The rider emerged even before the battle in far off Holt was finished. Its head breached the surface of the muddy pool at the north-western edge of the swamp just before its mount stepped onto the muddy shore. It wasn’t the edge of the darkness’s territory, but it was the closest place that any of its undead servants could wait out the harsh light of day. There was no place to hide in the plains, and though the red hills were drenched in death, they were still inhospitable to undeath.

It didn’t matter that the pool was only two feet deep or that, on its strange mount, the dark rider was almost eight feet tall. It had been nothing but a pile of bones and shadows until moments ago. It was more magic than man and scarcely counted as real according to most definitions of the word. The core was necromantic, and its messenger rode on a steed made of bones, but the rider wasn’t a ghost.

It was barely a shade, and the souls had been stitched together with so many shadows to make it that the result was practically invisible to the eye. It had only one purpose: To move faster than all the Lich’s other servants combined. Even though it had emerged from its hiding place less than a minute ago and was still dripping water, it was already devouring the land beneath it at a staggering pace.

It had a goal and a limited time to achieve it. Accomplishing that was the only thing that would keep it from being consigned to oblivion when dawn broke in eight short hours, and an errant ray of sunlight burned it away to nothing.

The only sound as it moved through the night was the wind in its wake and the click-clack of the boney steed as it charged forward with all its might. The Lich that had crafted it had no horses. It had slain a hundred adventurers and half as many knights, but not one had ever brought a mount into its domain, so it had been forced to improvise. The result was a monstrosity of function over form that would inspire nightmares in anyone unfortunate enough to see it. The body was formed from the large bones of a dozen men, with more than a few animal replacements from crocodiles and other large predators to make them fit together, providing a sturdy place to attach the six powerful legs of the beast.

Though the human femurs and patellas were used for the upper portions of those legs, they were too short for the lower limbs. There, elk bones dominated. Those longer tibias and fibulas gave the thing’s legs a spindly, spidery look that allowed it to reach farther than it would have otherwise with every stride. Cloaked in shadows as they were, it would have been hard for an observer to make out most of those details. The shod hooves, by contrast, were very visible as they sparked from the force of almost every step, leaving an angry trail of flickering lights in its wake. Each leg ended in a human hand drowned in molten iron. The results were nightmarish, letting the thing ride over incredibly uneven terrain without slowing and allowing it to grip the earth so that it could push off the ground powerfully with every stride.

Powered by magic and the suffering of the souls bound within it, the steed was tireless and could travel nearly twice as fast as the mundane horses its very existence mocked.

The rider carried no weapons or armor. It used no saddle. One hand gripped the reins while its body drifted behind the steed like a flowing cape, and the other held a tarnished bronze lantern.

As challenging as the other two constructs had been to design and build, they paled in comparison to that evil little thing. It was for that evil little lamp that its rider was leaving the bounds of its territory for the first time. It was the key to everything, but as it glittered and rattled under the starlight, it gave no clue about its purpose, nor would it until it was time.

It moved at speeds that humans would never know, but it still took two hours of tireless galloping for the nightmare rider to reach its destination. Even with the trip only halfway over, though, it was clear to the darkness that this servant might not be up to the task. Fingers were missing, fractures were appearing, and the boney head of the mount, an elk skull, was snorting frost with every breath. The Lich didn’t care if the thing suffered. All that mattered was that it completed its critical mission as the shadowy rider finally dismounted and glided above the abandoned battlefield.

The bodies of the men had been dragged inside the pitiful walls they had died defending by their victorious allies. The goblins had been slaughtered to the last and were left to rot where they had fallen. Their bodies were cool but not yet cold, and only a few embers were all that remained of their once formidable fire magics. That would be enough, though. The wraith drifted over the battlefield to the remains of a pyre. Then it opened its hooded lantern, selected a still smoldering ember, and placed it inside.

Now that the darkness had what it came for, it finally let the Gold Skull tribe off the leash. For weeks, it had been struggling to prevent Grod from snuffing out the last lair of the Burning Skulls. Punishments for trying to devour their last enemy within an easy march had included pain, weakness, and nightmares, as usual. Eventually, the swamp had been forced to add debilitating diseases to that list, temporarily crippling its tribe to hold them at bay.

That was all over now.

As soon as its dark rider had begun its trip, the Lich let his goblins off the leash. After that, they needed no urging. Without fire magics to call upon and only a few warriors worthy of the name, their gold-riddled warrens fell in a few brutal hours. On one side, there were less than 50 Burning Skulls, and on the other, there were ten full warbands of Gold Skulls. It was a massacre. By the end of it, there wouldn’t even be enough meat to justify the hunt. That wasn’t what it was about anymore. It was about dominance.

For the first time in generations, a single chief controlled the red hills, from the pine forests to the base of the mountains. There were still other tribes to subjugate and gather past that, but Grodd had grown into a brutal chieftain thanks to the swamp’s influence, and no one would dare stand against him.

The Gold Skulls were careful not just to purge the life of every goblin in those warrens, though. In addition to goblins, they hunted down every last totem and effigy. They defaced every image of a blackened skull they could find. Once that was done, they extinguished every fire that was still smoldering. They didn’t know why they did this, but they didn’t need to. It was a compulsion, and the goblins obeyed. In a single night, the fire spirit and the tribe he had guided for years were all but erased, as if they’d never been at all.

As soon as the shadow raised the lantern, the ember within it caught fire and began to burn a dull yellow. Second, by second, that color shifted, slowly turning chartreuse, lime, forest, and ultimately a pale olive color as any real light or heat was bled away from it. It was the ghost of fire, in the same way, that the wraith was the ghost of a man.

That trick had burned out two of his best mages in weaving the magic. Just as the opposite of life wasn’t truly death but undeath, the opposite of fire wasn’t truly water. It was stygium. Each element had an anti-element, the Lich discovered as it researched the subject more, though for now, at least he had no need for the other three. It turned out that past the veil of life and death, things got very complicated.

Of course, the fire spirit hadn’t been converted into undeath, though that might come later. It was just being bound in place by its antithesis. It would make the experimentation easier.

Once the color stopped shifting, all the remaining mana related to that lonely ember drifted toward the lantern in a slow spiral of faintly luminescent streamers. Souls rose from the corpses of its recently deceased minions in translucent cyan streamers that were dimmer than the waning moon. Sparks and flickers jumped from the ashes of its dying fires in whites and yellows.

For perhaps five minutes, the dark rider was surrounded by its own dim galaxy of strange lights. Fiery stars were scattered amidst the colorful nebula, slowly orbiting the shade like a dark fulcrum. Eventually, all the light and color faded as they collapsed into the void ember at the center of it all like the black hole it was.

Less than ten minutes after it arrived, the rider was remounting its still breathless steed and returning to the southeast. This time the travel was slightly slower to start and slowed down further as it went. When it reached the swamp’s edge four hours later, the horrific mount was down to three fully functional legs and limping badly.

It would have to be scrapped, unfortunately, the swamp decided, but it had learned valuable lessons on its failure points that would help when constructing its replacement.

The thing crumbled back into a pile of bones at the bottom of a pool of water once that determination was made, and the dark rider continued on its own. From where it stood, it had thirty miles left to cover by sunrise. That would have been an impossible distance for a human, but the shade’s steps didn’t sink into the muck. It ran effortlessly across the surface of water and quicksand alike as it struggled to reach the safety of the dungeon.

For it, the water offered no safe refuge. Any attempt to hide there from the sun would extinguish its valuable cargo and make the whole night meaningless. The void ember was worth more than the shade. It knew that, and so it knew that failure would only be rewarded with oblivion.

The swamp knew that too, though, and as dawn approached and the distance still looked too great, a mist began to boil up from the stagnant waters. The fog couldn’t shield a creature of pure shadow from direct sunlight, but it could keep the predawn twilight from turning its servant into a puff of acrid black smoke.

The dark rider stepped into the sweet embrace of the Lich’s dark tunnels only minutes before dawn finally broke. It had not only avoided a gruesome and painful death, but it had successfully brought the Lich the thing it wanted most.

Trapped in that small brass lantern was the suffering spirit of Krulm’venor, a petty godling that had once been so much more than the flickering spark that he was now. There was so much that it could teach the darkness now, whether it wanted to or not.

The Lich was very pleased. It had not yet decided if the fire spirit would be a meal, an experiment, a toy, or a servant, but no matter how it chose to use it, it would always be a trophy that it could add to its hoard. It was one more piece of evidence that nothing could hope to prevail against its patience and cunning.

Tonight it had conquered the red hills and united the goblin tribes under its banner. In time every scrap of land and everything that dwelled on it would belong to it, too, no matter how long that took to come to pass.