Time no longer made sense to the swamp. It hadn’t bothered to watch the passage of days before now. One life rarely mattered to it, and a single day never did.
Instead it relied on the slow arc of seasons to make sense of the world around it, but now that was impossible. All it marked was the lines on the mage’s face and the length of the mage’s beard. Albrecht - that was the man’s name. He’d heard it a thousand times, and the swamp clung to it as the only piece of flotsam that mattered in the wreckage that was its domain.
Albrecht wasn’t a young man when he’d first entered the swamp’s domain, but after being here several years, he was finally starting to show his age in places. A new wrinkle here. A touch of gray there. That was all there was to show the passage of time while he regularly shattered the swamp’s ability to think.
Even the fact that the fishing village across the lake was now well within its domain didn’t matter nearly as much as Albrecht’s receding hairline. In time the swamp might yet devour the poor net menders and fishwives of that dismal little place, but for now all it could do was inflict the stray nightmare while its power was continually siphoned off for magical experiments that the wraith couldn’t hope to understand.
It would never have understood them if the man’s apprentice hadn’t died. Fortunately, one day the warm climate proved too much for the anemia that Barnabas had suffered from since long before he set foot in the Fen. The swamp never would have cared about the soft, pale, boy, beyond how he’d tasted to the worms either, if the mage hadn’t decided that his apprentice would be good for one more forbidden experiment done in secret in the attic above the sixth floor.
It was in the middle of a terrible storm, drawn in a circle of Albrecht’s own blood that a fragment of the swamp was suddenly forced behind the dull eyes of Albrecht’s dead apprentice. It was a jarring experience. One moment it was prowling the reeds in a bid to feel more present in the jarring mess that had become its existence and understand the current edges of its domain. The next it was trapped in a body of slowly decaying flesh for the first time in years. At least part of it was.
Even in the tower he could still feel the swamp outside. It was like being both the troubadour on stage in an alehouse as well as being the crowd that watched him play. It was disconcerting and dizzying, all at once. For the first time in years the swamp could think in more than pictures and urges. It could think in words and sentences. Even though this brain was two days dead and slowly turning to mush it could still think better than acres of fetid water and a million insects.
Albrecht leaned back, in visible shock that his apprentice had opened his eyes, though he recovered quickly enough.
“Barnabas - is it really you?” the mage asked, his voice full of trepidation.
The recently deceased Not-Barnabas slowly sat up, raising himself first to his ass, and then to his knees. Standing only proved possible by leaning heavily against the wall, and whether it was because of the decaying limbs or the unfamiliar body, any sort of complicated movements were impossible. Not-Barnabas wanted to lunge for the old man's throat right then, but the distant jingling sound warned him that his right leg was attached to a manacle, and a quick glance verified that he was chained to the floor. Even that might not have been enough to dissuade Not-Barnabas were it not for one more discovery as he flicked his milky eyes around the room.
In this mind and this body, it could do something none of the other souls that made up its messy patchwork spirit could do: it could read. It could read well enough to see that the tome to Albrecht’s right was titled ‘A Treatise on Necromancy and other Forbidden Arts.’ The wraith inside Barnabas didn’t know what any of that meant, but the decaying brain of the body he currently resided in did, and as soon as it shared that information with the spirit, it badly wanted those secrets for itself. Just the word, Necromancy called to it like a long-lost love, and in that moment, it wanted something more than he wanted to return to the swamp that he belonged in.
So instead of trying to kill its mortal enemy the wraith did something it had never done before and forced itself to smile. “Am… Barrrnibusss…” it managed to mouth, feigning recognition to his former master in a way that made the older man suck in his breath in shock.
That started a long, and mostly one-sided conversation where the mage asked his former apprentice questions on death and dying, forcing the swamp to make up one and two syllable answers to questions it barely understood. Did it hurt to die? Do you remember me? What was the afterlife like? As the questions grew longer the answers became simpler and less sensible. Not because the swamp couldn’t answer of course, but because he was bored. It took every ounce of its willpower to play along as long as it did.
Eventually the mage tired of this and went downstairs, leaving all the ritual implements behind, including the book. That was when Not-Barnabas got to work, pulling the heavy tome down onto the floor in the light of the attic's only window so he could read the unfamiliar words and try to puzzle out their meanings. Most of what it read was far beyond the swamp, but it learned that death magic was the least natural and perhaps the most powerful in the world. It was mostly just heretical stories about death lords and necromancers of ages past. In the apprentice’s experience, tomes like this would usually have rituals and formulae for the channeling and execution of elemental magics. Death magic was taboo though, and forbidden to research, so it was much less well understood.
None of that mattered to the wraith though. The formula and stories faded into the background as the meaning seeped into its soul from the secrets written between the lines of the book. The meanings were obscured as if they'd written only for the wraith. The human part of it might not understand what it was reading, but the darkness that it had become resonated completely with that dark message. Many of these powers were already in its grasp, if only it had enough essence to use them.
All in all, it was a remarkable night. When it was done, Not-Barnabus had only one choice, and spent the remaining hours before daylight preparing for it, sure that Albrecht would pay it another visit soon.
It was not disappointed, and hours later under the rays of the noon day sun the mage returned to the attic. Not-Barnabas was sure that the mage thought that alone would protect him from the forbidden things he was doing. The door was unlocked now though, and neither the sun nor the circle would protect him from what came next.
“Did you see any of the gods when you passed, or the underworld after you died?” the mage asked. Not-Barnibus took one clumsy step forward, holding onto the beams, before whispering something almost inaudible.
“What’s that,” the mage asked, leaning forward slightly, just to the edge of his protective circle. “I command you to speak up!” Not-Barnibus took one more clumsy step. It was almost in range of its target now and stood as close as the chain bolted to the floor would allow - that is, the distance it would have allowed if Not-Barnabas had still been attached to it.
During the night it had shattered that ankle and foot to remove the thing. That meant there was nothing to stop it when it lunged for the mage's throat growling, “I’ve seeeen youurr deatthhh…”
The teeth buried deep into Albrecht’s throat for that one surprised moment that the mage’s sense of absolute safety made him let his guard down. All that Not-Barnabas had time for was to bite down before suddenly a spell ripped through it, sending it through the roof of the tower before arcing down deep into the muck below. Every rib in Not-Barnabas’ chest was shattered before it hit the ground, but even as its consciousness faded, and its trapped spirit slowly trickled out into the brackish waters of the fen, the corpse died for a second time with a smile on its face. Killing the mage would have been better of course, but that one bite was enough.
For too long Albrecht held the heart of the swamp prisoner in that tower, but now it had a card to play too. It had a taste of the man’s blood, and that was the perfect vector to slice through the wards and enchantments that the cagey old sorcerer had relied on for too long. Yes - it had been humiliating for a force of nature like the wraith to be trapped in someone else's body, even if only for a short time, but it had been worth it. It knew what powers awaited it, if only it could remove the wizard's boot from its neck, and now it had the perfect way to do just that.
The roof was repaired in a few days, and the mage’s neck healed a few weeks after that, though he would always bear the ugly scar he'd gotten that day. What mattered though, was the future experiments. Up until now, whenever Albrecht cast one of his terrible spells he used the power of the swamp without any regard to the cost, but now every time he tried to drain essence from the true lord of the fen, it was drained from him in equal measure. This wasn’t enough to completely plug the hole in the bucket that had doomed the swamp to such a fitful and hazy existence for so long, but it was enough to make the mage try his tricks much less often. Being bedridden for days tended to have that effect on people.
That was how the swamp recovered while his nemesis faltered. Each experiment and spell grew further apart from the last one as the toll on the Mage’s body became greater, and the wraith’s influence grew.
When the wizard had arrived in the swamp, he’d seemed almost ageless, but now he was aging a year every month or two as the darkness weighed on him and infected his soul. It was in those weakened moments the swamp pushed hard into his feverish nightmares, granting horrors and insights to the man. The mage almost always woke from these fugue states with some new theory or principle to try now, but without really understanding that it was exactly what the swamp wanted from him. That was also when the dreams about the treasure started.
Apparently, Albrecht had heard of the treasure. The tale of Riley’s Riches, the bards called it. The swamp didn’t know the details, nor did it care to, but it knew one treasure more than any other it sorely wished to add to that collection now, and for that to happen, it would finally have to let its hoard be unearthed.