Tenebroum PLUS Ch. 114-115 (Patreon)

Ch. 114 - Wheat from the Chaff

It was Verdenin who thought of it. Tenebroum would have to credit the man with that much, at least. That was why he still had a pulse after all.

Because the priest loved power, and he had some wonderful ideas about how to get more, he’d been allowed to stay alive. That, combined with the fact that he was as loyal as a turncoat could be, almost made it worth the trouble of keeping so many living on the second level in a part of its labyrinth once made to exclusively house the dead.

The priest had spent the whole winter exhorting those ideas to the other survivors of Blackwater and telling them all about the new world that was being born, as well as their place in it. “The darkness is inevitable,” he told them. “Death chases every one of us our whole lives, but it will not take you. Not if you are useful to it! Let us serve the night in all the ways it requires, and we shall live forever, unchained by the conventions of morality and the rules of light!”

The Lich still did not know how it felt about living followers, but it hurt nothing to give it a try. After all, all the other Gods and godlings it was aware of cultivated a flock of their own, so there must be a reason for it. Still, most of them had no other ready source of essence beyond their worshipers, where Tenebroum could always fall back on blood and suffering.

In fact, it doubted that an entire church could provide the same level of power as a single brutal night of fear and death, as one of its armies slaughtered a small town, but it had Kelvun make a note to conduct that experiment just as soon as the next phase of its war started. That was why it had constructed the dreamer. Both to delegate the task of surveilling their enemy and to increase their fear of what was going to happen next.

The Lich was proud of its many creations, and this latest one was no exception; even if it was more similar to the ones that had gone before than it was different, it was still something entirely new. More than anything, the dreamer was a shade, like the dark messenger that had served it so loyally for so long. In its case, though, the horse that it rode on was composed of pure shadow, just like the rest of its body.

So, it would need to find a grave or a pool of murky water to hide from the rising sun. If it did not, it would cease to exist as the rays of dawn reduced it to nothing but vapor and an unintelligible chorus of discordant screams as the many souls that made up its dreamer came apart at their very carefully sewn screams.

That and its inability to murder anything were its primary weaknesses. Its strengths were manifold, though, both literally and figuratively. It had the dark sense of human understanding of its puppeteer, it could spring apart into a hundred different copies like Krulm'venor, and it could speak in the sweet words of its herald so that no man could easily ignore it.

The Lich didn’t care if the dreamer or the missionary, as his priest referred to it, caught a single new worshiper to join its growing flock. What it cared about were the things that the dreamer learned as it prowled the dreams of the unwary, night after night.

That, and the uncertainty that the shadow monster left in its wake made it a most worthwhile investment of time and resources. The Lich created it by stitching together the souls of fervent Templars and priests that it had harvested by the score. As it turned out, it was easy enough to lobotomize such a soul, keeping its devotion but vivisecting the cause that it was so fervent about. That is the way it created such a loyal servant by stitching the souls of a hundred lobotomized servants of Siddrim to a single true believer of the darkness.

With only one thing left for them to believe in, they all believed it eventually, after enough pain and confusion. Some resisted, but the more souls that fell, the quicker the rest of them gave in. Finally, after 66 days and 66 nights, it had a quivering ball of shadows that was practically begging to go out and proselytize to the masses.

And the Lich was happy to let it. Tenebroum had once spent most nights invading the dreams of those that dwelled with its domain, but there were few survivors left in that area now, and it had better things to do with its time than harvest a tiny trickle of mana from a single nightmare.

Besides, the dreamer, or the nightmare as Verdenin referred to it, could invade the dreams of a whole village at once. In fact, within a few days of it being unleashed it was doing exactly that, almost every night, as it galloped from town to town.

The first few villages were a mixed bag that showed the need to fine-tune the way its dreamer operated because rather than a series of horrific nightmares about what would happen if they dared try to hold back the darkness, it turned out to be something closer to a psychic scream that woke up everyone that it didn’t kill or put into a coma as visions of a blood-drenched world assaulted the sleeping peasants.

So it tried again and again. On its fourth attempt, as the shadowy steed rode into the tiny square of the village of Muttson, it even managed to borrow inside the heads of every last resident for a few hours without waking a single soul.

By the time its dreamer reformed and retreated to the graveyard to escape the coming dawn, Tenebroum doubted that the people it had touched would ever feel quite safe again, of course, but that was progress. Night by night, it learned to whisper instead of scream, and slowly but surely, it began to learn things of great interest to Tenebroum.

It learned to separate the strong from the weak as it sorted the wheat from the chaff one community at a time. It learned that fear ruled the day, especially in the south, where people were close enough to hear about the fall of Siddrimar. There, they dreamed of armies of the dead marching on their lands and taking no prisoners.

That was where the dream that became known as the prophecy by so many over the next few months first started. It started by accident, but after a while, the Lich decided to honor it and see how it played out.

“You can be safe from all of this, Tanyana,” a fragment of the dreamer, pretending to be a woman’s dead mother, had reassured her in a dream. “Just tell me who the strongest warrior in the village is…”

“That’s… Braken,” Tanyana said, uncertain of what was happening. She knew that her mother had been dead for four years and that if she looked up at the speaker, she’d see only a desiccated corpse of the woman in that terrible logic that dreams had. Still, as long as she looked away and felt her mother stroke her hair, everything would be okay.

“Braken, of course,” her mother said soothingly. “I always knew that he’d grow up to be big and strong. If you want the village to be safe, then all you have to do is kill him and bury him under the road that leads here. That way, he can defend you from the dead, and you and all my little grandchildren can be safe and sound…”

It was meant to be a horrible choice that would nibble at the woman’s conscience whenever the suns set, and she feared the shadows. The dreamer had told hundreds of people thousands of crazy and terrible things that mostly involved worshiping the Lich, but none of them had actually done it, not until Tanyana.

She lured the man into her home to seduce him and then poisoned his beer. When her fellow villagers saw what she had done as she tried to bury the body, she defended her decision.

“Don’t you understand?” she yelled as they readied the noose. “I did this for you! For all of us! It’s the only way to save us from what’s coming!”

Her friends and neighbors still hung her, but they did bury both her and her victim under the road as her dream prophecy suggested. There was such a wonderful thrill to all the layers of that betrayal that the Lich had its dreamer deliver that prophecy to every village it invaded by night.

In the south and the east, where the war was the fiercest, the dreams offered a promise of peace, but in the north, where the mountains protected them from violence, at least for the moment, they promised a good harvest instead.

“The sun is weak,” the dreams whispered. “The growing season will be too short. By the time the snows come, all that will be left to harvest are stalks and rot unless you make a sacrifice to keep it at bay.”

It was a terrible prophecy, but day by day, it spread across an already hungry land. It was enough to keep every farmer awake at night as he feared for his livelihood and the health of his children. You will die. Your animal and progeny will die. Everything will die.

That was true enough. Once Tenebroum figured out how to snuff to infernal lights a second time, it planned to starve everyone and build an army with their frozen corpses. All that would come later, though. For now, all it could do was watch and see what the good people of the realm would do.

Not every village fell, of course. In some regions, whole swaths of them resisted the urge to sacrifice one for the many. Perhaps twenty percent of them did, though, to its surprise, and the Lich was sure that many of the warriors that were the most likely candidates for such sacrifice in other towns and villages that had not yet given in lived in constant fear.

It turned out that most of the good men and women of the world found a way to justify a little blood on their hands in the same way that the Templars had when they set out to purge the temples to Oroza. It was an interesting lesson, and Tenebroum took it to heart.

Even as its armies began to march north through the vast tunnel that was finally quiet and finished, it was these choices that determined where and how it would strike. Over the winter, it had assembled thousands upon thousands of new monstrosities in every form. It had created its centipede calvary and living siege engines. It had repaired its shadow drake and Krulm’venor. More than anything, though, it had created a nearly unending supply of armored zombies and given them a general without equal.

Now, it was about to unleash them on a corner of the world that thought itself safe, but it would save those who were willing to bend the knee for last. After all, even with its vast and ever-expanding armies, it could not be everywhere at once. If they were willing to kill their own friends and family, then what else would it be able to get them to do before this war was done.

Tenebroum wasn’t sure, but as people began to pray to the darkness to spare them, it found that it finally understood the appeal for why Gods worked so hard to attract their little chorus of worshipers.

Ch. 115 - Better Left Buried

Even with the small tide of blood that it had devoured, the thing that had bound away in the dusty stone sarcophagus lacked the strength to force off the lid. Such a feast had served only as an appetizer to the hunger that had awoken in it.

Its recollections of what had happened to bring it to such a nadir or even who it was were too complex to contemplate right now. It had been buried until it had become nothing but dust; it could worry about those thoughts later. All that its tiny mind could focus on tight now was the single crack in its prison. It would have been enough to let in light or even a breeze. Those things didn’t exist this far below the city, though.

Even in its much-reduced state, such a gap was not large enough for it to escape. So, it began to bite and chew. It gnawed at the very stone, seeking to expand the hole enough for it to escape. Teeth and claws weren’t as hard as the stone, but they grew back, over and over again, for day after endless day.

It did not even understand what it was. Not really. All it knew was that its tiny teeth could cut through even stone given enough time and that its hunger was too large to fit in any prison.

The blood hadn’t just woken it up from its timeless slumber; it had given it the strength to suffer. And suffer it did, widening that tiny gap only a little at a time as the days cycled somewhere above it. Then, at long last, it widened the hole enough that a single part of it could escape, and it did.

The small creature only realized what it was after it forced its way through the opening. It was a mouse. A tiny desiccated mouse that had been dead so long that there were only bones underneath its patchy white fur. That was when it knew that the rest of its body was much the same.

It had not been able to fit any of the larger bodies that belonged to it through such a tiny gap. It knew that now. It also knew that all that blood had only been enough for a single minor miracle. So, none of the larger, more powerful rats that could expect to put up a good fight against a seasoned tomcat had been resurrected in its place. It wasn’t even a moderately sized rat that some tiny part of it knew that it preferred. In the end, only the smallest field mouse was able to escape the prison and scramble free on the rubble below.

It was a shriveled speck of a thing, and it twitched from one side to the other as it looked for danger in the darkness. It was practically defenseless, but it found no threats. The tiny twice-dead mouse scampered through the rubble that partially entombed its tomb.

It had hoped that seeing the place that it was bound would bring back memories. Maybe it would have given time, but when it spied the first ancient corpse that had been laid to rest in the wall niches further down the hall, all of those thoughts were lost to the hunger that burned inside it once more.

Danger forgotten, the little mouse scurried across the dusty floor and into the niche, where it began to nibble at the remnants of parchment skin and leather that it found. It wasn’t enough, but then it doubted that anything would be enough the way it currently felt. It gnawed through the top of the femur and began to chew on the desiccated marrow, but still, it wanted more.

From body to body and room to room, it traveled. The mouse lost all track of time as it searched for scraps. That was where it encountered a real rat for the first time. This one was more than just skin and bones, and it had real beady eyes in its eyesocket instead of a faint glowing red light.

The rat made the mistake of bouncing on the corpse of the mouse, sure that it was food. It soon regretted it, but there was no escape. The mouse wasn’t just snapping at it and trying to devour it. It was melding with it.

They were two now, and both of them were dead, but the way that their tails twined together and they moved as a single thing, it would have been difficult to tell. They could eat twice as fast as one, and slowly, they moved through the crypt, gnawing here and there as they hunted their own kind and merged with them.

By the time the mob of rats had grown to 13 and the rat king’s tails had knotted together completely, it found its first corpse. Though any evidence of what had happened here had long since been obliterated by the predators beneath the city in the days since the corpse had been dumped in the sewers. Despite that, it could feel the betrayal and the anguish coming off of the body like a bad smell. It was interesting but not as interesting as the taste of the man’s liver. So, the rat king dined deep on his entrails for days as it feasted, but it appreciated the subtle strains of suffering, too, as it tried to understand why it should care about them.

Other rats tried and failed to steal a few morsels for themselves. Few of them lived long enough to regret it as they joined one at a time with the swelling, ghoulish rat king that grew well past the size of a cat as it gorged itself on its bloody feast.

It was only partway through devouring the man’s brain that it realized how much knowledge it was gaining from the act. Names poured into its mind a piece at a time. Hektan. Was that the name of the victim or... No - it was the murderer? And the reason? What was it? Gold? Revenge?

No, the rat king realized adultery. It was a strange word, and it only recognized it as being distantly related to a different sort of hunger than the kind that gnawed at it. It pushed those facts aside. All it cared about was feeding the bottomless hole inside of it.

Even as it brushed them aside, though, it continued to learn. The name of streets. The riots and the cold above. The light.

It was always afraid of the light, though it did not know why. There was nothing down here that it could not eat, so why should it be any different in the world above. Still, it did not go up there, not even when it heard the sounds of violence or smelled the fresh scent of coppery blood. Something that it could not name held it back.

There were other bodies, but none of them seemed linked. This was not a plan. It was just the very edge of chaos. It felt like the whole city might yet topple over into nothing, but it didn’t mind that. More chaos meant more food.

When it was strong enough, it stopped subsisting on the corpses of the recently deceased and began to attack the sickly and weak who hid away where they would be safe from the predators above.

Its first victim was a dying old man who had taken refuge in the catacombs under a temple. Part of it feared the temple, too, but not enough to resist those weak, watery breaths as the vagrant attempted to fight off gray fever.

He wouldn’t make it more than another night or two anyway, not that the Rat King cared. Life had no value when it was hungry. All that mattered were that its many slavering maws and its even more numerous eyes trembled with desire to devour him whole, and he was weak enough that he had no chance against an impossible melding of rats that was larger than a child.

That didn’t stop him from gasping and screaming until the rat king tore out his throat so completely that the man drowned in his own blood. More words and concepts bombarded it then, more than even the corpses it had devoured, but it pushed all of them aside in favor of the warm spray of arterial blood.

This is what it had craved from the moment it had been revived. Not the ancient mummified flesh of the interned or even the cold maggot-ridden corpses of the murdered. No, it hungered for the life force that could only come from death, and together, its dozens of mouths tried and failed to slake its thirst.

That was when it started to listen to the rippling thoughts and emotions that it devoured along with the meat of the corpse. Safety was the biggest one. The dead man felt sure that the temple he sheltered beneath should have been a safe place. The Temple of Saint Anothian... It was in the city of Rahkin. The names meant little to the rat king. It wasn’t until it realized that the temple belonged to Siddrim that it finally paused as a tremble of fear and recognition went through it.

It remembered Siddrim, and once it remembered that awful god, it remembered what happened to it, too. The memories came flooding back like a storm, and all the rat king could do was stand there and yowl in distress as disconcerting facts began to lock into place. Fire. Death. Pain.

It was only after all of those puzzle pieces came together that it finally knew who it was, no, who they were. Ghroshian was not a rat or even a rat king. They were more than that. They were more than all rats, even. They were hunger itself!

To rediscover one's selves was a curious thing, it realized. One moment, they had been an animal, but now they realized they’d always been so much more than that. The animals were just the tinder to the bonfire that was its mind.

As that thought completed, it was like a bell being rung in their mind, and it catalyzed everything. Before, it had only been a growing chorus of hunger and discordant thoughts as it picked up the discarded secrets of the dead while it feasted on their flesh. Now, it was a single chorus as Ghroshian took control of hunger rather than letting it take control of them.

Their giant rat king burst apart into several smaller murderous contracts at the same moment as the sarcophagus that held the rest of its moldering form shattered as it could no longer contain the dark god that it had held for so long.

Out of that wretched prison poured hundreds and then thousands of rats and mice. It was an unending stream of vermin, and every one of those humble creatures was a part of themself. It was a symphony of whispers more than it was a legion of being, but it was both. In hours, it would spread to every part of this city. It would learn what had happened since it had been defeated and imprisoned by Siddrim.

Siddrim. Even that name caused a flash of pain as it remembered the light invading every hole and crevice to flush it out when it had finally nibbled enough to draw down the wrath of the Lord of Light. Ghroshian could not remember what happened to Malzekeen - not exactly, but it knew that it was nothing pleasant.

That was the only thing to temper their growing hunger: the fear of the light. Even as they spread through the catacombs under Rakhin and into the sewers and cellars where the narrow, labyrinthine openings allowed, they shied away from even the smallest sliver of light. Not even candlelight was to be trusted. It was all that kept Ghroshian from rising up and devouring the city whole.

Indeed, it was tempting to take a peek at the surface, almost overwhelmingly so. It smelled not just people and hunger but turmoil that promised a near-infinite amount of secrets for it to devour, and it desperately wanted them to add to its collection.