Dinner consisted simply of white fish cooked in a tasty sauce, and a wide range of vegetables in different combinations, with a few different varieties of bread.

While it was nowhere near the extravagance of the Dwarf King's feast, and didn't have the gourmet finesse of the Princess' table, the food was surprisingly hearty and Leőn ate more than Gob had ever remembered seeing him eat before.

After the food was finished, the tables were removed from around the central fire, and replaced with fat, well-worn cushions that the people settled into. The adults were all served a strong drink like the booze Gob kept in his flask. They gave it out in small glass cups and they called it 'likker', which Kylie wouldn't let Gob touch. She was looking much better now, and was nearly back to her vibrant ruby red again.

Karl and Paula together told the story of their swamp, helped by the villagers Avery now and again as they went:

"This region was a bustling series of interconnected towns along the banks of this beautiful natural low-lying river system, with thriving and diverse wildlife," Karl began, "Our famous crawfish and shrimp had been harvested by generations of fishermen, and shipped out to the Realm, the Lizard cities further East and even to far-off places across the sea, via a wide channel cut through the salt marsh to accommodate trading vessels."

"I were a fisher on me Pappy's boat back in the day!" called out a stooped old villager, "back when we ate the craws rather than they's tryna be eatin' us!"

Karl smiled at the villager's interruption and continued, "The swamps and marshes had been fairly well left alone except for the fisherman who frequented them, until one day one of the fisherman reeled in a small, ornate piece of jewellery on the end of his fishing hook."

"That were ol' Jeremiah Becketts!" put in another villager, "He were me Mamma's ol' boyfriend afore she met me Pap! He got rich, she shoulda stuck with 'im!"

"It was a strange thing to find in a bog, far away from anywhere, so he called in some friends to help him search further. At the bottom of the bog they had found not only more precious artefacts, but the sealed up entrance to some sort of stone building, ancient from the look of it and cut from very precise stonework that they couldn't pry open no matter what they tried.

"As no tool of their's was strong enough to break in, they had traded the gold for outside help, brought in some Dwarves with powerful stone breakers, and after a few explosions and loud thumps from a post driving rig, the wall was battered and shored against the bog water..."

"We had soo many Dwarves here in them days!" someone called out.

"... and the ancient submerged structure was opened for exploration.

"Some strange multi-legged creatures with long sharp talons had emerged from the passages below..."

"Groshnickes!!" someone shouted.

"...yes, Groshnickes, and had initially taken the lives of a few of the explorers, but the benefits of what was being found inside far outweighed the risk in the minds of gold-hungry, and the sunken structure soon became a widely known and sought after place to visit.

"The sunken halls were extensive, as was the treasure, and the strange guardian Groshnickes, didn't seem to spawn in large groups, so were kept under control without too much trouble, though no no one could ever discover where they spawned from."

"My Pappy always said they was the devils who spawned from the pits of hell!" mumbled an old lady, but quite loudly.

"The bog water and mud was pumped progressively out of the collapsed sections of the tunnel system, the Groshnickes were killed whenever they spawned, and the treasure was brought out of the tunnels relatively easily."

He looked to Paula, who said, "The villages along the river system became wealthy quickly, and our populations swelled enormously. None of that was a problem, in fact it was a blessing on the region: we were now both beautiful and prosperous, and that's the generation many of us here grew up in."

"The origin of the sunken structure was known as Quezatl but we never really understood what that meant." said Karl, "The wall carvings and tablets that were brought out for study were largely unreadable and the real stories of the original builders were lost to time. The treasures were eventually exhausted, the sunken passages simply leading, eventually, to a dead end, and once emptied they were an historical oddity at best. But by then our villages had grown into large towns with self sustaining economies of their own and no longer needed the treasure anyway. Eventually the local leaders decided to collapse the entrance to prevent any more groshnicke spawns, and little by little the bog swallowed it all once again."

"It was years after that a gradual change came upon the swampland surrounding the site," said Paula sadly, "Things started to die, and they started to smell. Creatures started to appear who seemed deformed or not quite normal. Then it spread. It was a slow creep, but it changed and spoiled all the life in its path, replacing it with mutated versions of all the thriving creatures who had used to live there."

"The local militia were sent in to cull the mutant creatures that were emerging from the area, and that was the first time anyone heard of... the thing." said Karl, "It attacked or chased off anyone who approached."

"Why do you keep calling it the thing?" asked Leőn, "You seem to have names for everything else that's spawned out of the swamp..."

Paula and Karl looked at each other. Paula answered.

"It's ummm... it's what it said to call it." she replied.

"You have a mutant swamp monster who talks? And who told you to call it thing?" said Leőn skeptically, "What's it like? Is it intelligent?"

"It's... odd." answered Paula.

"Odd how?" pressed Leőn.

"Well," she looked at Karl again, who shrugged, "we don't really know because whenever the militias ever got close, it just attacked them or chased them away."

"It's like a giant, mud covered... tree." said one of the villagers, "My Pap saw it with his own eyes, may he rest in peace."

"But it's in the shape of a person," said another.

"And it can rooooooar so loudly that the ground shakes!"

"And it can grow it's arms to any length to wrap around and crush things."

Leőn held up his hands to the excited villagers. The thing was obviously a highly engaging and debatable topic among them.

"Who here has actually seen this thing?" he asked.

No one said anything. Paula broke the silence,

"While we've never personally seen it, the troll hag has. Most of what we know about it is from her. We do know it single handedly took out or chased off every militia force that went after it. Whatever it is, it's strong and terrifying." she said, "Anyway, it wasn't too long after the thing emerged that people started to get sick, and no amount of magic or might seemed to be able to stop the spread.

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"For most, taking their wealth and leaving was an easier course of action than trying to solve the mystery of the curse of the Mugwar swamps. Before long the largest towns were all but abandoned. Strange stories started to come to us from the remaining neighbouring villages, people going missing, people coming home from fishing trips changed, sick... insane. Then we lost contact with them. It was like the villages just gradually disappeared, one by one.

"Now the swamp is as it is today, and the foulness continues to creep outwards, even reaching towards upwards toward the mountain pass, and outwards towards the Shadowlands.

"We know," finished Karl "that there must be a source. It can only be the sunken structure which seemed to be at the centre of it all. What else could it be? But we also cling to the hope that the damage must be reversible, if only we could find it.

"But the entrance to the caverns are under the bog, and there's the thing protecting it. We think the troll hag probably knows more about where the structure is; she's semi aquatic herself and fiercer than most of the creatures in the swamp, but she only trades knowledge for things she wants, and we don't have anything to offer her. It's hard enough to stop her eating us most of the time."

"So, what do you make of it?" Paula asked, "Can you help us?"

"Help you how?" asked the White Orc, "We are on a quest ourselves and have only days here at the most, how could we hope to reverse years of degradation?"

"We don't need the degradation reversed, all of us would happily commit our lives to rebuilding this place, we only need to find the source and remove it." she answered.

"So do you have any idea what the source is?" asked Leőn.

"Well it isn't Magical, at least not any sort of Magic I can detect, and I've combed every corner of the Swamp looking." said Karl, "My Living Magic is strong and it can defy the putrescence only when I'm actively pushing power into it. No, this seems to be something else."

"So... alchemy?" sighed Leőn again.

"Perhaps…" said the White Orc thoughtfully, "but alchemy would more likely poison and kill than putrefy and mutate, and to enact change on this sort of scale would require an incredibly massive stock of source material."

"Oh thank goodness," said Leőn relieved, "I don't think I could have handled an alchemy crisis."

"Were any remains ever found in the tunnel complex below the bogs? Corpses, burial chambers, anything like that?" asked the White Orc.

"No, nothing like that." answered Paula, "In fact the structure was carefully documented and mapped, and a big part of the mystery was why it existed at all. There was no physical trace of the original designers except their treasure, their art, and their mysterious guardian creatures. The structure is simply a series of stone passageways, that wind around in decreasing conventional circles, with rooms that were stacked with treasures. The passageway itself simply leads to a dead end at the 'centre' of the circle."

"Well," said the White Orc, "from what I know of Quezatl structures is that they have multiple levels, usually three, with a central funnel that houses a powerful energy core... but you said all the passageways in this structure were on a single level... is it possible you missed a doorway? Or was there, I don't know, a section of damaged passageway that might have led to a lower level of the structure?"

"We have a map if you'd like to see it?" A said Karl, gesturing to one of the villagers who got up and went to a cabinet at the side of the great hall, and brought a large rolled up parchment across to him.

They rolled the map open on a clear space of floor. The map was a detailed and intricate piece of work representing a circular labyrinth. There was a main passage that began at the outside perimeter, ran halfway around the complex in a semi-circle, then looped back on itself around the other half, then followed the same path again and again in decreasing concentric patterns until it ended in the centre of the circle at a dead end. There was a large black dot right in the centre of the map.

"What's in this black area?" asked the Orc, pointing to it.

"Well... nothing. It's just solid stone walls like the rest of the structure. Some people even tried breaking through them, but no one ever could." answered Karl.

"Was there art in the structure?" asked the White Orc.

Paula pointed up at the wall of the hall, where angular stone carvings ran around the top row of stonework, some of them now overgrown with plants from Karl's purification garden, "We used some of the carvings when we built this hall."

He examined them intently. Kylie flew up to have a closer look out of interest and peered at them with a strange look on her face. The ones she stared at most intently looked like tall stone cylinders rising up out of the ground with smoke coming out the tops.

"Oh!" she said "I know what that is! We had them on my world! It's a nuclear powerplant!" she looked around excitedly, but everyone was looking at her strangely.

"Oh, umm, I was summoned here from another… actually you know what, don't worry that's a story for another time." she said a little embarrassed.

None of what she said changed the strange looks she was getting. The White Orc turned and looked up at her now, a similar strange look on his face.

"Umm, how do I explain… there's this stuff called radioactive… I don't know… metal? elements? And you can burn them to make a lot of heat, and then you use the heat to make steam, and then the steam turns big propellers… um, like wheels… and they make, ah… electricity. Like this!" she said and zapped the air with a small bolt of crackling blue energy.

There was silence in the room.

"Uhh.. OK, I mean I'm not the best at explaining stuff. But after a while when the radioactive… ah… fuel is all used up then you just kind of… bury the waste underground. For a thousand years or something."

Confusion.

Kylie was feeling embarrassed.

"Ok, it's like poison. Like mutagenic poison, apparently. From rare metal. It glows green I think... or maybe that's just in cartoons. Very, very strong, and very, very long lasting. If there's radioactive waste in that structure, and the bog water leeched in, and the waste water leeched out, then it would definitely be changing the environment."

There were some murmurs between the villagers now.

"So it IS alchemy," sighed Leőn "I knew it."

"No, not alchemy" Kylie replied, "Chemistry!"

----------------------------------------

The next morning they set out. The plan they had made after Kylie's rather confusing revelation was to find the troll hag and find out if there was any way she could take them to the structure. If she could, then they would head that way, and try to find the source of the 'radioactive poison' as Kylie was convinced it must be, and then to use some of Karl's powerful barrier Aspect materials try to contain or purify it.

Kylie herself was flying along with them completely contained inside a floating bubble of his creation to protect her from the noxious air. She looked funny floating around in a fairy sized bubble, but Gob had to admit she looked at lot healthier.

Karl spoke to the White Orc about it as they walked, explaining how in his progression as an Aspect Wright he had worked tirelessly until discovering a method to incorporate the affinities of both purity and air with the strength of glass, and the liquidity of bubbles he made from an extract of the mucus gland of a giant carniverous, but thankfully slow-moving, swamp snail.

"The trick," Gob heard him say, "is using absorbtion of the glass material into the mucosal liquid to incorporate the unique structure of an impervious glass panel while retaining the flexibility and light weight of the mucus bubble, at the same time as imbuing the affinity concentrations that I had previously crafted and bottled..."

As soon as Kylie heard him mention mucous, she looked around at her pure air bubble with a bit of disgust, but the Orc seemed engrossed in the description, and the two continued deep in consultation as they walked ahead of the others.

Gob couldn't understand any of it, and mostly he just felt nervous about meeting the troll hag. He'd heard things about them. Added to that he hadn't ever met another troll apart from his siblings and Big Troll. He wasn't sure how it would go. He wasn't sure he wanted to know.

The humans knew exactly where to go to find the troll hag's den, and it wasn't that far to get to her, but before they would even think about going they had to gather bogspawn.

Bogspawn, it turned out, were large, fat creatures that were just a bloated head with a long wriggling tail sticking out behind them.

"When they grow up they turn into giant bog-frogs," explained Criff to Gob, "Have you ever seen a bog-frog?"

Gob explained to Criff that he knew exactly what bog-frogs were. He couldn't look at the bogspawn the same after that.

The process for catching bogspawn was to lure them into the shallows with scraps of bread on the end of a string attached to a long pole, and then scoop them into big nets, or spear them with a multipronged spear. Gob watched Criff miss a few, they were fat, but they were very fast.

"i try?" he said the the boy. Criff nodded and lured a bogspawn into the shallows. Gob stuck his tail barb out, coiled his tail up and

SPLASH!

shot it into the water, skewering the bogspawn on his first try. He dragged it out wriggling and splashing.

"Oh wow!" shouted Criff excitedly, "Grandma did you see? Gob can catch bogspawn so easy! Can I get a tail too?"

Kylie, still enclosed in her protective bubble said, "You should check your stats on that tail Gob, you might be racking up enough points to be better with that than your claws soon… you might want to keep it!"

Gob just growled at her. He had to admit it was handy, but there was no way he wanted a tail. It got in the way of just about everything.

It wasn't long before they had all the bogspawn they could fit into two large hessian sacks that they'd brought along for the purpose.

"This is more bogspawn than we've EVER brought before… the hag's going to be drooling all over the place!" said Criff as he heroically tried to drag one of the sacks across the swap by himself.

It didn't make Gob feel any better. His tummy felt nervous any time he thought about meeting her.

or mibby i iz juz hungree? he thought.

Those bogspawn looked pretty good...