Tenebroum Ch. 28-30 (Patreon)

Note: Bonus Chapter. I have decided to post a third chapter this week for my Patrons to increase the number of chapters they are ahead. I plan to do this for the next few posts. We will see if I can keep up with that though. More on that in my post later this week. Enjoy!

Ch. 28 - A Bold Vision

As he rode beside his knights past yet another burned out farmstead, Kelvun chose to reflect on this latest adventure, rather than the reason so many were dead. He tried to tell himself the goblins would have attacked no matter what on earlier days, but it never felt entirely true to him

The other nobles had been none too pleased by his decision to ride west and crush the goblin scourge decisively enough that it would never threaten the region. They’d tried to insist that he stay, but as their new count and the still grieving man who’d lost his whole family to green skins in the last two months, they could hardly tell him no.

Truthfully, Kelvun wasn’t much happier about the turn of events. He’d wanted to focus his efforts on rebuilding Fallravea, and returning life there to some vision of normalcy. His dreams of being count had involved pretty serving girls and afternoon hunts, not more bloodshed. The bodies had been cleared from the streets of his city already, but the market square still smelled of blood and burning more than of baked bread. That would need to be fixed, and soon, or the county would suffer terribly from it.

Kelvun had wanted to be the count so badly. He thought that nothing would be too high a price to pay for that, but then it never knew the swamp would extract such a bloody toll. Thousands of villagers were dead, almost a quarter of the city lay it ruins, including most of the docks. The tax collectors told him that his revenues might fall by a fifth for the next few years until things were rebuilt, and nearly all the existing funds would be spoken for by such a vast project.

That wasn’t a setback. It was an unmitigated disaster.

That, more than their increasing levels of fear and vividness, was the reason he’d ultimately obeyed the dreams the darkness sent him and launched this expedition. The men only knew that it was to slay goblins and root them out of their lairs. They knew nothing of the gold.

If the dreams could be believed, then the place they were heading to had veins of the stuff wider than his fingers. It was a huge windfall that would do much to solve his potential problems. For now, that was Kelvun’s secret alone to bear. He trusted these men with his life, but perhaps not with that much fortune. Money did strange things to people, when they weren’t as equipped as he was to handle such things.

It hadn’t been his only secret of course, he—

“Excuse me, your lordship,” an unfamiliar knight asked, riding up beside him and disturbing his reverie. Kelvin noted that the man had his metal helmet on instead of one of the broad brimmed hats that were so popular among the men, even though there was no way there would be a goblin attack with the sun this high in the sky. “Me and the boys. We was wonderin’ how you know where the goblins are and when they’re going to attack?”

Kelvun suppressed the knowing smile that always tried to creep onto his face, and instead kept the wan expression of mourning firmly fixed on his face. “My father warns me. In my dreams.” he said, managing, somehow, to keep a straight face. “He’s come to me almost every night since he passed away, and tells me that he cannot rest until we annihilate the enemy.”

The first time he’d told some this, Kelvun had meant it almost as a joke. He was shocked when they’d believed him. His father’s ghost was certainly very busy elsewhere. If the darkness really had taken him, then even now his father was probably screaming in some diabolical torment that might never end.

This soldier reacted with the same look of awe that the others had, and after another couple minutes, he rode off with a distant look in his eyes. The lie was probably more believable now than it had been a week ago, thanks to the dreams the darkness gave him.

Those dreams had shown him where every nighttime ambush was about to happen, and several times they’d revealed the locations where large groups of goblins had attempted to hide from the daylight. Each time they massacred them, Kelvin wondered why the darkness was giving up his pawns so easily, not that he cared. The victories made Kelvun look like a master tactician as much as a visionary. How could you not look good, though, when you know when and how your enemy was going to attack.

It was child’s play. It was easier than beating his brothers at chess when they’d still been alive to play.

Fortunately, that was almost completely behind them. In two more days they’d reach the cave that was supposed to contain the gold, and if it was everything the dreams said it was to be, he’d make building a new mine and mint a top priority. With a fresh source of revenue, rebuilding would become much less complicated.

He’d studied the maps that he’d helped make on the trip, and he’d decided on exactly what he would do with that wealth. The closet approach of the Oorza to the red hills was the oxbow that they’d built the toll station at. If they were really going to be hauling tons and tons of ore and equipment too and from a place without roads, then a canal that started there and got as close as they could get would be the best answer. Not only would it unlock vast tracks of new lands in the freshly degoblinized area, but it could drain a great deal of the swamp, and reduce the power of the only thing left in the world that could still tell him what to do.

The only man above Kelvun should be the king, and distant as he was, he exercised that power rarely.

With some luck, the darkness would fail to understand the significance of such a far-sighted move until it was much too late. Once the gold was flowing, hiring a few earth mages to cut the channel would only take a year or two.

Kelvin looked down to give himself a second to suppress his smile again. Everything was going splendidly. They’d dig up the gold, purge the goblins, and drain the swamp all in one blow. In five years time his county would be flourishing, and he’d owe no one anything at all.

. . .

It had been a delicious few months for the swamp, but now that the bulk of the goblins had been slaughtered, things were returning to normal. It had made vast inroads on the lands of Greshen, particularly in Fallravea, where everything but the temple grounds were now its private hunting grounds. It was an old city, and the darkness could feel the layers of spirits that dwelled within it.

The vast majority of those were ghosts kept alive through myth and ancestor worship, but there were a number of petty household gods, and other, stranger creatures that were harder to identify. Other than Kelvun who was currently away and making progress towards securing the darkness’ gold, it had no servants in the capital. In time, it would fix that, but not yet.

With tens of thousands of souls massed together, the darkness did not need to feed on them very heavily to sate its hunger. For now, dreams inflaming their recent trauma, and forcing a few hundred residents to relive those terrible nights when the goblins had almost sacked the town, were enough.

Finding the best victims and servants was a process that would take time.

The lich was still focused on the river, almost to the point of fixation. It caught and consumed water spirits almost every day now, but it still wasn’t closer to understanding them. In large part, this was because they didn’t seem to understand themselves. That wouldn’t matter if it was gutting a man or an elk. The anatomy was the same every time. In the spiritual realm, though, things were more in flux. Krulm’venor might be a pain in the ass, but at least he had a strong sense of identity that greatly benefited the lich’s study in a way that the water spirits never would.

They wriggled and writhed, but had nothing useful to offer it besides sustenance. Other than catching them to consume them, the small river spirits served no purpose. The chain might have allowed the lich to catch large specimens with better results, but Krulm’venor’s rebellion had made that impossible. The chain would only be used to stop mortal traffic for the foreseeable future.

That was why the lich had decided that it needed a new focus: polluting the river itself.

While its dark rider explored the headwaters of the Oroza for the most likely spots to try its experiment, the lich’s servants were distilling the foul chemicals necessary for the unnatural materials it would need. Poisoning the waters themselves and watching all the plants and animals die wouldn’t be a particular challenge, but that wasn’t what it was looking to do. A dead river would eventually lead to dead cities, and the lich would eventually need many more humans than those that were currently at its disposal.

No, a more subtle perversion was necessary. Something that could taint the very spring that was the headwater of the massive river. It would be a slow process, but there was no hurry. The lich had all eternity if necessary.

While it waited for the sulfurous distillates to reach maximum potency, so it could lead to the next step, the lich turned its attention back to its latest experiment: splicing the souls of dead goblins together to see if it could make something more interesting out of them.

The goblins that had served it so ably for the last year had very little in the way of mind, and not much more than that, spiritually. Their souls were thin and not much more substantial than the water spirits the lich had been consuming. It could just devour them, of course, but the recent slaughter had provided it with so many, that it thought that now would be the time to try a few experiments in preparation for future works.

It was much more challenging than working with a proper human soul, though. The spirit of a human was rich in texture and quite durable. It could be manipulated like a piece of calfskin, and could be cut and molded into any form the lich might desire. The Goblins, by contrast, were barely more than shreds of burlap. They had to be almost completely unraveled and then held on a distaff of bone and steel until they could be spun into something the lich could work with.

It almost wasn’t worth the trouble, but there was such a wonderful quality of violence and rage left over in the finished product that the Lich toyed with it anyway. It would never be as loyal or as tractable as the embalmed lizard men in its honor guard, but in terms of pure savagery, there was no comparison. So far both of the corpses that it had woven its goblins into, had fought so ferociously in the tests that followed that they had torn themselves to pieces in less than a week.

Next time, it would have its zombie fleshcrafters more thoroughly reinforce the limbs before it tried again. The fact that a body needed to be more steel than human when it was powered by undiluted rage struck the lich as more than a little interesting.

Ch. 29 - Deeper Currents

It was only after the Lich poisoned the headwaters that the river turned against it. What had been benign neglect, on the part of the river toward’s the swamp as the water spirits ignored the poaching in their midst, quickly became something more.

There had been no reaction the day that its dark rider delivered the sieve of verdigris encrusted cholerium into the spring that was the first trickle that became the mighty flood that was the Oroza. That placidness didn’t last though. In the days and weeks that followed, and the river began to taste the poison that slowly seeped into the main channel, it rebelled.

Violent undertows rippled up and down the body as the thing became agitated. Its power was strongest in the places furthest from its heart, though, and it could do nothing to dislodge the screen that perverted every drop of water that passed through it. It did what it could to hurt the swamp in other ways, though. It tried and failed to break the chain that belted it at the Toll station, but it did manage to capsize two of the many barges that Kelvun had sent down to assist as construction on various projects intensified.

People died, but the swamp would shed no tears for them. To it, a single life was no more valuable than a drop of water flowing down the river.

The Oroza didn’t stop there, though. Even though it had ignored the Lich’s spirit hunting constructs for almost a year, they were all dashed in a single night as larger water spirits that took the form of translucent blue sea serpents began to prowl the waters of the swamp.

Until then, the Swamp had only ever seen spirits that emulated fishes and eels. These were new, though. They had come from the south, near the mouth of the river, where its power was strongest.

The lich outfitted the river dragon with wards and claws of tainted metal, lest it meet the same fate. That only extended the thing's life by a matter of weeks, though. The decade's old titan of the swamp fought in battle after battle, but each time a new storm refreshed the river’s strength, the combat would start all over again.

In the end, the broken wreckage had to crawl three miles across the muck on a moonless night to avoid total destruction. With the hand full of arms it had available, it took most of the night, and by the end it was an exhausted, broken toy instead of the nightmare monstrosity it had been for so long.

The Lich raged at the turn of events, and vowed to rebuild it to be stronger than ever, but adding cords of pure rage woven from the souls of goblins would mean that the whole skeleton would need to be reinforced, and a more powerful collar to control the thing from their poor impulse control would be required. It would be a massive undertaking, and risky too, now that so many humans were in the region.

The fool of a boy, Kelvun had earth mages deep in the swamp surveying leylines for road building or some such too. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but pulling massive amounts of magic for a new project would be something that was sure to arouse their attention. The swamp was just considering how best to make them disappear when an unwelcome visitor unexpectedly entered its lair through the river entrance.

At first glance it looked to be nothing but the corpse of a drowned woman, but the way she swam through the hallways as the tidal surge carried her ever deeper into the fetid darkness while she surged with elemental power were more than enough indications that she was possessed by something far greater.

Indeed, as the first of his servants engaged her, only to be torn to pieces he saw it - the river dragon that wore the woman as a skin to walk in his tainted domain, in the same way he had used aquatic corpses to travel the river for so long. She might look like a normal woman, that had been pretty enough before the river had begun to warp her flesh. The ghostly claws that drifted near her hands, though, they were powerful enough to do even its swamp dragon in.

The Lich had not been forced to deal with a threat in the heart of his own domain like this in over a decade, and the strains of panic began to rise in the symphony of souls inside it, though it was quick to push them back down. It immediately pulled back all of its minions of any value, moving its honor guard to its throne room, and feeding her only enough of his most worn out zombies to slow the spirit down as its specters and chirurgeons retreated to other parts of the dungeon.

She might never have been here before, but even still, she walked unerringly through the maze that it had spent so many years digging. It was maddening until the lich realized that her blind, milky eyes saw nothing, and that she was just doing as all the river spirits it had ever interacted with were doing: swimming with the currents. In this case, the current was the tide of dark mana that it pulled constantly toward itself, revealing its location for anyone with the senses to see it.

In trying to poison the river, it had revealed those dark currents to the river spirits, giving it the chance to finally see the undeath that had lurked within its waters for so long. Now it was coming for it, and the Lich had limited options.

Limited options weren’t the same as no options, though. As soon as the woman was far enough from the entrance that she wouldn’t be able to stop it, the Lich slammed the stone door shut, severing her from the river.

That stopped her swimming for half a moment as she considered her options. Tied to the river, her powers were practically limitless, but separated from it, she was only about as powerful as the lich itself.

In the end, she pressed on, and started swimming once more towards its throne room. The Lich had been prepared for that. With every second she was delayed, its minions moved and adjusted things, shifting the throne slightly to alter her path through the door, and then opening some sluices from the swamp to let in a few inches of its polluted waters to hide all evidence of the trap that awaited her.

She came with all the force of the tide, descending through the complex, quarter mile wide labyrinth in minutes. In the end she found the Lich where it always was, ensconced in its throne, while a dozen of its embalmed warriors were arrayed around it with their dark steel shields and spears. They would offer some resistance to even a powerful spirit like this, but both the Lich and the river dragon knew that it wouldn’t be enough.

“You have tainted my waters,” it roared like a crashing wave. “Remove your cursed implement, and I will make your end swift!”

The Lich regarded the woman in his throne room with a mix of fear and anger. Even at the height of Krulm’venor’s insolence, he had never felt threatened, and it did not care for the feeling. It had not come this close to true peril since the mage had toyed with it in those experiments so long ago, and it had spent all the time between then and now making sure that this would never happen again.

“You have a poor bargaining position, river god,” The lich rasped through a fresh zombie that stood next to it. “Even if you could kill that which cannot die, you will never be able to touch the knife I’ve lodged in your heart.”

The dragon’s only response was to roar in outrage at the truth of its statement as it surged forward on a column of water. She planned to crash right through its guards and then smash the lich into pieces, but she never got that far. Ten feet farther into the throne room, as soon as it crossed an invisible threshold, there was suddenly a wall surrounding the woman and her wave on all sides. That the wall was invisible made it no less impenetrable for her.

“You cannot stop me!” The river dragon raged. “I am the tide and the storm!”

“No,” the Lich corrected. “You are the Oroza, the same as every other spirit I have ever dragged from the river, and any spirit can be bound if you know its true name.”

The Lich made it sound so simple, as if it was a fate accompli, but the ring of bronze was a thing that had been built for testing and toying with Krulm’venor. His name had been effaced, and the new one had been hastily scrawled in its place. There was no guarantee that the new runes that had been carved in the place of the old would hold up to forces like this.

It was only because the Lich was cast in metal that it was able to maintain a straight face as its soul groaned under the strain. The Oroza was the tide, and it was the storm. That much was true, and all that force crashed against the walls of the circle, and with only the barest amount of leverage, the darkness had to meet that force and push back.

The binding circle wasn’t the victory that it pretended that it was. It was only a battlefield. A place where it could pit power against power. The swamp’s resources were not limitless though. Though its guards and interpreter continued to stand motionless, and the Lich sat there quietly pretending that it didn’t have a care in the world, in the background, every servant it didn’t need fell to the floor as the power was drained from it for a more important fight. In the swamp above, whole flocks of birds fell from the sky dead, and workmen that had eaten of his game fell sick or lame as the darkness drew from them. In the far away red hills, the goblins that were most attuned to the dark died sudden, silent deaths.

Even Kelvun felt dizzy for a moment as the swamp pulled every erg of power it had from every pawn it had ever touched. None of them mattered. It would deal with the consequences another day. Right now, all that mattered was its survival.

And there was no mistake about it. The very survival of the darkness was on the line. If it did not hold the water dragon back in a cage made of its own name, then the Lich would be sundered beyond repair. The darkness would still exist after that. So would the swamp that it had inhabited for so long, but it would be so much reduced that it would be no better off than the broken and caged fire godling that it kept in the corner as a trophy. Without the wizard’s mind to direct the maelstrom, it would quickly lose track of the world around it, and turn it back into the slow, limited thing it was before.

The Lich had to win. It was a fight for its very survival.

In the opening seconds that had seemed doubtful, but when the walls held, the River Dragon pulled back to regroup. Even as it struggled, the water level inside the circle began to fall. It could feel itself weakening with every blow it tried to strike.

This was no longer a dual, but an endurance match. Could the river overpower the darkness, or would the swamp outlast the raging waters and the tormented soul of the drowned women it had used to invade the Lich’s inner sanctum?

Ch. 30 - Tainted Waters

In the darkness of the bedrock beneath the swamp, hours became days and days became weeks as the two struggled against each other in a test of wills that resounded through the whole region. The River dragon would lay there quiescent for days at a time before bursting out with sudden unexpected attacks that were as deadly as any undertow. Their clashes caused sudden thunderstorms to spring to life where there had been only overcast skies, and blights to spring into existence where there had once been healthy fields. The amount of essence being burned took almost as much of a toll on the combatants as it did on the world around them.

Sometimes these outbursts lasted for only a single moment, like a lightning strike as she threw everything she had into a single fierce attack, and others lasted for week after week as she beat against his barriers with all the patience of crashing waves as she sought to erode his wards rather than shatter them. She proved to be a canny opponent, but in spite of almost losing several times, the lich managed to retain control of her prison. It was only after the fifth storm surge, though, the Lich knew that it had won.

The Dragon had tremendous power at its disposal, but it was separated from the river and had no way to replenish that power from where the Lich had trapped it, so day by day and outburst by frantic outburst, it grew weaker. Not so weak that the Lich dared to turn its back on it, though. It could feel the binding circle shivering underneath the opposing forces at times as it got so hot from the strain that it boiled the surrounding water.

One of the heads in its library pointed out that without that water to cool it, the apparatus would have long since melted to slag. It was a little irony that the Lich would have to address in the future. It had come too far to leave its fate to the merest of chances. The idea that it’s unwelcome visitor might have been a creature of any other element, and that it would have to face oblivion as a result, ate at it more than words could say.

Some months later, when the river dragon was no more than a corpse laying weakly in a few inches of remaining water, The swamp was finally able to look at the world again, but beyond starting its laboratories and returning their undead slaves to life, the swamp didn’t care. The opportunity was here. Kelvun could scheme and the goblins could fight and die, but neither one of them could help it to take control of a river and the titanic flows of energy that made their way through it.

The first thing the swamp did when it was safe to look away from the dragon was to have a second ring built around the first, in case it should fail. That much was child’s play, and the forges were relit at once. The second part was much more delicate though.

It was going to weave a second cholerium sieve and use it to see if it could keep the swamp dragon from expiring completely. After all, that was what the elemental wanted. The swamp could see her eyes begging for death when the woman stared at him from her position on the floor, but even if the Lich’s servants now had a chance of killing her, it would never waste such an opportunity for mere bloodshed. She was more valuable than that.

From here, it could taste the subtle pollution that already flowed through the Oroza. It was subtle enough that it wouldn’t even sicken one man in ten thousand, but it was there, and already the river spirits were choking on it in the same way that a freshwater marsh would as the tides shifted, and the salt overwhelmed whole sections of bog.

Soon the river dragon faced the same treatment, on a vastly accelerated scale, as the swamp began to feed her dwindling pool of water with its freshly tainted waters. In small quantities, she just lay there and tried to ignore it, but as the potency increased she once again stirred to life, this time howling with pain and rage at what it was doing.

“A monster like you does not deserve to live,” she screamed, slashing the barrier with her newfound energy.

She sought to use the energy to give her one more chance to tear the Lich’s head off, but that was not to be. It counted on this impulse, and was giving her just enough energy to think she had a chance, but every mote of essence she burned to power her attacks lodged a little more of his poison in her soul.

After several more weeks of constant struggle, she finally succumbed to the cholerium and slipped into a coma. The powerful river spirit had trapped itself in the body of a slowly rotting corpse, and it was so lost that even full immersion in the waters of its home might not be enough to ever let it wake up again.

The lich considered building her a vessel like he’d made for Krulm’venor, but it quickly decided that it would be pointless. Something as proud and angry as the river dragon would never bend the knee, so there was little point in holding it in captivity.

It would have to be yoked to a larger purpose or devoured in total. There was no third option. The possibilities flashed through the mages of his library back and forth, but most had never even imagined that an elemental spirit could get this large, so their ideas were less than useless.

The Lich considered devouring her and integrating her soul into his maelstrom, but she was more powerful than any single soul it had ever consumed before, and the results would be unpredictable at best. The Lich wasn’t even sure what it would want if its thoughts and desires shifted to a point halfway closer to the water elemental. Would it want to stop poisoning the river? Would it become the river? It was impossible to say.

Ultimately, there was only one vessel that it owned that could hope to channel such power: the swamp dragon. The Lich had already been reinforcing that ancient skeleton to deal with the fury of the goblin essence that were being used as tendons and ligaments in the newer version. The Lich had planned to use it to fight creatures such as the river dragon as they sought to stop it from seizing control of the river. It was ironic that instead of slaying the river dragon, the two would be melded together to become one.

It turned out that stitching her into place at the heart of the monstrosity was easy enough. Adding enough countermeasures to ensure her control was somewhat harder. In the end, he bound the corpse hand and foot in ornaments of gold and onyx. The gold was an unfortunate choice that had to be borrowed from its hoard, but the lich had to ensure that water could not corrode the fine lines and delicate inscriptions that went in to their creation. In the end the jewelry served two crucial purposes though. It not only forced the creature to obey its new master, but it prevented it from leaving the body and trying to flee into some distant corner of the Oroza.

The river dragon remained in a stupor during the long months that the new rib cage of bronze was forged and bolted to the stumps of bone that remained from the original swamp dragon. It was only when the thing made the long crawl from where it had been repaired deep in a swampy lagoon back to the river on a stormy night that the water spirit woke up once more.

“Wh-what have you done!” the tortured spirit silently screamed beneath the water while it took stock of its predicament.

“I have given you a body to match the shape of your soul,” the Lich taunted. “Do you like it?”

“I am not meant to be chained to flesh!” The elemental roared. The sound of its suffering wasn’t enough to breach the surface of the water, but it was enough to wake up every mortal with a sense of preservation for miles in every direction. For a moment, each of them rightly feared for their lives. Most went back to sleep, sure it was a dream, but for the river dragon, the nightmare would never end.

It was true, of course. That was the awful part. A creature of pure elemental majesty should never have tied herself to something physical. She’d made a terrible mistake in trying to face a threat beyond her comprehension, and she would pay for that mistake.

“You wore the body of a dead woman, so you could leave the river and challenge a master of death,” the Lich gloated. “It is little surprise that you lost, and now you will suffer the consequences of defeat.”

“I will never serve you!” the river dragon tried to thrash and break her new body of metal and bone, but the wards glowed brightly as they were invoked to keep her from hurting herself.

“Your service is not optional,” the Lich responded. “Starting tonight, you will do exactly what I require. You will prowl the dark water that you used to serve, you will devour the other spirits called Oroza that you used to share the river with, and you will bring me back their essence to fuel my other experiments until the whole of the river is a graveyard, and you are the last of your kind.”

The river dragon’s only response was a wordless scream of pain and tears of rage. “Please, have mercy! Don’t make me do this,” she sobbed, as she started to swim downriver. There wasn’t an ounce of compassion in the Lich’s soul though, and the only thing that filled its heart as it watched her go was triumph. Boundless, overflowing, overweening triumph.

She hated her orders with every ounce of her being, but she could do nothing to stop herself from fulfilling them. She might secretly hope that some bigger fish would be able to destroy her, just as she had helped to destroy the original swamp dragon, but that was unlikely. She was a master of water, fitted into a creature built to slay her kind. Even a god of the ocean, if there was such a thing, would be hard-pressed to fight her in her current form.

The swamp dragon had always been fearsome, but now it was a killing machine that would cleave a bloody path down river. It had the rage of whole goblin tribes, the strength of two dozen lizard men, and both of those things were powered by the ethereal heart of a captured water dragon that was wrapped in layers of runes and enchantments that made it utterly obedient.

It was the finest work that Lich had ever done, but it knew before too long it would dream up some new dark servant that would make the dragon pale in comparison. It only needed inspiration, because it had all the time in the world.

After basking in its triumph, the Lich finally turned back to its other servants. It had been almost a year since it had started its fight with the river spirit, and in that time other matters had surely developed that required its attention.