The Dead Swamp was, as far as Serenity could tell, not actually all that bad. It helped a lot that they were traveling by flyer; Serenity could remember more than one trip through a swamp where he’d been on foot and that really, really sucked.
Signs of life were everywhere. Despite its reputation, the swamp was filled with life. Plants grew and animals moved around them.
Of course, it was also filled with both death and the undead. They were not very far into the Dead Swamp when Serenity noticed that there was a deathly miasma somewhat similar to the one on Tzintkra; unlike Tzintkra, it was more insistent than simple residue. The same trick of infusing his aura with a mild Eat Death worked fine, fortunately; Andarit didn’t seem to notice either the deathly aura or when it went away.
They were less than an hour into the swamp before they were attacked by an oversized turtle. It caught them by surprise; while they’d seen the turtle in the tree, neither had assumed it would attack.
Perhaps it was a tortoise; Serenity knew they were different, but he wasn’t a biologist so he wasn’t certain how. He didn’t really care, either. Aggressive, with a two-foot-wide shell with everything else sized to match, the turtle was close enough to a monster even though it didn’t have a core.
The turtle jumped off a tree branch and fell into the flyer with the two of them. It landed hard, fortunately knocking Andarit to the side and attempting to snap Serenity’s arm with its beak. The bite might have badly hurt Andarit; as it was, it cracked some of Serenity’s scales and bruised his arm, but it didn’t penetrate. Its feet were trying to dig into whatever they could reach; the forelimbs shredded Serenity’s clothing while its rear legs gouged past Andarit’s limited armor and into her flesh, but it didn’t allow the turtle enough purchase to get a better angle on Serenity quickly.
They weren’t traveling unarmed, of course, and the turtle was using its best weapon hanging on to Serenity’s arm. Andarit had more trouble than Serenity did; the knife he replicated slid into the turtle’s neck easily while her spell had to punch through the turtle’s shell to reach its interior. Her bolt might have been enough, but his strike certainly was; the turtle quickly stopped moving, leaving the interior of the flyer a bloody mess.
Serenity pitched the dead turtle into his Rift before he started the search for a place to stop.
There were no good places to stop and clean the flyer, but staying in a blood-spattered shell was both uncomfortable and dangerous; the smell of blood might attract things more dangerous than a dead turtle. By the time they found a tree with low, large enough branches, Andarit’s hair ornament had already stopped her bleeding; the injuries would heal over the next half hour to an hour while they cleaned out the flyer.
Once it was clean enough, they rinsed the blood off themselves as well and hurried away. Andarit had a Path Skill that could slowly improve how well everything was cleaned, but it had been overwhelmed by the volume; even after getting rid of most of it, Andarit wasn’t certain the spell would finish cleaning their clothes before they had to stop for the night. It definitely wasn’t going to get the flyer quickly.
With that knowledge, Serenity stripped out of his clothing and placed it into his Rift as well; it was there mostly to cover his armor, after all. He was completely covered even without it and reducing the amount Andarit had to clean was helpful. Serenity was also certain they’d run into other attacks. He’d just as soon not run out of clothing before they reached Lowpeak.
They suffered several more attacks from minor wildlife over the course of that day. Andarit was puzzled why they hadn’t encountered any undead, but Serenity knew exactly why. He could feel it when they encountered his aura and they always either died quickly or ran. It was nice, in a way; it showed that the undead in the Dead Swamp were less foolhardy than the undead on the surface of Tzintkra.
Andarit was floored when he explained what was going on. At least, he thought that was why her mouth dropped open and she didn’t say anything to him for about three hours.
They traded off watches during the night, staying still in the dark; after the ambushes, they didn’t want to move forward without both pairs of eyes watching for enemies. Fortunately, they were left alone.
About an hour after they started moving in the morning, Serenity felt the telltale natural mana increase of a ley line. It was soothing and comfortable, far less hectic than the ley lines on Earth even though it was more powerful than most of them. There was a distinct directionality to the mana flow, a slight suction that Serenity was fairly confident he recognized. “Andarit?”
“Hmm?” Andarit sounded slightly groggy. Serenity suspected she hadn’t slept well, but she was doing her best to stay alert anyway.
“We’ve entered a ley line. Do you mind following it for a bit? It feels like there might be a dungeon nearby.” Serenity could only feel the draw from a dungeon when he was close to a ley line and suspected it was a matter of sensitivity; he knew that dungeons could affect ley lines for a much larger area than he could feel and that ley lines somehow affected the ambient mana around them, but he couldn’t feel those effects. It was one of many things he wanted to look into at some point, but it was nowhere near the top of the list. He’d probably get to it some time in the next few centuries.
“A dungeon?” Andarit sounded wide awake suddenly. “Where? Father’s been wanting to find a dungeon in the Dead Swamp for ages.”
Serenity took that as a yes and turned the flyer to follow the suction.
They flew right past the dungeon entrance; Serenity only figured it out when he felt the suction heading the other way. “Strange. I didn’t see anything that would normally be a dungeon entrance.”
Andarit shrugged. “We’ve never found one, but there has to be one here.”
Serenity knew they weren’t in a dungeon or “high mana area”; he would be able to feel the domain if they were and the ley line suction effect wouldn’t be happening. He swung the flyer around and headed back the way they’d come.
Navigating by a slight feeling sucked. Serenity was confident they’d passed over or extremely close to the entrance multiple times without finding it; he’d narrowed it down to a twenty-foot wide circle of ankle-deep water with only a few trees. His senses simply weren’t good enough to narrow it past that. It was rarely a problem because dungeons tended to announce themselves. Only this one didn’t; it was almost like it was trying to hide.
They’d checked the trees. None of them were a dungeon entrance.
Serenity grumbled as he hopped into the ankle-deep water and realized that it was deeper than he expected; after sinking about an inch into the mud at the bottom, it was more like calf-deep. He was simply grateful that this was one of the shallow parts; they’d passed areas that had to be feet deep, rather than inches.
It took entirely too long to actually find the dungeon, but eventually Serenity found it by scooting his feet along every inch of the ground in the area until he ran into a stick that poked up from the mud and a screen popped up in front of his eyes.
A closer examination of the “stick” showed that it was actually a bone rather than a stick; while it was probably a femur, it was buried vertically and only a few inches stuck up from the mud. It wasn’t even enough to get it above the water level.
Given the dungeon’s description, Serenity suspected that was on purpose.
[The Undead Dungeon]
[The Undead Dungeon was born out of the death of an unknown precursor dungeon, taking over its halls and dead monsters and converting them to defend itself. It has hidden itself ever since, to avoid the fate of its predecessor.]
[Status: Overflow]
[Current participants: 0]
[Tier: Unknown]
[Type: Undead]
Serenity considered telling Andarit he’d been wrong and leaving the dungeon alone, but that wasn’t the right answer. The right answer was to get the dungeon properly managed. “It’s here. Whoever goes in will need to be careful; it’s terrified for good reason and will try to kill them.”
He wondered if it would talk to him. He’d been able to talk to dungeons on Earth without delving them, but he’d also had Gaia’s help for that.
Even if it would talk to him, what could he tell it? Not to be afraid? He wasn’t certain that would be telling the truth.
“Dungeons always do.” Andarit stated flatly.
Serenity shook his head. “Not the way this one will. Not only is it overflowing, which means more monsters per area, it’s likely to try the tricks that dungeons usually don’t pull because they’re unfair. It’s terrified.”
Andarit frowned. “Terrified? Dungeons can’t think.”
Yeah, he definitely wasn’t going to tell the dungeon not to be afraid. Not when that was what Andarit thought; she’d even been to offplanet dungeons and clearly didn’t think of them as people the way he did now. “Yes, they can. They can talk, too. They’re simply limited in who they can talk to; you have to have an appropriate Path or some other reason.”
Serenity was fairly confident that the reason he could talk to dungeons was that he was technically a monster. Nothing else explained it as well; he’d talked to his first dungeon on Tzintkra. It still didn’t explain why he’d been able to bind the A Rest from Death dungeon, but that could probably be laid on the fact that it was Death-based and Serenity had an incarnate. That clearly meant more than an Aspect, but even the Final Reaper had never heard of it.
He should probably ask Althyr about it. That old dragon might know something.
Come to think of it, perhaps the reason he was able to talk to dungeons was simply that he had one? That might be an even better explanation than the fact that he was a monster. It made some sense if he was somehow acting like someone with a dungeon-related Path because he had … no, was a dungeon. Even if he hadn’t felt anything from it or even really thought about it in months, it was still true; A Rest From Death was in some sense Serenity.
It also made sense dungeons could talk to each other.
“Can you put it on a map? Even knowing it’s here and what it looks like is a start, but the location would be better and I don’t think I can manage that very accurately. If we can get rid of the Dead Swamp, we’d have one fewer direction to worry about and a better connection to the rest of Zenith.” Andarit’s words knocked Serenity back out of his head.
“It’ll still be a swamp; not exactly easy transit. When you say get rid of, do you mean to kill the dungeon or delve it until it’s under control?” Serenity was clearly going to have to talk to Duke Lowpeak about that either way. The dungeon needed to be delved, but killing it would only make things worse. Possibly quickly.
Serenity swung himself back into the flyer, leaving his feet dangling so that he could rinse the mud off instead of taking it in with him.
Andarit looked surprised at the question. “Kill it, of course. It causes Swamp Rot.”
“Does it? Or is that caused by something else?” Serenity was not certain, but he suspected that this dungeon wasn’t the source of the Swamp Rot. “The Swamp Rot was Death-based. The dungeon is an Undead dungeon. I’d be surprised if it’s the source.”
He was going to have to explain the difference, wasn’t he?
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