The young ‘warrior’ slogged through the forest with all the enthusiasm of a hunting cat belaboured with a rainstorm, shoving aside the branches of colossal spruce trees after they had repeatedly slapped him in the face. The green beards of moss seemed to believe they were the true rulers of this realm, which proved that old bearded people weren’t to be trusted whether they were human or otherwise.

Denor, the intrepid hero of this story in the loosest sense of the word, did his utmost to move stealthily, though both his own feet and the swamp mud underfoot had other ideas, gurgling in displeasure at his continued tromping. The local mosquitoes and assorted bitey insects, disturbed from their daily routines, voiced their own equal displeasure in an angry buzz and sampled his exposed skin with the gusto of connoisseurs at a feast. Much to their collective disappointment, Denor’s fortunately-placed feet saved him from becoming just another hapless victim of the forest’s treachery, Tamet be praised! His bumbling somehow evaded all the sucking death traps, where more qualified heroes would have landed for the sake of the story. Which was a good thing, since recovering from death only to find yourself permanently trapped in a swamp didn’t sound particularly appealing to the young boy. Or his narrator.

If Denor was capable at this point of a mental checklist, he most certainly would have added ‘make sure to have a companion to talk to’. Wandering around the swamps by himself really wasn’t that entertaining if he didn’t have anyone to annoy.

With a deft slice of his new sword, he felled a young pine and crafted what he considered to be a sturdy pole, but what was actually a severed branch that he managed to make marginally worse with his hacking. He advanced with the wariness of someone navigating their way through a particularly perilous space dock parking procedure, an analogy that wasn’t ominous future foreshadowing at all. Fortunately at this time, nobody had been foolish enough to gift Denor his own spacecraft yet.

Apart from the backstabbing quagmire, nothing had posed a serious threat to his life since the murderous Gurruks. Shadows of four-legged creatures occasionally flickered through the underbrush, but none of the local predators fancied a confrontation with someone as uninteresting as Denor. The remaining Andronian Outlander (since nobody else was alive to point out he wasn’t a member) knew it was only a matter of time before he met the forest’s bipedal denizens. They most likely wouldn’t mind trying to finish the job by poking him full of holes. As had been established repeatedly by his training, Denor wasn’t a fan of having holes poked in him.

He anticipated this encounter with a blend of caution and terror—Gurruks, after all, were much more dangerous than four-legged beasts, even if they weren’t smarter. Plus if they figured out the whole not dying thing, Denor could end up as target practice for the rest of his days. A fate marginally more interesting than being permanently swallowed by this swamp.

His wish was soon granted: as dusk fell, a distant rumble reached his ears, unmistakably the beat of drums. The drumming grew louder, mingled with rhythmic chants in a language both strange and disconcertingly familiar. Then, a sickly green glow shimmered through the trees, and Denor, not one to dally doing things like contemplating, headed towards it. Death held no fear for him due to the same reason most things eluded Denor: general inability. Retreat was not in his repertoire either since entering this swamp, as he’d just be getting hopelessly lost in another direction. Amidst the drumming and chanting, he heard the cries of women and children, their distress all too evident in a language he knew well. His face hardened as he realized that these were no Gurruks. He had stumbled upon kidnapped women and children.

“Hsst!”

Denor stood alone. The swamp was a place of mysteries, most of them damp, and Denor was fairly certain that no one sane would venture into it by choice. This said more about Denor’s mental state than anything else. He definitely didn’t just hear a voice then.

“Hsst!” the voice persisted.

He was a hero, of course, but even heroes sometimes wondered if they should have taken up a more sensible career—like orbital miner or explosives tester. Denor had fought the Gurruks, a vile species that combined the worst aspects of all the monsters from Tycho’s stories. He’d battled them, outsmarted them, and tumbled off a ravine with one overenthusiastic one that transformed into his own personal crash pad. No, he was now a hero with a noble mission: rescue the women and children taken by the Gurruks and lead them to safety. He couldn’t afford to be distracted by silly things like voices.

“Hsst!” repeated the voice, clearly quite annoyed by this point.

“Too much mud,” he muttered, wiping the muck off his boots for the hundredth time that day.

The voice had changed tactics, it was now a rustling sound from ahead. Denor froze, hand on the hilt of his sword. It could be a Gurruk scout, or worse—a swamp hag like the ones from Tycho’s crazy stories. He wasn’t entirely sure what a swamp hag was, but he was fairly certain he wouldn’t like it if he encountered it.

But it was neither. Emerging from the branches was a figure he recognized, though it was one he hadn’t expected to see outside of a funeral pyre. “Rodrik?” Denor whispered, eyes wide. “You’re supposed to be dead!”

Rodrik, leader of the Outlanders, looked very much not dead. He was just as Denor remembered, except for the whole being covered in Gurruk blood bit.

“Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” Rodrik said, as confused by Denor’s presence as our hero was at having a companion.

“I saw you fall, Denor! Into the ravine! Nobody could survive that landing.”

“Tamet be praised!” Denor exclaimed, hoping that would explain everything.

“Well, looks like it’s the two of us then,” Rodrik said, brushing off his armor, which seemed to have seen better days. “Bit of a disappointment, if I’m honest, but you’ll have to do.”

“Well, I'm better than the swamp!” Denor protested, then eyed a particularly impressive fern. “Ah, well... most parts of the swamp.”

“No time for chit-chat, Denor. We’ve got women and children to rescue!”

Denor followed the man for a few feet before he found his voice, though it sounded a bit strangled. “You’re alive,” he repeated. “And you want to go rescue the women and children. Right now.”

“Exactly!” Rodrik clapped Denor on the back, sending him stumbling forward. “The Gurruks are planning something nasty, and it’s up to us to stop them. Come on, lad, we’ve survived them before. Granted, nobody else did… but a little mud, a few swords, and some heroic speeches, and we’ll have them running back to their holes in no time.”

Rodrik was his leader, and leaders had a way of making you do things you really, really didn’t want to do. Like venturing deeper into a swamp that probably had teeth.

“So what’s the plan?” Denor asked, trudging along beside him as they moved through the swamp. “Do we have a plan?”

Rodrik gave him a sideways look that suggested a plan was the sort of thing other people worried about. “Oh, you know. The usual. We find the Gurruk camp, cause a bit of chaos, free the prisoners, and then get out before they realize what’s happened. Easy peasy.”

Denor considered this. It was about as much of a plan as he’d expected, and about as much of a plan as he had enacted by himself thus far. “And if it’s not easy peasy?”

Rodrik’s grin widened. “Then it’s heroic last stand time! But don’t worry, Denor. I’m sure we’ll manage to avoid that. Mostly.”

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

Denor chose not to mention that it would be a heroic last stand for Rodrik and nobody else.

They moved onward, the swamp squelching in protest beneath them. Denor couldn’t help but feel a strange mix of dread and excitement, as if he were caught between two particularly persuasive street vendors, one selling despair and the other hope. None of them selling pies. But if Rodrik was back, that meant they had more of a chance than if Denor attempted this alone—a small, probably suicidal chance, but a chance nonetheless.

***

The trees, after much sulking and grumbling, finally gave way to a clearing that could only be described as a swamp with aspirations—or more accurately, another slightly less swampy swamp—lit by the sort of moonlight that makes even the bravest warriors think ‘yeah, okay, this is a bit ominous’. Patches of grass poked through the water, and sat upon them, a parade of grotesque figures pranced in a dance that had evidently skipped several dress rehearsals and gone straight to bedlam.

Rodrik motioned Denor to stop multiple times before the boy got the idea, and they keenly observed their surroundings and just how likely they were to kill them.

These were not the sort of creatures you would invite to a family gathering, unless your family consisted of hideous creatures that had a fondness for cannibalism, which happens more often than you’d think. These beasts were the vile descendants of centuries of appalling matchmaking reminiscent of the modern dating scene, as if nature itself had thrown its arms in the air and given up, letting the remaining participants pick their partners through a particularly nasty game of chance. Their ghastly symphony of shrieks would have made the average black metal enthusiast nod in admiration, and their jagged teeth and even jaggeder weapons looked like they were designed for maximum cruelty. Some were even gnawing on bones, which Denor, with a shudder, hoped weren’t human. There were still no spleens in the vicinity. The nearby sand was littered with the remnants of their feast—both human and Gurruk, eaten with equal enthusiasm. While food was technically being consumed, it wasn’t exactly a dinner party that Denor wanted to be invited to, and from the look on Rodrik’s face he didn’t need to check for agreement on that.

Ever the reluctant observer of where his feet were wandering off to, he took an unfortunate slip and found himself lodged behind the trunk of a particularly stolid larch. At least his bumbling was hidden by the enormous din which would have been loud enough to drown out the clinking of a marching band, coincidentally that was about the same amount of noise Denor made when attempting ‘stealth’, much to Rodrik’s dismay. His resolve hardened as his companion extricated him from trunk and he gripped his sword, preparing himself for the unenviable choice between rescuing the captives and dying in a manner that would likely require several hundred painful retakes, or just repeatedly dying without any heroics.

“Wait,” Rodrik hissed under his breath, grabbing his shoulder and no longer quite so eager to plunge head first into acts of death-defying improbability. “We need more time to scout things out.”

So the narrator, being the kind sort, proceeded to inform them that in the midst of this pandemonium, the largest island lay like a desolate, moss-covered sentinel, distant but prominent.

Seeing that the heroes weren’t moved into action, the prose turned increasingly purple in response. For you see, behind them, the swamp seemed to stretch into infinity, as if goading our heroes to turn back and try to find thier way out. On the island, eerie green bonfires flared, casting shadows that danced and cavorted with the wild figures in a chaotic celebration that clearly wasn’t up to anything good.

Amid this revelry, one figure emerged as the island's most flamboyant resident: a Gurruk, or at least something with a passing resemblance to one, wearing the skin of an animal that Denor had never seen before. It was the first time he had encountered a Gurruk with what could be called fashion sense. The flickering firelight revealed a face covered in elaborate dark tattoos, which might have been mistaken for the work of an ancient artist if not for the bright green eyes that glowed like the proverbial lanterns of a mad scientist and the enormous boar-like tusks jutting from its mouth.

Before the shaman, encircled by a ring of flames that would have made any pyromaniac weep with joy, stood a black stone altar slick with the kind of blood that could make any sensible adventurer consider a career change, unless he was the aforementioned proverbial pyromaniac. Next to it lay children from Andronian villages, looking as though they’d been having a particularly bad day. Their bodies, unbound and slumped in a manner that suggested they’d finally learned what their parents had meant when they told them ‘I’ll give you something to cry about’, bore the unmistakable lack of blemishes that spoke of unspeakable torture to come—torture so thorough it seemed to have taken the very will to rise out of them.

That settled it for Denor. He could tolerate his entire squad being wiped out, he could accept villagers being kidnapped, but the potential torture of children? A bit of a step too far, that.

Two burly Gurruks, one so black he might have been carved from a lump of shadow, and the other a rusty red that made Denor wonder if he had taken a bath in old blood, hoisted a woman with the kind of care that is usually reserved for the elderly in homes. This meant they tossed her onto the altar without ceremony, and the shaman, brandishing a stone knife, proceeded to remove the heart with the sort of precision that would make a surgeon (or a pyromaniac for that matter) wince. The offending organ was hurled into the swamp with a flourish, accompanied by a stream of incantations in some sort of incomprehensible black tongue that even Denor’s translator refused to extrapolate.

“This is horrifying…” Rodrik helpfully supplied, not choosing this time to develop any character depth.

The children were stacked neatly at the island’s edge, and it didn’t take an investigator to figure out what would happen to them next.

“We have to do something,” Denor muttered.

They both watched this hideous scene with a complex mix of revulsion, fury, and more than a dash of superstitious dread. The ancient rock paintings from the tomb of the chieftain, which had previously been a vague mystery, like most of Denor’s attempts at comprehension, now seemed to reveal their sinister clarity, as though the artist had been commissioned to inform him at this very moment. He had not yet fully comprehended the depths of degradation into which the descendants of those people had sunk—those who, in times long past, had managed to topple the kingdoms to establish their own barbaric dominion. The old songs of his tribe hinted at the struggle of the Andronians, who had clawed their way up from a barbaric existence forced upon them by unending wars and calamities. But these ancient melodies had yet to reveal the beasts who, having never escaped their curse, had remained trapped in a state only marginally better than that of the predatory animals surrounding them.

Little did Denor realise just how formative this whole experience with an ancient species would be.

“Perhaps we should just… go back up the ravine? Call for help?” Rodrik suggested, no longer sounding like a leader or a hero.

Denor responded by tightening his grip on his sword, the ancient weapon gleaming with a fierce, almost malevolent light, and prepared to bring his own chapter to this vile saga. Hopefully one involving heroic rescue rather than the far more likely humiliating defeat as a result of constantly stalling.

The shaman, now in the throes of his particularly deranged bout of performance art, paused briefly in his task of ripping hearts from his captives. The green flames that had been dancing like a troupe of malevolent fireflies had started to burn even brighter, casting surreal reflections on the water that Denor soon realized were not reflections at all. The swamp was glowing with an unsettling green luminescence, something horrible was undoubtedly going to happen.

“Denor, we’re running out of time here…” Rodrik implored, having now ceded the leadership position, but Denor just kept watching, as if entranced by the wonderful narrative prose.

Ghostly tongues of flame flickered on the tree branches, shifting through every conceivable shade of green, reminiscent of the hypnotic light that had nearly lured him into a rather untimely nap back at the rocks. Yet, despite being closer to the source of this unholy illumination, Denor felt no drowsiness. His mind remained what could charitably be called ‘sharp’ by his own low standards, as though the flames had lost their magical charm in his immediate vicinity. He glanced at his sword, noting the stone at its pommel emitting a faint, dark red glow, which seemed to indicate it was either involved in some way with this whole thing or simply doing its best impression of a nightlight.

As Denor observed the shaman lift a child and place them on the blood-slick altar, a surge of fury coursed through him. He knew that if they were going to act, it needed to be now. Taking a deep breath that could have inflated a balloon, he surged forward, his ancient sword held high—and had the child understood that this was his only hope of salvation he would have been very disappointed.

The shaman, not missing a beat in his ritualistic fervor, turned towards the forest with a call that might have been directed at the dark forces or just a general invitation to the neighborhood’s more unsavory elements. Denor’s hair stood on end as shadows beneath the dense canopy coalesced into a form darker than night itself. Something immense, shrouded in dancing green flames, emerged from the underbrush, its form an ungodly blend of plant and beast—a monstrous hybrid that looked like a tree had decided to evolve into a nightmare instead of standing around all day in the swamps. With eyes as red as rubies, the abomination glided through the swamp with an unsettling silence, approaching the chanting sorcerer.

He might not have a bestiary or be an expert on monstrosities, but even Denor knew that this was bad news.

A good thing they hadn’t gone charging out to the rescue and…

The beast caught sight of Denor out in the open with his sword held aloft and let out a roar.

Oh, right.