Tenebroum - Chapter 92: A New Dawn

It was Tenebroum’s greatest triumph, exceeding even the ring or its subversion of the Temple of Dawn to catch a god in its trap. To the darkness, there could be no greater victory than a night that lasted forever. However, on the seventh day, after a week of darkness, light once again appeared on the horizon.

At first, it was a swarm of falling stars that pelted the region in a tiny lightshow that lasted for less than an hour. The Lich ignored it, treating it as nothing more than an astronomical oddity that was not as important as its slumber, even as it bombarded cities and fields with little fireballs. As far as the darkness was concerned, it did nothing but add a little fiery devastation to the icy grip that was even now beginning to seize the world.

Even as that was finishing, though, the smudge of light on the horizon stayed fixed in its position. It looked like the sun was about to rise once more on a world that had given up on that oft-repeated miracle. In this case, though, it was the wrong horizon.

The sun was supposed to rise in the east and set in the west, but on that morning, there was a glow on the horizon to the southeast. It was little more than a blue-gray stain and not even enough to force all but the Lich’s most sensitive shadow creations to seek shelter. Still, it brightened, minute by minute, and eventually colored the sky in reds and pinks that made the whole world hold its breath in hope.

It was that hope that was the real problem. Tenebroum had long worked around the limitations of the light that the sun had forced on it. The fear, though – it was a constant and refreshing source of energy that seemed from the world to where it slept, curled in the bottom of its lair, and the moment that the cursed sun rose, that steady river of terror dried up almost immediately.

The light that this new sun shed was wan and thin compared to Siddrim’s light, and it only glowed at perhaps a tenth of the former God of Light’s brightness. Still, that was enough to finally force the retreat of the goblins, some of the undead abominations, and all the other foul evils that had plagued humanity unchecked for a week.

It was also enough to force Tenebroum to stir as a few of its slower servants vaporized into a painful flurry of fire and ash.

“Impossible!” the Lich raged as it tried to understand how this could possibly be happening.

Even more confusing was that the light shone everywhere in its territories except for the vast circle at its heart. There, past the line demarcated by its binding ring, the light simply ceased to shine. It was the one spot in the whole world that kept its shroud of eternal night while the rest of the world was flooded with the thin rays that might be more normal on a cold winter morning.

A few hours later, a second sun started to rise from the southwest, which was even more baffling, but that insanity only increased when, a few hours after that, a third began to rise from the northwest. It was as if the whole world had gone mad, and for once, it was not the Lich’s doing.

The second was only a little dimmer than the first, and it was a dull grey instead of slightly blue. The third one, though, it was twice as bright as the first one and glowed an angry red. Now the sky was lit by three different small orbs instead of one large one!

It was an impossible thing, but it was undeniable! Each of them was only a quarter of the brightness of the old sun, and together, they cast crazy shadows in every direction as they all chose different spots to rise and different paths across the sky. However, no matter how much the Lich might hate such an eventuality, it could not deny that it was happening.

It had not destroyed the light. It had only broken it, dimming it in the process. However, despite all of its efforts, it had not been snuffed completely. For hours, the Lich was inconsolable with rage, and it could only conclude that the stars that it had seen escaping the body of the dying god had somehow grown into these abominations.

That raised more questions than answers. How could they have grown so much larger in the meantime? Why did they travel separately along their own paths? Why had they waited so long to reappear? Where were the other two that it had seen?

Tenebroum would have liked nothing more than to hunt down these fragile stars and devour them to complete what it had started, but it was much too weak for that. Even now, as its anger faded, it grew lethargic once more. The Lich was stronger than it had ever been, but the darkness was still weak from devouring so much light, and that weighed on it. It had given all that it had saved for decades to its most recent conquest, and it would be some time before it was ready to murder another god or perhaps even a godling.

No, it realized that for the time being, it would have to console itself with devouring even more of mankind instead. It would feast on them and spread its bloodshed in wide and expanding arcs to regain its strength. To the north and east. Though there were half a dozen major cities between Siddrim and the capital. In time, a year or two at most, it would claim all of them and, with them, the crown and the throne of the vast human kingdoms. Only once that was done would it turn its eyes skyward toward larger, more ambitious goals.

None of that would be a problem, though. Only the light was a problem, and its very existence galled it. By the time the first of the suns had begun to set, the icicles everywhere but in its shadowy kingdom were beginning to melt, and the snow had retreated to the shadows of nearby buildings for protection.

It was only when the first two suns had set, and the third was nearing the horizon that it got another nasty surprise, though. A fourth sun, which was pale white, rose slowly to replace the first two, making the day even longer than it had been before.

“The darkness was supposed to reign forever!” it bellowed in frustration, making the walls shake, even in the depths of its lair, as it understood that, in some ways, it had lost as much as it had gained.

This new light was much weaker, of course, and most of its constructs could fight beneath the light of a single one of these lesser suns without issue. Still, it was the very principle of the thing. It had planned this for so long and ripped out the very heart of the Lord of Light, and yet somehow, he lived on as lesser aspects of himself. It was utterly infuriating. Somehow, its enemies had managed to pull victory from the jaws of defeat, but Tenebroum would find ways to make them regret it.

For the next few hours, the Lich lived in dread that a fifth sun would rise next and deny it a true night altogether, but that did not seem to be the case. Instead, when the fourth pale sun finished its arc, there was at last true darkness, but it only lasted for five hours before the first sun started to rise all over again.

The Lich set a dozen scholars to the task of studying this new phenomenon so that they could understand what exactly was happening and chart a new rhythm for the celestial bodies. That, in turn, instantly set off a chain of new instruments that would need to be built so that they could better monitor the sky. That would require all manner of instruments, apparently, including lenses and mirrors, which were not a craft that it had mastered previously.

It was beneath Tenebroum to worry about such trivium, though, and instead, it delegated the tasks to its craftsmen and the sages that would ultimately need the strange implements. It would unravel this mystery, and then it would figure out how to slay the new lights one by one if it had to, even if it had to tear its shadow dragon down to the bones and rebuild it from scratch so that it could fly high enough to devour one of the wandering stars.

. . .

In the days that followed, it learned that the schedule of the new stars seemed to be somewhat fixed. This resulted in only about five hours of true day and five hours of true night, with all of the rest of the time falling somewhere in between the two. Ultimately, it was still a boon for the Lich’s forces. They could march and fight for about half the day now without suffering too many ill effects. This helped with its ongoing extermination efforts of the nearby cities that its elite forces were in the process of slaughtering.

Its more shadowy creatures, on the other hand, were severely limited. The dark rider and the shadow dragon were almost useless for now, and its ferryman wasn’t much better off. There was only so far that even its magical barge could get in the nighttime mists when it only had five hours to work with. It was unsure what it could do about that for the time being except alter its plans to account for their losses in its plans and move its terrible swamp dragon and its earth titan into more important roles in their place.

It was a shame, of course, because despite its clumsy nature, the shadow drake had done more damage to Siddrimar than the other three of its prime evils combined. That was doubly true once the priest’s damnable lights had finally gone dark shortly after the death of their god. Its ability to simply make a unit disappear or a wall crumble as solid stone dissolved into air was nothing short of extraordinary.

Originally, the Lich had hoped to turn its dark machinations next on the dwarvish All-Father, but those hopes would have to be set aside for the foreseeable future. It had not yet suffered any repercussions from that race of stone dwellers yet. However, the darkness was not about to open another front on its war with the gods until it understood exactly what it was that had happened here, and by the best estimates of the scholar spirits that it had set to the task, it would require at least a full year to monitor the patterns and discover how they affected the seasons and the tides as well.

The only consolation that the Lich could think of was that this would baffle and terrify the mortal realms even more than it had frustrated the Lich. How would they know when to set sail or farm their lands in this strange new world? How would they determine when to reap and sow when the wandering stars seemed to move at random through the sky?

A new day had dawned on the world, it was true, but the Lich would work hard to see that the men who dwelled under the new and untrustworthy lights saw them as a curse as much as a blessing.