Tenebroum PLUS Ch. 146-147 (Patreon)

Ch. 146 - A Lifeless Husk

Tenebroum feasted for three nights running before it finally decided that the city was now a lifeless husk. That first night, it gorged itself on the great masses of the living, leaving only the souls of the palace for the Voice of Reason to harvest and the remaining generals for its Dark Paragon to feast on. 

For the darkness, this wasn’t about harvesting great minds for future plans; this was about victory and a truly bottomless hunger. There were times in the swamp when a single bloated corpse had been an unimaginable luxury. Now, an entire city wasn’t enough to feed its bottomless hunger, and it had ripped the souls from the bodies of entire families at once. 

It had spent the following day slowly digesting its banquet of tens of thousands of souls in the catacombs beneath the city while the many rat vessels of Ghroshian cowered in the corners, avoiding direct contact. They were an interesting abomination, and Tenebroum looked forward to exploring their tiny connected minds once it was done with Rahkin.

That wouldn’t be for several more days, though. On the second night, it boiled to the surface like a hungry shark, searching for those few crumbs that had fallen from its table the night before. The strong, the clever, and the small made up its meal that night, and though there were only a few hundred of those resourceful men and women at sunset, it savored every last one even more for their rarity. 

By sunrise, none of them were left, and it retreated from the surface once again. This time, the rats were nearly as stuffed as Tenebroum, thanks to all the corpses their dark master had left in their wake. As a result, they were less skittish, and the two of them talked about many things while they sheltered away from the light. 

In this strange multi-tiered conversation, the two of them covered many topics, though they largely focused on the things that the rats could remember from ages past as well as the things that they had forgotten. They were able to answer, at least in part, one of Tenebroum’s long-simmering questions: where were all the other evil spirits? Why were their Gods in the heavens but no evil Golds? 

This was something that Tenebroum had wondered about for over a decade, but not even the most learned mages it had devoured had a satisfactory answer for it. Ghroshian did, though. 

“Long ago, before the age of the age of dawn that we lived in until recently, there were other spirits. There was a Goddess of death and any number of lesser cults,” the rats whispered, “But as Siddrim rose in power, displacing the other lights in the heavens, he finally gained the strength to devour and obliterate them. Well, some of them. He was forced to bury my ashes after we rose from our own grave for the third time.”

“Why?” Tenebroum asked. “What makes you special?”

“We do not know,” the rats confessed, “But it has something to do with the primal nature of some spirits. A river goddess may not be killed while her river flows; she will only be born anew in a new form. The god of a city will not perish as long as people still live and trade in his domain. ”

“So you could not be destroyed because hunger still exists?” Tenebroum asked. “An interesting theory.”

In all their conversation, the darkness senses only meek obsequiousness and confusion from the rats. These tiny, fragile creatures might know its hunger, but they would never be a threat to the darkness. 

On the third night, there were no living creatures left alive in the city. There were no humans hiding in houses, cats scurrying on rooftops, or fish swimming in the harbor. Everything that had once moved and breathed was now a room-temperature corpse. 

That was when it began to devour the graveyards themselves. Groshin or other spirits had long ago devoured scraps of ethereal energy and memory that clung to the bones stacked in the mausoleums and crypts beneath the city, but in the graves of the churchyards, and the private sepulchers beneath the manses of noble houses, there was well-preserved dead that went back for centuries, and Tenebroum devoured each of their souls in turn, draining the city dry of every last spiritual remnant as it sought to purge it for its disobedience. 

The ancient dead had long since given up their souls to whatever afterlife awaited them, but there were traces of the person they’d once been, and Tenebroum devoured those echos in a bid to fill the bottomless pit at the center of its own swirling maelstrom. This was unsuccessful, of course. It could devour the entire world and still feel the craving to know and possess more than it already did. 

It did learn scraps about the history of the city as well as those that had lived in it, though few of those memories held any real value. It did find many graves where the long dead were buried in finary of silver and gold, though, and it added each of those locations to its drudges’ to do list. 

Even now, they were ransacking the city in an orderly fashion, gathering and sorting everything of value, including bodies, parts of bodies, weapons, and wealth, and setting it aside to be turned into new bits of artifice and new soldiers for its growing army. It was only when all that was done that it called for a meeting for the other spirits that served it in the Grand Temple of Rahkin. 

The grand stone building was a place that had once been so holy that neither it nor any of its servants could have dreamed of standing there beneath the moonlit oculus of the vast place. Now, though, there was no one to stop them, and the assembled wraiths and skeletons stood there like something out of a mortal’s deepest nightmare. 

Tenebroum came wearing only the skin of the nearest drudge, as its only body in the city that was worth wearing was still melted to slag. Repairing that might take half a year, given how far away its dwarven spirit-powered forges were. 

Its lieutenants, on the other hand, made up for its drabness with their distinctiveness. To its right stood the Dark Paragon, flickering with dark fire from the neck of its imposing armor. To its left stood the Voice of Reason. She held the spender crown of the Kingdom of Hallen and looked much different than when he’d last seen her. Over the last three days, she had put the flesh surgeons to work and now wore the skin of the princess over her battered form, reclaiming most of the beauty she had lost in the explosion. 

Across from Tenebroum stood its silent titan next to a smoldering Krulm’venor. The fire godling had become less talkative of late. That made it more obedient, but less fun to torture. The Dreamer floated between the two of them as little more than an iridescent outline. Past all of them, the Puppeteer flitted about the rest of them as a mass of tentacles wearing three heads attached to different limbs, and Ghroshian’s countless red eyes glimmered like stars in the background of the conclave.

Innumerable lesser spirits like its shadow dragon and the various flesh crafters that toiled endlessly for the Lich were missing, of course. Despite that, this was perhaps the greatest focusing of its strength in a single location that had ever experienced before, and the Lich took a moment to appreciate that. 

Here, the shadows swirled so thickly that the world lost its color, and the very fabric of reality distorted slightly. It, along with its spirits, was a truly irresistible force, and it had not even finished its corruption of the captured nature spirits or finished some of its other specialized projects. 

“My victory is complete,” it said finally, “This Kingdom is no more, and the only residents that yet live are those who venerate me!”

There was only silence there for a moment before the Voice of truth stepped forward and said, “Sire, this is yours,” before lifting the crown toward his head. Tenebroum leaned forward slightly so she could place it upon the brow of the skeleton it was wearing. It was odd, given that the thing otherwise wore only rags, but it accepted the token regardless. 

“What are the next steps?” Tenebroum asked, turning to the Dark Paragon. “Where do my armies march now?”

“North, sire, across the sun-scorched deserts to Bastom and all the lands that lay beyond it. There are several northern empires, and each is ripe for—”

“A long march through the sunlit lands sounds less than optimal,” Tenebroum said cagily. “What about a nautical approach?”

“Ships could be built and made fast against the sun with wreckage from the harbor,” the Dark Paragon agreed, “But legions of soldiers should be safe enough in our approach as long as we stick to the dunes. We could—”

“Do it then. Both plans. We will take a few months to gather our strength and incorporate all of these new soldiers into the army, and then we will head north for fresh blood at the turning of the year,” Tenebroum ordered. “Be ready for it. I may have to divide you into pieces to create a new crop of generals, so I am not needed so far from my places of power.”

“As you command, my liege,” the general said with a slight bow, offering zero resistance to the idea of being lobotomized and used as spare parts to create a new series of spirits. 

In a sense, the Dark Paragon would die to create sons that would replace him. Even if the creature had protested, it would have changed nothing, but the fact that it had no sense of self-preservation heartened Tenebroum. The perfect servant was as talented as it was disposable, and by that measure the Dark Paragon was the best that it had ever created. 

It went around the room after that, asking for status updates and opinions on what it should do next. The Dark Paragon and the Voice of Reason both agreed that the Magica Collegium in Abenend should be their next priority, though both of them differed greatly on the right way to defeat such an enemy. 

The Voice of Reason argued that diplomacy could pay dividends in such a circumstance, while the Dark Paragon argued that only a massive attack would work on such a cagey opponent. Tenebroum agreed with their instincts but already had a plan in place for how they would deal with the damn mages, so it said nothing and moved along around the circle. 

The Dreamer delivered its answer in the form of a surrealist series of images where infants were planted in the dark earth and grew into crops of bloodthirsty men, the Puppeteer argued passionately in two different voices that it should winnow its growing priesthood and remove the most conniving, but only Ghroshian had something unexpected to tell them. 

“Abenend…” a chorus of rats whispered. “We know that name. Yes, we have heard it.”

“What of it,” Tenebroum snapped loud enough to make a third of the undead rodents scurry for cover. 

“The wolf,” the chorus said as one. “It’s where they keep the wolf!”

“The wolf, eh?” Tenebroum said to itself. The Rats had spoken to it before of a wolf and a worm before. It remembered that much. If the wolf proved to be as deathless as the rats had been, then that was all the more reason for the darkness to end those wretched mages for good and all. It could always use another interesting spirit to experiment upon.

Ch. 147 - Laying the Groundwork

Even as it debated the decisions with its tiny pantheon of underlings and slowly began to make preparations for larger tasks, its minions spread in all directions. Some of those were fast moving cavalry units that galloped throughout the night on discordant hooves before they sheltered by night in bogs and ponds. The infantry units moved slower, both because of their short, human legs and the fact that they had to dig their own graves wherever they went. 

There were only three areas of concern now, though. The first priority was to surround Abenend. 

After that, some small measure of its forces was sent to the north to keep an eye out for any northern armies that might which to disrupt things. A few scouting parties were also spared for the lands it had not yet ravaged to the south-east of Rahkin. Unfortunately, the north part of Dutton county. There were already nearly abandoned. 

At least, that was what the Lich believed, it was only after almost a week of scouring out every trace of life at each isolated farmstead that its scouts reported a small village on the banks of the Tolden river that was still prospering. 

Normally that would have been enough for the Lich to descend on it and feast on the still living morsels itself, even if it was currently busy with arrangements for Abenend were it not for one small complication. After many days of discussions with its Dark Paragon, it had decided that further frontal assaults would be fruitless. This left them with two options: tunneling under the mages’ school-fortress or laying siege to it. 

Of course, in a broad sense they had laid siege to the area for years now. It had done little good, though. The Wiley wizards somehow used their magic to sustain themselves even as the world collapsed around them. 

Tenebroum was just beginning to discuss a different sort of siege involving standing stones more than soldiers, but that was halted when the men and women with light in their eyes were found. That was enough to stop everything. 

Its troops retreated undetected, and instead a swarm of black birds was launched to go find out what new torment had been unleashed. It took days for more than a few of them to gather, but they revealed no dire news. 

Indeed, other than the fact that two dozen of the two hundred people in the tiny armed camp had glowing eyes, everything was as it should be. They were just humans preparing for the coming harvest. Other that a palisade and a sturdy gate they were as defenseless as anyone else. 

Still, the Lich doubted. There had to be more than meets the eye for such a strange occurrence to unfold. He suspected the work of the dead Templar, or if not him than evidence of another fallen star. The latter prospect was terrifying

If the gods were continuing to intervene in small ways at the edges of its domain, then who knew where they might strike at it next? The moon goddess might attack him again from anywhere in the sky, and the All-Father theoretically had everything beneath the ground within his domain. Then there were the gods of the sea and of nature to consider.

Tenebroum didn’t feel fear, but suddenly it’s paranoia raged out of control and it sent spies in every direction and dark messengers to check on its distant strongholds while it focused on this one. Something wasn’t right. 

As each of its minions reported back, though, all they had to say was that everything was as it should be. No reports contained anomalies, and no devastating attacks had been launched in unexpected places. Even the kidnapped nature goddesses were still trapped in their cells so that Tenebroum could experiment on them as time allowed. 

With trepidation, after several days it sent the dreamer forward to explore the minds of the villagers next, to try to get more information from their sleeping minds. The results were unexpected. 

The evidence of the light’s touch had made the lich fear the worst, but all it had found were the embers of hope. “This is where the Templar laid his head while he recovered from your last battle, sire,” the ephemeral Dreamer whispered. “There was a mage too, and some children, but they are gone now.”

“Where did they go?” Tenebroum demanded. 

“West,” the Dreamer said, playing a piece of a vision that showed the small band leaving. “To take shelter with the mages at Abenend.”

Even before the spirit had finished speaking, Tenebroum ordered a segment of his cavalry along with a small portion of the gathered raven flock to set out in search of the group. If they’d been forewarned about its coming, then they must be pawns of some importance.  

The trail was weeks old at this point, so magic would be of little aid. Still, it controlled all of the land between here and there, so there was nowhere they could hope to hide from its deathless eyes. 

“Shall I dig deeper and discover who might yet serve you with their whole heart?” the Dreamer asked.

“Not this time,” Tenebroum answered, shutting down the topic immediately. “They have been touched by the light, and I want only to consume them.”

Once the Lich had determined that the danger was minimal, it sent a single neuroid to the tiny village, projected by half a legion of war zombies. They didn’t attack though, they just got close enough to an unwatched portion of the palisade to fall under the spell of its minion's psychic screams. 

By the end of the first night, half of the village had torn the other half into bloody shreds over paranoid delusions and imagined grievances. Even after its units retreated before the light of day, the killing continued. Later that night, its constructs returned to find only a bare handful left that hadn’t been driven out of their mind by the maddening magics. 

That all of them had light in their eyes seemed to indicate that the Templar’s blessing granted some kind of resistance, but it wasn’t enough. Tenebroum took things slowly after that, sending back its minions each night just closely enough to ratchet the pressure up on the survivors as other minions studied which ones would crack first. 

It was only when the there was a single survivor left that they finally moved in and hauled her away for further study. Her mind was completely broken at that point, and she was covered in the blood of her family, but she generated such a rich flavor of suffering that the Lich could not bear to put her down until it had delved more deeply into her mind. 

That would have to wait though. It had wasted more than a week of its precious time focused on this anomaly, and even as it devoured the light tainted souls, it turned its attention back to the true threat: the mages of the Magica Collegium. 

There, at least, the plan was simpler. Indeed, it was already ongoing. While it had focused on understanding the light’s resistance to malign magics, its library had done the calculations, and all that remained was for its somber earth titan to do its job and create obelisks and standing stones at the required points, so that skeletal dwarven artisans could come along and carve the necessary runes to complete the spell. 

The theory was a simple one, it was only the scale that was grand. The mages had built their school in a very defensible and highly auspicious place. Perhaps at one point an army of Templars and Siddrimites might have been able to march into that valley and pit the love of their God against the combined might of centuries of learning and study, but no mortal army hard dared attempted it, almost since the founding of the institution.

The forces of darkness had already annihilated the surrounding town, but in the three waves since the initial attack they had done very little damage to the walls themselves. The mages imply possessed too much firepower and too many tricks. So it would take those away, and then it would slaughter them to the last and feast on their secrets so that it would be its future enemies that might know that pain rather than its own forces. 

Such a large plan required many parts, though. Its last few attacks had come from forces that had gotten as close as possible via the caves that ran throughout the mountains. Those entrances had long since been collapsed, but without much in the way of dwarven interference, it would not be hard to rebuild tunnels that went right into the basement of their fortress.

All it would take, was time. That too was fine, since the fourteen monuments that would have to be raised, and the Strangulite that would have to be fabricated to to power them would also be extremely time-consuming. 

What Tenebroum would have preferred to do was create a magical deadzone that blanketed the whole area, but the equations and forecasts had dubbed that infeasible. Were it to stop all mana from flowing in along the usual routes, more would just come in from elsewhere. Even if the Lich managed to succeed, then it would nott be able to follow up wit the coup de gras, because its own constructs would have difficulty operating in such an environment. 

 Instead, it would have to settle for twisting the current of magic that flowed along the Wodenspine range, and make them unpredictable and alien to the mages. Anti elements in the peaks would poison the currents that flowed through them as surely as it had crippled Oroza when it poisoned her waters. 

That wouldn’t stop them from casting their spells, though, but poisoning the nature and flow of mana would make the results very unpredictable. Albrecht had experienced only the smallest taste of that once the darkness wormed its way inside the man’s soul all those years ago. Soon, his peers would get a taste of the very same thing, and in the chaos, the Lich would storm their fortress and murder all of them. 

Oroza. For a moment that word sent a thrill of rage through it, and Tenebroum only pushed it down by force of will. She is not a priority, it repeated to itself for the hundredth time as it forced itself to calm down. Her river has been poisoned in every way, and she will die along with it while I focus on more important matters. 

The Lich had many more important tasks to do, of course. It had to split the soul of its paragon into perfect copies to prepare for all the wars to come, it had to finalize the spirits in its dark garden, or at least end them and give them up as failures, and of course, it had to use the very air itself to create itself in a dread sort of alchemy. Compared to those tasks, Oroza’s ultimate fate was less than meaningless. Whether she died tomorrow or a decade from now, she could barely even challenge it in the waters of her own river anymore.