As he rode beside his knights past yet another burned-out farmstead, Kelvun chose to reflect on this latest adventure rather than the reason so many were dead. He tried to tell himself the goblins would have attacked no matter what on earlier days, but it never felt entirely true to him.

The other nobles had been none too pleased by his decision to ride west and crush the goblin scourge decisively enough that it would never threaten the region again. They’d tried to insist that he stay, but as their new count and the still grieving man who’d lost his whole family to green skins in the last two months, they could hardly tell him no.

Truthfully, Kelvun wasn’t much happier about the turn of events. He’d wanted to focus his efforts on rebuilding Fallravea and returning life there to some vision of normalcy. His dreams of being count had involved pretty serving girls and afternoon hunts, not more bloodshed. The bodies had been cleared from the streets of his city already, but the market square still smelled of blood and burning more than of baked bread. That would need to be fixed, and soon, or the county would suffer terribly from it.

Kelvun had wanted to be the count so badly. He thought that nothing would be too high a price to pay for that, but then he never knew the swamp would extract such a bloody toll. Thousands of villagers were dead, and almost a quarter of the city lay in ruins, including most of the docks. The tax collectors told him that his revenues might fall by a fifth for the next few years until things were rebuilt, and nearly all the existing funds would be spoken for by such a vast project.

That wasn’t a setback. It was an unmitigated disaster.

That, more than their increasing levels of fear and vividness, was the reason he’d ultimately obeyed the dreams the darkness sent him and launched this expedition. The men only knew that it was to slay goblins and root them out of their lairs. They knew nothing of the gold.

If the dreams could be believed, then the place they were heading to had veins of the stuff wider than his fingers. It was a huge windfall that would do much to solve his potential problems. For now, that was Kelvun’s secret alone to bear. He trusted these men with his life, but perhaps not with that much fortune. Money did strange things to people when they weren’t as equipped as he was to handle such things.

It hadn’t been his only secret, of course, he—

“Excuse me, your lordship,” an unfamiliar knight asked, riding up beside him and disturbing his reverie. Kelvun noted that the man had his metal helmet on instead of one of the broad-brimmed hats that were so popular among the men, even though there was no way there would be a goblin attack with the sun this high in the sky. “Me and the boys. We was wonderin’ how you knew where the goblins are and when they’re going to attack?”

Kelvun suppressed the knowing smile that always tried to creep onto his face and instead kept the wan expression of mourning firmly fixed on his face. “My father warns me. In my dreams,” he said, managing, somehow, to keep a straight face. “He’s come to me almost every night since he passed away and tells me that he cannot rest until we annihilate the enemy.”

The first time he’d told someone this, Kelvun had meant it almost as a joke. He was shocked when they’d believed him. His father’s ghost was certainly very busy elsewhere. If the darkness really had taken him, then even now, his father was probably screaming in some diabolical torment that might never end.

This soldier reacted with the same look of awe that the others had, and after another couple minutes, he rode off with a distant look in his eyes. The lie was probably more believable now than it had been a week ago, thanks to the dreams the darkness gave him.

Those dreams had shown him where every nighttime ambush was about to happen, and several times they’d revealed the locations where large groups of goblins had attempted to hide from the daylight. Each time they massacred them, Kelvun wondered why the darkness was giving up his pawns so easily, not that he cared. The victories made Kelvun look like a master tactician as much as a visionary. How could you not look good, though, when you knew when and how your enemy was going to attack.

It was child’s play. It was easier than beating his brothers at chess when they’d still been alive to play.

Fortunately, that was almost completely behind them. In two more days, they’d reach the cave that was supposed to contain the gold, and if it was everything the dreams said it was to be, he’d make building a new mine and mint a top priority. With a fresh source of revenue, rebuilding would become much less complicated.

He’d studied the maps that he’d helped make on the trip, and he’d decided exactly what he would do with that wealth. The closest approach of the Oroza to the red hills was the oxbow that they’d built the toll station. If they were really going to be hauling tons and tons of ore and equipment to and from a place without roads, then a canal that started there and got as close as they could get would be the best answer. Not only would it unlock vast tracts of new lands in the freshly degoblinized area, but it could drain a great deal of the swamp and reduce the power of the only thing left in the world that could still tell him what to do.

The only man above Kelvun should be the king, and distant as he was, he exercised that power rarely.

With some luck, the darkness would fail to understand the significance of such a far-sighted move until it was much too late. Once the gold was flowing, hiring a few earth mages to cut the channel would only take a year or two.

Kelvun looked down to give himself a second to suppress his smile again. Everything was going splendidly. They’d dig up the gold, purge the goblins, and drain the swamp all in one blow. In five years’ time, his county would be flourishing, and he’d owe no one anything at all.

It had been a delicious few months for the swamp, but now that the bulk of the goblins had been slaughtered, things were returning to normal. It had made vast inroads on the lands of Greshen, particularly in Fallravea, where everything but the temple grounds were now its private hunting grounds. It was an old city, and the darkness could feel the layers of spirits that dwelled within it. The vast majority of those were ghosts kept alive through myth and ancestor worship, but there were a number of petty household gods and other stranger creatures that were harder to identify. Other than Kelvun, who was currently away and making progress towards securing the darkness’ gold, it had no servants in the capital. In time, it would fix that, but it wasn’t a priority yet.

With tens of thousands of souls massed together, the darkness did not need to feed on them very heavily to sate its hunger. For now, dreams inflaming their recent trauma, and forcing a few hundred residents to relive those terrible nights when the goblins had almost sacked the town, were enough.

Finding the best victims and servants was a process that would take time.

The Lich was still focused on the river, almost to the point of fixation. It caught and consumed water spirits almost every day now, but it still wasn’t closer to understanding them. In large part, this was because they didn’t seem to understand themselves. That wouldn’t matter if it was gutting a man or an elk. The anatomy was the same every time. In the spiritual realm, though, things were more in flux. Krulm’venor might be a pain in the ass, but at least he had a strong sense of identity that greatly benefited the Lich’s study in a way that the water spirits never would.

They wriggled and writhed but had nothing useful to offer it besides sustenance. Other than catching them to consume them, the small river spirits served no purpose. The chain might have allowed the Lich to catch large specimens with better results, but Krulm’venor’s rebellion had made that impossible. The chain would only be used to stop mortal traffic for the foreseeable future.

That was why the Lich had decided that it needed a new focus: polluting the river itself.

While its dark rider explored the headwaters of the Oroza for the most likely spots to try its experiment, the Lich’s servants were distilling the foul chemicals necessary for the unnatural materials it would need. Poisoning the waters themselves and watching all the plants and animals die wouldn’t be a particular challenge, but that wasn’t what it was looking to do. A dead river would eventually lead to dead cities, and the Lich would eventually need many more humans than those that were currently at its disposal.

No, a more subtle perversion was necessary. Something that could taint the very spring that was the headwater of the massive river. It would be a slow process, but there was no hurry. The Lich had all eternity if necessary.

While it waited for the sulfurous distillates to reach maximum potency, so it could lead to the next step, the Lich turned its attention back to its latest experiment: splicing the souls of dead goblins together to see if it could make something more interesting out of them.

The goblins that had served it so ably for the last year had very little in the way of mind, and not much more than that, spiritually. Their souls were thin and not much more substantial than the water spirits the Lich had been consuming. It could just devour them, of course, but the recent slaughter had provided it with so many that it thought that now would be the time to try a few experiments in preparation for future works.

It was much more challenging than working with a proper human soul, though. The spirit of a human was rich in texture and quite durable. It could be manipulated like a piece of calfskin and could be cut and molded into any form the Lich might desire. The Goblins, by contrast, were barely more than shreds of burlap. They had to be almost completely unraveled and then held on a distaff of bone and steel until they could be spun into something the Lich could work with.

It almost wasn’t worth the trouble, but there was such a wonderful quality of violence and rage left over in the finished product that the Lich toyed with it anyway. It would never be as loyal or as tractable as the embalmed lizard men in its honor guard, but in terms of pure savagery, there was no comparison. So far, both of the corpses that it had woven its goblins into had fought so ferociously in the tests that followed that they had torn themselves to pieces in less than a week.

Next time, it would have its zombie fleshcrafters more thoroughly reinforce the limbs before it tried again. The fact that a body needed to be more steel than human when it was powered by undiluted rage struck the Lich as more than a little interesting.