Tenebroum PLUS Ch. 103-104 (Patreon)

Ch. 103 - Cut Off

The very earth shook with Tenebroum’s undiluted rage as the river goddess slipped the leash and succeeded in sliding back into her river, where she immediately vanished. In that moment, she accomplished something that no one had ever done before - she had escaped the Lich, defeating it in a way that bordered on humiliating, even if it had only lost a single soul in the process.

Its very first thought, before the clouds of anger had even cleared, was to begin to imagine ways it might get her back. It could inscribe her true name on nets of woven metal. It could dig a reservoir deep beneath and trap her forever. It could build a giant cauldron and then boil her until she was nothing but cloudy vapor.

All of these were dismissed by it as being utterly impractical. Instead, it forced itself to accept what it really needed to do: crush her without mercy. In all the years it had owned her, it had never succeeded in breaking her spirit the way that it had with Krulm’venor’s. The Lich had never determined if it was her element’s nature or her fierce spirit that was the source of her resilience, but at this point, it no longer mattered.

Even in its most paranoid flights of fantasy, it never presumed that the goddess would muster the strength to escape or to help its enemies. It was unimaginable. Up until now, the most she’d been able to do was struggle to spare children or followers and, once, to delay her attacks long enough to try to get that pathetic creature Paulus to help her.

None of those acts had even hinted that she’d be capable of something like this, though. As it studied the wreckage of its oldest and best servant, it was plain to see what had happened. Salt and time had done their worst to the runes, and she’d waited patiently for her waters to do their slow, inevitable work. It was frustrating but easy to see how it had missed it in its single-minded quest to destroy the light. The version of Tenebroum that had emerged from that experience vowed to focus more on those minor details going forward. It would never let this happen again.

After all, it had been bad enough to lose one of its most powerful servants and watch the lone surviving Templar escape, but it did not realize the full depth of her betrayal until it finished the slaughter in the deeps and tried to dispatch a legion across the river to Dutton to finish the bloodbath it had started there. There was evidence that Siddrim’s church was regrouping, and it hoped to launch a sneak attack on their tenuous supply lines, but it very quickly found out that was a bad idea.

The first three ranks were getting close to the opposite shore when the river dragon suddenly appeared like the force of nature that she was. One moment, the water was just water, but moments later, it became impenetrable scales and devastating claws. In an instant, those clean ranks of bone, flesh, and steel that would have been difficult for even strong men to sunder were dashed to pieces by the treacherous currents.

The Lich immediately reversed course and sounded the retreat, but it was clear that going forward, the long, familiar paths that it used to shield its soldiers from the light were lost to it. This was doubly painful since it had already destroyed all the strong stone bridges upriver in its quest to slow down the Crusaders.

It tried to mend the crossing near Fallravea with timbers and magic, but no sooner had it made the way crossable than the waters around the central pillar began to boil and throb until the whole central support fell away into the dark, churning waters along with several zombies rendering the chasm unbridgeable.

This outraged the Lich even further. Though its domain over the waters had been slipping constantly since her rebellion, it did not think she had the power to do something so blatant, but she did.

“You trifle with me at your peril, woman!” Tenebroum roared. “If you seek war with me, then you shall have it!”

It continued its reconnaissance of the lands beyond, noting the fear had ebbed to some degree as people had started to accept the new state of things. It doubted that would last long, though. This was a chilly summer, and the signs of the starvation to come were already starting to show in most fields. Grain would grow increasingly scarce this far south, and not even the increased hours of sunlight was enough to combat just how thin and weak that light had become.

The darkness might not have won in a single stroke like it hoped, but if this was the peak of summer, then the world was in for a cruel awakening come winter. The Lich considered holding off on its advances until ice covered the Oroza once more in a few months.

There was no telling what that frigid bitch would do then, though, it decided. So even trying to cross on a river that was completely frozen over probably still wouldn’t be a good idea because she was very clearly fixated on thwarting it for the foreseeable future. In that, at least, it could not blame her. Albrecht had only caged its soul for a few years, and it still burned with hatred for the long-dead mage that became the skeleton of who it had become.

It had to come up with some other way to unleash its legions of death on the world. Ultimately, that probably meant killing the goddess and her river, but it wasn’t sure how best to go about that. Tenebroum had already poisoned her river once, and though it wasn’t sure when Paulus had removed the cholarium sieve, it was very clear that it was indeed missing from the spring where it had been installed when it sent a few shades to inspect it one night.

That was almost ironic. It had noted that the poison levels in the river were falling, but it had never made the connection because it had kept a watch on the area with dead-eyed ravens and four-winged vultures for years, and the man had never appeared. The Lich silently fumed at that as it berated itself for its fixation on preparing the Temple of Dawn, but all it could do now was address the issue and install a new one.

As soon as it did, something odd happened, though. The spring stopped flowing.

Its servant placed the tainted metal in the pool just as it had done before, but as the drudge stood there, slowly dissolving from the caustic water, the pool became still, and the small stream that ran downhill slowly began to dry up. It took several minutes for Tenebroum to figure out what had happened. The goddess had literally chosen to cut off part of herself rather than allow it to poison her the same way twice.

“If Siddrim had possessed such steel, there would still be a sun in the sky.” the Lich growled with the faintest hint of appreciation as it watched her reject it completely. “I wonder if your discipline will waver when we repeat this experiment at all your other headwaters.”

The goddess gave no response to that. It was not something that it could execute tomorrow, though. Creating so much of the brittle anti-water would take a long time. It did set the necessary works in motion, though, just as it dispatched its leaded earth titan to the Red Hills.

“If she wants to reject my gifts and dry up rather than embrace me, then we shall have to find a new source to flood the Oroza,” it mused. “Go west and dig a channel that reaches all the way to the sea. Connect Kelvun’s canal with the ocean, and let’s see if that doesn’t twist the knife a little more for her.”

Once that was done, and the poisoning of the river goddess was set in motion from all angles, it was free to focus on what needed to happen next. It needed a new way forward.

In the end, it was forced to send the iron men that it had been building to cut it a new, deeper path to freedom. The legion of rust it had been building ever since the sacking of Mournden used cast rune plates to force the skulls of the dwarves it had so many of these days to create something that its fire godling had never been: obedient and loyal.

The dwarves had a strong spirit, it was true. Each and every one of them, except for its mutilated and mutated hound, were much more likely to break than bend, but with their true names so helpfully engraved onto the mortal remains, it was easy to lead even the most obstinate ox with the right spell.

It had been planning on unleashing a legion of a thousand such warriors to cut right through the walls of Abenend, which still had not fallen despite its best efforts. It was the last remaining holdout in the whole region, but it was not a priority right now.

The church had been crushed, the last gasp of an army had been shattered, and their feeble efforts to build some kind of fortification to keep it contained were worrisome, but only because of their proximity to the river on the one side and the magic school on the other.

As much as it would love to purge it from the map, that assault would have to be delayed for now until it could strike at all of them from some unexpected angle. Even though it would have much preferred to use the unique anti-magic properties of these soldiers, its need to be cut free of the box it found itself in was far more important.

Every direction was barred to it, with the Wyrmspires in the north, the Oroza to the east, and the Relict Sea to the west and south. Right now, the only conceivable way out of that box was to the northeast, through the narrow gap in the foothills.

The problem with that was that all of its enemies expected it to do exactly that. They were converging there, and though Tenebroum could still likely win the exchange, it would come at a great cost, and after the damage the last army had done, it was in no hurry to lash out again unprepared. It would find another way that no one would expect.

The good news was that the peninsula well and truly belonged to it now. There was little that still lived on it, but the creatures that did, be they human, goblin, or lizardmen, belonged to it body and soul. The bad news was that its fortress was also a cage.

It hungered for fresh blood and souls as it always did, and no matter how much power it had siphoned from Siddrim’s dying soul, that well would eventually run dry if it found nothing new to feast on. And there was so much life to the north. More than even it knew about until it glimpsed the world through the eyes of the Lord of Light. Fallravea wasn’t even a large city by comparison, and it hungered to read the bloody harvest that those rich farmlands could provide, but first, it had to reach it in force, and the only way to dig a tunnel like that in anything approaching an acceptable timeline was to bend its army of tireless dwarves to the task.

Once it did the math and realized that the zombie drudges would take decades to carve the path, it required  them with mithril-tipped picks rather than the steel swords and shields it had been forging for so long now. Yes, the path over the mountains was much too rugged, but a tunnel just below them might be completed in only a year or two. Then, It would vomit forth death on the continent in a manner that would leave no survivors.

Ch. 104 - The Last Ship Home

Even after a few days to reflect on it, Jordan wasn’t exactly sure what had happened. They’d only barely managed to avoid death at the hands of the endless grasping dead, and then while they stood there on the shore, they were attacked by the rotting corpse of a dragon, and somehow Brother Faerbar had struck some vital blow, and it had torn itself to pieces.

It made no sense. None of it did. In fact, it felt more like a fever dream than reality, but no one really talked about any of it except the children, and that only added to the strangeness of the whole ordeal. How did you talk to children about anything? With small words and hopeful euphemisms.

It was Siddrim’s light that smote the dragon. Lunara’s mercy had saved the child. They should all be grateful to the swiftly flowing Oroza for saving them.

All of those things were true, probably, but none of them were answers. They were barely statements of fact, but since that terrible battle, the Templar had been silent and tended only to the child he’d rescued. Physically, he was uninjured, but mentally? To Jordan, his mind seemed shattered. The sailor wasn’t much better. He might swear and curse that something wasn’t being done fast enough or well enough, but other than that, he kept himself to himself, which left no one but children, an upjumped commoner who pretended to be a noble, and a couple of very frightened mothers to talk to.

They were all bad choices, and Jordan did as little of any of that as he could manage. Instead, he tried to study and sort the conflicting recollections of his mind. Often, while he toyed with the manacle, he’d scooped up when he rescued the Templar.

Honestly, if not for the dreadful magics that clung to that gilded hunk of rusted steel, he would have been quite certain that he’d made the whole thing up. There was no way he could make up dread magics like this, though.

He spent most nights sitting alone at the bow, watching the stars drift by on the languid bow wake while he studied the evil auras that wafted off the thing like an evil aura that only he could see. Well - the Templar could see it too. Jordan could tell that much  just by the way the man looked at him, but all he’d ever said on the matter was, “If you start to show any signs of corruption, I’ll cut you into pieces and burn the corpse to ashes.”

Jordan believed him. If anything, he had a much harder time believing that the man hadn’t killed him yet. Every day, he told himself that he should throw it overboard at least twice, but every day, he held on to it, certain that if he could just get it to a magus more learned than him, it might reveal some important clue about the enemy that they had to fight if anyone had any hope of putting the world back together.

Winning this terrible war could come later, though. Right now, all that really mattered was that they went away as fast as their fragile little sailboat could manage. Every day, they drifted more and more to the north, with the help of favorable winds and impossible currents, but it changed nothing. Everywhere they went, they found only devastation and empty fields. It seemed impossible that an evil that no one had even whispered about had spread so far in so little time, but if the women were to be believed, it was like this all the way to the sea. In less than a month, at least three counties had been utterly purged of life, and no one could say how much further the damage continued upriver.

It was basically the apocalypse; the world as they’d known it had been abandoned, and in its place, they found only burned-out farmhouses and unburied bodies. They found less boat traffic, too, but that was just as well because the living that they had found had become lean, predatory men.

When they passed from the Oroza to the Tolden river that flowed into it, just before they’d reached the ruins of Siddramar itself, one small skiff with four hungry men actually tried to pull alongside and take what they had by force.

Jordan didn’t even try to warm them, lest he find out the hard way that they have a crossbow bolt. He’d just muttered a few words and watched the lightning bolt arc down from a clear blue sky to hole their vessel and burn their sails.

A couple of them almost certainly died the moment that the lightning struck, but at least one of them might survive long enough to make it to shore, though Jordan very much doubted the man would survive the terrible burns that he’d received in the blast.

The children gawked and squealed at that, but her was subtle enough that none of them seemed to blame him for the magic. The adults knew, of course, but there was as much gratitude as fear in their eyes, and they said nothing at all. Even the suspicious old sailor, who was superstitious enough to make warding gestures at almost anything, didn’t outright chastise the mage for what he’d done because he knew that any other outcome would have been worse.

Two days later, they finally reached Siddrimar and the great stone bridge that crossed the Tolden, but they didn’t stop like Jordan thought they would. “Bah - keep going,” the Templar called out when he heard they were mooring.

“But if not here, then where?” Markez asked. “I only went this way because I thought your people could protect us, I—”

“Take them to the capital. Let the King protect them. This place is cursed,” Brother Faerbar said, unable or unwilling to take his eyes off the shore for a long moment before he turned around and walked back below decks with the child he called Leo still in his arms.

“Isn’t he supposed to be some bigshot with the temple?” Markez asked, obviously spooked.

“I mean, if you took a whole army off to slay a nightmare, I’m not sure you’d want to go back home and report what happened either,” Jordan responded without meeting the man’s eye.

Being this close to the church was a risk for a mage, and he had no doubt that any of the priests with the sight could have picked him out of the crowd without issue, but today, he wasn’t worried, even though he should have been. Today, he wasn’t too worried. There were bigger forces at play than witch hunts. Instead of worrying about who might try to track him down, he tried to imagine what these pristine walls had looked like before whatever terrible thing had occurred that had brought the high towers down into ragged stacks of rubble and littered the manicured landscape with burn marks and blood spots.

He’d known it was going to be bad, of course, but he was sure the Collegium looked no better than the church’s fortress city. Whether he’d wanted to come here or not, Jordan had assumed that this would be their destination. Despite Brother Faerbar’s lack of communication, he’d assumed that they were trying to warn the elders and high priests of all the terrible things they’d seen, but that didn’t happen, and that created a whole new puzzle.

“Where should we go then?” Markez asked as they drifted slowly toward the shore. “The Capital? I can’t imagine they’re eager for more refugees. We’re liable to find the gates shut in our face, and with so many mouths to feed, I doubt very much that we have the food to get there.”

Jordan nodded. He agreed on all counts. “No. A place like that at a time like this? That’s the last place I’d want to be. We’ll have to go home.”

“Home?” Markez demanded, slamming his hands down on the rail. “Are you mad? We’ve come all this way, and you think we should just turn around and go back to the sea? I… we will never make it through that shadow… if we go back and tempt fate, and mark my words…”

“No,” Jordan interrupted softly before the man could get much more worked up. “Not your home. My home.”

“No offense to you and yours wizard, but I don’t think the ruins of a magic school are a fit place for children and—”

“Not Abenend,” Jordan said louder than he meant to as he slammed his hand down on the railing. “Something you might not know… Something most people don’t know, even though it’s not really a secret, is that most of the students who end up there are the extra sons of wealthy families. I am no different.”

Markez did a double take, “Wait - you mean you and the idiot over there are part of the same club? How’s that work?”

“Well, technically, Dian is the second son of a Baronet. It is a title he wouldn’t inherit even if he was the first son. He’s all posturing and no substance,” Jordan said, flashing a smile. “His father holds the rights to certain… let’s say fishing grounds. Nothing more.”

Jordan had considered holding those details back, but the way it made Markez laugh for the first time on the whole trip made it worthwhile.” So yer sayin’ I can stop taking it easy on him?”

“I don’t think you take it easy on anyone, old man, except for maybe the kids,” Jordan added, getting an approving nod for his trouble.

“Alright then - you tell me where we’re goin’, and I’ll get ya there,” the sailor said, finally listening to the mage for the first time, whether he was blue-blooded or not.

Jordan told him as much as he needed to know. He told him that Sedgim manor was an estate of ample size less than a day from the north fork of the river and that it was less than a week away, just after the Greywood gave way to the hilly pasture lands that his family had owned for generations.

He left out the goblin threats, the sullen older brothers who might not be so happy about his sudden appearance, and the fact that the well-manicured grounds were probably larger than any five little fishing villages like the one that Markez had come from put together. Those were later problems. For now, he just needed the sailor to keep the ship moving, the paladin to produce loaves and potatoes from thin air every now and again, and he would focus on keeping everyone safe.

After all, no matter how far they had to go, as long as they stayed on the water, he didn’t imagine an army of the undead could reach them, and even though he was just an apprentice, he was confident that he could square off against anything short of that.