Tenebroum Ch. 21-23 (Patreon)

Ch. 21 - Uncertain Promises

Kelvun removed the wide brimmed hat to wipe the sweat from his brow as he gazed out at the broken, brick-red badlands in the distance. The hat was ugly, and he’d refused it the first day because it in no way matched his riding outfit, but once it had started warming up, and they’d run out of shade he’d changed his mind. The heat shimmer made the boulder studded hills waver uncertainly, he was glad to have the ugly hat, but even it’s shade didn’t help him to spot the last outpost of civilization they’d see until their return trip.

They were meant to reach Holt sometime around sunset. It was just a few farmsteads and animal pens clustered close enough together to merit a farce of a wall that would keep the creatures of the night at bay. He had no idea why anyone would choose to live out here when they could live close to the river or the Fallravea, but he supposed that some people just liked to suffer. This part of the county, in the dry lands, dealt mostly with sheep herding and cattle driving. Maybe that was easier than spending all day tending to your fields, and that made up for the stink. Kalvun hoped to never find out about more of the profession than that. The horse he was riding was bad enough.

It would make for good bragging rights at least, he thought, trying to look on the bright side. To say that he’d been all the way to Holt at the edge of the disputed lands. To be so close to the Woden Spine Mountains that they seemed to touch the sky. Neither of his brothers would be able to say that. Even with that feather in his cap, this still seemed like a complete waste of his time. The expedition would have functioned just as well without him. He was only here to curry favor with his master, and his father, he supposed. Lord Gavin was an afterthought, though.

He’d already forced Kalvun to endure a month and a half of boredom on that boat ride, which would have been a complete waste of time that he could have spent carousing and gambling were it not for the …thing he’d found in the swamp. That had been the only valuable part of the trip, and now he was traipsing across the backcountry, between villages so small they were scarcely worth the name. They both would have complete wastes of time if it weren’t for the darkness and its promises.

With a bland smile pasted to his face while he looked into the distance, Kalvun let those dark thoughts tumble through his mind. He had no way to know if the spirit would keep those promises, or if they could even be kept. All he had were a few words and the occasional vague dream, but as always his mind returned to that moment. There was a sense of power there. True power, and it dwarfed anything that he’d ever experienced before. All the stories said that something dark and terrible dwelled in the swamp, so there was every reason to believe it would do what it said as long as Kalvun kept up his end of the bargain.

It was an uncertain reward, but for Kalvun it had cost very little so far. If the darkness didn’t do as promised, then the only thing that it had cost him was a little blood on his hands from the murder of the buggerer that Kalvun had been planning to make disappear somewhere before Tagel anyway. He shrugged mentally, and stretched. No matter how often he reviewed his situation, he reached the same impasse. Even if patience wasn’t exactly one of his strong suits, he would just have to wait. His impatience wasn’t exactly helped by the vague dreams the swamp sent him. The dreams promised blood and fire, but the only thing they ever found on this interminable trip were hot days and dull nights.

He passed the time listening to the knights that were here to protect him. Their colorful jokes and war stories were far more interesting than the cartography lessons he was supposed to be studying with the mapmaker and the surveyors. Those had been deadly dull and almost put him to sleep in his saddle. A count needed to know nothing about optics or lines of declination. That was what he paid people like this to know!

Even interesting stories grew dull after hours of listening to them, and eventually the most interesting thing to Kalvun was the promise of roast mutton and a safe place to lay out his bedroll. Almost lost in the last flickers of the blood-red sunset were the unimpressive walls of Holt, only a few miles away. Sometime in the next half an hour, they would be safe inside them to recover after their two-day-long ride. At least that was the plan until they saw the fires and heard the screams.

Suddenly the night was broken by gouts of flame bursting from the dark to attack the sod walls of the structure, shortly after that the town’s small church bell started to chime a shrill warning. The city was under attack by something that could wield magic.

“My lord,” the eldest of the knights, Sir Farvus said. “We should withdraw, or at least wait until we have some idea of what’s happening before we join in the fray.”

“We’ll never find that out from here,” Kelvun said, continuing to ride forward. He didn’t need to know anything else. This was it. This was the fire and blood he’d been promised. The dreams had told him it would be an easy victory against a scattered opponent. The dreams hadn’t quite specified who that opponent was exactly, but he was sure it was no more than a small band of bandits.

“We need to—” Sir Favrus began to patiently repeat himself.

“Men!” he shouted, “Our people are under threat. We were told to avoid danger, but not to retreat from saving our fellow countrymen!”

The line brought up a few raged cheers, but most of them stayed quiet. They knew that the old knight lecturing him was the one that was really leading the expedition. That was why Kelvun intended to force his hand. “We ride for Greshen,” he yelled, drawing his sword and digging his heels into his horse’s sides.

The darkness had planned all this, and he knew they would follow to protect him. He had nothing to worry about.

. . .

Kruln’venor was outraged that it had come to this, as its minions crossed the plains to the settlement. In the fading hours of the day, they were intensely vulnerable, but there was nothing for it. The awful black teeth and their hideous yellow totems had taken over everything worth taking in the hills, and the only prey left lay in the farms and settlements of the human lands. The black skulls no longer stood a chance against their own kind, and numbered barely a hundred anymore.

Without meat the tribe would never recover their numbers, and without blood the spirit’s mana would soon run dry. Once the tribe was without fire, they would be devoured by their enemy within a week, and the fire spirit would finally be reduced to nothing. For an entity like it that was almost a century old, the very idea of being snuffed for good was intolerable.

So Kruln’venor was forced to do desperate, stupid things. At least thanks to its tactical brilliance they’d been paying off though.

For the last few weeks they had raided the smallest, farthest ranches with full war bands of over 30 warriors. The prey had been caught completely unaware and was easily overwhelmed with almost no losses. The human settlement though would be more challenging. Even once the fire spirit had decided that his tribe should take it and burn it to the ground, the chief and shaman had resisted his decision for days, until they had been sufficiently tortured in their nightmares to do as they were bidden.

This time they marched to war, not just against a larger, more fortified enemy, but one that was a full two days from their prime warren. It was a desperate gambit, but Kruln’venor was confident they would succeed. By bringing both war bands to bear, they could pit three shamans and almost sixty warriors against what would be perhaps fifty humans, many of which would be the weak delicious creatures that they called women and children.

This would be the victory that would set the Black Skulls back on their proper course. This would be a night of violence and brutality that would make the stars quail in terror at the ferocity of goblin fury!

The attack started off better than it could have hoped, and the war bands snuck from the farmhouse they’d raided the previous day to the walled village as the blood-red sunset slowly faded to ash gray and coal-black. It was a good omen if ever it had witnessed one. The humans had bared their gates, but the thick bricks of dried sod were scarcely a barrier for its warriors, and a few fireballs quickly weakened their pitiful defenses before the guards could even bring their crossbows to bear. It would have been a quick, clean kill, but then out of nowhere the warriors came from the night with sword and lance like they’d been waiting for this somehow.

It was a replay of the marshland rout all over again after that. The ground was splashed red here and there from fallen men, but green blood ran freely. Suddenly, while the war band’s best warriors were already inside the battered walls, and tearing at the soft underbelly of men, a line of warriors on horseback was making for the vulnerable shamans with no way for the fire spirit to save them. Few goblins were killed with the human’s weapons. They didn’t need to be. The most dangerous steel on the battlefield that night were the horseshoes of their mounts. The warriors that were not crushed or kicked to death were soon running in fear.

Kruln’venor used the last of his strength to try to force the warriors that remained to hold the line. Even with the loss of half their number, they still outnumbered the humans, but it was all for nothing. The goblins were ruled by fear now, rather than by rage or hunger. More than anything, they wanted to live, and that made the stragglers easy to cut down. By the small force that was exterminating more and more of them by the second.

As the last few goblins were cornered and put to the sword in the walled city, all the small fire spirit that had once been so much more had to show for it were a few small fires on a handful of buildings. These could quickly be extinguished once the fighting was done. Then it would have nothing. Nothing but a few small goblins that were too puny or weak to fight with the war bands, and a vein of gold it would never have the strength to properly mine.

One by one each pair of eyes that it could see out of were eliminated making it feel ever smaller. The rage and humiliation was bad enough. Worse than that, though, was not knowing how all this happened. There was some critical piece of the puzzle here, and Kruln’venor was unable to determine what it was. In the end, that one galling fact burned inside his dark heart even more than the humiliating loss he’d endured: he didn’t know what had made it happen.

Ch. 22 - Extinguished

Even before the battle in far off Holt was finished, the rider emerged. Its head breached the surface of the muddy pool at the north-western edge of the swamp just before its mount stepped onto the muddy shore. It wasn’t the edge of the darkness’s territory, but it was the closest place that any of its undead servants could wait out the harsh light of day, because in the plains there was no place to hide, and though the red hills were drenched in death, they were still inhospitable to undeath.

It didn’t matter that the pool was only two feet deep, or that on its strange mount, the dark rider was almost eight feet tall. Until moments ago, it had been nothing but a pile of bones and shadows. It was more magic than man, and scarcely counted as real according to most definitions of the word. The core was necromantic, and the steed that its messenger rode on was made of bones, but the rider wasn’t a ghost. It was barely a shade, and the souls that had been stitched together with so many shadows to make it, that the result was practically invisible to the eye. It had only one purpose: To move with greater speed than all of its other servants put together, and even though it had emerged from its hiding place less than a minute ago and was still dripping water, it was already devouring the land beneath it a staggering pace.

It had a goal and a limited time to achieve it. Accomplishing that was the only thing that would keep it from being consigned to oblivion when dawn broke in eight short hours and an errant ray of sunlight burned it away to nothing.

The only sound as it moved through the night was the wind in its wake, and the click-clack of the boney steed charged forward with all its might. The lich that had crafted it had no horses. It had slain a hundred adventurers, and half as many knights, but not one had ever brought a mount into its domain, so it had been forced to improvise. The result was a monstrosity of function over form, that would inspire nightmares in anyone unfortunate enough to see it. The body was formed from the large bones of a dozen different men, with more than a few animal replacements from crocodiles and other large predators to make them fit together properly and provide a sturdy place to attach the six powerful legs of the beast.

Though the human femurs and patellas were used for the upper portions of those legs, they were simply too short for the lower limbs. There, elk bones dominated. Those longer tibias and fibias gave the thing’s legs a spindly, spidery look that allowed it to reach farther than it otherwise would with every stride. Cloaked in shadows as they were, it would have been hard for an observer to make out most of those details. The shod hooves, by contrast, were very visible as they sparked from the force of almost every step, leaving an angry trail of flickering lights in its wake. Each leg ended in a human hand that had been drowned in molten iron. The results were nightmarish, letting the thing ride over incredibly uneven terrain without slowing, as well as letting it grip the earth so that it could push off the ground powerfully with every stride.

Powered by magic, and the suffering of the souls bound within it, the steed was tireless, and could travel nearly twice as fast as the mundane horses its very existence mocked.

The rider carried no weapons or armor. It used no saddle. One hand gripped the reins while its body drifted behind the steed like a flowing cape, and the other held a tarnished bronze lantern. As challenging as the other two constructs had been to design and build, they paled in comparison to that evil little thing. It was for that evil little lamp that its rider was leaving the bounds of its territory for the first time. It was the key to everything, but as it glittered and rattled under the starlight, it gave no clue towards its purpose, nor would it until it was time.

Even at speeds that humans would never know, it took two hours of tireless galloping for the nightmare rider to reach its destination. Even with the trip only halfway over, it was clear to the darkness that this servant might not be up to the task. Fingers were missing, fractures were appearing, and the boney head of the mount, an elk skull, was snorting frost with every breath. The Lich didn’t care if the thing suffered, though, only that it completed its critical mission, as the shadowy rider finally dismounted and glided above the abandoned battlefield.

The bodies of the men had been dragged inside the pitiful walls they had died defending, by their victorious allies. The goblins, though, had been slaughtered to the last, and were left to rot where they had fallen. Their bodies were cool but not yet cold, and only a few embers were all that remained of their once formidable fire magics. That would be enough, though. The wraith drifted over the battlefield, to the remains of a pyre, and then opened its hooded lantern, selected a still smoldering ember, and placed it inside.

. . .

Now that the darkness had what it came for, it finally let the gold skull tribe off the leash. For weeks, it had been struggling to Grod from snuffing out the last lair. Punishments for trying to devour their last enemy within an easy march had included pain, weakness, and nightmares as normal, but eventually the swamp had been forced to add debilitating diseases to that list, temporarily crippling its tribe to hold them at bay.

That was all over now.

As soon as its dark rider had begun its trip, the Lich let his goblins off the leash. After that, they needed no urging. Without fire magics to call upon, and with only a few warriors left that were worthy of the name, their gold riddled warrens fell in a few brutal hours. On one side there were less than 50 Black Skulls, and on the other side there were ten full warbands of Gold Skulls. It was a massacre. By the end of it, there wouldn’t even be enough meat to justify the hunt. That wasn’t what it was about anymore. It was about dominance. For the first time in generations, a single chief controlled the red hills, from the pine forests all the way to the base of the mountains. There were still other tribes to subjugate and gather past that, but Grodd had grown into a brutal chieftain thanks to the swamp’s influence, and no one would dare stand against him.

The Gold Skulls were careful not just to purge the life of every goblin in those warrens, though. In addition to goblins, they hunted down every last totem and effigy, and defaced every image of a blacked skull they could find. Once that was done, they extinguished every fire that was still smoldering. They didn’t know why they did this, but they didn’t need to. It was a compulsion, and the goblins obeyed. In a single night, the fire spirit and the tribe that he had guided for years were all but erased, as if they’d never been at all.

. . .

As soon as the shadow raised the lantern up, the ember within it caught fire, and it began to burn a dull yellow. Second by second though, that color shifted, slowly turning chartreuse, lime, forest, and ultimately a dull olive color as any real light or heat was bled away from it. It was the ghost of fire, in the same way that the wraith was the ghost of a man. That trick had burned out two of his best mages, in weaving the magic. Just as the opposite of life wasn’t truly death, but undeath, the opposite of fire wasn’t truly water. It was stygium. Each of the elements had an anti element, the lich discovered as it researched the subject more, though for now at least he had no need for the other three. Past the veil of life and death, things got very complicated, it turned out.

The fire spirit hadn’t actually been converted into undeath of course, though that might come later. It was just being bound in place by its antithesis. It would make the experimentation easier.

Once the color stopped shifting, all the remaining mana that was related to that lonely ember began to drift towards the lantern in a slow spiral of faintly luminescent streamers. Souls rose from the corpses of its recently deceased minions in translucent cyan streamers that were dimmer than the waning moon, and sparks and flickers jumped from the ashes of its dying fires in white’s and yellows.

For perhaps five minutes, the dark rider was surrounded by its own dim galaxy of strange lights. Fiery stars were scattered amidst the colorful nebula, and all of them slowly orbited the shade like a dark fulcrum. Eventually, though, all the light and color faded as they collapsed into the void ember at the center of it all like the black hole it was.

Less than ten minutes after it had arrived, the rider was remounting its still breathless steed and turning back to the south-east. This time the travel was slightly slower to start, and slowed down further as it went. By the time it reached the swamp's edge, four hours later, horrific mount was down to three fully functional legs and limping badly. It would have to be scrapped, unfortunately, the swamp decided, but it had learned valuable lessons on its failure points that would help when constructing its replacement.

The thing crumbled back into a pile of bones at the bottom of a pool of water once that determination was made, and the dark rider continued on its own. From where it stood, it had thirty miles left to cover by sunrise. For a human, that would have been an impossible distance, but the shade’s steps didn’t sink into the muck, and it ran effortlessly across the surface of water and quicksand alike as it struggled to reach the safety of the dungeon.

For it, the water offered no safe refuge. Any attempt to hide there from the sun would extinguish its valuable cargo and make the whole night meaningless. The void ember was worth more than the shade. It knew that, and so it knew that failure would only be rewarded with oblivion.

The swamp knew that too, though, and as dawn approached and the distance still looked too great, mist began to boil up from the stagnant waters. The fog couldn’t shield a creature of pure shadow from direct sunlight, but it could keep the predawn twilight from turning its servant into a puff of acrid black smoke.

The dark rider stepped down into the sweet embrace of the Lich’s dark tunnels only minutes before dawn finally broke. It had not only avoided a gruesome and painful death, but it had successfully brought the lich the thing that it wanted most.

Trapped in that small brass lantern was the suffering spirit of Kruln’venor, a petty godling that had once been so much more than the flickering spark that he was now. There was so much that it could teach the darkness now, whether it wanted to or not. The lich was very pleased. It had not yet decided if the fire spirit would be a meal, an experiment, a toy, or a servant yet, but no matter how it decided to use it, it would always be a trophy that it could add to its hoard. It was one more piece of evidence that nothing could hope to prevail against its patience and cunning. Tonight it had conquered the red hills and united the goblin tribes therein under its banner. In time every scrap of land, and everything that dwelled on it would belong to it too, no matter how long that took to come to pass.

Ch. 23 - The Spoils

Kelvun never made it to the lair of the Black Skulls, or to the gold vein that his dreams told him was there for the taking. The darkness didn’t make him suffer too much for that decision, though. It wasn’t his to make, after all. After the night of blood and fire, His expedition spent another few days in Holt as they helped to shore up the battered defenses of the village, and then they left for the long trip home.

It was just as well. With the fire spirit caged and awaiting, all the experiments that the Lich could think of, and with the help of his library it could think of a great many indeed. With its new toy, both the Viscount and the Grod got very little of its attention. Those pawns could think for themselves while it focused on what really mattered: power.

Not the petty spread of influence it had been focused on up until now, where it managed to gain a few feet in this direction or another hillside in that direction. The darkness was not aiming to become the god of meadows and pastures. It wanted, no, needed to consume everything, and for that it would need more power not shepherds and trees.

It turned out that quite a few spirits could use those things, of course. They put out a fair amount of mana, but it was the wrong flavor for the darkness. The subtle trickle of mana from a tree was less than the dream of a suffering child, but it reeked of light. The darkness could only make use of it if the land itself was poisoned, in the same was that the fire spirit could only harness it if it was burning.

That was why its grip on the river was shrinking instead of expanding. In all these months, the darkness hoped to have reached the sea by now, but instead its reach had almost been pushed back to the swamp. This had as much to do with the other spirits that no doubt dwelled within it as it did with the clean water resisting its corruption, but both things were problems that could eventually be dealt with, once they were understood.

So the darkness learned, by destroying the fire spirit over and over again. In its cage it was separated from the whole world, so when a bit of tinder was lit from that wicked lamp and used to start a natural fire, it created a copy of the original, rather than expanding the might of the spark it held hostage.

Most of the time, Lich would let it burn for a few minutes and watch as the mana current slowly stirred to life, gaining additional complexity minute after minute, and then it would sunder it to pieces to better understand how the pieces fit together and what they looked like.

Sometimes it would let the thing burn higher and faster before extinguishing it, or rending its soul apart, letting it gain full sentience and become a shadow of its former self. On those occasions, it would speak to it for a time, letting it alternate its blustering and raging with begging and pleading, just to see what the fire spirit might say. It learned some things this way, but less than in did by simply shattering its spirit and studying the pieces before they faded.

It found out that it’s name was Kruln’venor of course. It seemed strange to the lich that it should bother with a name, but it was fond of shouting it out whenever the darkness allowed it the strength to speak.

“I am Kruln’venor and not to be trifled with!”

“You shall rue the day that you showed Kruln’venor disrespect!”

“I shall melt you down and add you to Kruln’venor’s collection of the vanquished!”

The spirit was a broken record when it came to such things, but it amused the darkness to hear to repeat itself so often. The Lich thought that it would have made the perfect court jester, if it had a court, and if that court had visitors. As it was, all it could do was teach the swamp how spirits worked by dying repeatedly, because it had no real knowledge of how it came to be or how it had fallen from godhood to the wretched little thing it had become.

That fascinated the swamp as much as anything. If it had been a god, it would remember every detail. The days when whole seasons had slipped by it unnoticed were long past now.

Trapped in the lantern the core of the captured godling couldn’t feel any of these torments of course, but the Lich let it watch, and it knew that it could see what was happening because of the tiny tremulous screams of outrage and anger that escaped the lantern. It had seen the Lich casually dissipate it a hundred times, and worse, disrespect it on a number of occasions.

The lich thought that it might be able to do this every day and never grow tired of it, even if it hadn’t been making terrific strides in understanding the nature of spirits and how best to detect and kill them. That had been its plan - to murder the other spirits that called the Oorza home, but it was only after it started to plan weapons it could use to murder them that realized its time would be much better spent looking for ways to trap them.

This was an oversight, but only a minor one. The swamp was growing bored with its pawns, and found the ideas it had stumbled upon while tormenting Kruln’venor much more interesting.

After all, the only victim more appetizing to the hungry dead than a suffering human was a spirit bursting with essence. It abandoned spiritual weapons for the moment, and instead sought to make traps that it could create to harvest them, but while it did so the darkness finally took a moment to gaze at the outside world and was surprised to notice that over a month had already passed since it had last viewed the world beyond this room.

In that time Grod had subjected his northern neighbors, the Stone Fists, conducted several large raids of villages on the coast, and was now moving east, intent of finishing the raid on the human lands that the now dead Burning Skulls had started.

That hadn’t been a part of the darkness’ plan, and it considered stopping it, even though it would probably have to kill the goblin leader to do that at this point. In the end, it was a couple of thousand goblins, though, and the idea of that much bloodshed was too much to resist. It would just have to make sure that its human pawn, the viscount, was far from danger, in case Grod proved too successful for his own good.

. . .

Kelvin kept a bland smile on his face while he observed the dancers at the third and final gala being held in his honor. Despite not actually accomplishing his mission to map the badlands, he’d still returned home a hero, and his father had not yet gotten tired of celebrating that fact, much to both his and his older brother’s annoyance. Sure - right after he came back to Fallravea, his father had been pissed off enough to demand to be called Lord Garvin, but he’d gotten over that as soon as he noticed how the knights were looking at his son. After that, he wasn’t a foolish young boy - he was a hero.

Leo’s obvious frustration was the only thing that was actually good about it, though. The man was almost as green as his crushed velvet doublet with envy. He’d expected to return from the King's court as the talk of the town, but instead he’d barely been noticed, and instead he’d been forced to endure the story over and over again.

Kelvun’s smile gained some genuine warmth as he thought about that and took another sip of wine. It was worth the temporary exile being forced on him to watch the pretentious little lording squirm. He wasn’t happy about being sent away, of course. Now when he’d just caught the eye of so many young eligible ladies of the court, but they would still be here when he got back.

Leo might have prevailed upon father to send Kelvun back to the river with craftsmen and soldiers as part of a toll scheme that some aristocrat or another had proposed to him, but even if Leon was here by himself, he’d be stuck in Kelvun’s shadow for a long time to come. Not just with father, either, but with the people that mattered.

Leo had spent a season lounging around court and learning to dress nicer, but Kelvun had led two successful expeditions and beaten back the largest goblin raid that anyone had seen in a generation with nothing but a few knights and a pair of giant brass balls.

At least that’s how the story went when his father was in his cups.

“There he was - my youngest son,” Lord Garvin would say. “Leading the charge, outnumber ten to one? Do you know what he told Sir Farvus before he charged? Do you?”

Kelvun had heard his father say that same thing almost a dozen times in the weeks he’d been back. He’d practically memorized it. It was embarrassing, really. For both of them.

The truth was that Kelvun had never been more terrified than that night, and it was only because he’d managed to get himself drenched in goblin blood that no one knew he’d pissed himself. He’d barely managed to hold on to his sword, when what was supposed to be a few bandits or something had suddenly resolved into dozens of gibbering goblins with spears and spells.

It was only because of the protection of the darkness that he’d lived. It had to be. There was simply no other explanation on how he could have ridden through such a mob with so little armor without suffering a scratch. That’s what happened, though. He just kept going, and swinging his sword, and he just kept right on living while the knights charge along beside him.

He hadn’t even noticed the goblin mage he’d run down until it was practically under his horse's hooves. One second there had just been confusion and darkness, and the next - well, the thing’s staff had briefly glowed with light bright enough to spook his horse as it shattered under a well-placed hoof.

And now he was no longer Kelvun Garvin, third in line to the throne - he was Goblinsbane, protector of the west. It was enough to make him laugh when he was along with his friends, but in public occasions like this he had to play the role of dutiful son, no matter how ludicrous.

So he was going back to the swamp by his fathers’ request. Starting tomorrow he’d be going down river with two boats, three dozen men, and all the supplies they could cram in to the boats without sinking them. It was another duty he wasn’t exactly thrilled to be carrying out, but it would be fine. They’d sail down river for a few days, then he’d spend a few weeks watching other people work hard from the shade, and finally he’d come back with one more success under his belt. With any luck, he’d be back just in time to welcome Theon home and rub it all in his face too.