Tenebroum PLUS Ch. 154-155 (Patreon)

Ch. 154- Unrecognizable

 Niama. That was the only word that they clung to as they were trapped in the Lich’s dark garden. Niama will save us, each of them whispered to each other, like the frightened sisters they were. 

No one was coming to save them, though. Only Lunaris tried to visit them the once in that desperate place, but before she could even whisper whatever message it was she’d dared come to deliver, a whirlwind of inky black barbwire sprung up out of the hateful thing that was the circle that bound them together, and she was forced to take flight lest she be caught alongside the rest of them. 

It had been the only moment of hope that the three of them had experienced since they’d been stolen from the moon, and now it had turned only into a bitter stone in all their hearts. 

After that, the only visits they ever received were from that terrible shade. Sometimes, it came in the body of one of its servants, but more often, it came as a dark thunderhead billowing with wicked powers. 

Sometimes their captor tormented them words, but it always tormented them with pain as it cut away at who they were and pruned them into its desired shape. They had no idea of what that was, of course. All they could see were the bleak walls that surrounded the dead courtyard, and the leaden sky above them as the goddesses slowly forgot everything they’d ever known. 

They had all had names once. Tarieneian Vale. Verdant Glade. Thornwood. Now they often had trouble remembering who was who, and when they spoke they were no longer sure if they were talking to themselves or each other. 

It gained other things, though, while it lost so much. Sometimes, that would be a strange new power manifesting, but mostly it was hate. The monstrosity that had been three Goddesses slowly became consumed by hate more with every passing day as everything they’d loved about themselves faded away. It hated what the darkness had done to it, but it could not stop or protect itself. It could not even fight back.

One day one of her voices just stopped, and a few weeks later a second one followed. The corrupted nature spirit didn’t know if those two parts of itself had died or finally merged. Since it couldn’t remember which of the three it had been and which two were the ones that had vanished, it seemed to be the later. That realization wasn’t enough to keep it from feeling alone. 

That was when the Lich finally branded them with their new identity. By the time that dread creature showed up that fateful night wielding a darkly glowing wand with a smoldering tip, they had long since forgotten who they were or even what they were. The monstrosity that had once been more was bound to its tree like an anchor, but that did not stop it from pacing around the ring that was the boundary of its existence as it slowly mutated from something more plant than animal to something more animal than plant in a desperate and almost unconscious attempt to be free. 

“There’s no escape for you,” the skeleton rasped when it finally stopped before it, just outside the line. 

“No?” she asked, lashing out at the monster that had taken so much from her even as she knew that the thorny vines could’t cross the boundary any more than the rest of her. “Then come in here with me and I will settle for revenge.”

As the natural monstrosity spoke, she grew terrible claws from her six arms, but the Lich showed no reaction. Instead, with a few muttered words, she felt something gripping her heart even as it tried to beat in her chest. 

“The only revenge you shall ever have is mine,” it intoned as she fell to her knees. “You will tear apart the Gods and Goddesses you once called friends—”

“Never!” she spat, but the Lich ignored her.

“You shall be their undoing,” it continued. “And when their souls are mine, I shall give you a gift.”

“We… I want nothing from you!” the thing that had once been a woman, no, several women, spat. 

“And yet you shall have it just the same,” the skeleton whispered. “I shall give you dominion over all of the natural world that you consume so that no one else can rise up to take the place of those you slay.”

That was when she finally understood that she was being offered the chance to serve this terrible thing. She laughed at that, disturbingly, in all three voices. 

That laughter came to an abrupt halt as the fist in her chest squeezed tighter. She collapsed to the ground, and then, as she lay there, a dozen skeletal hands came up from the cursed earth and held her tight. 

She reached for the tree to try to return to the safety of its wood, but it was inches too far away, so when the Lich began to carve terrible words into her very soul with its evil-looking wand, all she could do was scream. 

She had no idea how long the process took or even if it was finished, but by the time dawn began to color the edge of the sky, it was gone. She was alone again, with nothing but the pain of the darkness’s latest atrocity to keep her company. She could only lay there as the vines and branches that made up her body writhed in complaint. 

When she finally made it back to the tree, she didn’t come out again, not for more than a season. There was no point. There was only pain out there, and though the Lich could still hurt her in here, it was slightly more protected. 

That torpor might have gone on forever, except for one spring day, she realized that her strength was returning. For many months, she’d confused the weakness that winter imposed on all their kind with the weakness caused by all of these surgeries and experiments. 

As the sap began to flow, though, and she felt herself grow revitalized, she realized that she might be able to finally dig through the stone far beneath her. It was a slow, methodical plan, but day after day and week after week, she made progress. Once she finally felt the stone that had barred her way for so long crack, and she penetrated to the deep earth and pure water beyond it, she tried to drink deep of it but was almost immediately sickened. 

Too much of a good thing after starving for so long can be almost as bad as the starvation itself, she reminded herself as she began to tunnel blindly toward the edge of the city. 

It took weeks more to find some hearty climbing vines to link to, and once that was done, things moved quite quickly. So far, no one had discovered that she’d slipped from her cage, and despite how deep her roots had dug, she was determined not to give that away. If she could just reach the foliage beyond the city walls, she could flee to the nearest forest, and Niama would take her into her loving arms and fix her. 

She was sure of it. There was nothing the goddess of nature could not do. 

Two days later, while the red and the white suns were high in the sky and the Lich’s forces were all hiding from their gaze, she finally made contact with the weedy, overgrown irrigation ditches nearest the walls, and fled. In her ethereal form she raced along from one set of roots to the next. The fields had long since gone fallow and were being reclaimed by nature. That only helped her move faster.

Less than an hour after she escaped the city, she made it to the nearby woods only a dozen miles away. She would move farther tomorrow, and in time, she would reach even Niama’s court itself, but for now, she desperately needed to rest.

She tried to feast on nature's bounty here, but found the essence almost tainted. Could the darkness’s reach really extend so far? She wondered as she began to search for allies so she could explain what happened. 

Shortly after noon she looked into a pond at her reflection and she immediately regretted it. What she saw was a horror. The left and right side of her face clearly belonged to two different people, and even if she had recognized whose body it had been originally, the fact that she had six arms made her look anything but natural. She was a monster, a nameless monster. 

She concentrated, and after a few seconds she was able to become something close to what she thought that she might have one looked like. Even the indistinct features and curled vines that were only vaguely man shaped were better than the alternative, though. 

It was almost twilight when she found a small encampment of the children of the forest. She concentrated, and with some effort, she forced her strange, new body to return to a form that they might find more pleasing. 

“Greetings wanders, I come in—” As she spoke, the elves drew their weapons, obviously sensing something was wrong about her. 

“Who are you?” one of the ageless young men demanded in the musical language of his race, pointing his black glass dagger at her. “You stick of evil. How did you find your war through our glamours.”

She wanted to tell him that the glamours, and the way they glowed in the deeping gloom were the reason she’d found them at all in the first place, but even as she opened her mouth to explain how she’d been captured and tortured by the evil gripping the land she felt the Lich smoothly slide into her mind.

“Such a good huntress,” it whispered in mock praise. “You’ve only just been released into the wild, and already you’ve found some of my most elusive quarry. Make sure not to let them get away.”

“I would never!” she hissed, trying to resist the command, but even as she did so, she felt her disguise coming undone and her other arms slipping free as their claws extended. 

“By the goddess,” the closest forest child whispered, backing away as the ones farther from her started to scatter and run for their lives.  

“You cannot escape me,” the Lich continued, ignoring the growing chaos. “Even if you could, you would soon starve to death because the light is forever lost to you. So, my Queen of Thorns, it is time to claim your destiny. Feast on the flesh of your allies by the time the sun rises, or I shall call you a failed experiment and feast on your soul instead.”

After that, the Lich was gone, but it didn’t matter. As he said that terrible name, Queen of Thorns, the profane symbols he’d carved into her very soul sprang to life and began to burn inside her like a forest fire. She now knew who she was again, for the first time in months, but she did not like it. 

It became harder to think after that, and as her body began to shift with every move, and the bloody thorns erupted through her bark colored skin, she didn’t even try. She felt the hunger now, and she scented her prey, and that was enough.

A few minutes ago, she’d been a mutilated goddess looking for allies to save her, and now she was a thorned, eight-legged hunting cat bounding down the fading trail to rip those same allies to pieces. Part of her screamed in horror at this turn of events. She never even suspected that the Lich would let her escape, but now it was too late. She was gaining on her quarry rapidly, and any second, she’d be able to rip out his ageless little throat and drink the sweet taste of elder blood before she started looking for another corpse.

Ch. 155 - A Long Shot

When the first of the ships were ready to head north, the Voice of Reason was on the largest of them. It had taken almost as long to make her tiny fleet seaworthy as it had to make her new skin fight right. It did now, though, and it was worth the effort. 

As she stood in her deep red dress on the aft castle of her refloated Caravel, she admired the way her skin fit like a literal glove on her hands as she flexed and moved. It was only after that, that she looked back at the tiny, black sailed fleet, she wondered if she would return or if she would die on her fools errand far away from her master and his power. 

Some of those ships contained soldiers and powerful constructs, it was true. She was hardly defenseless. Beneath her, somewhere were even a few aquatic monstrosities that lurked somewhere beneath her should the gods of sea and storms give them trouble.

She was well protected and had all the resources that she would need for her mission, but most of the ships that followed her contained only the skeletal remains of a few sailors, along with a hold full of poisoned and diseased rats powered by a god that was not her own.

The Lich had planned to send a scouting mission along the coast to weaken the enemy. It was she who proposed that any such mission should have a diplomatic component to it. It had, after a few considerations and some questions, agreed. She’d argued that such dialogs could sew discord and panic and discord among nominal allies, but the Lich had been far more interested in the prayers of the living. 

That was why her master’s high priest, Verdenin, had sent along a few of his black-robed monks. They were the only living souls in the entire armada, but if her efforts were successful, then they would be the most important. Apparently, its war machine was a hungry thing, and in lieu of blood and souls, prayers to the dark could ameliorate a great many of its concerns. She would have done it for any reason if only to be useful. In this thing, she was the carrot, and the ships behind her were the stick.

The thought sent a shiver down her spine as she flicked her eyes back to them. The Lich could do no wrong as far as she was concerned, and any new abomination from its flesh forges was beautiful in her eyes. Even the dread leviathan that had been so critical to its attack on Rahkin had been a work of art, but a hundred thousand squirming squealing rats packed into the holds of her fleet just waiting for her negotiations to go wrong so that they could be unleashed and despoil everything they could find?

She found something about all of that deeply unsettling. Not only were they ugly, unsettling things, but they were somehow independent of the one true master of the world in a way that she would never be. She shook her head and walked slowly back to the prow of the ship. 

She hoped that she would never need to unleash them. She shouldn’t have to. Not when she had such powerful allies of her own. The Dreamer and the Puppeteer had both joined her on this voyage, and though neither of them would be much better in a fight than her own fragile form, they would both be very helpful in determining who might want what, and where the political fault lines of a given kingdom might be. 

At this point, they were little more than dots on a map to her. She’d read a few dusty tomes on the subject of the Kingdoms of Zum Jubar, but it still made little sense to her, and beyond the most important trade cities, little was known about them in the south. She’d summoned and consulted the spirits of a few sailors and merchants that had been there, but apparently those that were more knowledgeable had fled long before the Lich’s forces had completed their conquest. 

“Those will be our most fearsome opponents,” she said to herself in a voice no louder than the breeze. “The ones that fear what they do not understand and have just enough knowledge for others to believe them. Something will have to be done.”

Two monks stood not so far from her, but they neither looked at her nor spoke to her. They couldn’t. Their eyes had been sewn shut long ago so that they could only see darkness, and their vows of silence prevented them from making any noise except for singing the discordant psalms of the Lich. 

Part of her resented that the living had any place on this mission, but it was not her place to question her master, so she ignored the urge to strangle them or push them off her ship and drown them. Instead, she focused once more on the view. And the destinations that lay far ahead.  

Somewhere in the distance, passed endless dunes and alabaster cliffs, lay Tanda. It was an ancient, walled city ruled by a sultan that tended to focus on trade rather than on warfare. It was often thought of by southern merchants as the gateway to the north, and though she was journeying there for something other than the dates and ivory that were the mainstays of their trade, she was confident she’d find what she was looking for. 

They needed allies, and leaders that cared more for the fate of their subjects than the vanity of the gods that lorded over them all. If she didn’t find those things in Tanda, then she’d keep going, and in Bastom, or somewhere even further north she was sure she would find what both she and her master were looking for. 

The voyage from Rahkin to Tanda would take a good crew and a fast ship about three weeks. They, unfortunately, had neither, thanks to the limitations that daylight imposed on their vessels. Each morning, they lowered the sails and drifted more at less and random. After a month at sea, though, they still had not arrived. 

It was only the magic imbued into the ships that kept them even somewhat together, especially after the storms that she was sure that the Gods were tormenting them with. Still, they met no opposition from mortals, until they were passed all the dunes, and reached the White Gates. 

There, they found a small armada of well-trimmed warships waiting for them. Fortunately, thanks to the wraiths that were released each night to scour the ever-shifting seascape for hazards, they saw the enemy long before their sails crossed the horizon. 

As far as the Voice of Reason was concerned, the best course of action would have been raise the flags that communicated the need for a parlay, and work things out with the opposing captain. She was sure that she could reach an amicable solution. Unfortunately, with dawn a few hours away, that was impossible, and in the light of day those sleek white sailed ships would easily sink her helpless black sailed vessals. 

Such an outcome was intolerable. So, instead, she continued to sail forward directly at them, and when she was close enough, she unleashed a swarm of death’s heads. They had hundreds of those cursed skulls in the hold of her ship, and they were not strong enough to sink a large ship on their own; the fires they caused would do that in an hour or two.

As much as she might have liked to keep survivors and merely send a warning shot, that outcome was equally intolerable. Knowledge of how easily the Lich’s forces might sink the local navies could be valuable in establishing a reputation in a new area. Unfortunately, that was not the reputation she wanted, which meant that there had to be no survivors. 

Thanks to the Lich’s magic, that’s exactly what happened. Fire rained from the sky, and every vessel, no matter how small, received its share. They went up like so many candles, and though the Voice’s heart felt heavy that she had not found a way to bring about a peaceful solution to this impasse, she looked at her lovely hands and decided that she would much rather have them stained with blood than be ruined by weapons and wooden shrapnel.

That dawn, as everyone fled below decks to escape the distant blue rays of the first sun, the black fleet floated there at rest, surrounded by the flaming wrecks of their burning enemies. In the morning, they would harvest what corpses they could for spare parts, and the Puppeteer would do what it did and sniff out secrets that might aid them in their quest.  

That sinuous monstrosity learned a great deal in the night that followed. They sadly could not find the corpse of the fleet’s admiral, but they found a captain and several quartermasters, and it was able to confirm her worst fears. 

“We came to stop yer foul kind before you could stain the holy lands with your evil!” the Puppeteer growled in an unfamiliar voice through the mouth of a dead man, “And even if you make your way past us, you’ll find neither quarter nor succor inside the walls of our beloved home!”

Those sentiments were echoed by the other drowned souls, which they harvested for their dark god. Those sentiments worried her but not so much as to deter her from her plan. All they had come away with from this encounter was maps and warnings, but they had lost nothing of value in return, and that would have to be enough. 

Less than a week later, they reached the verdant coast where Tanda stood like a glittering gem. It was gifted by nature and clung to both sides of a fertile river that provided so much of its wealth. The Voice became instantly suspicious of what small gods of city and nature might lurk in such an old place, but ultimately, she still unleashed her wraiths and the Dreamer to learn what they could from the sleeping populace while her black fleet rested at anchor far offshore. 

It would be hours before any of those shadowy servants returned with useful information, of course, but even so, the Voice could not tear her eyes away from the glittering white spires that dotted the city and the starlight blue domes that sparkled in the moonlight. 

It was the most beautiful place she’d ever been, and she dearly hoped that she could find a peaceful solution that would bring these people into the fold. She would hate to ruin such a lovely place just to make a point that the other local lords would better understand, though she would if she had to.