Tenebroum PLUS Ch. 93-94 (Patreon)

Ch. 93 - Ten Thousand Candles

Even with the great dome of the temple toppled and the sun missing from the sky, the surviving leaders of the church would not listen to him. He, like so many of the other veterans who had survived the onslaught of monsters they’d all faced, urged their leaders to act with all the strength they had left and strike at the heart of the evil that had silenced their god and almost eradicated his temple. The ecclesiarch refused, though.

He wasn’t the only one. They all refused. The Hierarch of Purgative Flame refused to fight the decision, and his few surviving high priests did likewise. “We must defend this sacred place! We do not have the men to hold the walls, let alone strike out with an expeditionary force!” they said as one, no matter how many times they were petitioned by the surviving Brothers of the Purgative Flame in the long silence that followed their terrible tribulation.

For the strongest holy warriors to huddle behind the walls of their fortress city while the world was plunged into darkness was folly, of course, but what could he do? He could not even make the argument that they must defend the farmers who fed them as long as the sun no longer existed to ripen the grain.

Every bone in Templar’s battered body told him that staying on the defensive was the wrong decision, but he would have accepted it because that was his nature. Then, the sky filled with shooting stars.

To most, it was seen as an omen, though people could not agree on whether it was a sign of hope or something more sinister. Just the same, everyone watched it, including Brother Fearbar, who was praying at the ruined altar high on the temple mount for more guidance.

That was when he was struck by a star that came careening out of the night sky and hit him like a lightning bolt through the giant hole in the roof above him.

He barely noticed the stars and didn’t remember being struck. He’d looked up briefly at the start of the shooting stars through the ruined tangle of the nearest stained glass window but quickly focused on his prayers to Siddrim. Those efforts were earnest and fervent enough to block out the talking and chanting that otherwise filled the holy place for the next several minutes, and then the world was suddenly lost in white light.

For a moment, Brother Faerbar thought that he had died, but it wasn’t heaven he’d been gifted with, but a vision of hell. He saw a struggling, dying god, as well as the terrifying evil that he had fought, as well as the suffering that creation faced without a light to keep the terrors of the night at bay.

He woke up on the floor of the chapel surrounded by other acolytes and warriors, miraculously healed from the injuries he’d still been suffering from. More importantly, though, he woke up filled with light. He literally glowed with power.

Brother Faerbar had always been sensitive. Most people would have considered him too sensitive for the role of a Templar, but he’d reveled in it. What he’d seen before paled in comparison to the sights he saw now, though. Until tonight, he’d been blind, and it was only now that he could see. The light that filled his soul shone with a purity that let him see right through the men that surrounded him.

It was a depressing moment of exaltation as he saw the amount of cowardice and sloth on display. The church had not been defeated by an army of darkness. They had been defeated by themselves long ago. Some part of the aging Templar had always known this. He’d struggled with his orders many times throughout his career, though he’d always eventually obeyed and done what he’d been told.

That was his sin, and he knew that. He also knew the truth, though. Siddrim was dead, and this was one of his last gifts to the devout. The Templar couldn’t make sense of all the details that had befallen his god, but one word stood out above all the rest: Blackwater.

Something terrible happened in that place, and he personally needed to go and end it. That was all that Siddrim had asked for in return for this power.

Everyone waited for him to speak as Brother Faerbar rose to his feet, but as he absorbed all of this information, he was struck dumb, and slowly but surely, the entire room joined him in silence. “Tomorrow, the sun will rise, but not as we have known it,” he said finally, unwilling to share the full truth with his brothers just yet. “Then, once everyone has seen what has become of our world, we march to war.”

They asked more questions, but the Templar ignored them. Instead, he walked to the ruined window, well aware of the fact that he would glow like a beacon in the dark night. Light shot out of his eyes and mouth, and his every word seemed louder than before, so he did not waste them.

Instead, he repeated his message again to the audience that was gathering below. It was only once he’d done that that he began to preach from the Book of Dawn, trying to give all those who heard him hope that he no longer had. “We must share our light and spread into the darkness in the same way that the flame of one candle might light a thousand more without ever really depleting itself. We must be generous with that light, not miserly!”

As The Templar continued on, he couldn’t help but notice that it was true literally as well as figuratively. Normally, Siddrimar would be lit brightly, even at midnight, but today, he outshone the few candles and guttering torches that were scattered around and doing a remarkably poor job of illuminating the white city. However, here and there, he could see other pure white lights milling amongst the masses in the courtyards below.

He was not the only one who had been chosen for this task, and he was sure they would join him soon enough. They had to. They’d seen what he’d seen and knew what he knew.

Once that was complete, he returned to his room to gather his weapons, armor, and the surviving men of his cadre. The rules and the rulers of the church no longer applied because the church was no more. Broth Faerbar would only stay in these lightless walls long enough to prepare, and then he planned to camp outside of the main gate and wait for the rest of his army to show up.

By the time dawn once again touched the frigid world, he was already dressed in his full plate regalia and walking out of the main gate with a growing mob behind him that was trying to heap all sorts of unearned accolades upon him. Prophet. Messiah. He was none of these things. Eventually, he allowed them to call him Paragon, though. That was an ancient title for the leader of crusades, and this is surely what this was to be: the church’s last crusade.

By the time the third sun had risen, they had built their camp just across the river from the city, making their opposition to the church elders very clear: there was no safety to be found in those walls. For a time, they were ignored. However, by the time the first two suns had set and the third one was descending, a trickle of men started to join them in twos and threes. That trickle didn’t become a flood until nightfall, which was also when Brother Faerber noticed something peculiar for the first time.

By the time full darkness had set in, most of the men that were most loyal to him now had glowing eyes of their own. They’d spent the day telling scripture and stories, and it was that spark that he somehow managed to spread to them without diminishing his own. The other men present, who had mostly discussed fears or concerns about the fragmented nature of the sky, still had dark eyes, and Brother Faerbar thought that was fitting enough. It showed him that he still had work to do.

He’d hoped that explaining how each of the lights in the sky was one of the horses from Siddrimar’s chariot running free would have been enough to buoy them, but it was not. “Agrathixus, Nimeia, Dronicus, and Bosperon cannot light the world on their own,” he’d told them. “They need a strong hand to hold their reigns and a world awash in the prayers of good men to graze on.”

It wasn’t until morning that the church elders came with orders and admonishments. They’d obviously been unable to work up the courage to do so in the dark when the growing camp of the Crusaders was lit more brightly than the holy city. Now though, by the wan bluish light of morning, when the frost was still heavy on the grass, they came with banners and censers and all the pomp that they could muster to reassert their authority.

The council of Hierarchs from the different branches of the church started with bluster, but when that failed, they were reduced to reason and then finally pleading.

“Would you dare risk your immortal souls by defying the Ecclisearch?”

“Marching off with so few men in times such as these would be the height of foolishness!”

“Please, Don’t you understand? For the sake of church unity, you must obey us. The men respect you too much. Anything less would cause a rift in the church…”

Each time, Brother Faerbar rebuffed them, and each time, they returned only slightly more humbled than before.

Finally, though, during dinner, after his following had doubled and then doubled again, he denounced them. “Siddrim has left us, and it is because of old men like you!” he yelled. “I no longer take orders from men that have no light in their souls.”

That was something everyone could see. There were over a hundred men in the camp now, and most of them had a little light in their eyes. The church fathers, though, were a notable exception to that, and they left almost immediately once that was pointed out.

“Humility could still save them,” he told his comrades that night by the fire, “But that is a straight the church hasn’t prioritized in truth for a long time.”

All the confrontation did was cause the powers that be to shut the main gate to the best of their ability, but that was, in a sense, an admission of defeat, and over the following day, the trickle of men that had left Siddrimar to join Brother Faerbar’s crusade became a flood, but he never left his growing camp, nor spreading the tales that would inspire hope in the beleaguered men.

It was only when his dozens had become thousands that the Templars finally started to march to the west. He knew that others would join him along the way, both from Siddrimar and from every city that they passed through, but he could no longer wait. The evil they sought to vanquish continued to grow every day, and if they hoped to drive a stake through its heart, then time was of the essence.

Ch. 94 - Slowly Stirring

Tenebroum slept fitfully, dreaming of the tide of overwhelming death that it had unleashed on the world. It was a pleasant dream, and even as it struggled with the churning changes deep inside itself, it was lulled back to sleep by the symphony of screams and the gurgling rattles that followed them. Light had returned to the sky once more, but it was chaotic and weak, and it could not stop all that the Lich had set in motion. At best, it could only slow it down a few hours at a time, and in most places, it did precious little good. Only Siddrimar and Abenend were exceptions to that.

The mages had survived its assault largely intact, thanks to their dangerous magics, marking them as perhaps the most dangerous of its enemies. Another mass attack without its shadow drake or its titan to bring down the walls would be an exercise in futility, so they would be allowed to live a while longer. It had made them afraid, though. It could smell that fear wafting over the walls of their castle even as they tried and failed to understand what it was that they were up against. They now seemed disinclined to leave their walls for fear of what was to come next, and scrying was of very limited effectiveness when you did not know what exactly it was you were spying upon.

By contrast, the cursed city of Siddrimar had been ground halfway to dust in a bloody night that had lasted for day after day, but still, they insisted on becoming a problem once more. Krulm’venor had been allowed to tear apart the city until scarcely any copies of him had remained. That had been a battle worth watching to the Lich, and it reveled in the suffering of its slave almost as much as it did the deaths of its enemies.

Its most powerful servants were still grievously wounded by the terrible battles they had just endured, so they would be of little help in the days to come. By the end of the battle, Krulm’venor had escaped all but depleted, the shadow drake had been held aloft by only the magic that imbued it despite having one wing shredded and the other broken, and its titan had limped away from the battle missing an arm.

Even the death and destruction that the Lich’s four horsemen had rained down to earn those scars hadn’t been enough to fully extinguish that fervor, apparently. Amongst the ashes, some fresh spark had been relit there, lighting a new brushfire that was even now spreading south and west.

The darkness had made no progress in understanding the new lights that plagued it, nor the erratic movements they made as they moved from horizon to horizon by different paths each day. The tiny suns danced, doing their best to stave off its evil, but they were failing miserably. Just like its own servants, they were largely ineffective, though the Lich worried they might grow over time.

If each were to grow into a proper sun in its own right… the Lich worried, but it dismissed the thought. It would not let itself fret over hypotheticals until it had more information from the minds it had set to studying the new phenomena while it roused itself from slumber and focused on the dangers at hand. It would focus solely on the resources it had right now and not the ones it would like to have or those that might come available soon.

Only Oroza still functioned at anything close to full strength, and the Lich unleashed her without a second thought. It commanded her to smash bridges and sink boats in the northern end of her domain, wherever she found them, to buy it time.

The warriors were visible to it even before they made much progress into its territory. That was how bright they burned. It wasn’t just the relics and the blessed armor that they wore, though. Their fervor would have been obvious even without that. Many of them burned with an energy similar to that which it had only experienced before in Siddrim’s avatar, and that made the Lich nervous. It did not have many tools that could stand against that might.

It was that realization that finally pushed it from its slumber and back into the world of men. It could feel that it had been changed by the changes to its soul, though it would take a long time to truly understand those changes. Shadows and death were still there, of course, but beneath those murky waters, there were new currents. It was reminded of the strange things it had seen as its mind roiled with the chaos that underlay the world, but experiments on those subjects would have to wait until this danger had passed.

It had ten thousand undead warriors but few good options in fielding them against its current enemy in a timely manner. Its deathless soldiers were making great strides in reaping a crop of blood and death each night, but they were spread out in all directions, sacking everything in their path at points that were far from here, and it needed the strength that seeped into the darkness from corpses they left in their wake badly enough that it was hesitant to end their rampages entirely.

There was no denying that the darkness was weaker than it had been in a decade, but that was only because of exhaustion. It was confident that within a year, or perhaps two, it would be stronger than it had ever been before.

Some of them would have to return for the battle that lay ahead, though. Of that, there was no question. In places where deep mines for coal and ore existed, it could create shadow gates to bring home portions of the vast horde it had unleashed on the world. The rest of its forces would take time to draw back to where they were now needed most, though.

So, it summoned all of the allies and monstrosities it had built over the years. With the exception of the specialized creations, like the fleshcrafters, and the abominations that manned its library and its forges, it emptied its storehouses and tunnels of everybody that could stagger forward.

Most of these corpses were drudges that had already been worked to the bone for decades, but they would be enough to slow down the attack force and give it pause, buying Tenebroum a few more days. With luck, the waves of ineffective dead might even buy it the element of surprise in the attack to follow, though it would not bet on it. Not against veteran holy warriors who had already managed to survive their might in the first attack on their holy city.

After that, it reached out to the goblins in the west and the lizardmen in the north. Both groups had grown fat in the shadow of its protection, and they would now be called upon for service once again. It would take time for them to arrive, but the Lich was hopeful that the Goblins would arrive as the Templars reached Fallravea just so that unlucky city could have a chance to live through their deprivations all over again.

Those actions alone should have been enough to ensure its victory, but it was not enough to set the Lich’s mind at ease. It had tried to kill god and only partially succeeded; it had tried to steal the sun from the sky, but all it had managed to do was shatter it, and it had tried to raze Siddrimar to the ground, but all it had done was awaken a hornets’ nest.

A failure this time, or even a partial success, might mean that they would breach its temple or, worse, the mazes below. So it did every last thing it could think of to tilt the battlefield to its own advantage. It dispatched its shades by night to poison all of the wells between Blackwater and Fallravea, and while that was being done, it forced its titan back to the surface to use its earth magics to turn roads into bogs and erect a wall across the main approaches to its domain, just inside the veil of eternal night that protected it.

Once all of this was done, it unleashed a plague on the survivors that huddled inside the damaged and damaged city of Fallravea. The Lich had directed small attacks on that hollow shell of a city several times, but it had never been for the purpose of conquering it. It hadn’t needed to. They would never be a threat. It just liked to keep the populace afraid enough that they looked for new victims to blame this on and burn in effigy. That had been their way for the last few years, and Tenebroum would never grow tired of the smells of the innocents roasting on a pyre.

The plagues weren’t about killing people either, though a great many would die. Neither the red, bleeding sores of Weepers Rot nor the Grey Fever it had been improving over the last few years would be even a shadow of The Drowning. They would both do an excellent job of weakening the city as well as the army that was about to pass through it, though.

In the long term, it had hoped that hunger would do the majority of its work for it, but as powerful an ally as starvation was, it had one terrible drawback. It was slow. It would make no difference in a battle that would be over in weeks instead of months. The holy warriors that advanced on it might never have another meal for the rest of their short lives, and they would still be strong enough to put up a good fight by the time their emaciated forms reached its lair.

That stray thought was enough to trigger a whole cascade of thoughts about what it might be able to do concerning rats. Vermin like that would be the ideal carriers of plagues, and they might accelerate its push for famine by months or years if given metal teeth so that they could chew tirelessly through stone granaries.

The Lich had but to think it, and almost instantly, its servants began to draft plans for the disassembly of living subjects as well as the pieces that would have to be fabricated to improve them. It could not spare the resources now, of course, but it would be a good experiment to toy with another time, especially if it filled them with tox poisons for them to vomit into dwindling foodstuffs.

Tenebroum’s shadow raptors continued to function well as spies and test subjects for the mysterious magic that was flight. Even now, they watched the army of light’s advance each night, and it watched their progress through those red eyes as they grew both in terms of numbers and light. It had never before thought to use them to intentionally spread pestilence.

That was one more thing it would do once the battle ahead was won. Diligently, its tome recorded all of these ideas, though the Lich doubted it would return to them for many months. For now, all that really mattered was how many war zombies could beat the army of light when it arrived and what strange new surprises its fleshcrafters could create in the weeks that remained.