Tenebroum - Chapter 112: Beneath it All

Even before it reached the battlefield, while it was still just a skull being carried toward the site of the dig in the steel claws of a giant four-winged condor, it knew what it must do. It had no time to prepare nor body to fight with yet. Instead, it would be installed on the body of a random nameless drudge that had carted away rubble up until now when it had arrived. However, ever since its creation twelve hours before, when it had been removed from the soul foundry, the library of its Master sang to it, filling its hungry mind with all sorts of information.

There were many voices, but among them, the Skoeticnomikos was the loudest and the most constant. It poured information into the mind of Paragon throughout the whole of the flight, building up the history of the battle, the nature of the wins and losses that the Lich’s forces had endured, and, of course, maps. Due to the nature of the combat, many of the tunnels had changed a dozen times already as old tunnels collapsed and new tunnels were dug under or around them. By the time it landed, it knew everything about the dwarves that the darkness had so far discovered.

It was a precarious game where each victory could be turned into a loss with only a little bit of surprise and preparation. One second, the Lich’s forces had vanquished another band of dwarves, and the next, they were crushed to uselessness under the rubble of a well-laid trap. It was a theme it picked up repeatedly in the record of battle. Despite the Lich’s scouts, the guerilla tactics of the dwarves had grown bold and surprisingly effective. The only unit that they didn’t bother to attack anymore was the Devourer, and that was because, physically speaking, the construct was practically indestructible.

Obviously, though, they had no need to attack it if the drudges that carried away its tailings could be slaughtered with impunity and bog the whole project down. So, the very first thing that Paragon did when it arrived was to abort all hostilities. Even the Devourer was halted for the first time in weeks. Before its head was even fully installed and it had the ability to walk, the Great Tunnel project grew unnaturally silent for the first time since it had begun.

Before it could deploy its pieces, it had to understand the position of the board, and right now, the board was in chaos. So it waited for an hour, then two. Slowly, the shades and specters that had been searching for the dwarves for so long spread out. They weren’t hunting now, though. They were merely listening, and after two hours, it was content that it had discovered 6 points of likely ambush and two hidden bolt holes that the enemy was using to resupply.

It was the sounds that gave them away. It was their sounds that told it what they were doing. Talking and snoring said one thing about the location, and the metallic echos of picks and shovels said something else entirely. In the perfect silence of the stone, it could hear even the beating of their hearts with enough patience. It was confident about that.

As soon as the nature of its plan became clear to the Lich, its workshops began to design listening devices that could be scattered throughout the area in the form of strings of possessed ears and taunt skin membranes the size of a man that could pick up even the faintest vibrations. Those would come later, though. Now that it knew where the enemy was, the time for violence was at hand.

Instead of striking the areas of sabotage that the dwarves attempted to bait them into, it sent its rusting vanguard into the dwarven strong points, where it expected those guerilla hit-and-run groups to flee to.

Suddenly, after months of fighting, the shoe was on the other foot. Until now, the forces of darkness reacted to the dwarven provocations, letting the enemy follow their own plan. Now, they reversed that.

It was a bloodless, calculating general, and it reversed their strategy entirely, planting units in escape paths and then pursuing the dwarves into a pincer movement of their own making. For day after relentless day, there were random pauses so it could hear exactly where they were and what they were planning just before it unleashed its next counter move.

Worse, Paragon ignored their provocations, letting the whole tunnel project fall into disrepair at least once a week as it focused on its quarry. The Lich wanted the tunnel completed as soon as possible, but the only rational way to achieve that was to eliminate the saboteurs. It was simply too vulnerable of a target to be defended against on all sides for almost 40 miles. That was especially true after all of the shunts, side passages, and workarounds that had been created were taken into account.

However, the dwarves had even more trouble understanding this than the Lich did. It could peer into its mind any time it liked to check in on the state of the war before turning to other tasks. The dwarves, on the other hand, could only wonder at the sudden and complete shift in strategy, and they were adapting to it poorly.

It was obvious they were getting some hidden insight into the way it arrayed the forces of darkness as well, but it couldn’t say if this was because of smell, magic, or some divine insight from their deity. All it could say was that it wasn’t going to be enough. Day by day, they suffered setbacks, and week by week, their forces eroded.

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They still won victories often enough because of the constrained nature of their forces. It was difficult to get soldiers from the lair of darkness where they were created en mass to the tunnel project, even if the Lich was constructing additional depots between the two locations so that armies in transit would have a place to shelter during daylight hours.

As it turned out, after undermining and avalanche, the dwarfs’ rune magic was by far their most powerful weapon. Though it was rarely deployed for reasons it didn’t fully understand, it could trigger any number of useful effects when one of its units stumbled upon one of them.

It wasn’t enough, though. No matter how many times the priests summoned their god to save them, and no matter how many traps their minor miracles saved them from, there were always new battles to fight and new traps to spring. Slowly but surely the living were ground down and forced to rise up to fight their comrades. By the second month of the insurgency, they were all but defeated. There was simply nowhere left to hide. For so long, the twisting mountain passages had served as a refuge, but now they had become a tomb. Paragon had finally found a use for all of the smashed and buried corpses that were no longer fit to be reassembled into new warriors.

As suggested by the library, they could become a different sort of weapon if they were mixed with sulfur and a few other alchemical ingredients and acids. If silence and sound were the weapons that it used to win the war under the mountain, then the corpse gas it unleashed in the waning days secured the peace.

Above ground, the weapon would have been ineffective in even the mildest breeze, but down here, they could saturate the main tunnel and all of the side tunnels to such a degree that the dwarves could no longer even get close to it for any length of time.

So, it was under a yellow-grey shroud that the main tunnel was repaired, completed, and opened. The dwarves had been soundly defeated, and its first test was complete. It had won a war while the Lich was free to focus on other, more important tasks.

There were oddities, though, and stragglers. The wraiths that scouted the lower tunnels occasionally found signs that small groups of dwarves had passed. Most of the time, these hinted at guerilla action or resupply routes, but sometimes, those tracks did not seem to lead to or from any known settlement.

As far as it was concerned, that just meant that the dwarves were fleeing from the fighting like the cowards they were. It had won this battlefield, and going forward, and soon, the real fight would begin on the unsuspecting fields, where it would reap a bloody slaughter in the name of its Master.

. . .

“You’re certain you weren’t followed,” the acolyte asked them as Belag’ma and the small group of dwarves he’d led here entered through the last of the 8 secret doors that separated their divine work from the labyrinth tunnels beyond.

Already, he could hear the echoed songs of the dozens of dwarves that dwelled here, slowly carving the unremarkable pocket of vaulted stone into a cathedral, one day at a time.

“We waited for two days and two nights, but nothing tried to strike or spy on us,” the priest assured him. “We are here to do the All-Father’s work, no matter how long it takes.”

The acolyte nodded at that and then allowed them entry before bolting the door behind them. “Then I bid you welcome, Timoria, and hope that none of us leave here alive,” the young dwarf said before he turned around and brought them to see the monks who had started this project so many months ago.

The news traveled fast after that, and most of the rumors and updates were exchanged before they’d even finished that short walk. The war in the caverns far above them was going poorly, and Hugeldin had fallen with no survivors. They were grim tidings, but for the survivors that huddled here behind several barriers that were both natural and unnatural, they stoked the fires of anger, not despair.

“We’ll likely lose the whole of the Wodenspines in a year or two if nothing changes,” one of the dwarves, a crippled warrior, grumbled. “Even that would be better than this thing going deeper, though.”

“Of course, it will go deeper,” the priest shot back in anger. “It devoured Mourn’den. It can go as deep as it likes! We’ve never faced anything like this before!”

Belag’ma ignored them as they continued their conversation all the way to the center of the secret hold. He knew the truth. The dwarves could not face this threat any more than they could flee, and in the near future, they would likely be an endangered species in this part of the world. It was like trying to deal with the goblins and the shadows at the same time. Each enemy could be beaten on their own with some difficulty, but combined? It couldn’t be done.

Dwarves would live on, of course. The world was a vast place, and some of them would escape into the light rather than be snuffed out in the dark, but in time, that darkness would devour the world. That was why they were here. To give them that time.

He smiled as he left his charges with the forge father to return to his duties. That was probably his last trip outside, but it was just as well. If they sealed the doors, the shadows could not hope to find them, and they would have all the time in the world to sing their hymns, mold their stones, and sharpen their grudges. One way or the other, the fallen clan holds, and the graves of the defiled would have their revenge. Even the dead rising from their graves wouldn’t be enough to stop that.

It would take the new arrivals time to get used to the steady diet of stone and prayer, but the All-Father would sustain them. This was his plan, and he had called all of them here to implement it. Now, all they needed was time, and they would finally strike a blow that the enemy would not soon forget.