Tenebroum PLUS Ch. 148-149 (Patreon)

Ch. 148 - The Dark Garden

Even as it planned the assault and set its forge ghasts and its hammer weights to crafting magic resistant weapons and armor from the bones and armor of long dead dwarves, it turned its mind back toward more important tasks. When night next fell, it soared halfway across its domain from Rahkin to the hub of activity that was Constantium. 

The city was still devoid of life. Even the plants had withered and died because of the overwhelming amounts of unlife as well as the caustic embalming fluids and tanning liquids that spilled so frequently on the ground. Despite that, it was still a hub of activity. 

During the day, those activities were limited to the growing catacombs that hummed beneath the place as well as the Grand Temple. However, by night, the streets would come alive in a parody of the life that would normally be present in such a large city. 

There was no food, or merriment, though. There was no buying and selling, there were only drudges carrying bones from the beetle pits and fresh armor from the forges so that all the component parts could be assembled smoothly by the silent supervisor of its city factory. 

Even that dread giant had grown in both size and complexity to account for new techniques and workflows, and each of the pillars that held up the giant dome were lined with appendages, handing off constructs in different stages of completion. Truly, it was a work of beauty well beyond the mortal mind. If anyone with a pulse had ever seen the thing in action, they might have died on the spot from the dread gaze of its 300 eyes that lined the dome and monitored all the work as it was being performed.

That was not why Tenebroum had returned here, though. There were no problems here, and if there were, they would not be the fault of its industrial strength fleshcrafters. They had no will. They existed only to bring to life the horrors of its mind, not to improvise or even object. 

That was not why the Lich had returned to this place, though. With everything else going on, Tenebroum would have liked to delegate the tasks that would be necessary to experiment with its captured goddesses, in the end such important work ultimately could be done by it alone. They were simply too valuable as specimens. Even if it was unable to turn them into something grander, then it might yet learn a great deal simply by dissecting them.

Whatever it decided, though, it would need to be done soon. Cut off from light and life in its lead and stone dungeons, they were wilting a little more every day. Gods of nature were not meant for stygian captivity, and though it might have simply consumed their souls and gained more power. As a result, another servant with a new domain would be much more valuable to it. 

Oroza had taught it a tough lesson, though, and it would not let them escape. The first in doing that, of course, was to learn their true names. 

For some Gods and Goddesses that might have been impossible, Even the names that they were worshiped by sometimes had little in common with their true names. Siddrim had several secret names it had learned, but it wasn’t until Tenebroum had consumed the other god that it had learned there were several more names that it hadn’t known. 

For nature goddesses, at least, though, that was easy enough. It simply spread its blackbirds far and wide and looked for forests and natural areas that seemed to be dying for no discernible reason. Once it had identified those three places, it was simply a matter of torturing the three bark-skinned women until it found out which name belonged to which forest goddess. 

It was a straightforward process. Soon, Tenebroum figured out that the three small gods it had stolen were Tarieneian Vale, Verdant Glade, and Thornwood. Each of the women was slightly different, in both demeanor and appearance, in ways that suited the territories they called home. 

Only one of them, Tarieneian Vale appeared almost human. She had skin of bark of course, but otherwise she looked very much like a woman. The other two, though, were much less so. Verdant glade was more like the outline of a person made from foliage, and rarely spoke. Thornwood was the most alien. She was constantly shifting set of brambles that appeared as an animal much more often than a person. 

Unfortunately, its every attempt to chain any of the three, failed repeatedly. No matter how it attempted to chain them with manacles of servitude, they would grow in such a way that the bonds would slip free within only a few days. Only the wards of the cell itself held them reliably, which was far form ideal. 

It was maddening. In the end, the Lich was force to improvise, and made the dark garden itself it’s means of control. This undertaking was grander, but less complicated. It simply chose an unused plaza in Constantinal and after the runes were carved by night in the stone of the place, its servants began to fill the whole thing with grave earth.

The hardest part of the project, as it turned out, was choosing which plaza would least impact everything else that was happening since Constantinal had become so busy. It knew that if it gave them a single opening, they would escape the way that Oroza did. So, even before it installed them in that lifeless courtyard, it installed leaden rings inscribed with each of their names to keep them from spreading their roots too widely.

Once that was done, it salted the earth in the rest of the place so that not even a blade of grass would grow. It was only then, when all was in readiness that it replanted them and observed what came next. 

To start with, all of the women became trees that grew quite quickly at first. They’d thought that with enough strength, they might pierce the stone beneath them or bridge some kind of connection to the rest of the vegetation outside the city and vanish, but that was not possible. All they had done in the process was take in a tremendous amount of taint from the grave earth instead. 

Tenebroum let them acclimatize to this, and grow new leaves and buds before it started to add Cholorium to their water, feeding the three slender trees a steady diet of poison and unquiet dreams. 

After that, its drudges began to carven profane symbols into the bark of all of them on a regular basis. The former was to continue to increase its grip on their foreign element of wood, while the later was merely to provoke a response from those that might be watching. 

Those markings would vanish in a few days, and the spirits within the wood barely even cried out in pain, but then, they weren’t the intended audience. Now that the Lich had shown its hand, it knew that somewhere out there, the Moon and the rest of her friends were watching and waiting for their chance to rescue. 

Tenebroum had prepared for that, too, and had several creative countermeasures prepared for just such an eventuality. There were watchers and guardians every night. During the day, the whole operation was far more vulnerable, but its artisans were working on the completion of a mechanical trap that would slide a rusted awning across the whole area and lock anyone foolish enough to attempt to free its prisoners inside with them. 

There were a few false alarms, but the conflict it had hoped to bait never happened. So, when it became apparent that its enemies would be patient, it decided to test that patience with a bit of brutal theater. 

First, its drudges installed a second, larger binding ring to accommodate all three of them, and then, seeds from each were planted and allowed to grow before the three trees were chopped down and burned to ash. 

It was done on the night of a full moon to ensure that the show reached its intended audience. Despite how terrible of a scene it was, Lunaris never attempted to intervene, though. Instead, Tenebroum feasted on the agony of its prisoners alone and then proceeded to twine the trunks of the new bodies together while they were still flexible saplings. 

The trees resisted this, and it was forced to use steel chains that had been profaned with terrible engravings to force them into an unnatural shape long enough that it started to become permanent. It was only when their forms began to blend that it started to work on their spirits. 

Tenebroum was a cruel God, but in many ways, this was the cruelest thing it had done since it had given Kelvun his richly deserved reward. It had to be, though, both because of the assumed audience of this project, and because of the level of brutality that would be needed two destroy three individual spirits, and turn them into one new monstrosity. 

At first, they endured this monstrosity silently. Even when its servants began to feed its prisoners more poison and prune their branches to force terribly unnatural symmetries on it, they did nothing. It was only when it began to prune their very souls that they began to beg once more. 

The Lich hoped that their silent screams would carry for many miles for those with the ears to hear them. It was only when those wounds were fresh that it began to stitch them together that it could see a glimmer of what they would become when all this was done. 

The Lich was very familiar with the idea of sharing its soul with others. It had done so since almost its earliest days. Initially, the shade and the murderer had warred and feuded in its heart, but by the time the mage and pieces of its first dozen victims swirled there, too, it had become normal.

It would never be normal for these three godlings, though, and with a midnight thread spun from pieces of its own tattered soul, it began to turn three women into one. For now, it started with minor enough operations. After all, they hardly needed three heads and thirty fingers between them. These rounds of psychic surgery were incredibly taxing for them, of course. They had to be. All of his subjects wanted to die. 

So, Tenebroum would have to give them frequent breaks and occasionally stop poisoning them for weeks at a time. Despite that, progress was made. Slowly, wounds healed closed, thoughts began to mix, and day by day, what had been three fae and beautiful women became a terrible chimera. 

Even tied together so tightly they would never escape, they still weren’t one by any stretch of the imagination, of course. They warred within their strange braided tree as they fought to preserve themselves at the expense of the other two Goddesses that now shared their soul. 

It was a losing battle, though, and in the end whatever this produced was unlikely to look like any of them. 

Ch. 149 - Something New

 When it shattered its Dark Paragon, Tenebroum expected each of the four identical fragments to grow into a separate clone of the original. Not only would that allow it to better manage its sprawling armies that were scattered almost haphazardly across the land by this point, but it would allow them to focus on multiple tasks at once while it, it devoted itself to more important projects. 

This would only become more necessary as the scope of its wars increased. Soon, there would be more armies, more enemies, more fronts, and more factory cities for all of the above. Even as powerful as it was, it could not do all of those things while plotting to bring down the remaining gods. So, delegation to effective minions was no longer optional, if it had ever really been before.

The Lich had planned to devote one to advancing to the north, one to building its drowned fleet, another devoted solely to monitoring the mages, and the fourth to cleaning up any loose ends in its current domain.

Unfortunately, one of the four souls began to mutate almost immediately. It was easy to see the change, even after only a few days. 

The other three were slender shards of ephemeral green glass that slowly rebuilt themselves, the way a mosaic might if you planted a single tile in fertile soil and gave it room to grow. The fourth one, though, was a spidery thing that continued to grow like a cancerous weed. 

The Lich tried to trim it back to its crystalline core twice. Both times, it cut off so much that the thing almost dissolved completely into ether. That didn’t change anything, though. 

If anything, the thing grew back more snarled than before, with sharp edges and little barbs as it sought to defend itself against the unknown attacker. It lashed out at the Lich, which was almost enough for it to shatter the thing on principle. Still, it was harmless, and the barbs it attempted to infect the maelstrom that was Tenebroum’s soul were quickly snuffed out. 

The deformed soul was a strange, aggressive thing, but it wasn’t strong enough to do any real harm. Still, as an experiment, it was interesting enough to preserve, but it was dangerous enough that the Lich couldn’t just let in grow unmonitored. So, it moved it back into the soul forge and locked it up tight until the appropriate binding circle could be built to contain it. 

There was a wonderful aggressiveness about it, Tenebroum decided, and even if it would never become a general on the field of battle, it might yet become some new type of weapon. Even in failure, it could find purposes for most of its creations. 

After briefly checking in on its twisted plant Goddesses and pruning them again while they learned to speak in a single voice, the Lich moved on to Rahkin to observe its naval preparations. There it found the Voice of Reason lording over a dead kingdom, and she quickly provided all the updates he requested, showing him not just the ships that were already refloated and repaired but the ones that still lay at the bottom of the harbor where the dead could work on them night and day without regard to the sunlight. 

It was a clever arrangement, and the Lich approved. “Your efforts do you credit,” Tenebroum praised her. “See that they continue.”

Of course, they would for the foreseeable future. Its zombie leviathan had destroyed almost every ship in the harbor during its attack, and so there were still innumerable wrecks to choose from. Even when those started to run low, though, there were plenty of wooden structures in the city that could be torn apart for additional timber. 

The fleet was undoubtedly ugly in the eyes of men, but that hardly mattered to the eyes of men. What mattered were the enchantments that were even now being laid on those blood-soaked keels. They would enable the black fleet to use unnatural storms and fog to both block out the hateful sun and to catch unwary ships at sea as they probed further north for weakness.

Tenebroum was under no illusions that it would catch them by surprise, of course. Even now, the meddling gods were already doing what they could to thwart it. It was certain that the people to the north would be better prepared than the Kingdom of Hallen. However, that mattered little since it was equally sure that it would crush them. These ships would make effective scouts, but they would make even more effective plague ships, and they would sow panic and blight wherever they landed when the time was right. 

Of course, some of them would exist just to be bait for the Goddess of Sea and Storms, should she decide to intervene. Istiniss had, so far, largely stayed away from its plans. That was almost certainly because the Goddess of the seas had seen how easy it had chained her sister, the river Goddess, and opted to steer clear. 

The darkness knew that couldn’t last forever, though. Eventually, she would come for him, and he would have ships filled to burst with poison ready for her, just waiting to be ruptured. For a few days, it mulled over the idea of crafting the defective soul shard it had created into a harpoon of sorts and using it to snare the Goddess before deciding against it. If it was going to create projectiles sharp enough to pierce the soul of a God, then there were better targets to choose from. 

. . .

Once those were all on track, Tenebroum returned to the most important task: watching the isolated citadel of mag craft as its invisible noose slowly tightened. Over the last few weeks, while its paragon shards grew to fruition, it had begun to fabricate Strangulite. The machinery to craft it had been finished years before, shortly after it had succeeded in making its shadow drake fly, but since Tenebroum had no pressing need for the stuff in all this time, it had never begun production. 

Now that the time had arrived, though. It finally ordered its servants to kick things into motion, and the giant cylinder that guarded the served as the door to its inner sanctum began to rise and fall rhythmically hour after hour. It was both a door and an elevator, but it was something else, too: it was a pressure chamber. Though most of the shaft beneath it was devoted to the plumbing for the pressurized water that allowed it to rise and fall, the central core held a single harm-sized conduit of air.

When the runes activated, and the air in the tall, narrow chamber was compressed, along with a very fine dust made of corpse ash and souls of those who had died of suffocation, the air crystallized, forming a lens that could be carved a lens no larger than a dinner plate, which could be carved into any number of shapes depending on the requirements of the spell. 

In the same way that Cholerium would turn normal water to a poisonous acid and Stygium would not burn from normal fire, even as it burned the undead to ashes, Strangulite, in its raw form, did nothing but make the air that passed through it quite unbreathable. 

That was of no concern to its servants, of course, but if properly cut and polished to form a lens with the right convexity, it poisoned the essence that passed through it in a similar way. These effects had been predicted by the heads in its library, but even so, when it came time for experimentation, those were done far from the seat of its power, by lesser mage souls that it would not be bothered to lose. 

For this work, they were disposable, because it had no wish to track whatever the secondary effects of those foul magics into any of its seats of power. The experiments started off simple enough. It took a mage with an ample supply of tainted essence and had it cast some very basic spells. It summoned fire and lightning. It attempted to raise the dead or use basic wards to protect it from the magic of its opponents. 

None of those effects worked as expected. The flames appeared, but they sputtered and died before long; they were only ever more smoke than fire. Lightning likewise came into existence, but it arced and split more than it should, scarring the ground around its target without actually hitting it. 

It was the wards that were the most interesting, though. Wards and binding rings were complex things, and each symbol and connection needed to work properly for them to function. Changing only a single symbol at random could make the whole thing behave differently than it should. 

This is exactly what happened when the strangulite-tainted essence charged symbols that had been drawn into the wet earth. The whole thing went haywire. First, power began to arc between symbols that had no connection, and then a few of them exploded under strain they should never have been subjected to before the whole thing imploded. 

Unfortunately, the skull that the spirit that was performing these experiments was bound to was swallowed up in that vague spacial distortion and vanished without a trace. Even after extensive study, Tenebroum was unable to determine what happened to it and was forced to delay furether testing for two days while another bound mage was delivered to the testing location. 

All in all, the results were impressive, and the Lich’s only concerns were that releasing this weapon so near its lair might have unforeseen consequences for it in a way that the first two elements never did. Fortunately, the perverse wild magic effects seemed to fade almost immediately, falling by 90% within three days and 99% within two weeks. 

While that still wasn’t enough that it would ever conduct experiments of this type near the giant rune encrusted catacombs that anchored it to the earth, it was enough that it no longer had qualms with the idea of embedding these gray cobweb filled lenses in the standing stones that were even now being constructed. 

However, these interactions, though, would require some changes to the design. The Lich had not been aware of the effects that these perverse currents would have on the runes when construction had started. Now, with this new data, the stones seemed as likely to detonate themselves as they did to poison the Collegium’s magic. 

So, it started again, where it had to, on better designs that would summon the storm winds and aim them in a particular direction for an extended period of time. As it did so, Tenebroum wondered idly how long it would take the mages to notice exactly what it was doing. 

Would they try to attack its monoliths? Would they even be able to find them? Teneborum wondered. It wasn’t sure. Truthfully, it wasn’t even sure how it would go about looking for such a source and set a quartet of minds to the task immediately. How could you locate something when it warped the very divination that you sought it with?

It was only when it was fine-tuning those structures and raising the height of the lens so that the runic ring that anchored and powered each monolith was well clear of the poison it generated that it finally Occurred to the Lich that they’d never found the mage it had sought in the immediate aftermath of Rahkin’s fall.