Tenebroum Ch. 58-59 (Patreon)

Ch. 58 - A Fitting Sacrifice

This was the second time it had caused the city of Fallravea to burn, and it was glorious. The Lich had done little else but watch things unravel once the Templars had made their appearance. The fighting and the dying had been interesting in their own way, but the longer things unraveled, the better things got. Even though the scents of death had barely begun to mingle with the thick smoke and rank fear that suffused the city, it already made for a better sacrifice this time than it did last time its minions had sacked the town.

This time things were only getting started, too. Previously the goblins had butchered at random, which had its charms. However, the genuine malevolence and corruption that it had been brewing beneath the city for years had finally been lanced by the Templars. The methodical nature of the way they did things turned the whole affair into almost a ritual sacrifice. Now that evil was flowing out into the streets and fleeing from the city under the cover of night. As contagious as The Drowning had been, panic was the faster of the two plagues.

The Templars hadn’t just killed the evil that the Lich had been cultivating, though. They had destroyed the religion that even the untainted members of the land had taken heart in for generations in one form or another. The worship of Oroza touched every life in the small city. Fishermen prayed to The River Dragon for still waters before they set off each day, the sick prayed to The Drowned Woman not to take them, and midwives prayed to The Lifegiver for a healthy birth.

For every member, the Lich had converted to The Cult of The Undying, a hundred people worshiped one of Oroza’s more benign aspects. However, that didn’t matter to those that walked in the light. They smashed every other god with equal fervor. It made for an enlightening lesson for the Lich. However, that was less important than the fact that they had ripped the heart out of that community by their actions almost as surely as its chirurgeon Granzarious had ripped the heart out of one of their companions as they had tried to purge the underchapel of evil.

Even now, the heart still beat slowly as it hung by a slender silver thread in the center of its fleshworks. So captivated had the chirurgeon been by the clean way it had cut it out of the warrior that it had been unwilling to let it stop just yet. Though the Lich did not know what they would do with it at present or how it would pry the holy spirit out of the lump of flesh without damaging it. For now, the Lich was content to let it reverberate alone in the dark while the darkness watched its comrades blunder around, making a bad situation worse.

The Lich had been slightly surprised at how easily they cut through the leviathan. As large and powerful as its flesh crafters had made it, it had been little more than a clumsy parody of the River Dragon. Even if the monstrosity hadn’t been its best work, the Lich had still expected to kill more of the holy warriors before it finally succumbed to them. Either way, it had learned a great deal from both the way the forces of light had fought and the way that its creations endured that terrible brightness, of course, but next time wouldn’t just be a test. It would have to improve its creatures if it wanted to crush the enemy utterly.

Its undying army was deadly and larger than ever, but in the fight, it had not been the swords that had struck the mortal blow but the radiance of their wielders that had boiled them from the inside out. The Lich had felt the revulsion and the fear surge through the hardened warriors at the sights they had been forced to endure in those fights and vowed to make its creations going forward even stranger than they had been to date to make better use of both emotions. Why wouldn’t it? Those dark emotions paralyzed and weakened its foes almost as well as its magic did, and they cost it nothing.

Everything was in motion now, and most of it was going splendidly. Its minions had managed to peel its pet Lordling completely before the quivering mass of flesh that had been left behind was finally allowed to expire. The only change to its original plan was that instead of keeping Kelvun’s spirit amongst its other trophies, it was currently bound in a skull set aside to observe exactly what was being done with the parts of his body step by step. It would, of course, be reunited with them in time, but only when its newest abomination was complete.

Its dragon continued to make progress in that regard, but it still could not fly. The Lich was tempted to replace the scales with hardened black iron, but its chirurgeons rightly cautioned against such changes for reasons related to weight. The beast was so massive that each time they tested it for flight, it had to be taken apart to be brought outside and then put back together for testing, which had thus far been fruitless.

That had been frustrating to no end. Even with three sets of wings: Manticore, Wyvern, and Drake, it simply lacked the energy to take to the sky. All it could manage was to leap from hills or to glide from the top of a boulder pile near the area where it did its testing. Its fiery servant burned without issue, and its aquatic servant had no problem swimming, but the winged servant that was being built to swoop down from the darkness and smite its enemies simply couldn’t get airborne.

At this point, it couldn’t stop the Templar’s messenger even if it had the inclination to.

Its shadow raptors that had been stitched together from darkness and appropriate swamp fowl had found a dozen minor air spirits. Generally, these fast-flying servants took the form of four-winged ravens, though lately, vulture corpses using two wings that had been lengthened and modified showed excellent results too. Sadly when it came to the magic of flying, symmetry appeared to be a core part of the process, which was not a complication that mattered to any of its other servants.

Symmetrical design was an alien idea to the mind of the Lich as well as its servants, and it struggled with it. How much different would they have turned out if it had been forced to build its dungeon or its swamp dragon with such principles? The Lich tried to imagine what that world would look like, but it could not. Every glimpse of the perfect symmetry that Krulm’venor offered from the dwarven city had baffled it in much the same way.

No matter how many aerial spirits were stitched into the wings of its greatest creation to date, it had yet to solve the problem. The bird’s prey had not been enough to buoy it into the skies. Normally they would be busily out hunting even now, even though half of them never returned to the rookery from their dangerous night flights. That wasn’t the case tonight, though. Tonight they hung thickly over Fallravea. Dozens of them circled the city in low, lazy circles. Most of them basked in the fear and distrust that was radiating throughout the city, but some of them watched the positions of the Templars and the city watch, whispering their information to the Lich as it changed.

Though darkness was everywhere, its attention couldn’t focus on everything at once. With the help of its servants, though, the Lich could keep an eye on the whole city, whispering into the ears of its agents and any other evildoers that might show promise on how best to escape the tightening noose. Many of its agents would die in the prisons and the torture chambers of the just in the coming weeks, but many more would be innocents, and the Lich hungered for those terrible travesties almost as much as it hungered for the public executions and pyres that would certainly follow.

Other than perhaps its torments of the Late Kelvun, and everything that was going to happen to him in the coming months while his new body was shaped to purpose, it could think of nothing it wanted more than to watch good men dirty their hands with the blood of those who had done nothing wrong. Even the light could not blot out the spots of darkness on the souls of the just.

The Lich could see them even now. It could see that one of the most dangerous Templars tended to do terrible things when he was drunk, which was most nights, and that another’s body was riddled with venereal disease as much as his soul was riddled with perversion. Even the young child that seemed to be the apprentice or servant of the band’s leaders had blood on his hand from the children he had murdered. All of these things were things that it could touch and manipulate if the circumstances were right. They made the Lich’s mind race with possibilities, but none of the servants of the god of light were as filled with darkness as the unconscious priest was.

That man still stood on death’s door, even after two days of healing magic. It was not the light that saved him, though - it was that the Lich planned to hold back death and disease as long as it would take for the weakling to recover. The priest hadn’t been a particularly bad person before this adventure. His worst sins had been greed and pride, which were things the Lich understood well, but its shadow hydra had bitten deeply into the man, and even after the priest had eradicated the thing’s first two heads with a powerful spell, the teeth that had been buried in the man’s arm had stayed behind, burrowing ever deeper into the man’s necrotic flesh. Even though the Templars had wisely removed the arm the next day, that darkness had already traveled through the priest’s bloodstream and into his heart.

The priest might not be the Lich’s creature exactly, but only because the Lich wanted him to keep his connection to the light. When the time was right, it would take the pawn completely, but now it would let the wounded man fester spiritually in equal measure to the way that the disease refused to take root in his physical wounds.

Few others would merit its mercy, though. The thin trickle of death that was leaking from the city now was nothing but the appetizer for a promised banquet. It would claim the souls of the few who had died on its cursed earth, but they would serve only to whet its appetite for the carnival of death that was sure to follow.

The servants of the light had already sent a messenger back to the holy city they resided in, and it was certain that messenger came to beg for reinforcements, so the Lich would do nothing to bar its way. After all, when it had finally decided to devour his puppet ruler in such a public fashion, it had known that a day of reckoning for such a brutal piece of theater was inevitable. All it could do now was learn from it but let the priests and pontiffs show off as many of their tricks as they liked so that it would be prepared for the great war to come.

Ch. 59 - At Long Last

“Purify the headwaters!” echoed in his mind with the same cold, tormented voice as always, startling Paulus awake. He recalled everything else she said, too, of course. It almost never changed. So, it would have been impossible to forget, but none of her other strangled ravings that she made while gripping the bars of her steel cage burned right through him as much as that impossible command. The darkness? The dead? Even the moment when she told him to flee to land before the dragon overpowered her once more hadn’t mattered nearly as much as those three simple words.

He pulled himself into a ball, huddling his legs against his chest under the thin blankets as he shivered in the chilly predawn darkness. The reaction was more from fear than the cold, but it comforted him just the same. The winter had stopped his search for months, but with the spring flood, he’d returned to the Wodenspine Mountains, even though the cold still lingered there. His patched clothes and thin blankets might do little to warm him, but his urgency kept him from freezing each night. He would find the poison the Goddess spoke of because he must. There was no other option.

Why would he do anything else? In the villages where he’d labored for little more than food and place in the barn, all that awaited him were the nightmares as he recalled that awful night. At least when he was out here searching, he felt like he was outrunning the terrible Goddess that had issued him this burning command. That was doubly true on the days like today when he felt certain he was getting close. It didn’t matter to him that he’d felt that way for almost a week now. It seemed like the higher he rose following this stream, the cleaner his soul became. It was like he was slowly but surely rising above the world’s corruption with every step.

There was real relief in the search, and he secretly believed that if he succeeded, he could finally be free of the dead eyes that haunted him. On the days he couldn’t search as she’d ordered him, though, all he could do was relive that terrible night as his mind connected dot after dot in an endless and expanding web of evil. It always started sensibly enough - with the priestess and the Count. However, if he obsessed on it long enough, he could inevitably connect everyone from the fishmonger to his mother in a plan that was too vast for anyone to understand. Anyone but him, of course. He might no longer have the spies or the purse of a true spymaster, but his mind was sharp, and his notes were expansive. No one could take either from him, no matter how far he fell.

Even now that he was free of both the city of evil Fallravea and the cursed county of Greshen, he still imagined that the conspiracies he’d started to uncover followed him. He could never stay with a family more than a week or two now. Even when he was with good god-fearing people that rewarded him with extra portions when he worded until his hands bled, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the washerwoman was watching him. He didn’t know who she was reporting back to, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to if they were strong enough to enslave a river goddess and poison a whole river.

A thin strip of light clung to the horizon, but he would need more than that before he could build himself a fire. Still, he stared at it like a ward against evil until the sun finally peaked above the earth, dispelling most of the shadows on the high slope. This gave him the light he would need to decide which of his pages he could steal an inch of paper from so that he could shred it to kindling.

His overstuffed journal was all he still had after his year spent fruitlessly searching for the source of the taint she’d spoken of. He’d explored four tributaries and three watersheds but found nothing definitive. All he’d accomplished in that time was wearing out the soles of his boots and filling the last of his clean pages with detailed maps of places that few people had ever been to and no one, but shepherds cared about. He no longer had the paper to document this latest trip, but that was okay. He could no longer afford ink either.

“Soon,” he told himself. “Any day now, and you’ll be done with this. Then you can finally rest.” He still had caches in the city. When he was done looking for the source of the sickness, and the river was pure and clean, he could finally return to Fallravea and retrieve them. Then he’d return to the village of Bellmor and disappear; of all the places he’d been on this insane quest, it had been the most picturesque. He could see himself retiring there under a different name as a trader or bookseller while he waited for the world to forget he’d ever been born.

None of that mattered right now, though. All that mattered was which pages he could tear a bit of paper from. Even though he didn’t need the book to remember, Paulus still treated it with a reverence that was more appropriate to a holy text than a scribbled notebook. He tore the thinnest strip he could stand to part with from the side of a sketch that showed the imprisoned Goddess. He then shredded that, using it to catch the sparks from his flint.

A minute later, he was feeding twigs to the tiny flame and trying to put the image of the Goddess trapped inside that giant corpse out of his mind. To him, that image always looked like the strange decaying dragon she was chained to had swallowed her, but something like that obviously didn’t eat. Its giant maw full of rusting steel teeth was only for murder.

Paulus only stayed by the warmth of his fire until the sun was entirely above the horizon. By then, his feet and brain both itched too much to sit still, and he set off for further up the mountain. It didn’t matter to him that his feet were bare or that his few remaining possessions were stuffed into a satchel made of his best blanket. All that mattered was the destination, and like yesterday and the day before, he was certain that today would be the day.

Once he started walking, he didn’t stop except to eat old snow that he found in the shadows of trees and boulders. That was one of the reasons he was so sure that this stream was the tainted one: drinking from it made him violently ill. It was a technique he wished he would have figured out sooner, but it had eluded him on his quest until recently. This time he was sure. This was the tainted water, and he would follow it to its source.

Still, once it warmed up, the day was lovely, and other than the occasional cloud of gnats, it was as close to paradise as he’d ever known. From this high, he felt like he could see all the way to Dutton, and though he didn’t let himself stop to appreciate the view, he frequently glanced over his shoulder at it.

Paulus continued like that until he reached a fork in the road a little before noon as the stream split into two. This time he didn’t even need to taste it to know which of the two was tainted. He could smell it. The large flow to the left might look as crystal clear as the smaller stream to his right, but it had a faint whiff of death that only got stronger as he went further up the slope.

He knew he’d found the source of the poison half an hour before he finally set eyes on the cursed pool. It was easy to see because everything in the area was dead. The trees were brown, the birds were silent, and animal life was entirely absent. As soon as he set eyes on the pool, he understood why. In the middle of this glen sat a small spring-fed pool. Instead of being the crystal clear artisanal spring that he’d seen half a dozen times before, though, it was a bubbling pool of murky green that made his eyes water to approach.

He’d heard that there were smoking mountains across the sea that burned at night and stank of sulfur, but even this strange mockery of nature was as close as Paulus ever hoped to get to seeing one. As he stood on the bank, afraid to touch the water, he looked into the shallow pool and saw something bubbling and fizzing at the bottom. It was a large metal object that was too flimsy to be called a grate. It looked like a buckler of thin woven metal, which was full of holes. That made no sense, of course, because the thing couldn’t stop a single blow. Regardless of what it was, though, it was the only thing that didn’t belong, which meant that it was definitely the source of the problem.

After studying it for as long as he could bear, he decided there was no way he was reaching in there to grab that thing. Instead, he went off in search of fresh air and a long enough branch to fish the object out. The dead trees scattered throughout the glen had plenty of branches to offer. That wasn’t the hard part. The hard part came when he tried to use them to pull the thing out. They started falling apart on contact with the water and had fully dissolved in only twenty or thirty seconds. Paulus was incredibly thankful that he hadn’t just waded in there to retrieve the object and instead went off to find another branch.

After four branches, he was finally able to drag it near enough to the edge that he could reach in to pull the thing out with the tip of his short sword. Once it was firmly pierced, he pulled it out and carried it very carefully to the nearest rocky slope, where he placed it on a small boulder to inspect the oddity. From the damage he’d done to it just by poking it with sticks, it very clearly wasn’t meant to be armor. He wanted to bring it down the mountain to deliver it to the church so they could deal with the cursed thing themselves, but one look at his sword showed that to be an impossible task.

His blade had been made of fine steel, and until today it had been pristine, but now it was pitted in places and spotted with corrosion. Everywhere it had touched the strange shield, it was falling apart.

“What in the hells am I supposed to do now?” Paulus asked empty valley as he set his sword down to dry. There was no way he was putting it back in its sheath until it was dry as a bone.

While he waited, he tried to figure out what he could do. He lacked the ink to draw it or any tools to carry it. In the end, all he could do was dig a hole in the scree and push it in with a large rock. Then he covered it up and marked the spot with a stack of flat stones. There it wouldn’t contaminate much water, and if he found someone that could help him investigate, he could always escort them back here, even without a map.

In the end, he belted on his sword and inspected the pool. Even those few hours had made a real difference, and the water was now merely murky rather than hopelessly polluted.

“I did just what you told me to,” he said barely above a whisper while he looked at his bare feet with something approaching reverence. He knew she couldn’t actually hear him from here as he spoke to the water, but he was sure she would feel the difference as the pool became clearer and clearer. “You hear that, Oroza? My task is complete. Let me rest now, I beg of you. That is my only prayer.”

Then he turned, and itching a stray bug bite on his hand, he turned and began to walk back down the mountain. Paulus could finally close the book on this insane chapter of his life.