Even though the snows were still deep, and the temperatures were still frigid, the river ice on the Oroza began to break up early that year. It was unexpected, but such a strange occurrence wasn’t because of the weather or even an improvement in the strange behavior of the suns that provided less light and heat than usual. It was because the Lich had sent a new flood to poison her domain, and this time it was salt water.
The mortals of the region had suffered greatly under this year’s long, dark winter, but other than the springs she had stilled to thwart the darkness’s plans, Oroza’s winter had been remarkably uneventful. She tried to help the few living people who remained along her banks where she could, especially those who still prayed to her.
Most of those who were living when the snow first started to fall had died or fled by the time the hints of spring arrived. It was tragic, but she could not save everybody. Certainly not those who had turned their backs on her so recently.
She didn’t let them distract her too much, though, as she waited patiently for the darkness that had imprisoned her and used her for so long to reveal its plans. She’d expected to dash hundreds or even thousands of the Lich’s servants as it tried to recapture her or cross her domain to attack the wider world once more.
None of that had happened, though. The blight had confined itself almost completely to the strange darkness that always covered the land closest to its layer now, and though she could not explain it, she stayed clear of the area, fearing another trap.
Then, one cold spring morning, the ice all along that darkness started to break up as salt water was added to fresh water, and the surging wall of water dashed the ice that had been thickening for months.
She was outraged. Not because the salt water might kill her; thanks to the time she’d been forced to spend at sea when the Lich had decided to dry up her river all those years ago, it didn’t even weaken her.
It annoyed her, though. The idea that it could remake the world in whatever way it desired ate at her day after day, poisoning her heart with anger, the same way that the salt would kill so many of the freshwater plants and animals once the trickle became a flood.
She wasn’t sure if she could stop that from happening, but even knowing that this might well be a trap, she certainly had to try.
Oroza surged up along the canal that had drained the whole western watershed so long ago, swimming upstream against the poison. As she went, she brought a handful of lesser spirits with her, joining them not as the river dragon she usually favored but as a school of powerful salmon swimming upriver against the salty tide.
She expected elaborate traps tuned specifically to her. She expected this to be bait for a larger plan. That was why she’d brought other spirits with her. The Lich only had a few tricks, and since every spirit born of this river was Oroza, it would let her see them coming.
There was nothing there, though, and by the time she reached the small lake that was the source of the canal, she found out why. The whole thing wasn’t even close to finished yet. The original canal had been built to very precise specifications through the region’s bedrock by human mages.
The new section, though, was a narrow gouge that cut its way out to the sea in a weaving and irregular path. It was an ugly scar that was almost as ugly as the deathless creature that built it. While she had little in the way of control over the earth, she did what she could do, and created an ice dam with all the broken ice that had been created. She couldn’t stop the seawater from coming, but she could redirect it, flooding the whole region of the Red Hills rather than let it further pollute her tributary.
This technique would only work for a few more weeks, of course. When it got too warm, the ice would melt, but by then, Oroza hoped to figure out what she could do next.
She was so pleased with this plan that she was distracted as she watched the lake’s level rise and begin to runoff over the southern edge. Over the course of hours and days, it began to flood across the countryside, rekindling some small amount of joy in her heart that she had finally crushed another one of her captor’s plans.
That was when the Lich struck.
She felt the shockwave in the water as soon as it happened. It detonated some kind of alchemical explosive on the outgoing canal that she’d only recently swum up. She expected poison or magic, but instead, she found a simpler trap. Pure separation and physical distance. He’d built a new prison for her, but this time it was a lake, not a body.
The Lich had simply eliminated a hundred yards of the canal, filling it with earth and rubble, disconnecting her from her river. Oroza began to weaken immediately, but it wouldn’t be a real problem any time soon. Instead of panicking, she turned to the ocean-bound channel and started moving. If she could swim to the sea, then she could swim all the way back around to her river once more.
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It would be exhausting but fairly straightforward. She couldn’t, though. As soon as she reached that slender channel, it detonated as well, closing her second exit.
When she’d arrived, there was no magic here that she could detect, but now there was something throbbing beneath her, getting closer every second. The Lich had turned this lake into a cage and would do whatever he had to, for as long as it had to so that it could reclaim her. Even as she began to panic while she tried to decide what to do, she heard her captor’s voice whispering at the edge of her mind.
“You’ve come back to me, Oroza,” it teased. “You thought you’d escaped forever, but in less than a year, I’ll have a new and better body for you to serve me with. One that you’ll never escape from.”
She ignored those awful words. She’d rather die than let that happen, of course, but if she died, then the next river dragon would be far more likely to be captured by the darkness because she would have so much less experience with all that had happened until now.
Oroza couldn’t let that happen, so, coming up with a desperate plan, she divided herself into more and more pieces. This morning, she had been a single river dragon. As she moved up the channel, she had become a school of translucent salmon, but now that the trap was springing around her, those dozens of large, powerful fish had become thousands of tiny ones.
With no real way out, it would take a desperate move and more luck than she was comfortable with to fight free of it. So, she surged for the southern shore where the last of the overflow was still leaving the lake’s edge to pour across the plains.
This whole region had never been fertile soil, though she did not know much about it beyond that because it was far from her domain. The hard, frozen ground would not absorb the water, though, and it was too salty to freeze, so she skimmed along it, with one soul spread across nearly five thousand bodies. She followed the tiny flood tide she had created as it went downhill, watching the weakest parts of herself flicker out around the edges, and the torrent focused into a gully and became muddy and polluted.
It was a miserable experience for her. She’d already lost almost a thousand of the fish that made up her school, and she was painfully aware that at any point, this wild ride could end, and she would be stuck in some canyon or ravine until the spring sun dried her to nothing. Worse, it was entirely possible that some hole could open up and send her down into the depths of the world, where she’d be polluted by filth like goblins and the darkness itself.
There was nothing she could do about that though. All she could do was stay at the head of the frothing, dwindling flood as it followed its way toward her eventual fate.
Fortunately, water tends to find its own level, and after hours of slowly flowing down slopes and through water-carved flood channels and washes, she found a frozen-over creek and slowly burrowed beneath the ice and back to her beloved fresh water. It was just a trickle of life, but even from here, she could feel that somehow, some way, this spot connected with the river that was her.
Slowly, she transformed from thousands of tiny fish to dozens of mud-dwelling eels and crawled her way single file for mile after ice-bound mile through that trickle of flowing meltwater. It would be the easiest thing in the world for the Lich to eradicate her now if it knew where she was.
She knew that. The third sun was already setting after all, and when darkness reigned, not only would it be free to do whatever it wanted, but the water would likely freeze solid once more. Then she would be trapped at least until morning, and any number of the Lich’s servants could end her without too much effort. That dragon that was in the process of rebuilding could erase a whole section of the world with its breath weapon.
Those extremes probably wouldn’t even be necessary, she realized as she slowly froze in the gathering gloom. A few dozen zombies with shovels could gather her into buckets and bring her down in the darkness once more.
Oroza wasn’t given to fear, not after decades trapped in a decaying body where she was forced to murder the innocent and watch her worshipers die. Dread was another matter, though, and she spent the next eight hours worrying that, at any moment, the Lich’s minions would arrive to capture her and that all she’d done so far was fall for the thing’s insane, convoluted plans.
Sunrise arrived before any of the darkness’s creatures did, though, and after a few hours of that thin light, she was finally able to move again. Toward the end of the day, her frozen creek became a frozen stream deep enough to stay ice-free throughout the day, and from there, she knew that she was home-free.
The stream deepened and sped up until it joined another and another. All too soon, it became a lesser tributary that sped right for the heart of her river, and her heart began to sing. She had made her way home and snatched victory from the jaws of defeat through her quick action.
Slowly, over the space on leagues, she returned to her true form, melding together all the smaller animals she had been into the fearsome predator that she truly was. Even though she was much reduced by all she had sacrificed to break free of the Lich’s trap, she was still mighty. It might take several moons to return to her former strength, but in this form and in this place, no one could possibly defeat her.
Still, her heart trembled to think about what had just happened. It had been a close thing, and if she’d delayed or even paused long enough to listen to doubt, she would still be trapped even now in the Lich’s little lake while he did Gods knew what to her. She was grateful that she was more clever than wise, but she would never underestimate the Lich’s traps again so long as she lived.