Tenebroum PLUS Ch. 99-100 (Patreon)

!00 chapters. Can you believe it? The first 100 chapters of this story is 100 chapters long and I don't consider us quite to the halfway mark. Crazy, right? Thank you for reading this far and joining me on this weird journey into the dark. 

Ch. 99 - Pure Futility

It watched the army approach with a calm feeling that bordered on amusement. The army itself was impressive enough for being a mass of flickering candles surrounding a single bonfire, but the Lich had nothing to fear here. It had watched the mass of men grow at every step of the way as they marched from the battered husk of the holy city to the southwest through the red eyes of its ravens and other, more shadowy minions, but Tenebroum was no longer concerned. Their window had already passed, though, and they didn’t even know it.

A small group of swift riders that had gotten here three or four days ago could have done far more damage to it than the lumbering force that was arrayed against it today. Now, it had left Tagel by the sea and all the other cities across the river in Dutton as burnt-out husks to stand as a warning to any humans who might try to venture this close again and reunited the fingers of its vast army into a single fist once more.

Even now, the fools that were marching on Blackwater had no more of an idea of what awaited them there than they had of the fate that was already befalling the men they’d left behind. This brash general had thought that the dividing line was the difference between danger and safety, but they’d made a horrible miscalculation. Tenebroum was awake now. It was more awake than it had ever been in its entire unlife, perhaps, and safety was quickly becoming a scarce commodity everywhere.

It had devoured the Lord of Light, but that feast had only clarified things, making the shadows of its soul that much darker by contrast. What it had gained from the God that had ruled the skies until so recently, though, was a newfound appreciation for a sense of order.

The Lich had managed to stumble on some of those precepts in the last decade, but all of those had bent toward the end of trapping and slaying a god. Beyond that, it had simply worked as nature willed and unleashed its creations based on whim.

For a long time, chaos had served its goals. It had been as natural as the swamp that had been a part of it for so long. Now, though, it understood the limitations. Chaos could not form clean battle lines, it could not execute orders simple enough for its drudges to obey, and it could not execute pincer attacks.

But Lich could do all those things now. It was a new clarity that it had stolen from the God that now made up almost half of its oversoul. In some ways, that was worth more than the sheer amount of power it had gained from its latest conquest.

It watched the battlefield now, not as a hungry observer but as a cautious general. For days, it had been sending small waves of useless drudges to slow the march, and now, after the Templars had wasted precious days curing the sick and feeding the hungry, it had them boxed in on all sides. Once its ambushing force massacred their rear guard, it would outnumber them two to one and grind them to dust.

The early victories it allowed them were meant only to test their mettle and increase their overconfidence enough that they felt strong enough to venture into the depths. When they finally succeeded in killing its juggernaut, the Lich’s interest became all the more intense as it watched the wave of shrapnel shred the nearest men in a hail of green fire and cursed metal. The leader survived, but that was unsurprising. The man fairly glowed with divine light, though the Lich had watched with great interest as it had flickered when the man had viewed the corpse of his God.

As with so many things in the world, it seemed to Tenebroum that the human heart was the weak link, and it wondered how many of the man’s soldiers it would have to slaughter before that light went out for good. It was a question that the darkness was hoping to find out soon, though for now, all it could do was watch as they healed the dying and counted the dead.

That little skirmish had cost almost 50 lives, and most of those had come from the juggernaut’s explosion, but the Lich was unconcerned by the loss. Those bones were dipped in molten iron - it could easily build the thing once the fighting was done. It would build others like it now that the concept worked. It had only built the bomb to blast open the doors of a particularly resilient keep, but it had worked wonderfully to flense the living as well.

When they reached the Temple of the Dawn, it did not bar their way. It let them gaze upon the mockery that had been made of their holy site without any obstacle to bar them. The sight of the golden saints reduced to nothing but necromantic abominations pinned to the walls was enough by itself to make the light go out in more than a few of the Crusaders all by itself. And they quickly smashed many of the decorations before they started down the winding stairs into the darkness.

The Lich could have stopped them here. It was sure of that. There were two armies on the surface right now, and both were larger than the Templar force. The former stood silently five hundred yards to the west near the river, in neat rows and was made up of eight thousand war zombies, and the latter group was made up of almost four thousand and was drawing slowly into a tighter ring around the outnumbered defenders that were being methodically slaughtered.

In truth, the Lich could have likely wiped the second, smaller group out already if it wanted to. In this case, though, the fear that was radiating from the women and children that were clustered there in the center that stayed its hand. The templars had faced a difficult choice, of course - leave the stragglers they found undefended to be killed by the first mob of zombies that found them or keep them close to protect them. They had tried to be heroic, but there was no heroic defense to be had on a battlefield where they could not even save themselves, and in time, it would slaughter them to a man.

Well - to a boy. It amused the Lich to spare the son of his favorite tome, so when the bloodbath was complete, only one squalling cry would be done. As far as the Lich was concerned, he was welcome to lay there until exposure took it and serenade the drudges, bringing corpses back to its lair for resurrection once the battle was done. It didn’t know what it would do with the child’s corpse, but it was sure it would think of something appropriate.

And though it would be hours before the battle was done, the Lich was already confident of the outcome. Oroza lay just offshore, waiting to catch any soldiers that managed to flee so far when its army had broken them. The Lich just wanted a few hundred more deep beneath the earth so that their army was spread out as much as possible.

That was only minutes away, though. Every few seconds, another soldier descended those stairs in a tightly packed and intensely vulnerable formation. They’d checked the nearby buildings and thought that they’d secured the area, but they were wrong. They’d been trapped by it.

Once the vanguard was completely below ground, the altar mechanism was tripped, and the stairs began to slowly rise back into position, cleanly splitting the army yet again. Now, it could leave its war zombies to massacre the leaderless group on the surface while its menagerie of monsters devoured the elite in the depths.

As the second battle started in earnest, the screams and battle cries were inaudible to those who’d already descended into the depths of its labyrinth, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t happen. Unlike the battle that was just coming to a conclusion just outside its domain, this one was only beginning and would take time.

At first, it was a simple thing with plate mail-wearing warriors against platemail-wearing warriors. The zombies moved slower, but they were almost impossible to bring down while wearing steel gorgets that made beheading impossible. This turned the whole thing into an ugly grinding deathmatch, with the warriors of light using pikes to try to help their front ranks while the zombie warriors took blow after fatal blow without falling while the warm blood of the living slowly turned the icy ground they were battling on into dark, sticky mud.

This was just a feint, though. The Lich was merely checking to see what use of divine magic those that remained might have, and the answer proved to be almost none, which filled it with hunger. That would let it unleash the second part of its plan without fear of reprisal.

Sadly the shadow drake was still lying in pieces on the floor of its largest fleshcrafting shop, but it had other shadowy servants that it could bring to bear to break the ranks of these brave holy men. That distraction came in the form of a flock of blackbirds that descended on the bright-eyed men. Up until now, they’d shown such bravery, but it was one thing to face down a common zombie armed with a sword bolted to its hand. It was quite another to deal with a flock of undead, skeletonized birds soaring out of the dark to peck out those bright, glowing eyes from your skull.

Paroxysms of panic and fear shot through the assembled men as those without their visors down who thought they were safely in the third or fourth rank were suddenly forced to defend themselves against a threat that should have been little more than an annoyance. In truth, its blackbirds were hardly a threat to a prepared enemy, but it had thousands of them to spare at this point and a flesh crafter who did nothing but make half a dozen every day, so it was worth wasting a few hundred for a moment of advantage.

While the Templars were distracted, the zombies surged forward, breaking through the ranks of their enemy in several places. Given time, the Templars would close ranks and fill the gaps, of course, if it let them, but the Lich had no plans of doing that. Now that everyone was hopelessly locked into place, it released the few hundred dead goblins it had been holding in reserve. Many of them had been originally intended to be incorporated with Krulm’venors form to increase his multiplicity further, but the loss of so many of himself in the battle of Siddrimar had driven its favorite fire spirit quite mad, and so for now, the Lich held off until it could incorporate it with some of the dwarven dead to bring the mixture back into balance.

Though not as fast as they were in life, the goblins clamored atop the zombies and ran through the legs of their enemies, attacking anything with a pulse with wicked steel claws. For an already besieged enemy. This was enough to force them to start blowing the horns and sound a fighting retreat, which suited the Lich fine. If they wanted to wait until both of its armies could fight them at once and crush them between the hammer and the anvil, then it would oblige them.

Ch. 100 - The Vanguard

They were already hundreds of yards from the entrance when it started to close, as Jordan knew it would. It had to. A narrow set of stairs down into the darkness to defeat the thing that had done all this without a single guard in sight was obviously a trap.

Still, that certainty hadn’t been enough to stop him from obediently following the Crusade’s Paragon. His only act of defiance had been to count his steps as they went because Jordan’s backup plan was never far from his mind. He’d sworn to himself that he would fight alongside these brave men until the end, but at the same time, he had no wish to become the very thing that they were fighting once he died.

He hadn’t really wanted to stay behind in the Temple of the Dawn either, though. He’d never personally been to a place that reeked of evil and death as much as that place. Well, at least not until he descended the stairs and made his way to the temple beneath it. There, amidst the miasma of evil that was so strong it was almost palpable, he made sure to stay close to the Paragon’s light even as the darkness crowded around them.

“Fear not, my brothers,” Brother Faerbar said as the stone door they’d entered slowly rumbled shut somewhere behind them. “We are not trapped down here. It is the monsters of the pit that are now trapped in here with us!”

There was a rallying cry from the other men to accompany that, which was frighteningly loud as it echoed into the dark. After that, Jordan could hear the other men talking about how the Paragon had done exactly this sort of thing before when he purged Fallravea of the degenerate Oroza worshipers.

He found it hard to concentrate on that, though, with the dull echo of their earlier. In fact, as he listened, he realized that the echo was getting louder again like it was coming back to them.

“Sir… ummmm, your Paragon-ness, I think that—” Jordan started to say, but the gruff older man interrupted him.

“They’re coming,” he said quietly.

Jordan could hear it now. Even as everyone around him drew their swords, he could hear the distant rumble getting louder and louder until it was nothing but a keening horde that was so loud he couldn’t think straight.

They’d passed through the main under temple, through the main exist, and had been following an elaborately tiled corridor with irregularly spaced exists on either side. Up ahead, the mage could see that the corridor expanded out into a large room, but even with the volume of the sound, or perhaps because of it, he couldn’t quite figure out which direction the sounds were coming from.

The answer turned out to be all of them. Even as the Paragon forced his way forward into the larger hall where bodies had been stacked like cordwood along the far wall, the tide of evil was coming for them all. To the Templars’ credit, nobody turned and ran, though Jordan would have if there had been a direction that was free. There wasn’t, though. He had walked into hell itself, and the gates had been slammed shut behind him.

Jordan feared that at any moment, he would see more zombies, ready to fight him in wave after relentless wave. That wasn’t what happened, though. Instead, they were assaulted by dozens of oddities that looked utterly inhuman. The first came a wave of screaming skulls that were on them before he could even decide what spell to cast against them. They were covered in blue-white fire and blew up on impact with the first line of warriors.

After that came an assortment of anatomical oddities. There was a giant snake made from the limbless torsos of a dozen people with a mouth full of rusted swords for fangs, a jellyfish made of a disembodied brain dragging a small thicket of semi-translucent tendrils behind it, and a ball of arms that was so large that it moved by pushing off the ceiling and floor simultaneously.

Each of those seemed almost comical on the face of it, and Jordan almost started to laugh hysterically as a strange sort of coping mechanism. It wasn’t so funny when they got close, though. The serpent seemed to have no issue ripping people in half with its powerful jaws. The weird ball of hands lost a few as it approached the men with swords, though it quickly started to strangle everyone around it like a particularly aggressive octopus, and the brain, well, it didn’t seem to do anything. It just sort of floated there halfway across the room, and then people started killing each other.

For the moment, Jordan found himself immune to whatever magics the hideous thing was using to make Templar turn against Templar, but as soon as Brother Faerbar surged forward to deal with the twisted serpent creature, Jordan immediately found himself filled with paranoid delusions. He could feel the hate that the religious men had for him. He knew exactly what they would do to a mage like him. Any moment, they would stab him to death. He could practically feel the blades piercing his organs, and the urge to set all of them alight before they could deliver such a gruesome end became almost too much to bear.

He did, though. Instead of spraying fire at the knights in all directions, he called upon the thunder and struck the brain entity instead, noting how jellyfish-like it looked as the energy arced back and forth between its gently waving fronds until it burned itself to a crisp and fell slowly to the stone floor as a collection of cinders.

Those weren’t the only monstrosities to appear, though. They were just the first wave. “To me!” the Paragon yelled as soon as his serpentine opponent finally lay still, but very few men answered his call.

Most of the worst monsters that seemed to be made out of shadows more than flesh gave Brother Faerbar and his aura a wide berth, but they quickly cut swathes through the brave, holy warriors. The Templars slew their wraithlike enemies by the score, but when you are outnumbered by a perpetual tide of damnation, what did it matter if you killed a dozen or a hundred before they finally ripped your still-screaming soul from your body?

The room behind them had been reduced from one giant battlefield with two sides to a hundred smaller battles that ranged in size from skirmishes to duels. Jordan doubted that the other men in the hallway leading to this point were doing much better based on the echoing screams that made it this far. A minute or two ago, they’d been a single unified line against the darkness, but it was impossible to fight these things with any martial discipline when each of them was a unique monstrosity that had been created by a clearly deranged mind, and Jordan was quite sure that if they managed to fight their way free of this horror show, he would never have a good night’s sleep again.

Brother Faerbar continued to slice a bloodless path through his enemies, slaying as many as any other ten men in the room put together as he pressed toward the nearest doorway where they might be able to establish some kind of coordinated defense. That seemed like a pipedream at this point. No matter how many times he wove the threads to summon a wall of fire to ward off his enemies, he could feel them getting closer with every beat of his heart.

Part of him wished he’d just stayed at Abenend and died with his friends. He would have still died and been raised as a soulless servant of some dark god, but at least he would never have had to endure the sights he’d seen tonight.

Then suddenly, without warning, he was grabbed by the color of his robes. He thought for sure that was the end, and rather than fight it, Jordan went limp and accepted his fate. No teeth knawed at his throat, though, and no sword was jammed through his heart. Instead, he realized too late that it was Brother Faerbar. He’d grabbed him, yanking the mage off his feet and pulling him behind him.

Jordan landed in a mound of the actually dead. At least, he hoped they were, as he pulled himself to his feet. They were in a small alcove that had been reduced to the storage of moldering dead. For a moment, he almost broke down in tears. He was never meant to be in such a place. He didn’t give in, though. Being trapped like this made it easier. Now, Jordan knew he had only one choice. He started to chant.

Up until now, he’d only channeled fire and lighting. They were easy enough spells that did great work against the shadows, but he would run out of mana long before this pit ran out of shadows, so he focused on the number of steps they’d take since they left the army behind. It was only 48 steps down and 200 steps eastish to get back to the temple entrance. That was doable, even with other people.

It was the solid stone between here and there that made that an iffy prospect. Well, that and the fact that there were certain to be more monstrosities waiting for him there.

The mage tried to ignore the Paragon’s desperate hymn as he fought back against some deathless monster in the doorway. He tried not to think about the fact that the fanatic was all that stood between him and a death too gruesome to mention as he focused on the facts.

It wasn’t like he could just teleport the two of them free and clear anyway. The edge of the wall of shadows was just over five thousand steps away. That was too far for anyone but an archmage.

It felt like an impossibility, but he didn’t let that stop him. The inescapable fact was that the last time he’d cast this spell, he’d ended up miles from anywhere he’d meant to be and had been lucky to be alive. Every fiber of his being was telling him not to do it again, and yet he was certain that even a messy death where he ended up fusing with a tree or a wall and dying in agony was immensely preferable to whatever would happen to him after he died down here.

So, with that thought in mind, he aimed for almost a mile away, toward what he recalled as empty fields, while he focused on the words and the gestures necessary to bend the world to his will in such a complex way. His odds were certainly less than one in a hundred with all the complicating factors involved, but Jordan ignored them. Brother Faerbar’s light was flagging, and his strength was failing. It was time to roll the dice, so with his last syllable, he reached out and grabbed the shoulder of the Pargon and took him along for the ride.

Jordan was sure that the man would have vehemently refused such an act and that he might well kill him when they reached the other side, but it wasn’t like they were leaving any of the living behind. They’d been separated from the larger group and forced to face an endless series of monstrosities alone for a while now, and everyone who had stood by Brother Faerbar’s side was already dead.

As the world disappeared and vanished into a flash of light, he left with a clean consciousness. Jordan’s heart might have been pounding out of his chest, but this time he felt sure that he hadn’t screwed up the spell.