Tenebroum Ch. 17-18 (Patreon)

The next two chapters will post on 11/28!

Ch. 17 - The Viscount

After the floodwaters receded the swamp focused most of its attention on the goblin tribes and their constant wars to the west of its domain, but that did not mean it failed to explore other opportunities. While the Goblins warred, and the zombies chiseled ever deeper into the earth it always kept a watchful eye out for new victims while it explored the edges of its domain.

No matter what else it was doing, each night it devoted some time to toying with Lord Garvin. Leo had led his vainglorious charge months ago, but entering the depths in his fruitless attempt to purge the evil from his lands had given the lich a small but permanent hold on the man, and while it didn’t know what it wanted to do with the man or the county of Greshan that he ruled over, but until it decided, it enjoyed filling the man’s dreams with dread, and memories of the swamp dragon.

In time that wasn’t enough though. With enough drink the Count could dull even those terrifying memories, so the swamp found a fresh torment for the ruler: his sons. Leo Garvin was gifted with three strong sons, any one of which would make a fine ruler when he finally passed on, so in those nighttime hours where the darkness reigned, it began to create intricate nightmares of betrayal and treachery between the family. Fratricide. Patricide. Regicide. By knife and by poison the Count and the Viscounts that were his sons died almost every night for several weeks, until the old man finally had enough.

Convinced that they were secretly at each other's throats and the gods were sending them a warning, he sent each of them away in separate directions. His eldest, Leo the second, went upriver to spend a season at the king's court. Theon, the middle child, was sent off to school at Abenend. Not for the whole curriculum, but just as a trial to see if he had any talent for it. Finally, Kalvun, the youngest son was sent down river with a royal commission, to remap the river. One of the main sources of income for the county of Greshan was the tolls that river traffic paid from the northerly kingdoms as they made their way out to see on the count’s waterways. The storm might have cleansed the land of evil, but it had played havoc on the maps and for every historical hazard it erased it added two new ones, so something would have to be done.

The darkness had only intended to deprive the Count of the emotional crutch that was his family to do further damage to the old man’s psyche, but it was thrilled at the idea that his youngest would soon be paying the swamp a visit. It intended to make sure the stay was a permanent one though. Whether by sickness or violence the swamp was going to make sure that the boy’s body never left the thick dark mud of the river. If the count could extract silver ducats from every ship and barge that plied the Oroza then the swamp could take its tithe in blood.

Strangely though, that decision changed after only a few weeks. As the small river boat slowly made its way down stream, mapping sandbars and probing for deadheads the boy ate its fish, drank its water, and day by day unwittingly gave the darkness a window into his soul. And the swamp liked what it saw. The boy was practically a monster in his own right. His father had been a good, if vein man, but in the shadow of such men, crowded out by his older brothers, the boy’s ambition grew like a creeping vine. The sort that dug into old stone and rotted wood until it dragged the whole edifice down.

Night by night it probed the boy's mind with dreams that revolved around terrible choices, and Kalvun always chose power, no matter who suffered for it. The darkness was intrigued. It had learned many lessons from the bard. It had thought that absolute ownership of its minions was essential, but that too came with its own drawbacks, now that it knew about the templars. A servant who could be picked out of a crowd by holy men would never be anything more than a pawn.

It needed someone that would serve willingly. Someone it could use only the lightest of touches with, and buy their loyalty instead. So for the last few days of their trip to the swamp the darkness sent the same dream over and over: that the boy was standing amidst the ruins of the mages tower, looking down the stairs as they descended into the worldly darkness. In his hand was a bloodstained knife. Kalvun studied it, like he’d forgotten why he was holding it, and then, remembering, he kicked the body of the man he’d murdered down into the darkness. Some nights it was a member of the boat crew, and others it was his father, but the message was always the same: All the powers of the earth can be yours. All you must do is seal our dark bargain in the lifeblood of another, and you will rise, slowly but surely to the place you truly belong.

Far from being disturbed by his recurring nightmare, the boy was more cheerful than usual as they entered the swamp. That was just as well, because if he refused the wraith’s dark bargain, the swamp dragon that slumbered beneath them would rise up to rip him into pieces. It was the most fitting possible end that the darkness could imagine for a father that had failed to slay the monster on his last visit. It needn't have worried though. Their second night in the swamp they anchored on the shore near the ruins that were the heart of darkness. Kalvun let himself be led away into the dark after a couple beers by a crew member who had nothing good in mind for the lad. He never had a chance to take advantage though, because no sooner had they walked behind the rubble to shield themselves from the eyes of the rest of the boat crew huddled near the bonfire, than the young Viscount killed the old drunk.

In the swamps version it had been a clean sacrifice, with a throat slit quick and clean. The boy had other ideas, because after he delivered a quick punch to the older man’s windpipe to shut him up he produced a short, sharp knife from his sleeve, and stabbed the sailor in the kidneys over and over while he struggled to breath. The blood hadn’t even stopped spurting before the boy kicked the body of the dying man down the ancient stairs.

“I chose the worst one.” the boy called down after it. “The most vile old bastard of the bunch. I hope you see how serious I am about your offer, spirit, and hope that shows you what I’ll do to you if you cross me.” Yes, there was definitely a darkness in the lad that rivaled its own, in fury if nothing else. Normally the darkness would snuff out anyone that dared to speak to it like that, but the boy would learn his place in time.

Slowly the dead man at the bottom of the stairs began to rise, and with some effort, began to crawl up the stairs, one step at a time. It wasn’t a true zombie. Not yet. After all the water damage the flood caused, the darkness didn’t raise the dead permanently unless they had been embalmed and tanned. It was just a temporary vessel. A set of fresh vocal chords that would let it speak to the living for a few minutes to seal their pact.

To the boy’s credit he didn’t flinch or try to run as his murder victim slowly crawled towards him with dead eyes. He just stood there while the dead man’s head flopped from side to side with each step.

Finally when it reached the top of the stairs, the corpse weezed, “Obey me in all things and your father’s lands and title will be yours inside of a year.” The voice that came from the corpse's throat was much older and darker than the body it inhabited, but even that didn’t scare Kalvun.

“But that’s too soon. If my line dies so quickly, people will suspect I had a hand in it,” he protested.

“In. All. Things.” The darkness thundered, finally succeeding in cowing the lad to a small degree as the voice echoed through his soul and made a flock of bats take flight with their unholy reverberations. “Swear fealty to me and you shall have everything your heart desires. Betray me, and I will feast on your soul for centuries to come.”

“And if I take your offer - what is your price?” Kalvun asked shrewdly. His voice quavered slightly, and he stank of fear, but he had not yet pissed himself or run screaming into the night. “Surely you want more than one man’s blood for such a gift.”

“What I offer you is no gift boy. You will pay for everything I give you over and over until you are bathed in blood,” the corpse rattled. “I require a terrible tithe, to be paid in oceans of blood and coin. One coin in every ten that passes through your hands will end up in the bottom of the river to be claimed by me, every year you will personally deliver a token of our compact to me here, at this very spot, or you will live only long enough to regret it.”

“I so swear,” the boy said, smoothly dropping to one knee and bowing his head, as much to hide the fear in his eyes as to pledge his devotion. “I will have no master but you, and will obey you in all things.”

The corpse reached out his hand to the boy, blessing him, but not actually touching him. The last thing it wanted was to stain his soul too darkly. “Very well. It is done. The bargain is struck. Tomorrow you will continue on your trip, but wherever you go, I will go with you.”

“My trip? But there’s nothing important to the south,” Kelvin argued, looking back at the corpse. “Not until you get to Tagel by the sea at least. Surely my place is back in Fallravea, so I can—”

This time the swamp did not yell or bluster. It just reached out and closed its fist over the boys beating heart, slowing it until he lost consciousness. Only then did the lich release his grip and let the frail creature come back to life.

“You will do as you're told even if you do not understand. Your father must be proud of you. Proud enough to inspire jealousy in your older siblings,” the dead man rasped. “That will play into what comes next, when you volunteer to map another poorly understood part of the Count’s domain.”

“What part is that?” the boy asked, still gasping for breath.

“The hills in the borderlands to the west of here.” the corpse answered, slowly beginning to lose what little patience it had left.

“But those aren’t even Greshan territory. Not really…” the boy disputed, before he suddenly realized he was talking back to something that had almost effortlessly murdered it earlier. “I mean. Whatever you say. If the road to power runs through that savage place, I’ll take it.”

“You will,” the darkness agreed. “Now go back to your men and tell them a gator took this pitiful soul. I will put him to other uses later.”

The youth bowed one more time, and then rose, and with a single backward glance he walked back to the light as fast as he could without looking like he was running away. He’d walked into the darkness as hard a man as seventeen year old could be, but he learned to fear the dark like everyone else as he scampered back towards the relative safety of the light.

He would never be safe again though. He belonged to the dark now.

Ch. 18 - A Taste of Ashes

The darkness followed the rest of the Viscount’s trip with some interest, but without having its tendrils into the boy as deeply as it had slid them into the soul of his former bard, the information it received about the world further down river was intermittent and muddy as the water of the river he traveled on. That was fine. The swamp was still exploring its territory in that area, and continued to encounter some difficulties, even now that the floodwaters were a thing of the past and the Oroza should have assumed its new route for the foreseeable future. Day by day the lines seemed to blur and shift. That made sense for something as dynamic as a river, but less so on the banks where it happened with equal frequency. It was almost like something was pushing back against its slow spread, but not in the same powerful way that the consecrated ground nearby once had. Nature, it would seem, was rejecting it.

None of the mages in its library of minds was certain. The best they could come up with was the idea of shifting leylines now that its territory had become broad enough to be affected by such things, so the lich filed away the issue for another time. As long as it could feel the villages and fishing communities scattered along its bank, that was enough for now. It was already exploring the dreams of those simple people, and learning the social webs and schisms that existed in every neighborhood. Soon enough it would aggravate them and little by little extract a bloody toll of its own as long cold grudges and dead feuds found new life. Maybe when winter finally arrived it would spread a new fever down the river and test just how far its influence really spread. Somewhere to the south lay Tagel - a true city. It had glimpsed its waterfront and tavern rooms through the eyes of those the bard had infected with avarice, but it would dearly love to see a plague spread through the city so that it could gain true insight into the inhabitants.

That was in the future though. Right now the important thing was the goblins. The Black Teeth continued to make great progress in all directions their enemies lost ground. To the west their victories against the Dog Eaters were quickly becoming a rout, and to the east and south the Fire Skulls were taking real losses, even with their magic. Grod led his own warband now, and it was full of the most savage warriors the Black Teeth had to offer. It didn’t hurt that the swamp had started to give Grod’s most ferocious warriors lesser gifts of their own. They would never be enough to be a threat to the swamp’s chosen leader of course, but it wanted more blood, and it could only taste it with more connections to the creatures that were doing the killing. So, the more savage the warrior was in the Black Teeth, the more savage he would become.

It was through one of these lesser connections that the swamp first found the source of the Burning Skulls' power. In a rare losing battle where Grod had been forced to flee before a sustained barrage of fire from the massed might of several shamans, one of Grod’s warriors was slain, and that night the victorious side brought the corpse back for a celebratory dinner. Nev was the biggest warrior that had been left behind on that scorched battlefield, so it was perfectly normal that the victorious side would want to take him back to their lair to feast on his strength. Yesterday’s battlefield was tomorrow's banquet in their eyes, and to those savage creatures nothing tasted better than the flesh of their fallen enemies.

The darkness learned several things about that awful dinner though. The first was that past the smoky fumaroles and geysers that marked the heart of Fire Skull territory, there was a cave that seemed to be their true stronghold. It wasn’t a cave though. Not like the one the Black Teeth had lived in. This one was an old mine shaft that had long been abandoned by whoever had built it. That in itself was interesting, the darkness had seen no signs of civilization this far west, so a decades old mining site was unusual. A few of the voices in the periphery of his mind whispered that dwarves were responsible, and the darkness believed them. None of its main voices had ever met a dwarf, and it had certainly never tasted the suffering of one before, but it would like to.

What was more unusual was that on the third level of the shafts, where the old mining operations gave way to a pure goblin warren, there was gold. Even as the corpse that served as its spy was dragged down dusty tunnels, big bright veins of the stuff were in plain view, and the darkness hungered for them. There was more gold in the walls of just this one tunnel, than there currently was in its whole hoard, and it hungered to add it to its collection.

There was no doubt about it. The Fire Skulls would have to fall, and probably in time the Black Teeth would too, but only so that the Count’s men could dig this up for it. In theory zombies would be able to do it of course, but that would represent a fantastic amount of resources that would have to be diverted from the great work in the lowest level of the mazes. No - it would have to rely on the avarice of men to mine this, at least until after that was done. Now that it was starting to better understand the world, no more delays were acceptable.

Since the victorious warriors of the Burning Skulls had started to drag this body, the darkness had been brewing all sorts of toxins and letting all manner of diseases fester inside of it. The other tribe might get to devour one of its pawns, but that would be an act that wasn’t without cost. When they spitted the goblin corpse and began to roast it over the open flame that changed nothing. All fire would do was blunt the impact of its malice, not eliminate it.

That was when it felt the fire.

Not the flames that licked the skin, or the heat that began to crisp and burn the grisly feast. No, that was when it felt the fire behind both of those things. There was something darker, and hotter than fire lurking in the embers of the cookfire. It was the same flavor of magic that the shamans had wielded on the battlefield. The darkness did nothing, except for enduring the growing pain of the fire as it tried to study the new phenomena. Was this something like it? Another spirit that preferred fire and violence to the death and disease that the swamp favored? It could have been anything of course, even some new goblin phenomena that it might never understand, but now that it was looking for it, it could feel the faint trickles of essence from the totems scattered throughout the cavern.

Yes, by the time the goblin’s were ready to start eating their feast and ripping into the sizzling flesh of the fallen, the darkness was sure: it had found a kindred spirit. It had no idea if they were very common or very rare, but it also had no desire to fight with it directly until it better understood what it was dealing with. Such a loss could be costly, and the fire spirit likely had no more idea that the darkness existed than vice versa. There was a value in the element of surprise. That was a lesson that the swamp had learned again and again since the village. So, rather than risk revealing its plan and adding another dose or two of botulism to the mix, it relinquished its grip on the goblin, letting the link fade away into the aether.

There wasn’t just gold and goblins worth fighting for in the area. No - there was another spirit to learn from. Would the darkness be able to devour it? Would it want to, or would it be safer to simply find a way to snuff it out? It didn’t have answers to these questions right now, but it didn’t matter.

What mattered was the new plan: the Burning Skulls were no longer Grod’s primary focus. They would wait until the darkness could bring other tools to bear and better understand where the fire spirit that supplied their shamans’ magic got its power.

For now he would focus on subjugating the other tribes. First they would finish crushing the Dog Eaters, and once that was done he would focus on the sharp spears and the bone gnawers and whatever tribes lay beyond that. The goblins would have no problems with that change in tactics. They loved nothing more than pick on the weakest possible victim, and it was only the swamp’s constant goading that had forced them to turn their attention to the superior foe.

It was still certain that its chosen tribe could beat the Burning Skulls and their fiery magics of course, but it would do so easier once it had crushed the surrounding tribes and formed their survivors into a terrible fist that would make short work of its fiery enemy. It was a simple plan, and one that was eagerly embraced by Grod after several nights of dreams were enough to impress the swamp’s will on it. From that point they only harried the Burning Skulls enough to keep them on the defensive and the trash the scum’s ashen totems wherever they found them while their real warbands raided their neighbor to the west over and over again until the other tribe no longer had a single mangy dog rider left to its name.

If the thing it was facing really was a spirit then it had to follow similar rules to itself, the swamp thought, complete with territory and boundaries, didn’t it? The best way to disrupt those so far from the murky embrace of it’s muddy waters and undead army was simple: the goblins needed to tear down every scrap that indicated the Burning Skulls ever owned a particular piece of territory, and replace it with the grisly trophies of the Golden Skulls. So, soon each skirmish  to the east led to ritual defilement of any area that the other spirit’s tribe seemed to care about.

The swamp took a sick joy in this behavior, even before it felt the boundaries start to shift. A few months ago it had only the most tenuous of footholds in the area that existed mostly in the minds of a few goblins that had drank from its polluted floodwaters. Now it had a tribe to its name and a bloodstained territory that was slowly but surely growing in all directions.

Those gains were cemented when the Dog Eaters finally fell. Not just because Grod beheaded the chieftain in front of a bloodthirsty mob drunk on victory, though, but because as soon as he did that he immediately turned around and crushed the chieftain of the Black Teeth as well. The crowd went wild at this turn of events. In the space of moments the spawn had abolished two different tribes and established himself as the warboss of a new one: the Gold Skulls.