Stygmarsh. Introduction

Introduction to the Stygmarsh

         Stygmarsh steamed and stank in the late spring sunshine. There was a scent, a smell, a tang to the marshes. It sprang from the springs. It popped out from the foamy scum, whisked up by the fast moving streams in the waterway warrens. It chattered with the clacking stems of the reed-choked lakes. It bubbled up quietly from the deepest, stillest pools and burped and belched its way out of the tar pits. It seeped from the waterlogged heaths and oozed from treacherous shifting mires. It tousled the stubby heather of the boglands and moors. It carefully picked at the thorny thickets on the scrubby hills that provided the occasional landmark. It made whistling play with the yawning arches of the forgotten stone ruins that dotted them. Sometimes it seemed salty, sometimes sweet, sometimes it was earthy and overpowering and sometimes delicate and elusive. In places it was accompanied by an oppressive heaviness that made one’s sweat slick on the skin, in others it’s grip was clammy and chilling. It was difficult to put a finger on what it was, yet, once experienced it was never quite forgotten.
         In size the Stygmarshes were vast and, if one could have flown over it like a marsh crow, it would have seemed to be a rough diamond of glistening green, fully three hundred miles from east to west and maybe two hundred from north to south.
To the north the marsh was hemmed in by the low hills that formed the border with the Young Kingdom of Ember, though gaps in these had allowed many streams to worm their way through and dash prematurely toward the sea. To the east ranged the more formidable Old Stygian mountains, better known now as the Angel mountains, beyond which lay the Papal State of Nasturia and the Holy City of Kolken.
         The bulk of the waters feeding into this great basin from their mountain sources far to the west and south, percolated slowly through the mires and collected into a vast lake, deep and moody, in the northeast. Here they brooded awhile before erupting with a tumbling rage down through the Angel Gorges. Now spent and exhausted their character was transformed into the river Styg, which meandered past the city of Styghead through the lowlands of the Young Kingdoms and slipped quietly to the northern sea.

         It had not always been this way. The land had changed in the millennia past, a time Kingdoms men reckoned as the Age of Angels, when there had been abrupt and brutal upheaval in the land of Terra that was termed the Cataclysm. All that was history so ancient that only the Churches had any idea of what had befallen Terra, and all traces of that time had sunk into the past as the marshlands had formed and stabilised.

         The stones that could still be seen were the result of a more recent history, when men of the Old Kingdom of Ember had finally returned. They expanded into the marsh and raised towers to hold this, their southern border against the threat of the Stygian Necromancers who had taken the Holy City, and laid claim to the marsh and the land beyond. The Old Kingdom, then united, had finally triumphed in the Dark Wars, though it had itself been mortally wounded. From that time, nine centuries ago, there had been no more building and Stygmarsh had quietly claimed these follies as its own, moulding the ruins as it saw fit.

         One ruin from such bygone days was termed the Old Watchtower, which once marked the southernmost border of the Old Kingdom. It was built on the highest point of some low hills, near the middle of the marsh, as near as anyone who had cause could judge, where a low outcrop of stone had been heaved up out of the mire. Its crumbling eyeless windows squinted west towards the Goblin tribelands and right below its cracked face, the old marsh road, from the Thanelands of Tanais in the south to the Young Kingdoms in the north, wound around the bluff. The path up the side, that led to a village that once clung to its skirts, was overgrown and had been stripped of its stones long ago. Nothing remained of the proud men who had built it, all had been reclaimed by the great marsh, all was now almost