Chapter 22: Mist, Mire, and Marsh
“Where did Nidhogg go?” The Little White Dragon left the headless rider that had died in her mouth. Before she left, Lilith stacked its skeletal horse and every iron piece of gear together. She felt a twinge of shame over how she fought, a blush under the mist. She knelt by the headless knight’s remains and murmured an apology. Then she parted its body with handfuls of earth, burying the pieces in several patches of mud.
She guessed it would slow the knight’s return, like throwing stones into a stream to muddle its flow. Unfair, maybe, but a threat like that should sleep a while longer. When Lilith cleared the Moonswallow Mist, she’d let it out again.
“Sorry, okay? Just rest here a bit longer.” Lilith whispered to the Undead, a word tossed into a well with no echo. The headless don’t hear, but the Little White Dragon still reached out and stroked the armor, cold as night frost on steel.
Then she left the dismantled skeletal horse and the headless knight in pieces. The second level of the Grand Mausoleum felt thinner in life than the first. Not fields and quiet towns now. A ring of lightless marsh, a sweep of gray-black steppe, and flats so level they looked ironed by death.
The Grand Mausoleum was wrapped in death to begin with, a shroud over stone. Yet here Lilith couldn’t sense even a thread of breath. It felt as if no adventurer had ever stepped down, or else they were cut like candles the instant they did.
But Lilith couldn’t find any living aura at all. The Little White Dragon widened her eyes; sapphires would envy that blue, and in them rippled confusion.
No tall reeds broke the sightline in this bog. Nothing waved, no screens, only an endless slick of mud and an empty horizon that swallowed figures whole. “Where did everyone go?” Lilith peered into the haze; even her sharp dragon sight saw no silhouettes. The Little White Dragon muttered, tucked the Astrolabe onto her back, and let the pink, sword-shaped sigil on her arm dim like twilight. She dropped her guard, took a breath, and searched as she rested, like a heron standing still in marsh water.
“Abaddon’s gone too.” The thought pricked like a thorn. The Black Dragon who came down first was nowhere. And the two who crossed by pocket space—Abaddon and Litt—were missing as well. They should’ve popped out to find me. Where did everyone drift to?
She walked on in bafflement, her steps tapping at the skin of the world. The swamp thinned underfoot. At first the muck could swallow half her calf. She had to freeze a plate of ice below each step to stand, like laying lily pads of frost. After a while the sludge sank to her ankles. Then not even her ankles went under; the murk couldn’t cover her feet at all. A sliver of white, snow-pale instep showed above the gray-brown mire, a small moon shining in a sunless land.
“Ew, filthy.” The sigh came first, then the wrinkle of her nose. She’d long made peace with grime, but a hidden streak of cleanliness still tugged at her like a taut string. With so little water, even ice underfoot couldn’t float her above the muck; the mud held like old hands.
“Wu...” The Little White Dragon could only whine, a flute-note in fog, then hurry her steps, dragging through the mire toward open ground.
Lucky, the shallowing mire promised an edge, like dawn light under a door. Her mood lifted with each slurp of mud releasing her heel.
At the border grew many black plants, soot-feathered against the damp. The Little White Dragon didn’t know these eerie stalks well, yet they weren’t strange; the Grand Mausoleum nursed them everywhere. She recalled Nidhogg’s warning about crops that suckle on dark magic. She guessed these plants had tamed those fields, like tutors in shadow.
She left the swamp so vast she couldn’t picture its reach, and set bare feet on wet, rough black turf. The Little White Dragon sat by the black earth. After felling the headless knight she’d slipped off her shoes and walked barefoot through mud, like a crane forgetting its reeds.
She shouldn’t have, not without wards, not in a swamp thick with unseen pests and nameless fevers. But her current body could shoulder a little willful cleanliness, like a shield against small sins.
Lilith sat on the black grass and set her shoes beside her, twin boats run aground. She was an ice mage; she knew no drying spell. The heat-stone she used to carry was missing, likely lost in the fight, a coal fallen into river silt. So she couldn’t cheerfully bake her feet warm the way she used to.
She had to fix it the dumb way. She gathered the water on her skin, froze it into little plates of ice; dirty frost clung to her feet like barnacles. She tapped the ice off with her fingers, flakes falling like broken shells. When the last shard dropped, Lilith pulled on her shoes again and stood on the black plain.
“Finally out.” Relief washed in first, like wind after rain. Leaving the filthy swamp brightened her mood. But at the thought of Nidhogg, still no trace, her heart sank again, a stone in a well.
Where did you go? the Little White Dragon thought, small and lonely as a candle in fog.
