Tenebroum

Chapter 188: Desperate Times

Time ticked by full of characteristic indecision as Tenebroum tried to decide the best course of action. It told itself, at any moment, Malzekeen might return. This could be a trick… an ambush, and I should wait a little longer. That was only part of the truth, though.

The truth was that it was it didn’t know what to do as it swam back and forth through the skies above Blackwater, trying to devour every soul that slipped free of its grasp.

That, of course, was a losing prospect, but there was nothing else it could do in that moment. It was certain that the only way to sever its connection with the worm had been to shatter the only thing that the two of them had in common. That had been successful but at a terrible cost.

Now I need someone smarter than what I’ve become to help it decide… As Tenebroum had that thought, it realized that it still had that, at the very least. As soon as it realized that, it fled down at high speed, leaving more bits of other people’s souls in its wake as it fled to the library.

Malzekeen might well come back. There was nothing it could do about that. It might be in a day, a week, or even a year. The darkness couldn’t prevent that in its current state. All it could do was hemorrhage and grow weaker, and that was the last thing it wanted. Its enemies were going to come back, one way or the other. If not the ghastly chimera, then the forces of light or even one of the meddling gods like Lunaris. Someone would smell its weakness like blood in the water, and it had to be ready for that.

So, it dove through three floors of stone and into the library, hoping that it wasn't completely wrecked like so many other parts of its stronghold. There, it found the room completely intact. Here, there was row upon row of mismatched pottery. Only a few of the heads in this room were even relatively fresh. Most of them went back for years and decades. It was an arcane treasure trove. Normally, it would be picky and choose the right mage or mages for the job, but it no longer remembered which jar held which head, and Tenebroum could not reach out to the Skoeticnomikos to find the answer. So, picked one at random and dived toward it.

As it did so, there were some sounds echoing through the halls to indicate that either its surviving acolytes or some of the larger shards of its soul had gone berserk in some distant part of the labyrinth. For now, Tenebroum ignored that. Every minute and every distraction would cost it a part of its mind as it dwindled. The smaller it got, the slower it lost strength, but if it did not find a way to reverse this process in a day or a week, it would be nothing but a handful of murder victims lingering in the heart of what was once a swamp.

The head that it chose belonged to young master Bartholomew, an elemental mage that focused on earth magics. Tenebroum found that out immediately, but it took longer to remember where it had collected him from. That answer came back to it only as it forced energy in the mage to bring him to life. The man had been one of the men that the very late Count Kelvun had hired to dig a canal through its swamp.

The darkness bristled at that memory but stayed focused on the matter at hand as it commanded the mage’s slowly awakening soul.

The most unexpected thing happened then. The man actually fought him. Not for long, and not successfully, but for the first time in decades, one of its servants squirmed in its deathless grip like it had a chance to escape.

“Tell me!” Tenebroum raged again.

This time, the spirit gasped and flailed. “I don’t understand the question… the problem? What is it you need?”

Patience was the very last thing that Tenebroum had at that moment. Still, it stopped itself, and instead of trying to pour a book's worth of information into a single thought, it carefully explained what had happened to the mage and told it all about the destruction of its phylactery and its eventual dissolution as it drifted slowly apart. Having a physical form, even in the form of this borrowed head, seemed to help with that, but the darkness was still losing power, and it did not think that Malzekeen was the cause.

“You must build a new one,” the mage said eventually, “or you will continue to devolve into lower energy states as you equalize with the natural world.”

Tenebroum took that in and was shocked that it had not considered that itself until the head said as much. Am I really so far gone? It asked itself, balking at the obvious solution as it fled the mage’s head and sought the closest drudge that was still in one piece to do everything that needed to be done next.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

The darkness skipped over several that bore the telltale signs of rot that indicated a brush Malzekeen before it found an aging specimen that was deactivated but otherwise unharmed. Tenebroum hated that it couldn’t simply beckon to its lair and have these things come to it, but even worse was climbing into such a flimsy thing and forcing itself to its feet. Walking had always been complicated for the darkness, even when it had been a Lich. Now, though, it staggered down the hall toward its library and was barely able to stay upright with the use of the wall.

Once there, the Lich wrestled the lid off of the jar it had just interrogated, and then, grabbing the mage by the hair, it headed toward its treasury. On the way there, it saw no signs of the battle that it could hear, but it made no attempt to look for it. The very last thing the darkness needed right now was a fight. It was trapped inside a fragile, limping relic, and it was slowly bleeding to death on a spiritual level. It needed no other hardships.

Fortunately, it found none either, as it made its way to the treasury. Well, none, but the difficulty of retrieving and carrying a bag of gold with it up to the surface. The zombie that it was wearing was strong, but balance was made harder with such a heavy weight. Eventually, the darkness was forced to retrieve two bags just to balance it out as it trudged toward the surface.

Along the way, it saw many terrible things. Even if that monstrosity had only been in its lair for a few hours, it had wreaked havoc. Walls were knocked over, sections of tunnels had partially collapsed, and everywhere the soul web was snarled. It seemed to recall that the Templars had done less damage when they invaded, but it was hard to say. The darkness kept confusing that invasion with some of the smaller ones done by adventurers before that.

Then it reached the undertemple and found that its flock had been slaughtered, almost to a man. There were still a few praying, including Verdenin, who seemed to be dying, but Tenebroum ignored them. Their survival didn’t matter compared to its own, and right now, it did not need prayers; it needed a smelting cup and enough precious metal to fill it.

The way up to the surface was longer than the darkness remembered. It had been so long that it had traversed the path in physical form that it could not remember when it had done so. The past didn’t matter, nor did the difficulty. All that mattered was reaching its desperate goal.

There was no one to stop it on the surface, either. Indeed, the only obstacle it found there was that the blast furnace was almost out, and it was forced to set down its heavy load and retrieve a great deal of dried peat and charcoal, which had been set aside previously to get the thing back up to temperature.

Tenebroum had never known much about the metal works of its lair. It relied on its drudges and forgewights for that expertise. It knew that fire melted gold if it was hot enough, though, and it knew that it needed molten gold and the mind of a mage to replace what it had lost. How that worked? Why that worked? It had no clue. All it knew was that it was dissipating like fog on a sunny day, and it had to stop.

So Tenebroum loaded up the crucible with gold coins that it had looted from a dozen cities. Part of it worried that some of this gold might yet bear another spirit's touch, but right now, there was nothing it could do about it. Right now, anything was better than nothing. So long as it wasn’t Malzekeen’s gold, it would be enough for now.

What followed was a messy, clumsy process. The coins were slow to melt, even after Tenebroum figured out that it could work the bellows to increase the heat of the fire. It caught itself on fire twice, which was annoying, even if it did no real damage. Each mishap and mistake was more salt in the wound, though. A day ago, it had been a God; it had held the souls of hundreds of thousands and powered a war machine that functioned like clockwork, even half a continent away. Now, it was a bare chorus of ten thousand minds that were slowly bleeding away while it was forced to do all of the work itself.

It was humiliating, but worse than that, it was inefficient. To the lingering vestiges of Siddrim and the All-Father that it still held onto tightly, that was the most unforgivable sin of them all.

The remnants of the God of craftsmen cringed again when Tenebroum finally poured out the golden crucible onto the head of the mage, creating a tiny, ugly version of the phylactery it had possessed until recently. It was an effort that bordered on failure.

The head was hardly the heart that Albrecht’s preserved corpse had been, and the darkness gnashed its teeth in frustration as it tried to understand why. It had taken the mind of a mage and encased it in gold, just as it had done so long ago. This time, though, it wasn’t a new dark heart that it could gather endless amounts of power into. If its original phylactery had been an ocean, then this one was a pond or a very small lake.

Still, it was enough to staunch the bleeding. Even though Tenebroum felt like it filled the new thing up to bursting, it stopped hemorrhaging souls, and that was the important part. Now, it could even control a number of drudges once more, though they had to be close for it to do so.

This was still an unacceptable situation, but it was able to think and plan again, and using its drudge to carry its new quasi-phylactery around, the darkness went back down into its lair to ask its library for guidance on what to do next. Bartholomew was spent, but it had many other mages that could advise it on such things.

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