Aestra Wren wrote this account in the First Volume of The Wanderers of the Deeproot Marches, copied from the fever-ridden testimony of a dying man
-Addition by Eonod of Oemon, scarab apprentice: the party never reached Darklight. They were lost and they reached the floating remains of Akermon what is known today as the Staircase. Deyn’s remains were returned to Barrowfen eventually by a group of heroes originating from that town paid by an unknown woman. Their memoirs are available in the great library of Kinetika and are been restored. The account is written in master Eolon scripture form. Deyn’s existence was not so note-worthy if not for his cloak been worn by the late king of Andor Iandor during his last voyage to the haze rift.
The Swamp Drifter
I record now what Deyn described between coughing blood upon my boots. Part of the story I lived to tell the tale, part I wish to forget. I never took gold again for a job that was not meticulously planned. But I was young back then and kind of a scoundrel, in a naïve silly way appropriate for that age.
There are men who walk into Barrowfen believing courage alone can bear them through its muddy traps. The swamp is an unforgiving teacher, especially to those with such audacity.
The swamp is an unforgiving teacher, especially to those with such audacity.
His name was Deyn “Redvale” Alqueth, though by the end scarcely any flesh remained upon him enough to carry the memory of names. He had once been a caravan scout from the free pastures of Erenor or so he said. His left eye twitched when he mentioned his home. Thin shouldered, slender backed, proud beneath layers of hardened leather and tarnished scale armor lacquered dark green against rot-water and mold. His beard had been tied with copper rings from some forgotten lover, and around his neck he wore an angelic charm of smoked quartz that glowed protectively whenever the dead drew near. He intended to reach Darklight City, but no sane man travels there alone.
Yet Deyn entered Barrowfen on his mule, strapping his enchanted spear and a satchel of relics bought from grave robbers in Veneria. His last adventure years brought him a small treasure, enough to get access to the arcane mercants. Among them:
A lantern fueled by skeleton dust that burned blue in the necrotic fogs.
A ring of preserved cedar that repelled swamp leeches and vermin.
Three glass spheres containing blessed sunlight gathered from cathedral mirrors.
A cloak stitched with runes of warding against the Haze storms.
He would need every one of them.
In Crooked Pike, the town inn and hunter’s hall, he managed to hire two mercenaries, me Aestra Wren a devious rogue by profession with enticing pale eyes, and Olphen a forester skilled in the ways of pathfinding and hunting, student of master huntsman Brennivar and an old mate of mine. He meant to keep our group rests short and go unnoticed as far north as possible. After spending a few days at the tavern getting to know each other a bit over the local sweet ale he managed to build some basic trust with us. He finally found the grit and decided it was time. Truth was that if we were real scoundrels it would be easy to kill him of and let him rot in the swamps.
“At some point you will need to sleep.” I told him one night. I need not finish my sentence. He understood he had made a choice. It was a matter if he would follow through.
We looked through the open wooden gates of the city into the buzzing north, somewhere in the sky Therril was starting to feed on the skylight. The fen swallowed the road within a day as if the swamp was eager to make us lost.
Mud rose to our knees with every step. Black reeds sliced the skin beneath the greaves. Clouds of corpse gnats fed upon our neck until the flesh blistered and wept yellow fluid down our collars. Deyn was a bit protected by his ring still the magic could not stop completely the ravenous hunger of the swamp. By the third day the mule collapsed screaming into sucking mire while something beneath the water pulled its legs backward until bone snapped through hide.
Deyn abandoned the carcass as the swamp creature kept screaming and gnawing long after we walked away.
On the fourth evening we found our first undead. Three pilgrims nailed upside down upon cypress trunks, their stomachs split open and packed with swamp flowers. They had not rotted properly. Their eyes still moved.
“Turn back,” one whispered through a throat filled with moss.
The amulet on Deyns’s neck flared white illuminating him with some protection, then the bodies tore themselves free.
The corpses hit the water like starving dogs. Their skin peeled from their arms in long wet ribbons as they crawled toward him. One woman’s jaw hung loose against her chest, attached only by tendons stretched white and glistening.
Deyn thrust his glowing spear through the first skull. Rotten fluid burst across his gauntlet, thick as stew and stinking of opened graves. The corpse did not stop and bit into his forearm while Olphen’s arrows pierced it without result. Its teeth shattered against his vambrace, but dead gums smeared across the steel like spoiled wax. Deyn tore the spear free sideways, ripping half the creature’s face away in a spray of blackened marrow.
The second reached him from beneath the water. Cold fingers slid through the gaps in his armor and gripped his thigh meat. He felt nails entering him before he saw the thing. A drowned priest with bloated skin and blind milky eyes surfaced at his waist and began chewing through leather straps with frantic jerking motions. He tried to use the first sunlight sphere, but his hands were tied between his shield and his enemy. I appeared like a faint breeze; I grabbed the globe from his belt and smashed it against the priest’s skull. Holy radiance exploded across the swamp in a roar of golden fire. Steam burst upward from the undead. Flesh melted from their bones in greasy streams. One corpse staggered blindly into deeper water while its eyes boiled from their sockets.
The priest clung to Deyn until its fingers burned down to charred knuckles. When the light faded, he stood in front of us among drifting pieces of human fat.
But the swamps always take their toll. The bite upon his arm blackened within hours. His flesh hardened around the wound. Veins darkened beneath the skin like roots spreading through earth. Fever struck him so violently his teeth cracked from shivering. He survived by wit more than strength.
Olphen cut fungus from dead trees to draw the poison from the wound. He boiled rainwater inside his helmet using alchemical embers from his travel kit and settled Deyn above the water by binding him to cypress trunks with rope so the swamp things could not drag him beneath while dreaming.
Three full days passed before he could march forward. Once again, we pushed north, crossing a field of floating reeds only to discover too late they concealed corpse pits beneath.
I noticed the bubbles first. Then the smell. The mud ahead shifted unnaturally. Deyn dropped flat just as skeletal arms burst upward where he had been standing. Ancient soldiers chained together beneath the swamp clawed blindly toward sound and warmth. Their armor had fused into their ribcages through centuries underwater. He escaped by scattering dried bloodmeal into the marsh to lure them elsewhere, then leaping from root to root with desperate precision while the dead snapped at our boots inches below. Olphen’s arrows nailed them to tree branches, long enough for us to retreat.
By the seventh day his body had begun to fail. The skin on his feet sloughed off in strips from constant immersion. His lips split apart from fever dehydration. Rot spread beneath his left shoulder where swamp mold entered a cut made by reeds. Still he walked like a madman, because sometimes, beyond the fog, we could see it.
The staircase. Floating impossibly high above the drowned world. An enormous spiral stairway of pale stone ascending into clouds stained green by swamplight. It hung unsupported over the marsh like the spine of some dead god. Chunks of broken masonry drifted around it in slow circles, untouched by gravity.
And atop that impossible ascent stood the shattered remains of an ancient Angelic fortress. Even in ruins, its parts were forming a mountain. Broken towers leaned above the swamp like cracked spears. Immense statues of winged angels lay decapitated along their outer walls. Sections of the fortress simply floated apart from one another, connected only by bridges of glowing chains.
That place became Deyn’s obsession. The final refuge and one last promise of dry stone and fire. We reached the staircase during a storm that turned the fen black as ink.
But the swamp notices too what rises above it. The dead came in numbers then. Not just wandering corpses, it was an army. They emerged silently from the waters carrying rusted weapons and fragments of sanctified armor. Hundreds of them. Ancient holy warriors slain long ago during the Fall of Aspiel. Their flesh hung loose from bone in dripping curtains. Some had no faces left at all, only skulls packed with writhing swamp eels. Others carried swords grown into their forearms by calcified rot.
I climbed while they followed, pulling him with all my might. The pay was not enough but I had already a bad name in town to let this pilgrim die. Step after step into thunder and rain as it gathered and washed upon us like a waterfall from the floating stones above. It was then I heard Olphen scream, hand slipping on rock falling on the undead below. His voice ended like a twig snapping, flesh shred and the scream drowned in blood as mouths devoured him alive. More hands grabbed my ankles from below. I hacked fingers away with a dagger until my arms gave out. One corpse climbed onto my back and bit through the leather at my shoulder. Another drove broken nails into Deyn’s calf muscle and tore downward. I noticed him fainting as I pulled the second sunlight sphere.
The explosion hurled bodies from the staircase in burning clusters. Flaming undead plummeted screaming into the swamp far below. Still more climbed. I reached a broken gate panting, lungs and muscle burning, nearly blind from blood loss. And there I saw the truth. The ruins were not abandoned. An angelic guardian, a massive metal golem remained, the last defense on the staircase. It drifted above the broken courtyards with vast jumps dragging chains of silver fire and pushing away floating remains. Its face smooth and eyeless, muscles like steel pillars.
The undead below continued their approach, indifferent to their steel doom. I collapsed at the gates as rain washed blood through the cracks in the floating stone. The last thing I remembered was the construct lowering its faceless head toward me, while the staircase vanished into storm beneath the clouds, filled with broken undead remains.
Then I awoke in Barrowfen care two weeks later. I survived. Though survival is not always mercy. My employer had died, my friend was slain, another mark on my name.
Though survival is not always mercy.
The rot never fully left me. Even years afterward, I smelled faintly of swamp water and opened graves. In cold weather black fluid seeped from beneath my left-hand fingernails. Sometimes I still stare upward for hours at empty sky as though still watching that impossible staircase above Barrowfen remembering Deyn’s last whispered words.
“The guard remained to protect something beneath the fortress… not keeping the dead out.” He never managed to reveal her identity but the person who gave him the rings was very important to him and somehow related to the reason for his journey. His last breath was drawn with hands on his rusty beard rings, as if they were made from the most precious gold.
I have never returned to the Staircase to learn what he meant but when the rainstorms hit Barrowfen I wake up from the screams of Olphen and the sound of worms eating Deyn’s body away.
— From the First Volume of the Wanderers, set down by Aestra Wren
