Tenebroum PLUS Ch. 122-123 (Patreon)

Ch. 122 - Fog of War

After the ambush in the woods, Tenebroum laid low. It was not out of fear of the moon, though, but caution. It had built a large bronze telescope with fine lens that had been made from the clearest glass in the cities that it had sacked, but other than studying the pock-marked surface of Lunaris’s shield as she carried it through the sky every night or the heavily filtered wandering stars that the sun had become, it learned nothing new. So, it sought to steer well clear of her and her machinations.

Instead, it consulted its servants and studied the field, more aware than ever that it was a target. It had a world full of enemies now, and just because the sun had been shattered and the Lord of Light was no more did not mean that there weren’t other enemies that could slay it, nor that their mortal servants and avatars could do terrible things.

Each target was scouted extensively in a variety of ways by different sorts of agents. Blackbirds looked for any signs of physical resistance from the populace, and at the same time, shades stalked the night, looking for more evidence of interference from the divine. It even listened to the pleading prayers of its growing flock for any clues about where resistance to its efforts might be starting to form.

Sometimes, these efforts located saboteurs or even mages that were eliminated before they could create too much mischief. Devouring their souls was enough to answer many of the questions about the traps they’d planned, but those who had given the order remained a step or two removed and remained inscrutable, much to its growing annoyance.

It was a simple thing to rip the souls from the still-warm bodies of rogues that were seeking to smash the keystone of a bridge, and it was nearly as easy to make a mage that had secreted themselves on the slopes of the Devlan Pass beg for death before forcing him to spill his guts about how he’d hoped to bury hundreds of zombies underneath a landslide, but that information did little good when they could provide no answers as to who gave the order or paid the bill.

Only once did the saboteurs manage to strike a serious blow against it, and that was when they made a brazen attack at noon and burned down the barns that it had been sheltering 800 soldiers in away from the harsh light of the sun. The loss was greater than any single battle it had faced, and before the coals of that victory had grown cool to the touch, Tenebroum responded by snuffing out every life within fifty miles to make sure that word of the tactic would not spread and undermine its disparate forces.

Even those subjects that had otherwise proven themselves loyal to the darkness over the last few months were slain. It simply wasn’t worth the risk that even one person might survive long enough to share such a dangerous idea. After that, though, it tried to limit its reliance on wooden buildings, and whenever possible, it stationed its troops in caverns, fortresses, and mines.

All these incidents combined to give Tenebroum pause, and after extensive reflection on the subject, it decided that it had become too predictable. For too long, it had operated with the advantage of surprise, but now even a blind man could see what it was up to. All of its movement had been in a single direction and all. Of its strongest forces were part of a single army, and whoever was watching it from a distance had noticed that, too.

Was that the influence of the light, it wondered? Was there too much order in its soul now? While the delegation to lesser servants for logistical and tactical purposes had been a great boon, Teneborum was forced to concede that it was entirely possible that it had become too straightforward over the last year. So, it decided to muddy the waters. It dispatched lightning raids to the north and west and had Krulm’venor burn an entirely unrelated woods to the ground in case it was sending his fiery servant into a trap.

For the next month, the darkness upset all of its plans. Not because they weren’t correct, but because correct was predictable. That was the true lesson here. It had optimized its general to such an extent that a clever opponent could guess what it would do next. Excessive perfection was not a defect it had previously considered, and Tenebroum considered retiring its Paragon for a time until it could better understand the problem but decided against it.

It was too valuable a tool, and with so many warriors streaming under the mountain toward the front every day, the ability to delegate the fighting to someone else was vital to the Lich. Instead, it opted to do something that none of its enemies might expect: it sent envoys of peace to every kingdom that was still standing with the same message: swear fealty to the rising shadow, and you may yet live.

Sometimes, these messengers took the form of a living person and other times, the messenger was a construct custom-built for that purpose. Living messengers were usually either one of the fanatic priests who listened to Verdenin’s increasingly unhinged sermons throwing off the chains of the flesh in rapt joy or a person from one of the villages that its dead armies had spared within the same domain.

While there was never a shortage of the latter, it sometimes amused the Lich to compel one of them to make the offer. It knew precisely what would happen to the trembling man or woman that dutifully went to their Lord’s court to make the terrible offer on its behalf, almost as much as it amused the darkness to burn their village down and leave them alive long enough to watch if they refused.

These poor souls were almost universally executed on the spot for consorting with evil, proving that the dead were a better option. At first, Tenebroum sent ghosts like his favorite bard with these glad tidings, but they were, unfortunately, able to extract very little in the way of retribution because of their nonphysical nature.

Eventually, Tenebroum started sending skulls to every town and keep days or weeks ahead of its armies. They were simple, custom constructs with a single purpose: they delivered the Lich’s terms, and if those terms were rejected, then they would shriek in outrage, burst into flames, and explode with enough violence that everyone in the room would be shredded by bone shrapnel before they could escape.

The Lich enjoyed that part so much that it ordered siege engines built just for firing the things at fortified structures. There were many ways to scare mortals half to death and make their essence more palatable for its consumption, but few of them were quite so enjoyable as flaming skulls soaring through the air moments before their death.

Eventually, the Counts and Barons in the path of its armies came to fear those death's heads, and they called them almost as much as the armies themselves because once they were delivered, the fate of the recipient was sealed.

In the past, one might be able to refuse it and live for a week or two while its soldiers moved into position. An enterprising Lord might even flee east and try to stay ahead of the armies of death. Now, though, refusing the Lich’s terms came with a very personal cost.

Not that they were particularly onerous. All that it demanded was 10% of the living, the Lord’s weight in gold and silver, and an oath of eternal allegiance to reject the gods of light and serve the dark. Surprisingly, few were willing to make that deal, though. Even the slenderest of lords seemed willing to risk everyone's lives for the sake of a few coins.

It didn’t matter to the Lich that its entreaties were rejected. All that mattered was the division and fear it sowed. How could someone hope to second guess where it was or what it would do next to lay another trap when it seemed that its forces might make peace or strike out in fresh conflict in any direction at once.

Besides, Tenebroum didn’t want the fealty of anyone who didn’t have those dark, murderous impulses. Disloyal servants would make for better zombies or drudges than they would living, breathing humans that could cause mischief.

This game occupied it for a time, and as victory after victory stacked up, a few noblemen like Count Wardrick and Duke Elbin sued for peace. The darkness only accepted their offers because it knew just how many skeletons were already in their closets, of course, but it was sufficiently shocking news to echo across the continent and put its opponents on their back foot.

When the Lich’s forces entirely skipped their kingdom’s though and followed through on its pledge of peace, the floodgates opened. Suddenly, every Lord wanted to swear their allegiance to the dark. Tenebroum saw through this too, or at least its puppeteer did. It understood human nature better than any true human, and it could see which groups were playing for time and which sought to position their armies for a stronger counter-attack in the read of the undead army.

They were foolish thoughts since armies of the dead lacked supply lines in the traditional sense, but even at the end of the world, the powers that be sought the comfort of the familiar rules of war, and they died to a man. Not a single one of those vipers was allowed to know peace or even given an audience. In fact, the deathheads disappeared altogether after that. Now that its opponents expected it to seek peace, it sought only war once more.

Why shouldn’t it? Peace had been an interesting diversion, but the darkness had tens of thousands of subjects in its lands now, but corpses outnumbered the living at least five to one, and that ratio only grew by the day.

It was an interesting calculus. Dead could not betray it, but they were fueled by essence. Every day, it burned whole lakes of the stuff and replenished them through cruelty and murder. Living subjects, on the other hand, provided essence, but at the cost that they were not direct pawns for the Lich to control. There was an argument to be made that it should leave as many alive as it could and make peace with anyone who earnestly wanted it, but that seemed unwise.

“No,” the darkness whispered to its far-flung council. “We have only one offer of peace left, and we must save that for the King after all hope was lost.”

That wouldn’t be too much longer, of course. There were still a few large armies, and the mages seemed to be up to something from their growing fortress on the banks of the Oroza, but in terms of defenses, there was simply nothing to stand in its way for hundreds of miles.

So, while its general and its copies played at war, growing ever more skilled at striking hard targets with small groups of death knights and maneuvering the larger blocks of troops in the field to optimal positions for the battles that would follow, the Lich began work on yet another new project. This time, it would make a messenger worthy of a King and see what sort of reception it received at court.

Tenebroum had made many things as deadly as possible, and it had made even more creatures that were optimized for efficiency. It had never attempted to make a construct that was as beautiful as possible, and that, it decided, would be a more interesting project than whatever outcome came of its newest toy.

Ch. 123 - Payback

As he walked through the woods, Krulm’venor didn’t dare think about how close the Lich had come to being murdered on this very spot. That wasn’t because the thought made him uncomfortable, though. It was because it made his heart sing like nothing had in years.

Now that he had a skull full of goblins, keep secrets bordered on impossible, so it was better simply not to think at all. In that sense, he had finally become the perfect automaton that the Lich had wanted him to be for all these years. He didn’t think about who he killed or why he did it. He didn’t think about all those dwarves he had burned alive. He certainly didn’t think about Oroza and how she had finally managed to slip the chains of the Lich’s commands.

All he thought about was the next goal, and today’s goal was a simple one: to burn this forest and everything in it to ashes. He didn’t start that immediately, though. Though that would have been satisfying. Instead, he wandered through the moonlit glades, hoping to attract some sort of attention from the locals.

Each time some small beast like a fox or an owl flickered across his path, the voices in his head would open up in a hungry chorus of baying and obscenities. For a moment, his only desire in life was to run the thing down and rip it to bloody shreds, but he resisted. He was here for bigger game.

“Kills it!” a small chorus of goblins screeched.

“Feed us!” another shouted over a gibbering, unintelligible din of madness.

Krulm’venor struggled for a moment to retain control. While he moved through the forest, he kept the blue flames that were his tortured soul at the very minimum. The only visible fires were those that burned in his eyes. Everything else stayed bottled up inside his bones, where he was filled with ever-burning coals and rage instead of marrow.

He could feel strange magics here. The shadows were full of them, though they were not the dark sorceries of his master nor anything to do with flames or other elements that he had a passing knowledge of. They were thinner than that; they were insubstantial, like cobwebs or the oil sheen upon still waters.

It could very well be a trap, Krulm’venor realized. Behind these illusions, or whatever they were, there might be whole armies waiting in ambush just beyond what he could see. He didn’t care, though. He welcomed death, and that was even true when he was still relatively whole. Each time the Lich sent Krulm’venor against a new opponent, he hoped that the darkness would finally overreach and that such an enemy would be his last.

Once he broke apart into dozens of lesser versions of himself, he didn’t care what happened to himself at all. This didn’t make him brave. There was no bravery left in his hollow metal bones. He was filled only with fire and madness now. He would have felt sorry for himself about it if he still had the privacy for self-pity.

When the first arrow finally came at him, it was much too quick for him to dodge. It streaked through the night, leaving a trail of white fire in its wake, but just before it hit his skull and they saw whether its enchantments or the Lich’s forges were stronger, he ruptured, splitting into two. Each version of him was now a little to either side of the arrow, and it passed harmlessly between them before embedding in a nearby tree, where it exploded in a shower of sparks.

Maybe this will finally be the end, both versions of himself thought hopefully as they charged into the woods after their unseen target. Neither of them ran directly where they thought it would be. Instead, one version of the fire godling ran wide to the left, and the other ran wide to the right. More arrows came. Enough to know for certain that there was more than one of his opponents. Some even found their mark, and the copy that they stuck was either mangled or eliminated.

Most of the arrows missed their ever-multiplying targets, even though each division made Krulm’venors fires glow brighter each time, and soon the woods were full of flickering blue lights that might have looked like will-o-wisps to anyone watching the scene play out. The trees didn’t begin to burn, though, not until Krulm’venor had fully surrounded his quarry.

Thinking was harder now, but the plan was not a complex one. Surround the enemy so they couldn’t escape, then burn them alive. This was where the godling gave in to the dark voices that overwhelmed it somewhere around twenty different minds and bodies. This was when they began to cackle out loud in his voice instead of simply shouting obscenities in his head.

“No escape left for you!” one shouted.

“We can smell your fear!” another one yelled from somewhere not so far away.

Then, at an unseen signal, as soon as eighty-something copies of him completed the nearly quarter-mile loop, they all flared to life and began to burn with the unearthly heat they’d wanted to do for so long. By then, the godling’s mind was lost. Each version of it held only a single sliver of sanity that was overshadowed by the gibbering madness that boiled up inside it.

These goblins had never tasted elves if that’s indeed what they were hunting, but they were hungry to sample them, and each lurching steel form ran at full speed, eager to beat out all the other versions of itself to be the first to taste the warm flesh of their enemies. While they moved, the forest lit up behind them in a curtain of flame.

There would be no escape in that direction. Not for anything of flesh and blood, at least.

The first instance of Krulm’venor arrived just in time to see the last of the elves disappear through the shimmering, mercury veil of some strange new portal magi. It immediately felt a pressure in its mind as the Lich moved forward to investigate it, but before either of them could do much more than glimpse it, the magic faded, leaving only the hoary old oak behind and an empty tree hollow that no seemed bereft of magic.

There were more fire godlings in that burning glad now, and all of them advanced on that giant tree, driven to find the path that their meal had used to escape. For the original version of Krulm’venor, so much fire would have been enough, but the thing that he had become craved slaughter even more than the ashes that he left in his wake.

They’d never get the chance to find out more. Even as the first half dozen copies reached the tree and watched the spindly cobweb enchantments burn away to reveal the woods were alive with any number of other dangers, they knew this would not play out as they were sure that it would only moments before.

The hunters had become the hunted. The trap they’d sought to spring on their enemies had become a trap of its own. There were too many Krulm’venors left to care about that, though. Each giant beast and thorned dryad sprung from their hiding place, and the field of battle became ever more crowded.

Suddenly, wooden talons and powerful jaws were tested against the steel that bound the many molten fragments of Krulm’venor’s soul, but in almost all cases, they were found wanting. Even bears and dire wolves lacked the strength to do much more than dent skulls or bend bones, and every one of them was immensely and enjoyably flammable.

Soon, the whole, smokey section of the forest spells of burning meat, but that was only the warm-up act for the giant oak. It began to move as soon as a few versions of Krulm’venor approached it, but before they could reach it, the thing came to life as a sort of tree giant and smashed three of him to pieces with its two-foot-thick limbs.

Treant, the word came to mind. It was supplied by the Lich because he had never heard it before. “Perhaps she’s even a godling,” the Lich whispered. “Capture it if you can; kill it if you must.” Then it was gone again, leaving its pack of hunting dogs alone to fight the thirty-foot-tall giant.

“You tread on hallowed ground, monster!” the tree boomed in a voice that sounded like wind roaring through branches. “This will be the grave of all who are foolish enough to invade my domain!”

Krulm’venor wouldn’t have bothered to answer its foe intelligently, even if it had been capable of such a thing. Instead, it hurled insults as much as fire, as the dozens of small battles and depravities were forgotten in favor of the new challenge. The goblins that were in the driver's seat now weren’t much more loyal to the Lich that had woven and bound their wretched souls than Krulm’venor was, but they didn’t need to be. They craved violence, and a giant that could crush their rigid steel bodies like they were nothing but dried leaves was nothing if not violent.

“I have beaten you once, and I shall do so again!” she screeched.

The longer the tree fought against them, and the more it manifested, the more it shaped itself to resemble a giant woman with thick, rough bark instead of skin and leaves and vines for hair. She might have eleven been beautiful if she wasn’t on fire.

The old wood was not yet burning, but the leaves had already flown apart into ashes, and the bark was smoldering. Even awash in curtains of blue flame, the oaken monster still raged. Every blow and swipe caused at least one version of Krulm’venor to wink out of existence, and as the total number of its copies drifted down somewhere below 100, the diffuse consciousness that was the core of its mind found itself rooting for its failure almost as much as its victory.

Slowly, her cries of defiance morphed into cries of pain. The fire godling understood that all too well. Some small distant point of hope that she managed to die properly at least and that no trace of her was left behind for the Lich to study and corrupt because, to his eyes, it was looking less and less likely that she was going to win.

As strong as the behemoth was and as many steel goblins as it shattered, it could not bear the heat of the Lich’s unfire for more than a couple of minutes. Soon, wood was splitting as sap boiled into steam, and the wooden goddess was screaming in pain as much as rage as his strikes got slower and slower. After two minutes, she scarcely had the speed to connect her terrible blows with her agile tormentors, and after five, as she could do was make weak warding gestures as the goblins used metal talons to dig deeper and deeper into the veins of charred wood that penetrated almost all the way to her core.

It wasn’t until she stopped moving completely, and the entire grove had been reduced to a charred ruin, that the sixty-eight copies of Krulm’venor spread out into the night. Freed of their chains, they spread out into the dark of the woods, looking to kill and burn.

They had no idea if they would find the elves or even other opponents worth fighting. They didn’t care. They only wanted to maim and destroy, and Krulm’venor had no choice but to let them. He’d long ago lost control of the mob, and now he was just along for the ride as waves of blue fire beard throughout the forest in all directions, replacing what should have been the coming dawn in a few hours with an endless inferno.