Serellia (Everlasting Legends, Book 2)

Ch. 24 - Rudimentary Augury

Journal Entry, Obtoxicullous

It was late spring, as I recall when the swamp was sufficiently thawed but still frigid enough to threaten hypothermia to an unwitting traveler foolish enough to spend any time submerged in the muck and filth. Unlike the bogs and wetlands of the south, the frigid marsh is too cold for flies and mosquitoes except for the short summer months, and its waters are too brackish and bitter for most fish and reptiles. The exceptions are monstrous armored sturgeon and goliath toads that grow large enough to devour entire ponies whole. Ferns, moss, and pretty Ice-shrooms blanket the black mud while giant arrow-straight elder pines and twisted junipers stretch beyond the effect of the shorter undergrowth. From their branches grow hanging moss and the silky thin lines of reaver webbing, for the marsh was their land long before man's arrival. To traverse through the marsh is to be under their watchful gaze, for every trip line brushed or broken alerted the entire clan, which laid claim to that patch of mud.

I felt their presence but never spied one in earnest, as they seemed only curious enough to observe my activity from afar but never to engage. That was because of the presence of my staff, though it might have been mistaken for a walking stick by humans by the way in which I held it. To the reavers, it was a warning of magic, and there is only one thing that the reavers hate more than magic--fire. This is why the reaver clans reside in the wet and cold places of the world where the presence of fire is hard to come by and harder to spread. So they take great care to eliminate the threat in any territory they claim. Candles, torches, lanterns, and other hazardous, flammable materials are seized and drowned in the nearest lake, stream, or well. And it is just as well as every reaver is equipped with six red eyes that see just as keenly in the dark as a hawk might see on a clear and sunny day. But even when unable to see, their sense of touch is more than enough for them to live quite happily and traverse even the darkest places of the world, and reaver are just as frequently found in deep caverns, with some clans never knowing the surface world.

But my quest that day was not to study or disturb the reaver that called the frigid marsh home but to find where their territory unexpectedly ended. For as I stated, the reavers fear fire and remove it from their lands diligently, and reaver clans will branch their lands long and wide right up against the territories of other clans and even overlap in some cases. So when I came upon a stretch of the marsh that was oddly deficient of reaver webbing, I knew what I had found. A place where no clan dared lay claim or bothered to venture, a place that was already home to something that haunted the dreams of even the great weavers. A dragon's den.

The entrance to the den was like a colossal gaping maw in the side of the washed-out bank that had once been a large hill before flooding had cleanly swept half of it away. Now it was a wall of mud that more closely resembled the layers of a cake decorated with tree roots, rocks, and several small holes made by birds and other small creatures. But none compared to the enormous empty void leading down into the earth.

But before I could explore the lair's depth, I faced the considerable expanse of icy muck that stretched out between me and the entrance to the dragon's lair. Black dragons were like other dragons and not always pure black, in my experience. What set them apart from other dragons wasn't their coloration but their hunting habits. Black dragons preferred rotten meat and carrion. They'd let their meals marinade for weeks before devouring them. Which was precisely how I'd become aware of this one. My undead followers in the Silent Slough were well past death and into various states of decay, which made them walking appetizers for a creature whose diet was mostly decaying flesh. To be frank, I'd never considered that one of the possible downfalls of creating an undead army was that they would be appealing—or appetizing to anything. But such is life, filled with concealed consequences, and thus I found myself one murky trudge away from confronting the dragon who had been supping on my herd of undead like a wolf to succulent sheep...