Tenebroum

Chapter 161: An End for Abenend

Though it took almost a year for the winds of magic to sour enough to spell the doom of the Magica Collegium, the effects were felt widely within months. For a time, the mages struggled against the invisible noose of the Lich without any real understanding of exactly what it was it had done, but it was no use.

First, the delicate divination and teleportation magics they relied on to detect and counter any incursions into the valley failed them, and in time, everything else did as well. By the time Groshin’s rats had wormed their way into the granaries of the villages and the basement of the school itself, the wards that had protected it for so long were spontaneously combusting nearly every day and becoming almost as hazardous to those they protected as to those they defended against.

In that way, magic was increasingly becoming more of a liability than anything. One minute, a set of wards that had been carved into the doorway of a building to protect it from evil were doing the job they'd done for generations, and the next, they were bursting into flame and catching the thatched roof on fire.

It was a subtle evil that apparently not even their Goddess had discovered the cause of. For it was only at the end of things when mages were already fleeing their sinking ship, that they even thought to begin striking out those ancient wards with hammer and chisel. Those short-sighted actions would not save them, though; they just made Tenebroum more eager for what was to come next.

The mages of Abenend had lived by magic for so long, and now they would die from it as well. The Lich hungered for that moment. It remembered well when they tried to drown it and smother it in its cradle. They had failed, but it would still return the favor. Tenebroum just wished that it had been able to use water rather than air to affect its revenge; it would have been more poetic that way.

Indeed, the day the hordes of undead finally began to pour the tunnels that had been dug in opportune places where underground caverns nearly reached the surface, it was probably already over, and most of the runes that might have warned the mages of what was coming had long since been defaced. The result was a massacre.

Until now, every assault after the first one had been met with overwhelming firepower as soon as the Lich’s forces were within range. This time, the mages that remained to secure the walls of the Collegium were blindsided, and the battle that followed was bloody and brief.

It was hard to fight, of course, when every fifth spell might blow up in the face of the caster. Even before the Lich’s abominations had topped the ramparts, there were already mages on fire and others who had turned themselves to stone in the face of twisted essence. For the first time in their long history, indeed, for the first time in the history of the world, the winds of magic had turned against them, and they had no idea how to cope with that.

Tenebroum had decided not to send anything fancy or complicated on the assault, for that reason, of course. Krulm’venor and the shadow drake were both left home, far from this battlefield, because the delicate spells that bound their tremendous power might unravel in a stray gust of un-wind. Instead, the Lich sent simple, bloodthirsty creatures that were less likely to be affected by such complexities.

The wights and the war zombies that boiled up from the ground and charged across the night were fast and brutal but not nearly as fast as the centipede cavalry that followed in their wake.

The multi-legged horses and their skeletal riders sometimes started to come apart where the lack of magic treated them unfavorably, but this didn’t stop them from forming siege ladders on nearly every stone wall that protected the school. Its cavalry was gruesome but fairly simple. Even the relatively simple magics that tied together the bones of dozens of different people and animals were too complex for the terrible smog that now covered the valley.

Indeed, the strangulite-laden winds proved more dangerous than the mages themselves, and once they had unfolded in place, only a few of them were dislodged by lightning and other magics. The casters themselves weren’t so lucky. They became lightning rods that glowed even brighter than their targets while they were boiled alive by their own magics.

It was a thing of beauty, or at least it would have been had Tenebroum dared to observe it up close. The whole valley of Abenend, with its few remaining twinkling lights, was too contaminated for it to even risk a view from a flock of red-eyed black birds thousands of feet above. Instead, it merely tasted the impressions from its bloodthirsty minions as they charged heedlessly into danger. The resulting picture of a hundred maddened viewpoints was fairly complete but hopelessly flawed, like viewing the world through thick, frosted glass. Even if the details were lacking, the pain still came through very clearly.

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It didn’t need to see every blow to know that it was winning. It could tell that merely from the taste of blood and the sight of distant fire as the fortress finally began to burn.

In the end, even the Lich had expected the defenders to put up more of a fight than this, but famine and the loss of magic had taken their toll; apparently, the two combined had broken the spirit of the mages far faster than it had hoped. Even so, it had expected that it would have to repeat this assault, once, or even twice more, to finally purge the annoying mages.

When it saw the moon moving through the sky to defend her last bastion of mortal defenders, Tenebroum knew it had already won, though. She would never do such a bold thing unless her cherished mages were on the brink of defeat. As far as evil and darkness went, she was a terrible weapon in her own right, and as she brightened, night faded into pale twilight.

As her light flooded the valley fully, it was enough to cause all of its undead minions who were not already deep inside the castle to turn to dust. Dozens of its minions died, but every one of them was easily replaceable, and Tenebroum cared very little for the loss. It would have lost a thousand minions to put her in such a vulnerable place without batting an eye because it was then that the Lich launched the weapon it had been working on for so long, just in case an opportunity like this should ever arise.

Tenebroum could never be sure that the witch Lunaris would strike at it again at this moment, of course, but it had been certain that she would do so again one day. That was why it had taken the cancerous shard that would never become a copy of its dutiful Dark Paragon and turned the thing into a single cursed weapon that was closer to arcane cancer than any true construct it had built.

The thing still had a tiny piece of its maker at its core, of course, but it had mutated beyond all recognition. It was a violent, primitive thing now, made from dark ether, and the Lich was certain that even if it tried to give the thing a body, it would have been quite mad and very nearly uncontrollable. So it didn’t bother.

In the last two years, the constantly morphing dark crystal shards had been pruned and sharpened, and they had been fitted with wings and enough minor air essence to ensure that it could fly as quickly as even the dark rider. The Lich had never bothered to name the dread creation, though, as a drudge that had been stationed on a nearby mountaintop for just this purpose released it, and the thing soared across the sky Tenebroum decided that it looked like a harpoon or a vampire bat more than anything.

The Goddess paid no attention to it as it soared over the top of the Wodenspine mountains, aiming ever higher. She was so intent on burning the evil that was burrowing its way ever deeper into the heart of the Magica Collegium that she only noticed the jet-black projectile gliding against the black backdrop of the night sky in the moments before it struck her.

By that point, it had flown so high that it had left even the tallest peaks in the distance behind it. Lunaris tried to retreat then, but she was too slow. She tried to blast it with the full force of her light, but it was impossible to focus on a point that was so close to her, and in the end, all she succeeded in doing was burning the wings off of the dread creation before it pierced the thin skin of lunar soil, and began to worm its way deeper inside of her like a bladed tapeworm.

The soul shard had been rejected by Tenebroum because it was too aggressive and too out of control for any conventional servant it would care to make. To unmake one, though, or even a God, it was perfect, and it quickly began to spread out its tendrils of avarice and hate as it sought to devour its host.

The moon screamed, then, as she turned away from the world completely to focus on the tiny shard of shrapnel that was growing inside her as it looked for something vital to sever and devour. As she retreated into the void, Tenebroum’s awareness of its construct slowly faded. It doubted that a single pinprick would be enough to end such a powerful goddess, but it would certainly remind her that even she was not beyond its reach. That wound would take up her focus for a long time, and it would have been enough to put a grim smile on its face if it had been more than implacable gilded bones.

Instead, the Lich turned its gaze back to the fall of Abendend and felt the desperate battle play out as a distant series of urges. Rage, bloodlust, and fear dominated the scene and gave it just enough details to understand that though it only had a few hundred wights and reavers left in that cursed place, the mages were far fewer in number. There were perhaps only a few dozen of them left, and they were quickly becoming an endangered species in their own bloody halls.

In the basements, at the heart of their power, their magic worked far better, but even their strength could not last forever. It also cut them off from their greatest ally of all: the light. The suns eventually started to rise, but that light could not harm the teeming horde of the dead that still fought in the depths.

For hour after hour, the two wildly uneven forces fought. Mages blasted apart whole corridors full of bloodthirsty monsters with their wands and staves, only to be ripped apart in turn by the pieces of the survivors that were still strong enough to rip them to bloody shreds. The fighting was as intense as any his forces had endured since the fall of Constantinal, and part of the Lich longed to get closer to the violence, but it knew the whole area was poisoned still, so it resisted.

After the obelisks had been shut down and the whole area had been allowed to detoxify for several weeks, it would collect all the souls and trophies worth collecting. It would still have what it needed, even if the bodies had long since grown cold.

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