The First Lich Lord
Chapter 127

Friar Brown had not left any of his people behind in the Death Marsh, which made sense. He needed every person he had. The friar wasn’t going to start the civil war yet, he wanted to gather his strength and build a position of power he could move from. It was smart because if he didn’t prepare correctly, he would be crushed. He’d suggested I do the same.

The former camp of zealots had zombies wandering around. I had shrouded myself in a concealing spell of dark magic. I was not here to fight, but to explore. Raven was out in the marsh someplace as well, no doubt hunting or getting into some kind of mischief.

The zombies in the camp were mindless and uncontrolled. And even as I watched, a snake covered in dark, almost black, scales struck out of the water and grabbed one of them. The snake slithered back into the water dragging the struggling zombie with it. It wasn’t a massive snake like I had used on my way in, but the zombie was helpless against it.

It didn’t take long before I lost sight of them in the water. Part of me expected things like the zombies in the camp to be someplace in the middle of the food chain in these death biomes. But in an hour, I’d witnessed multiple zombies taken out by everything from a swarm of hand-sized insects to a vine covered plant one had meandered a little too close to.

These mindless uncontrolled zombies were likely pretty darn near the bottom of the food chain. Death biomes were predatory, like the blood marsh, but even more so. Zombies being the bottom of the food chain, in a way, made sense. Any living creature that wandered into a death biome and was killed would come back as a zombie eventually. Whatever killed them, assuming they did not consume their bodies, would move on and the zombie would then wander around the biome.

They would either grow strong enough that things wouldn’t eat it, or it would serve as sustenance for something else. But that second death would likely stick. Reanimating bodies after being killed a second time became more difficult, and when they did reanimate, they weren’t as strong. There were ways around this, but I doubted they existed in a natural environment like these death biomes, though I wasn’t certain.

The biome was fascinating.

I started to develop a theory about how these biomes could fully function. They couldn’t only rely on wandering creatures, so there must be some way of reproducing. A swarm of insects caught my attention. And after they failed to eat or harm me, I was able to follow them back to their nest. It was something akin to a wasp nest except made of bone.

Using Mercy, I carefully cut away some of the layers so I could see the inside. To my surprise, there were little larva pulsing with death energy in there. Just a spark really. Then I noticed a larger insect giving little dollops of death energy to the larva. She was in turn being supplied by the wasps that were flying in bearing small payloads of death energy.

I spent several hours investigating the different aspects of this death biome. It truly is remarkable when you think about it. When I first started, I assumed death biomes only existed and could only thrive by creatures wandering in from the outside—that simply wasn’t true. But that is a very complex subject that is not useful at this point.

I was further out in the marsh, watching a seemingly unthreatening pack of lily pads flow around, slowly chasing some large creature under the water. They just about caught whatever it was when Raven strode up in her lynx form.

“Some of those guild people,” Raven said after she transformed into her human form, “are on their way here.”

“I wondered if they would come back. Do they seem problematic?”

“Not from what I can tell,” Raven said. “But I’ve been careful not to get too close.”

“Take me to them,” I told her. She gave me a worried look. “I’ll be fine. I doubt they’ve changed their stance, and if they have, I can always flee back into the marsh. Nothing can hurt me in here, but they would have to be very careful in how they progress.”

“That and Vito has your phylactery now,” Raven agreed. “I heard him grumbling about making some cautions against your idiotic antics.”

The attack that traveled from me into my phylactery had worried Vito. Fortunately, he was a vampire and could use soul energy. He said he was going to be doing some things to further prevent that from happening, though he warned it would not be possible to completely stop it. It would merely be more difficult.

It didn’t take long for Raven to lead me to the oncoming players. I was still shrouded in my spell, so they didn’t notice me right away. I identified the group quickly—a combination of the first group to have cleared the dungeon led by Ezra and the group I had sent on the bogus quest led by Aaron.

I let the spell fade as I stepped out from behind large bush. “Come back for more?”

“Ezekiel!” Jessica said when she saw me. She was one of the two rangers on Aaron’s team. “We were worried, you’re outside of the dungeon?”

“Yeah, no longer the dungeon boss. The new guy is way stronger than I am, and honestly he’s probably making better gear than I could.”

“Oh really?” Ezra asked, a hungry glint entering her eyes. “Livia will love to hear that.”

“I will warn you that the lower levels of the dungeon are likely to get a lot harder,” I said. My warning wouldn’t slow them down, players were drawn to loot like a moth to a flame.

“What exactly happened here?” Marcus asked. When I first met Marcus, he was an asshole, and I still thought he was. But once he realized I wasn’t all that I seemed he dropped a lot of his pretentious role-play routine. I still didn’t like him. “From what we have heard another army of priests showed up and attacked the ones besieging you? Now the entire country is in uproar.”

“That is more or less what happened,” I agreed. “Friar Brown showed up and saved my ass.”

“Yes,” Aaron nodded. “That fits. This Friar Brown fellow is now stirring up problems, and just by the quests people are getting, it feels like things are going to get messy.”

“You’re players,” I scoffed, “don’t you love that kind of stuff?”

All of them winced a little at that. Ezra was the first to speak. “Yes, it’s a good way to earn experience, levels, and loot. But when that instability is threatening to tear apart the guild, we are less thrilled about it.”

I gestured for them to follow me, I didn’t mind easing their trip through the death marsh. “Why is the guild under threat?”

“People like Marcus,” Derek grumbled.

“Hey, I’ve gotten better,” Marcus protested, though he still sounded pretentious to me.

“I know,” Derek admitted. “But you remember what you were like. We put up with you for months. It took you replaceing out Ezekiel is from Earth for you to finally chill.”

“What Derek is saying,” Aaron said to cut off Marcus before he could further protest. “It’s that the guild has many priests and paladins. Enough of them are in the Church of Olattee, and they are being forced to take a side wherever they go.”

“Despite playing a role,” Marcus glared at Derek. “No one likes to be forced to take a side or make a decision they don’t want to make. But that’s what’s happening.”

I nodded along, understanding the issue. Players tended to be an independent lot and never liked it when they got forced into things.

“Livia sent us here to see what happened because she’s hoping to move the entire guild out to the swamp,” Ezra explained.

I looked at Ezra in surprise. “Technically it’s a marsh,” I said offhandedly, processing what she said and what that would mean. “Being here would get you away from the church’s influence… Though this is not necessarily a safe place.”

“She knows,” Aaron agreed. “But she is certain we can make it work.”

“How have things gone so quickly downhill to the point that she’s ready to uproot the entire guild from wherever you guys are set up?” I asked.

“They haven’t,” Aaron said. “Livia has some interesting contacts within the church and the government. From what she’s let slip, she knows this is only the start. And there is a whispered rumor that there will be a third side in this war.”

Aaron gave me a very pointed look, I shrugged. “It’s no secret—the friar is my friend and I’m going to help him. I owe him.”

“You can’t ruin my marsh,” Raven chimed in. “I like all the different critters that live here.”

“Oh, we won’t,” Jessica smiled at Raven. “We don’t want to get rid of all the fun stuff either.”

Raven gave her a suspicious eye and transformed back into her lynx form.

“I suppose it’s not unusual for guilds to set up on top of dungeons,” I said.

“It’s not, and I think Livia wants to get a move on with your dungeon before anyone else realizes how good these weapons are,” Derek said, hefting the hammer I’d made him.

“Killing two birds with one stone I see,” I nodded.

“Is this going to be a problem?” Ezra asked carefully.

I walked for a few minutes without responding, just doing my best to think through what the implications would be and letting them stew for a little bit. We came to the large body of water that was up next to the ziggurat, where the stream coming from the top flowed down.

The sun was setting, and the dark stone of the ziggurat reflected it in different places where the crystalline substance within shown through. The reflected light wasn’t bright though, it was ominous. I thought it was cool.

“No,” I said. “I do not have a problem with this—under one condition. Your guild has to protect my dungeon. I might not be the dungeon boss anymore, but I am still connected to it.” I didn’t want to explain what the dungeon Lord was, I doubted many people knew.

“Livia will be more than happy. She figured that would be part of the requirements,” Aaron agreed. “After all, it would be silly for us to go to the effort of controlling access to this dungeon only to let it be destroyed.”

“Just don’t be too controlling about who you let in, you don’t want to piss off Kellnock.” I met Aaron’s gaze. “Trust me, you really don’t want to piss him off. And if you stymie his access to the energy by not letting enough fodder in, he will become very annoyed.”

“We know how to feed a dungeon.” Ezra rolled her eyes. “Does our agreement with you about the archive still stand?”

“Kellnock is the controller of that now. You will have to reach a deal with him.”

I left them after that, returning to the ziggurat. I figured I should let Kellnock know what was about to happen and hoped I’d received news back from Vito.