The Swamp

The Swamp lies south of the Forest, past the bridge the bandits guard. At its centre, the Heart of the Swamp, a ruined church holds the statue of the Goddess of Nature, the Old God’s sister. The fairy you summoned serves her. This is where the story tells you what went wrong with the world and sends you after the portal and the Old God, and it is a free source of the blue crystals every zombie collar needs.

Getting there

The bandits Hans and Sven let no one over their bridge without a Royal Pardon, and the way through the swamp needs the Fairy’s Swamp Map you got from summoning the fairy at home. They take both. The Forest page has the details.

The Goddess of Nature

The fairy meets you in the swamp and scolds you for keeping them waiting. She will not have Larry anywhere near her lady: he has betrayed them twice. She leads you on to the statue, and the Goddess wakes.

She knows you as “the man from another world”, next in a cycle her brother has grown tired of. The world, she says, is dying. Her brother, the Man with the Red Eye, and the magic portal held it together; Keeper One, your other half, used the portal and nearly destroyed both. Find her brother and restore the portal. Ask her more and she has three things to tell you:

• Her brother is trapped somewhere, nearly powerless. She is too weak to find him, unless a worshipper performs a ritual for her. You know one: Jully, the man in the wooden mask. That sends you back to the village (Januarius).
• The portal has someone’s soul bound to it, someone odd, “obsessed with the symbols of the days”. Ask Larry.
• Blue crystals: her tears, which she sheds every Envy day, grieving for the world.

Blue crystals

After you have met her, a heap of tears appears by the statue at the start of every Envy day, as long as the last one has been collected. Break it with your bare hands for 4 Blue Crystals. Every zombie collar takes one crystal, and otherwise only Gunter sells them, so this is how you keep raising zombies without paying for it.

Jully’s ritual

After the village election Jully keeps his word. Goddess in the Swamp: bring him 100 Faith, then lead him to the statue. He has never done this before (“Hear me. How dare you!”), but it works. The fairy takes him aside, and the Goddess, stronger than she has been in years, looks for her brother: he is underground somewhere, under buildings and zombies, with rivers on three sides, “like a cell, but not meant for humans”, and it smells terrible. That points you to the sewers and to Davy the Dagger. You cannot leave the swamp before you have heard her out, and you get a Story.