Tenebroum PLUS Ch. 107-109 (Patreon)

Merry Christmas! (Or happy holidays as the case may be.) Enjoy your bonus chapter present and let me know if you think the events of chapter 109 should be further extended. Thank you!

Ch. 107 - War Without End

Tenebroum expected to turn the tide quickly in the weeks that followed, but it was sadly mistaken in that belief. Instead, it was put on the back foot in the short term, and the dwarves continued through side passages they created around the tunnel it collapsed. Through those warrens, they pressed forward, collapsing section after section and undoing all its hard work until it could bring new units to bear.

Since most of the Lich’s units weren’t ready, it unleashed the goblin hordes still loyal to it. Though not quite endless, they were massive swarms in the thousands, and they needed no urging to join their slaughter against an ancestral enemy. At best, that was a delaying tactic while it studied the souls of the corpses it had taken and devoured all the dwarven secrets it could.

The dwarves were made out of sturdier stuff than most, which was both a blessing and a curse. The Lich enjoyed that struggle, but on this matter, it was in a hurry, and it desperately needed to know what had caused the men of the deeps to join together in common cause with the men of the realms.

As it turned out, nothing had. There was no alliance here. Instead, this had all been a part of a plan against the darkness. One that had started even before Siddrim’s light had been plucked out of the sky. The dwarves were here to avenge the loss of Mournden. They’d been driven here by divine revelation and come from cities as far away as three hundred miles to make it pay.

It was practically another crusade, and this fact frustrated the Lich to no end. As much as it would love to take the time to unleash new horrors into the deeps and hunt the dwarves to extinction, they were not currently the priority. They wouldn’t be until the sunlit realms above had been hunted until humanity was near extinction, and their gods lay broken and scattered across the face of a cold, dark world.

All of that awaited a new path to send its forces, though, and right now, a few hundred dwarves were saving hundreds of thousands of humans just because one of their graveyards had been desecrated. Day by day, the darkness lost the element of surprise because of this farce, and slowly, despite its more strategic worldview, its patience waned.

That was fine. The goblins cared for neither patience nor strategy as they spread into the side tunnels and the crevices. They explored the dark, hunting for prey, and created ambushes and attacks along unexpected routes, as their race preferred. At first, these bloody surprise attacks worked remarkably well, but soon, the dwarves adapted and slowed their push so they might be ready for even the most devious surprises.

Their deliberate approach made further ambushes impossible, but that wasn’t the main problem. The main problem was that it seemed to face numbers without end. The dwarves were nearly as numerous, and for all the bearded warriors that its goblins, both living and dead, slew, more came to continue the fight.

The Lich hurried the reconstruction of its hound’s duplicates so it could get the fire godling back in action. That was a lengthy and ongoing process. Of all its servants, Krulm’venor’s form was the most complicated. It was even more involved than the shadow dragon, and that fragile beast was more enchantment than it was flesh and bone at this point.

Oroza’s bindings had been as simple as the swamp dragon’s, and its Titan of earth was only stone trapped in bindings of lead because the Lich still didn’t fully understand the creature to do more than that. It couldn’t even communicate with the damn thing. It was just a ball of fear made up of so many tiny broken lives that it scarcely had a sense of self. All it knew was that if it obeyed, the pain would stop, and for now, that was enough.

Krulm’venor’s skeleton was more complicated in a thousand little ways, from the painful souls that were bound to it to the clever use of shadows that allowed one skeleton to unfold into a horde of goblin abominations with a thought. As much as it might loathe the fire godling, the thing’s powers were impressive, and so it was worth investing in.

Those bodies had taken months to complete the first time, though, and had been completely depleted in the gruesome assault on Siddrimar. Krulm’venor had slain hundreds of Templars all by himselves and turned whole chapels and sanctuaries and chapels into a crematorium, but the cost had been heavy. He’d begun with 63 bodies but ended with only four, and when the Lich had finally pulled its hound back, the fire godling had fought it every step of the way. It wanted nothing more than to throw its last few lives away, but the darkness would never allow that to happen.

Tenebroum had already increased Krulm’venor’s number of bodies back to 36, and before it unleashed him on its dwarven enemies, it wanted him back to at least a hundred. Truthfully, though, the Lich was no longer sure that Krulm’venor’s soul could take such a strain.

So, even as a whole workshop spent its days casting and assembling iron goblin bones for the spirits of its lesser encanters to ensorcell and enchant, the Lich devoted significant time to trying to rectify the situation. This was done, in large part, by grinding the crystal skulls of dwarven heroes into dust and infusing those fragments into the soul that was more goblin than dwarf now, but the results were mixed. So, instead of unleashing the inferno on its enemies, it recalled its Titan to see what the earthen abomination could do while its deathless artisans put the finishing touches on its newest construct: the Devourer.

The Titan was not a fighter. It had participated in the night of blood and fire in the holy city. It had been instrumental, even, in breaching the walls of the fortress city and tearing down the tallest spires, but any deaths it had caused had been incidental. It was a pacifist, and as far as the Lich was concerned, that was its only weakness.

The Titan abandoned its canal just short of the sea when Tenebroum called. Unlike most of its servants, it could travel by day as it burrowed underground and strode beneath the earth. Like everything the Lich touched, it struggled with daylight, but it was not required to operate in it. That was doubly true for this mission. The Lich wanted it as deep in the mountain as possible, and when it attacked the dwarves that had troubled it so, it took them by complete surprise.

Attack was the wrong word. The Lich was certain that it could crush even the fine steel and mithril armor of those monsters, but it refused to do so, even as it screamed while the Lich clawed at its very soul. What it did do, though, was good enough.

For lack of a better word, the creature liquified the stone beneath the feet of its enemies, and they began to sink into the rippling stone as if it had always been quicksand. There were cries of alarm, of course, but this time, there were no enemies to fight. Only those groups that had a priest of the All-Father with them managed to survive, and their magic over the stone proved to be weaker than the Titan’s in most cases. So, if they were caught by surprise, its servant might not be able to drown the whole troop in stone, but it might lock them into place until such time as the priests could either free them with their stone singing or amputate their legs if they could not.

Soon, Tenebroum learned to use these two tools with increasing synergy. First, it would distract the dwarves by liquifying the stone, and then as soon as the priest started to counteract the effect, it would have the Titan resolidify it once more and then attack the dwarves while they were stuck with a tide of goblins. The goblins weren’t a match for the bearded warriors under normal circumstances, but when they couldn’t turn around, they became little more than a meal for its most chaotic and hungry servants.

After that, they retreated for a time, allowing the Titan to cobble together the stone in the most damaged portions of the tunnel so it would be safe to dig through once more. It did not waste its servant’s time digging all that rubble back out. Not when the Devourer was on the way.

The Lich boiled with rage, but at this point, all it wanted was to bore a hole through the mountains to reach the central provinces. Instead, it was dealing with an increasingly chaotic and multisided war. The dwarves simply would not stop with their incessant need to be a thorn in the Lich’s side. In the end, that was why it released the Devourer along with a hundred new members of its legion of rust.

The Devourer was an interesting idea, but truthfully, it had no idea how it would perform in most conditions. The device was a single serpentine shape powered and controlled by the souls of broken and unimaginative men with a single purpose: to go forward. It could just as easily have been called the snake of ten thousand teeth because that’s what it was made of.

In all the Lich’s experiments, the only things harder than mithril had been adamantine and, paradoxically, kobold teeth. The hard, milky gemstones seemed to be able to cut through anything. Naturally, this had led to experiments in creating a mining machine to expedite things even before the dwarves had arrived. That change had necessitated armor for its new creation, which also took the form of teeth, lending the whole thing the terrifying look of an enamel-armored earthworm.

It was an unimpressive thing that was built for only a single purpose: to move forward. Each tooth carved a chunk out of the stone that lay ahead of it and then carried it backward in a continuous loop. All of its teeth did that, lending the entire construct the appearance of a slow but implacable caterpillar inching along the ground as it created a tunnel that was both perfectly straight and perfectly round.

In time, the maddening sounds of dozens of teeth scratching away at the stone would be enough to drive men mad and force groups to retreat, but that wasn’t how they felt during those initial encounters. At first, the dwarves tried to fight it, but those few that met its terrifying maw head-on did not live to tell the tale, and by the time they had been processed from one end to the other by the thirty-foot monster, they were little more than bloody gravel.

Even this was not enough to stop the fighting, but it was sufficient to restart progress on construction. The dwarves simply had no counter to it. So, they switched tactics to trying to sabotage existing sections of the tunnel, which caused a whole new set of skirmishes to erupt along the slowly lengthening passage.

These, at least, could largely be resolved with goblins, and in time, Tenebroum was able to send its Titan back to finish its main priority as the dwarven assaults lost steam, which greatly pleased the Lich. It had not yet won this front, but after months of fighting, it felt like it was getting closer, and as frustrating as tunnel fighting had been, it had several advantages.

One of which was that it was easy to follow the source of the attackers back to their source. Even now, it launched shadowy scouts in all directions, looking back through dwarven tunnels to find their bases of operations.

They had thought that they could trouble it, but they did not know the meaning of the word. The Lich would inflict an eternity of grief on the troublesome species for the minor inconvenience they had caused it. By the time it was done, they would be even more endangered than the gnomes it had already slaughtered.

Ch. 108 - A Hard Winter

The only good thing about the snows was that it brought the goblin raids to a halt, Jordan decided. It wasn’t until later that he learned that was only the case because of their Templar. He’d disappeared for three days after the first fall of fresh powder, and it was only after he’d been back for a few weeks that he told one of the other warriors the story after they’d been drinking; it was so unbelievable that the way it spread around the camp like wildfire had to be a form of mockery, but Jordan believed it.

Brother Faerbar had walked out alone into the snow after the raid and used the freshly fallen snow to track the vermin back to their lair before spending days slaughtering every last monster he could find. It was hard not to imagine the old man drenched in the green blood of his enemies, though it was more than a little disturbing.

When Jordan finally cornered the older man and asked him about it and why he didn’t ask for help, the Templar simply shrugged. “It was my penance,” he answered. “Nothing more than that.”

“I…I understand what you’re saying,” Jordan answered, trying not to blow up at the obstinate old man who was so different from the Paragon that he’d met on that dark road a few weeks ago. The light still burned in the man’s eyes, of course, but in his heart, it seemed to have gone out. “But we need you here, training the next generation of warriors and protecting us should the read rise up once more. If you were to die in some hole—”

“I was stabbed a hundred times in the foul pit, and now only the faintest scars remain,” the Templar answered with nothing but scorn, “Unlike the men I led into battle. It seems that I shall not have the privilege of joining the honored dead anytime soon.”

“Maybe so,” Jordan said, trying to comfort him, “But then your God works in mysterious ways; perhaps there’s a reason that…”

Jordan’s words trailed off as Broth Farbaer turned on his heel and left him standing there. “My god is dead,” he spat. “There’s no plan for any of this anymore.”

Encounters like that made it hard to keep hope alive in Sedgim Manor, but Jordan did his best. He’d stopped wearing his mage robes and switched back to wearing the clothing of his brothers to seem more familiar, and he’d begun taking daily walks to try to put his remaining subjects at ease, but the results of those efforts could be called mixed, at best.

A malaise gripped the whole area as the weather deteriorated. Some feared starvation and other zombies or goblins, but everyone feared something. That was sensible to Jordan. The world had never been more fearful, and he could not sleep more than a night or two in a row without dreaming of that terrible zombie dragon and the way that it had gone insane and ripped itself to pieces.

Shortly before the midwinter feast that would be remarkably spartan this year, a group of starving bandits tried to seize the grounds by force. He sent most of the mob fleeing with a few thunderbolts while a few of their friends lay steaming in the snow. He might not be able to do much to fend off an army of Templars or zombies, but a superstitious mob was another story.

Bandits were the least of their problems, though. The thieves that truly needed to be worried about were the rats and the hungry mouths of the kitchen workers. Between them, they always seemed to go through the meager stores they’d harvested at twice the rate Jordan expected. At least they didn’t have to worry about sickness too, on top of everything else, he thought, trying to look on the bright side.

The Templar didn’t do much anymore besides sulk and sit on the stairs watching the snow fall, but he’d still stop whatever he was doing and apply his healing magics when one of the children fell ill, and that was more than anyone could ask for.

As the winter wore on and the days became more darkness than light, they slaughtered their way through the farm animals, preserving as many of their prime breeding stock as they could, even as they winnowed the herds, guaranteeing that next year would be at least as hard as this year had been.

Even his father’s prized horses and hounds were not spared this terrible fate. As much as the man might have loved them and as beautiful as a war horse could be on the battlefield, they ate grain that could better be given to staving mouths and hay that needed to be saved for the cattle and sheep that life would depend on next season.

It was around the time that he was serving everyone stew but no longer telling them what was in it that Brother Faerbar finally got out of his funk, at least to the smallest of degrees. When it was pointed out to Jordan that the miracle in question had happened around the same time that the manor had run out of alcohol, he assured the gossipy cook’s boy that it was an unrelated coincidence.

The cause didn’t matter in his mind; all that mattered was the effect, and that effect was that lacking other outlets, Brother Faerbar resorted to sparring to get some of the volcanic anger that always building in the man’s soul out of his system.

These training sessions started as impromptu beatdowns to show some of the young men just how much less they knew than they thought they did. This quickly became the sole source of entertainment as well. The children had begun to share strange stories, which, as far as he could tell, were just myths and repurposed scripture from the Book of the Light, but none of these little games proved to be as interesting as watching grown men beat each other with sticks in front of growing crowds.

In time, most of the men of fighting age started to improve. Some of the fieldhands would even make decent swordsmen, as it turned out. None of them bested the Templar, though. With maces, swords, or even unarmed, he faced all comers and left them flat on their backs. Most days, after the younger men had finished their chores and practiced their forms, he would face them three-on-one or even five-on-one, occasionally. This just ended the matches faster because he felt no need to hold back when he was outnumbered.

It was those fights that made Jordan reflect on just how dire the straights had been in the undertemple and the catacombs beyond it. There, the jaded old warrior had barely been able to hold back the tide of death, but here he was utterly invincible. It was a stark reminder of just how hopeless the situation would be if the evil of Blackwater managed to spread this far east.

Honestly, he’d half expected it to by now. He’d even put off butchering the extra horses for as long as possible in case they’d needed to load the wagons or sleighs with children and supplies and flee, but so far, that hadn’t happened. But the only hazards without a pulse that other towns ever reported were cold and hunger. Only the usual dangers of goblins and bandits haunted the dark nights, and for the residents of Sedgim Manor, both of those groups were in short supply.

No, by all accounts, despite their misery, they lived in a winter wonderland compared to the rest of the region. So, Jordan would definitely try to hold the fort here as long as possible. As things stood, they were partway between the world going completely insane and the world ending, and though he prayed for the best for his family, just now, he wanted no part of the wider world. In the spring, maybe he would work with some of the other local lords to gather some kind of collective defense, but that was as far as he planned to venture until things started to make sense.

It started with one of Franko’s sons. Markez was certain of it. He’d seen the gleam in young Kell’s eyes early that morning when he’d gotten up to go ice fishing. It wasn’t very productive, and most days, he didn’t catch much, but the little shack he’d cobbled together at the very end of the longest pier was a good place to catch a nap and find some peace and quiet in the madhouse that was the mage’s manor.

Even with servants, only twenty or thirty people had probably lived here before this, and now it was bulging at the seams with almost seventy men, women, and children, with a serious emphasis on the latter. His mission of mercy upriver had saved almost two dozen of the little rug rats, and though he didn’t regret it one bit, that didn’t mean that he liked the energetic little bastards any more than he had when he was on the stony shore.

The gleam was something new, though. It wasn’t quite the glow that the crazed Templar had. That man’s eyes always radiated light. It was a subtle enough effect in the daytime, but at night, it was just plain creepy, and Markez avoided him whenever he could once it was dark out.

And now it was spreading. How was that possible? He had no idea, but instead of dashing out young Kell’s brains with a piece of firewood, he went and got the mage. He didn’t like talking to mages either, of course, but better him than the other guy. He might have sold his soul to the dark powers for his magic, but at least he didn’t look at you with a gaze of constant judgment.

The mage had no answers, though. It was all just praise for having noticed, and he promised to keep him informed after he’d discussed the matter with Brother Faerbar. None of that had stopped that light from spreading, though. First, it jumped to his brother Mason and then to little Gina.

It was contagious, is what it was. By the time the first snows began to melt, half of the children had been infected by it, and no one seemed to care! As far as he was concerned, it was a spiritual plague. To the Templar, it had been a welcome sign of redemption. A rebirth, he’d called it, but that just made Markez laugh.

“It’s disturbing, is what it is,” he said, talking to the river through the little hole in the ice as he counted down the days until it started to crack up. He didn’t care how many people called it a miracle. To Markez, those looks just made him regret not nipping it in the bud before it started to spread. “I didn’t work so hard and save all those little lives just so they could join the cult of some dead god.”

He spent as much time as possible out here now, worried that if he spent too much time around the infected ones, he’d wake up one morning to find his eyes glowing too.

“No sir,” he told himself. “Just as soon as the ice breaks up, me and anyone else that hadn’t drunk too deep of the Holy Man’s poisonous words - we’re taking my ship and getting out of here and going just as far away as we can.”

Ch. 109 - Turnabout

Spring had not yet started when Tenebroum’s wraiths found the first city in their long search beneath the Wodinspine Mountains. They had found supply depots and holdouts before that point, and they waited to ambush the soldiers while they slept, draining the life from their bodies until they were still warm corpses.

They never found a large gathering of more than a few dozen men away from the front lines. The darkness was beginning to think they never would until one day, they heard the distant hammering of the forges echoing through a vent shaft. The inhabitants called the place Hugeldin, and it was a true city with more than 10,000 inhabitants.

That made it significantly smaller than Ghen’tal. However, according to the dwarven souls it had devoured, that was apparently typical for dwarven cities so near the surface, and most of their kind preferred the depths. Technically, Hugeldin was above the surface; one of the tallest peaks in the Wodenspines had been significantly hollowed out, and so it lurked there in the relative safety of its mountain fortress that only occasionally had to deal with the threat of goblins from below.

When the wraiths found it, though, they did precisely nothing. They did not even swarm around the dustier passages of the city. They merely lurked at the farthest edges to determine all approaches and left as Tenebroum instructed. It wanted to give them no warning after all. No one would know what was coming. No one would know the price to be paid for fighting the darkness until it was done.

The dwarves should appreciate that, the Lich thought wryly. After all, they were huge fans of holding grudges and settling debts.

Krulm’venor stirred slowly for the first time in a very long time when the Lich ordered him to rise. “The fire will rise once more, hound,” the deathless voice commanded. It sounded different now, though Krulm’venor wouldn’t have been able to say exactly how if he tried. “You are but a guttering spark, but I am a generous master, so I shall give you more chance to feast.”

He knew that the Lich’s words must be a trap. They always were, and any feast that was placed before him would surely be poisoned, but part of him still hungered for it. It had been a long time since he had tasted the flesh of the living, and he longed to do so again.

He felt more himself than he had… well, since before Mournden. Since before, the Lich had made him suffer. That was when he figured out the difference. He couldn’t hear the other voices. The voices that spoke to him with his own guttural goblin voice. He could still feel those dark spirits deep inside itself, though. They were a churning maelstrom of violence and discontent looking for any excuse to awaken, but he was too weak for that just now.

“Where must I go?” he asked.

“North,” the Lich commanded. “Ever north, deep into the mountains. The ravens will guide you.”

“You mean for me to strike the dwarves, then?” Krulm’venor asked.

“Will that be a problem?” the Lich asked.

“It is not,” the fire godling answered, surprised to find that it wasn’t.

He was no longer truly a dwarf, after all, not after everything that had happened. He could hear it in his voice and feel it in his posture. He had become something the All-Father could never accept. So, while parts of his mind genuinely wished for good fortune for his people, the other parts wanted to burn down everything that he could never have.

He thought about those warring feelings constantly on his walk north. During the brightest parts of the day, he buried himself in a shallow grave, and during the night and the long twilight that made up most of the day, he walked as a faint blue torch, visible to towns that he passed by as nothing but a will-o-wisp.

At first, he wondered why he didn’t get more attention from the villages and farm holds he passed. The first time he’d walked across the peninsula to do his dark master’s bidding, he’d attracted lots of attention from the superstitious locals. It was only later that he learned that everyone in the area had either died or fled.

That did little to warm his heart. Once, he’d been at the heart of a goblin horde that had rampaged through this whole region. He’d gloried in the blood that they’d spilled and the magic they’d wielded. Now, he couldn’t even bring himself to make small detours from the path to burn down the small clusters of buildings and glory amongst the ashes.

It was a strange dichotomy, and he didn’t understand it until he realized he sometimes remembered things that he’d never experienced. He remembered dying to a giant spider and having a family in far away Grom’ron. He remembered devoting his whole life to the way of the axe and the way of the anvil. All of these things were impossible because the two paths were entirely incompatible. He’d never even been to Grom’ron, had he?

The solitude of his journey gave him all the time in the world to contemplate these inconsistencies. However, every examination only deepened the questions until he arrived at his destination.

The stone doors of Hugelden stood shut, and the moon was low in the sky as Krulm’venor approached them. There were guards present, and as soon as they saw that his queer blue light was the thing he was rather than something he carried, they sounded the alarm and began to shut the doors. It would be the last decision they’d ever make, and when the group of dwarven warriors chose to stay outside rather than retreat within, he saluted their bravery, though they would not survive it.

“Be careful, men!” the sergeant shouted in dwarven, “It’s just another one of the metal mockeries we’re warring with in the depths!”

Metal mockery sounded just about right to poor, beleaguered Krulm’venor. His flames burned brighter as the dwarves in plate began to fan out around him in a defensive formation.

He wondered how surprised they’d be if his form suddenly exploded forth into dozens of other copies of himself but resisted. He could feel the goblin horde beginning to stir inside him, and he wanted to stay himself as long as possible. So, he would do this himself.

He’d been too long in the cold, and he desperately wanted to feel warm again.

As the first dwarf came at him, his fires burned brighter, and he lashed out in all directions, making them take a step back as he singed their beards. That was just an appetizer, though. Even as they were taken aback, he was charging forward, and before the Sergent could do more than raise his weapon, Krulm’venor had removed his head in a shower of gore.

The rest of his men followed though they were not given such mercy. Each of them was burned alive and died screaming. It was only when their whimpers ceased and the fire godling had finished feasting on their pain that he started to come alive. Whatever veneer had been holding together, his shattered mind slowly fell away to reveal the yawning cracks that separated him into his multiplicity of selves.

Then he began to unfold, again and again, and again, multiplying every few steps. It was a single monstrosity that had killed the guards, but by the time it reached the doors, it had become a small army. Each time, he split. Krulm’venor’s mind shrank as his viewpoint grew. By the time there were 84 slavering versions of himself, he’d given himself over entirely to the horde of goblins that lay within him, but he could see everything that each of them did in a constant kaleidoscope of rage and hunger.

They attacked the door with fire first, but that did little. A handful of guards would not give him the strength to melt granite slabs into magma. That would come later.

Instead, they started clawing at that stone. Each of them was a mismatched, unholy construct that had been cobbled together by undead artificers. Almost all those claws were tipped with mithril, adamantine, or kobold teeth. Now, all 84 of them started to dig as one at a door that had stood for untold centuries and never once been breached. 171 hands began to dig. 941 claws sank into the stone, and a fraction of an inch at a time, they began to cut through the ancient bulwark.

The dwarves inside assumed that they were as safe as they’d always been, even with the alarm gongs sounding in the distance. They were wrong. These steel banded slabs were feet thick, but they wouldn’t last the hour. Before the moon was high in the sky, the mob that was Krulm’venor breached the defenses in a tide of gibbering, rabid madness.

The first two steel skeletons to scamper through the opening were demolished by the defenders. He was down to 82 members of his own private tribe now. He responded with an angry firestorm that scattered the well-ordered lines of the opposition long enough for a dozen versions of himself to pour through. Then, they were fighting the remaining guards, and all the rest flooded inside.

What was a fight for half a minute became a brawl for the next few as battle lines were dissolved by ferocity. Then, it just became a slaughter of blood and fire.

By the time the defenders were entirely broken, and the many versions of Krulm’venor were running throughout the city, he’d lost ten more versions of himself, but he’d left hundreds of dead and dying dwarven warriors in his wake, and the ground was slick with their blood.

The fire godling felt each life, his and theirs, as they slipped away. This wasn’t just because the darkness used his bodies as focal points to steal the souls of the dead, either. It was because, despite all that had happened, he felt the pangs of his own morality start to chip away at the numbness of his mental armor.

As disconnected as he felt from the dwarven race now, and as much as he hated them for everything he could no longer be, he couldn’t help but be moved by their final moments as the deaths poured in, especially not after the tribe of monsters that he was finished with the brave men and started to descend on the women and children.

He’d felt like this at Siddrimar, too, he recalls suddenly. To kill the holy warriors had been exhilarating, but the rooms with the priestess and the youngest acolytes had tasted only like ashes as he’d put them to the torch.

It was replaying again now, and there was nothing he could do about it. The Lich had built him the perfect prison as punishment for his earlier disobedience. He lacked the strength to control even one of his bodies when he was fully unfolded like this. Each skeleton was controlled by the angry spirits of dozens of goblins that had been skillfully woven together. They were simple but powerful constructs, and until they had sated their thirst for blood and death, all he could do was channel the Lich’s orders and wait for it to be over.

That’s when the fires started to rise. The 58 skeletons who remained burned because they enjoyed it, but Krulm’venor ordered them too simply to speed up the suffering and grant the survivors a quicker end.

Individually, each inferno was terrible, but together, they were a natural disaster. Within minutes, the smells of smoke and burning meat permeated everything. Shortly after that, the sounds of distant screaming were replaced by coughing. After that, the only sounds were his gibbering and war cries as the most barbaric parts of him celebrated their complete victory.

The temperatures would keep rising as they unleashed more and more destruction, and by morning, there would be only a single skeleton lying among the ashes of the main clan hall. The Lich had gotten his revenge, and all it had cost were the lives of thousands of dwarves and another piece of Krulm’venor’s soul.