It was hard to believe the world had changed so much in the darkness’s absence, but when it returned its focus to the world beyond its lair, it found the map practically rewritten. It wasn’t just its influence, either. The patterns of both people and mana from the Wodenspine to the Oroza had shifted more than it would have thought possible. Its shadow was still spread across the world, but all the pieces had been rearranged in its absence to the point where the game no longer looked the same.

As it ventured out into the night to gaze upon the world with fresh eyes, it saw that its territory had advanced farther than ever upriver, and the poisoned river slowly bent to its command, connecting the islands of bloodstained territory from the swamp to the capital. The swamp could touch a dozen fishing villages it had never even tasted before now, and through the traces of poison that it had lodged in the spiritual life of the river it could see the patterns of those spirits almost without trying.

As it soared over the river it inspected the life it contained, and was pleased to note that among almost all of it there was the faintest trace of death. Only a year into its plan, and already the mighty river was closer to the swamp than it had ever been before. It was a beautiful sight. Before its protracted battle with the river dragon, the cholerium might have only sickened one in ten thousand. It wouldn’t be surprised if that number had doubled and doubled again in the meantime. Unless it further tainted the wellspring, the swamp didn’t expect the taint to grow much thicker, but that was fine. This was enough for now.

Fallravea showed fresh scars, but it was no longer in ruins. Throughout the city, rubble had been cleared, and new buildings were being erected on the foundations of the old. It was a slow process, but it was that slowness that spoke to the swamp. For the repairs to have advanced so far meant that it had withdrawn from the world for a very long time, at perhaps exactly the wrong moment. There were still wrecked blocks that it could carve out some sort of special purpose, but many of the most geomantically appropriate locations for a second lair were already being occupied by half finished row homes and trading houses. It was a terrible waste. The swamp looked throughout the city for Kelvun, but found him neither in his palace nor in the city, so it shifted its gaze to the southwest, looking for him.

In the red hills it still held sway over most of the land, but in their defeat the goblins had fractured into a dozen different tribes that warred against each other and posed no threat to the men of the region. It would take some time to put those little pieces back together, and the swamp wondered if it was even worth the effort. It still held sway over much of the region, and many of the tribes kept the yellowed skull totems even as they brandished their own. The Blood Smiles, the Dark Claws, the Dog Boys, and so many others. These were the tribes that warred with each other as their numbers slowly regrew.

None of these facts mattered as much as the new outpost of humanity that stood where the Burning Skulls' lair used to be. A mining outpost. The boy had finally done as instructed and begun efforts to mine the precious gold from the cave. As the darkness drifted effortlessly down the shaft, he found new shoring timbers and primitive tracks being laid for mining carts, even though they used donkey driven wagons for now. The efforts were crude, but the shiny ore was leaving the cave a little at a time, and the thought that some of that would eventually end up in its hoard made the darkness burst with greed.

So much so that it couldn’t help but notice how many nuggets were ending up in the miners' tents and the overseers' belts. As the men sat around campfires, they would roll dice and gamble little bits of food and unrefined metal with their fellows. They were drinking and laughing while they played with their stolen wealth that had been filched in its caves. It would have to do something about that, of course, but today was not the day. It would not let anyone get between it and its rightful share of the gold.

The young count wasn’t here either, though the darkness could sense his presence. He’d been here recently enough that it could follow the trail across the moonlit plains toward the swamp. The darkness was neither omniscient nor omnipresent, but at night in its own territory it might as well be. Nothing could hide from it. Certainly not a mind that the darkness had already touched.

It eventually found Kelvun camped in a river on the edge of the swamp. The young man was snoring softly in the largest tent of the group. The darkness glided past the young Count’s guards and his tent flap and walked directly into his dreams to quickly rifle through his memories. It was surprised and even a little impressed by what it found. The pawn was actually thinking ahead, and rather than trying to manage the nonexistent roads from his new mine to the capital, he’d hired mages to build a canal through the swamp. Between that and the river they were planning to divert, they’d be able to make this rugged landscape bloom. The swamp approved of such a slow, long term plan.

More people within its domain was always better, and if thousands of people lived clustered around the swamp, then it could easily afford to make a family disappear every now and again. The bloodshed would be blamed on the goblins, and not on it, so it would be all to the good.

The darkness walked through the young cretin’s mind, but besides the plans he had for what was now his kingdom, he mostly thought of women, and what the other nobles of the region thought of him. It was a shallow pool that was dirtier than the swamp water it called home, and the darkness quickly left when it determined that part of the gold that the Count was bringing back to the capital with him was intended to be delivered to it.

That was the most important thing. The darkness had gone to great lengths to give this worm that power he ached for, and now it would be paid for that work, in gold or in blood. That was all the darkness needed the lordling for now. To mine its gold and populate its land with more victims. As long as he was doing those two things, it didn’t care how frivolously the lad spent his time.

Everything the darkness had seen was strange enough, but as it returned to the heart of its swamp, it was truly astounded by what it saw. What had been a tower and couple small buildings for collecting the river tolls had become a full-blown village while it had been distracted fighting for its life.

There wasn’t just the rickety piers that Kelvun had sunk when he first arrived. Now there were three piers and several small fishing vessels moored at them. Next to those docks were fishmongers, net menders, and two separate bars. For a moment, the swamp could not comprehend so many changes, or the huts that people slumbered in behind them. Where would they have found enough earth to raise so many buildings above the water line?

That was when it noticed the canal. It wasn’t a particularly deep wound. It was only 5 feet deep and almost 15 feet wide, but cut by magic, it traveled straight through the swamp like a line to the north-west. What had once been an unimportant backwater was now the most important crossroads of the region, and it was drawing men to it like maggots to a corpse. The swamp had mixed feelings about that. Part of it wanted to snuff out every last one of these interlopers and fill the new canal in a tide of blood that would be washed out to the Oroza.

It stayed its rage as well as its minions, though.

As good as that would feel, it would be incredibly counterproductive. In truth, nothing that the lordling had done was detrimental to its plans, but the fact that the swamp had not ordered him to take these steps still galled it.

It disappeared into the caverns beneath the tiny boomtown in a puff of mist and re-emerged in its own darkness. Here at least it was comfortable, and it could forget that only a few dozen feet above it were men sleeping in what they thought was perfect safety. It would teach them otherwise, eventually.

The Lich stared into the dark as it considered the variables. There were too many possible plans to consider, and a million ways it could let its attention be divided if it wasn’t careful. In the end, it decided that it would have to gather the goblins back into a single fist eventually, but they were not the only minions in the region. As it surveyed the swamp, looking at the damage that the Count’s canal had wrought on the landscape, it found the lizard men were flourishing once more in the places farthest from man. The swamp would devote some attention to them, it decided, but not before the mages that had cut this scar. As soon as they completed their great work, the swamp would devour them whole. Not only would it bring more elemental knowledge to its library on a topic that was sorely lacking, but it was the only reward that seemed fair for all the hard work they’d spent defacing its home.

Yes, the goblins and the lizards would make fine servants, but the Lich had its sights set on larger targets. When Grod had brought the Stone Fists to heel it had learned much of the monsters that had preyed on the goblins deeper in the mountains. There were no true dragons unfortunately, but there had been ogres, chimera, and wyverns, and the darkness would dearly love to make some truly monstrous creations with the parts that those creatures could provide.

All of that would require a separate entrance, though, it realized as it imagined the logistics. There was no way that it would be able to get the fresh corpse of an ogre down from the mountains, and through the small river entrance before it had completely putrefied. At a thought, it moved two dozen zombies from what they had been doing to a new task: building an entrance to the north-west. If the humans insisted on building a canal through the swamp, then the Lich could use it too.

At least that would be true after it built a deathly ferryman appropriate to the task.

Item by item, the list formed in its mind, getting longer and longer all the time. At first it was just a list of the things it needed to do, but slowly each of those became a seperate list of the things it would have to accomplish to achieve the larger task. Soon it was a long and wandering list that was still growing all the time like a cancer, but as each item was decided on, somewhere deep within its necropolis a servant woke from storage and started shambling through the empty halls in a quest to fufill its master's desire. Sometimes that was a skilled fleshcrafter, but often as not it was a common drudge with simple steel tools.

All of them labored in the sightless dark for the Lich. Its will would be done, no matter how many months or years it took to accomplish.