dim galaxy of strange lights. Fiery stars were scattered amidst the colorful nebula, and all of them slowly orbited the shade like a dark fulcrum. Eventually, though, all the light and color faded as they collapsed into the void ember at the center of it all like the black hole it was.

Less than ten minutes after it had arrived, the rider was remounting its still breathless steed and turning back to the south-east. This time the travel was slightly slower to start, and slowed down further as it went. By the time it reached the swamp's edge, four hours later, the horrific mount was down to three fully functional legs and limping badly. 

It would have to be scrapped, unfortunately, the swamp decided, but it had learned valuable lessons on its failure points that would help when constructing its replacement.

The thing crumbled back into a pile of bones at the bottom of a pool of water once that determination was made, and the dark rider continued on its own. From where it stood, it had thirty miles left to cover by sunrise. For a human, that would have been an impossible distance, but the shade’s steps didn’t sink into the muck, and it ran effortlessly across the surface of water and quicksand alike as it struggled to reach the safety of the dungeon. 

For it, the water offered no safe refuge. Any attempt to hide there from the sun would extinguish its valuable cargo and make the whole night meaningless. The void ember was worth more than the shade. It knew that, and so it knew that failure would only be rewarded with oblivion. 

The swamp knew that too, though, and as dawn approached and the distance still looked too great, mist began to boil up from the stagnant waters. The fog couldn’t shield a creature of pure shadow from direct sunlight, but it could keep the predawn twilight from turning its servant into a puff of acrid black smoke. 

The dark rider stepped down into the sweet embrace of the Lich’s dark tunnels only minutes before dawn finally broke. It had not only avoided a gruesome and painful death, but it had successfully brought the lich the thing that it wanted most. 

Trapped in that small brass lantern was the suffering spirit of Krulm’venor, a petty godling that had once been so much more than the flickering spark that he was now. There was so much that it could teach the darkness now, whether it wanted to or not. 

The lich was very pleased. It had not yet decided if the fire spirit would be a meal, an experiment, a toy, or a servant yet, but no matter how it decided to use it, it would always be a trophy that it could add to its hoard. It was one more piece of evidence that nothing could hope to prevail against its patience and cunning. 

Tonight it had conquered the red hills and united the goblin tribes therein under its banner. In time every scrap of land, and everything that dwelled on it would belong to it too, no matter how long that took to come to pass.

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Author's Note: This was one of my favorite chapters to write so far in this story. Probablly number two, just behind The Broken Bard of Blackwater. Certain things need to happen to move the story forward, but I love it when I have a chance to get as weird as possible. I feel like a six legged skeletal horse and necromantic un-fire certainly qualify. 

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