Tenebroum Ch. 200-201

Ch. 200 - The World Below

Tenebroum had no idea where Krulm’venor got off to. That annoyed it, and not just because that vile godling could have helped with pest control once it started boring deeper into the earth. It was also that the Lich hated the idea that the arrogant dwarf might have finally managed to slip his leash. Tenebroum found that idea almost as intolerable as the idea that Oroza had gotten away and vowed to recapture him, even if it wasn’t strictly necessary. 

It would either own its hound or it would have the beast put down. There was no third option. 

The hard part was now over, fortunately. After dealing with the overland logistics from its Wyrmspine Tunnel, it finally had what it needed to dig a very deep hole. These things were not easy when its army was practically down to a skeleton crew, but in the weeks that followed, it made do without any losses. 

The dark titan had been left just where the Lich had finished with it. This wasn’t because it maintained some loyalty to it. It was because its leaden armor prevented it from phasing with the stone and escaping into the depths without the Lich’s magic, and there was no other way out of the side tunnel it had been cast aside into when the work was done. 

It was impossible to determine what impact the long isolation might have had on the thing, but that didn’t matter as long as the creature obeyed. It did, too, however grudgingly. As soon as the Lich touched its soul, it began to move and obey orders once more. 

The Lich didn’t care about tormenting the earth elemental too much, though, because it had never figured out how to do so in a satisfying way. Even at the height of its power, the thing was completely alien to it, and unlike Krulm’venor or Oroza, it had never found the right levers to make it suffer properly. 

Of course, Tenebroum hadn’t even been expecting to find the thing, anyway. It had barely sensed the creature until it was practically on top of it. It had come for the Devourer. Though the machine would have to be taken apart and then reassembled to dig vertically instead of horizontally, it was the perfect construct for what came next, even if it had lain dormant for such a long time. 

Tenebroum’s current plan was a simple one. It was going to dig ever deeper into the dark and search for more shadows to feast on as it made its way toward its real goal: the All-Father’s forges. It had only the dimmest idea of where those might be, of course, thanks to the God’s memories, but that was as good of a place as any to start. If the stars held back one source of darkness, then it would dig as deep as it needed to find the power that it needed. If the stars held back one ocean of darkness, then it would snuff out the All-Father’s forges and find another. 

All of this would, of course, require it to further mar its glorious undertemple as rigging and scaffolding were set up so that the Devourer could be put into place. The thing was made of bone and steel, along with the clever arrangement of the teeth and claws of over a thousand kobolds that had been gathered throughout Krulm’venor’s long trip in the depths. It was a complicated device in that almost everything was a moving part, so some work had to be redone by its remaining forgewights before it could be locked into place. Such progress was slow, but every day, the glittering crystalline monstrosity stood a little higher and a little more complete until, one day, it was so tall it practically touched the ceiling.

Of course, even after the Devourer was assembled and rattled to life with graceless motion, there were other problems. As the thing started burrowing downward at the rate of a dozen feet a day, the noise of all those crystalline teeth and claws scraping against stone was so loud that it even threatened to overwhelm the volume it was capable of speaking through the steam-fed pipe organ. 

That was just an inconvenience, though. The real problem was the sheer amount of waste rock that the thing generated. There were other problems, too, like the way the vibration damaged nearby components and the way the whole lair could shake quite disturbingly at times. Thanks to Tenebroum’s constant construction and the growth of its lair for nearly its entire existence, there was some capacity to dispose of such dross, but not on this scale. 

Rather than speed up digging, that quickly became the dark titan’s full-time job: liquifying and disposing of as much rubble as possible. This had the added side effect of strengthening the walls of the ever-growing well, but it was mundane work for a creature of such terrible power. Those magics became much more useful when the Lich’s efforts ran into tunnels and caves periodically, letting it reinforce such areas without sending its digging contraption crashing to the floor. 

While its digging never paused in such places, Tenebroum’s attention did. It turned out that most of the ground beneath the earth was taken up by stone. Its godling's infinite journey through the darkest places of the world made it seem like there would be more caverns, but they were indeed a rarity, and each time the Lich’s efforts discovered one, it would explore it in search of anything that might be able to killed or put to better use. At this point, shorthanded as it was, it would even consider reanimating goblins as drudges, if only to dispose of excess rubble. 

There were no goblins to be found, though. Not at first, at least. Instead, the first thing it discovered were dwarves or at least the remains of some. Their souls had long since departed their bodies, but the evidence showed they were up to a construction project of their own that had been interrupted when their entire race had been intentionally infected with madness. After that, it found a nest of kobolds that it toyed with for a while.

Tenebroum made sure to kill those with shadow magic to leave the bodies whole, so their prodigious digging talents could be put to use wherever necessary. Even such additions did little to speed up the progress of things. Digging this deep was a laborious business, and the Lich only focused on it when it found something interesting. 

After the kobolds it was a den of giant spiders and then a subterranean river that quickly evolved into a large subterranean lake only a few dozen feet below that. Tenebroum’s constructs had no need for breathing, though. They merely kept digging, no matter what they found, and when another cavern complex was found below that, the waters above were quickly drained into unimportant tunnels and offshoots to drown whatever might have lived there. 

After that, there was a cavern of endless fungus that briefly gummed up the complicated components of the Devourer. The Lich was briefly interested in the slow-moving fungal people that occupied a small portion of the larger cavern, but once its experiments showed that the creatures neither had souls to capture nor bones to reuse in large projects, it sent a few forgewights to burn the place until it was nothing but ashes. That was the last form of life that it saw for quite a while. 

There wasn’t a lot this deep, though. It recalled that Krulm’venor had mentioned that once, but increasingly, the few caverns that were found were completely empty without so much as a stray shadow to devour. Such ideas swirled around in its mind from the souls of other dwarves, too. Above a certain depth, monsters existed, and below a certain depth, there were only shadows and worse. Dwarves preferred to live in the quiet area between the two, but Tenebroum wanted to drill well past those depths and keep going until it reached the center of things. 

After a while, whole weeks could pass where the Devourer found nothing but bedrock. Those times were enough to make the Lich second guess this whole plan, but it would not be denied. It could not yet have the night sky, so it would have the dark heart of the world instead.  It felt sure that the swirling shadows that had devoured so many dwarven cities were still down there, and it would feast on all of them. Ironically, that would make the depths safer than ever for the dwarves, but it was unlikely that there were any of the little men left at this point. 

Its continued diffing efforts found a slender vein of gold, once, which excited the Lich enough that it paused the larger mining project to start a smaller one almost a thousand feet beneath the surface, but that was only a distraction to pass the time. It needed the gold, of course, but even a vein ten times as rich found have been a distraction.

In the fragments of dwarven memory, it knew that there was more wealth than it could ever put to use in the dwarven God’s lair. Of course, finding that was the question, but barring another enemy to fight, the Lich could continue at this pace in perpetuity until it found what it sought. The Devourer was a very efficient machine, and digging ever deeper cost Tenebroum very little. 

It also gave the Lich plenty of time to plan and begin to lay out how its structure would need to change in subtle but important ways to accommodate the wellspring of evil that it hoped to tap. Most of the work had already been done in its rebirth, of course, but based on its first dual with the Moon Goddess’s minions, there were some improvements left to be made. At this time, though, it saw no need to reinforce the well, which was growing ever deeper with runes in the same way that it had done to trap Siddrim so long ago. 

It imagined what that would look like, as delicate golden glyphs spiraled down into the dark, repeating its true name over and over. It would have been a work of pure beauty, and the part of itself that had once been Sidrim saw value in that, but in the end, Tenebroum decided against it for reasons that were more utilitarian. Such measures were time-consuming and not strictly necessary. 

No matter how deep it dug, though, and no matter how many side passages it explored, it never found its wretched little godling. That surprised it, given that it had to be much closer to Krulm’venor than it had been on the surface, but then it had yet to find the Queen of Thorns or the Voice of Reason, either, which was evidence enough that it remained quite diminished in some ways. Tenebroum would fix that if it was the last thing it did.

Ch. 201 - Purging the Darkness

For week after week, Leo slaughtered his way through the countryside. Without anyone with him, he could go further and faster than ever before, and he gloried in it. Several times, he found a lone family sheltering in a cave or a farmhouse somewhere well off the beaten path. Each time, he told them where wayward was and how to get there, using the landmarks of his quest to guide them around anywhere he considered dangerous. 

He didn’t accompany them, though, and he had no idea if they made it to safety or not. He felt guilty about that. The right answer would have been to cease his quest and make sure every one of those lives was saved, but every day not spent purging the darkness felt like it would be a waste to him. He had a sword that could not be resisted glowing in his hand and a light that was only burning brighter in his heart. 

Food, or the lack of it, no longer held him back. He could make his own bread when he had need of it, but it was the light that fed him now, and the only real nourishment he needed was after he’d been wounded, which happened on more than one occasion. Each battle where he was wounded badly enough to need to repair his armor afterward was a wake-up call for him. Some small part of his mind told him that if he wasn’t careful, he would fall, and no one would ever find his body. 

He wasn’t one to back down from a challenge, though. Every near-death experience only taught him what not to do in the future, and he learned from each of them, be they a horde of zombies or a floating brain with tentacles that had tried to make him kill himself without much luck. 

Leo slowly circled around Rahkin, planning to come at it from the north after he’d purged the various dungeons that surrounded it. They vented evil like volcanic geysers and were impossible to miss. Soon, he was able to gauge the threat of whatever lay within based solely on the color and thickness of the miasma. That made him overconfident and almost cost him his life when he found one of them full of strange, rusted men.

He had fought all manner of abominations, including many that were made of obvious animal parts, but these were the first he’d seed that weren’t human in any way. At first, he thought they were children trapped in iron armor, which was a horrific thought. But as he’d discovered that the strange meta men knew how to fight better than almost any war zombie he’d ever faced, he quickly reached another conclusion. 

“Dwarves,” he grunted as he parried the blow from a deadly axe. 

Such creatures were a myth, but there was nothing else that made sense with the beards and the weapons. He’d always thought that dwarves were made of flesh and blood, but maybe the stories got it wrong. Perhaps they were creatures of stone and metal, and when the Lich reanimated them, they rose up just the same. 

He didn’t have a lot of time to consider the question while he was fighting them, though. They weren’t so fast, but they were skilled and strong. Worse, unlike most of the abominations he’d put down, they actually exhibited teamwork, which made their combined attacks that much worse. 

Even after he’d dispatched the creatures and studied their remains, he still couldn’t decide if the things that had almost cut him off at the knees were really mythological creatures that had been returned from the dead or if they were mockeries of the myths. “Why would a monster do such a thing, though?” he asked himself. Surely, such tricks required a sense of humor, or at least irony, and the dead had no room for anything but hunger in their souls. 

Those thoughts stuck with him for a while after that. Until now, he’d assumed that the creatures he faced, from the ragged birds to the centaurs made from the rotting remains of plow horses and farmers, were no more than the scraps that the darkness had on hand at the time, but sometimes, he found creatures that made that seem less likely. Twice, he found rotting Templars whose rotting forms had been covered with very shiny armor in a mockery of the light, and in the second case, the man exploded with a thick yellowish gas when Leo put him down. 

That had made him sick for days while the light healed his burned lungs from the inside out. “At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised to find a dragon,” he said to himself once he finished coughing up blood. 

Eventually, though, he decided he was just dragging his feet. For so long, he’d told himself he needed to go into Rahkin, and now that it was there, on the horizon, he kept finding reasons not to go. There was evil out here that needed purging. His friends would look for him there. He thought of any reason except the real one: There might be something in that shadow-shrouded city he couldn’t beat. 

Oh, it was one thing to secretly believe you could do anything and kill any abomination that existed, but something had killed Brother Faerbar, and no matter how hard Leo practiced and how many of the walking dead he slew, he doubted he would hold a candle to that man. 

Still, on the day Leo purged the last of the barrows he could find, he reluctantly decided that tomorrow would be the day he would find out what was really in there. The result was… underwhelming. 

At first light he entered the town to find it halfway leveled. There was nothing left within the walls that resembled life. He could find neither crows nor rats. He couldn’t even find creeping ivy that wasn’t withered and brown. Something awful had happened here. He was sure of it. He didn’t know what, but it had drained every last ounce of light and life that might have ever existed in that place. 

Still, that was all the more reason to stay and wait to see what came out at night. That night, after he finished exploring the city for any sign of survivors, he chose the largely intact castle as the place where he would have his fight. He took the last few hours to prepare the ground and barred what doors he could to ensure he wouldn’t be surrounded, and he’d have several fallback locations if he’d truly bitten off more than he could chew. What found him at sunset was underwhelming, at least at first. 

When the red sunlight finally faded and was replaced by the cold, distant stars, the first creatures to scuttle out of cellars and crannies in the rubble where the mangled pieces of zombies who had been killed at least once before waited out the day away from the sun’s harsh light. None of them had all four limbs, and few of them had more than one or two, making them easy to dispatch as they crawled forward in a quest to devour his light. 

He was glowing literally now. That was a first, even for him. He barely took note of it while he was hacking the monsters to pieces, but when he did, he doubted it would last once he left this cursed place. After all, anything halfway to decent would burn with light in a place so dark, and no matter how many souls he set free, the miasma clung to everything like a stubborn fog. 

Those dead were merely the warm-up act, though. Other, larger, broken things came after that. There was the upper half of an armored ogre that had long since lost its legs, there was a giant spider made from the parts of men that only had five limbs and three eyes left to attack him with, and there were a few war zombies that were still in mostly decent shape, though there was nothing special about them otherwise. 

None of them stood a chance. Oh, the ogre could certainly have killed Leo if it had gotten a grip on him with those giant hands. They ripped out a door frame without an issue, and he doubted his bones would fare any better. Still, it couldn’t turn fast enough to stop him from climbing its exposed spine like a ladder and embedding his glowing sword deep into its thick skull. 

The spider hadn’t even been that hard. Maybe when it had been fresh, it had been a quick, dangerous enemy. Now, it was simply an arthritic zombie on stilts, which again made him wonder about whatever it was that had created it. Something or someone had labored for months and years to create this panoply of horrors, and he had trouble imagining that. 

Once those monsters were dispatched, Leo was starting to grow confident. At least until he felt the ground start to rumble and shake. It didn't take him long to realize that something was attacking the castle because it was too large to get at him inside. So, he went up top of the battlement to take a look. The result wasn’t quite a dragon, but it might as well have been. 

Someone had taken the broken pieces of sunken ships, the severed parts of sea monsters, and a seemingly endless variety of human hands and feet and created a three-story hermit crab. The thing was vile, and even after all of Leo’s experience up until now, the smell made him gag. 

When his light showed up on the parapet, the thing noticed him immediately, but it was much too large to climb, so it continued to attack the wall, as it alternated between roaring in frustration and  

Still, he mounted the battlement and prepared to jump. 

Leo had no doubt he could jump onto its back. He just had no idea how he was supposed to kill the thing. The other creatures had been easy enough. Even the ogre had an obvious weak point, but this thing? It was armored in three inches of wood, and under that, it was nothing but a writing mass of evil. 

He studied the problem while the beast thrashed and flailed, and then when he identified what he thought was a cluster of eyes, he decided to make that his target. “I’d rather fight the dragon,” he said with more than a little disgust before he finally lept down to the monstrosity fifteen feet below. 

In that moment, Leo had considered a lot of things. He’d considered where he would land and how he should strike. He’d considered his escape plan and the thing’s reach. The one thing he hadn’t considered, though, was how slimy it was. He’d never fought a sea monster before, and when he landed on its rough back, his legs instantly went out from under him, sending him sliding down the thing’s back toward its many limbs. 

Leo buried the silver blade into the thing’s side, using it to slow his descent, but as it moved, his hand slipped, and he was sent tumbling to the thick wood of the drawbridge. He was up immediately but immediately wasn’t fast enough for this thing. It wasn’t a dried-out, desiccated husk like so many of the creatures he’d fought up until now. Its movements were fast and slick. And before he could do more than rise, rotting tentacles had wrapped around the young man and were slowly squeezing the life out of him. 

Leo’s life flashed before his eyes for a moment as he looked at the glittering hilt of his magical sword embedded in the monster a dozen feet away. If I had that, I could cut myself free, he thought into despair. That moment of weakness was dispelled when the thing began to crush him even tighter as it dragged him toward its maw. The thing wasn’t a proper mouth. It was just a cavern lined with rusting swords; it was nothing but a mockery of life, and it was that moment of indignity that made his light shine brighter. 

Leo Garvin the Fifth would not go out like this. He would not let the darkness take him as it had his forebearers. Leo struggled as hard as he could against the vice-like grip, determined to use its slimy nature to his advantage. It did nothing, though. 

Well, nothing, physically. His light had been visible as an aura nearly all evening in this vile place, but the more he struggled and fought, the brighter it grew. Eventually, only a few feet from rotting, certain death, the thing’s tentacles burst into flame, and it shied away as Leo’s light began to take a real toll on the creature. 

He thought about pressing his luck but decided against it. First, he needed his blade. Even his silver sword glowed when he pulled it out of the creature, and that made him smile grimly. As it tried to move away from him, flailing widely, he thought about pressing the fight but decided it was too risky. He could feel his broken ribs still trying to mend, and he knew that light or not, he wasn’t at 100% yet. 

Instead, he pulled back, and before the thing could leave the drawbridge, he attacked the chains holding the thing in place. Each severed cleanly with a single stroke from his radiant blade, sending the bridge and the giant crab zombie tumbling into the dried-up moat. It fell there, hopelessly pinned, which was good enough for Leo.

“Let the sun take you,” he spat as he went back inside. He would find a place to heal and rest, and then, in the morning, he would continue his purge. If there were still things like this around, then there was more work to do.