Tenebroum PLUS Ch. 55-65 (Patreon)

Alright, so this is the first half the Tenebroum PLUS chapters, but if you have already been reading along as a Tenebroum subscriber, and you just made the switch, then you have likely read all of these already. If not - enjoy!

Ch. 55 - Things that Should not Be

Things happened all at once after that. One second the haughty priest-candidate was arguing with his master and the next, he was being dragged off into the shadows too quickly for anyone to understand what happened, let alone stop. His panicked screams echoed off the walls, and the light that he managed to hold onto got further and further away. The very first thing that Todd had noted when they were getting ready this morning was that the man had only bothered to bring what was obviously a ceremonial weapon with him, which had struck Todd as laughable when one considered where they were going. Even someone that thought that going almost unarmed into a bastion of shadows like this palace didn’t deserve this fate, though.

Before he could react, Brother Faerbar and Brother Lucius were charging down the hall after the wailing priest. Their chain mail rattled as they went, and Brother Faerbar’s sword glowed all the brighter as he prepared to engage the enemy, but they didn’t even get halfway to the priest before there was a sudden explosion of light rippled outward, and his motion ceased. That was when Todd started to charge, too, with his mace in hand. He didn’t know what that was, but he knew what would happen next and what his master would want him to do. Brother Faerbar would slay the vile pit spawn that had dared to attack a servant of the light, but while he was doing that, someone would need to save the priest.

As Todd ran to aid the fallen priest-candidate, he tried to puzzle out what that abomination might have been, but he could think of nothing that he’d been taught which could match that description. For a split second, he’d seen it. It had appeared as a viper larger than a horse made of almost pure shadow, which meant that it had to be what? A demon? A work of clever and malicious sorcery? He knew that it couldn’t be natural, but he wasn’t sure of anything beyond that, and he didn’t have the time to wish that he’d focused less on swordplay and more on learning his letters.

When Todd arrived, he’d thought for a split second that the red-robed acolyte was practically unharmed. It was only when he grabbed him to pull him into a sitting position that he realized that those robes were soaked with blood, almost completely hiding the extent of the man’s injuries. Todd quickly peeled them back from the priest-candidate’s obviously broken arm and pushed him back against the wall when he started to squirm.

“By the light, that hurts!” he yelled, but Todd ignored him, trying not to gasp audibly as he saw the ruin that the priest-candidate’s arm had become. The blast of holy light had annihilated the beast that was attacking him, at least in part, but it did nothing for the crushed bones or the portions of the jet-black teeth that were already buried in the man’s pale flesh.

Todd mumbled a prayer of healing, and he saw the flesh try to knit together, but his strength wasn’t nearly enough to override the trauma that the injured man had received. His efforts did little, if any, good, though. Even with the gift of sight, he had little talent for healing and none for summoning the holy light. So, rather than try again, he pulled off his belt and wrapped it tightly around the injured man’s bicep to stem the flow of blood. This took longer than it should with all his squirming, but once he stopped cursing and passed out from the pain, it became easy enough to finish the task.

It was only when the priest-candidate’s life no longer hung in the balance that he looked up to his master’s fight. Though the thing had only seemed to have a single giant head moments ago, it had three now. One was half the size the previous one had been and would have had trouble making the sorts of marks that the injured man bore, but the two smaller heads were only big enough to latch onto perhaps one of his hands rather than the entire forearm as it had done. For all their reduction in size, they were no less threatening, though. Instead, single strikes with the shocking sort of power that could drag a man to his death, they now struck in a series of dizzying patterned attacks that were almost hypnotic and no less dangerous than the single giant head had been.

The only thing that was faster were the swords of the Templars that fought it. In the dim light, Todd couldn’t really see Brother Lucius’s blade, but his master’s blurred like a living thing, leaving streaks of light that wove patterns that were almost arcane as he smoothly switched from attack to defense and back again, holding the monstrous threat at bay in a grudging stalemate.

Todd had no idea what was going on, but as Brother Faerbar parried a barrage of attacks, Brother Lucius charged in and cut off one of the two smaller heads. Almost immediately, it grew back into two more heads that were each half the size of the original. That was what finally made the pieces fit together for him. He hadn’t known that there was such a thing as a subterranean species, but this was very clearly a hydra of some sort. The reptiles were said to be creatures of flesh and blood that were almost as dangerous as the trolls that dwelled in the same swamps, but this one was practically incorporeal.

As he struggled to think about how he could help, his eyes fixed upon the torch that the priest-candidate had managed to hold onto. Instantly, he knew what to do. Fire was said to stop the creatures from regenerating, but even if he didn’t know how that would work for a creature made of shadows, he had to think that such a state would be even more vulnerable to the purging flame. So, without thinking of his own safety, he picked up the guttering torch and ran forward between the two Templars, plunging the flaming end of the torch deep into the spongy wall of shadows that was the thing’s body. The smallest heads burst into flame and then ashes. Its largest remaining head lasted a few seconds longer, giving it a chance to snap at Todd, but its teeth didn’t get through his leathers before his master had a chance to push him back and out of the way.

The thing smoldered on the ground for a few seconds after that before dissolving into smoke and ash. It left no trace to study, making him think of the nightmares that haunted him last night. This palace was cursed. Anyone could see that much, but in his dreams, the shadows tore at his flesh, trying to drag him down and drown him. He wasn’t the only one that had slept fitfully, he was sure, but he didn’t truly feel clean again until dawn’s light had cleansed him during morning prayers.

“Brace yourselves, men,” Brother Faerbar called out as the sounds of shuffling and moaning grew louder. “The light will protect you!”

As soon as the shadow finished dissolving, it revealed a wave of zombies coming down the hall behind it. No, he realized as he rushed towards his mace. The sounds of battle coming from behind him weren’t just echoes. There were zombies there, too, now. Coming from two, no three other corridors. For a long moment, Todd was conflicted about which group needed the most help, but then tightening his grip on his mace, he ran to his master’s side.

The bulk of the cadre was facing far more zombies, but they had 13 people, and right now, Brother Faerbar only had his glowing holy sword and a single Templar to support him, which was enough to face any single evil, but it might not be enough to face such a horde. The next few minutes would be both critical and terrifying. Todd had been lectured many times about fighting the undead, but after all the mundane opponents he’d faced to date, he wasn’t sure he’d ever see something so fantastical. In the last year, as they’d dealt with nothing but bad people, he’d grown increasingly sure that the more fantastical opponents he was trained to fight were just myths. He was wrong.

“Hold the line!” he heard someone yell behind him, but there was no time to turn around and see how the rest of the cadre was doing. Not when half a dozen dead men were clawing and biting at the three of them, with who knows how many more lurking in the darkness behind them.

These were old dead, and they fought with strength and brutality, but without the speed of the living, that would make them a truly fearsome opponent. The real danger was how many of them there were. If there were dozens, they would finish cutting through them in minutes, but if there were hundreds, then they might well drown beneath the waves of the enemy no matter how many they slew in the process.

Todd held his master’s left flank, beating back every monster that came at him with his mace and shield until his arm began to feel like lead from the repeated, almost mechanical blows. They were so regular that they made him feel like he was practicing on the dummies back in Siddrimar rather than fighting a deadly evil, but the moment certainly put those rigorous drills into the proper perspective. These enemies were easy to hold off but hard to kill, and lacking Brother Faerbar’s height, he had to content himself with breaking arms and knees - maiming the undead into harmlessness rather than beheading them outright and granting them the peace of true death, which required almost more endurance than he had.

Fortunately, after only a few minutes of desperate combat, the tide of the dead began to wane until there were more dead bodies scattered on the floor than there were standing against them. Once the endless flow of the dead peaked and stopped, the battle was over in seconds. Without infinite reinforcements, the zombies were barely a threat at all to properly trained warriors. After that victory, the cadre quickly reformed in the intersection and counted only two squires, a paladin, and their priest candidate among the injured, but except for the red-robed acolyte, no one was seriously hurt.

“Brother Samael - take the others to the surface and tend to the priest. We will continue without you,” Brother Faerbar ordered. “Should the worst happen, then I trust you will put the torch to this palace so that none of this filth escapes.”

Samael nodded tersely, and a whole conversation was exchanged in that gaze. Of course, he could be healed and stay in the fight, but if he stayed, the priest would surely perish, so ultimately, no matter badly he wanted to fight, someone had to go, and his bloody wound made the choice an obvious one. He was obviously not pleased with being ordered to withdraw but knew better than to argue, and the wounded squires quickly made a litter with a cloak to carry the unconscious priest candidate to safety.

While Todd was securing the acolyte to the makeshift stretcher, he bandaged the man’s shattered arm and noticed that the terrible broken teeth that had embedded themselves had vanished. Though the most likely answer was that they had simply ceased to exist when the monster they belonged to was slain, he couldn’t help but visualize those broken shards of shadow burying deeper and deeper into the dying man’s flesh until they disappeared from view.

With a shudder, he shook the image from his mind and stood, readying his mace and torch as they prepared to head even deeper toward the sound of running water.

Ch. 56 - The Under Temple

They continued deeper into the darkness after that. As the sound of water got louder, the hair became more humid until water began to drip from the ceiling of the narrow winding passage. They waited for the next attack to come at any moment. Instead, the terrible fury of the zombie’s attack had been replaced with an unsettling silence so oppressive it made Todd’s hands tremble, at least that was until he heard the sound of distant chanting. The words were too faint to be understood, but the darkness behind their terrible rhythm was clear.

He could not let himself be overcome by the fear that boiled out of the dark and mouthed a silent prayer to the light bringer to drive it back. At the same time, he followed Brother Faerbar deeper into the darkness. Even the holy light radiating from the Templar's and their weapons did not penetrate far into the cursed shadows they were walking through, so when the room opened into a large cavern, it surprised everyone. One moment the winding path seemed like it would continue forever into the bowels of the earth, and the next, the walls fell away to reveal a wide hall that was very dimly lit by a number of large brass braziers lined up down the center of the hall.

It was entirely different from the tunnels they’d traveled through so far. Not only was it larger, but the floors here were smooth and the walls painted. Someone had taken great care in their construction. In places, there were grooves cut to channel something from the broad, flat surface, but he had no way to know if they were meant to keep water from pooling, or if they existed for some darker purpose.

Brother Faerbar led them along the left wall, toward the nearest of the small doors that lead away from the great hall. This made sense Todd reasoned, since they shouldn’t stray far from their only known exorcist until they’d found another. Instead of finding more attackers, though, they found a wall and a series of rooms which resolved themselves into a nightmare more awful than anything they’d seen in the palace above. There, there was only the blood as evidence that something horrible had happened. Here though, lay the bloodless corpses - pieces of them, anyway. The Rooms were packed with stacks of body parts, and on tables, there were corpses in different stages of disassembly or reassembly. That most of them wore the remaining shreds of fine clothing told him that they had found the final resting place of the missing nobles.

All the squires had made signs of warding as soon as they’d caught a glimpse of these sights, but the muttering began when they saw one particular corpse, with five extra arms grafted onto it and a sixth sitting there just waiting to complete the horrible symmetry. Barbaric. Butchery. Abomination. The words were quiet, but the disgust in the syllables was unmistakable. This place needed to be cleansed, and the people responsible needed to be brought to justice.

There was no one to hold to account, though. Wherever the chanting voices were coming from, it wasn’t here. Here there were just mutilated corpses that had been modified until none of their humanity remained. At least, that was the case until they reached the final room. There they found a man with his back to them, busily stitching away on the corpse before him like they weren’t even there. His back was to them, and they couldn’t see his face, but because of the fluid nature of his movements, Todd was sure that he was a living person, and if he was persuaded properly, he could finally give them the answers they sought. So, he was surprised when Brother Jakobous approached with his glowing sword raised high to split the stranger in half without asking his name.

Todd understood the rage as much as anyone. He could see the evil roiling off the cloaked figure in waves and knew a swift execution was too good for such a man. It was only when the Templar was bringing his sword down like a vengeful god that Todd finally saw the third hand that it had been using to hold the stitches and understood the truth: it was just one more corpse that happened to be busy making other corpses.

Everything happened at once after that.

The blow never landed as a corpse next to the strange surgeon suddenly came to life and grabbed the brother’s arm. The undead’s hand began to smolder on contact with the Templar’s holy aura, but its death grip held firm nonetheless. Even as that happened though, all the partially finished and half-completed zombies suddenly came to life on all sides of them as the room erupted into chaos. Not even the zombie that began reaching for Todd distracted him from the gruesome sight that would remain burned into his mind for as long as he still drew breath.

With Brother Jakobous’ sword held over his head and his arm restrained, there was nothing to stop the strange zombie’s fourth hand from plunging through the Templar’s chest and ripping out the man’s heart before suddenly withdrawing. For a second, Todd struggled to understand how something could rip through the warrior’s blessed chain mail like it was little more than paper. However, that single image of the hand holding a still beating heart answered his questions and would live in his nightmares forever. The seven fingers on that hand had all been knives of one shape or size, and they glowed with a foul aura that made them glitter violet and black in his sight.

After that, he didn’t have time to rush to Brother Jakobous’s body. No one did. They were all fighting for their lives, and though many of these half-finished monstrosities were effortlessly slain a second time, some of the more monstrous creations proved quite a challenge. No matter how hard Brother Faerbar and the other Templars fought, they couldn’t quite reach the surgeon that had struck down their friend and sworn companion.

Each time they got close, there would be a new surge of monsters to push them back, and it only ever had to move to parry their blows a handful of times. It didn’t even bother to turn around and face them as it had its ragged little army attempt to tear them to pieces. Ultimately, the Templars were forced to retreat from the relentless, murderous insanity. Such a maneuver was not without cost, though, and warriors were wounded and maimed as they fought their way free from the insane slaughterhouse to regroup in the main hall, where they weren’t surrounded.

They’d expected to have to hold the door against a wave of dead, but in the end they weren’t followed as they left those cursed rooms and returned to the eerie orange glow that was reflected in the puddles that spotted the floor. There was an argument then, in that relative moment of safety. Some of the men argued that they needed to go back to secure the bodies of the fallen before that thing could bring them any harm, but Todd was having trouble paying attention to that as he noticed one simple fact: the chanting was getting louder.

“They are brothers,” Brother Harnin swore. “We owe them nothing less than this!”

“It pains me to say this, but the light will protect their souls, but their bodies are already dust, and we will have to mourn them later.” Brother Faerbar said softly, “The light will protect us too, but we need to keep pushing deeper. We have not yet found the true source of evil in this place, and people will keep dying until we.”

A few moments were spared for the paladins to use the light to heal the most injured of their brothers. Once they were done, the only evidence they’d been wounded were rent clothes and damaged armor. Even these miracles were a trade-off, though. Every one spent healing the dying was one less they could use against the darkness, so those with lesser wounds made do with bandages. Then they were back to pushing deeper into the cavern.

“Why would there be light?” Brother Samael asked as another brass brazier bloomed to life in the distance with no apparent cause. “Surely the damned would do best in the dark.”

There was some quiet debate about witchcraft or it being a trap before Brother Faerbar interjected. “It’s because they want us to see this sacrilege,” he said, pointing at the barely visible wall on the far side of the light. The way was narrowing as they approached a pool, and the walls were covered in blasphemous murals of aquatic scenes, which were barely visible in the dim light.

Todd wanted to study the pictures but couldn’t take his eyes off the almost circular pool of water in the center. Its dark water was perfectly placid but so full of evil that it might as well have been acid or poison. Nothing had happened yet, but he was sure that it would.

It was only when he saw the murals on the far side that he finally turned and looked to his master, “Look - it’s Oroza - the water dragon!”

The mural depicted her as a giant, sinuous blue-gray water dragon, but no sooner had he spoken that name than the pool began to boil and froth. For a moment, he worried that the water dragon herself would burst up and devour them all.

But instead, tentacles show out of the water, aiming to drag every nearby warrior into the depths and drown them. When Todd felt the first two tentacles crunch beneath his mace, he realized they weren’t tentacles at all but arms sewn one to another until they stretched over a dozen feet and made a mockery of life itself. The monster might not have revealed itself yet, but this fact told him a great deal about it. He shouted a warning to his brothers, but he wasn’t sure if they heard him over the roar of the leviathan that finally rose from the bloody pool.

It rose along with the pitch and volume of the hellish chanting that echoed through the hall. This wasn’t a man or a beast; instead, it was a monster made into the shape of a beast out of the parts and pieces of countless men. Todd would never be able to describe it better than that. Its wide mouth was filled with row after row of teeth, and innumerable tentacles were attached to its bloated body. He would remember those details in his nightmares for years. As it dragged itself onto land with its wavering tentacles and clawed limbs, it used its grasp to entangle and then devour two of his fellow squires almost immediately. A Templar followed soon after.

It was all Todd could do to keep from hyperventilating as he battered the grasping arms and pseudo tentacles from him as he tried to fight his way to his master’s side. He couldn’t, though. Even if he could fight through this forest of flesh, he never would have been able to stand so close to Brother Faerbar’s brilliance.

The Paladin shone like a tiny star as he advanced on the horror, with no fear on his face. There was only determination as he struck at it time and again. Three of the other Templars did the same, as they fought in a long crescent, absorbing most of the attacks. Still, none could get so close as his master, which filled Todd with a strange sort of pride as he struggled to do his part.

In the end, it was their holy light that did the creature in. No matter how many limbs they lopped off or rents they created in the creature’s bloodless skin, more tentacles ending in dead men’s hands always rose out of the water to assault the warriors. Still, slowly but surely, the thing began to smoke and smolder before it finally burst into pale-yellow flames of holy fire. Todd had been taught that evil could never stand against the might of good, and he had never doubted that.

It was one thing to believe and quite another to see with his own eyes. As the strange aquatic creature switched from lashing out in a never-ending storm of attacks to flailing in agony as it became a slowly deflating spiritual bonfire, Todd praised Siddrim for his protection and strength, vowing never to forget this moment of triumph.

Ch. 57 - The Purge

When then aquatic abomination was no more than a melting pile of flesh sloughing off a jigsaw puzzle of a skeleton, it was finally over. Another four brave warriors had died in that final fight, and twice as many had been seriously hurt, reducing the martial strength of their cadre to half of what it had been at dawn. Most of those hurts would be healed within a few days with the proper rituals, but the dead were set aside together respectfully in a bloodless part of that foul hall until the danger had passed enough that they could be brought to the surface. Already though, Todd could feel the change. Everyone could. The blight that existed in these dank caverns had, in large part, vanished with the death of that monstrosity.

The chanting that had throbbed in the darkness was gone now, and the dreadful stillness had once more replaced its unnatural rhythm. Was it possible that they had really slain Oroza, he wondered. The Oroza was said to be a mighty river dragon, but the way that these people worshiped around that pool, it wasn’t impossible, was it? Perhaps she’d never been a dragon at all, and that had just been a myth to cover something darker. From its size, he could easily believe that it was linked underground to the nearby river.

That was the thought he returned to over and over again as they searched the side rooms after they’d skipped until now. In them, the holy warriors found prayer rooms filled with unresponsive cultists who seemed to be able to do nothing more complicated than breathing and small libraries that were overflowing with blasphemy about the nature of their gods. The Templars would not even allow the remaining squires to look at the latter and had them end the suffering of the helpless cultists while they alone reviewed the profane material before burning it. In their search, they found several altars dedicated to the Oroza in all her aspects. Still, they found no one who could explain what had happened here. The leviathan had died, and somehow it had taken everyone’s minds with it.

The living worshipers weren’t much different than the remaining zombies in that sense. The zombies still moved and attacked if you got close enough for them to sense the spark of life that burned within Todd or his fellow warriors, but they lacked the strange teamwork that had made them such a formidable threat before. Now they were just thrashing menace somewhat less challenging than a rabid dog.

The Templars made quick work of the place after that. In killing the abomination these heretics had worshiped, they’d torn the heart out of this web of darkness just as it had torn the heart of Jakobous’ body. In the end, they retrieved the bodies of the warriors that had died in the butcher’s den, but the strange surgeon that had made all of them had vanished without a trace. In the end, that zombie and the heart it had stolen from Jakobous were the only missing pieces of the puzzle, in a physical sense. Still, the mysteries only grew deeper as they found the routes that led from this underground temple to the buildings it was connected to on the surface.

That the set of winding stairs closest to the river leads to the main temple of Oroza, the Storm Bringer that looked out over the river was a foregone conclusion. The only ones that were surprised that was where the first tunnel led were the priests. They interrupted when they burst into the place. After taking several priests into custody, they quickly summoned the city guard of Fallravea to handle their prisoners and put the place to the torch.

“Rotten from top to bottom,” Brother Garrand said, scowling.

Todd was forced to agree because, to his eyes, the whole edifice was tainted. The beautiful marble building might not have been as obviously evil as the temple below. Still, it was easy enough to see the shadows lurking in the corners and on the faces of the devout. The entire edifice of the Oroza’s worship was as contaminated as the river, and he had no qualms in helping to light the fires himself.

Things happened quickly after that as Brother Faerbar took command of the guard from a weaselly-looking noble named Baronet Geldin. He was locked in a tower with the rest of the captured priests until each could be questioned and tested individually. It was a priority, but there was too much work to be done to take care of that just now. The smoky plume from the waterfront temple was drifting over the whole city by the time they had sealed the old city’s gates. Now they could descend again into the darkness and root out all the other filth that had to be purged by fire.

Watch Captain Bruden had worked hand in glove with the now-arrested guard captain. Still, he’d shown no reluctance in obeying every order the remaining Templars delivered to him. Todd couldn’t say whether that was because he was a devout man or because he knew the kind of scrutiny such resistance could bring to him. He’d heard that inquisitions were an ugly business, and there was no doubt in his mind that Brother Faerbar would send for those fanatics once the danger was past.

While the holy warriors were busy rooting out the nests of filth below, the watch captain carried out his mandates on the streets above. Curfews were being established, checkpoints were being manned, and anyone that seemed the least bit foreign or strange was being rounded up so that his master could look hard at them for the taint of evil. Each new path led to a new tunnel and a new den of vice and evil that needed to be purified by fire. A brothel, a butcher, a warehouse on the docks, and three noble houses all went up in flames before sunset. It was only once that was done that the Templars brought their dead to the surface to give them their last light rites by the glow of the setting sun.

“We honor the fallen with the full knowledge that someday we too will fall as well,” Brother Faerbar entoned as he looked from his comrades to the setting sun and back. “They are only a step ahead of us in the eternal struggle, and we shall meet with them again in the next world.”

The ceremony continued until dark, and each surviving Templar said a few words. Todd could tell from the way several spoke that he wasn’t the only one concerned by Brother Jakobous’ missing heart, but he said nothing because it was not his place. He, like everyone else, was just grateful to have survived. They’d gone into the darkness of the palace with 17 men: eight Templars, eight squires, and one priest candidate. Now two Templars and three squires were dead, and another 6 people were dead, including Brother Verdenin, who was still only barely clinging to life.

By tomorrow half of those injured would be so wholly healed that it would be as if their wounds had never existed, but that was tomorrow. Tonight there were only five members of their cadre that were uninjured, and there was still much work to be done. The smell of smoke was heavy in the air, and the prisoners were overflowing the city jail and three other defensible buildings that had been set aside for that purpose.

Todd had always thought that he would have been thrilled to be doing the work of the divine on such a day, but this evening excitement was the farthest thing from his mind. Between the exhaustion and grief, he felt like he was about to pass out on his feet. Unlike so many others, though,  he was uninjured, so he owed it to everyone to do whatever he could for as long as he had to. As the night wore on, that mostly turned out to be running messages back and forth across the city through empty streets to let this unit of the city guard know to reposition here or inform the watch captain that all boats were to remain moored pending a thorough search.

“Don’t you see? This is the most crucial time,” he heard Brother Faerbar yelling at the watch captain after he hurried back breathlessly from delivering another message to the jailers. They were to start bringing prisoners to the temple at first light for questioning. Usually, his master would have another errand for him as soon as he arrived, but this time he had to wait for this argument to subside… or escalate, he thought grimly.

“Wasn’t that when you set half of Fallravea aflame this afternoon?” The man asked, not bothering to hide his irritation. “I’m telling you, the day watch needs to sleep, or we’ll be adding mutiny to our list of problems.”

“They can sleep when the checkpoints are all manned,” the paladin answered. “We have burned the viper’s nests and rounded up as many of their colleagues as we can find, but tonight is the night that the rest of the vermin will try to flee. Every man that escapes is another village that we will someday have to purge and burn in the exact. Same. Way.”

Whether it was the strength of Brother Faerbar’s argument or the way his eyes glowed as his righteous anger gathered, eventually, the Watch Captain relented. “I’ll see what I can do, but I ain’t promising any miracles,” he grumbled.

“Siddrim will provide all the miracles we could ever ask for,” the brother said with a smile, which quickly disappeared when he turned to Todd and gave him his next assignment.

Todd didn’t talk back. He just took the note and was off again on another jog through the moonlit city. He would deliver two more messages before his work for the day was finally done. It was almost midnight when he finally went to sleep on the floor of the tiny chapel to Siddrim that had become their base of operations in this godless city. They couldn’t be sure anywhere else was safe until they knew how deeply the rot had already spread. So, like everyone else, he fell asleep in his armor, waiting for an attack that never came.

Instead, he was greeted by dawn’s light and freshly baked bread that he greedily devoured after morning prayers were complete. There was still much to do, but now that the light was again on their side and the Templars had enough energy to heal the wounded, there was no chance that they would lose, Todd told himself.

When what healing could be done had been done and everyone had finished eating, Brother Faerbar addressed them all. Though he wasn’t a handsome man, as he stood before his assembled warriors in torn armor, silhouetted by the rising sun, Todd couldn’t help but be stunned as he took in everything his master said. The church of Siddrim forbade iconography of their god, preferring to think of him as pure white light. Still, in that moment, Todd couldn’t help but think of the man as the living embodiment of all that was good and just.

“You may or may not have realized it already,” his master said, speaking mainly to the assembled squires, “but we have already won. Last night was evil’s last chance to strike us down, and they failed. Instead, they are routed, and we are victorious.”

A cheer went up after that, but Brother Faerbar kept talking for quite a while as he laid out the plan. By the time the sun was set again on the city, there would be a messenger on their way back to Siddrimar to relay everything that had happened and request more assistance and public proclamations would be read to explain what had transpired to the fearful townspeople. After that, those with the sight would use it along with some harsh questioning to sort the genuinely guilty from those that had merely been standing too close and cut their number of suspects by at least half before they started putting people to the question. He continued, enumerating a long list of specifics they would focus on and who exactly was going to do what, but Todd didn’t worry about that. All that mattered to him was that they had fought evil, and they had won.

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.

Ch. 60 - A Public Spectacle

Though it was hard, Todd forced himself to watch as his superiors put the people of Fallravea to the question. It was an ugly business that went so slowly at first that they could only redeem a few souls each day as the cultists and blasphemers denied they were ever involved in any of the terrible activities that the Templars had uncovered. The butcher who had been trafficking in corpses denied knowing that the tunnel dug into the rear of his shop was even there, and the noble families whose manses were also connected to that dark network insisted that they had despised the Count and his toadies more than anyone.

“If my family was really as close to that disreputable swine as you say, then why weren’t I or my daughters at all of his unseemly little parties this summer?” the Granddame Rockmira demanded angrily after a series of less than courteous questions.

Unlike the butcher’s tale, it was a story that had initially made sense to Todd, though he would have never contradicted his seniors by saying that. Eventually, the priests forced her into the light of truth, kicking and screaming by using brutal techniques that made Todd wince. Ultimately, both confessed and gave the names of all other local luminaries that had helped them with their misdeeds. The former eventually signed a statement that he sold human meat to unsuspecting customers for reasons related to both profit and devilry. The latter admitted that the only reason her family wasn’t fornicating with all of the other nobles as they usually did the night of the massacre was because they had been forwarned by their dark Mistress, The Drowned woman.

No one called her Oroza anymore. That was the name of a river, not of a goddess of the underworld. In private, Brother Faerbar was conflicted, though, in public, he never wavered. He’d seen signs of the river’s corruption for years, but at the same time, he’d never known any of the healers that worshiped the river goddess to have anything but spotless souls, especially during the year of the plague. It was a conundrum that he wrestled with often, but according to him, even prayer couldn’t resolve it.

“How was it that so many good people could worship such an evil thing?” he asked them all at dinner one night, but no one had a good answer.

Fortunately, there were still good people in the city, and the weight of the witness statements that their neighbors buried them with was usually enough to force a blubbering confession before it was time to bring in the thumb screws or the hot irons. That all changed a week later when their reinforcements arrived from Siddrimar.

Though the Templars might be the best-known arm of the church militant, they were not the most feared. That distinction belonged to The Penetient Seekers of Truth, or the Inquisitors as everyone called them. A hush followed in their wake when their convoy entered the city, and after that, a muted anticipation about what would happen next hung over Fallravea like a cloud.

It would not take too long to answer that unasked question, though. The Inquisitors differed from their brethren in that they preferred to do all their questioning and the associated penance under Siddrim’s light, so they only waited long enough for a scaffold to be built in the city center before they began their bloody spectacle.

Fortunately, Todd was not expected to watch them work. Still, he caught glimpses often enough while he was out and about performing other tasks for his Master as they carried out their ever-expanding carnival of mortification. For the first week, there were almost no spectators, but gradually that changed for reasons Todd didn’t really understand. He knew that people often gathered to watch hangings, but torture? That seemed too far, even if the crowd’s true interest was in justice and salvation.

Still, day by day, the crowds grew, taking some kind of comfort from the public nature of the proceedings. After that, though, things got weird. Brother Garrand had said that they would, but Todd had not fully believed him. On the ninth day of the Inquisition’s attempt to turn over every last stone of sin, people began to come forward from the crowd and confess without anyone laying a finger on them. Sometimes these crimes were significant, and other times they were only private shames, but soon enough, the Inquisitor’s cages were overflowing with those in need of salvation.

Most of those that confessed spontaneously weren’t executed, which was more than he could say about those that had been dragged kicking and screaming into Siddrim’s light thanks to a tip from their neighbors or someone that had already spent their time on that bloody stage. Todd thanked the divine for that. More than enough intersections were decorated with the flayed body of the guilty already. If his brothers started to kill everyone who had confessed to blasphemy or adultery, then eventually, there would be nowhere left to put them all.

It was a dismal time. At first, he’d been excited to strike such a blow against evil, but now he couldn’t wait to be free of this place. It was one thing to strike down the animate dead but quite another to wake up each morning to the smell of corpses and the sound of screaming. Even those things were only slightly better than acting as a nursemaid to priest-candidate Verdinen while he recovered. While that task had been easy enough while the man was unconscious, he’d become a petulant nightmare once he’d awoke to find that he was missing his right arm, and since Todd was one of the few squires that knew his letters, he was frequently forced to sit with the bitter man for hours, scribbling reports. No mark he ever made on the page was good enough, of course, but all of them were better than what Brother Verdinen was capable of with his left hand.

Thirty-eight days later, The Penetiant Seekers of Truth pronounced the city clean of all of its taint. To celebrate, they held a midnight mass in the center of the city, burning every last vestige of The Drowned Woman that they could find. Every holy symbol and tapestry in the city that was left with a river theme was thrown on the pier that night.

“So does this mean we finally get to go back to Siddramar now, sir?” Todd asked his Master the next morning after they finished their sunrise sparing session.

“I’m afraid not,” he said. “Now that the city no longer needs our swords, we travel south to Blackwater to see if the rot has spread downriver.”

“Blackwater?” Toad asked, confused. “But the taint on the river has to come from the north, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t we be following it to its source to finally purify it once and for all?”

That answer made the older man laugh louder than he should have. “You would think, wouldn’t you, but that isn’t how they see the world. To them, the water is polluted by the souls of the people that worship it when they should be worshiping the light.”

“But what if it’s the other way around?” Todd asked. “What, it’s something in the water that poisons the hearts of those who drink it?”

“Who can say?” Brother Faerbar asked philosophically. “You and I - the church relies on our strong sword arms. It would be hubris not to trust in the learned men who use their minds to do the same. The learned priests say the devil is in the heart, but my nose tells me that there is something rotten in the Wodenspines, and it will have to be addressed eventually, but if it happens after we gauge the darkness of Blackwater, it makes no difference to me.”

Todd nodded, understanding why his Master was correct, even though he knew that neither of them agreed with those morally upright words deep down.

After that moment of silence, Brother Faerbar continued. “They say that the whole area around that little port town has an evil reputation. Even the song we heard in the inn on the way here was about dead rising from the bog to protect its ill-gotten treasure.”

“I didn’t see a swamp when we traveled through,” Todd retorted after searching his memories for a moment.

“No,” his Master agreed. “You wouldn’t have. The late Lord of the region paid a king’s ransom to the mages at the Magica Collegium in Abenend to use their earth magic to dig him a canal to Garvin’s… I mean Garmoore’s Gift.”

Brother Faerbar sat down so that Todd could unlace his Gambeson. Last week they’d started renaming everything in the region that had been named for the late Lord’sLord’s family in an attempt to erase his blasphemies. Everything that had once been named for Leo, Kelvun, or Garvin was now named after an appropriate saint of Siddrim or another lesser god, though it was hard to remember so many recent changes.

There had even been a petition sent to the king to rename the whole county to something more appropriate in light of everything that had happened. The priesthood lacked the power to make those changes unilaterally; Todd struggled with a particularly stubborn knot as he recalled just how frustrated the Priest Cawleon had been frustrated by that fact. As temporary governor of the whole area, he chafed at any limit imposed on Siddrim’s vision.

In the end, the only thing that would be left to bear any of those forbidden names was little Leo Garvin the Fifth. Though only an infant and the spawn of a heretic, he would be well-taken care of for some time to come. This was because, through his guardianship, the church could lay claim to the whole area, at least until he came of age.

“It’s my understanding that late Count wasn’t specifically trying to rid himself of the swamp so much as build a path free from goblins so he could extract the riches of the earth,” Brother Faerbar continued, interrupting Todd’s wandering mind and pulling him back into the conversation.

“But if the swamp was evil, and he was evil, then why would he seek to drain it?” Todd asked, meeting the other man’s eye. “I just… Something about all this doesn’t seem to make sense, don’t you think?”

That protest brought the patient smile back to his Master’s face as it always seemed to when he’d said something that was unintentionally smart or stupid. “The only people in the world that everything makes sense to are the ones that are truly crazy. We should just be grateful that in the midst of all his other debaucheries, the late Count of Greshen cleaned up one mess and replaced it with verdant farmland. That’s one less place that evil can hide from our Lord’sLord’s light. Right?”

“Thank the light for that,” Todd mumbled, unconvinced.

That would be the last time they would spar in that benighted city because the following day would be spent packing and provisioning, and then why were back underway, traveling south on the main road, which was uncomfortably close to the river as it parallelled the Oroza south and west to their destination.

Even though it was only four nights by horse, Todd slept fitfully. For weeks he’d been forced to battle that awful tentacled abomination over and over in his sleep, but this was something new. Now in his dreams, he imagined something lurking just beneath those oily waters. It waited there each night, and though it never broke the surface, he was certain that if it had, it would have crushed the life out of all of them without issue. Even Brother Faerbar was no match for that much darkness lurking in those still nighttime waters.

Ch. 61 - Petty Little Lives

The Lich watched its finest craftsmen as they made the final few stitches on the spine of its dread book with some small part of its mind even as it gazed out over the turmoil of its kingdom. Now it was drinking deep of that suffering, but as soon as the blood-red sun finished setting, it would be time to complete the spells and unite its latest victim’s body and soul once more. For now, though, it was content to enjoy the view. The Shrines were burning in every town and village along the length of the Oroza now, and the Lich’s pet goddess was struggling against her chains even as she burned with them. She could feel the suffering of those who loved her most in the same way that she’d been able to feel it as the Lich had slowly poisoned the souls of her most devout.

Both the darkness and the light had violated her in this sense, but she could do nothing about either, not as long as she was merely a focal point for such a terrible master. She still managed to resist the magics that chained her from time to time, but years of captivity had all but broken the river Goddess’s spirit. Her purpose was to constantly absorb torrents of power only to have them stripped away while the Lich filled whole reservoirs with her tears, drop by drop. Usually, this suffering was a private treasure, but today it shared the view with someone who would soon know his own personal brand of hell as a hint of things to come.

“She will remember this moment forever,” the Lich intoned to his audience of one. “Whereas I will forget it ever happened in time, I always do. A month? A season? A year? How could I ever hope to remember every torment I inflict on this miserable world? When the darkness overshadows everything, these small sadnesses will be erased like everything else.”

The maelstrom of souls that was its heart of darkness was so tumultuous and chaotic that it often had trouble remembering anything but its current obsession and the next steps of its great work. Today in between thoughts about the mysteries of flight and breaks to enjoy the continuing efforts of Siddrim’s dogs as they ravaged the countryside, all it could think about was its newest creation which was nearing completion, hour by hour. The tome was weighty by anyone’s measure, but it wasn’t the size of the thing that would define it when the construction was complete. It was the infinite darkness that would fill its pages, one black word at a time.

“But I cannot bear to lose even the smallest of my treasures anymore, and that is why I have created you. From now on, it will be your job. To remember everything that ever happens. You shall document my every whim and whisper so that nothing is lost. Likewise, every debt, every grudge, and every obligation will be recorded along with all the ways those debts are eventually repaid in blood so that everyone will get what it is they deserve when the time comes.” As the Lich’s poison-drenched words echoed voicelessly in the darkness, the soul that was the target of that terrible message trembled from the skull that it was still bound to. The last thing it wanted was to be put to such a purpose, but it had no choice in the matter.

When the world above finally drifted into night, the Lich turned away from the spectacle to find that its book now sat finished in the middle of the heptagram binding circle as it had been for the best part of the last hour, awaiting the next step in the process.

An ugly thing, the large black tome measured a foot and a half tall, nearly a foot wide, and several inches thick. Though that wasn’t enough space to fit an entire corpse, the Lich had done its very best to waste nothing. The book was bound in Kelvun’s flesh so that his face could still be made out on the cover, his sinew had been used to stitch the thing, and even his bones had not gone to waste. Not only had they been used to make the glue for the binding, but they’d also been pulverized and added to the pulped pages of religious scrolls and rare spell books to make up the terrible paper that was at the heart of this project. Though it might seem that the slender volume had perhaps 200 pages, there were a thousand times that many hidden inside the clever working, or at least there would be once the Lich’s magic had activated the rest of them.

Though its library of heads had served it well for decades as a repository of knowledge, they were not portable, and it would soon be time to centralize that power into a single implement that it could bring with it to the battlefields of the world above. The living might not realize that the darkness would soon be upon them. Still, every day drew closer to that dread confrontation whether they knew it or not.

At an unspoken signal, zombies brought in seven severed heads and set them down at each corner of the star. In life, none of them had known a single thing about magic, but in death, all that mattered was that they were fresh meat that was less than a week old. They had been pilfered from the local graveyard shortly after the ceremonies ended and brought here to be dissected for parts.

The locals of Blackwater might think that such places protected the dead, but the evil here ran deep, so only the first few feet of ground was truly consecrated. Beneath that lay the Lich’s domain, and every week new bodies were delivered to it only to disappear into the depths like they had never been.

Their arms and legs would yet be used for new, outrageous war machines, but tonight their heads were nothing but extensions of the Lich’s will. As one, they began to sing a complex seven-part harmony. It was less of a sonata than sacrilege, and note by note, it pulled Kelvun’s screaming soul from where it had resided the last few weeks and into the infinite pages of the Lich’s new library. In time, he might be joined in there with other souls as the complexity of their task increased, but for now, his little lordling would suffer alone under the burden of transcribing everything the Lich knew.

Minute by minute the layers of enchantments and compulsions built up in a complex symphony of arcane cruelty that would have hurt the ears as much as the souls of any listeners if there had been anyone in that empty room to hear. Each line was a prohibition; it was a brand on Kelvun’s soul. The book must do this, but it couldn’t do that. It was a formula that had been borrowed from Krygain Mundi, a book that was meant for dealing with the diabolic, but there was no reason it couldn’t work on the dead, so long as small alterations were made to reflect the true nature of the bound.

Eventually, after several minutes, the singing reached a crescendo that verged on screeching as one of the head’s vocal cords started to fray, while two more were beginning to smolder even as they screamed their commandments louder and louder. Just before its tiny little implements could burst into flame, the ritual was done, smothering the room in an eerie silence that lasted until it was disturbed by the brief shuffling of pages as the book stirred briefly.

Judging the spell a success, a drudge was then allowed to bring the book to the Lich’s throne room. It held it there motionless until the thing suddenly sprang to life in its lifeless hands, opening on its own to a random blank page as it waited expectantly for its first order.

“We will start the volume with your own terrible end, Kelvun,” the Lich gloated. “You forgot that I existed, so we shall make certain that nothing else ever goes unremembered regarding our encounters.”

Suddenly the book sprang to life as line after line of dark script appeared on the page. The ink was a mixture of blood and shadows, but the handwriting was Kelvun’s formal penmanship. He’d hated those lessons his tutors had forced on him over and over with a passion, and now he would spend the rest of time doing just that. Creating short lines of text that captured every detail of an event with clean loops and tight, well space letters, the book started the section with ‘The Life and Death of Kelvun Garvin.’ It went on ceasly for seven pages, making notes about things that Kelvun had never been aware of in life as it gathered clues and facts from the vast darkness that was the Lich.

In the end, it noted correctly that it had crossed the Lich three times and ‘in his final attempt to cheat the darkness of its due, Kelvun met with a sudden violent end, which is the only possible way to pay back such debts when dealing with forces of this nature.’ Obviously, if Kelvun had known that, he would have happily paid double for the rest of his days in an effort to be as helpful to his dark benefactor as possible, but it was the Lich’s knowledge that lent to rash man the only wisdom he’d ever had in the afterlife. The Lich was pleased to note that the document didn’t fail to mention that Kelvun’s surviving son was the product of an affair that his wife had one of the many bards the house entertained while he was off on his own dalliances.

That was one of the only reasons the Lich had spared the child, of course. A mewling infant would have made a lovely morsel in its banquet of death that night, but as the only living member of Kelvun’s “lineage,” the Lich knew that would forever irritate the tormented spirit and that the church would use the child to cement their legitimacy, as any group seeking to usurp power in the region would.

To most, it would make no sense at all that the darkness was doing everything it could to invite the light into its domain, but it knew something they didn’t. It was the first lesson that it had ever learned: the safest place to hide a treasure was a few feet under an empty treasure chest. The forces of light had already found and vanquished an evil in the form of the cult of the drowned lady. They would have no need to dig deeper and find out that she was little more than a hand puppet in the grand scheme of things. She'd never been at fault in the same way that the Garvin family had never really been in charge.

Neither had done anything, yet it was their names that would bear the shame in the histories that would be written about such things. Not that history portrayed the reality of such events any more than bardic song writers did, of course. After all, Blackwater wasn’t even a swamp anymore. It was the name of a growing river port and a style of beer that was brewed there now more than a place that no longer existed.

Where once there had been a swamp brimming with disease and the unquiet dead, there was now only rich black earth and more farms every year as the population continued to blossom like the crops in the fields. People sometimes disappeared, of course, and to a man, the region experienced terrible nightmares that no one was willing to talk about openly, but that was the price that they paid for their peace, and no one seemed to think it was a high one.

Ch. 62 - Dead Man Walking

Paulus stumbled down the dark foothills, toward the light in the distance. He didn’t know what the building was, or who might be living there, but it didn’t matter. He was dying. He had been for days actually, but he knew that he didn’t have long left now. His heart was pounding in his chest and his breathing was erratic and shallow. This morning he had left almost all of his meager possessions behind when the throbbing in his arm had woken him up. All he wanted to do now was to give his book to someone, anyone, who would get it to the proper authorities before the poison ran its course.

It was almost a week ago that he had pulled the strange object from the mountain spring. In doing so, he had finally freed himself from the river goddess’s final command, but in the process he’d let a single drop of that poison land on the back of his left hand without noticing.

For the first day it had only been an itch, and he’d thrilled in the beautiful weather and had the last of his bread to celebrate the completion of his quest. He hadn’t even known there was a problem yet. He’d just scratched at the spot now and then like his other bug bites as he walked down the mountain.

However what was a red bump on the first day, had turned into a painful canker by the second, and after that, the black tracery lines began to crawl slowly up all the arteries and veins beneath the surrounding skin, reaching closer and closer to his heart. At first the process was slow, but by the fourth day, the necrotic skin advanced with that darkness. It looked like some kind of snake bite, and hour by hour, and inch by inch, his arm began to rot away.

At first Paulus was terrified by what was happening. He’d tied his belt around his bicep as a tourniquet, cutting off blood to the arm, but that had stopped working tonight. Now he could feel the throbbing as the poison traveled deeper and deeper into his body. He was no longer afraid though, because now he knew what he must do.

“The records must be saved,” he murmured as he traveled inexorably forward staggering the whole way as he weaved back and forth like a drunkard. “They have to know. They have to know the truth about everything that’s happened, and everything that’s going to happen…”

Speaking was exhausting now, but it still moved him forward through his haze of pain. It reminded him of why he couldn’t just lay down and die right there on the wet grass, even if it would have been the easiest thing in the world to do. That part he couldn’t say out loud, because he might listen to himself. He was sure that if he paused long enough to undo the belt that held back the rot that had already ravaged and mumified his left arm, he would be dead before he hit the ground.

He paused a moment to listen. Hearing the sound of distant crows. He was sure they’d been following him for the last few days. They might be gone every morning, but they were there every night he made camp, waiting for the day he would fall asleep and never wake up. They were ready and waiting to pick his bones clean and devour his brains for all the secrets he contained to spread them to gods knew who, but he wasn’t going to let that happen.

“At least the poison in my veins will make sure sure that they didn’t live to tell anyone,” he whispered to himself with a chuckle that quickly became a racking cough. Paulus forced himself to keep walking though, even through that. He had to, he knew that if he stopped it was all over.

He’d thought about cutting the hand off days ago, but he’d lacked the will to do what was necessary, and now he was paying the price. That, and the fact that his blade had almost completely rusted through by the time he’d noticed there was a problem.

“Almost there,” he reminded himself as he stepped onto a dirt footpath. That meant that lots of feet had been though here, he realized, and at least a few people would be connected to those feet, so he was definitely going the right way.

Soon he found walls he could stagger against. A waist high fieldstone enclosure was the first, but soon there were thatched outbuildings too. Soon enough cobblestone appeared beneath his feet, and he could see other, larger buildings looming up out of the dark as he approached some kind of small town square.

“Help!” he called out, as he continued to stagger forward. His voice didn’t carry very far. It wasn’t even loud in his own ears because he couldn’t quite catch is breath anymore. “I-I’m dying… and I need… I need…”

Now that he was in the square proper he looked into a second story window to see a woman. Paulus opened his mouth, but his words were taken away by the look of disgust she’d given him. Rather than help him, she made a sign of warding and then pulled the shutters closed, leaving him tottering in the dark. Part of him wouldn’t believe that a decent person as that woman so clearly had been could have turned him away like that, and he reached out to her even as he collapsed backwards onto the cobblestones.

From his view on the ground he could finally see what it was he’d been walking toward. It was one of Siddrim’s eternal flames perched atop the little white temple that they so favored. They didn’t have them in every small village temple, but there had been two in Fallravea, and it was a point of pride that they had been lit since the end of the last King’s mourning period. It had beeen a point of pride for his city and his family, and it was that pride that forced him to roll over and force himself to his feet instead of laying down next to the well there and dying.

Clutching his papers to his chest, he staggered stiff limbed to the reinforced wooden door of the temple, and he pounded on it. There was no strength left in his arm though. Instead all he could do was bang on it with his head while he leaned heavily against the cold wood, and slowly slumped down to his knees as the world began to swim around him.

. . .

Sister Annise stumbled down the stairs half asleep to see what all the commotion was about only to find Priest Mallen and his acolytes wrestling the body of a hermit onto a table in the small clinic that the temple ran for the villagers of the area. Thankfully it was empty but for the four of them, but that still did nothing to explain what was happening at this late hour.

“What in the name of the light are you doing at such an infernal hour?” she demanded as she swept a few stay brown hairs out of her face. From all the noise she’d heard, she’d feared they were under some kind of attack, so she’d only put on her cream colored robe and left her white apron and shawl upstairs to investigate.

The priest noticed immediately and rebuked her with his eyes, but he said nothing about it. “A dying hermit was found on our door. He’s been bitten by a snake I think, though it’s much too late to save the arm.”

As Priest Mallen spoke, his acolyte Theo moved out of the way for just a moment, but it was long enough to see the ghastly shriveled thing the old mans left arm. No, he wasn’t old, she corrected herself as shey started to strip him. He was just haggard. From his birdsnest hair to his gnarled, blacked feet, he was every inch the holy man. Right down to his dangerously slender waistline and emaciated ribs.

“Well then, if you’re here make yourself useful and burn these,” the priest said gesturing to a pile of wadded up robes and a sheave of disintegrating papers that might have once been a book. “We’ll do what we can for the poor bastard but I’m not expecting much.”

“You’re going to heal him?” she asked hopefully. It would have been a strange thing for the priest to attempt. He almost always horded Siddrim’s light, claiming that the recipient wasn’t worth it, so this time she wasn’t surprised when he shook his head and picked up a cleaver.

“Maybe if he survives the night,” the priest answered, cleaning the meat cleaver with a rag, “but even with a tourniquet, I don’t expect a man in his condition will survive the bloodloss. Still - we must place it in the lord of light’s hands.”

Sister Annise brought her hand to her heart and bowed her head in reverence at the mention of her lords name, but only for as long as was necessary. Then she quickly scooped up the garbage that the priest had pointed out and fled the room. Though her heart went out to the man, she had no wish to see any butchery this evening. She was certain it would give her nightmares.

She had only just gotten out of the infirmary door and shut it behind her when she heart the dull impact of metal on meat and gagged at the mental image that was briefly conjured up involuntarily in her mind.

Thoush she was sure that the flash she saw wasn’t the sight, she blamed that gift for the vivid imagination she was cursed with. She couldn’t see anyone sick or in pain without knowing exactly what it would feel like, and when she was trying to assist someone who was vomiting, it was all she could do not to join them. It was a curse that she’d lived with her whole life, and tonight she was grateful for Priest Mallen’s low opinion of her as she went to the main fireplace and threw the lice infested robes onto the bed of coals, quickly making the flames leap to life for a moment in a burst of greasy brilliance

She was about to add the papers too without a second thought. After all, as soon as they were ash she could return to her bed. Sunrise would always come sooner than she would have liked. Something stayed her hand though, and instead she decided to flip through them first.

At first she expected them to be mad religious ramblings, and at places, where the writing was still legible, they sometimes seemed to be. “The poison river continues, no matter how far I travel into the mountains today. She follows me. Her and her storm clouds and only the light of the heavens keeps her lightning at bay,” she read to herself.

Did that make the hermit some mad Orozian prophet then? If that was true then should she hold on to these for The Penetient Seekers of Truth? She wasn’t sure, and ultimately it was hardly the place of a sister to decide these things. Still, she couldn’t help but flip to another spot and read again.

“But the Count has no enemies. None I can point him to. He’s already had me kill the few he had, which makes him both the villain and the hero of his own story. Still if I do not find a name to give him by our next meeting mine is certain to move a few places higher on the invisible list that the shadows put into his head.” This passage was almost nonsense, and if the words weren’t enough to convince her that the man that had written it, the doodles around the edges of the book were certainly enough to do it. Random words were circled and linked to other random shapes. It was insane.

She decided that more than anything she didn’t want to deal with whatever this mystery was, and was about to flip the book closed, but as she gazed transfixed at the madness on the page, she felt herself start to freeze up. Then suddenly she could feel the edges of her brain quaking as a vision boiled up out of the edges of her mind and her body began to tremble. She was having a fit, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

Suddenly the fire fell away, leaving her in the dark room that expanded into an endless web and expanding web of darkness. She could see people she didn’t recognize connected in ways that she didn’t understand in an infinite web of causality that spread further and further until it was the landscape itself, from the Wodenspines to the Oroza. From here she could see that the river flowed with blood, and that a town far to the south was on fire as a black sun set in the distance behind it all.

It was a terrifying image, and almost as soon as it was done she found herself on the floor, gasping and sobbing at a feeling of loss and fear too terrible to understand.

Ch. 63 - City of the Dead

His walk ever deeper was a timeless monotony, punctuated only by death, as Krulm’venor slew each and every creature that crossed his path. Neither the slow-acting slimes nor the dreaded stone borrers could hope to match the fury he could draw upon at any moment, thanks to the nearly limitless power of the Lich that he was tethered to. At first, the fire spirit welcomed these terrible bouts of violence because they were all that could distract him from thinking about the Allfather and wondering about all the other things he'd forgotten.

Even thoroughly fireproof enemies like belchers and emberkin could not stand up to the strength of the steel skeleton that was his body. No matter how satisfying it was to rip his opponent’s limb from bloody limb, though, the dwarf eventually grew to hate and then dread the encounters. This wasn’t because it disliked striking down all the terrors that lurked in the dark, though, or purging the rust funguses and the acid spitters from the teunnels with fire the way that every dwarf wished they could.

No, it was because every time there was violence, he could feel the goblin spirits that powered the bones of this body come alive and pollute his soul a little more. Each time they were roused by violence, his rigid, perfect dwarven soul was suffused by the slime of their simple existence, and even when the fight was over, some measure of that filth stayed behind.

It was inescapable, and no matter how many kobold dens he destroyed or spider nests he cleansed, it wouldn’t be enough to make up for the terrible poison sliding inside him one drop at a time. He could hear the whispers all the time now, even when he was at peace and the goblin tribes that dwelled within him were asleep. He thanked the All-father that at least he did not yet understand their gibbering, for he knew that when he’d fallen that far, he would begin to grow truly mad.

He didn’t even feel the need to resist the Lich’s orders anymore. There was no point. With this terrible punishment, the proud godling was slowly being hollowed out in the same way that the dread kobolds might ruin a city: with one small hole at a time, undermining what had taken a lifetime to createwith their irresistable hunger. With each day and each fight, Krulm’venor could feel the inevitability of what was happening to him, and it was with growing despair that he realized that even if he found a way to escape this body, it was likely that the taint he carried within him was permanent now, no matter how brightly he burned.

So, he walked in misery, and it was only when Krulm’venor reached the gates of the Ghen’tal that he knew this was where it had all started. From the very moment he spied the tarnished crest of the city on the huge brass doors, the sundered mountain eclipsing the world axe, he knew he was home, Just as he knew that behind those open doors stood a dead city populated by only dust and shadows.

He'd barely stepped past the threshold when he felt the darkness boil up inside his skull.

“What is this place,” it whispered as they gazed out of his eyes together at the shadowed ruins of what was once one of the greatest cities beneath the world. “You know it. You’ve been here.”

“Aye,” Krulm’venor agreed, looking out into the darkness. Unlike some of the previous places he’d been that were devoured by kobolds or ruined beyond recognition by goblins, Ghen’tal was still just as perfect as the day he’d left it for the last time. The city itself had become a mausoleum, and the bodies still lay where they’d fallen when the last of the lights had been extinguished. “I was born here, I lived my whole life here, and when I was raised again from the clutches of death to fight the darkness, I was born here a second time.”

It wasn’t until the words had left his mouth that he realized he’d said far too much. These were the secrets that could truly hurt his people, but he’d dwelled in the darkness alone for months now, with only the whispers in his head for company. So, when the darkness had asked a question, he’d answered it automatically, and now he could feel the Lich salivating as it awaited more details.

Krulm’venor was extremely grateful when he saw movement in the darkness to distract both of their attention. For a moment, he thought it was goblins, but the red glowing eyes gave it away. Goblins wouldn’t still be alive this deep with nothing to devour. It was just one of the silent wearing a goblin’s shadow. Of course, the silent ones would still be here. Why wouldn’t they? They’d been the ones to sack the city so long ago.

Just like the Lich, they weren’t living creatures but a parody of life that existed only to snuff it out. Like other cities before it, Ghen’tal had dug too deep and paid the price for it in the form of these horrors.

Fortunately, these creatures of darkness were very susceptible to light. When he flared to life, he saw the closest creatures that were slinking through the rubble to ambush him,  burst into greasy smoke as the light of his fires erased the darkness they needed to survive.

Then just as suddenly as his fires had kindled, they vanished, preventing him from becoming a living inferno. A moment later, Krulm’venor realized it was because the Lich had cut him off from its dark power.

“No,” the darkness hissed painfully in his mind. “Do nothing while I study these wonders, you ignorant swine, or I will find an even deeper pit of filth to bury you alive in!”

With a command like that, the fire spirit could do nothing but stand there as more of the dark spirits began to swarm him. First, there were dozens and then hundreds, but he was not alive, so they could do nothing to him except wonder at the strange new thing that had invaded their home.

When the boldest of the wretches, wearing the shadow of a venerable old dwarf, finally reached out with its magic to drain the life essence from his body, Krulm’venor trembled in rage and revulsion. He was only molified slightly when the Lich grasped onto that magical thread and absorbed the caster instead of the other way around.

That little reversal was amusing the fire spirit at least, even if the sudden chill of the alien soul going through him was incredibly disconcerting. What happened next, though, was that much worse. As soon as the Lich realized it could devour the silent in such a straightforward way, it began to do so voraciously.

The creatures were only spirits of darkness wearing the shadows of their victims. There was nothing to them that one could touch. So, at first, the darkness that dwelled within him began to devour them one at a time, but soon that wasn’t enough as its greed expanded to fill the size of the cavern. Five spirits, then ten… The Silent were fleeing now, which was not something that Krulm’venor had ever seen except for in the face of fire. Now that the Wraith knew what it was looking for, though, and it stalked the city, hunting the creatures that had been hunters their whole lives until a moment ago.

That idea might have filled the fire spirit with some measure of joy if it wasn’t being forced to endure the torrent of dark magic from the very center of the vortex of darkness. Even if the cavern’s light had grown too dim for him to see what was happening, he could certainly feel it. The first one of the silent shadows to be devoured had made it feel chill, but now the skeleton was frozen solid as its flames guttered until it was once more reduced to a single spark in its skull shape lantern of a head as it tried to endure the torrent of darkness that threatened to snuff it out completely.

Of course, Krulm’venor longed for such an outcome, but even as the metal skeleton that was its body got colder and colder and icicles began to grow on its ribcage, the final ember that was his tainted consciousness would not be snuffed out, no matter how much the Lich feasted on the souls of its enemies.

Then, just as suddenly as it started, it was over. In only a few minutes, the Lich had defeated an enemy that tens of thousands of dwarven warriors had been unable to best. Only when that was done did it restore its power and allow the fires that burned within Krulm'venors bones to light once more.

When he began to move again, he ignored the sounds of cracking ice that broke off him and fell to the stone floor below as the Lich spoke. “Now that the pests have been taken care of, you begin again. Tell me of your rebirth here, hound.”

Krulmvenor chaffed at that, but after the harrowing experience he’d just endured, he lacked the strength to fight the Lich. “When a dwarf that has led a good life dies, they go to their promised reward in the afterlife. To Vargaren, the eternal forges, to labor on greater things than mortal minds can even imagine.” As he spoke, the fire spirit began to walk toward the now cold forges of Ghen’tal in the center of town. “But sometimes, when there is a great threat, as with the silent ones, a soul is brought back to this world as a spark of the divine to help the living and ensure a future for all dwarves.”

It wasn’t the whole truth, but Krulm’venor desperately hoped it would be enough because it was treading right on the edge of terrible secrets that the Lich must never know.

Krulm’venor’s dread relaxed slightly when the Lich finally whispered, “Show me the city’s cemetery. Show me where you keep your dead.”

Silently the fire spirit moved to obey. There was no harm in it. He walked to the far wall and showed him the deathless halls of the mausoleum complex. It contained tens of thousands of dwarven dead, but to accommodate so many, all of them had been burned to bone and ash and placed in clan ossuaries.

The Lich had him rip open several, which was an unconscionable act of defilement for the Krulmvenor, but he obeyed just the same. In the end, that wasn’t enough for the dread voice in his head, though, and the Lich finally said, “You’re hiding something from me, Krulm’venor, but since you have given me such a banquet of darkness to feast upon, I will give you one final chance to tell me the truth before you are made to suffer for your definace.”

“This is the only place in the city where the dead should ever be,” Krulm'venor swore, “Right now, there are bodies in the streets, but normally—”

“Silence,” the Lich’s voice thundered, freezing his disobedient body in place once more. “There is another place then. Outside the city perhaps, because I see no statues of kings or plaques for heroes in this dingey place. Tell me where the dwarves take the bodies of their elders and their hallowed dead.”

Krulm’venor didn’t answer the question because doing so would have terrible consequences. He simply stood there as the pain started to rise, and the goblins boiled up out of his bones to gnaw at the corners of his soul.

“You will tell me what I wish to know, and if you wish to suffer until you are ready to do that, then so be it,” the Lich whispered.

Krulm’venor wanted to say something defiant. He wanted to tell the Lich to go to the pits and that he would never betray his people. He couldn’t do any of that, though, because once the fire started to flare in earnest, he couldn’t stop screaming.

“Then stay here and burn with your secrets until you’ve learned the error of your ways.” The Lich said as it began to fade from his mind. “Unlike your kin, no matter how long the flames assault you, you will never be allowed death's sweet release.”

Ch. 64 - Blight

Once the rain started, it didn’t stop until the parched land was transformed into mud. The Lich hadn’t been the one to cause such widespread destruction, of course, but once he’d given Oroza free rein to refill her river, it hadn’t felt any need to hold her back while she thrashed and raged inside the abomination it had inflicted on her. Even as its underground reservoirs had filled, the river emptied, and no matter how many tears poured from the sky in memory of all of the good and loyal priestesses that had died for the sake of its schemes, it didn’t care. So while the people suffered as a consequence of her suffering, the Lich merely reveled in both.

At first, the long-suffering people of Greshen welcomed the rains. All they wanted in life was mild weather and healthy children. It took weeks for the torrential rains from the constant storms that swept in from the sea to the south that the goddess had mastered during her exile for relief to become torment. In the summer, boat traffic had ground to a halt in the face of a vanishing river, but in the winter, even as the barge traffic resumed, the roads had become almost impassible to wagons. Only small groups of riders with good horses could move about with any freedom as the whole world seemed to flood in an overreaction to everything the earth had endured earlier in the year.

This caused no end to mudslides in the rural villages that dotted the Wodenspine range’s foothills. Not all of these tragedies were random, though. The Lich targeted Garhaam and Bellmor to be swept away specifically. The former had to be buried in eight feet of mud because of the monastery it hosted, and the latter was devastated in a flash flood from the river it hugged in the hopes of displacing them because it was too close to the ever-expanding range of its pet lizardman tribes. The Lich’s dark hand would never be noticed amidst all the other very natural tragedies that occurred that season, though. Everything would be blamed on their evil Lord, and all of that blame would be recorded by Kelvun’s ghost.

No amount of rain could wash away the blood that had been spilled in gutters for the last few weeks, though. Just like no amount of inquisition or persecution could purge the rot that was taking hold in granaries around the county. Indeed, even as tortures continued in the capital where the devout and the corrupted were sifted and judged, the ergot that blossomed amongst the grain stores of the city would only add fuel to the pyres of distrust.

It would make good honest people see horrible things, and even if they weren’t real, they would still damn others in their life to slow, painful deaths until they finally confessed to dark deeds they’d never done. Trust quickly became rarer than food as once kind, happy neighbors would blame sicknesses in both their household and their farm animals on each other.

Soon it wasn’t just the official witch hunts that were being undertaken. Thanks to the late Lord’s many plans, thousands of strangers had moved to the county in the last few years. They spoke to each other in unfamiliar dialects and accents that did nothing to help with mutual understanding. Sometimes they even worshiped foreign gods. It took only the slightest push from the darkness in the form of dreams for the people of every village and town to begin to blame their misfortunes on the new arrivals or the bitter old spinster that lived at the end of the road. Even with all of that, though, the darkest winter in memory had yet to truly explode while the rains tamped down the building fury.

It was only when the cold started to arrive that tribunals were quickly put together and blessed by the local priests. Sometimes this was done in earnest fear, and other times it was with a jaded eye toward new lands and old grudges. In Isiqha, while winter flurries hinted at the heavy snows to come, old lady Fotenoi was fed to the flames because she was a midwife and an herbalist that had charged too much for her remedies during the drowning years ago. Elza Brom joined her for the crime of having dark eyes and two black cats that were said to feast on the souls of sickly children. The two were roasted in the town square by a group of villagers as eager to stay warm as they were to see the women punished.

That winter, there would be few Yule feasts. Not even the mild weather could offset the lack of food and goodwill. They were hard, bleak times, even for the good and the righteous. To the Lich’s annoyance, it did make the light burn brighter in a few as they sought redemption for the things they’d done wrong. Most turned to envy instead, though, blaming others for everything that was going wrong in their life.

In the span of little more than a year, the region that had been perceived as one of the richest of the southern domains had been brought to its knees. In truth, it had suffered for years in the wake of the goblin attacks, and only the outrageous revenues from the Count’s gold mine had been able to hide all of that human misery behind a gilded veneer.

The plague had touched Greshen only lightly, but nothing could stop the brewing famine, and this pleased the Lich greatly. Only in the area directly around Blackwater did it make even the smallest efforts to stem these terrible trends as the black mold and red rust spread amongst the last of the crops that still lingered in the fields and those that had been quickly harvested at the start of the storms.

The farmers had prayed for months for rain and left the crops in the ground until the very last minute in many places in the hopes that some miracle might save their harvest. The result was that their often requested blessings built up and were delivered all at once as a curse. Though most families would survive for another planting, not all of them would, and that was a lesson that was hammered home by the children scavenging the empty fields for grains of wheat and barley along with the birds each day until the snows fell.

As the world slowly turned to ice, people’s hearts were no exception, and the Lich watched with undisguised hunger as villages turned on their weakest members in an effort to save enough grain for the spring. Many people just disappeared into the snow that winter, and a rash of the elderly and infirm passed away in their sleep with a pillow pressed into their faces.

The fact that the Lich had not been the one to force these once-good people to take such drastic action only pleased it more, and it rewarded the culprits for such things with unending dreams filled with guilt at what they’d done and dread that they might yet be caught.

The only area spared from the fog of distrust was the region immediately around Blackwater. It was a relative oasis of peace and plenty as the rest of the region descended into chaos. This was because of the Templar presence, of course, but there were also more pragmatic reasons. The Lich wanted to consolidate power and prestige on the heart of its growing empire, and while its tools for encouraging the men that dwelled there were limited, it had many, many tools to crush the smaller surrounding towns and villages.

Fallravea itself would need no further efforts on the part of the darkness. By the time the holy men had finished with it, it was a broken husk of a city. All its buildings would still be standing, of course, but its heart had stopped beating, and its reputation was cursed by people as far away as the capital. Almost all of its best families were ruined, and its harsh governor that ruled in the name of the infant count, was a brutal tyrant that would soon crush all the joy that could be found within a days ride as he forced the River Goddess’s worshipers to convert to his Lord of light.

The Lich considered murdering the man just to see what the church would do about it, but for now, it stayed its hand and chose not to inflame them any further. Forcing a confrontation before the time was right would not be advantageous, and it was still concerned that it might have to disappear the templars roaming the area should they dig too deeply. After all - they foolishly thought they’d already fought and defeated the worst monsters in the region, but nothing could have been further from the truth.

They’d beaten only what it had built specifically to test them and nothing more. It had other weapons in its arsenal that would easily grind them to dust. The juggernaut had been built specifically to counter light wielders. Its flesh had been soaked in darkness before it was reattached, and the eighth-inch verdigris-covered scales that had been riveted to its hide would resist the glare dozens of times better than the thin skin of its leviathan. Besides, if it succeeded in its current tests with its shadow dragon, then it could simply immolate the warriors from the sky whenever it desired, leaving the church no leads to chase it down with.

The dragon flew now, but only because of the innumerable air spirits that had been woven into its cured flesh to render it as light as a feather. It was almost as fragile as one too now, and the Lich might have set the clumsy project aside to focus on other things were it not for its breath weapon.

Drakes had no ability to belch fire naturally like their cousins, the true dragons, but thanks to the shocking influx of shadow energy that Krulm’venor had located for it, the black fires that its creation could belch defied belief. Though they were not a limitless font of flame like the godling, the shadow dragon’s breath was more devastating, erasing even towering trees in seconds as the darkness unmade the physicality of creation and whatever was caught in it effervesced into nothingness. In that sense, it was an acid, not a fire, but no matter what it was, it was lethal, and the Lich would horde it until just the right moment before it unleashed it on an unsuspecting enemy.

The only thing that stayed its hand now was the one-armed priest. Despite the darkness that so obviously festered in the wounded man’s heart, his comrades had yet to drive a stake through it. This made the Lich wonder how much corruption they really saw and much he could taint the man before they decided he had to be dealt with. It was an interesting experiment that the Lich would not rush, and since it could keep tabs on the troublesome group through the man’s dreams, it saw no need to strike them down just yet.

For now, it would do just what it had done for the last few months. Nothing. It would let the world think that good had won while it planned for the next phase. Darkness could never move openly until it had a way to banish the light in the same way that man currently used light to push back the dark, but that day was coming. All that the darkness needed was time to breed more sheep for the slaughter and the way that Blackwater was growing and would continue to grow as the famine took hold further inland. It would only be a few more years now before it was ready to challenge the gods themselves.

Ch. 65 - A New Order

The trip to the red hills had gone without issue, and the rains hadn’t affected their ride across the grasslands nearly as much as they’d affected the roads to the east, which had been brought to a halt by the river. For Todd, it was a thoroughly nostalgic experience, and he reveled in the half-remembered views of the distant mountains that could only occasionally be seen through the stormclouds.

The nights were miserable, so they stayed in the barns of righteous villagers where they could find them and in burned-out ruins or ghost towns that were still left over from the goblin war where they could not. One night they even stayed in the overgrown remains of Todd’s old village so that he could pay his respects to the rough stone marker that had been erected after all the fighting was done. The inscription was the same as all the others he had seen, save only for the name of the village. ‘The good people of Widinreach will be avenged.’ It was simple and a little trite after he’d seen so many similar monuments, but Todd appreciated it just the same.

His parents would never have a proper grave, of course, because only a single mass grave for the victims that had been found was erected, as was the case with all of the ghost towns they’d passed on the ride so far. Still, Todd left a bundle of wilting wildflowers and purple thistles he’d been able to find. He even said a prayer to guide them into the light, though he had no evidence that they were actually buried here.

Still, it gave him closure, which in turn gave him the confidence he’d never had when they finally arrived to rename Garvin’s Gift into something more appropriate. The templars had discussed it at length, and by the time they arrived to give the news of everything that had happened in Fallravea to the priest who ran the temple and orphanage, they’d chosen Gelhome’s Gift both because it sounded similar and because it was named for a saint as famous for being a pauper all of his life as for his good works.

There were plenty of memories there, too, for Todd, and even some old friends that he could share his adventures with, but there were shadows as well. They stayed in Gelhome’s Gift for only three days, and Todd spent half the time in the graveyard, thinking about all the awful things he’d done to the people that had been so cruel to him. He hadn’t killed anyone, of course, but still, every one of the boys that had made his life hell had managed to end up here because of his bad advice. Even if the goblins had been the ones that had killed the boys, Todd had still been the one to put them in harm’s way.

The fact that he knew for certain that if they hadn’t ended up in this cemetery, then he certainly would have didn’t help him at all, which puzzled him. If he’d killed a man that was trying to kill him today, he wouldn’t have felt the least bit guilty about that, but this seemed more duplicitous somehow.

Todd thought about that on the long rainy canal ride back to Blackwater. Even while the other templars worried about what they might find in such a den of villainy, he could really only focus on his own guilt and on helping priest-candidate Verdenin. The ride had been hard on the injured man, but in spite of all the exertion and the damp, his injuries hadn’t gotten reinfected and were slowly healing. The worst was definitely behind him, and he was gaining strength every day.

Todd helped him with writing his missives, but also more basic things like helping him to dress and changing his bandages. He also watched him, though, and wondered at the darkness he saw growing in the man. At first, he thought it was just rage and despair as a result of the horrific injury that had been inflicted on him while fighting Siddrim’s enemies, but as the days passed, he decided that there had to be more to it. So, the day after they arrived in Blackwater, he approached Brother Faerbar about it.

“Master, when should the darkness in the hearts of your allies worry you more than the darkness in the eyes of your enemy?” he asked while they sat alone under an awning waiting for the rain to slacken so they could continue their sparing.

“And which of our allies troubles you so, Todd?” he asked patiently, as he always did.

“Can you not see? It has become so obvious that—” Todd protested.

“There will be some darkness in the heart of almost everyone you ever fight beside,” Brother Faerbar cautioned him. “You cannot fight evil for long and stay clean. No one can. Our priest candidate has only just regained his physical health after a grievous wound. Surely you can begrudge him some time for his soul to mend as well, can’t you?”

“Of course, Master,” Todd answered, feeling suddenly ashamed at the very gentle admonishment. It was natural, he knew that, but like so many other things, that didn’t stop him from worrying about it. “I’m not saying anyone is perfect or that they should be, except Siddrim, of course. Certainly, I’m as flawed as anyone.”

“Well, maybe not anyone,” the paladin laughed. “But I wouldn’t let you serve me if you didn’t have a good heart. Knowing that makes me certain that whatever you’ve done to stain your own soul was done for the best of reasons, and with time and effort, you may yet wash that taint away, just as the Oroza is already recovering.”

“You noticed it too?” Todd asked, surprised by the sudden shift in topic.

“The spiritual poison seeping from Fallravea upstream will take years to be cleansed,” Brother Faerbar said, looking past the courtyard they were sparing into the water of the flooding river beyond it. “But the healing has already begun. Do you see how the river floods? It is almost like it knows that the source of the poison has been removed and that, with enough water, it can flush it all away. It is nature healing itself as it should.”

Todd considered that as he watched the river flow by. It was high enough now that it was only a few feet from the top of its channel and was threatening to overtop the piers. The toll chain that was a landmark for the area had long since disappeared under the murky brown waters, and though it would be ridiculous to call the water clean now, it was certainly cleaner than it had been on their last visit.

Then the water had been a clear blue-green color. Though not clear enough to see the bottom, there had also been a patchy grey oily slick of spiritual taint that clung to the water's surface that was almost entirely absent now. If he stared hard, he could still see a spot now and then, but it would appear that purging that awful temple was already doing some good.

Uncomfortable with the lull in the conversation and the slowly building uncomfortable silence filled only by the drizzling rain, Todd finally said, “The whole city is cleaner than I thought it would be. Spiritually, I mean.”

“I agree,” Brother Faerbar answered. “For all the evil stories that center on this area, it seems no worse than any of the other parts of the kingdom I have been to and a better than a great many of them. There are problems that need to be fixed, of course. The poverty and the prostitution most of all, but if there is hope for the country of Greshen, it likely lies here.”

“Not Fallravea?” Todd asked, surprised. “It’s the bigger city.”

“Fallravea existed as the seat of governance and culture for the region for decades,” he agreed, “but only because it was where the main sources of income met. The harvests traveled east to the city each fall, and all the trade traveled by it on the Oroza. Even if we hadn’t had to purge the city of half its leading lights for dealing with unclean spirits, Blackwater still would have eclipsed it in a decade or two.”

“Because of the gold?” Todd asked.

“The gold and the canal,” the paladin nodded. “What villages remain bring their goods south to the canal now instead of east to the capital. It’s a faster, safer route without a swamp and its foul creatures to threaten them.”

Todd opened his mouth to speak again, but his master interrupted. “Alright, lad, let’s work on your reposts. I’m sick of waiting for the rain. It’s likely to drizzle like this for the rest of the day if we let it.”

It did rain the whole day and the next one too, but the Templars didn’t let that stop them from doing what they needed to do. They proceeded to round up the pimps and the pushers of vice and drink and then punished them publicly. Those that were the least tainted were invited to confess their sins publicly so that they could give testimony against the worst of the lot. Then they would be shriven and flogged before the true scum was hanged and left to dangle until they’d rotted enough that their neck would no longer support the weight of their torso.

Beyond busting up the brothels and the gambling dens, though, there was little for them to do. A review of the warehouses and the shipping records revealed little that was amiss, and even the tax collector, Jurgen, seemed like a man more obsessed with making sure the numbers were right than enriching himself in the process.

There weren’t even any rumors of evils or cults, and apparently, the zombies and the lizardmen that featured in so many stories about the swamp hadn’t been seen in almost two decades since Count Leo Garvin, the Third, had been the ruler of the area. While Todd didn’t doubt that the stories had a basis in reality, two decades without a monster, even before the swamp had been drained, making it difficult to believe that either one of those creatures had ever been a real threat.

Once all of that was done, and there was seemingly no one left to bring to the light, they made a show of burning a small shrine to the Oroza at priest-candidate Verdenin’s suggestion. It only had one full-time priestess, and she was a kindly old woman who was full of light that did little more than cry as they shattered the shrine that she had spent years tending. They decided not to kill her or even to flog her since she was deemed to have been the part of the goddess’s cult that had worshiped the good and the true.

The decision didn’t save her, though, and a few days later, she was found dead in the river. Rumors said that she’d killed herself in grief for what the Templars had done to her goddess, and the town’s attitude toward their saviors soured a bit after that, but Todd didn’t care. Like everything else, he felt grief over her death just as keenly as if he’d caused it, and he spent the afternoon digging her grave by himself in the rain as penance for the tragedy.

The following day, Brother Faerbar announced that they would stay here the full month to root out evil as they were told to, but every man in the cadre agreed that there was little need for such thoroughness. Soon enough, they would be going back to the holy city to bury their dead and report the horrors they’d seen to their superiors.