Tenebroum - Chapter 107: War Without End

Tenebroum expected to turn the tide quickly in the weeks that followed, but it was sadly mistaken in that belief. Instead, it was put on the back foot in the short term, and the dwarves continued through side passages they created around the tunnel it collapsed. Through those warrens, they pressed forward, collapsing section after section and undoing all its hard work until it could bring new units to bear.

Since most of the Lich’s units weren’t ready, it unleashed the goblin hordes still loyal to it. Though not quite endless, they were massive swarms in the thousands, and they needed no urging to join their slaughter against an ancestral enemy. At best, that was a delaying tactic while it studied the souls of the corpses it had taken and devoured all the dwarven secrets it could.

The dwarves were made out of sturdier stuff than most, which was both a blessing and a curse. The Lich enjoyed that struggle, but on this matter, it was in a hurry, and it desperately needed to know what had caused the men of the deeps to join together in common cause with the men of the realms.

As it turned out, nothing had. There was no alliance here. Instead, this had all been a part of a plan against the darkness. One that had started even before Siddrim’s light had been plucked out of the sky. The dwarves were here to avenge the loss of Mournden. They’d been driven here by divine revelation and come from cities as far away as three hundred miles to make it pay.

It was practically another crusade, and this fact frustrated the Lich to no end. As much as it would love to take the time to unleash new horrors into the deeps and hunt the dwarves to extinction, they were not currently the priority. They wouldn’t be until the sunlit realms above had been hunted until humanity was near extinction, and their gods lay broken and scattered across the face of a cold, dark world.

All of that awaited a new path to send its forces, though, and right now, a few hundred dwarves were saving hundreds of thousands of humans just because one of their graveyards had been desecrated. Day by day, the darkness lost the element of surprise because of this farce, and slowly, despite its more strategic worldview, its patience waned.

That was fine. The goblins cared for neither patience nor strategy as they spread into the side tunnels and the crevices. They explored the dark, hunting for prey, and created ambushes and attacks along unexpected routes, as their race preferred. At first, these bloody surprise attacks worked remarkably well, but soon, the dwarves adapted and slowed their push so they might be ready for even the most devious surprises.

Their deliberate approach made further ambushes impossible, but that wasn’t the main problem. The main problem was that it seemed to face numbers without end. The dwarves were nearly as numerous, and for all the bearded warriors that its goblins, both living and dead, slew, more came to continue the fight.

The Lich hurried the reconstruction of its hound’s duplicates so it could get the fire godling back in action. That was a lengthy and ongoing process. Of all its servants, Krulm’venor’s form was the most complicated. It was even more involved than the shadow dragon, and that fragile beast was more enchantment than it was flesh and bone at this point.

Oroza’s bindings had been as simple as the swamp dragon’s, and its Titan of earth was only stone trapped in bindings of lead because the Lich still didn’t fully understand the creature to do more than that. It couldn’t even communicate with the damn thing. It was just a ball of fear made up of so many tiny broken lives that it scarcely had a sense of self. All it knew was that if it obeyed, the pain would stop, and for now, that was enough.

Krulm’venor’s skeleton was more complicated in a thousand little ways, from the painful souls that were bound to it to the clever use of shadows that allowed one skeleton to unfold into a horde of goblin abominations with a thought. As much as it might loathe the fire godling, the thing’s powers were impressive, and so it was worth investing in.

Those bodies had taken months to complete the first time, though, and had been completely depleted in the gruesome assault on Siddrimar. Krulm’venor had slain hundreds of Templars all by himselves and turned whole chapels and sanctuaries and chapels into a crematorium, but the cost had been heavy. He’d begun with 63 bodies but ended with only four, and when the Lich had finally pulled its hound back, the fire godling had fought it every step of the way. It wanted nothing more than to throw its last few lives away, but the darkness would never allow that to happen.

Tenebroum had already increased Krulm’venor’s number of bodies back to 36, and before it unleashed him on its dwarven enemies, it wanted him back to at least a hundred. Truthfully, though, the Lich was no longer sure that Krulm’venor’s soul could take such a strain.

So, even as a whole workshop spent its days casting and assembling iron goblin bones for the spirits of its lesser encanters to ensorcell and enchant, the Lich devoted significant time to trying to rectify the situation. This was done, in large part, by grinding the crystal skulls of dwarven heroes into dust and infusing those fragments into the soul that was more goblin than dwarf now, but the results were mixed. So, instead of unleashing the inferno on its enemies, it recalled its Titan to see what the earthen abomination could do while its deathless artisans put the finishing touches on its newest construct: the Devourer.

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The Titan was not a fighter. It had participated in the night of blood and fire in the holy city. It had been instrumental, even, in breaching the walls of the fortress city and tearing down the tallest spires, but any deaths it had caused had been incidental. It was a pacifist, and as far as the Lich was concerned, that was its only weakness.

The Titan abandoned its canal just short of the sea when Tenebroum called. Unlike most of its servants, it could travel by day as it burrowed underground and strode beneath the earth. Like everything the Lich touched, it struggled with daylight, but it was not required to operate in it. That was doubly true for this mission. The Lich wanted it as deep in the mountain as possible, and when it attacked the dwarves that had troubled it so, it took them by complete surprise.

Attack was the wrong word. The Lich was certain that it could crush even the fine steel and mithril armor of those monsters, but it refused to do so, even as it screamed while the Lich clawed at its very soul. What it did do, though, was good enough.

For lack of a better word, the creature liquified the stone beneath the feet of its enemies, and they began to sink into the rippling stone as if it had always been quicksand. There were cries of alarm, of course, but this time, there were no enemies to fight. Only those groups that had a priest of the All-Father with them managed to survive, and their magic over the stone proved to be weaker than the Titan’s in most cases. So, if they were caught by surprise, its servant might not be able to drown the whole troop in stone, but it might lock them into place until such time as the priests could either free them with their stone singing or amputate their legs if they could not.

Soon, Tenebroum learned to use these two tools with increasing synergy. First, it would distract the dwarves by liquifying the stone, and then as soon as the priest started to counteract the effect, it would have the Titan resolidify it once more and then attack the dwarves while they were stuck with a tide of goblins. The goblins weren’t a match for the bearded warriors under normal circumstances, but when they couldn’t turn around, they became little more than a meal for its most chaotic and hungry servants.

After that, they retreated for a time, allowing the Titan to cobble together the stone in the most damaged portions of the tunnel so it would be safe to dig through once more. It did not waste its servant’s time digging all that rubble back out. Not when the Devourer was on the way.

The Lich boiled with rage, but at this point, all it wanted was to bore a hole through the mountains to reach the central provinces. Instead, it was dealing with an increasingly chaotic and multisided war. The dwarves simply would not stop with their incessant need to be a thorn in the Lich’s side. In the end, that was why it released the Devourer along with a hundred new members of its legion of rust.

The Devourer was an interesting idea, but truthfully, it had no idea how it would perform in most conditions. The device was a single serpentine shape powered and controlled by the souls of broken and unimaginative men with a single purpose: to go forward. It could just as easily have been called the snake of ten thousand teeth because that’s what it was made of.

In all the Lich’s experiments, the only things harder than mithril had been adamantine and, paradoxically, kobold teeth. The hard, milky gemstones seemed to be able to cut through anything. Naturally, this had led to experiments in creating a mining machine to expedite things even before the dwarves had arrived. That change had necessitated armor for its new creation, which also took the form of teeth, lending the whole thing the terrifying look of an enamel-armored earthworm.

It was an unimpressive thing that was built for only a single purpose: to move forward. Each tooth carved a chunk out of the stone that lay ahead of it and then carried it backward in a continuous loop. All of its teeth did that, lending the entire construct the appearance of a slow but implacable caterpillar inching along the ground as it created a tunnel that was both perfectly straight and perfectly round.

In time, the maddening sounds of dozens of teeth scratching away at the stone would be enough to drive men mad and force groups to retreat, but that wasn’t how they felt during those initial encounters. At first, the dwarves tried to fight it, but those few that met its terrifying maw head-on did not live to tell the tale, and by the time they had been processed from one end to the other by the thirty-foot monster, they were little more than bloody gravel.

Even this was not enough to stop the fighting, but it was sufficient to restart progress on construction. The dwarves simply had no counter to it. So, they switched tactics to trying to sabotage existing sections of the tunnel, which caused a whole new set of skirmishes to erupt along the slowly lengthening passage.

These, at least, could largely be resolved with goblins, and in time, Tenebroum was able to send its Titan back to finish its main priority as the dwarven assaults lost steam, which greatly pleased the Lich. It had not yet won this front, but after months of fighting, it felt like it was getting closer, and as frustrating as tunnel fighting had been, it had several advantages.

One of which was that it was easy to follow the source of the attackers back to their source. Even now, it launched shadowy scouts in all directions, looking back through dwarven tunnels to find their bases of operations.

They had thought that they could trouble it, but they did not know the meaning of the word. The Lich would inflict an eternity of grief on the troublesome species for the minor inconvenience they had caused it. By the time it was done, they would be even more endangered than the gnomes it had already slaughtered.