Tenebroum PLUS Ch. 142-143 (Patreon)

Ch. 142 - The Feast Nearby

Tenebroum retreated to the nearest dungeon, four miles away from the city walls, but restless, it moved twice more before daylight made further travel on the surface impossible. It left the dark Paragon to handle the withdrawal of its forces, though its general did not wish to leave. 

“Sire, if we push only a little further, we can kill thousands and then bury our remaining legions in the city catacombs proper,” it insisted. 

The Lich ignored that advice, though. It was almost peaceful once the darkness’s forces withdrew and the screaming stopped, but that didn’t fool the Lich. More surprises awaited them all in Rahkin, and even if they did not, it wanted to feast on those remaining defenseless lives itself. 

Though its forces left behind the battered husk of a city and a shell-shocked population, it was certain that there was one more trick awaiting it. There always seemed to be. The moon had seen how much those infernal flames had weakened it, and she would rally some new hero to strike the final blow. So it laid low and flitted between locations while it recovered. 

Nothing came, though. Later in the day, some of the humans began to stream away from the still-burning city in long refugee caravans to the north and the south. There were no heroics, though. No new champions of the light raced across the plains eager to strike it down, and no Gods descended from on high to do so either.  

Instead, Tenebroum was allowed to slowly coalesce from the ragged fog it had become back into the true pool of night that was its nature. Surely they will take advantage of this moment, the voice gibbered in its head in half a dozen tongues. Surely, they will strike me down when I am out of my strongest constructs. 

No one did, though. Instead, it huddled there in the dank, dark pit with the dozens of abominations that were being stored here to protect it. The day above them was calm and hideously bright, even twenty feet under the surface as the wandering stars made their way across the sky. 

No doom was leveled at it, which gave Tenebroum the time it needed to lick its wounds and recover. It cursed itself for underestimating the Templar, but even that castigation was not enough to entirely quell its joy that it had finally won. 

Well, won this region at least. There was still the bastion of magic to the south, and there were still likely humans to be purged or claimed along Dalton’s eastern shore. Even when it dealt with both of those groups, there would still be other enemies far to the north across the trackless sands to contend with, but the Lich was not concerned about any of them immediately. There was not a single army left in a hundred miles besides its own, and once it crushed the mages and the vestiges of the Sidramites that sheltered with them, it would have all the time it needed for even the most complex of plans.

In a perfect world, it would already be preparing a new combat form for tomorrow’s slaughter. The charred remains of its mithril armor would not be easily fixed in a minor dungeon outpost without any proper tools. What it needed was a handful of flesh crafters, a forge, and some exotic raw materials. It had none of that, though. Instead, it had 47 drudges, 13 many legged horsemen, a handful of wraiths, and a neuroid. 

None of those would help it to create what it needed, so, instead, it turned inward into the shadows. The flesh was strong enough to tear people limb from limb, but for what came next, there were no armies or priests to contend with. Instead, there were just families barricaded inside their homes and people hiding wherever they could while they prayed for a miracle that wasn’t coming. For most of its campaign, it had tasted the blood that had been spilled in its name through a chain of intermediaries, and now, on the eve of its ultimate triumph, it would not be denied a more direct experience.

Shadows lacked the strength of flesh, but what they did have was versatility. It could become anything in the shadows. A dragon, a mass of writhing tentacles, or even a bizarre combination of the two was entirely possible. It was not limited by the real world when it made its form solely from the souls of its victims and the darkness that was at the core of its being. That would make it intensely vulnerable to mages and all the rest, of course, but according to the whispering of the rats and the assurances of its general, there were none of those left.

For hour after hour, Tenebroum healed, and it also sculpted a new form it would wear for the slaughter to come. It started with something resembling its own discarded form of mithril and steel. However, as it realized that it did not need something slow and heavily armored, that began to change.

The first thing to go was its constrained size. It had grown so used to the human parts that it was most frequently forced to work with that it had practically forgotten what it was like to unfurl its true self, except for when it was watching the battlefield from high above as a cloud or a flock of dark birds. 

Tenebroum did not need to be diffuse any more than it needed to be small. It was a vortex of death and power that could tower over almost any spirit it had ever encountered. It was with that in mind that it slowly uncoiled from the shade of a man into that of an ogre. It grew so large that the cramped dungeon could barely contain its majesty. 

Ironically, in this form, the Templar could have defeated it easily with his terrible light. Now that he was gone, though, the darkness could practically devour the city whole. 

It only needed something with claws that could cut through the souls of its prey and speed to evade any traps that might yet wait for it in the battered city by the sea. So, modification by modification, that primal, amorphous form became more animalistic. Its back grew more hunched, its armor disappeared, and that bulk was, in turn, replaced with a sinuous body and additional limbs.

Even as a centipedal abomination covered in hands so that it might move through even the smallest of crawlspaces with ease, the darkness decided it wasn’t yet fast enough. So, it added wings, and then tweaked them, replacing claws with bladed feathers and removing each element one at a time until it was nothing but an incarnation of hunger than even its pet rat godling might approve of. 

Tenebroum paid attention to even the most minor of details, adding unnecessary symmetries to things like the nine rows of teeth present in its maw to ensure that it would fly that much faster and making sure that every last shadowy pinion on its nine pairs of outstretched wings was a perfect reproduction of the real thing, only sharper. 

Each feature mutated and improved, and each of those improvements were polished and rehoned as Tenebroum became lost in the activity of making itself the perfect spiritual predator. Normally, it used the corpses of others because it was safer to play puppet master, but so much of it had burned away the night before, and so few enemies now remained that its normally cautious nature took the back seat to hunger. 

It became so engrossed in the activity that the final sunset of the day passed without its notice. It was halfway to midnight by the time it crawled from its burrow as a dark phoenix and flew like a bolt toward the now quiet city. As it left, it only issued a single order to its general. 

“Capture or kill the stragglers, and let none escape,” it commanded. “The city itself is mine!”

None saw it as Tenebroum approached the city like a monster of legend. Now that it had cast off the human form that it had grown too comfortable with, it had become a force of nature. Its wings stretched nearly a quarter mile against the nighttime gloom, blotting out stars in its wake. Even if the residents had been able to see the dark shape coming for them, ready to engulf the city, they wouldn’t have been able to pick out the thousand terrible details that would drive most men to madness. 

When Tenebroum flew over the walls it expected another strike against it, but none materialized. Instead it saw only a few ragged guardsmen holding their posts with pike and crossbow against an attack that would never come. They feared zombies, but tonight they would face something much worse than anything it have ever build of steel or bone. 

When it landed in the battered merchant quarter, it landed as a wall of darkness that penetrated every building that it brushed against. There, its attention to detail paid off, and even before it had folded its wings completely to dissolve into the next stage of hideous abomination that it had created for the once-capital city, its blade feathers had already spiritually maimed and flensed dozens of helpless people. 

They didn’t even know they were under attack when suddenly a line of darkness pierced them, and they fell in two as surely as if they’d been struck by the blade of a guillotine. Their flesh was intact, but they were mortally wounded just the same. 

The lucky ones died of shock and heart attacks as the impossibility of what had happened to them simply shattered their soul. The unlucky ones fell to the ground screaming or were unable to remember their name as they were only maimed instead of mortally injured. 

Tenebroum stood there for a long moment, testing the air as it searched through the fainted whirls of essence for any sign that something might be amiss, and when it found nothing, it began to unravel. It had not spent hours of its day simply perfecting an eighteen-winged behemoth to look pretty, it had built a terrible purpose into every appendage. Now, each of those appendages dissolved into a hungry multiheaded hydra in its own right, connected to the rest of the body by only the thinnest strands of malice. 

With every moment that passed, the dread god began to resemble a giant spider web more and more as its body became half a hundred grasping mouths that spread through every nearby building in the search for life to devour.

Most of its victims barely saw more than a ripple in the air before it attacked them. If a small mouth found someone, then it latched on to the very core of their being, and if a larger one found them, it simply swallowed them whole. 

Those few victims with some measure of the sight, or those who watched a loved one fall to the ground next to them, often tried to run, but they didn’t get far. In every room and in every building, the darkness was feasting. Those few that remained with a flicker of light in their eyes were sometimes enough to hold it back a moment until another limb could attack them from behind, but that was as much opposition as it faced. 

Amidst the spiritual carnage that it inflicted, a rush of energy and joy-filled Tenebroum. What it was doing was monstrous, and it gloried in it. 

Here, it began to achieve an apotheosis it had not reached even when it had devoured a god. Each of the lives it was consuming at that moment was a minor thing, but the way they were all connected became the lattice that it crawled over as much as the cobblestones and tunnels. How could you escape from the darkness when it already had its claws in your neighbors and your siblings?

Each victim hunted to the ground and died screaming as the Lich’s wildly mutating form burrowed ever deeper into their souls and forced them to relive their deepest traumas over and over before they finally passed. But in their passing, they opened up a small window into those lives they’d touched most. 

Tenebroum didn’t even need to hunt them anymore. It just needed to want them, and that wasn’t hard. It wanted everyone and everything. Though it had gotten a late start, it continued to spread quickly. Though their bodies would remain as it hollowed out their souls and took everything that made them who they were, the slowly cooling corpses of the citizens that had once been the true heart of the city were quickly becoming an endangered species. 

By sunrise, there wouldn’t be a single living pulse remaining anywhere in the city. All that would remain would be a feast for rats and raw materials for future constructs. Right now, the Lich didn’t care about any of that, though. It was lost in its predatory bloodlust as it drank in the lives of the innocent and rendered them screaming into the void.

Ch. 143 - Vengeance not Victory

While her dark god feasted and thrashed about the city, the Voice of Reason entered the hole that had once been the main gate astride a skeletal horse that walked slowly into town. Her master would devour every last soul in the place. All save one or two in the castle. Those, it had left them to her, so that she could properly carry out her vengeance. 

Despite the obvious joy her lord was taking as he sucked the life out of Rahkin’s inhabitants, part of her was saddened to see it. Her terrifying master had built each of its constructs for a single purpose. The Dreamer existed to spread the darkness into the minds of those who might be susceptible, the Dark Paragon existed to crush the forces of light and life on the field of battle, and she existed to make the reluctant see reason and bring them into the fold. 

After all, even a lord of the dead would rule better if it had a few living allies to carry out tasks during the daylight hours, and the darkness’s priesthood was a bloody place always eager for fresh recruits. Each of them had their purpose, and only she had failed in hers. 

Had the King seen things her way, then even now, this might be a bustling city of thirty thousand souls working hard to bring in the harvest. Instead, walls were blackened, buildings were collapsed, and dead lay scattered in the streets. 

As she rode slowly toward the heart of Rahkin, she watched men and women continuing to die as the hungry mouths and limbs of the darkness ripped soul from body, making their corpses fall to the ground like a marionette with severed strings as the dark jungle made of etheric limbs multiplied in number again and again.

It could do the same thing to her just as easily. She knew that. It might at any time, too, if she failed it again. 

For now, though, the person-sized tentacles that were its grasping mouths steered around her. One day, she might not be worth repairing, but for now, she was hardly considered food. 

Her soul, like the rest of the darkness’s constructs, was a fragile, artificial thing and hardly the font of life force that it was currently seeking for. So she continued on, unmolested, as she rode toward the castle. 

Several times along the way, she found guards. In most cases, they simply ran from the sight of a broken woman on a skeletal steed, but in one instance, they had enough steel left in their spine to stand their ground. 

Then she took a deep breath into her hollow chest and shrieked a single inhuman note that lingered in the air for almost half a minute. The terrible note cracked nearby glass and was enough to rupture the eardrums of the men who opposed her. Most of them fled at that, but the one that didn’t, collapsed with blood pouring from his ears and nose. 

He wasn’t dead, but he would be when her lord found his insensible form and consumed him. The Voice of Reason rode past the body without so much as a sideways glance as the body as she approached her target at the main gate. 

Before her carriage exploded, she would have hesitated to use the sole weapon she’d been given for fear that she would have cracked her perfect porcelain face. Those days were over now. Though the cracks had been fixed with molten gold, and where larger caps were visible, pieces of moonstone and finely crafted howlite had been cut to fit. 

The end result was still beautiful, in its way, though it lacked the perfect symmetry she’d had at her creation. As a result, she could not bear to look at herself in the mirror and routinely shattered them when she came across them. 

The rest of her broken body had been repaired in a similarly piecemeal way. The golden wires of her hair had been melted down and replaced, though they were not as lovely as before, and her limbs were repaired in the same flawed style as her face, though they could not be seen under her black dress. 

The construct rode into the castle without opposition. The gate was still sealed, but one of the side doors had been left open by someone who’d decided that fleeing would be safer than cowering behind the walls. They were wrong. Nowhere was safe now. The Lich owned the world for leagues in every direction.

The halls were even more vacant than the rest of the city, but the Voice of reason ignored all of that as she made her way to the Grand Hall and the throne itself. She was here for one reason and one alone: to murder the traitors and redeem herself. 

The only guards she found were outside the door to the throne room itself, but these weren't palace regulars. One old man with a boar spear stood shoulder to shoulder with a boy too young to grow a beard wielding a kitchen knife. It was a laughable scene, and when the two of them found themselves face to face with a construct as hideous as her, they bolted in opposite directions, leaving her free to enter the seat of Rahkin’s power. 

Inside, she found the last stand she’d expected. Half a dozen gray-beared knights stood or knelt in prayer in the center of the room, halfway between her and the throne. 

None of them was able to endure The Voice of Reason’s keening scream long enough to make it even halfway to her before they fell on the polished stone floors. The only difference between this encounter and the last one was the way that the stained glass fell from the intact windows near the ceiling and rained down on all of them. 

She walked over that glass, letting it crunch beneath her high-heeled boots as she strode toward the throne where the Queen waited for her. 

“Queen of the dead,” the Voice of Reason said cordially. “Pity you had not taken my lord’s generous offer. Then your people and your sons might yet live.”

“So you admit it!” The Queen yelled a touch too loudly, for she was still partially deafened by the earlier screech. “I knew it was your vengeance for their refusal.”

“Vengeance?” the construct asked in confusion. “My vengeance only arrives today. I have come to wring your sorry throat as well as that of every member of your family who dares to live!”

“You have already slain them with your foul poison!” the Queen yelled with tears in her eyes. 

This confused the Voice of Reason considerably. She’d killed no one. Certainly not the people she’d been trying to negotiate with. “I believe you are mistaken,” she said simply. “My only weapon has ever been words, and now I have come to take yours away forever for interfering in my Lord’s critical diplomacy.”

As the Voice of Reason strode toward the throne itself to carry out her task, a voice yelled from the shadows. “She did nothing! If you want someone to blame for standing against you, then face me, you monster!”

The woman who spoke so bravely stepped out of the darkness, clutching a dagger in her hand, and the Voice of Reason turned to the new speaker and then dropped the frail old woman back onto the throne to face this challenger. She might not have been created for fighting, but even a doll like her could take off the starving woman before her. She’d probably been beautiful once, but like everything else in this city, war and starvation had taken their toll, and the princess was a shadow of the woman she’d once been. 

“No. That’s impossible. You?” the Queen mouthed, unbelieving. “You couldn’t have… your father… your brothers. You couldn’t have—”

“I did.” the princess said curtly. “I had to. They sought to ally with evil, and that made them evil as well.”

The Voice of Reason merely stood there, letting all this play out while she listened. Not only was this level of betrayal and emotional turmoil certain to draw the hungry gaze of her master, but it meant one thing above all others. 

I didn’t fail, she thought to herself. I convinced the man and his generals to see the error of their ways. 

She felt the relief wash over her, and as she stood their stiffly, only the slightest of smiles at the corner of her ceramic lips betrayed that sudden lightness. For months now she’d carried around the weight that was the certainty she’d failed to accomplish her mission. Now she knew that was incorrect. She’d succeeded in winning over the heart of the kingdom, only to have that tentative truce betrayed by the man’s own daughter. 

That was simply too delicious for words. It was almost enough to make all these wasted lives worthwhile. 

“Your father, the King, he would never—” the Queen answered. 

“He did, Mother!” the princess screeched, almost matching the volume of the Voice’s earlier destructive note. “He was going to trade human lives and souls to this… this… thing and I could never have allowed it. It would have damned all of us to the pits!”

The Queen opened her mouth to protest again, but no sound came out. Instead, she broke into sobs and lay heavily across one arm of the jeweled throne, letting the crown on her head trouble to the ground. It was a pitiful sight, but the Voice basked in it for a moment before she began walking toward the princess. 

“What is it you think you prevented?” The porcelain doll asked. “All you did was seal the fate of everyone in your city. Why would you do that when piece would have saved so many lives.”

“I’m more concerned with their souls than their lives,” the princess spat back. 

“Their souls will never escape the grip of my master either,” the Voice of Reason said, gesturing toward the window. There, they had a clear view of the black veins burrowing into half the buildings of the city. The shadows no longer looked like a monstrous creature. They grew too thickly and too numerously for that now. 

The scene looked like the roots of an impossibly large tree or the tangled veins of a cancer now. Either way, the metaphor was apt, and it feasted on the city while tiny things like them could only watch in disbelief as it devoured the world. 

“You’re lying,” the princess whispered. “My father and brothers are safe in Elysium, where you can never touch them, and I’ll join them there soon enough.”

“Is that so?” the Voice of Reason asked, taking two steps toward the woman before she raised her weapon again. This time, she dropped it and staggered back a few steps. 

“I will not run from my city, but I will not let you have me either.” the princess said. Those were her final words before she dropped to the floor. The Voice had thought that the woman was merely starving, but it would seem that she turned the same poison she had on her brothers on herself in a bid to die before the darkness could take her. 

That was never an option, though. The Lich would devour every last soul in the city before the night was through. 

It wouldn’t devour the bodies, though, and this one was too lovely and too fitting not replace her current one. She moved to the wall to lower a tapestry so she could hang it by its heels and drain it of blood before it began to rot. Perhaps in light of her good work, the Lich would grant her a boon and give her the flawless face of the woman that had upset all of their plans. 

Only then would the voice of reason be able to look at herself in the mirror again.