Tenebroum - Chapter 89: The Infinite Dark

Tenebroum slept as the world burned, but it still dreamed, and through those dreams, it watched fitfully as events played out. It couldn’t help it. The Lich was both the darkness at the center of its domain, controlling everything like a spider in a web, as well as every drudge and construct that was currently marauding across the face of the world. So, its sleep would never really be dreamless. It couldn’t be when ten thousand parts of it were in constant motion.

It had never been able to see so far as it could see right now in its slumber, though. It had always imagined that the world stopped at the shores of land where its ravens had reached and its bard’s songs had traveled. It could see that the world was bigger than that now, though. There were other islands and contents in all directions, and though some of them were even more populous than its current home, a few had never known the hand of man.

Past that, there was only infinite ice… but if it stretched even further, which it could only do because the sun had set forever, it found an ocean of inky blackness that only got stranger as it went further. In that outer darkness, it could see things just out of reach that would drive a lesser mind mad. Out there, and the distant edges of frayed reality before the void consumed everything were twisted structures and impossible recursive knots that recoiled in on themselves infinitely.

At least the darkness thought that’s what they were. As it reached out to inspect them more closely, though, it found that they were not the calcified relicts of a bygone age that it had presumed that they were. The vague light that even now swirled through its darkness was enough to make them spring to life and recoil, escaping out into the darkness of the void where it could not follow.

It was another unsuspected layer of reality that the Lich had never really been aware of. Without the sun in the sky, it could drift far above the world and see that what it thought of as everything was merely a few warring kingdoms atop a tortoiseshell in the midst of a storm-tossed sea. It was only its fear of journeying further out that kept it from exploring further, and as for going beneath the waves… well, some part of it knew that as large and as powerful a predator it had become, in the darkness of the depths it was merely bait for the things that lurked down there, and it retreated to escape any chance that it might gain their attention.

Even as the Lich returned to the distant island of relative sanity, before it became hopelessly lost, it was distracted by the way that the world warped and warped again. At first, every spec that floated in that ocean was reduced to the flatness of a map, and their connections and distances were charted and labeled in a constantly mutating language that made no sense. Later, as it got close enough that it could finally, once again, see the continent where its lair resided, everything became spherical, like hanging gemstones drifting through space in rings that connected them and tiny concentric orbits.

By the end of that strange voyage, the Lich would be hard-pressed to say which version of what it had seen was the truth or if all of them were some aspect of the truth it could not understand. The sheer amount of power that resonated through it in the wake of its victory was enough to distort the world as a whole. It might have been that nothing it had seen had changed at all and that the only thing that was changing were the eyes that viewed it.

It would have all time in the world to evaluate this, though on the eternal night, it had created. Already, that night had lasted for three days, and it showed no sign of ending. The stars still twinkled, but the smaller plants had already begun to droop, and ice was beginning to gather in the higher parts of Oroza’s watershed along the banks.

Only a few days ago, when the sun had still shone, it had been a warm spring day, but now, only days later, all of the summer had been skipped, and winter was coming. The Lich did not mind that. The dead did not feel the cold, and though it made its stiff zombies slightly less effective, in time it would create newer, better minions that could resist this too.

All that mattered was that the light had been slain, and Siddrim’s bones lay across a league, slowly dissipating into nothing. It was the only victory that mattered. So, whether the people of Irbrahim and Movahn’s Rest banded together and struck down the moldering dead that had erupted from their cemeteries or whether that endless tied of limping old warriors eventually succeeded in slaughtering the living of those cities mattered little to it.

If this wave of dead did not succeed, then the next one would, and if it didn’t, then the starvation and snows of its endless night surely would. Life was doomed, but no matter how much the Lich enjoyed watching the last struggles of humanity, it would not miss them when they were gone. Instead, it would reach out with its bony hands and grasp ever larger chunks of the world until everything was under its control. Once that was the case, and every living creature had been brought back as its undying slave, then it could establish caravans to collect and gather all the wealth of the dead world and bring it back to Blackwater, where it would melt it down to create a monument to its greatness.

First, it would have to deal with the dying embers of humanity. They were everywhere, like a scattered campfire. They were in barges and fishing boats along the coast where the survivors of the goblin raids sought peace and safety of the larger cities.

There would be no safety there, though. Tagel-by-the-sea was already overwhelmed with the dead that had spent the last few days marching along the bottom of the river. Now, the implacable dead led by its juggernaut were ravaging that rich trading hub, and only the lonely keep that looked out at the sea yet stood against its monstrous forces.

Only a few places had resisted Tenrboum’s grasp with any kind of success, and they were either far away or places of immense power, like the Magica Collegium at Abenend and the holy warriors at Siddrimar. Nothing that the Lich had done had severed the bonds of magic to the mages of Abenend, so they stood alone in annihilating the first army that it had sent its way, but despite the loss of the light, the warriors of Siddrimar had done better than it would have thought, and despite the fact that their holy city was in ruin they had managed to wound all four of its horsemen and send them back to its fleshcrafters so they could be repaired.

All in all, it was not the absolute victory that Tenebroum had hoped for, but it was a start. It was a stepping stone on the path to the extinction of all life, and almost every city on this continent had been put on notice that death was at the gates.

The Lich enjoyed these bloody, transient scenes as they played across its mind, but they were a flickering light show and nothing more. Its focus, as always, was on itself and its core.

The battle with Siddrim had been a vicious close, fought thing, and the immense amount of light energies that it had drained from the god’s dying body was taking almost as much a toll to integrate, and it was more painful than incorporating the watery nature of the Oroza had ever been.

Then, it had been a matter of alignment and understanding, but in this case, it was one of annihilation as the light and dark destroyed each other, and it clung to the tenuous third force that was released by that obliteration. Tenebroum did not truly understand it in much the same way that it had not understood the anti-elements when it had first synthesized them, but it would, no matter how many mages and scholars it had to burn out in that quest for knowledge.

It had already cost it Albrecht’s ancient corpse. The Lich had left the body intended for battle and returned to its true seat of power at the heart of its dark labyrinth, but only hours into devouring the Lord of Light’s carcass, that gilded statue had erupted as the body inside had caught fire and turned to ash after too much exposure to the light.

It had hoped that the giant focuses and binding rings would have been enough to prevent that from happening, but it wasn’t. No amount of magical infrastructure was enough to truly and completely insulate the Lich, and it had been forced to return to its light-resistant body and rest among the tainted bones of holy men as parts of its soul warred with itself, and it slowly catalyzed into something new.

Throughout its existence, Tenebroum had slowly collected souls until it became a haphazard agglomeration of all of the things it had ever murdered or claimed. Now that the essence of the light was burning through it, what was left was smaller but stronger. The weakest parts of it were being burned away, and beneath layer after layer of muck and madness, there was sterner stuff that held up to even the worst assaults.

In time, it would build a new core to hold its essence at the seat of its domain, but it would be stronger than Albrecht had been, and it would stretch all the way from the temple above to the treasury below. It could picture a column of more than three hundred spines, twisting together and clad in gold growing from the root of its power. On that terrible tree, it would hang the severed heads of its most important foes like terrible fruits and…

“No!” It chastised itself even as the idea started to solidify. Even in a world of darkness. Even in a world where there were no more living to plot against it, Tenebroum would still keep its secrets far from prying eyes. To build such a perfect form for itself only for one of those mages from Abenend to summon a storm and sunder it with lightning would be a waste of irreplaceable resources.

Just imagining the irreplaceable heads that fermented in its archives popping because of the magical heat like overripe fruit was enough to make it change its mind and focus on an entirely different model that focused more on spinal roots that reached down to the roots of the world instead. There were goblins down there that might cause damage, though, and Kobolds that would gnaw on the lead and brass that it would use to secure such things.

Death knights, housed in the repurposed skeletons of dwarves, could hold off those pests, of course, but that would take high-quality souls. The question became one of energy expenditure at that point…

Before the Lich could finish that thought, it was already drifting back to the world above as it watched another city burn. This time it was Charis, in the west, and the burning was a trap by the living to defeat their undead enemy. It was only a phyric victory. The Lich had lost corpses that had not even belonged to it a few nights ago, but the people of Charis had lost their livelihood, their shelter, and their stores of food, and when the winter got worse, they would all freeze to death in the rising snow until Tenebroum reached out to take the fools into its collection.

Some places were doing better than others, of course. An army was martialing in Fallravea based on rumors and fear, which was ironic given that it was one of the cities that had been least affected by all of this, given the recent Templar purchase. There was no rhyme or reason to any of this, though, and the Lich would not be able to determine if that was because of the fugue state it currently dwelled in as it slumbered and adapted or if the world really had gone as mad as it thought it had.

Time would tell.