Tenebroum Ch. 37-39 (Patreon)

Ch. 37 - Forged in Fire

Krulm’venor had no idea how long he’d been kept in isolation before the lantern was opened, and he was allowed to flare to life once more, but he knew it had been a long time. It had been at least months, and possibly years since he’d tried to defy his jailer and had his legs cut out from under him in the attempt. Even sitting in the throne room, able to watch everything the Lich did, it was very hard to understand any of it when he was reduced to the size of a single forsaken spark that cast a blue glow so faint it barely reached the golden corpse that he hated with every ounce of his being.

The treatment would have enraged him if he’d had the energy for such a powerful emotion. Instead, he just watched the world flow past as a flickering of events. The only image he’d been able to hold onto for any length of time was the golden bastard that had imprisoned him meeting with a woman clothed only in water. She had radiated power until the Lich had drained her dry and forced her to submit just like it had forced Krulm’venor so long ago.

He shuddered at the humiliation as he stirred to life while the fire that the Lich had built in the crude summoning circle slowly came to life and his mind returned to him.

“Why do you wake me?” Krulm’venor barked silently at his tormentor as he stirred to life and looked around the dark and changeless throne room. “What fresh torments have you prepared this time?”

There was nothing he could do to stop the Lich from hurting him, but he would not give it the satisfaction of begging or submitting to the monster. Even the short thrill of glorying in fire and blood for the first time in decades hadn’t been worth that terrible price, and that had been truly grand.

“Torments?” The Lich asked silently. “I don’t come to hurt you again stone burner. I have woken you to give you a gift.”

“Gifts? Pah!” The spirit crackled, “I want nothing from you.”

“Nothing? Not even your freedom?” The Lich taunted as one of it’s many zombie minions approached the lantern, and picked him up from the hook he’d hung on ever since he’d been brought to this place.

The fire spirit felt a flicker of worry, wondering where this monster was taking him after all this time. He didn’t even bother to dignify the Lich’s offer with a response. The only freedom that he was ever likely to receive was when his jailer finally tired of toying with him and snuffed him out for good. He doubted that would be any time soon though, because the foul creature fed on suffering the way that he fed on kindling. He could only watch as the slow moving lantern barrier left the room and began to walk through the dank maze that was the Lich’s home.

These weren’t proper tunnels. Krulm’venor knew that much from his dwarven history. Everything was wrong about them. The places where they turned weren’t square, and neither were the junctions where the walls met the ceiling and the floor. Everything was crooked and rough-hewn. There was no artistry at all in anything the Lich did, and it grated on him to no end. He’d only let things slip as badly as he had because he’d been forced to rely on goblins, but the Lich had all the power it would ever need, and minions that existed only to follow his orders to the letter. It was just sloppy, and it was one more thing the fire spirit would never forgive it for.

“You’ve sat as a trophy in my throne room for too long, Krulm’venor, and your potential has been wasted because you lack the obedience to do what you’re told. That changes today,” The Lich’s silent voice echoed through the halls sourcelessly, following the fire spirit as his lantern was carried along.

“I obeyed you once and I still regret it. I will never…” the words vanished into smoke before Krulm’venor could finish expressing them as he beheld the sights of the room he was brought into.

The room was vast enough that he couldn’t hope to see the walls with the wan blue light of his adulterated form, but what he saw was enough. It was an abattoir, but the gore wasn’t what disturbed him so much that for a moment he flickered hesitantly. Around the rooms were bodies in different stages of disassembly or reassembly, and each of them had been modified to the point where they no longer strictly human. All except for the thing that stood in the center of the room. It looked human enough, if one had their bones dipped in molten iron and bronze of course. The fire spirit was sure that such a vessel had something to do with him, if only because there was very little of it that looked flammable.

The metal skeleton had a skull of steel and a spine to match, but both of those were gilded so that they blended in with the bronze limbs of the rest of the body. It occurred to the spirit only once he was close to it that it wasn’t the skeleton of a human, but a mixture of human and goblin elements that were most visible in the height and the hunch of the spine.

“You will obey me, and in time you will even thank me for this gift,” the Lich intoned. “Not today or tomorrow I think, but one day you will beg me for more orders, no matter how humble and demanding. You will crave them.”

“A larger, stranger cage, is still just a cage,” the fire spirit blustered, trying to ignore the bad feeling that was building inside of it. “Your lantern didn’t break my will and neither will anything else!”

As Krulm’venor spoke, the zombie that had carried him into the room reached into the lantern with its bare hand and removed the ember that was the true spark of his being. For a single second he was free, but before he had a chance to revel in it or feel the warmth that came with it, the ember was inserted into a small opening on the back of the monstrosity's skull, which was then shut and locked, plunging him once more into the terrible void that the stygium created.

“That zombie will burn to ashes,” the Lich said while the fire spirit tried to adjust to his new surroundings and see what mischief he could get up to in this strange body. “Void fire burns unlife just as easily as true fire burns pitch. It’s a pity you don’t have more control, or you could destroy all my creations just as easily.”

“Oh?” Krulm’venor said, flexing his new hands as he imagined throttling the last spark of unlife from the Lich’s dead eyes. “I’ll remember that when I use this to—”

“Stop!” The Lich yelled in a voice that hundred through his skull. For a moment Krulm’venor tried to keep moving despite the order’s. That was a mistake. Instantly the whole body came to life and revealed its true purpose in an instant as he was assault with a dozen varieties of pain.

“I made that body just for you. I made sure it would be the perfect fit for an insolent, disobedient spirit like you, and each bone in it will be loyal to me until the day I finally let you die,” the Lich gloated. “One day you will be too, though not too soon I hope. I’ve devoted too many days to this particular torment, so you’ll have to suffer for decades at least to make it worth my while.”

“Wh-what did you do to me!” The fire spirit screamed. This time, rather than silently speaking from the fire in the throne room, he actually put his new mouth to use and let out a thin, grating voice as sparks spewed from his empty throat.

Right now he was experiencing the worst pain of his entire existence, and he couldn’t understand why. It was heat, and fire, but it felt like skin that he didn’t have was melting from his bones. Normally fire was a welcome sensation, but right now, even as the traceries of blue fire began to spread across the runes that decorated his ribs, spine, and the long bones of his leg, all he felt was an unquenchable desire for it to go out.

The pain only ended half a minute later when he finally did exactly what the Lich said and stood there perfectly still without even thinking about moving. The runes dimmed slightly when he was still and obedient, but stayed lit. Even thinking about disobeying was enough to cause them to burst into flames once more and make him wish for death.

“I selected the souls that empower your body with great care Krulm’venor. Please know that,” the Lich taunted. “Each one of the bones in that body has been bound to the spirit of a human that you have personally burned to death. Each one of them want nothing more than to make you suffer, and they have permission to do just that whenever you do anything but obey my instructions to the letter.”

“You what? That’s maddnaaarggghhh!” The fire spirit wasn’t even able to finish the sentence before the pain assaulted him again. It lasted for almost a minute before he was finally able to still his mind enough to quell it.

“You won’t be alone with them though,” the Lich continued. “Since I know how much you love goblins, I’ve distilled the spirits of hundreds of them into the sinews and ligaments that make that strange machine move with such fury. Right now you can probably scarcely feel them, but in time their darkness will seep into your soul and help you to become the true warlord that you were always meant to be.”

This time Krulm’venor managed to stay silent, but internally the fear competed with rage in his cold heart. He could feel the power flowing through him, but he could also feel how dirty it was. He felt tainted by it already, and it had only been five minutes since they’d been comingled.

They stayed like that in a silent impasse for several more minutes, watching the zombie that was burning with blue fire slowly burn down to nothing but a pile of ashes. Finally, when the Lich had proven his point he said, “I have a job for you. You may speak, but you may not disobey.”

“What do I need to do to return to that lantern,” the fire spirit asked, repressing his rage.

“You really think I would be so merciful,” the Lich asked, almost amused at the idea. “I wish to know more about your past. I want to understand how gods fall to better know how they rise.”

“I will tell you all I know,” Krulm’venor answered, gritting his teeth as he studied the abomination he had become.

“But you do not know enough!” The Lich declared in a voice so loud it echoed in his skull. “So you will return to the depths and rediscover them for me. You will tell me of Ghen’tal and Mournden. You will discover why you were once called the stone burner, or you will die in the attempt.”

Even as the Lich spoke the words, Krulm’venor felt the compulsion to start walking, but he hazarded a few words anyway, “But the way is blocked, there is no way into the deeps any longer.”

“The miners in the red hills following the gold vein have found tunnels so deep the goblins never explored them. They were almost certainly how you found your way to the surface, and they are how you will find your way back,” the Lich answered smoothly. “You will walk back to where this all started, avoiding contact with men where you can, and killing anyone who sees you when you must. I will see through your eyes, and let you know when it is time to return.”

“But—” the fire spirit protested, feeling the pain already starting to blossom in places in his new body.

The Lich interrupted him though. “If you do not go now I will have you stand in the bottom of the Oroza for a year and a day, and we can satisfy a different curiosity of mine: to see what it feels like as you drown while you are burned alive.”

The wave of fear was enough to overpower the pain that was coursing through Krulm’venor, and he started to move immediately.

Ch. 38 - Spreading Plagues

For years the Lich had been content to feast on the dreams of the simple people that dwelled in the towns and villages in its domain. A drop of anguish from the thousands it afflicted nightly added up to a tide of suffering, and it drank greedily from both the nightmares of mortals and the very specific pain of its enslaved river dragon greedily. It was overflowing with power now. Neither of those was truly enough though. It was never enough.

So one day, as the armies of Dutton gathered on the east bank of the Oroza, the Lich decided that its latest creation was ready, and it unleashed it in the dead of night. It was not as mighty as its juggernaut or its river dragon, but it was more deadly than both of them combined. Unlike the vessel that contained Krulm’venor, it lacked obvious artistry, but it still represented years of painstaking work. The tiny mote was little more than a miasma - a breath of sickness. It was just a wicked little curse that it inflicted on the least of the swamp’s denizens, but in a few months in would spread over half the continent.

It started small though.

The sickness first spread across the lands and down river, affecting almost everyone to some degree as the disease that the Lich had nurtured and developed for years finally appeared. It was first noticed in the crew of boats bound for port cities like Bridigem and Tagel in the county of Dutton. Both of those cities were regional crossroads, though. They could never hope to contain the disease. Instead, they would amplify its spread.

Two weeks after the first sailor complained to his mates about not feeling too well as he went to bed early, dozens were dead and thousands were sickened while the new disease spread its tentacles down every trade road and tributary, searching for new victims. At first, it was treated as the gray shivers always was, with rest and water, but soon enough they called it something else, and boarded the victims in their home as new cases were discovered in a desperate bid to avoid the same fate.

The Drowning.

The word and the rumors associated with it spread even faster than the illness itself. Those who caught it still ran high fevers, and they skin still turned pale and ashen, but in their final days their lips turned a distinctive blue color, and their wracking coughs began to resemble the gurgling sounds of a drowning victim as their own fluids slowly filled their lungs. It was an awful way to go, but most survived. They simply waited at death's door for several days before they managed to break free from the undertow that clawed at their soul as much as their body with its clammy hands.

Even though it was a magical sickness created by the Lich, the people of Greshen were not spared. It could only control its release from the biting flies that were common to certain river sandbars in its ever-growing domain. It couldn’t control its spread. It didn’t even want to. In due course it came to Fallravea, and burned through most of that city just as it had the rest of the region. Though the deaths there would be an order of magnitude less than in the surrounding counties, the suffering would be almost as great, because that was what the darkness desired. With the waning of the swamp and the storage of its undead minions the world had forgotten it. Its evil had been relegated to dreams and stories.

That was a mistake.

Even if it wanted to hide its existence, it still wanted the people that dwelled within its lands to fear the dark powers that lurked in the darkness each night. Not that the disease was simply a lesson in vanity of course. The Lich had thought long and hard about when to release its terrible plague, but it was the lord of Dutton that had decided on the timing. When he had begun to martial troops to his cause and draw mercenaries to Bridigem with an eye on its gold mines it had sealed their fate. Those warriors would be some of the first to be infected in their crowded barracks while they waited for orders to cross the river, and fully half of them would die gasping for air without a single sword being unsheathed.

That this whole war had almost happened and been prevented without Kelvun ever finding out our raising his own armies was an amusing irony for the darkness. Normally it would be happy for the two neighboring regions to fight themselves to a bloody standstill, but not today. Not only was the Lord of Dutton targeting its gold, but it would be a great distraction to the ongoing building projects. The Lich needed the peoples surrounding its ever dwindling swamp to be fruitful and multiply, not die in pointless squabbles. Those could wait.

Only those loyal few who worshiped at the temples to Oroza were completely spared of this blight because it had used the river’s own strength to fuel its foul spell. The other priests could heal it with their magic of course, but even they still feared walking into the neighborhoods where the malady had taken hold. The water bearers had no such fear though. They would journey into even the worst of the outbreaks to bury the dead and tend to the dying.

At first this charity caused some backlash as the stricken populace feared that the river goddess had something to do with the outbreak, those thoughts were quickly quelled with the right fever dreams given to the right people. The water bearers weren’t the cause, but the cure, and everyone should give thanks to the pure waters of the Oroza for that.

She was neither of course. She hadn’t been a queen for years; she’d been reduced from guardian deity to attack dog, and all the prayers that were sent to her were siphoned away by the Lich through the ruins that chained her to the dead flesh she was trapped inside. None of that mattered to the Lich right now though. All that mattered was he wanted the cults in her name to grow. They would need to if it ever wanted to get the holy city to take the area seriously in a way that didn’t involve it sending templars to slay it.

The religious fanatics that worked for the gods of light took the small gods and the order of such things very seriously if the dreams from the red hill's monastery were to be believed. As dangerous as it would be to play with the one group of people still capable of slaying it, they would be necessary eventually.

The sickness had one welcome side effect that the Lich hadn’t planned on though, and that was when Krulm’venor walked into the gold mine to journey into the depths, there was no one there to see him. The Lich had made sure of that. Two days before its ferryman had delivered the godling to the landing, the whole area had been struck with a bout of the drowning so severe that they’d closed the mine until further notice.

It pained the Lich to think about delaying its portion of that delicious gold of course, but it would be compensated in other ways by its minion’s trip into the darkness. It had no idea how deep the tunnels went or what it would find down there, but it wanted to. Did dwarves still live beneath its lands? Would they be a threat? Those were important questions, but neither was the reason it had spent so many days building Krulm’venor such a work of art.

More than anything the Lich wanted to know how a demigod could fall to become a lowly spirit. There were valuable lessons there that it would require, and soon. In perhaps only a decade or two its plans would reach fruition and such pitfalls were at the forefront of its mind. The tunnels beneath blackwater landing were complete, and the runes and blood gutters were being carved to complete them. In only a few more years all of that hard work would be complete, and its terrible mandala would be complete, but the town of Blackwater landing still had a long ways to go.

It was almost unique in the region, in that, despite the poor hygiene and nutrition of its residents, not a single person died to the drowning plague. There was still the smattering of deaths related to drinking and duels of course, including some that were caused by the Lich itself. As disease went though, it was a blessed place, and it was said to be holy to the Oroza even though it was palpably the opposite. Such rumors were welcome by the darkness though, and they did wonders for the growth of the city. It had grown by leaps and bounds since it had completed its year long duel with the river dragon, and

Where once there had been only muddy streets and ramshackle buildings crowded into the shadow of the toll collector’s tower, there was now the beginning of a real city starting to take shape, and it was slowly replacing the dirty boomtown that had been here the last few years. A brick street now connected the docks on the Oroza side of the small peninsular community with the docks of the canal across town, and nearly every building along that street looked almost respectable. The constant draining of its precious swamp continued to expose more and more buildable lands, and as soon as those lands dried out, the men that flocked to Blackwater busied themselves with carving out their own little piece for themselves.

Sometimes that involved clear-cutting the dying mangroves for lumber, and sometimes that involved digging up the clay to make whole piles of bricks, but it always meant that the area was a hive of activity. It wasn’t just that the darkness didn’t recognize the seat of its own power anymore, it was that each time it looked away it didn’t recognize the new monstrosity that had replaced the older one from several months earlier. The town was just as impermanent and changing as the river it relied on, and almost as poisonous too.

Farther out the immigrants that had taken Kelvun up on his generous offer were taking larger patches of land, and taming them with the primitive human magic of controlled burns and plows. In time those farms would feast on its rich black earth, and the darkness that had been fermenting in the water for decades would take the form of fruits and vegetables that nourish a whole generation that would belong to it, and it alone. The gods could not touch what they had not nourished after all, and even though the water level fell every day, the darkness that was left behind only grew more concentrated.

A piece at a time, the mortal world was getting smaller and more crowded, but the Lich had long since learned to ignore its noisy neighbors that existed only twenty feet above its head. They were nothing but cattle, awaiting the slaughter, and it didn’t care what they did with their time so long as there were a few more of them each week. After all, it would take thousands and thousands of souls to reach its bloody goals.

Ch. 39 - Nightly Raids

Kelvun flipped through the briefs not quite sure why he should bring himself to care about their contents. His spymaster had brought him while he lounged half naked in the study of the little house he kept for these sorts of indiscretions. His wife was as frigid as her family was wealthy, and she would never understand his needs any more than Paulus seemed to understand what he was being paid for.

“Well, what is it I’m supposed to be seeing,” Kelvun demand, looking up at the fearful expression of his intelligence chief. “None of these even discusses the county of Greshen. Noden. Black Pine. Svendon. These are all villages in Lindvell. Do I need to get you a map to your job properly?”

“No sire,” the old man said, not entirely able to keep his voice from trembling. “I just - you said that you wanted to know about any goblin attacks as soon as they happened, and word of a recent rash of conflicts just reached from us down river, so I thought—”

“So you thought that I would care more about goblin attacks in the ass end of nowhere more than I would care about spending time admiring Lady Margaret’s ass?” he asked slamming the sheaf of papers hard enough against the desk he was sitting next to, to make the older man flinch slightly. “No one would think that would they. Certainly not my spymaster. Someone that I place such trust in would without doubt have more sense than that.”

“Well that’s not the only reason my lord…” Paulus said, fumbling, even though it obviously was all he had. The man wrote everything down, and he’d already given Kelvun every paper he’d walked in with. Anything past this point was the old fool just looking to curry favor with his lord, when he clearly didn’t understand that every extra minute he kept Kelvun from the arms of his mistress was compounding the damage he’d already inflicted on himself. “There’s also word in Blackwater that—”

“To the pits with Blackwater. Until and unless you can point to a credible threat on my person I’m not going back to that flea bitten hellhole until it’s time to tithe the river goddess herself. Anything that doesn’t rise to either of those thresholds can be handled by you, or you can send a bird to the local governor and have him handle it for you.”

“But—” the spymaster protested.

“No buts - not from you anyway. You’re as wrong about this as your predecessor was about an imminent attack from Dutton” Kelvin said with a smile as he stood unsteadily. He’d tried to make that a joke, with all the charm that the two bottles of red he’d shared with Lady Margaret could make him, but it had come out as more of a threat, which worked almost as well. “When you have something more important than my lover’s butt you may return to me, until then though - spies work best when they are neither seen nor heard. Do you understand?”

Paulus opened his mouth one more time to speak, but thought better of it, and he closed it again before quickly bowing and taking his leave. It was the smartest thing he’d done in weeks, Kelvin thought, taking one more look at the papers before he turned and walked back toward the bedroom where he belonged. His wife would be expecting him home from his hunt in a few hours, and he would have to make sure he caught his prey another time or two before then.

He shook his head, ruing the day he’d had to get rid of his first chief spy Wurmnth. Despite the disloyalty that had eventually forced Kelvun to kill him, the man had been competent at least, but in the years since his passing, it seemed like every replacement had been worse than the one before. At the rate things were going now, he doubted that Palus would last more than a year, but that was hardly Kelvun’s fault.

Despite the nest of traitorous vipers he ruled over he’d managed to make a fine show of things over the better part of his decade as Count Garvin, and that was no thanks to his incompetent help. The county had prospered under his rule like it never had under his father, Count Leo Garvin, and the old man had never had to deal with a plague half so bad as the Drowning, though. Despite everything, the county had come though everything almost unscathed when compared to their neighbors, all things considered.

Kelvun laughed to himself as he opened the door to his darkened bedroom. His previous spy had warned of an imminent invasion from the east, and instead their army had been decimated by fever.

“Is something funny my Lord?” Margaret asked. Her sonorous tones drifted in from the shadows.

“I’m just thinking about how hard it is to find good help,” he said smiling wider as she leaned forward, letting the crimson sheets fall seductively away from her as he spoke. “I’m afraid Paulus might not work out.”

“No? Isn’t he your wife’s cousin? I thought he was supposed to be quite perceptive. What a shame,” she answered, but she didn’t seem saddened by the news.

If anything she loved the vicious streak he had. That was good, because as his little secret she saw his ruthlessness more than anyone else, and it made him love her all the more.

He wasn’t going to lose any sleep over Paulus’ instincts just yet. After all, things were looking up: it had been years since the darkness had troubled his sleep which spoke to its powerlessness, and in a year or two when the swamp finished drying up it would be well and truly dead.

. . .

Paulus hurried through the streets back to the room he kept on the water front. Not the main one that the Count Garvin might think to look with him if his irritation hadn’t subsided in a few hours though. He’d gotten rid of servants for less, including his predecessor, and Paulus was under no illusions that his family ties would save him from one of Kelvun’s fits of drunken pique.

A pithy slogan that a particularly clever bard had coined to describe the current state of the county of Greshan was “The best of rulers governs least, by that measure Count Garvin is the land’s highest priest.”  The man’s words had outlived him, and even if Paulus didn’t dare say them out loud he thought about them often.

Just like his father, Kelvun had little interest in actually governing his kingdom, but unlike his father he lacked the ability to trust in other competent nobles to do it for him. It was a complete mess that was hidden entirely by the revues of Garvin’s gift, if the notes he’d obtained from the master of coin’s private books were to be believed.

Everyone from the highest Baron to the lowest blacksmith knew that the kingdom was horribly mismanaged, but few besides the Count’s loyal spymaster could see the true shape of the problem, and that was likely one of the reason’s that the good count went through spymasters like other nobles went through mistresses. As long as he had a steady supply of gold and the love of the people from his youthful exploits though, no one was inclined to do anything about it.

Indeed, several of the Barons were getting quite rich as a result of their Lord’s folly, and as long as they bought him shiny gifts and made the proper obediances before their lord, he wasn’t overly concerned. Indeed, all the time that should have been spent running the county from day to day was spent chasing down secret enemies. The Count was sure these existed, even if he could not name them and could provide no evidence except for his feelings on the subject, but almost every real threat that his spymasters brought to him was shrugged off as unimportant.

Last year his predecessor had warned Kelvun that the county of Dutton was preparing an attack on the pretext of their resurgent river goddess worship, but when the plague brought everything in the region to a halt and the attack never materialized, poor Gelwin had paid for it with his life. That had made things very clear to Paulus from the very beginning: if he was going to tell the count anything then he’d better be right, or else.

And he was, at least when it came to the goblins. After years of relative silence where they had done no more than attack supply convoys in the red hills, they were suddenly resurgent. Instead of attacking the farming villages again like they did a few years ago though, they were attacking the logging and fishing villages on the coast. His spies said that it was because there simply weren’t enough farms to the east anymore for them to bother attacking the same place for a second time, but he didn’t buy that explanation.

Paulus was a religious man, and he could smell a greater evil involved, even if no one else could. His master might see traitors everywhere without being able to point to anything specific, but Paulus was in just the opposite position. He could see dozens of individual instance of evil, but he could find no common thread to connect them. The goblin attacks, the barges that disappeared on the river, the stranger rumors concerning the cult of the drowned goddess, and of course the nightmares were all the most obvious examples, but there were so many more, and most people never seemed to notice.

Even the waters of the Oorza stank of evil to him now, which would have been impossible if he wasn’t so sure. The river water had made him sick often enough that Paulus only drank from deep city wells now, and he never ate seafood anymore. It wasn’t worth the risk for reason’s he didn’t understand.

The nightmares were the thing that troubled him the most. Paulus didn’t get them too often, but after he’d discovered that one of the men he was to make disappear was also suffering from them, he’d made a point of asking everyone who was going to die about them.

To a man, every person on the wrong end of his knives suffered from similar dark dreams. Some had them nearly every night, and some like him only had them once or twice a moon, but everyone had them, and they were all the same imagery. They all had dark grasping hands, and darker suffocating water. Paulus would have been inclined to blame the swamp and the ancient evil that was said to lurk there, but it was all but gone now.

That was the one great thing that the wastrel, Kelvin had accomplished. He’d drained the darkness from that blighted land once and for all and made it tillable. In a few more years it would be nothing but a fertile valley, and in a generation or two Blackwater might be a larger city than Fallravea proper.

He’d drawn all these details into detailed reports. Reports that made it all seem a little less crazy when all the facts were collected together in black and white like that. When the reports on the cults were combined with the river dragon sightings and the entrail readings he’d commissioned from the local temple, it was clear: there was a growing darkness in the heart of his beloved homeland. He considered giving that report to his lord many times. It was only his fear of what would happen next if he couldn’t substantiate them, and give his count a target for his angst. Well, there was that fear along with another, deeper one.

What if instead of simply being the neglectful ruler that darkness blossomed under, Kelvun was somehow part of its machinations? To Paulus he seemed much too incompetent for such a thing, but perhaps that was his role to play. It was his strong suit after all.