Chapter 13:

Chapter 13: Peat

Echoes of Fallen Gods


Two weeks into his journey toward Terynia, the countryside began to feel less familiar than the landscapes Pelam had grown up with. No longer was he surrounded by verdant meadows and open fields, crisscrossed by shallow, slow-flowing rivers, or by the birch and spruce forests of his youth.

Here, between the rivers Rax and Talar, the bedrock of Tearon lay close to the surface, and the topsoil was thin and poor in nutrients, not the deep, black richness he was used to back in Cloverheart. Spruce forests gave way to pine, and meadows to marshlands, covered in dense, white fog. And here, farther north from the River Plains, the wondrous heat of the sun didn’t warm him quite the way it used to back home.

In the first few days of his travels, his steps had been fueled by righteous fury. But as the days turned into weeks, his march toward the capital slowed to a crawl. More than once, he set up camp for the night, only to remain in his makeshift shelter for the entire duration of the next day.

At first, he told himself the slower pace of his trek was just a matter of practicality. He couldn’t stay on the road all day, every day. There was hunting, fishing, and foraging to be done if he wanted to sustain himself. But as the days went by, Pelam began to realize that was little more than an excuse.

The truth was, he missed his home and his family. He was a hunter, not a soldier, and despite having become a man in the eyes of his peers more than three years ago, he still felt like a child at times. A young boy who wanted nothing more than to climb into the safety of his father’s lap or rest in the warmth of his mother’s embrace.

It was just a dream, of course. They were all dead now, and he would never see them again. That only served to deepen his loneliness as he slowly, and without much passion, trudged on toward distant Terynia.

The thought of the home the gods had so cruelly taken from him filled his heart with rage once more and briefly infused his legs with strength. It sickened him to think he had been duped by them for so long. That he had, with each prayer and every sacrifice, honored and glorified the very beings who had taken perverse pleasure in slaughtering his family and friends.

His stomach churned when he thought of all the animals he had eviscerated in their names, bleeding them to death or pulling out their intestines while they were still alive, all to glorify one traitorous god or another.

But more than that, his heart was filled with shame over the part he had played in supporting their reign of terror. He shuddered when he remembered that fox he had sacrificed to Tila, god of love and rape, to get that kiss from Orania. Back then, even the fox’s terrified cries had seemed sweet, his torture of the animal innocent. It was all for youthful love, after all. But now, he saw the true nature of the sacrifice he had performed and the prayers he had said. His acts had been no different than if he had, against her will, forced himself on the baker’s daughter in the seedy backroom of some rundown tavern.

Once he got to Terynia, he’d have his revenge, if not on the gods themselves, then at least on their followers.

He continued forward, the spring in his steps his rage had empowered him with soon replaced by the slow dredge of melancholy. Around him, the forest was old and withered, filled with thin, twisted pines covered in gray lichens, growing sparsely in the wet, impoverished soil of the surrounding peat bogs.

Suddenly, he realized he couldn’t move his right foot.

Looking down, Pelam saw it was stuck in the mud, sunken to the ankle in the brown, watery sludge, as if the ground itself was sucking him down. The sparse forest he had been walking through for the past several hours had given way to an open area, which he had assumed, unfamiliar as he was with the terrain here, to be just another meadow. Now he realized he was walking straight across a marsh.

He wiggled his foot a little, and it came loose without much trouble. Looking up again, he made a mental map of the surrounding area. The bog was almost an ellipse, stretching far into the distance on both his left and right sides. In its middle were two smaller hills—no, more like almost imperceptible rises in the ground, really—that suggested there were patches of dry land out there.

Most important, though, was the fact that the distance to the opposite side of the marsh was less than that to its sides. Doubling back would cost time, but even if he didn’t count that, going around would still be slower than trudging straight through the slush.

Reluctantly, Pelam decided to press on. But he knew he’d have to be careful when going deeper into the mire, or more than just his foot could get stuck here.

He was almost halfway to the handful of old pines that grew on the dry patches of land ahead of him when he thought he saw a movement between the trees on the other side of the bog. Squinting, he tried to see what it was, but among the shadows of the distant forest floor, he couldn’t quite make it out.

Probably a moose, Pelam thought. Or possibly a bear.

In either case, it was reason enough to keep his eyes open going forward.

Despite the harshness of the conditions he was walking in, there was beauty here, too. It was a kind of desolate, solemn allure that made him feel almost at peace. In the distance, he could hear the cries of the black grouses from the trees, bog bilberry shrubs grew in the underbrush, and on the ground, he saw cloudberry leaves spreading thick across the sphagnum moss, promising riches of the gold of the forest later in summer. Although the air was filled with the smell of rotting vegetation, there was also a pleasant, almost metallic fragrance from the aromatic oils of the gnarly, hardy plants that thrived here.

Ahead of him, he saw a movement in the water, as if something pale had passed him just below the surface, half hidden by the peaty murkiness of the bog.

An eel, perhaps?

Were there even eels in the mires? Pelam wondered. He knew the snakelike animals swam upriver from the Sea of Pearls. In Cloverheart, they had often caught them in traps as the fish swam past the village.

But here in the marshlands? He just didn’t know.

By now, Pelam was starting to realize he probably had misjudged the mire. The water no longer reached just his ankles. Instead, he was starting to feel like with every other step, his entire leg got stuck in the peat. The effort it took to wade through it, and the very real danger of drowning involved, made him begin to regret his choice.

Pausing for a moment, he took stock of his surroundings again. Whatever had been moving on the far side of the bog earlier was still there, and still just as impossible to make out clearly. But a small flash of color—a little blue, a little red—made him think, just for a moment, that it was probably a man and not a beast.

To his right, and a bit ahead of him, was the small island of twisted trees, easily within reach if he wanted to, but that wasn’t quite the direction he needed to go in. And almost in the middle of the peat bog, Pelam Gathór, enemy of the gods, stood alone and not knowing in which direction to go.

Behind him, another grouse cooed eerily from the forest he had left, wordlessly calling him back to dry land.

Pelam turned around, finally giving up his treacherous trek across the mire.

He had only taken two steps back when something suddenly grabbed his left foot.

Something sinewy and leathery. Something pale, hiding just below the murky waters of the bog.

It pulled hard on his left leg, trying to drag him under. Screaming frantically, he tried to kick off whatever it was that was holding him down, but the dense water turned the kick into more of a slow, wading motion. The thing still held him in an iron grip.

A broken pine branch lying on the vegetation, gray from decades of drying in the sun, caught his eye. He lurched at it frantically, trying to reach it with his outstretched arms, but it was just out of reach.

Something grabbed his waist.

With only his shoulders above water, he looked down. Shimmering through the brown water of the bog, a thin, pale arm held on to him.

Pelam tried to pry it off with his hand, while at the same time kicking with his legs to try to stay above water. But the leathery appendage holding on to his chest, constricting his breath, was too strong, or perhaps too insensitive to pain, to respond to his efforts to remove it.

One final breath, and his head went under as well.

The cold gloom of the marshy waters surrounded him. Around him, he could still feel unseen things moving in the water, stroking him, bumping into him, caressing him.

Pelam opened his eyes.

In front of him, the mummified, leathery faces of men, drowned centuries before and almost perfectly preserved in the acidic waters of the mire, appeared out of the dusk, floating or swimming in the peat colored water—Pelam didn’t know which.

Bog men.

One of them turned to face him, its mouth opening in a silent scream as it approached him.

Gods, he prayed instinctively. Come to me! I need you!

But no being of light appeared in the sky to stretch out its hand to pull him up.

He did, however, notice the sharp branch he had previously spotted on the surface had now sunk into the water in the commotion. It was finally within his reach, and he grabbed it eagerly.

With his last few seconds of air, he stuck it between his chest and the arm holding him, dragging him down into the depths. The added leverage the stake gave him was more than the bog man could withstand, and the grip loosened enough that he finally managed to slip out of its deadly embrace.

Kicking with his right leg, he now ascended toward the life giving surface, but his left foot was still in the grip of another leathery creature. Pelam forcefully thrust his stick at the hand holding him down, severing one of its fingers in the process.

With both his feet now free, he swam toward the surface, breaking it in a cascade of brown, muddy water.

In a circle around him, corpses, haunting and decaying, slowly rose from the water, their snarling faces looking at him with rage and contempt.

“You will sleep forever among us,” one whispered, with a foam of peaty water bubbling from its mouth.

“We will sacrifice you to time and to the gods,” another wheezed.

They came for him from all directions, rising from the depths like pillars of death.

Frantically and on the edge of panic, Pelam stabbed at them with his long stake. One of them he managed to hit in its face, gouging out a rotting eye in the process. Still, the creature kept coming for him, more a puppet of man than alive.

But with every jab and thrust, he gained a little ground, slowly backing toward the island of pines behind him. The closer he came to it, the shallower the water became, and eventually the bog men began to suffer from the same problem he had had when he first waded through the knee-deep marsh—their legs got stuck, just as his had been. Apparently, the deeper parts, where the decaying bodies could move freely and there was space enough to drown him, were where the real danger lay. Here, in shallower waters, they were on equal footing, and with the body of a nineteen-year-old man, Pelam was significantly more agile than a centuries-old corpse.

That’s not to say the fight was easy.

The bog men still had the advantage in numbers. But those also began to dwindle once he reached the safety of dry land on the little island. Breaking off body parts from them, he realized, didn’t stop them from moving, but some of them gave up and waded back into the peat, seemingly to protect themselves from being damaged further.

Eventually, the last of them sank back below the murky waters, not to be seen again by living men.

Pelam could breathe once more.

He rested his back against the thin trunk of one of the twisted pines, considering his options. Looking across the marsh to the other side, he saw the strange thing that had been standing on the edge of the bog during the altercation disappear into the forest beyond. Whatever it had been, it made him feel uncomfortable. Its connection to the bog men seemed to be just a tad more than a coincidence, appearing right before them, and disappearing as soon as they had left. But without knowing what it had been, there was nothing he could do about it.

The route back to the forest he took was longer and less direct than the one he had used when wading out here, but he didn’t dare reenter the deeper parts of the marsh. Instead, he traced a path between the small islands where the brown slush never reached above his knees, until he could safely cross over to the tree line beyond.

Finally standing on dry land among the pine trees of the greater forest of the marshlands once more, Pelam decided he’d had enough. He was not a one-man army. Taking on the gods and their priestesses was not a job for a young boy.

With his head hanging, he began to walk back toward the River Plains, Terynia now at his back.

The gods had won this battle.

But unknown to Pelam, they had already lost the war.



Author's Note

Thank you for reading Echoes of Fallen Gods!

This novel is 43 chapters long, with new installments posted twice each week. Perhaps you’d be interested in reading some of my other stories while you wait for the next update?

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