《Tenebroum》


 Chapter 1: Blood Money

    Chapter 1: Blood Money


    <em>Tenebroum (Noun): A ce cut off from the light.</em>


    Riley ambushed Cutter while they slogged through the mud, dragging their raft higher onto the shore. He shoved a foot and a half of dull steel into his partner¡¯s side while his hands were full of rope.


    The struggle that followed was brief, and by the time Riley had finished gutting Cutter like a fish, he barely had the energy to cry out in pain. All he could do was cough up blood andy in the mud while he tried to hold his entrails in. He didn¡¯t even have the strength to stop Riley from rifling through his pockets for the map and whatever else he might have had on him.


    ¡°Two shares is good, but one share is better, don¡¯t you think, chum?¡± Riley asked, smiling that rotten smile as Cutter¡¯s blood poured into the swamp water, and his world faded to ck.


    That should have been it for poor old Cutter. A bad end for a bad man. It wasn¡¯t, though.


    Even though he was dead, Cutter¡¯s spirit stood over his own corpse, watching while his partner mutted his body for a few more coins. He couldn¡¯t do anything to stop it as Riley broke fingers to get his rings off and followed that up by bashing him in the face a couple times with the hilt of his de to pry loose his two gold teeth.


    Riley wasn¡¯t any gentler when it came to getting rid of Cutter¡¯s body. He just shoved the hole in his guts full of stones before dragging him into three feet of water and letting him sink into the murk of the fen¡¯s deep mud where no one would ever see him again.


    Cutter might have done the same thing, of course; waste not, want not, and all that. He would have had the good sense to wait until they¡¯d gotten the gold out of the swamp and downriver, though. Killing anyone before you had eyes on the goods was about the dumbest thing a thief like Riley could do, but that didn¡¯t stop him from doing it anyway.


    Cutter¡¯s memories didn¡¯t stop even after his eyes were blinded forever and his lungs filled with water. Things just kept right on going after that. Cutter even smiled as he watched the look of horror bloom on that weasel¡¯s face when he opened the blood-soaked treasure map and found it hopelessly ruined. That memory wouldst forever, even after the names and details of everything else dissolved in the murky water. Even after the carp and the crawfish reduced him from a feast to a skeleton a little more every day, he would never forget that moment of tion.


    Riley still dug for the treasure that day, just as they¡¯d nned to do together. He got close too. Painfully close. He found the traces of something buried and dug up the empty chest Cutter had put down there as a decoy. The look of disappointment that bloomed on Riley¡¯s face when he opened it was grand but not half so satisfying as the rage that followed.


    Suddenly, the man exploded in violent fits that didn¡¯t stop until he¡¯d broken his shovel, beating the wooden chest while he shouted obscenities. If he¡¯d only dug two feet further, he¡¯d have found the bags of old imperial coins and grave goods they¡¯d stolen from those adventurers, but he didn¡¯t.The murdering bastard had stopped just short of the finish line.


    He left that day empty-handed, searching for a new shovel and a better n.


    If he¡¯d left with the gold, Riley would have dragged it off to some city where he could live like a king for a few years, and the echo of the partner he¡¯d left decaying in the bog would have faded entirely. Cutter would have drifted away to whatever eternal reward awaited cutthroats and confidence men.


    That isn¡¯t what happened, though. Riley left the swamp with nothing but bloody hands and a couple gold teeth for his trouble. He¡¯d tried to steal everything bute away with almost nothing. That thought kept Cutter¡¯s wraith anchored where it was, basking in the misery of the murderer and anyone else who¡¯de after his treasure.


    Things grew more jumbled after that. Days and nights blended together. Cutter med it on the mist as he stood there in his lonely vigil, clinging to the bitterness of his betrayal like apass needle. If he wasn¡¯t going to get to spend that shiny on a lifetime of wine and women, then no one else would, either. After a few weeks, he wasn¡¯t really a person any more or even a memory of a person. He was too diffuse for that. He was a handful of memories mixed with a need for vengeance that slowly spread among the bog¡¯s pools, drifting outward like poison.


    At first, he was stuck to the spot where he died, but as his blood drifted outward and the bugs that fed on his flesh wandered further afield, his reach widened. By the time he could reach the treasure he¡¯d so carefully buried deep in the muck, he could barely remember how they¡¯d swiped all that gold in the first ce. He knew they¡¯d stolen it from adventurers that had piged it from an ancient crypt and that he¡¯d nted a deadhead log so Riley could ram it and sink their skiff on the way upriver. Still, he couldn¡¯t remember quite how he¡¯d gotten those casks this deep into the fen. A few dayster, he couldn¡¯t even remember that much. It didn¡¯t matter. He wasn¡¯t even a ghost anymore. He was a mist - a fog of greed that would never let anyone take the score he¡¯d died so unpleasantly for.


    The only thing that kept time for the spirit was Rileying back over and over again. He spent months digging and searching on the boggy ind after flea-bitten sand bar without sess. Day in and day out, he traipsed through the swamp, digging new holes where old holes had filled and faded away.


    It was enough money that he would have a hard time spending it in a lifetime, so it was worth finding, even if it took half a lifetime. Anyone might have done the same thing. Every day Riley looked for it, and every day Cutter¡¯s spirit fed the darkness growing there, though. Every time he raged in frustration at another empty hole, the treasure sank a little lower into the earth - forever out of his reach. It was these outbursts that fed the shade of his partner. He couldn¡¯t do anything but exist and hate. He couldn¡¯t defend the treasure or summon minions to do it for him. All he could do was watch and feed on the frustration of the man who searched.


    The murderer consulted soothsayers and arcanists. Sometimes he returned with little toys like dowsing rods and charms that did nothing. asionally he even brought the hedge wizards with him. The con artists spent days leading the bastard in circles, but the ones with a real gift only found a growing malignancy in those murky waters and left almost immediately, never to return. They sensed the light fading from this ce as surely as the egrets that had stopped nesting here in the year since his betrayal. The dark waters and deep rushes were still full of life, but that life was changing. Ducks and cranes chose tond in other wends along the river, but Shoebills and Bloodbeaks were bing moremon in their ce. The animals all sensed what Riley couldn¡¯t.


    The murderer didn¡¯t notice. Instead of running from the festering darkness, he built a ce to stay atop the one ce he was sure the treasure wasn¡¯t: the empty chest. It was a terrible excuse for a shack - just sticksshed to sticks to make a ce to sleep. The floor was a foot above the high water mark, and the roof was thatched well enough that it mostly kept the rain off. The shanty had arge t rock in the center, just big enough to make a small cooking fire without burning the whole ce down. It was a sign that he¡¯d exhausted his meager savings staying in the nearby vige, not that the shade cared. All it cared about was that, instead of feeding on its murderer for a few hours at a time, it could do it all day long now. Things became more vivid after that.


    The murderer could only spend half his time hunting for treasure because he had to spend the other half hunting or fishing for food, but that only made things worse for him. The more he ate of the swamp, the more he became a part of the swamp. The shade could touch him now. It could slide its fingers deep into the man¡¯s twisted little mind and fan the mes of greed so that he would never give up. In time the swamp discovered that all sorts of new torments became possible as well. It couldn¡¯t just make him stay - it could make him suffer. Those torments turned the trickle of life force he¡¯d been siphoning off his betrayer into a flood.


    Dreams were the easiest way to hurt anyone foolish enough to dwell in its depths. The shade could invade the murderer¡¯s dreams most nights when his defenses were lowest and force him to remember what he¡¯d done. The swamp couldn¡¯t remember those details anymore, but its murderer did.


    Most of the time, it could only remember that look of disappointment when the murderer realized the map had been smeared into illegibility by his partner¡¯s lifeblood. When it was in the head of his murderer, though, it could remember other things too. It could remember what it was like to have a name and hands. It could remember what it would feel like for his reanimated corpse to hold Riley¡¯s head under the brackish water until the bubbles stopped. It could teach the murderer things too. It could teach him what it felt like to be devoured by the denizens of the fen one tiny bite at a time. These dreams were almost always rewarded with screams as the murderer bolted up from his nightmares.


    The real nightmare was all around him, though, and because of that treasure, he couldn¡¯t leave. So, day after day, he sank further into the mud and the madness, and he fed the one thing he wanted to stay buried the whole time.


    After dreams came diseases. It was a harder thing to do that required the swamp to work through insects and spoiled food because it had no hands of its own. All it had was a desire to make its murderer suffer, and the best tool for that turned out to be sickness.


    The first fevers came on tiny wings. Mria. Swamp shivers. Grey fever. For over a year, the murderer had managed to avoid all of them, but in the space of a month was infected with all three, back-to-back. After that, the swamp let him recover from death¡¯s door just enough to avoid killing him before he followed with Giardia and Goblin Guts. Every day was hell after that, and every night was worse. Not just because he couldn¡¯t manage to keep anything down but because he was too sick to fulfill the need to hunt the swamp¡¯s treasure, and it ate at him as badly as the diseases did. Any sane person would have left by now, but there was no sanity in Cutter¡¯s Fen. There were only the dead and the damned.

 Chapter 2: Those that Followed

    Chapter 2: Those that Followed


    It didn¡¯t start out as a n. The swamp couldn¡¯t n because it no longer understood anything but now. It knew what more meant though, and it always hungered for more.


    It was those sentiments that filled the murderer¡¯s dreams. If there were more men like you to dig, then you would find it. If you hadn¡¯t killed your partner the two of you could look in twice as many ces and you¡¯d already be rich by now. They were the regrets of a damaged mind infected by a hunger that could no longer be sated by a single victim. They were echoes of a person that no longer existed, but every night it found a thousand subtle ways to make the victim long for more hands to help him dig up the swamp. All he needed were a few ves or even a small gang to help him tear the fen apart and find his ill-gotten gains.


    The murderer didn¡¯t notice how sick he was getting, or how the ind he¡¯d built his hovel on had started to grow with the waste earth he brought back daily. All he could think about was his worn-out shovels and the strong backs he needed to dig more of this ursed soil. So, one day he left, and the swamp didn¡¯t even try to stop him. It knew that he would be back - no matter how long it took.


    The wraith followed him to the edge of its domain, surprised that it could see a small vige from there, just across thegoon. It had known it was out there somewhere, because sometimes they ate its fish or brought down its fowl, but the ce was an afterthought. Looking at it now, all the shade could make of it, was that it only had a few dozen souls at best. The swamp would have loved to devour them, but they were just out of reach and under the protection of a vague curtain of light that had to be the work of the divine. It could feel the sanctifiednd of her temple, even from this distance, so for now the wraith would have to let it be, unless a fisherman was foolish enough to cast hiss too deep into its mire.


    The days blurred in the absence of a human mind to toy with, and so it drifted among the fog. For a time, all that the wraith cared about was that its treasure continued to slowly sink downwards. It had started out five feet under where the hovel now stood but was closer to twenty feet now. It had left theyers of mud and slime behind and was now buried firmly in the thick band of red y that hid beneath the swamp for at least a league in every direction. No one would ever find its treasure now - the swamp was certain of that. After drinking deeply of intoxicating emotions like fear and madness though, the swamp had developed a taste for humans, and desperately wanted more.


    Then one day, there was a boat. No - there were several boats, paddling from the river that marked the edge of the swamp towards thends of mist and darkness that the wraith alone held sway over. The murderer had returned, and with him came arge group of strangers. Many of them looked even less savory than the murderer that brought them here.


    He¡¯d certainly seen better days. He¡¯d left a frail and starving hermit looking for help to find the treasure he¡¯d sought alone for almost two years. He returned bound hand and foot - the victim of someone stronger who¡¯d smelled opportunity. The big man wasted no time and began barking orders before they¡¯d even arrived. Once they madendfall on the murderer¡¯s ind, a handful of henchmen quickly stirred the ves from their oars to start unloading everything they¡¯d brought with them.


    Within minutes there was more activity in the heart of the fen than there had the entire rest of the time the wraith had been awarebined. Boards. Tools. Food. Sandbags. It didn¡¯t know the words, but as the menmunicated with each other it learned them. None of them had eaten or drank of the swamp yet - so they were mostly beyond its vaporous reach.


    That was fine. The wraith merely watched as they turned its very heart from a small and empty ind with only a hovel, into a true campsite. That was when they strung up the murderer from a strong tree,shing him to make sure that he hadn¡¯t forgotten anything before they were done with the lunatic. The swamp watched, and it feasted, enjoying the pain and despair as the light behind the eyes of the man that had murdered it so long ago finally went out. After he¡¯d hung there for a few hours someone finally cut him down, letting him ssh into the water where the swamp could finally taste his flesh.


    It had waited years for this moment and would have waited years more if it had to. Now that the day had finallye though, there was a feeding frenzy as water rushed to fill the corpse¡¯s chest, dragging him below so that the catfish could nibble, and leeches could drain to their heart''s content. A pulse of power flowed through the wraith that it had never known before as the soul of another living human was dragged screaming from whatever its true destination was meant to be, into the dark heart of the bog.


    Its obsessions added to its own, and its need for gold only amplified the needs that were already there. The sensitive among the ves could feel it, and made a sign against the evil eye, even as most of the rest of that motley crew let out a ragged cheer while the animals ripped the corpse to pieces and made the dark water bubble and froth.


    When that grim business was done, and the waters were finally still, the neers turned to the business of keeping away the darkness. Dry wood was hard to find this deep, and what they¡¯d brought with them would onlyst so long, but for now they had enough to keep the shadows at bay. The swamp was in no hurry as it circled them. They would falter¡­ they would drink its water and eat its creatures, and then the wraith would worm its way inside their heads the same way it had with the murderer it had haunted for so long.


    Now there was a small part of it that wanted these betrayers to die as badly as it had wanted to feast on the murderer - but it would have to wait, because if the wraith ate at this group too quickly the rest would merely flee. They needed to be cultivated and allowed to dig until they caught the deadliest fever of all. The one that would keep them chained here for as long as it took to feast on them: gold fever.


    Their camp formed over days. The original hovel was leveled except for the posts and crossmembers that had held it up, then the floor was reced by nks, and walls made of cloth were put up to keep the bugs out. It was in that room, almost out of its reach, they schemed while sandbars were dug up by the ves and used to expand and tten the main ind.


    Shacks for the men and supplies, and canvas tents for the ves quickly became the pattern. Two men kept watch every night and tended the fires, keeping the darkness at bay and weakening the swamp when it was at its strongest during the darkest hours of the night. It had enjoyed feasting on the murderer, but he was sloppy and careless. The shadows had found a thousand ways to worm into his soul, but now the swamp worried that these men and their precautions might be too much for it to devour.


    For a time, they were. The neers were cautious and methodical, eating the salt pork and ship''s biscuits they¡¯d brought with them while they kept up the fires and set about their methodical search n, eliminating one ind at a time in a slowly expanding spiral that turned up very little. Then one day the ves got it in their head to supplement their meager rations with skewers of freshwater drum and carp.


    It started with a couple of them surreptitiously using a bit of line and a watch fire to feed the grumbling in their stomachs, but soon spread to most of the men. They devoured the flesh and spit out the bones, but worms and parasites that they contained, along with a touch of darkness - those persisted long after the meat was digested and passed. Those men didn¡¯t belong to it yet, but every day they got a little closer.


    Soon it was feeding off their dreams, taunting them with visions of gold, or even better - escape. Days of hard work and nights of treasures they would never have soon wore down even the strongest of them, and the whole time the darkness of the swamp gorged on it all. After almost a month of fruitless searching came the first escape attempt, followed by the first mutiny. Those led to the first whippings and executions, and every drop of blood that ended up in the water made the wraith that hounded them ache for more. Being able to drink deep of so much essence so often was a luxury it had never imagined before, and its reach and power only grew by the day.


    The sickness started with their leader. The swamp knew that if it started to pick off the weakest, the strongest would just flee while they still could, denying it the revenge and vitality that it craved. So, it watched and waited for his habits to cken - for his men to fail to boil the water long enough or for him to leave his windows open on sweltering nights. Then in the peak of summer, when the water levels were at the lowest, and the ruins of so many of the smaller inds were visible above the much-reduced water line, the task master came down with a bad case of gray fever. His sweating became more profuse even as the sun set, and then his skin turned ashen.


    ¡°What you need is to take a trip into Aiden. I¡¯ll row you myself. They¡¯ve got a real healer, and gods know you need one,¡± his second inmand argued.


    ¡°Bah,¡± said the taskmaster, weakly. ¡°We both know that if I leave half of the superstitious mutts we have here will run for the hills. I wouldn¡¯t dream of such a thing.¡±


    ¡°That might be true,¡± his second agreed, ¡°But isn¡¯t that reason enough to think about packing all this in. Maybe that lunatic had no idea what he was talking about.¡±


    ¡°We¡¯re close Mick. I can feel it in my bones we''re close,¡± the leader answered, before ending the conversation.


    They were close of course - practically on top of it. The swamp knew that, but it also sent dreams telling him that almost every nighttely. That they were so close. That any day now they¡¯d find the object of his desires. He was certain they¡¯d find the gold before the fever broke, but while hey in bed, other disasters abounded. Without careful inspections, rats had gotten to two casks of food and spoiled thempletely, and a crew returning with firewood had capsized on the way back to camp after hitting a snag that hadn¡¯t been there the day before. A good man lost his leg to a gator, and two ves drowned in a panic to escape, in water they should have been able to stand in.


    While the wraith drank deep of all this human suffering with one hand, it had used tremendous amounts of its energy to cause them, and so it was a loss. It was getting impatient though. It knew that this groupcked the monomaniacal dedication to seeking the treasure that the murderer had unless they found something, and it was loathe to give up a single coin - even to keep them here forever. A few dayster the taskmaster was well enough to leave his sick bed, and he started to issue orders - they were leaving.


    That¡¯s when the real madness started. One of their pole boats sank, three ves escaped, and several more fell sick with a bad case of goblin guts. If things had been going bad before they decided to leave, then they got much worse once they were making preparations.


    Four months earlier they had arrived with 23 living souls including the murderer toward the end of spring rains, and now that summer heat was finally dying off 14 people were making ns to leave in the next day or two. They¡¯d been humbled by nature and feasted on by powers they couldn¡¯t see, let alone understand.


    Then the mage came.

 Chapter 3: Taming the Swamp

    Chapter 3: Taming the Swamp


    The mage was alone. He came without any servants, but he practically glowed with ethereal energy. Hisyers of enchantments left him well beyond the reach of the wraith from the moment he first crossed into the swamp¡¯s domain.


    He was rowed out into the fen by a local fisherman who had only the tiniest stains on his soul from regrly eating the swamp¡¯s polluted catch; it was just a hint that soon enough - a year or two at most - he would have the whole vige, not just the men hidden in the fever-ridden swamps outside of it. The mage¡¯s robes didn¡¯t have even the faintest trace of mud or stains from work on them, and he smiled at the dangerous men like he didn¡¯t have a care in the world.


    ¡°Leaving already, are you?¡± he asked, ¡°I suppose I could allow that. Sell me your ves and the rest of your supplies, and I¡¯ll even give you a good price. You¡¯ll need money for the road if you¡¯re going to get far enough away from me that I¡¯ll never find you again.¡±


    ¡°Leave? We¡¯ll be back, and with even more men than before!¡± the headman yelled, purpling with rage. The swamp loved anger and rippled hungrily around the violence, preparing to savor what was sure to happen next. The leader would never have the chance to yell anything again, though. In the split second it took him to reach for his sword, a lightning bolt came down from a clear blue sky and boiled his brains in his skull before he hit the water, still steaming. He was dead before he¡¯d gotten wet and before he or the swamp had gotten even a taste of suffering.


    ¡°Anyone else?¡± The mage askednguidly. Everyone there stood dumbfounded, including the swamp. It recoiled from the painful re of essence that wasn¡¯t his own. One moment it had been expecting to feast on blood and suffering, and the next, it was burned by foreign magics - hurt in a way that it had never been hurt before. For the first time in its existence, it knew fear. ¡°The local lord has promised me this whole area for my experiments if I purge the thieving vermin in it. As far as I¡¯m concerned, purge means ¡®to expel,¡¯ so if you hurry, I won¡¯t have to kill all of you. I can just¡ª¡±


    The headman¡¯s second had been standing at the window of the main building, overlooking this whole exchange near the shore. He raised a crossbow, but he burst into mes before he could pull the trigger. The swamp was tempted to drink deep of that terrible suffering but held back.


    The mage¡¯s magic cut through the mist and shadows that made up the wraith like the noonday sun, and it wanted nothing to do with them. So the second threw himself from the window into the shallow water to enjoy a short life amid the mud and worms, leaving only a few men that had pissed themselves and a burning building behind him. Before he hit the water, though, everyone else with a weapon met with an equally grisly fate. It was only when the gang was dead that the mage got off the boat and began to survey the ind. ¡°Yes - this will do, I think,¡± he said to himself, ¡°This will do nicely.¡±


    ¡°What will be of us,¡± one of the surviving ves asked. He was strong enough to have survived two rounds of the shivers, but he didn¡¯t look like he would make it through a third.


    ¡°Why - you¡¯ll work for me, and when I have no further need of you, I¡¯ll set all of you free.¡± The mage said, not bothering to look at any of them. ¡°Now unload the boats and bring the tools. We¡¯ll need to knock some of these huts down before we can put up the circle.¡± The men got to work after that - knocking down many of the structures they¡¯d built up so carefully until now. This should have pleased the swamp, but the swamp knew that nothing good coulde from this new arrival. It slunk away into the shadows to feast on the corpses of the recently dead to recover its strength and keep an eye on all of the goings on from a safe distance.


    The fisherman left at once, and everyone elsebored for several days until the mage pronounced their preparationspleted. The swamp could feel the change - like a numbness in the center of its very soul. The mage had cleared and leveled thend enough to create a broad ring on the ind that only existed to safeguard the treasure. Once that was done, he¡¯d lit a brazier. Then, he added potent incense to drive back the fetid swamp air from his ritual site before adding granite dust mixed with salt in a perfect circle while chanting, causing the whole area to thrum with geomantic power. The weather smelled of storms, but even if the swamp called to the thunderheads, there was no way the rain woulde in time to stop what wasing next.


    The swamp was afraid. It had stayed clear, so it wasn¡¯t trapped inside the circle, but its treasures were. There were a few coins and pieces of jewelry in the waters surrounding itsir. Still, it was less than nothing in the face of its great golden heart, and right now, it could barely feel its sole reason for being. Was this mage really going to dig up its treasure in a single moment? Was it going to do in a day what the murderer hadn¡¯t been able to aplish in years? That part of his soul was frothing with rage while the rest sank into fear and despair. That¡¯s when the ground started to move.


    It started somewhere below it. Below theyers of y that it had imed, in the bedrock that would forever be too hard for the dark waters of the swamp to prate. What was once silent and still was rumbling and cracking. Then the rock began to rise higher. It was an impossibility, but it was happening just the same. The ves fell to their knees as the earth shook, even as the mage stood there unperturbed while his chanting reached a crescendo. The rock was rising in a handful of broken spires - like teeth or ws, and the swamp could feel them tearing at its underbelly. Was it not enough to rip the treasure from its beating heart? Was it also going to pierce the y so the infected waters could benced and drained before reaching the vige?


    The swamp recoiled in anguish as the first outcropping pierced the bloodstained soil of its domain. Like the mage that summoned it, the rock was entirely beyond its control. It was an affront to everything it had been building - a monument to frustration, but one built within mere feet of its gold. The first outcrop wasn¡¯t the only one, either. Soon there were half a dozen, and each was a finger in the fist gripping the core of the wraith¡¯s being. It could feel itself being damaged by the ritual. Even if the rocks hadn¡¯t pierced the soil in such a way as to drain the swamp, they¡¯d still pierced it in a way that was probably fatal, and there was nothing it could do.


    The swamp could only watch as the megalithic stones eventually stopped moving. The still-living humans celebrated this with avish dinner. All the swamp could celebrate was that even though the mage had dealt it a grievous blow, the treasure everyone sought stilly more than a dozen feet beneath them. If raw magic like that couldn¡¯t force it to the surface, then it was confident that no one would ever find it, and as long as it wasn¡¯t found, the swamp would heal and recover. It would feast on victims or slowly increase its reach a little every week until it had enough blood to be strong again.


    Things passed quickly after that. Lost in the fog of its weakness, the swamp couldn¡¯t follow the small changes on the ind that used to be its or the people who lived on it as they slowly improved it. One day it was just a series of ugly stones, but only a few monthster, those stones had been dressed and shaped, and fired y bricks were being ced into walls around the whole thing. The y still belonged to the swamp, and so did the wood used to bake them, so slowly, even though the humans tried to seal it out of whatever they were building, they were unknowingly locking themselves in with it.


    After almost half a year, it began to look like a tower. That¡¯s one of the words the mage used most often, along with phrases like geomantic and ley lines. They meant nothing to the swamp. The mage had apparently discovered that the spot he now upied was a source of great power, and he hade to harvest it. The swamp grew angry at this revtion, of course. The mage hade here to steal its powers, and there was nothing it could do to stop it. That was why it had never recovered, it decided, finally fitting the facts together. No matter how many corpses it devoured or dreams it invaded, it was trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it. Without mending that hole, it would never be full again.


    It could do nothing, though, and more months passed while the tower that both was and was not the swamp began to grow in height. Three stories and then four were added. Eventually, artisans started to frequent the ind, adding timber supports and ornaments that were beyond the mage¡¯s ves. After over a year, they finally came onest time, adding ss to the windows of the sixth story, just below the t roof. That¡¯s when the tower took on its final form. It was a drum tower just over 30 feet at its base and a little over half that on its highest story.


    It was a massive structure that would hum with the mage¡¯s power when he conducted one of his experiments. Those were the days the swamp feared most. Whenever that happened, there was nothing for it to drain or harvest, and the mage sucked power from the wraith to aplish his arcane goals. Whenever that happened, the swamp lost weeks of time as the energies that let its soul exist faded into the background.


    During one of these ckouts, the mage had his libraries and tools moved into his new home by a small army of servants. After that, no one new came for a long while, but dozens of men still swarmed about the mage, running his errands and doing his bidding. There was precious little the swamp could do to interfere in any of this. Indeed, it could only watch as entirely mundane cottages and, eventually, even a manor house sprung upon its ind. It was practically a vige in its own right now. The swamp should have been drowning in blood and power with such a feast on its doorstep, but it could only watch and wither as civilization flourished and the mage sucked it dry.

 Chapter 4: Gazing into the Abyss

    Chapter 4: Gazing into the Abyss


    Time no longer made sense to the swamp. It hadn¡¯t bothered to watch the passage of days before now. One life rarely mattered to it, and a single day never did. Instead it relied on the slow arc of seasons to make sense of the world around it, but now that was impossible. All it marked was the lines on the mage¡¯s face and the length of the mage¡¯s beard. Albrecht - that was the man¡¯s name. He¡¯d heard it a thousand times, and the swamp clung to it as the only piece of flotsam that mattered in the wreckage that was its domain.


    Albrecht wasn¡¯t a young man when he¡¯d first entered the swamp¡¯s domain, but after being here several years, he was finally starting to show his age in ces. A new wrinkle here. A touch of gray there. That was all there was to show the passage of time while he regrly shattered the swamp¡¯s ability to think.


    Even the fact that the fishing vige across theke was now well within its domain didn¡¯t matter nearly as much as Albrecht¡¯s receding hairline. In time the swamp might yet devour the poor menders and fishwives of that dismal little ce, but for now all it could do was inflict the stray nightmare while its power was continually siphoned off for magical experiments that the wraith couldn¡¯t hope to understand.


    It would never have understood them if the man¡¯s apprentice hadn¡¯t died. Fortunately one day the warm climate proved too much for the anemia that he¡¯d suffered from since long before he set foot in the Fen though. The swamp never would have cared about the soft, pale, boy, beyond how he¡¯d tasted to the worms either, if the mage hadn¡¯t decided that his apprentice would be good for one more forbidden experiment, done in secret in the attic above the sixth floor.


    It was in the middle of a terrible storm, drawn in a circle of Albrecht¡¯s own blood that a fragment of the swamp was suddenly forced behind the dull eyes of Barnabas, Albrecht¡¯s dead apprentice. It was a jarring experience. One moment he was prowling the reeds in a bid to feel more present in the jarring mess that had be its existence, and understand the current edges of its domain. The next he was trapped in a body of slowly decaying flesh for the first time in years. At least part of him was.


    Even in the tower he could still feel the swamp outside. It was like being both the troubadour on stage in an alehouse as well as being the crowd watching him y. It was disconcerting and dizzying, all at once. For the first time in years the swamp could think - he could think in words and sentences. Even though this brain was two days dead and slowly turning to mush it could still think better than acres of fetid water and a million insects.


    Albrecht leaned back, in visible shock that his apprentice had opened his eyes, though he recovered quickly enough. ¡°Barnabas - is it really you?¡± the mage asked, his voice full of trepidation.


    The recently deceased Not-Barnabas slowly sat up, raising himself first to his ass, and then to his knees. Standing only proved possible by leaning heavily against the wall, and whether it was because of the decaying limbs or the unfamiliar body, any sort ofplicated movements would probably be impossible. Not-Barnabas wanted to lunge for the old man''s throat right then, but the distant jingling sound warned him that his right leg was attached to a manacle, and a quick nce verified that he was chained to the floor. Even that might not have been enough to dissuade Not-Barnabas were it not for one more discovery as he flicked his milky eyes around the room.


    In this mind and this body, he could do something none of the other souls that made up his messy patchwork spirit could do: he could read. He could read well enough to see that the tome to Albrecht¡¯s right was titled ¡®A Treatise on Necromancy and other Forbidden Arts.¡¯ The wraith inside Barnabas didn¡¯t know what any of that meant, but the decaying brain of the body he currently resided in did. As soon as it found out, it badly wanted those secrets for itself. Just the word, Necromancy called to him like a long lost love, and in that moment he wanted something more than he wanted to return to the swamp that he belonged in.


    So instead of trying to kill its mortal enemy the wraith did something it had never done before, and forced itself to smile. ¡°Am¡­ Barrrnibusss¡­¡± it managed to mouth, feigning recognition to his former master in a way that made the older man suck in his breath in shock.


    That started a long, and mostly one-sided conversation where the mage asked his former apprentice questions on death and dying, forcing the swamp to make up one and two syble answers to questions it barely understood. Did it hurt to die? Do you remember me? What was the afterlife like? As the questions grew longer the answers became simpler and less sensible. Not because the swamp couldn¡¯t answer of course, but because he was bored. It took every ounce of its willpower to y along as long as it did.


    Eventually the mage tired of this and went downstairs, leaving all the ritual implements behind, including the book. That was when Not-Barnabas got to work, pulling the heavy tome down onto the floor in the light of the attic''s only window so he could read the unfamiliar words and try to puzzle out their meanings. Most of what it read was far beyond the swamp, but it learned that death magic was the least natural and perhaps the most powerful in the world. It was mostly just heretical stories about death lords and necromancers of ages past. In the apprentice¡¯s experience, tomes like this would usually have rituals and forme for the channeling and execution of elemental magics. Death magic was taboo though, and forbidden to research, so much less well understood.


    None of that mattered to the wraith though. The form and stories faded into the background as the meaning seeped into his soul like a secret meaning between the lines of the book. The meanings were secret, and they were written only for him. The human part of him might not understand what he was reading, but the darkness that he had be resonatedpletely with it. Many of these powers were already in its grasp, if only it had enough essence to use them. It was a remarkable night. When it was done, Not-Barnabus had only one choice, and spent the remaining hours before daylight preparing for it, sure that Albrecht would pay it another visit soon.


    It was not disappointed, and hourster under the rays of the noon day sun the mage returned to the attic. Not-Barnabas was sure that the mage thought that alone would protect him from the forbidden things he was doing. The door was unlocked now though, and neither the sun nor the circle would protect him from what came next.


    ¡°Did you see any of the gods when you passed, or the underworld after you passed?¡± the mage asked. Not-Barnibus took one clumsy step forward, holding onto the beams, before whispering something almost inaudible.


    ¡°What¡¯s that,¡± the mage asked, leaning forward slightly, just to the edge of his protective circle. ¡°Imand you to speak up!¡± Not-Barnibus took one more clumsy step. It was almost in range of its target now, and stood as close as the chain bolted to the floor would allow - that is, the distance it would have allowed if Not-Barnabas had still been attached to it.


    During the night it had shattered that ankle and foot to remove the thing. That meant there was nothing to stop it when it lunged for the mages throat growling, ¡°I¡¯ve seeeen youurr deatthhh¡­¡±


    The teeth buried deep into Albrecht¡¯s throat for that one surprised moment that the mage¡¯s sense of absolute safety made him let his guard down. All that Not-Barnabas had time for was to bite down before suddenly a spell ripped through it, sending it through the roof of the tower before arcing down deep into the muck below. Every rib in Not-Barnabas¡¯ chest was shattered before it hit the ground, but even as its consciousness faded, and its trapped spirit slowly trickled out into the brackish waters of the fen, the corpse died with a smile on its face. Killing the mage would have been better of course, but that one bite was enough.


    For too long Albrecht held the heart of the swamp prisoner in that tower, but now it had a card to y too. It had a taste of the man¡¯s blood, and that was the perfect vector to slice through the wards and enchantments that the cagey old sorcerer had relied on for too long. Yes - it had been humiliating for a force of nature like it to be trapped in someone else''s body, even if only for a short time, but it had been worth it. The wraith knew what powers awaited it, if only it could remove the wizard''s boot from its neck, and now it had the perfect way to do just that.


    The roof was repaired in a few days, and the mage¡¯s neck healed a few weeks after that, though he would always bear the scar. What mattered though, was the future experiments. Up until now, whenever Albrecht cast one of his terrible spells he used the power of the swamp without any regard to the cost, but now every time he tried to drain essence from the true lord of the fen, it was drained from him in equal measure. This wasn¡¯t enough topletely plug the hole in the bucket that had doomed the swamp to such a fitful and hazy existence for so long, but it was enough to make the mage try his tricks much less often. Being bedridden for days tended to have that effect on people.


    That was how the swamp recovered while his nemesis faltered. Each experiment and spell grew further apart from thest one as the toll of the Mage¡¯s body became greater, and the wraith¡¯s influence grew.


    When the wizard had arrived in the swamp, he¡¯d seemed almost ageless, but now he was aging a year every month or two as the darkness weighed on him and infected his soul. It was in those weakened moments the swamp pushed hard into his feverish nightmares, granting horrors and insights to the man. He almost always woke from these fugue states with some new theory or principle to try now, but without really understanding that it was exactly what the swamp wanted from him. That was also when the dreams about the treasure started.


    Apparently, Albrecht had heard of the treasure. The tale of Riley¡¯s Riches, the bards called it. The swamp didn¡¯t know the details, nor did it care to, but it knew one treasure more than any other it sorely wished to add to that collection now, and for that to happen, it would finally have to let the hoard be unearthed.

 Chapter 5: The Birth of a Necromancer

    Chapter 5: The Birth of a Necromancer


    Night after night the dreams eroded the mage''s fixation on his own experiments, recing it with the obsession about the rumors and the swamp. When he came to the swamp all he cared about was using its energy to cast his strange spells so that he might better understand the universe, one faltering step at a time. Now he had a new project.


    He¡¯d grown increasingly convinced that this myth and the treasure that it focused on was at the core of the power he¡¯d drawn on so frequently. He focused on research now as much as dowsing and divination. He wasn¡¯t just trying to find the treasure as much as he was trying to understand the truth behind the stories. Was there really a treasure, or was it just that gold fever was as easy to catch in this cursed ce as the shivers were?


    It wasn¡¯t hard. For the first time in years the wraith didn¡¯t try to hide the treasure. It wanted it to be found. It wanted Albrecht to dig deep into the soil and find the riches that hid in the very heart of darkness. It just didn¡¯t want him to share them with anyone else, so it infected the mage with a subtle strain of paranoia. The treasure could only belong to one person after all - if an apprentice or a servant were to find it, or to help him dig for it, they would only steal the riches for themselves.


    So, one day the mage made the decision to close off the whole tower to everyone else. His servants still cooked and brought firewood, but only ever to the door after that. From that day on no one saw what he was working on, though rumors began almost immediately.


    For weeks the mage worked alone and in secret. Even after he chiseled the mortar from between the stones that made up the floor and pulled them aside, to reveal the dark earth, he didn¡¯t make much progress. The soil beneath the tower wasn¡¯t just long hidden - it was a thick y that made any excavation a challenge. The treasure of the swamp had taken years to slowly sink down to the bedrock and it would take a great deal of effort to reach it, even though he now knew exactly where it was.


    Maybe Albrecht could have done it by himself if he¡¯d still been the ageless magician he¡¯d been years ago when he entered the swamp, but now he was an old man - he was more frail than he¡¯d ever been, and seemed to go a little grayer with each spell that he cast. In thest few months his cheeks had be sunken and his graying beard began to go wild. No matter how well paid his servants were, they were beginning to whisper that he hadn¡¯t been the same since the ident and began to tell lurid stories at night about what dark bargains he must be striking with the devils of the pit.


    Albrecht didn¡¯t hear their stories, but he could see the way they looked at him whenever he actually came to the door. That was when he decided he needed help that wouldn¡¯t betray him. The first servant he resurrected into dark servitude was one of the cook¡¯s boys who was taken by mria. Unlikest time, the mage didn¡¯t use aplicated resurrection that attempted to preserve the soul.


    This zombie was just a puppet on strings that could do only the most basic tasks. Its orders were simple: dig. Every day it filled a few wicker baskets with earth, and every night it emptied them into the waters of the swamp when everyone was sleeping. It was the first mindless servant, but it wouldn¡¯t be thest. Soon the small graveyard behind the tower that had been built and filled over thest couple years by the people the swamp had taken was being robbed nightly. As the hole got wider and deeper more zombies were made to fill it.


    In time it became impossible to hide the strange activity from everyone, and eventually some of his servants worked up the courage to ask questions. Albrecht bought their silence by doubling their wage instead of providing answers. He traded a few coppers to buy time for the gold that was getting a little closer every night. He didn¡¯t stop there though.


    He brought the boats inside of his tower so no one could easily leave the fen without his permission. He was out of viable corpses to make more servants from, but he was still not so far gone as to kill people just to make more zombies. Just because he thought it was wrong to kill them though, didn¡¯t mean that he was going to let them escape in case he should need themter. After that, fear clung to the ind as thickly as the mist did as rumors started to run rampant, and the mage only let his most trusted apprentice return to town to fetch supplies.


    Slowly the tunnel under the tower wound its way in a loose spiral. Thanks to the graceless efforts of the zombies it meandered a little to the left or the right every day, but it was always going deeper. Every day his tireless servants dug a few more inches, closing in on his secret prize, until one day they were there. Albrecht had stopped eating by this point, fearing that his former servants would poison him, and was so thin he couldn¡¯t make his hands stop shaking.


    His paranoia was hardly misced; the living that were still on the ind had long since girded themselves for battle with kitchen implements and the few bows that had been kept for hunting. Given the chance they would surely mutiny and try to kill him. They didn¡¯t have the chance, because he never left the tower, which was just as well because there was nothing they could do to a man who wielded fire and lightning.


    That night in the midst of a terrible storm he dug thest few inches himself to gaze on the pile of treasure embedded in the wall like a fossil from another age rather than a pile of blood money that a couple of thieves had fought over half a decade before. Albrecht never had the chance to enjoy more than the sight of that gold. He was never going to own even a single coin - how could he? He was just another piece of treasure being added to the pile.


    For a long time Albrecht had pulled his power from the swamp to run his experiments and cast his spells. He was suffused by it. It had eaten of his flesh and corrupted his very soul, so tonight it was the swamp that pulled power from him instead. As the mage reached for one of the coins it started to vibrate, still embedded in the wall. Then suddenly it wasn¡¯t. He felt the slight pull of fire as something else tapped into the elemental energies he was so talented with, but while he was attempting to figure out what was happening it was toote. The coin leapt into the air, melted into a spike, and embedded into his flesh in an instant.


    The mage looked at his hand in surprise, and watched as his blood slowly dripped down the gold spike that impaled it. He started to back away, but it was toote - he could feel his energy being channeled away from him again in an even bigger surge thanst time. Several more coins shot out from the wall, and each of them became a simr spike. Depending on which object was melted the projectiles were bigger or smaller, but each one of them found their way into Albrecht¡¯s flesh before he could react. He turned and fled at the onught. Even with all of his arcane power, there was nothing for him to do. He couldn¡¯t fight something that wasn¡¯t there.


    ¡°Help me,¡± he yelled to the undead ves that stood there waiting for their next order, silent and impassive. They began moving immediately, but they didn¡¯t respond to him. Instead they moved to block his way even as several more pieces of goldnced into his back, making him cry out in pain.


    ¡°Gods you¡¯re stupid!¡± He yelled at the zombies, ¡°If you aren¡¯t going to do anything useful then get out of my way!¡± They didn¡¯t though. Instead they started to walk towards him. At first they were just pushing, but after a moment they were grabbing and holding, and then carrying. The terrible servants he¡¯d spent so much time creating weren¡¯t even his anymore. They were answering to their true owner - the swamp. It was its darkness that brought them back from the dead and its darkness that made them move. Now they were doing just what it wanted and adding a crown jewel to its terrible collection.


    ¡°No! Stop!¡± He yelled as the fear leaked into his voice. This wasn¡¯t how this was supposed to happen. He¡¯d finally gotten what he was obsessing over and now everything was spiraling out of control. ¡°What are you doing!¡±


    The zombies carried him to the wall, and though he tried to set them aze, nothing happened. Not only would his minions not respond to his orders, but he couldn¡¯t properly channel his own essence to catalyze his spell. Instead something else siphoned it away, and as he was pressed hard against the wall. More and more coins and trinkets were melted into spikes, and each one of those found its way into a soft part of the mage''s flesh.


    He was slowly being devoured by an iron maiden made of gold. He gave up on words or spells then and just screamed instead. It was a terrible agony, and since each wound stayed filled and the blows avoided vital organs none of the punctures were fatal. He didn¡¯t stop wailing until hundreds of the little daggers had impaled him, and both of his lungs were punctured. Even his death rattle, loud and inhuman as it was didn¡¯t reach the building his servants lived in while they waited out the storm.


    Nothing could save Albrecht as the treasure consumed him. Soon hundreds of spikes were embedded in his flesh, but death still didn¡¯te for him. After that the pain became even worse as all of the spikes that impaled him suddenly began to heat up and melted again, forming a sarcophagus that melted around him like a second skin of molten gold. Every step in the process was agonizing, but it was meant to be.


    The swamp fed on his pain as it tormented the mage and brought him closer to his death as slowly as possible. The mage felt each wound. He felt the metal heat to liquid and swallow him whole, and it was only after another minute of suffering that he finally suffocated in his permanent shell. He was no longer a person now. He was a thing.


    For so long all the swamp wanted was to make sure that no one ever took its treasure - but after years it had found an even greater treasure than gold: the mind of the mage. It coveted the terrible arcane secrets he possessed, and wanted them for itself. Now it had them in the form of a grisly sarcophagus. In time the suffering upant of the phctery would be as much a part of the wraith that was these swamps as Cutter or the murderer, but for now it was just a trophy - a repository of knowledge that should have died with its owner.

 Chapter 6: A Trip Into Town

    Chapter 6: A Trip Into Town


    That was the night that everyone on the ind died. Before the storm ended, Albrecht¡¯sst few servants were torn apart by the dozen zombies that had spent thest few months toiling to dig the tunnels ever deeper. Even without any weapons of their own, the zombies still strangled the life out of almost every soul that remained on the ind within minutes. It could hardly even be called a fight. The living managed to mangle or maim a corpse or two, but that did nothing to stop them from following through with their murderous orders. Only one of the apprentices managed to escape out a window before the zombies knocked down the front door, and he only waded a few hundred feet into the water before something dragged him down into the muck until his lungs filled with water.


    In the morning the storm cleared, and for the first time in years there was utter silence in the area around the ind as the sun rose. Not one bird dared to chirp or sing in the aftermath of the deadly transformation that had urred. Up until now the evil that lurked in the fen had been localized and specific about one thing: protecting its bloody treasure. Even though the darkness could always be felt by those most sensitive to those things, it was a pall that was palpable now. It was a shroud over the whole area that even the vigers could feel as they made gestures to ward off evil before setting off in their boats to catch today¡¯s supper.


    The evil in the fen was metastasizing, and growing at a prodigious rate as it changed into something darker and more malevolent than it had ever been before. A powerful mind was being devoured deep in its dark heart and that made it think of all sorts of things it had never considered before. Even now the wraith was using the zombies to try new experiments that the mage had imagined, but was much too moral to actually explore. New circles with darker runes were being drawn, zombies were loading corpses into barrels to see if pickling the corpses would produce heartier and stronger vessels, and all the while, the remainder of its servants retreated into the depths with makeshift tools to begin tunneling into the bedrock once more.


    The swamp had an even greater treasure to protect now, and that meant burying it ever deeper, in abyrinth so dark and fortified that no one would ever find it. That those efforts might take decades, or that the undead servants performing the work would turn to dust long before their efforts wereplete, didn¡¯t matter. The avarice of the swamp was timeless, and it would not rest until all that it coveted was safely tucked away where it could never be taken from it. It was that very urge that made it look to the small fishing vige which was now well inside its territory. Those insignificant human lives that were so obsessed with fishing and eating only to raise young humans that would also learn to fish and eat were no longer just a source of suffering and sustenance, but also a source ofbor for this endless project.


    It had been preying on the dreams of the children and the illnesses of the infirm for months now, but flush with the dark knowledge brewing in the prison that was its phctery, the swamp took a wider view. The dead buried in the consecrated ground of the temple at the heart of the vige were beyond its reach, but everything else belonged to it, if only it reached out to grab it. The bones of the drowned, picked clean in the pond, the bodies of murder victims in shallow graves where they were never supposed to be found, and even the small coven of witches that tried to bargain with dark powers to curse their neighbors were all the property of the swamp now. Each one was a source of energy or a possible weapon to be wielded, and it studied them as intently as it could, even though its focus still drifted frequently with the weather and the phase of the moon.


    Consuming the mage had drained much of its reserves, so it did nothing immediately. Instead it simply existed, letting the fetid waters rejuvenate as day and night cycled harmlessly around its domain. It needed nothing now. In time it would need more corpses to animate, and more iron to melt into hammers and chisels for them, but there was no hurry. It didn¡¯t know how to hurry anymore. All the swamp did was watch and wait until the moment was right.


    That moment came a monthter when two men argued over beer about whose turn it was to mend thes. The argument became a fight, and the fight led to one of them drowning in the heat of the moment not far from the vige. The murderer went home like nothing happened, while the fish started to nibble on the corpse of his victim. In only one week the corpse would decay beyond recognition. In two weeks there wouldn¡¯t be enough left to animate. Tonight though - tonight it trudged along the bottom of the pond until it reached the shallows and walked up a sand bar, heading toward his former vige.


    Before he died, the corpse had been called Jeorge, and all he¡¯d known about the swamp was that the catch was getting better but that no catch was worth staying out close to sunset. He¡¯d been a decent man, and had lived hand to mouth for all of the thirty two years he¡¯d been alive. Now he was just a corpse with water in its lungs that was making its way to his cousin¡¯s shanty one clumsy stride at a time. No one was awake by the time it found its destination shortly after midnight, and if anyone heard Somon¡¯s scream of horror as his own victim strangled him to death in his bed, they didn¡¯t bother to light antern and investigate. The swamp enjoyed the brief thrill of joy and vengeance that shot through the dead mind of its puppet as it gave the dead man his most fervent wish.


    Death within its domain was always a thrill for the swamp. Every single act of predation fed it - from a shoebill devouring an eel to a man ying another man. Death was its banquet, and the farther its domain spread, the more those tiny acts of nature added up. A murder like this though - full of emotion and vengeance - that was worth more than a week of nature¡¯s bounty, and the swamp was revitalized by it. Even as it absorbed that essence it had to council itself against wanton ughter of the townspeople. After they were gone there might not be anything to feast on for a long time, so it would have to devour them slowly, a single life at a time.


    Murder wasn¡¯t what tonight was about anyway, not really. Jeorge dragged Somon¡¯s body out of the shed and back towards the rickety piers that served as the waterfront for the men who fished here. Only halfway there though it stopped, and left the corpse on the street as it suddenly turned and tried to enter the temple grounds. The reaction was instant, and the swamp immediately regretted the experiment. It backed away as a sharp and alien pain assaulted it, but it was toote. Even though it had only barely stepped on to the consecrated ground, the zombie began to smoke almost immediately. The swamp tried to cut its strings and end its connection to the corpse of Jeorge, but it couldn¡¯t. It was forced to endure everyst sensation as the waterlogged corpse boiled while it burned from the inside out. The swamp considered animating the corpse of Somon to drag the still burning corpse of Jeorge to the water, but decided it didn¡¯t want to risk further contact with the holy tonight. The first incident had wiped out much of its reserves anyway, and it didn¡¯t see the harm in sending the vige a warning.


    The encounter gave the swamp much to think about. Until now it had thought of the small patch ofnd as simply beyond its reach for now, but if that was what the divine felt like, it might well always be beyond the reach of its dark influence. The holy power that pushed it back was immediate and irresistable. The darkness that lurked in the swamp couldn¡¯t imagine any n that would let it triumph over that power. The only weakness it seemed to have was that even if it was incredibly powerful, it was very limited in scope. Almost every part of the vige, and every single home and shack was in the swamp¡¯s reach and outside of the protection of the divine. It shouldn¡¯t cause a problem, but it would have to figure out how to cauterize that small hilltop refuge if it couldn¡¯t eliminate it, lest it be a constant thorn in its side.


    The swamp was badly mistaken about how the people of the vige would react. It did scare them when men heading to their boats found the pair of corpses hourster and ran to fetch the priest. That was hardly the end of it though. The event stirred up a ho''s nest, and even after the bodies were buried in the church yard, they had a watchman that rotated between the families to make sure that they were prepared for any evil they might find in the darkness. Worse though, was that the idea that the dead might be rising from the dead and murdering people had the effect of making almost everyone that lived there more devout. They said their prayers. They went to church. Rather than paying lip service as they¡¯d done for so long they really started to believe.


    The swamp felt it almost immediately. Only a few dayster the consecrated grounds around the goddess¡¯ temple were expanding, pushing back against the darkness and the dreams of many of the fishermen were now closed to the swamp. It was a catastrophe. Could this continue indefinitely, it wondered? Could the town grow in size and devotion so that in a year or ten the dark shadows that the wraith hid in were entirely erased by the holy light of the divine? That was a fate too terrible to contemte. Something had to be done. Before the swamp had wanted to devour the vigers one life at a time for the next few years. It wanted to find just the right feuds and animosities to aggravate so it could enjoy the darkness welling up from the souls of both the murderers and the murdered. That was impossible now though. At its current pace, the entire vige would be lost to it again within the year. It had to act immediately.


    Over the next week it was as if a gue had struck the vige as so many people began to fall ill. The priest kept anyone from dying, but over the next month almost every person in town was terribly sick for at least a few days. If they weren¡¯t bedridden with a fever then they were stuck in the outhouse wishing that they were. It was a terrible time to be there, but by the end of it if anything their faith had increased, even though the swamp didn¡¯t understand exactly how.


    Its retribution was supposed to make them run in terror or sumb to sickness, instead it had somehow made them put more faith in their strange god, and as its influence grew, the swamp''s domain faded and shrank. It was a frightening phenomenon that could be solved only one way: war.

 Chapter 7: Claiming the Village

    Chapter 7: iming the Vige


    One day the fishermen didn¡¯te home. The day started normally enough, with a crisp sunrise in reds and oranges that failed to entirely burn away the mists whichy heavily on thegoon and the surrounding fens. Wives gave their husbands cloth-wrapped parcels for lunch and kissed them goodbye, unaware that it would be for thest time, and then the men of the vige packed up theirs and crab pots and went out onto the water. Everyone went about their day like tomorrow would be the same as yesterday. It wasn¡¯t, though. Things would never be the same again.


    Even in the afternoon, when children were supposed to quit ying ande home for their chores, the docks were still empty. The skiffs and dinghies that were all this town could afford were supposed to be tied up, and the men that spent all day working them should have been heading home to their families, but they never came back.


    Not one ship that left that morning was back by sunset, and the silence was deafening. By nightfall, a couple of the hunters and woodsmen returned. However, their stories made the absence of almost all the other men of the vige that much more ominous.


    The stories of the survivors were all slightly different, but to a man, they felt like they were being hunted that day. One old trapper said that someone unseen in the shadows of the mangroves had their eyes fixed upon him for the whole day. They tracked him just as he was tracking his own prey.


    Another said that the deer they followed made it almost too easy on him before it darted into a shadowy grove that was dark enough to hide almost any evil. Something made him decide not to follow that doe any further, and he¡¯de home empty-handed only to find out how lucky he was toe home at all. It was only those hunters that had experienced an intuitive sh of worry or that made it back. In a single day, the sleepy vige had lost a third of its people and almost all its strongest men.


    They felt like they were being hunted, of course, because that¡¯s precisely what was happening. The darkness in the swamp had grown tired of slowly losing its grasp on the dreams and the blood on its only actual inhabitants. There was only so much essence that could be collected from the web of animal and insect life that suffused its domain.


    Real power - the power to raise the dead and change the weather - that required victims, and if nothing changed soon, the whole vige would once again be entirely beyond its reach. That was intolerable! It would not be denied its own livestock. The swamp would have gnashed its teeth in frustration were it not entombed in a golden sarcophagus.


    The light of the vigers¡¯ faith flourished while the darkness of the swamp faded. So, for the first time in almost a year, the digging beneath the tower stopped. It was thest thing the swamp wanted, but it couldn¡¯t be helped. It needed fresh blood more than the feeling of safety that came from escaping the light.


    With as much urgency as it could muster, the zombies marched out into the murky depths of thegoon over the following days. Every single one of them did so eventually, leaving the dark heart of the fens exposed and unprotected for the first time ever. It wasn¡¯t concerned. The only thing that could hurt it was one tiny patch ofnd that it would steer well clear of. Everything else in the swamp - even people were just food waiting to be eaten, and it was starving.


    Time was often elusive to the spirit of the swamp. Sometimes whole seasons could pass by without it noticing anything had changed, but the prospect of blood and flesh kept it focused on the task at hand as it formted a n. It could just attack the vige again. It had the forces to crush such a paltry ce, and the losses would be so slight as to be meaningless to it.


    Then it thought again of that temple - that cursed speck ofnd that foiled it thest time - who knew what would happen if it attacked there again so soon. No, it decided that it was better to kill as many as it could as far from their homes as possible lest they retreat to that ind of safety. Humans thought that they were safe during the day - that it could only hurt them in the night. Underwater its murky waters, it was always dark, though, and it was there that its undead minions waited patiently.


    Its servants stood where fish were thickest because, after all - almost all the creatures of the swamp belonged to it too now. When one controlled everyst detail, it was very easy to bait the hook, and as a consequence, every that was cast that morning got tangled on the rotting limbs of its zombies. Some men never even managed to pull their haul onto the boat - they just fell into the dark water, which was soon stained even darker with their blood.


    Those that did manage to pull a zombie into their boat didn¡¯t fare much better. Even if they had a weapon handy, none of them managed to inflict a fatal blow before their throats were ripped out or they were strangled to death. It was a grim and silent massacre. Everyst fisherman died within the same hour, but other than the swamp and its minions, nobody saw a thing. The same was true for most of the woodsmen. Only some of them realized there was something amiss before they walked into their very own ambush.


    For the next week, almost everyone huddled in the safety of their homes and prayed to their goddess for protection; only a few thought to flee while they still could. The ones that fled the swamp while it was otherwise upied were the only ones that would live to tell the tale. Without any boats, they still managed to slog through miles of mud and bog, leaving the ever-widening boundaries that the darkness controlled. They were the lucky ones - but the swamp didn¡¯t mind. Word would spread, and the tale would attract other explorers and adventurers looking to unravel the secrets of ckwater fen.


    Those that stayed thought that it was their God who was saving them from whatever had taken away nearly all of the husbands and fathers of the vige, but the light¡¯s blessing only kept the fevers at bay. Those that prayed for the return of their loved ones would soon get their wish in the darkest way possible.


    The week of peace wasn¡¯t a blessing, though. It was only ever a by-product of the time it took to get those fresh corpses back to the tower for dark and nameless rituals that would nearly double the size of its army. Beneath the tower, rituals happened every night as the swamp poured its dark magics into the corpses of itstest victims and brought them lurching to life.


    Every evening a row of waterlogged corpses wasid out on the bloody septagram in the heart of thebyrinth, and every midnight a new vanguard of its servants rose to their unlife. They were unwilling and fought the process, seeking only the sweet release of death, but they had no choice. Their souls might swirl and struggle, but eventually, they were all forced to submit to their new master.


    The deathly moans and inhuman chants dragged them back to their flesh, kicking and screaming; there was nothing they could do to stop it. The swamp would see them toil for decades or centuries more, but only after it forced them to murder their own friends and neighbors in theing days. The grief and anguish of the swamp¡¯s own servants fed it almost as much as their murders had. Even in their resistance, they nourished that which they hated most.


    Once the darkness was done, though. Once its army was on the move, only the temple grounds were truly a safe haven. None of the other buildings in the vige was strong enough to hold back an imcable enemy for very long. So, on the ninth night, after the men had vanished, they finally returned to the vige when everyone was asleep.


    As one, the swamp rose up again as a tide of rotting flesh from the water, intent on ruining the vige and iming everyst soul within it for its own. All the doors were locked, and all the windows were barred, but it did little good. Once the screams started, they didn¡¯t stop for hours. Each household called to their neighbors for help, but they were all too busy fighting their own battles to save anyone else. It was thergest tragedy the swamp had ever beheld, but the dark spirit of the fens gloried in it.


    It was a night of screams and struggles where zombified corpses returned home to devour and y their loved ones. Some families even unlocked their doors for their loved ones, making the killings that much faster. It was a vile sight that no feeling person could look upon without having their heart break.


    The darkness of the swamp had no feelings, though. It was just a golden shell around the mummified remains of a broken mage. It cared only for fear and pain, and tonight it drank its fill of both. The only thing better than tasting the blood of another victim was tasting the anguish of a woman who was being strangled by the zombified corpse of what used to be her loving husband. It was deliciously wicked, and the swamp¡¯s only regret was that it had to massacre them all in a single night rather thaning back to do this over and over again.


    In the morning, there were only bloodstains and broken windows to mark its passing, along with the six survivors that had barricaded themselves inside the ancient temple on the hill. The love of their God could save them from the swamp¡¯s evil, but it could do nothing to protect them from starvation. After a few days, they had to make a terrible choice: escape while they still had the strength to do so or starve to death waiting for help that would nevere.


    Those who left the temple to try to make it to a passing ship on the river for help were never seen again, and those that stayed would only have the sce that their bodies would not rise up again to serve the swamp after they died. The lights embrace could save their souls but could do nothing to save their lives.


    Everyone else had been dragged away into the depths for dark and unspeakable purposes, and each of them would be reborn into an unwilling afterlife. The strong would be forged into more zombies, and the rest would be impressed into other, stranger purposes. The sheer number of resurrections it had done recently had given the wraith a great many ideas for future experiments, and it was eager to explore even more hideous sphemies than those it had done so far.


    The town had been looted within an inch of its life. What little gold and silver the simple folk had was dragged back to the swamp¡¯s dark hoard, and any tools of iron and steel were added to the stockpiles it would need as the darkness continued to build its true home: thebyrinth. No living eyes had ever seen it, but the deeper its roots stretched into the bedrock, the more certain it was that no one would ever survive to say that they had.

 Chapter 8: Silence is Golden

    Chapter 8: Silence is Golden


    In the weeks and months that followed the massacre, the swamp was at peace. Its zombie minions retreated to the tower with their bloody spoils, returning to the depths to continue their endless toil, and the swamp continued in perfect silence without anyone to disturb it. It had everything it wanted - the blood of the innocent, gold for its hoard, fresh bodies to conduct dark experiments on, and no new enemies seeking to steal from it. Everything was as it should be.


    Well - almost everything. The splinter that was the holy ground remained, and the disparity was more galling than ever now that the darkness held an unquestionable sway over thends that surrounded it in every direction. In fact, its domain covered everything from the forested hills in the west to the long snaking river that defined its boundaries to the east. Practically the entire watershed had fallen under its domain now.


    The swamp hoped that in time, theck of believers would see thatst speck fall to darkness as well because it never wanted to touch that holy fire again. The domain of gods almost certainly needed the devotion of its adherents in the same way that the wraith needed the blood of living things, so it would simply starve it out, until the purpose of the brick building on the hill faded from memory. Then it would be able to help itself to all the bodies buried there. That at least was something to look forward to.


    For now though it merely drifted in and out of consciousness, bing as cid as the stagnant waters it controlled for miles in every direction. It might havein there forever dormant if its hunger had not stirred once more. It had been seasons since it had tasted the blood of man, and during the fall it grew restless. There was nothing to harvest, and no further ces to stretch its influence, though. Neither of those facts did anything to quell the gnawing sensation that started off as a minor inconvenience and slowly became all-consuming over the course of weeks. Once it needed nothing but its small golden hoard. Now that it had a small army of minions to maintain, though, its core of avarice would never suffice, not without a muchrger and bloodier pile of treasure at least.


    Day by day its zombies slowly went dormant forck of sustenance, until one day the endlessbyrinth beneath the tower was finally just catbs for the bodies of the dozens of victims it had rued in thest few years. In the end all that was left was the silent Lich at its core - encased in its golden shell. The swamp screamed in frustration at this turn of events but could do nothing to stop it. Its rage called out into the ether, making flocks of waterfowl take flight at the sudden disturbance. Then things were quiet once more as the wraith at the heart of the swamp''s darkness finally drifted off to sleep once more, however unwillingly.


    A bell can¡¯t be unrung though, and like called to like, so once the winter passed and the wheel of seasons turned to spring once more, new life returned to the swamp. No one new took up residence in the fishing vige that was already halfway returned to nature, but trappers and hunters from other ces nearby came to poach its minks and alligators before they left again. The darkness was too weak to pull them screaming into the muck, but it invaded their dreams and made sure they left with fevers and boils in exchange for their haul.


    Then the lizards showed up. In life, the small parts of the swamp that were Cutter, Riley, and Albrecht had heard of the lizard men. Some parts of them even worried they would encounter them in the very swamp that they were now a part of. They¡¯d never seen them before though. Now that a group was moving in, not so far from the tower itself though, they were impossible to ignore. At first the wraith feared that the group was a warband, intent on taking its treasure while it was defenseless. Desperate fear shot through the Lich as it sat on its dark throne, about what would happen next without the power to defend himself. That it would be torn apart for the gold shell and the mummified core that had given the swamp so much understanding of how to use the darkness would fade away to dust.


    In the end though, they spurned the tower as having the stink of man and set up camp on the sandbars that dotted thegoon that was expanded by that desperate treasure hunt years before. There they caught fish, built crude structures, and sunned themselves. It was a simple life for simple creatures. The swamp appreciated that. Once it saw that they had no care for riches or secrets, it was no longer afraid of them. Even though they wore loincloths and used crude spears they were little more than animals and would do nothing to trouble it.


    The only problem was that they were so inhuman they were beyond its reach to feed off of. The swamp would receive some slight essence whenever they brought down a creature in a hunt and their blood sshed into the muck, but they weren¡¯t like the men who had once dwelled here. Their scaly skin kept out the bugs that would trigger its worst fevers, and their minds were just primitive enough that they were all but beyond its reach. Still their presence was enough to stir the swamp to wakefulness most days - if only to watch and understand its newest residents.


    During the long hot summer when the waters melted away beneath the zing sun, some of the lizards began to take refuge from the heat in the ground floor of the tower, and sometimes in the basement that served as the entrance of thebyrinth itself. They never wandered far from the light though and never once brought a torch with them. That was good, because even with all their hunting the darkness only had a handful of zombies moving - and it wouldn¡¯t be nearly enough to stop a hunting party of the well-muscled lizardmen. It did have one added benefit. This deep in its ce of power, the voice of the darkness was the loudest. Even if it couldn¡¯t really understand the minds of the primitive creatures, here at least it could touch them. It could give them nightmares and taste their fear. Over the long hot months that was how the wraith upied its time. With the alien dreams of reptiles while they regted their temperature with its shade. It was a symbiotic rtionship.


    Then one day as the temperatures started to fall and the rains returned, they stoppeding to the tower. Instead, they started shunning as they¡¯d always done. They did something else too though. They started to erect a totem. It was a crude and ugly thing. It had watched them carve it for some time without real interest, but as they embedded it in the ground near the tower the darkness finally understood what they were attempting to worship. The length of the thing was carved and colored with crude dyes to represent different animals that they hunted. There was a catfish, followed by a deer and a blood beak. They went all the way up the pole, one by one. The lizardmen were second from the top, and the only thing above them was a bright yellow skull. Suddenly everything clicked. That was supposed to be a golden skull - they were venerating it as the most powerful creature in the swamp.


    It was a surprising turn of events, but not an entirely unwee one, especially after essence started to flow from their primitive ceremonies. It might never understand the reptile creatures, but it was clear from the way that they sacrificed to him that they viewed him as a vengeful deity with the power of life and death over them, which it supposed was true in a way. It had great power over this primitive group, just not as much power as it would have if they were human. Its desire to find a way to gain strength from their suffering waned as their sacrifices to it increased though. First it was just choice bits from a hunt, or shiny bits like shells or tree resin that they offered up to it. In time though, the offerings increased as their tribe swelled in strength. Once during the winter, they even brought back a hunter they¡¯de across on a hunt of their own. He was gravely wounded, but they didn¡¯t strike the killing blow until they¡¯d forced him to kneel in front of their crude altar. Only then did the stone knife cut his throat deep enough for the flint to graze the vertebrae.


    The drumming and dancing went on long into the night after that sacrifice, and the darkness could feel the essence from it wafting up on the breeze like the smell from a delicious meal, but the meal itself was what made it drool. For the first time in almost half a year it had blood. It had once again tasted real death and suffering, and it longed for more. The next morning, they dumped the body down the stairs in the tower and it was never seen again. The flesh did little to sate the tower''s reawakened hunger, but there was no one else to devour. There wasn¡¯t one man left anywhere in the swamp right now, so the darkness was forced to cope with the pangs from its reawakened appetite.


    With the steady supply of essence from the tribe, the swamp started digging its maze again. It was only a trickle of power - and not enough to raise its whole army back up, but it was enough to pursue its goal of hiding its greatest treasures ever deeper in the earth, and ever farther from the grasping hands of men. In the years that followed, the lizardmen prospered and their tribe grew rapidly. During seasons when hunts went poorly and fish were scarce, the swamp would even send themrge animals in response to what it imagined were their ceremonies beseeching mercy and sustenance from him.


    The darkness was not well equipped to show mercy to even creatures like this, but it had a vested interest in them now. They worshiped him as a sort of god, and it was incumbent on it to make the flock grow, if only so it had more worshipers in the future.


    In the months that followed the darkness sometimes wondered if that was how the divinity that still held tenaciously onto its little patch of ground around its temple still felt. Were they once a minor spirit in some far-flung vige? Did it perform minor miracles as its faith spread from town to town until it ended up with a backwater temple hidden in its swamp? It was certainly possible. Maybe that¡¯s all the gods really were. Spirits thatsted long enough for most people to know them by name. If any of that was true, then the swamp supposed it was a minor deity by now - a demigod of a sort, and to at least one tribe of lizardmen that was true. It was a start, it supposed, but it was mostly just relieved that they didn¡¯t seem to care at all for trinkets of gold and silver.

 Chapter 9: Heroes for Hire

    Chapter 9: Heroes for Hire


    Kaligos looked back for the fifth time that hour and red hard at Solovino until the dandy noticed and wilted back into silence. Sneaking through the knee deep waters of the swamp was impossible, but he¡¯d made it very clear before they¡¯d gotten off the boat that the group needed to stay as quiet as possible to avoid hunting packs and ambushes. Lizardmen were only a little stronger than men after all, and the most dangerous part of fighting them was the element of surprise. The scaly bastards could lie in wait in the water and mud for hours, catching just about anyone off guard.


    Most of the group at least tried, and some, like Marko and his woman, were even good at it, but their pet arcanist had been abysmal since his slippers had touched the mud and the bard that the count¡¯s court had saddled them with was even worse. Kaligos sighed. Between them he felt like they were doing everything they could to turn this milk run into a catastrophe.


    It wasn¡¯t that he didn¡¯t understand why the Count wanted a poet along to immortalize their deeds. He was paying 2 regals a tail and a 50% bonus on top of that if they cleared out the main nest before high season. That wasn¡¯t just good money for a week''s work. It was a ridiculous sum. It might be enough that he and his flock could take the whole war season off this year. Not that they would. No matter how many coins found their way into their hands, they would always slip through their fingers and into the pockets of innkeepers and whores on the way to the next battlefield. That wasn¡¯t his problem though. He¡¯d long ago lost the right to save their souls - he¡¯d just have to settle for saving their skins for as long as he could. As the leader of the Unwritten Rule that was his main job; that and making sure they got paid.


    ¡°What¡¯s the big deal, your holiness?¡± Regg asked, his voice just above a whisper as he closed the gap with Kaligos. ¡°We¡¯ve already killed 8 of those snakes so far. It wasn¡¯t even hard! A few well aimed arrows and an asional icy st from Von Wandren and they fall like dominos.¡±


    ¡°Sure, when you can see them,¡± Kaligos shot back, not letting his focus drop. The further they pushed into the swamp the thicker the fog got, and the harder that job became. Last night they¡¯d found the remains of an old temple to sleep in, and honestly that might be where they headed back to tonight, depending on whether or not they got a good lead on the lizards'' nest today.


    ¡°But that¡¯s Von Wandren¡¯s job. He says his spell can find them 500 feet away. That¡¯s further than any of us can shoot, and a damn sight farther than they can throw those spears of theirs. With that kind of advantage they don¡¯t¡ª¡± Regg¡¯s whispered appeal stopped with a sputtering sound and a sudden thud. Kaligos didn¡¯t even have to look to understand that his friend had gotten himself skewered for trusting a mage¡¯s spell more than his own eyes.


    ¡°To arms!¡± He shouted even though he hoped that any warrior serving underneath him would have seen enough already to pull out his sword before being told to. ¡°They¡¯re here! The cold blooded bastards are here!¡±


    He didn¡¯t have to look at Regg¡¯s copsing form to know how bad the wound probably was, but he did anyway as he jumped away while pulling out his sword. He had to. There was always the chance that he could be saved by his meager healing talents. As he looked at the obsidian tip puncturing through the front of the young man¡¯s jerkin he saw it was hopeless though. No one could survive a spear through the heart.


    It was a thrown spear at least, and after a quick check, Kaligos found the culprit on a sandbar off to his left. He wasn¡¯t alone though. Several other cold-blooded killers were rising up immediately before him, as well as between their merry band of misfits and the spear throwers assembling on the hill. Lizardmen were dangerous ambushers - but rarely hunted in groupsrger than three, and never in more than packs of five, so why the hell were there over a dozen here, with more appearing every second.


    ¡°Retreat,¡± he yelled, ¡°Find cover!¡± He didn¡¯t listen to his own advice, and strode forward to meet the two closest to him. The next volley of spears would being any second and the only way to avoid it was to get tangled up with some of their own tribe, so Kaligos did just that, swinging his giant two-handed ymore in huge deadly arcs. The de was heavily notched, but had always served him well. It had broken more than a few steel des in its day, and the wood and bone that these lizards used didn¡¯t stand a chance. The first warrior that attempted to parry his blow lost its head and the second lost an arm for the trouble. It retreated after that, and he found a new monster to tangle with, sparing only a quick look back at his men.


    Most of them looked like they¡¯d made it back to some high ground of their own, so he just had to hold his own for a little while before the arrows and spells would start falling like rain and give him the chance he needed to break away from this muddy pit. The next five minutes were ugly. One of the cold-blooded bastards managed to take a bite out of his shoulder even as he drove his sword like a spear through its heart. He had to drop the sword after that and pull out the throwing axes he carried as a backup. There was no way he was pulling five feet of steel out of 300 pounds of dead lizard while these things were trying to bleed him out.


    Eventually though, the tide turned and the few scaly survivors retreated. Kaligos didn¡¯t see what had happened to the rest of his men while he¡¯d been fighting for his life, but by the time he got back to where they made their stand he could see they¡¯d taken an ugly toll as well. They¡¯d beente ining to his aid because they¡¯d been ambushed a second time, and almost everyone that was left was bleeding, and they were all moring for his aid.


    ¡°Either that was just about all of them, or the count was dead wrong on how long these critters have been infesting hisnd. What do you think chief? Do we continue on or¡ª¡± Marko was asking the right questions, but Kaligos didn¡¯t have the time for it now. He didn¡¯t even have time to heal his wounded friends as he made a beeline for their illustrious and often useless wizard.


    ¡°What happened, Von Wandren?¡± Kaligos growled, picking him up by the throat and pinning him against the trunk of a cyprus. ¡°You said you could see them! You said it wouldn¡¯t be a problem!¡±


    ¡°I-I know¡­ I¡ª¡± the mage choked, but Kaligos cut him off.


    ¡°The problem is that you weren¡¯t paying attention.¡± Kaligos continued. ¡°The problem is you were gossiping with this fop instead of doing what I pay you to do.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ll have you know ¡ª¡± Solovino started, but Kaligos dropped the sputtering mage and whirled to face him.


    ¡°Shut it, fool. You¡¯re here to watch and write, not to tell me what to do,¡± Kaligos roared.


    Everyone was quiet after that, until Von Wandren finally said sulkily, ¡°I wasn¡¯t distracted you know. I still can¡¯t see them. Even the dead ones. Something is blocking my spell. Everything is working as it should though. It still detects crocodiles in this direction, and even a fleeing lizardman,¡± he said, pointing towards the temple and the river the way they¡¯de. ¡°But this way though¡­ It¡¯s like the whole swamp is dead."


    ¡°So you¡¯re saying we should leave, and now,¡± Marko said, helping his wounded lover tie a sling on her wounded arm. Without the ability to use her bow she wouldn¡¯t be much good in any future fight he noted.


    ¡°No, I¡¯m saying we need to go deeper and see what¡¯s doing this. It should be utterly impossible.¡± As the mage spoke he could see the looks of skepticism on everyone¡¯s faces, so he turned back to Kaligos. ¡°I bet the count would pay a hefty sum to find something on hisnd that might alter the very way we look at the arcane.¡± Kaligos considered both options briefly. A lot of people were hurt, but more than a couple were dead - and all of the sudden thepany would need to be paying out a lot more survivor benefits this week than he¡¯d expected.


    ¡°I agree with Marko,¡± he said finally. ¡°That is the Marko from a few minutes ago. I don¡¯t think there¡¯s more than half a dozen of those things left in fighting condition. They¡¯re broken and spent, so we''re going to get everyone ready to move, and then we''re going to push a little further and see what there is to see.¡± The shepherd looked over his men and could see some skepticism, but he didn¡¯t let that stop him. ¡°It¡¯s toote to get the wounded back tost night''s camp site now as is. We press forward, find somewhere defensible to sleep, and tomorrow we carry a whole load of tails back with us.¡±


    This made at least some sense to everyone, so grudgingly every survivor went along with it, and they spent the next few minutes getting the wounded patched up while keeping a sharp eye out for another attack. Kaligos thought that his healing spells, simple as they were, weren¡¯t working quite as well as they should, but he might have just been tired, so he said nothing. When that was done and everyone could stand again, he retrieved his sword and the one axe he could find, before they continued on.


    Five minutester they were in the lizards'' vige. It had been utterly abandoned, but they still took the time to crush the eggs they could find, and put a torch to every structure. In the fog it was slow work, but after what had just happened, it was all the more satisfying.


    ¡°So do you think this is it?¡± Kaligos asked, walking up to the wizard who was studying a crude altar nked by a pair of strange primitive totems.


    ¡°No,¡± the mage shook his head. ¡°This is nothing. For an effect like this, the cause would need to be bigger. Much bigger. Like so big it should be impossible to hide.¡± As the mage spoke the fog parted briefly and Kaligos saw the silhouette of a tower looming out of the fog.


    ¡°Obvious, huh?¡± Kaligos said, a little amused by the scene. ¡°You mean something a bit - like a tower?¡± Through the fog he couldn¡¯t make out much more than the outline, which wavered uncertainly - but there was at least the ruin of something there.


    ¡°Yeah - like a tower, but it would be close, it has to be! As you can see there¡¯s nothing here. I just can¡¯t put my finger on it¡­¡± The mage continued to ramble even after Kaligos lost interest and started walking forward.


    ¡°All right everyone - on me,¡± the shepherd called, cupping his hands to his mouth. ¡°I think I found where we¡¯re staying for the night. That will give Von Wandren here time to figure out how he screwed up and give him plenty of time to find a way to make it up to us in a way we can sell for gold!¡±


    Behind him he could hear the mage ask where the hell that came from, but he was happy to let him stew. All Kaligos cared about was finding something that was at least moderately defendable. In the morning they could chop up these corpses, and cart them back along with the bard. Some of the money would go to the newly minted widows created by today¡¯s ambush but the rest would go a good long way toward drowning everyone¡¯s sorrows until they could buy some new friends.


    He was confident that with the eight of them and a few walls to use for cover there wouldn¡¯t be an issue. With the right fortifications he could hold back the gates of hell itself with his handful of warriors. Kaligos smiled. He was going to sleep better tonight than he¡¯d thought he would.

 Chapter 10: Just For The Night

    Chapter 10: Just For The Night


    The tower wasn¡¯t alone on its dismal, fog-shrouded ind. There was a whole littlepound of moldering buildings slowly sinking back into the mud. Kaligos couldn¡¯t imagine what would have driven someone to build such a building this far out into the middle of nowhere. It was a creepy old thing, but unlike the rest of the buildings, it still had a roof, and since it looked like more rain, that fact alone settled their sleeping arrangements.


    He¡¯d initially nned on setting up camp on the top floor to give them amanding view of everything, but that changed after a quick survey of the area with Von Wandren. The top of the tower stank of evil, and it didn¡¯t take his pet mage¡¯s warnings to understand why - the remains of a magic circle on the floor was caked in blood. Something terrible had happened here.


    ¡°I think we should tell the others,¡± the mage said on their walk back down, but Kaligos just red. He knew how superstitious his team was.


    ¡°I think you should leave your damn mouth shut and let me decide what¡¯s the best thing to tell to who, Von Wandren. You¡¯ve already done enough today, don¡¯t you think?¡± Normally Kaligos didn¡¯t like to twist the knife, but right now, he was short-tempered and didn¡¯t want to stay up half the night arguing about ghosts. He wanted to do his watch - get some sleep and be halfway back to the boat by this time tomorrow.


    Besides the signs of old evil, there really wasn¡¯t anything to worry about. The rest of the day had gone remarkably well. Once they¡¯d stowed the injured and the gear on the tower¡¯s second floor, they¡¯d scavenged wood for arge bonfire just outside the tower¡¯s front door. Then Kaligos had put the uninjured to work chopping up lizardmen and stacking tails. Even after they paid out to the families of the dead, they still looked to make even more than he thought when they nned this trip. The deaths were tragic, of course, but not as tragic as wasting this windfall would be.


    That night thepany dined well. Why shouldn¡¯t they? They¡¯d packed in enough supplies for a week, so they had a hearty stew instead of the thin soup they usually dined on this far out in the wilderness. ¡°Did you decide to thicken this up with some lizard meat when no one was looking, boss?¡± Serin joked. His humor didn¡¯t slow down his eating, though, Kaligos noted. The bowl was halfway empty already. Serin was a big man with a powerful appetite, so he had no doubt he¡¯d be back for seconds.


    ¡°Of course! Anything to pinch a copper or two,¡± he said, absently looking past him to those assembled. Something seemed amiss, and it was only after he did a head count he realized what. ¡°Where did Marko and Liz sneak off to now?¡±


    ¡°Oh, you know them,¡± Serinughed. ¡°Always looking for a little alone time.¡±


    ¡°Maybe when you finish that bowl, you go beat the bushes and let them know it¡¯s supper time. I don¡¯t want them out after dark.¡± Kaligos was worried about something even though he shouldn¡¯t be, and it wasn¡¯t hard to think of what. The blood-red sunset made it impossible not to think about what he¡¯d seen on the tower¡¯s top floor, and that wasn¡¯t doing anything for his appetite or his sense of inner peace.


    ¡°Oh - well, they aren¡¯t out there. Too many bugs.¡± As Serin spoke, he gestured broadly to the horizon with a spoon. ¡°Marko decided to have a look at her underground passage¡­ I mean the tower¡¯s


    passage.¡± The big man blushed at the slip of his tongue. ¡°You heard about that, right? About the trap door?¡±


    ¡°I vaguely recall telling everyone not to wander off alone¡­¡± Kaligos said, his annoyance rising.


    ¡°Well, they ain¡¯t alone, are they? They¡¯re¡­¡± Serin stopped and stood. He wasn¡¯t the sharpest sword of the group, but he could see when he was about to get himself in trouble. ¡°You know what - let me just go and fetch those two love birds right up.¡±


    After that, they were down to six by the fire, and one of those six was the bard, who was strumming his lute quietly while he apparently tried to find the right rhyming word for ambush. Once the sound of the trapdoor on the bottom floor being opened and the tromp of Serin¡¯s big boots on the stairs faded, it was a lovely night - peaceful even. A few minutester, though, that peace was shattered by a yell from inside the tower and the sound of running. ¡°Captain! Captain!¡± Serin bellowed, rushing back up the stairs. ¡°I think you need to get down here. I think everyone with a sword needs to get down here right gods damned now!¡±


    Kaligos took the kettle off the fire and picked up his sword, leaning against the tower wall not far from him. ¡°You heard the man. Everybody finish up and get ready for anything.¡± Normally he¡¯d chastise one of his men for overstepping like this, but Serin didn¡¯t scare easy, so if he came back up in a wide-eyed panic, there was a problem. ¡°What did you see down there?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s not¡­ I c-can¡¯t¡­¡± Serin stammered, ¡°I think maybe you should see for yourself.¡± He was obviously shaken, but Kaligos wasn¡¯t inclined to doubt him.


    ¡°Alright. I¡¯ll do that.¡± Kaligos said grimly, ¡°You break out the torches, get ¡¯em lit and start passing them out.¡± Then he went inside himself and started walking down alone into the dark. The void beckoned, and Kaligos could feel the evil on the humid breeze from the yawning dark, but he could feel the love of his god too, and that was enough. With a thought and a silent prayer, the holy man lit his sword in a glowing holy light that was brighter than any torch, and he started walking. He soon saw what had Serin so spooked.


    The tunnel stank of death and the tunnels were built in such a way that they weren¡¯t quite human. Nothing was plumb. Nothing waspletely level, and nothing was straight. This was the work of something dark and monstrous - but the hard limestone the tunnels were dug through ruled out green skins or lizards. Nothing like that would have the steel or the patience to dig a structure like this. In the minute or so he¡¯d been walking, the hallway that Kaligos was walking down had already split and divided half a dozen times, and never at right angles. This ce was neither a warren nor a cer - it was a maze built with no apparent purpose.


    Kaligos inhaled, ready to call out for Marko to pull his pants up and get out of there, but that¡¯s when he saw the blood. It was fresh, and there was enough of it to tell the story of what happened here. At least one of the lovebirdsy dead or dying somewhere down here. He could see torches approaching him in the dark now. The rest of thepany would be here soon, and he¡¯d have to have answers for them, but honestly, he had no idea what they should be. The right answer was to follow the trail of smeared blood and save their friends or take their revenge, but the further he walked into these dark halls, the more every fiber of Kaligos¡¯ being told him that they should leave. Not after a search. Not after they¡¯d packed or at first light. They should leave right now and count themselves lucky for having escaped.


    A leader couldn¡¯t tell his people to run away and abandon their friends, though. Not when they¡¯d already lost good people today.


    Once they had regrouped, they talked about it. A few, including their bard, had voted to leave and burn the ce down, but he didn¡¯t get a vote among apany of equals like the Unwritten Rule. So they followed the trail of blood and broken fingernails that led off of what Kaligos hade to think of as the main passage before splitting up. They split into two teams of four, with Von Wandren in charge of the other group. He could be unreliable at times, but right now, everyone could see that he was just itching to burn down whatever it was that they found.


    The tense silence didn¡¯tst much longer. Kaligos spotted a silhouette moving at the edge of his light and had Teryn and Grim put a couple arrows in it; the screaming started from somewhere behind them. The holy man didn¡¯t let that distract him as he noticed that not only did the arrows do nothing to the creature that was very slowly approaching, but that others seemed to be closing in behind it.


    ¡°Zombies,¡± he spat in disgust. True evil had a face, and it was a face that was very slowly decaying. ¡°Come on - let¡¯s get back to the other group and see if we can stay ahead of these slowpokes. No need to fight what we can outwalk.¡± Kaligos tried to put a brave face on it, but he was worried. Who knew how many of these abominations were tucked away down here or even how long they¡¯d been here.


    The way back was easy, and when two zombies suddenly appeared from a side passage, his glowing ymore made quick work of their heads, but Kaligos was already regretting his choice of weapon. If they got boxed in, the thing would be less than useless, and the further they went, the more shuffling and moaning they could hear down the side corridors. Once their group had returned to where they¡¯d split up, Kaligos called out, ¡°Wizard - where in the hells are you!¡± There was no response to that or the follow-up calls he made, so, in the end, he had to rely on his sense of smell, leading his team to the smell of burning that became visible as smoke after only a few more turns.


    ¡°Show¡¯s over,¡± he said, walking into the room. ¡°Grab your wounded, and let¡¯s get out of here before we¡¯re¡­¡± The words died in his throat. This wasn¡¯t a battlefield - it was ast stand. Even as they rushed into the room to try to save the other half of their team, they found only pieces of them mixed with pieces of the enemy they¡¯d died fighting. It was a charnel house, and just looking at the scattered viscera and the violent end it implied made Kaligos gag. He turned to block the doorway and keep his remaining men, but the fop Solovino was too close behind, and his eyes went wide at the awful sight before he ran off into the darkness screaming.


    ¡°Solovino - get back here!¡± Kaligos yelled, but the bard was beyond listening, but more importantly, he was heading the wrong way.


    ¡°Want me to chase him down, boss?¡± Teryn asked, looking pale as he tried to keep it together. ¡°There¡¯s about 15 royals running away in terror right there.¡±


    ¡°Hang the money. We¡¯re leaving while we still can,¡± the holy man said, turning around and leading them back toward the staircase. There was nothing left down here worth dying for.


    Kaligos cursed himself on the way back. He cursed himself for deciding to stay the night in this tower. He cursed himself for not listening to Von Wandren, and most of all, he cursed himself for not listening to his gut while it screamed at him all through dinner. If Marko and his minx wanted to die as kinkily as they¡¯d lived, that was between them and their gods. All Kaligos wanted to do was live to fight another day. Fighting was something they couldn¡¯t escape, though, and by the time they got back to the main hall, they found it clogged with another dozen zombies, including the one with two arrows in its chest.


    That meant that they were surrounded now, but that fact would only be more obvious as the minutes passed and the noose closed tighter. Kaligos did something he hadn¡¯t done in a long time, and he beseeched his god for aid, ¡°Lord of blood and battle - smite this wickedness from the face of creation,¡± he cried out, holding his ymore not as a cleaver, but as the cross that it was in the face of evil. The light of his sword shone brighter for a moment, and the two zombies closest to him crumbled to dust before they could reach him.


    The rest froze or backed off a few steps as they recoiled from the light, and Kaligos pressed his advantage, beheading one as he tried to break through. If they could just force their way past thesest few, then they could reach the stairs and flee long enough to return with a cadre of real temrs to deliver proper vengeance for the fallen. He could hear hisst two men fighting their own battles behind him, but it didn¡¯t sound good. He was no mage, able to cast spell after spell, and his faith was no match for the darkness of this ce. Reluctantly he let go of his sword that was stuck in the body of one of the bloated corpses before him and pulled out hisst axe.


    If they were going to die on this spot, then they were going to die fighting.

 Chapter 11: The Leftovers

    Chapter 11: The Leftovers


    True to his word, most of Kaligos¡¯ men died fighting, but to their credit they took down several times their weight in zombies before they fell. The swamp didn¡¯t care. All the broken pieces were just spare parts that would be repurposed for other experiments. With the tribe of lizardmen and their strange worship of it all but extinguished it wouldn¡¯t have enough energy to fuel so many constructs in perpetuity anyway. In time they might yet grow in number again, but that would be years from now. Until then it would have to make do with less unless it could find other ways to feed its ravenous hunger.


    Right now that wasn¡¯t a problem though. Right now it was overflowing with blood and suffering, and with so many fresh test subjects, both living and dead, it was eager to try a number of experiments that it had been dreaming up during all the quiet years it had slumbered in the swamp. Yes, it decided, it would torture the living to power its terrible projects with their dead friends, and any that survived after that, it would find other uses for.


    Unlike the vige, there was no hurry here. Once its zombies seized control of the tower entrance, everyone else was trapped inside, and there was no troublesome divinity to get in its way. That flicker of holy light had died with Kaligos, and was at best a minor irritationpared to the painful sore that was the temple. The zombies would set his body aside anyway though - thest thing it wanted to do was reconnect with the man¡¯s angry god in some idental way during the resurrection process.


    The wounded on the second floor fell quickly enough. Theysted only a day before they were dragged below; they would never see the sun rise again. They screamed until their throats were raw as flesh was yed from bone and minds were broken by the darkest sights that the wraith could imagine. While all that happened the bulk of its zombies went to the surface, to gather all the corpses of the lizards that they could. They had been strong warriors in life, but they would be even stronger in death.


    The lizard corpses that were mostly whole would be set aside for embalming. Properly treated, they would then be able tost a century or more, which suited the dark ns slowly taking shape in the mind of the wraith. Now that it had a mind it could n, and those ns always led to other ns, even this one. Because the pieces of the tribe that were too maimed and mutted to rise again were gathered too. Their tribal bonds and spiritual beliefs would be exploited as much as their rotting flesh, and their shattered parts would be stitched together into something altogether more terrible than a zombie.


    In the end only the bard was allowed to run free in the endless tunnels. It became a game to the swamp - allowing him to think he was almost free before a new enemy lurched from the shadows, and scared the hapless creature down another path. The bard was utterly harmless, but the swamp had important ns for him once his mind had beenpletely shattered, so it was important that the pitiful man stayed utterly terrified until all was in readiness.


    For days the darkest rooms underneath the tower throbbed with dark and baleful energies while the dead chanted and the living screamed. From the eldritch circles painted in blood beings that never should have existed were raised into terrible unlife, destined to spend eternity enved to the Lich and its machinations. First came the lovers. Marko and Liz never wanted to be parted. They¡¯d said as much with their dying breath, so the wraith granted their wish. From two separate bodies it stitched together a single two headed, four armed monstrosity. Into that body both of their souls were pulled back from paradise screaming, and forced to power the wretched, broken creature that was the mockery of their love. It would have been tragic if anyone but the swamp was ever likely to learn of it.


    After the lovers had a chance to despair at the abomination, the swamp set them to using their four hands and still nimble flesh to assemble the true monstrosity. This had to be done outside in the ruins of what had once been Albrecht¡¯s manor, because the thing that they were creating was toorge to navigate the tunnels under the tower. It would take weeks before it was ready for reanimation, maybe months. That didn¡¯t matter to the swamp though - one stitch at a time the lovers would assemble the pieces of over a dozen mutted warriors into something the world had never seen before.


    Only after all this was done did the Lich finally turn its gaze to the one that they had called Solovino. After two days of constant running and hiding the man was a wreck, with wild eyes that no longer seemed to focus on anything. He was not yet the sole survivor of the expedition, but he was the only one that had anything resembling a mind anymore. When the zombies that were sent to drag him to the throne room finally reached the broken bard, he put up no resistance, and all he did when the zombies picked him up and dragged him down the hall was quietly piss himself. There was no fight left in him, but that was hardly a surprise. There had been very little to begin with. The only surprise was that despite all the bruises and scrapes he¡¯d gotten running in the dark, he¡¯d somehow managed to keep a hold on his mandolin. It hade through the whole ordeal without a scratch.


    The zombies said nothing as they walked unerringly through the darkness to the very throne of the Lich. Like everything else, they were just an extension of the swamp. They were just two fingers on one hand bringing them ever closer to its mouth. Whether that was because it wanted to speak to the wreck of a man, or it wanted to devour him whole had not yet been decided. Solovino was the first living soul ever to enter the throne room. It had been carved from the bedrock three levels below the tower, though there was no quick way to reach it without navigating most of thebyrinth in a wide and circuitous fashion. Besides the ritual rooms, it was the only ce that was lit in the entire maze, and two burning braziers of witchfire burned in the corners of the room, casting blue-purple light that resulted in dancing shadows tinged with red, making the already bizarre room look even more nightmarish.


    Even though the bard was physically present, he did not see. He did not see the squat bronze throne that held up the gilded body of the Lich, or the creeping patina of corruption that ate at it, even though it had been cast barely a year ago. He also didn¡¯t see that the gold that had once been hoarded in a pile had been put to better use. It now spread across the floor, and climbed the walls, forming a web of nameless arcane purpose that looked like the baroque decorations of a royal family gone mad, but was really a series of arcane focuses allowing the heart of the swamp to better store and direct the tides of mana it received from its terrible domain.


    ¡°Do you wish to live?¡± That was the question that was posed to the bard by the swamp, but it didn¡¯te from the mouth of the Lich, for it was bound eternally into its molten sarcophagus and utterly unable to move. Instead the speaker was the fresh corpse of another human very familiar to the bard: the mage Von Wandren. In time the swamp would find another use for such a talented mind, but for now it needed to speak, and this was the only mouth that still had a set of lungs that hadn¡¯t been put to other uses.


    Solovino responded to the voice, and looked unseeingly at the speaker, but didn¡¯t respond, so the mage repeated himself with its unnatural voice. ¡°Do you wish to live Bard, or has life lost its luster?¡±


    This time the bard found his voice. ¡°Y-yes¡­ I-I want to live. I have a family, well, a lover or two at least, and the king¡­ I must¡ª¡±


    ¡°I care not for your reasons, worm. I only ask what you would do to leave here with your heart still beating.¡± The voice of the dead mage sounded nothing like it had in life. That wasn¡¯t because it was missing an arm or because it was two days dead though. It was just because the swamp no longer had the correct mannerisms or nuance to sound like a human. It was beyond all of that now.


    ¡°Anything!¡± the bard shouted as he finally started to realize where he was and what was happening. Even in the depths of madness, the broken parts of him still wanted to live on. ¡°I¡¯ll do whatever you ask Von Wandren, I¡ª¡±


    ¡°The mage is dead, and his soul is mine, dog. Make no mistake about that.¡± The swamp had not known that it was still capable of taking offense until the moment this pitiful creature dared to address it by the name of its broken puppet. The rage that flowed through it in that moment made the lights flicker and the Lich almost snuffed the lights in the impudent bard¡¯s eyes out by ident in its wroth, but it restrained itself at thest moment.


    ¡°I- I¡¯m sorry my lord.¡± The bard bowed his head until it touched the stone floor as much to repent as to avoid looking. He had felt the shadow of death pass by him, and he did not want to feel that cold touch again. ¡°Tell me what I must do.¡±


    ¡°Swear fealty to me¡ª¡± The mage intoned.


    ¡°I will!¡± the Bard interrupted, too afraid to do anything else.


    ¡°Swear fealty to me, and wear this.¡± With its one remaining arm the mage held out a heavy bronze chain with arge medallion attached. It was a in thing, that highwaymen might not even steal from their victims, but that was only on the front. The back of the medallion was covered in runes and profane symbols thatpleted the spell.


    Solovino grabbed it and put it on immediately, afraid to do anything else. Immediately he doubled over in pain as the thing burned into his flesh. ¡°Ahhhh! What¡­ My lord! What is this!¡± he screamed loud enough for his voice to echo through the catbs.


    It was only when he was silent that the Lich¡¯s mouthpiece began to speak once more. ¡°The bargain is struck. I give your life, and in exchange it is mine forever more.¡±


    ¡°What must I d-do,¡± the bard asked, struggling to rise.


    ¡°You must tell my story. To everyone. Sing your songs and spread the word. There is evil here and heroes muste to defeat it.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ll s-sing the s-song of thest s-stand of the Unwritten Rule,¡± the Bard stammered, ¡°But I don¡¯t know your story my Lord. How can I write a song for a legend I don¡¯t know?¡±


    ¡°You will,¡± the dead throat chuckled dryly. ¡°You¡¯ll never dream of anything but my story ever again bard. You¡¯ll sing and dance and spread my story until you break, and even then you won¡¯t get away from me. Enjoy what time you have left, because your soul is mine for eternity now.¡±

 Chapter 12: The Broken Bard of Blackwater

    Chapter 12: The Broken Bard of ckwater


    Once he was released back into the light of day, he was frantic. He made straight for the swamp¡¯s borders, but he¡¯d never really be able to escape from it. It was inside him now and his soul was as muddy as the velvet slippers he tramped through the muck with, and every bit as ruined. He fled upriver on the first barge that he could g down, with promises that the count would pay them double for their trouble. They epted of course, but no matter how fast they poled up river - no matter how far he ran from the terrible things he¡¯d seen, the dreams kepting.


    At first Louven Solovino tried to ignore them, but that was aplete failure. He wasn¡¯t strong enough to ignore a nightmare when he could taste the muddy water as he was drowned or feel the way the fish devoured the fleshy remnants of his corpse. By the third night he was drowning himself in alcohol, which only dulled the dreams of murder and betrayal a little.


    In the end, the only thing that did any good was to start telling the crew scary stories about the ckwater. That¡¯s what he¡¯de to call the swamp because it had a nice ring to it. In truth he wasn¡¯t sure it had a name. The night he told the crew about the fall of the Unwritten Rule was the first time he slept without waking up screaming since the day he escaped from the crypt of the swamp. It was still rough, without any of the flourishes he would need to add before he yed it for anyone important, but it was a start. As long as he spent the day tuning his mandolin, and telling the swamp''s stories, then he would be able to sleep at night. He¡¯d still have dreams about the terrible history of the swamp, of course. The swamp still had to inspire him.


    As long as he did as he¡¯d sworn, Solovino would be an observer to the terrible history of the swamp rather than a participant; he would get to watch as the small fishing vige of Triesten was torn apart by the hordes of the dead, rather than be forced to relive the agony of one of the victims over and over again. It was a devil''s bargain, but he took it without ever once looking back. What he didn¡¯t see was how his stories infected the minds of everyone he told them to. It was the smallest of sparks, but with each word, the influence of the golden Lich that was now his master, grew. The more the bard¡¯s words spread, therger that the domain that it was trapped in grew.


    By the time Solovino reached the court of his patron, Count Garvin, he¡¯d managed to whip up not just an impassioned bad about how the brave warriors he¡¯d fought beside had fought bravely he called ¡®To The Last Man,¡¯ but he¡¯d also improved on the older song of ¡®Riley¡¯s Rotten Riches.'' It had been out of favor, for some time, but now that Solovino had a new horror to link to the old tale, it seemed more relevant than ever.


    In front of the court he delivered the sad news that even though the mercenarypany was sessful in purging the swamp of lizardmen, they were ultimately done in by another, far greater evil. The dreams made him think that some of the lizards had escaped, but that wasn¡¯t something the count would want to hear, so Solovino glossed over it. The bard tried to tell them all about the Lich, but he was surprised to find he couldn¡¯t. All he could tell the assembled court was that the undead rose from the ground and tore them to pieces. When he was asked for more information, he could only tell them about a few of the vile creatures, but no more. Some part of himself was no longer under hisplete control, and that terrified him.


    The Count issued a new call to arms at once, urging brave and godly men to purge this new evil, and offering a generous purse for doing it. Why wouldn¡¯t he? Solovino thought skeptically while he maintained his mournful expression in front of the assembled guests, he¡¯d never have to pay up for the lizard men now, so he could spend that coin twice.


    That night at the feast when he tried to sing his songs, nothing tried to strangle him, not even when he rhymed Lich with witch andbyrinth with plinth. The darkness that resided inside him now would let him sing and tell stories all he liked, but never issue a genuine warning about the terrible danger that any would-be heroes were likely to face if they actually went to defeat this foe. It was a maddening realization, and by the time he finished with his performance of ¡®To the Last Man,¡¯ he was crying actual tears, which the audience found very moving. They weren¡¯t tears of sadness though, but tears of frustration. Even if he couldn¡¯t see what he was doing exactly, even if he didn¡¯t know precisely how he was spreading evil among the lords anddies of court, he knew he was nothing more than a puppet on a string at this point.


    Of course he was. That¡¯s what he¡¯d agreed to in exchange for his miserable little life. He knew that, he just didn¡¯t expect the Lich to be able to enforce such a bargain from almost a hundred miles away. Even from this distance though, every note of his new and improved version of ¡®Riley¡¯s Rotten Riches,¡¯ rang with evil. Solovino wasn¡¯t sure that it was rted, because even though he¡¯d seen many of the swamp¡¯s memories, he still had no real idea of what order they belonged in or how they fit together. That kind of rity probably wouldn¡¯te for a long time. He did know that it was the only local tale of tragedy worth telling though, and that it would be an easy thing to link it to undead horrors rising from the swamp and make them feel familiar to his audiences.


    It was true though, and now the very genesis of the swamp¡¯s evil was spreading into poptions entirely outside of its domain. Most of them would shrug it off, but some would get infected by that tiny splinter of evil and go home to strange dreams and a faint lust for gold. Over time they might be the swamp¡¯s creature every bit as much as the poor fisherfolk of Triesten had been before they met an untimely end. The wraith had now found a way to spread further and faster than even the mosquitoes it had used so effectively before.


    The bard wouldn¡¯t need to worry about bad dreams tonight. That night he went home with a Baress who insisted on her own private encore. He yed her every bit as well as he yed his mandolin earlier in the evening and left her even more tainted than the rest of his audience. Solovino was a spiritual leper now, and even if no one else could see that yet, he could feel it growing inside himself a little more after every performance.


    He stayed at the Garin¡¯s court for the rest of the season but moved north as winter turned to spring. The count had offered him a newmission, and several women of the court had made other very appealing offers, but it was time to go. Not because Solovino wanted to of course, but because there was no sce in singing to the already converted. After months of ying his songs, everyone that was vulnerable to the swamp¡¯s message was already infected by the subtle magic of Solovino¡¯s voice. His dreams were growing ever darker, and he was certain that the only cure was to find new audiences to sing to.


    So, he rode and he yed. He stopped in small inns andrger taverns. He yed before the local barons and viscounts, and even a duchess on asion, but he didn¡¯t stop. He didn¡¯t dare stop, and he couldn¡¯t look at himself in the mirror. From the reaction he got from thedies of every court that he stopped in, he knew that his voice was still just as clear and his face, just as handsome as ever, but he could feel the darkness growing inside himself, and on the asion that he identally saw his face in a stray reflection he recoiled in horror. Even if his flesh felt fine to the touch, he knew that he was rotting away. It was one more secret he feared the discovery of - that one day a beautifuldy would help him remove his shirt and scream as she found the open sores and rotting flesh that must decorate his body by now.


    They never did though. They always begged him for another private show before he disappeared on the road once more.


    He added new songs to his performances. Now whenever he sang about ¡®Riley¡¯s Rotten Riches,¡¯ he sang about ¡®Garin¡¯s Goodly Gold,¡¯ too. The swamp loved nothing more than when he tried to send brave fools to their horrible ends and rewarded him with an almost pleasant night¡¯s sleep whenever he did such an awful thing. Solovino didn¡¯t stop though, even though he knew it was wrong. It was the only thing that kept the darkness at bay.


    Before the ill-fated trip to y the lizard men of ckwater Marsh he¡¯d been like any other bard. He¡¯d lived for wine, women, and song. Now though wine did nothing for him, women were only used to reassure himself that he wasn¡¯t the monster he¡¯d feared he¡¯d be, and song had be a terrible punishment. He would have preferred that his mandolin was strung with des rather than that he¡¯d be the personal bard of the Lich that owned him now.


    He¡¯d tried to take off that cursed medallion so many times now, but each time the motion was met with the feeling that his heart was about to explode. One time he¡¯d even tried to do it despite that. He¡¯d gotten good and drunk and tried to rip it off as a perverse form of suicide, but he¡¯d only cked out from the pain and woken up in a puddle of his own vomit. He¡¯d tried to confess to a priest, but even entering a church or walking near a cathedral was enough to make him physically ill now.


    It hadn¡¯t even been a year since his terrible brush with death, but he didn¡¯t even feel like the same man he once was. Some days he didn¡¯t even feel like a person anymore. He was a monster now, and as hepleted his circuit through Abendean and ck Rock, before steering back towards Count Gavin¡¯s seat of power in Fallravea, he could swear that he could tell if he¡¯d sung one of his ck bads to the people he passed by on the high road just by the look in their eyes. It was a subtle thing, but more and more as he walked by strangers, he could see a darkness dwelling inside them where the spark of life and joy should have been. It was disconcerting, but even in the ce where those darkened souls dwelled in great numbers the sky did not fall, and vige life still continued as normal.


    Normal for everyone but him. He yed for harvest festivals all the way back to his patron to pay his way, but at each one he stopped at, they wanted to hear the older songs he was once known for. ¡®The Maid, Waid,¡¯ ¡®A Pretty Witty Ditty,¡¯ and other fun crowd-pleasing favorites. The fragile smile he wore to hide the monstrosity he¡¯d be was much too fragile for such frivolity now though. No - he could feel them looking at him with concern now, but as soon as they figured out what he¡¯d be, those looks would be reced with outrage and pitchforks. He had to move on before that happened. He had to keep spreading the songs of his true master before all the awful things he¡¯d done caught up with him.

 Chapter 13: Heroes All

    Chapter 13: Heroes All


    The swamp had always known that there was a world beyond its territory. It had the dimmest memories of its time as a creature of flesh and blood before it had be something altogether more terrible, and it could feel the boundaries against its domain constricting against it painfully. It was one thing to remember though, and another thing entirely to be connected to the world outside once more. Thanks to the songs of his servant, it could suddenly peek into the lives of thousands upon thousands of new souls, and each new city that Solovino went to just made the swamp hunger for more. It had settled for scraps for far too long, and now it was time to feast.


    The tiny splinter of evil that the bard lodged into the minds of his audience wasn¡¯t enough to toy with the dreams of the corrupted, or to draw any real power from individually. Often as not those that had been tainted managed to shake themselves free of its influence after a month or two. In the end only the twisted or the greedy were truly fertile enough ground for the darkness to take root. Fortunately there were more than enough of those in the world. Week by week they added up, and soon those tiny flickering candles in the minds of a thousand strangers gave off enough heat that you could confuse them for a bonfire. Gathering essence this way wasn¡¯t nearly as efficient as blood sacrifice or torture of course, but the soul web it had built with the shattered survivors that had apanied the bard helped with that at least. The tortured remnants of their immortal souls enchanted a giant web of silver strands on the deepest level of the dungeon, pulling all of the stray essence into a whirlpool of power.


    The same shards of evil that nourished the swamp provided early warning as well, when a group of adventurers that had heard Solovino sing, came to take Riley¡¯s Riches for themselves. A band of somewhat less than a dozen warriors and a mage made their way slowly downriver, with only one destination in mind: the lonely tower of ckwater Fen. Far from being afraid or anxious, the swamp was overjoyed. It set traps, and woke servants in preparation for their arrival, and when there was nothing left to be done it merely watched and waited. This is why it had released the bard in the first ce. Everything else was a side effect. All that really mattered was its ravenous hunger for the blood of the living.


    Once they were inside the swamp, the wraith followed their every move, delighting in the false bravado they used to cover up their rising fear. They were ten that first night, but their scout was dragged to a watery grave on the second day. They never found her body, or the skeletal hands that had dragged her down into the muck. The useless limbs left over from zombies that were too far gone to be of any real use anymore had been nted all over the most likely approaches to the tower for miles in every direction. Against a determined foe they were useless, but against a surprised and frightened one they were terribly effective.


    Nine would-be heroes made it within sight of the tower after wasting half a day looking for their drowned friend. They camped that night on a high sandbar that overlooked the crumbling edifice, and were cautious enough to set a three person watch tost the whole night. It didn¡¯t save them.


    None of the songs that the bard sang talked about dragons. He mentioned the ¡®Lich of gold that was a terror to behold.¡¯ Most people took it to be a metaphor though. He also sang about zombies and lizard men, but Solovino had never seen what the wraith had done with all those lizard corpses. He didn¡¯t know that for months zombie servants had embalmed and cured that reptile flesh before stitching the pieces into a fearsome mass and braiding all those individual souls into a singr thread of rage. The result wasn¡¯t a real dragon of course - though the Lich could to do such wonderful things with it if a beast like that were ever to fall into its clutches. The dark ys tricks on even the sanest mind though, and if you¡¯re woken up by something with the strength of ten men ripping yourpanions to pieces with eight legs and several snapping mouths, what else would you call it?


    Some of those warriors showed bravery, even as the swamp dragon left maimed corpses and dying adventurers in its wake, but whether they resisted or froze made no difference. They were all ripped to pieces, except those that ran. By morning none of them had reached the tower, and two of the three souls that ran for their lives were still breathing. Neither would make it back to the river.


    The swamp delighted in their suffering, but even before it had decided what to do with all of the fresh meat, another group of heroes had started heading its way. It was more than the wraith had hoped for when it spared the life of that pitiful bard. Week after week and month after month, new heroes made their way to the swamp. Some sought to purge the evil that they¡¯d heard so much about, and others only bothered for the gold. It didn¡¯t matter. Neither group had any real sess.


    The second group got lost, and saw neither the dragon nor the tower before they were picked off one by one, but the third group made it inside the tower at least before they met their end. They stood no chance against the rock hard skin of the embalmed lizard warriors or the armed and armored corpses of the previous adventurers. By now the wraith had an embarrassment of riches in both blood and treasure. Every new adventurer that fell added to its pile of riches, as well as to its growing army. That was when it learned to make minions of the very souls of its adversaries. Soon vengeful haunts and hungry ghosts were prowling the darkness, making the swamp almost as dangerous as the tower itself.


    The first group to find the swamp¡¯s newest denizens tore each other to pieces on the second night as charges of cheating at a dice game grew out of all proportion until the evening ended with blood. These were friends - people that would normally die for each other, but tonight they had blood on their hands and a spirit riding their body urging them to seek deadly retribution for imagined slights. In the morning there was only one survivor, and he fled the swamp like his life depended on it.


    Unfortunately his story spread, and tarnished the tale of easy riches waiting to be taken. After that the woefully unwary were much lessmon. The well prepared didn¡¯t fare much better though. The swamp was awash in power now. So much so that it was starting to warp and change the local ley lines, and even the flow of the mighty river that hemmed it in to the east. Once what was happening began to affect the wider world, the true powers of the region finally began to take notice.


    The first person to send a real expedition was Count Garvin. Rather than merely offer rewards to adventurers, he raised his banners, and drew 80 men to arms under them, then he marched off to put an end to the evil on his borders. Among the men were priests, mages, and a pdin. They made it to the tower without issue, and the mages counseled him to simply copse the ugly thing and lock the evil that festered beneath it inside forever. They could feel just how twisted the ether had be.


    Leo Garvin the third was a man of action though, and wanted to cover himself in glory more than he wanted to end the evil that seeped up from the depth. He took fifteen men - the elite vanguard of his force with him into the dark while the rest set up camp in the area around the tower. They were down there for a full night and a day before Lord Garvin and his pdin champion finally fought themselves free. They didn¡¯t have a chance to tell anyone about the horrors they¡¯d seen in the darkness, or about how they, after first being picked off one at a time, had been led in circles for half a day until they were hopelessly lost and beset on all sides with the ravenous dead, because the men that they¡¯d left behind to guard the tower were themselves under siege.


    They beseeched their Lord to leave before night fell once more and the dread dragon of the swamps came again, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. Count Garvin needed at least one trophy to justify the terrible cost of this expedition, and a dragon was just the right sort of head that he could mount on his wall so that the bards would sing songs about him for the rest of his days.


    The night did not go well for the Lord, but it went even worse for his men. At sunset they numbered 42, but by sunrise there were only 18 still standing with three more in bandages clinging to life. They¡¯d managed to do grievous harm to the rotting chimeric beast as the armored men met each charge with shields and spears behind impromptu barricades, but even a hundred wounds didn¡¯t stop it from killing several men with each attack before retreating into the night once more with a screaming victim or two.


    As they beat a hasty retreat that morning, the Lord went back without a trophy, or even any way to carry back the bodies of his dead. The only monument to his expedition would be the number of strong men that he¡¯d add to the undead menagerie of ckwater Fen. It was a humbling moment for such a proud man, and he would never be the same after the horrors he¡¯d seen. The swamp would make sure of it. It was so deep into his mind now that toying with the lord¡¯s nightmares would be child¡¯s y.


    An archmage from the magic collegium at Abenend was the next person of note to travel to the ckwater at the end of winter. He came with only a small retinue, and after a brief session of scrying he guided his party to the ruins that had once been the temple in Triesten and studied the problem from there, just beyond the reach of the swamp and its minions. This enraged the wraith more than anything else had in years, and that night the angry spirits of the swamp swarmed around the temple, making that displeasure known. Even though his apprentices trembled with fear at the sight, they stayed within the consecrated grounds and their protective circle, and so they came to no harm.


    Three dayster the expedition left after conducting a fairly powerful elemental ritual that called on the forces of air and water in aplex weave that not even the Lich could entirely decipher. The day after they departed, a powerful storm system began to brew and the wraith could finally see the magic taking shape. They¡¯d called a thunderstorm forth, but the swamp was hardly afraid of a little water. This too would pass, and then it would find fresh fools to feast on.

 Chapter 14: The Storm

    Chapter 14: The Storm


    As it happened, the storm didn¡¯t pass. The Lich had been wrong about that. Over a week, it slowly brewed before an orgy of violence in the form of wind and torrential rains burst forth.


    At its worst, it raged for days. Even when the wind died off to the point where it no longer leveled trees and scoured the earth, the system continued to churn slowly above the area, continuing to rain. It lingered for weeks on and off after that. Water could not damage the swamp, but as the water level rose, the flooding redirected the whole course of the river and diluted the swamp¡¯s power as well as its connection to the darkness that lurked beneath it.


    It was a titanic work of magic, but as the tunnels flooded and the dead that served the darkness became submerged, everything slowly ground to a halt an inch at a time. The water wouldn¡¯t hurt any of the abominations or zombies that the wraith had constructed, but letting them all slowly fall asleep to conserve energy was the obvious choice. The darkness was both timeless and eternal. Its great work could wait for an age if necessary. It could wait as long as it needed to, even until all the men that knew the song ¡®The Last Man¡¯ died old and alone in their beds.


    Those mages had no idea what it was they were attempting to fight. They had attempted to purge its darkness from the world above, but they were as foolish as Albrecht had been. They couldn¡¯t erase its influence no matter what they did. All they were doing was allowing it to spread downriver. In time the waters would fall, and it would consolidate its hold on all the new territories that it had been spread to. For now, it felt numb and detached from everything save thends closest to the tower. Even feeling for the sparks of darkness that its pet bard had now seeded far and wide became almost impossible at times.


    That worried the swamp, but it could focus on that problem once the storm cleared. For now, it would take advantage of the forces that the mages had unleashed. The wraith slowly turned its mind to one of the darkest rooms in thebyrinth: the library.


    The Lich¡¯s library contained no books, though. Instead, it held the heads of its most important victims, soaking in y jars of preservative brine. For a long time, the room had contained only Von Wandren, but all of the mages and some of the other interesting heroes that came after now filled the room in row after row. They were spared the indignity of bing part of its army. Instead, their souls were sealed away and only used for special asions.


    Usually, that was to reactivate a single one to ask them important questions, but today the Lich didn¡¯t draw out a single voice from his collection; he used them as a choir. Albrecht¡¯s affinity for elemental magics had long sincepsed. The necromancy had devoured every part of him that mattered now.


    The heads of the in mages were the perfect tool to channel such power through their own elemental affinities, though. The Lich was sure that a few of them would burn out under such tremendous strain, but that didn¡¯t matter. All that mattered was that their tortured screams wove into a single voice of terrible power and slowly but surely redirected the currents. The darkness couldn¡¯t do anything to stop the storm now or the damage it had done, but it could steer the river to make sure it destroyed the only thing that the swamp couldn¡¯t: the cursed temple and the consecrated ground around it that had frustrated the darkness for so long.


    With great effort, using up much of its power reserves that it had stored from all of the would-be heroes it had devoured, it slowly deepened some parts of the swamp while it raised others until the terrible floodwaters of the river were aimed at remnants of the fishing vige it had devoured so long ago.


    Two dayster, before the raging flood had even started to crest, the remains of the temple were drowned in mud as the hill was practically erased by the erosion of the dark, churning waters. After that, the swamp didn¡¯t care what happened. Thest shackle ced on its domain by a deity was finally gone, and no one but the wraith would ever im dominion over any part of the swamp again.


    At the crest of the waters, the tower finally fell, copsing in on itself. That didn¡¯t trouble the swamp. The original tower had been built with experiments in mind that it had no interest in pursuing.


    The darkness turned inward, retreating from the surface as the waters drowned its kingdom, and clung to their high-water mark for a week after water-logged week. The tunnels beneath the towers spanned miles in total now. Even if they had begun as a meandering maze intent on trapping the unwary in abyrinth from which they would never escape, it had be something more.


    Now it was a summoning circle measured in miles or at least the start of one. Past the corebyrinth and the route that eventually led to the seat of its power in the Lich¡¯s throne room on the third level, long branches extended outward. They were already almost half a mile in length, and when they reached the proper distance, they would curve around until they created a perfect circle underneath thend. No one would be able to interfere with its terrible n when the time was right.


    Even if the waters were to recede tomorrow, that n was still many years and many lives away from fruition. The number of victims it would need would be enormous, but there was no rush. Like everything else, that was a solvable problem, and even though its ns had not involved the river before, it was easily incorporated.


    The swamp wouldn¡¯t let any mortal derail what wasing, no matter how powerful they thought they might be. No single life could hope to rue the sheer amount of essence that the wraith had gathered in its growing whirlpool of darkness. While only two or three of the souls among the legion of lives it amassed really mattered in the grand scheme, every single one of them counted whenpared to the petty and fragile lives that sought to oppose it.


    So ity there in the dark, dormant as it brooded and schemed, until almost a monthter, the floodwaters fully receded. The magical typhoon had changed the wholendscape to the point that it was almost unrecognizable. Allndmarks had been moved or erased, and all that was left of the tower was a pile of stones atop a hill that now overlooked the river. That was thergest change.


    The course of the river had shifted almost 15 miles to the west in arge oxbow that took it through the heart of the swamp now. The river was its possession now. It was now one more treasure in its hoard.


    None of these changes could affect the web of life, though, or the swamp¡¯s ce within it. Even now, as the storm surge passed, it could feel its greatly expanded kingdom slowly returning to its grasp.


    Every day thend dried a little more, and every night the darkness¡¯s awareness spread a little further. Its domain had increased in size by almost half, stretching further downriver. It could sense not just the few scattered lizardmen that had survived the bloody battle and fled further into the swamp but the two dozen tiny fishing viges that clung to the banks in what was now its domain.


    Even past that, it could sense many smallermunities that were well outside of its reach because it now had a im on the lifeblood of theirmunity - the mighty river Oroza, and it was connected to them through it. It could not yet see the sea where the river emptied out, but it knew it was there. The darkness was certain that further downstream, it would find any number of cities that it could sink its teeth into to further its ns.


    Now wasn¡¯t the time to worry about such far-off goals, though. Now it focused on incorporating the new areas and understanding the delicate ecological bnces that would begin to provide it a trickle of essence day after day, even as it used that power to slowly remove the water from its flooded depths. Only after that had happened could the dead that slept for over a month return to the unlives they hated so much and begin to dig once more.


    Progress was slower than the darkness thought it would be. It was mostlyposed of water, so it had assumed that water couldn¡¯t do much to hurt it, but the pathways of stone, filled with carved runes and dotted here and there with a totem or a bronze and silver soul web, all began to tarnish and corrode as soon as the water was gone. The untreated zombies fared even worse. Many of the older ones decayed to uselessness within weeks of returning to work. The Lich cursed those human mages, swearing it would find ways to make them suffer for the swarm of minor inconveniences they had inflicted on it.


    Before it could do that, though, it would have to assign its dwindling servants to clean the runes of the muddy sediments that the swamp¡¯s waters had left behind and repair the failing soul webs lest the spirits tied to them escapepletely. Zombies were not good at detailed work like cleaning, so all of that took much longer than it should have. At cleaning, they were only almost hopeless, but the detailed drudgery of heating silver and drawing the thin silver strands that were needed to repair the webs was entirely beyond them.


    The Lich would have to do that itself, though it did at least send the swamp dragon into the river to capsize a small barge and bring back the drowned crew. Because neither the Lich nor the waterlogged zombies had the dexterity to make the delicate repairs, it would need fresh meat that it could puppet so that, once again, everything would be as it should.


    Out of everything, the only part of the swamp¡¯s efforts that had suffered no real ill effects from the deluge were the lizardmen and the swamp dragon. The lizardmen were naturally waterproof to arge degree, but after they¡¯d been embalmed, there was little left inside of them to rot. They would serve as the swamp¡¯s honor guard until the end of days, in all likelihood.


    The swamp dragon shared many of the same benefits. It had weathered the flood where it spent most of its time, at the bottom of thegoon where the fishing vige it had devoured almost a year ago had once been. Now the swamp dragon sat nestled in the silt of the same spot as before, but it was now in the depths of the main channel of the river. It never moved without its master¡¯s say-so, which was rarely, and only to catch and smash the smallest of vessels. The swamp still needed some blood, but right now, it needed to remain hidden more.


    Men had sought to destroy it with water, and the swamp had no reason not to let them think that they were sessful. Both the tower and the temple were all but gone now - there was nondmark left from the stories to find it and trouble it any further, which was ironic since now its seat of power was practically next to the river. Any would-be adventurers that sought it deep in the swamp now would be looking in entirely the wrong ce. That was all to the good.


    For what came next, it would need a much lower profile. It would be easiest if it could disappear altogether, but that would take time. It was better to let them think that the threat was gone, and the evil had been washed away than to let the kingdoms of men find out the truth: that the swamp had used their magics to take control of the river, and day by day it was iming morends to the south as the river¡¯s polluted floodwaters tainted everything they touched.


    Let them all be distracted by the superficial, the darkness decided, pleased with itself. Let them think that the danger was over while the roots only spread deeper. Once that decision was made, the Lich sent fresh dreams to its pet bard. It would need a new song. Something to let the kingdoms of men know that it had been vanquished and that Riley¡¯s riches would never be found beneath the waters of the Archmage¡¯s flood.

 Chapter 15: Solovino’s Last Song

    Chapter 15: Solovino¡¯s Last Song


    For almost a month, Louven Solovino had finally known peace again. The dreams had stopped almostpletely. For the first time in recent memory, he¡¯d sung all the verses of a particrly bawdy song to a crowd of drunks in themon room of the tavern he was staying inst night. He¡¯d told them all exactly how the maid had gotten waid, and even during the encore verses, he¡¯d felt no need to switch gears and tell everyone about that awful swamp or its dreadful riches.


    He¡¯d only done it to bring the barmaid back to his room, of course. It worked as it always did, but the difference was that for the first time in half a year, he¡¯d actually enjoyed spending the night with the buxomss. Now, even though she¡¯d left before sunrise to avoid a walk of shame, and her side of the bed had long since grown cold, he finally felt like a weight had been lifted from his heart. Not so much that he dared to try taking off that damnable medallion, of course. He¡¯d learned that lesson too many times already. Just this measure of peace was enough.


    He slowly rose and stretched, absently scratching his neck and shoulder. Maybe today, he¡¯d go as far as Cambria or Anwoken. He hadn¡¯t been to either vige in an age, and they¡¯d been decent to him in the past. As he started looking for his trousers, he was sure that today would be a good day. He kicked off the nkets and brushed aside his boots, finally noticing what a number he and that barmaid had done on his room. His backpack had gotten knocked over, and its contents were scattered across the floor, along with half of the pillows. Louven supposed he should be grateful that the whole damn bed hadn¡¯t given out after the night they¡¯d had.


    ¡°Tiarna?¡± He asked himself quietly. ¡°Temara?¡± He couldn¡¯t remember her name. He supposed it didn¡¯t really matter. All that mattered was getting dressed and getting downstairs before they ran out of eggs or sausage. Finally, he found his pants peeking out from underneath her side of the bed. Tired of standing around in just his breeches and more than a little hungry, Solovino bent down to grab his pants, but clumsy as he was, he seeded in only pushing them further under the bed. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs. He didn¡¯t think he¡¯d been that drunkst night and was only the faintest bit bleary now. Still, as he got down on his hands and knees to fish out his clothes from the darkness, he was grateful that, at least this time, he wasn¡¯t in a hurry to get out before an angry husband found him.


    The darkness under the bed was almost absolute. None of the faint light from the window reached him, so it might have easily been an abyss except for the brown cloth he was reaching for. Memories of true darkness flickered in his mind, but he pushed those memories away as quickly as they surfaced. He¡¯d been in the pitch-ck darkness of that maze for days and tried very hard to stay in well-lit establishments ever since. The bard clutched his pants and yanked them out from under the bed. The unpleasant memories were doing an excellent job of souring his wonderful morning. It would take at least two or three beers to fix his outlook once he got downstairs, he decided, frowning.


    Halfway out, though, the clothes got stuck and wouldn¡¯te any further. ¡°Of course,¡± Solovino sighed. As he crawled a little bit further into the darkness so he could grope with his hands and find out what they were stuck on. Idly, he wondered if there was a song in this mishap. Undoubtedly other men in the audience had faced a simr dilemma of trying to get dressed and get away after a rough night.


    ¡°But I¡¯ll need something that rhymes with trousers, of course. Ours? Flowers?¡± he muttered, shrugging mentally. He could work on it after his brilliant creative mind had been adequately lubricated. He could¡ªSolovino barely had time to scream when he felt the first pair of hands grab him, and he instantly let go of his clothes and tried to pull away from them. Maybe Tenessa really did have an angry husband, he thought in a panic, before he felt a second and a third pair of hands grab his arm and pull him into the darkness with irresistible strength.


    Then suddenly, he was back in that room with that awful golden cadaver. Aside from a foot of water on the floor and dark mold that had blossomed across the walls, nothing had changed. The bard could feel the amulet he wore on his bare chest throbbing like a second heartbeat.


    ¡°You¡¯ve beenzy, bard,¡± the skeleton said with slow, precise words in a hollow voice. Thest time he¡¯d seen the Lich, it had sat there, frozen on its throne like a particrly distasteful sculpture. This time though, it leaned forward and spoke. ¡°You¡¯ve beenzy, and that will cost you, but not just yet. Right now, I need something from you.¡±


    ¡°Anything!¡± Solovino gasped, his voice cracking from fear as he shied away from this thing¡¯s presence. ¡°Just don¡¯t hurt me!¡± The bard had long ago given up on being brave. He¡¯d thought that he¡¯d run out of those urges. But right now, he felt an anger in him that he knew would have withered to nothing under the cold gaze of this monster if he¡¯d really been back in the swamp. This was a dream; it had to be. In a dream, there were no zombies that could rip him to pieces.


    ¡°I need a new song.¡± The Lich continued. ¡°You must sing to all who will listen that I am dead, and the rains of the archmage have washed away the darkness and¡ª¡± Solovino¡¯s heart was pounding in his ears so loudly that he could barely listen to what the gilded skeleton in front of him was saying. Suddenly his hands shot out and wrapped around the thing¡¯s throat and started to squeeze as he throttled it. There was nothing to choke, but he shook it violently, trying to break the brittle old bones.


    ¡°Dead? Why settle for a song about being dead,¡± the bard growled, ¡°I can just give you the real thing.¡± One final shake, and he felt as much as he heard something crack as the Lich¡¯s skull tumbled across the floor. The head rolled half a dozen feet away from him beforeing slowly to a stop, face up.


    ¡°Compose my song, or your misery will never end,¡± it cackled. Even as itughed, though, the room began to darken until secondster, only the skull was still visible. ¡°Sing about my death, or yours will be quick to follow.¡±


    Solovino woke with a start, gasping for air as he let out a breath he hadn¡¯t realized he was holding. He looked down in the predawn light to find that even though his hands had been wrapped around Lich¡¯s throat in the dream, they¡¯d been wrapped around Temira¡¯s in the waking world.


    ¡°No,¡± he whispered, looking at her blue, lifeless skin in the morning twilight. ¡°Nononono - fuck!¡± Even in death, she was beautiful. Only a monster would have hurt such a pretty young woman, and with a sick feeling in his stomach, he realized the only monster in the room was him.The bard got out of bed and started to panic, dressing and packing as quickly as he¡¯d ever done. There was nothing he could do and nowhere he could hide the body. Part of him wanted to turn himself in, but the rest still wanted to live. It was that part that won the fight and hurriedly left the inn after he¡¯d covered the tavern maid with a sheet out of respect for her dignity.


    He didn¡¯t have a horse, and he knew that thew would be looking for him before the end of the day, so he decided to take the backway to Anwoken. He wouldn¡¯t sing there either. He¡¯d just stay the night until he could get further on. Far enough from here, this story might be a rumor that he could downy as gossip. From there, he could tell whatever lord sheltered him when the news finally ran faster than his feet that it was a case of mistaken identity and wait for it to fade from crime to scandalous rumor. Right here, though? Right now? There was no way to reason with a noose or a tree, and he doubted very much that the darkness that gripped his heart would let him tell even a tenth of the truth. Even if he wanted to.


    He stayed ahead of the events that nipped at his heels for three days. After the first night, he no longer stayed in inns. He knew it wasn¡¯t safe. Instead, he slept fitfully in ditches and woods, camping rough and getting off the road whenever he heard the distant sound of galloping. Eventually, he even started topose the new song the voice in his headmanded of him, if only so he could sleep again. Solovino¡¯s luck didn¡¯t hold out, though. On the fourth night, his campfire was spotted by armed men, who, after a brief chase through the woods, bound him hand and foot before they heaved him over the back of a mule to be brought back to Illingsbruck for justice.


    It was a miserable ride, and the darkness in his soul took no pity on him just because he was physically unable to follow the Lich¡¯s orders. For the first couple of nights, they tried to ask him why he did it. They wanted to know why he killed Temira badly enough to beat it out of him, but for once, the bard had nothing to say that anyone wanted to hear. All he could offer was apologies and gut-wrenching sobs.


    As luck would have it, though, he didn¡¯t get the noose reserved for him. When they arrived in Illingsbruck, a small band of temrs was waiting there to put him to the question about some of the heresies he¡¯d been spreading.


    Solovino would have preferred the noose.


    They didn¡¯t give him a choice when they tied him to a chair, though, ¡°Please - I-I¡¯m just a singer,¡± he pleaded, ¡°I don¡¯t know anything!¡± He tried to exin that to them.


    ¡°A singer, huh? You¡¯re a man of high fame and low morals Louven Solovino. Everyone knows that about you, and now they know you¡¯re a murderer too,¡± the inquisitor said as he went through the bard¡¯s pack, ¡°I hadn¡¯t nned to make you sing loud enough for the whole vige to hear untilter; but if you want to sing now, then why don¡¯t you start with a hymn to put us all at ease.¡±


    Solovino opened his mouth to try to sing the opening notes to ¡®Our Lady of Peace,¡¯ but nothing came out.


    ¡°Yeah, I thought not,¡± the holy man nodded. He had a touch of gray at his temples and sad eyes that didn¡¯t fit at all with the air of danger about him. ¡°Maybe this will help you to find your voice. I find the gods always inspire me in my times of darkness.¡±


    Solovino was bound to the chair by his wrists, so he couldn¡¯t pull away when the inquisitor shoved a small silver icon into the bard¡¯s hand before closing his hands around the bard¡¯s fist.


    ¡°Normally, this is when I would pray with you while the pain of your foul, tainted spirit burns, so we can better understand what we are dealing with before¡ª¡±


    ¡°Ahhhhh, just let - I need to¡­¡± Solovino babbled. The object that the inquisitor had shoved in his hand had felt wrong from the first moment he¡¯d been forced to touch it, and after a few seconds, it started to burn, but now it was pure agony.


    ¡°Gag him,¡± the inquisitor ordered, and almost instantly, one of the temrs came forward to obey. The dirty rag muted the screaming but did nothing for the pain. It was only when thin traces of foul-smelling smoke began to pour out from between Solovino¡¯s fingers that the inquisitor allowed him to let go of the icon. It fell to the ground, where itnded in some dry hay without so much as smoldering. The inquisitor opened the bard¡¯s limp hand and showed him the raw and mangled burn the holy symbol inflicted on his palm and fingers.


    ¡°Well, it doesn¡¯t look like you¡¯ll be ying that Mandolin of yours any time soon,¡± the inquisitor shook his head slowly as he spoke, ¡°But just between you and me, I don¡¯t think you¡¯ve got much singing left in your future either. I think you might have one story left inside that corrupted soul of yours, and I¡¯m going to pry it out of you no matter how many pieces we have to cut you into.¡±


    The inquisitor let the pain of thest minute mix with the terror of the present before he continued. ¡°You see, our hallowed pontiff received a letter from the Magica Collegium in Abenend, warning us of a horrible danger from some backwater and encouraging us to mobilize an expedition to root it out. Can you believe it? Those dogs haven¡¯t dared to speak to us in decades, and then they send us a letter that mentions a corrupted little man like you by name?¡±


    Solovino couldn¡¯t speak, so he just shook his head from side to side. He wanted nothing to do with these people or their religion. If they would only let him talk, he¡¯d dly tell them anything they wanted to hear, but they obviously had no interest in that yet.


    ¡°Our pontiff, blessed be his name, has sent us out on a little fact-finding trip that starts with you. We¡¯ve spent more than a month looking for you in all the lowest ces we could find. We might never have found you if you didn¡¯t decide to go and kill that girl.¡±


    The inquisitor¡¯s lips curled into a cruel smile when the bard began to shake his head even more violently. ¡°So, you can tell me everything I want to know about this cursed arch magus and his sted swamp, or I can take you apart a piece at a time until you change your mind. It¡¯s entirely up to you.¡±

 Chapter 16: The Goblins

    Chapter 16: The Goblins


    Despite the pain that was caused by the searing white light of the inquisitor¡¯s god, the darkness stayed with Solovino until the end. It wasn¡¯t just because the bard''s suffering was delicious either.


    Though it was.


    It was because with every word the fool that tortured his minion to death gave it valuable information. Temrs existed to hunt down evil. There was a Holy city. The church thought very little of mages, and by proxy, since a mage thought that the darkness was a grave threat, they were utterly unconcerned by it. It was almostughable to the darkness. They were more interested in hurting the bard for his terribly licentious reputation than in understanding the darkness that suffused his pitiful soul. It didn¡¯t help matters that the Bard was literally incapable of telling them what they wanted to know though.


    With every word, the swamp¡¯s decision to keep a low profile and disappear from sight in the wake of the storm seemed like a better and better idea. It had barely begun to explore the new opportunities that awaited in its expanded territory, and thest thing it needed right now was to deal with fending off a serious threat in its weakened state. So it watched while the Bard tried in vain to tell the holy men what they wanted to know while he lost his fingers one at a time. The swamp would have preferred to keep Solovino. His songs had been useful for whetting its appetite for the wider world, but its grip on him weakened during the flood, and the wraith would much rather that the bard was put down like the dog he was rather than give him the chance to somehow slip the leash.


    In the end Solovino didn¡¯t even die with a whimper. When he was finally on the verge of telling the men about the Lich beneath the swamp, that same Lich simply pulled his soul out of his body,pleting their dark bargain and pulling the bard back to him like a fish on a hook. After a brief spasm, Solovino¡¯s body grew still, and with an acrid odor and a puff of foul smoke, the amulet on the tortured man''s chest began to melt until it was nothing but g. Momentster the darkness lost sight of the Temrs, but he doubted they would find any clues on the body that woulde back to haunt it.


    Free from that distraction, the darkness turned its attention back to other matters. It would save the damned soul for a special asion. It had other things to do now. Last week it noticed that the flooding had ced a string of caverns to the west firmly in its reach now. That was surprising enough. It had no other formations like this anywhere in its territory. What was more interesting were the creatures that dwelled inside: goblins.


    The swamp knew what goblins were of course. They weremon enough. They were a vermin that had been purged from all civilizednds, but foothills and the mountains thaty beyond them were still wild ces, and all manner of strange creatures still lived there. The darkness had seenrger predators like wyvern and chimera soar far above the edges of its territory, but it had no hold on them, and could only watch as they flew into the distance. Goblins were different though. They were more like true men, than even the lizard men that still worshiped it in small numbers here and there.


    It wasn¡¯t just possible to infect the goblins with its darkness. It was easy. The creatures had just enough of a mind to be filled with avarice and bloodlust, but not enough for anything resembling higher pursuits. In the weeks that followed the swamp spent almost all its time learning about the small tribe that it had the smallest of holds on. It learned how they fought, how they bred, and what they ate. They were vermin with fingers, but they were his vermin. They drank of its polluted flood waters, shat in its mud, and as soon as the darkness understood them, they would belong to it, forever.


    More than anything else they did, they fought amongst each other and the neighboring tribes in the surrounding area for space and resources. One week they were fighting over this cave, and the next over that wateringhole. The green skinned beastscked a propernguage. Indeed, even their dreams were little more than shes of pure rage or fantasies to sate one of their many hungers. In time the swamp identified them by their totems, and the crude graffiti they daubed on the walls of theirirs. The tribe that dwelt in the swamps domain was the ck Teeth tribe, named for how the poisonous frogs stained their normally yellow teeth ck as much as the stctites that dominated their dankir. Surrounding them were their most fearsome enemies: the Dog Eaters and the Burning Skulls.


    It was unable to get much insight into the other two tribes that surrounded the cave system, but the swamp was vaguely excited when it saw a member of the Burning Skulls wielding a sort of fire magic in battle against the ck Teeth. It didn¡¯t matter what they fought over, as long as they had someone to fight, and day after day that trickle of blood and rage nourished the swamp in a way that neither the worship of the lizardmen nor the ughter of adventurers had. These petty conflicts were the perfect vor for what the darkness craved, and it was with that revtion that the swamp realized exactly what it could do to bring itstest pets into the fold: power.


    Of the three it seemed to be the only one to possess even rudimentary magic. It was no surprise then that it was winning, and slowly pushing both of the other groups of goblins out of the most desirable territory. In time it might be the only tribe left standing. The swamp wondered how that would affect the regional bnce of power as it gazed across the swamps and foothills, and then north towards the ins where the humans dwelled. Between the rugged ounds where the darkness held sway were fifty miles of ins dotted with human viges. As it viewed the big picture, the Lich could see what needed to happen next.


    In a vision he saw them, ten thousand hungry mouths of a united goblin army. Instead of killing each other each day they rose up as one and devoured the kingdom of man, one small town at a time. It was a tide of blood that could sweep away everything in its path. Enough blood that the bottomless hunger that was the darkness might finally feel sated.


    But they¡¯d never be united. Not like this.


    Even if the Burning Skulls were to win and rece the ck Teeth and the Dog Eaters, they would still be prey to a fourth tribe, or they would grow sorge that they would break into two, and fight themselves forck of another opponent. It was their way after all. They were only a few steps above the animals of the swamp. The darkness mightmand a crocodile to devour a trapper that strayed too far into its domain, but it could nevermand an army of crocodiles to invade a city. The brutality and the hunger of the former was their nature, but the discipline of thetter was an impossibility.


    The same might be true for the goblins, the swamp considered, but it seemed like there was enough of man in them to know fear and take orders, and for now that would be enough. All they needed was a leader strong enough tomand that fear and bring the other tribes to heel, and if that goblin did not already exist, then the swamp would create one.


    The darkness finally found its first candidate, dying in the depths of the cave. Its name was Grod, at least that¡¯s what the darkness thought its name was, not that it really mattered. Goblin dreams could be very confusing. The goblin was a fine warrior, but had bitten off more than it could chew in a fight with a Dog Eater half a head taller than him. Grod had still managed to win, by using a level of sheer brutality that had managed to impress the darkness. Even with a knife in his guts he¡¯d managed to rip out the other goblin¡¯s throat with his teeth and make it home.


    He wasn¡¯t the toughest or the best warrior in the tribe, but he was a fighter, and he was dying from the infection in his wound. Grod knew it too, just like he knew that his fellow ck Teeth were circling like vultures, waiting for him to be too weak to be a warrior anymore. Once that happened he wouldn¡¯t even be a goblin. He¡¯d just be food. As the dying goblin slipped in and out of his fever dreams, the swamp slipped in. Dreams and illness were its purview even more than life and death. Saving this wretched creature would be one of the most minor miracles it had aplished in years. Impressing the power of the pact on it though, and forcing it to agree to serve it would be much more challenging than actually healing it.


    In the end it took a night and a day, with the dream imagery getting increasingly concrete and convoluted. Rather than dreaming of battle, as Grod usually did, he dreamt of a dank temple. On the altar was a goblet of blood shaped like a golden skull. The first time the dream yed through, he tentatively drank from it. He was surprised to find that his wounds had healed, but panicked when the chains rose up from the floor to shackle him. The second and third times the dream urred, the choice was the same, but it was more epting of the shackles.


    The goblin understood. Its life could be restored, but it came at the cost of service. Whether or not it understood the depths of that service, or that it wouldst a lifetime, the darkness couldn¡¯t say. It didn¡¯t matter though. If the creature proved too troublesome then the darkness would make sure it died a slow and painful death before it found another to serve in its ce.


    Two dayster Grod was hale and healthy again, with only a terrible ck scar to show where his brush with death had been. As goblins go he¡¯d always been quarrelsome and bloodthirsty, but now he was worse than ever. He literally hungered for blood now, charging his opponents in every fight, and using only his bare hands and teeth rather than the crude weapons that goblins usually favored to rip them to pieces. Every death made him stronger, and no matter how badly the darkness¡¯ pet goblin was wounded, the next day he was fine. Every week his standing rose in the ck Teeth tribe, until soon he had a spot close to the fire and tender meat instead of the scraps he¡¯d always made do with until now.


    The goblin did its part too, boiling the skulls of his in foes in an old pot helmet. The goblins would never have the skill to work metal, but yellow y mixed with goblin urine did a wonderful job of turning the skulls yellow. Once they were stained, the goblin began to mark its slowly expanding territory with the fearsome totems. The tide had turned, and for once the surrounding tribes were on the back foot as the ck Teeth began to win battle after battle and seize control of key parts of the surrounding area.

 Chapter 17: The Viscount

    Chapter 17: The Viscount


    After the floodwaters receded, the swamp focused most of its attention on the goblin tribes and their constant wars to the west of its domain, but that did not mean it failed to explore other opportunities. While the goblins warred, and the zombies chiseled ever deeper into the earth, it always kept a watchful eye out for new victims while it explored the edges of its domain.


    No matter what else it was doing, each night it devoted some time to toying with Lord Garvin. Leo had led his vainglorious charge months ago, but entering the depths in his fruitless attempt to purge the evil from hisnds had given the Lich a small but permanent hold on the man. While it didn¡¯t yet know what it wanted to do with the man or the county of Greshen that he ruled over, it enjoyed filling the man¡¯s dreams with dread, and memories of the swamp dragon.


    In time that wasn¡¯t enough, though. With enough drink, the Count could dull even those terrifying memories, so the swamp found a fresh torment for the ruler: his sons. Leo Garvin was gifted with three strong sons, any one of which would make a fine ruler when he finally passed on, so in those nighttime hours where the darkness reigned, it began to create intricate nightmares of betrayal and treachery between the family. Fratricide. Patricide. Regicide. By knife and by poison the Count and the Viscounts that were his sons died almost every night for several weeks, until the old man finally had enough.


    Convinced that they were secretly at each other''s throats and the gods were sending them a warning, he sent each of them away in separate directions. His eldest, Leo the fourth, went upriver to spend a season at the king''s court. Theon, the middle child, was sent off to school at Abenend. Not for the whole curriculum, but just as a trial to see if he had any talent for it. Finally, Kelvun, the youngest son was sent down river with a royalmission, to remap the river. One of the main sources of ie for the county of Greshen was the tolls that river traffic paid from the northerly kingdoms as they made their way out to sea on the Count¡¯s waterways. The storm might have cleansed thend of evil, but it had yed havoc on the maps and for every historical hazard it erased it added two new ones, so something would have to be done.


    The darkness had only intended to deprive the Count of the emotional crutch that was his family to do further damage to the old man¡¯s psyche, but it was thrilled at the idea that his youngest would soon be paying the swamp a visit. It intended to make sure the stay was a permanent one, though. Whether by sickness or violence the swamp was going to make sure that the boy¡¯s body never left the thick dark mud of the river. If the count could extract silver ducats from every ship and barge that plied the Oroza then the swamp could take its tithe in blood.


    Strangely though, that decision changed after only a few weeks. As the small river boat slowly made its way down stream, mapping sandbars and probing for deadheads the boy ate its fish, drank its water, and day by day unwittingly gave the darkness a window into his soul. And the swamp liked what it saw. The boy was practically a monster in his own right. His father had been a good, if vain man, but in the shadow of such men, crowded out by his older brothers, the boy¡¯s ambition grew like a creeping vine. The sort that dug into old stone and rotted wood until it dragged the whole edifice down.


    Night by night it probed the boy''s mind with dreams that revolved around terrible choices, and Kelvun always chose power, no matter who suffered for it. The darkness was intrigued. It had learned many lessons from the bard. It had thought that absolute ownership of its minions was essential, but that too came with its own drawbacks, now that it knew about the Temrs. A servant who could be picked out of a crowd by holy men would never be anything more than a pawn.


    It needed someone that would serve willingly. Someone it could use only the lightest of touches with, and buy their loyalty instead. So for thest few days of their trip to the swamp the darkness sent the same dream over and over: that the boy was standing amidst the ruins of the mage''s tower, looking down the stairs as they descended into the worldly darkness. In his hand was a bloodstained knife. Kelvun studied it, like he¡¯d forgotten why he was holding it, and then, remembering, he kicked the body of the man he¡¯d murdered down into the darkness. Some nights it was a member of the boat crew, and others it was his father, but the message was always the same: All the powers of the earth can be yours. All you must do is seal our dark bargain in the lifeblood of another, and you will rise, slowly but surely to the ce you truly belong.


    Far from being disturbed by his recurring nightmare, the boy was more cheerful than usual as they entered the swamp. That was just as well, because if he refused the wraith¡¯s dark bargain, the swamp dragon that slumbered beneath them would rise up to rip him into pieces. It was the most fitting possible end that the darkness could imagine for a father that had failed to y the monster on hisst visit. It needn''t have worried though. Their second night in the swamp they anchored on the shore near the ruins that were the heart of darkness. Kelvun let himself be led away into the dark after a couple beers by a crew member who had nothing good in mind for thed. He never had a chance to take advantage though, because no sooner had they walked behind the rubble to shield themselves from the eyes of the rest of the boat crew huddled near the bonfire, than the young Viscount killed the old drunk.


    In the swamp''s version it had been a clean sacrifice, with a throat slit quick and clean. The boy had other ideas, because after he delivered a quick punch to the older man¡¯s windpipe to shut him up he produced a short, sharp knife from his sleeve, and stabbed the sailor in the kidneys over and over while he struggled to breathe. The blood hadn¡¯t even stopped spurting before the boy kicked the body of the dying man down the ancient stairs.


    ¡°I chose the worst one,¡± the boy called down after it. ¡°The most vile old bastard of the bunch. I hope you see how serious I am about your offer, spirit, and hope that shows you what I¡¯ll do to you if you cross me.¡± Yes, there was definitely a darkness in thed that rivaled its own, in fury if nothing else. Normally the darkness would snuff out anyone that dared to speak to it like that, but the boy would learn his ce in time.


    Slowly the dead man at the bottom of the stairs began to rise, and with some effort, began to crawl up the stairs, one step at a time. It wasn¡¯t a true zombie. Not yet. After all the water damage the flood caused, the darkness didn¡¯t raise the dead permanently unless they had been embalmed and tanned. It was just a temporary vessel. A set of fresh vocal cords that would let it speak to the living for a few minutes to seal their pact.


    To the boy¡¯s credit, he didn¡¯t flinch or try to run as his murder victim slowly crawled towards him with dead eyes. He just stood there while the dead man¡¯s head flopped from side to side with each movement.


    Finally, when it reached the top of the stairs, the corpse wheezed, ¡°Obey me in all things and your father¡¯snds and title will be yours within a year.¡± The voice that came from the corpse''s throat was much older and darker than the body it inhabited, but even that didn¡¯t scare Kelvun.


    ¡°But that¡¯s too soon. If my line dies so quickly, people will suspect I had a hand in it,¡± he protested.


    ¡°In. All. Things.¡± The darkness thundered in a way that was never meant for a human throat, finally seeding in cowing thed to a small degree, as the voice echoed through his soul and made a flock of bats take flight with their unholy reverberations. ¡°Swear fealty to me, and you shall have everything your heart desires. Betray me, and I will feast on your soul for centuries toe.¡±


    ¡°And if I take your offer - what is your price?¡± Kelvun asked shrewdly. His voice quavered slightly, and he stank of fear, but he had not yet pissed himself or run screaming into the night. ¡°Surely you want more than one man¡¯s blood for such a gift.¡±


    ¡°What I offer you is no gift, boy. You will pay for everything I give you over and over until you are bathed in blood,¡± the corpse rattled. ¡°I require a terrible tithe, to be paid in oceans of blood and mountains of coin. One coin in every ten that passes through your hands will end up in the bottom of the river to be imed by me, every year you will personally deliver a token of our contract to me here, at this very spot, or you will live only long enough to regret it.¡±


    ¡°I so swear,¡± the boy said, smoothly dropping to one knee and bowing his head, as much to hide the fear in his eyes as to pledge his devotion. ¡°I will have no master but you, and will obey you in all things.¡±


    The corpse reached out his hand to the boy, blessing him, but not actually touching him. Thest thing it wanted was to stain his soul too darkly. ¡°Very well. It is done. The bargain is struck. Tomorrow you will continue on your trip, but wherever you go, I will go with you.¡±


    ¡°My trip? But there¡¯s nothing important to the south,¡± Kelvun argued, looking back at the corpse. ¡°Not until you get to Tagel by the sea, at least. Surely my ce is back in Fallravea, so I can¡ª¡±


    This time the swamp did not yell or bluster. The corpse just clenched its fist in front of his face, and slowly, but surely his heart stopped beating because of the spiritual vice it was caught in. The Lich held its grip long enough for the boy to swoon, and released only when he was about to lose consciousness. Only then did the frail creaturee back to life.


    ¡°You will do as you''re told, even if you do not understand. Your father must be proud of you. Proud enough to inspire jealousy in your older siblings,¡± the dead man rasped. ¡°That will y into whates next, when you volunteer to map another poorly understood part of the Count¡¯s domain.¡±


    ¡°What part is that?¡± the boy asked, still gasping for breath.


    ¡°The hills in the bordends to the west of here,¡± the corpse answered, slowly beginning to lose what little patience it had left when it came to speaking with mortals.


    ¡°But those aren¡¯t even Greshen territory. Not really¡­¡± the boy disputed, before he suddenly realized he was talking back to something that had almost effortlessly murdered it earlier. ¡°I mean. Whatever you say. If the road to power runs through that savage ce, I¡¯ll take it.¡±


    ¡°You will,¡± the darkness agreed. ¡°Now go back to your men and tell them a gator took this pitiful soul. I will put him to other usester.¡±


    The youth bowed one more time, and then rose, and with a single backward nce he walked back to the light as fast as he could without looking like he was running away. He¡¯d walked into the darkness as hard as a seventeen-year-old man could be, but he learned to fear the dark like everyone else as he scampered back towards the rtive safety of the light.


    He would never be safe again, though. He belonged to the dark now.

 Chapter 18: A Taste of Ashes

    Chapter 18: A Taste of Ashes


    The darkness followed the rest of the Viscount¡¯s trip with some interest, but without having its tendrils into the boy as deeply as it had slid them into the soul of its former bard, the information it received about the world further down river was intermittent and muddy as the water of the river he traveled on.


    That was fine.


    The swamp was still exploring its territory in that area, and continued to encounter some difficulties, even now that the floodwaters were a thing of the past and the Oroza should have assumed its new route for the foreseeable future. Day by day, the lines seemed to blur and shift. That made sense for something as dynamic as a river, but less so on the banks, where it happened with equal frequency. It was almost like something was pushing back against its slow spread, but not in the same powerful way that the consecrated ground nearby once had. Nature, it would seem, was rejecting it.


    None of the mages in its library of minds was certain. The best they coulde up with was the idea of shifting leylines now that its territory had be broad enough to be affected by such things, so the Lich filed away the issue for another time. As long as it could feel the viges and fishingmunities scattered along its bank, that was enough for now. It was already exploring the dreams of those simple people, and learning the social webs and schisms that existed in every neighborhood. Soon enough it would aggravate them and little by little extract a bloody toll of its own as long cold grudges and dead feuds found new life.


    Maybe when winter finally arrived, it would spread a new fever down the river and test just how far its influence really spread. Somewhere to the southy Tagel - a true city. It had glimpsed its waterfront and tavern rooms through the eyes of those the bard had infected with avarice, but it would dearly love to see a gue spread through the city so that it could gain true insight into the inhabitants.


    That was in the future, though. Right now, the important thing was the goblins. The ck Teeth continued to make great progress in all directions, their enemies lost ground. To the west their victories against the Dog Eaters were quickly bing a rout, and to the east and south the Burning Skulls were taking real losses, even with their magic. Grod led his own warband now, and it was full of the most savage warriors the ck Teeth had to offer.


    It didn¡¯t hurt that the swamp had started to give Grod¡¯s most ferocious warriors lesser gifts of their own. They would never be enough to be a threat to the swamp¡¯s chosen leader, of course, but it wanted more blood, and it could only taste it with more connections to the creatures that were doing the killing. So, the more savage the warrior was in the ck Teeth, the more savage he would be.


    It was through one of these lesser connections that the swamp first found the source of the Burning Skulls'' power. In a rare losing battle where Grod had been forced to flee before a sustained barrage of fire from the massed might of several shamans, one of Grod¡¯s warriors was in, and that night the victorious side brought the corpse back for a celebratory dinner.


    Nev was the biggest warrior that had been left behind on that scorched battlefield, so it was perfectly normal that the victorious side would want to take him back to theirir to feast on his strength. Yesterday¡¯s battlefield was tomorrow''s banquet in their eyes, and to those savage creatures, nothing tasted better than the flesh of their fallen enemies.


    The darkness learned several things about that awful dinner, though. The first was that, past the smoky fumaroles and geysers that marked the heart of Burning Skull territory, there was a cave that seemed to be their true stronghold. It wasn¡¯t a cave, though. Not like the one the ck Teeth had lived in. This one was an old mine shaft that had long been abandoned by whoever had built it.


    That in itself was interesting, the darkness had seen no signs of civilization this far west, so a decades old mining site was unusual. A few of the voices in the periphery of its mind whispered that dwarves were responsible, and the darkness believed them. None of its main voices had ever met a dwarf, and it had certainly never tasted the suffering of one before, but it would like to.


    What was more unusual was that on the third level of the shafts, where the old mining operations gave way to a pure goblin warren, there was gold. Even as the corpse that served as its spy was dragged down dusty tunnels, big bright veins of the stuff were in in view, and the darkness hungered for them. There was more gold in the walls of just this one tunnel, than there currently was in its whole hoard, and it hungered to add it to its collection.


    There was no doubt about it. The Burning Skulls would have to fall, and probably in time the ck Teeth would too, but only so that the Count¡¯s men could dig this up for it. In theory, zombies would be able to do it, of course, but that would represent a fantastic amount of resources that would have to be diverted from the great work in the lowest level of the mazes. No - it would have to rely on the avarice of men to mine this, at least until after that was done. Now that it was starting to better understand the world, no more dys were eptable.


    Since the victorious warriors of the Burning Skulls had started to drag this body, the darkness had been brewing all sorts of toxins and letting all manner of diseases fester inside of it. The other tribe might get to devour one of its pawns, but that would be an act that wasn¡¯t without cost. When they spitted the goblin corpse and began to roast it over the open me, that changed nothing. All fire would do was blunt the impact of its malice, not eliminate it.


    That was when it felt the fire.


    Not the mes that licked the skin, or the heat that began to crisp and burn the grisly feast. No, that was when it felt the fire behind both of those things. There was something darker, and hotter than fire, lurking in the embers of the cook fire. It was the same vor of magic that the shamans had wielded on the battlefield.


    The darkness did nothing, except for enduring the growing pain of the fire as it tried to study the new phenomenon. Was this something like it? Another spirit that preferred fire and violence to the death and disease that the swamp favored?


    It could have been anything of course, even some new goblin magic that it might never understand, but now that it was looking for it, it could feel the faint trickles of essence from the totems scattered throughout the cavern.


    Yes, by the time the goblins were ready to start eating their feast and ripping into the sizzling flesh of the fallen, the darkness was sure: it had found a kindred spirit. It had no idea if they were verymon or very rare, but it also had no desire to fight with it directly until it better understood what it was dealing with.


    Such a loss could be costly, and the fire spirit likely had no more idea that the darkness existed than vice versa. There was a value in the element of surprise. That was a lesson that the swamp had learned again and again since the vige. So, rather than risk revealing its n and adding another dose or two of botulism to the mix, it relinquished its grip on the goblin, letting the link fade away into the aether.


    There wasn¡¯t just gold and goblins worth fighting for in the area. No - there was another spirit to learn from. Would the darkness be able to devour it? Would it want to, or would it be safer to simply find a way to snuff it out?


    It didn¡¯t have answers to these questions right now, but it didn¡¯t matter.


    What mattered was the new n: the Burning Skulls were no longer Grod¡¯s primary focus. They would wait until the darkness could bring other tools to bear and better understand where the fire spirit that supplied their shamans¡¯ magic got its power.


    For now, it would focus on subjugating the other tribes. First they would finish crushing the Dog Eaters, and once that was done it would focus on the Sharp Spears and the Bone Gnawers and whatever tribesy beyond that.


    The goblins would have no problems with that change in tactics. They loved nothing more than to pick on the weakest possible victim, and it was only the swamp¡¯s constant goading that had forced them to turn their attention to the superior foe.


    It was still certain that its chosen tribe could beat the Burning Skulls and their fiery magics, of course, but it would do so easier once it had crushed the surrounding tribes and formed their survivors into a terrible fist that would make short work of its fiery enemy. It was a simple n, and one that was eagerly embraced by Grod after several nights of dreams were enough to impress the swamp¡¯s will on it.


    From that point, they only harried the Burning Skulls enough to keep them on the defensive. They trashed the scum¡¯s ashen totems wherever they found them, while their real warbands raided their neighbor to the west over and over again until the other tribe no longer had a single mangy dog rider left to its name.


    If the thing it was facing really was a spirit then it had to follow simr rules to itself, the swamp thought,plete with territory and boundaries, didn¡¯t it? The best way to disrupt those so far from the murky embrace of its muddy waters and undead army was simple: the goblins needed to tear down every scrap that indicated the Burning Skulls ever owned a particr piece of territory, and rece it with their own grisly trophies. So, soon each skirmish to the east led to ritual defilement of any area that the other spirit¡¯s tribe seemed to care about.


    The swamp took a sick joy in this behavior, even before it felt the boundaries start to shift. A few months ago, it had only the most tenuous of footholds in the area that existed mostly in the minds of a few goblins that had drank from its polluted floodwaters. Now it had a tribe to its name and a bloodstained territory that was slowly but surely growing in all directions.


    Those gains were cemented when the Dog Eaters finally fell. Not just because Grod beheaded the chieftain in front of a bloodthirsty mob drunk on victory, though, but because as soon as he did that he immediately turned around and crushed the chieftain of the ck Teeth as well. The crowd went wild at this turn of events. In the space of moments, the monster that the swamp had created had abolished two different tribes and established himself as the warboss of a new one: the Gold Skulls.

 Chapter 19: Dying Embers

    Chapter 19: Dying Embers


    Krulm¡¯venor was disgusted by its circumstances, but that was nothing new. That was the first emotion it felt each evening, as it red to life when the Burning Skulls added fuel to their cookfires and lit the bonfires at their shrines. During the day, when it was slowly reduced to embers, itcked the awareness to contemte such things. Each evening it was born again, though, which meant that it had to remember how far it had fallen all over again.


    Krulm¡¯venor, once the scourge of the under realm. Stone burner. Sacker of Ghen¡¯tal and Mournden. Once, dozens were fed to the fire each day, so it could feast on their flesh and mana, but now it lorded over a handful of goblins. That there were less than two hundred of the buggers only added salt to the wound.


    How a dwarven demigod had fallen so far that instead of inhabiting the forge fires of a dozen cities, it dwelled only in the campfires of a single tribe of greenskins, it couldn¡¯t quite recall. The further back that the flickering fire spirit tried to think, the hazier things got until there was nothing but dark smoke and bitter disappointment.


    The goblins wouldn¡¯t have been enough to support it now if they weren¡¯t so bloodthirsty and didn¡¯t dwell in the shadow of a dead volcano. Krulm¡¯venor seemed to recall that it had been forced to flee something in the dark when itsst fortress monastery had fallen and that it had chosen the volcano as a ce to be reborn, like a phoenix from the ashes it had nned to detonate it and use the eruption to ignite the nearby forest on fire in a congration that was truly worthy of its majesty. It hadcked the strength, though. Over time, it had withered away until its pride had atrophied so much that the idea of being a war god to a vicious army of goblins hadn¡¯t seemed like a terrible idea.


    It surveyed its shrinking kingdom and knew it had erred mightily, though. Perhaps it might have been different if it had been an orc warband full of rage or even hobgoblins with their crude sense of discipline. Goblins simply weren¡¯t cut out for greater things. As it was, recently, the Burning Skulls had stopped expanding. No matter how much power he poured into their shamans, they could barely hold back the resurgent ck Teeth. All of a sudden, its tribe suddenly seemed tock the strength to match such an insignificant tribe like that to the West. Yet, it was still nowhere near strong enough to brave the ins to the east and the humans they would almost certainly find there.


    It was maddening.


    The spirit would have withdrawn its power from the ipetent bastards entirely if that wouldn¡¯t have spelled its inevitable doom. Without blood and fire, it was doomed to fade into the background until even it forgot it had ever existed. Even if it was a fruitless struggle, the fallen god would cling to life in the same tenacious way that the goblins did when they ripped each other to pieces for scraps of territory.


    It tore its gaze away from the goblins'' filthy warren and took to the sky to survey its kingdom. Today, not even the beauty of its gold could mollify it. Once, that had been its focus: to conquer enoughnd to bring ves back to mine it, but it had never materialized. Now it served as an unwee reminder of better days.


    The nighttime hillside wasn¡¯t much better, though. Only a year or two ago, it had two dozen fires burning for it. Now the spirit had to settle for less than half a dozen cookfires and a few torches. It was pathetic. How could the shamans that imed to worship it even expect to have enough mana to sling their bolts and sts around if they would not pay homage to the fearsome Krulm¡¯venor and his terrible hunger.


    When they went to bed at dawn, but before the fires had guttered entirely, it would chastise them in their dreams and make its displeasure known. The spirit trembled with desire at the prospect. Its prophetic dreams hadn¡¯t seemed to be having much of an effect on its worshiperstely. Still, it enjoyed tormenting them just the same. Besides the taste of meat, it was the one joy left in its life.


    Had its territory always been so cramped, it wondered as it floated from hill to hill, surveying its tiny kingdom. It used to be that its world stretched far enough that it reached most of the way to the horizon. Now it seemed like almost half of that was in a shadow that its me wouldn¡¯t prate. Instead of the ash-covered skulls of its enemies dotting totems along the old boundary, there were only the new yellow skulls to rece them. It didn¡¯t even understand why either tribe would use a yellow skull. What was that supposed to signify. Were they meant to mock it?


    Krulm¡¯venor should have been marshaling patrols to go and strike down the strange totems, but it couldn¡¯t be bothered. Not unless it concerned a fight or trips to one of the stands of trees still standing in its territory to gather firewood. Nothing else mattered.


    Eventually, that¡¯s what the spirit decided it needed, and it stoked the emotions in the warband leaders. Tonight it wanted a fight. It wanted blood and flesh, and after a bit of coaxing, they did too. They seemed strangely reluctant to deal with the ck Teeth to the east, and the broken remnants of the Stone Fists were too far north to deal with without more nning. Vanishing into smoke each morning after the fires died made it somewhat difficult for the spirit to n anything anymore.


    So they set out. A warband of thirty would be more than a match for any scouting or scavenging party they found. Krulm¡¯venor let the group drift further away from the main strongholds of the ck Teeth and hunt for one or two that it could get alone near the watering hole just outside its domain. There amongst the reeds and the weeds, it was easy enough to pick off a straggler and take it back to the caves to feed.


    It had been a favorite strategy of the Burning Skulls for a long time and had worked to excellent effecttely. It had, first against the Dog Eaters andter against the ck Teeth after they¡¯d usurped that boundary. Once, the spirit had tried to instill some dwarvish martial discipline into its ragged tribe of greenskins, but it had never taken. Now it settled for some hit-and-run sneak attacks and the sheer ferocity that goblins naturally excelled at.


    Further thoughts about tactics and nning drifted away like smoke as the ragged cry went up. Someone from another tribe had been spotted. Instantly, the vast majority of the Warband surged forward. They¡¯d been goaded into such a frenzy that each one of them wanted to be the one to rip out the throat of the enemy. Only the two shamans and their flunkies stayed behind at the edge of the tall grass. They weren¡¯t wary, exactly. They just saw no reason to get involved in chasing down a single warrior. The only fire needed for such a small meal was already burning back in the lowest level of their warren.


    Outside its territory, it could only see through the eyes of its goblins, but that was enough to enjoy the spectacle. Through half a dozen pairs of eyes, it saw shes of a single goblin fleeing for its life as it ran at the water¡¯s edge. Its lead was shrinking, though. Ten feet¡­ Five feet¡­ Any minute now, the Burning Skulls warrior would catch it and disembowel it.


    Except that¡¯s not what happened at all.


    Suddenly, a wall of ck Teeth stood in front of the fleeing goblin, and he seamlessly slipped through a hole in the lines before it closed behind them. There were at least two dozen of them. The worst part wasn¡¯t even that they seemed to have appeared from nowhere; it was that the ones at the center of the ambush were the bigger, crazed-looking goblins that had been responsible for their recent gains. It had to have been some side effect from the poison toads that the tribe ate in tough times because the berserkers that charged heedlessly into battle had dark veins throbbing underneath their skin, crisscrossed with dark ck scars.


    In a battle of savages, they were monsters. The Burning Skulls tried to fight at first, but what was supposed to have been a simple ambush had reversed now. Instead of being a quick bit of sport followed by a snack, it was a bloodbath that was quickly bing a rout.


    The ustrophobic battlefield dominated by shadows and dense foliage that was much too wet to burn yed to all the ck Teeth¡¯s strengths and all the Burning Skulls¡¯ weaknesses. It was almost like they¡¯d nned it that way.


    That was impossible, of course. None of the other goblin tribes in the area had a patron spirit, or magic for that matter, which only made the moment that much more humiliating for Krulm¡¯venor. Its strongest Warband was getting their faces bashed in, and it was all due to dumb luck.


    The Burning Skulls broke before the fourth body fell, bleeding into the muck. Even though they outnumbered their enemy, they could feel the danger radiating off the warband leader and the core of his warriors. The only thing they had which could stand up to that sort of violence was the fire. So, they broke and ran back towards their shamans. It was a desperate flight, both because of the fear of the enemy they ran from, as well as the fact that some of the Burning Skulls closest to them would inevitably be burned alive in the crossfire.


    That was fine with Krulm¡¯venor. Either way, it tasted flesh and the screams of agony it craved. It was practically drooling for the climactic conclusion when those ck-toothed bastards burst out of the tall grass only to face a wall of fire. They might have bloodied its nose, but they would pay a heavy price for the privilege.


    At least that¡¯s what it thought, but when the first Burning Skulls burst out of the wall of cattails and could finally see their shamans again, that view changed everything. Krulm¡¯venor warned the shamans quickly enough for them to turn and see what was bearing down on them, but by then, it was toote to summon fire or to run in fear. No matter how fast they ran, they would never outrun the dog riders bearing down on them.


    Dog Eater cavalry and ck Teeth berserkers working together? It didn¡¯t make any sense to the spirit, but that¡¯s precisely what was happening. The fire spirit had fought enough real wars with soldiers wearing fire-forged armor and wielding its steel and its mes to know this was an ambush. It was a ssic pincer move, and it was almost as ashamed that it had been caught unawares as it was angry that it was losing so many of its warriors.


    This was a trap that had already been sprung, and it could see that there would be no survivors. Krulm¡¯venor epted that. What it could not ept was being outwitted by a goblin chieftain or the idea that two different tribes had suddenly started working together. This had something to do with those strange yellow skulls.


    It was sure of that much.

 Chapter 20: A Growing Threat

    Chapter 20: A Growing Threat


    As the new chieftain of therger tribe, Grod immediately went on a rampage in every direction. He knew the meaning of neither caution nor restraint. Under his bloody leadership, it might have seemed to the surrounding tribes that the only thing that changed was the pace of the killing and the body count.


    That was only true on the surface, though.


    Everything had changed when the Gold Skulls had defeated and absorbed the Dog Eaters. That boost in size and capability gave their brutality a crucial new element it had never had before: speed. After so much fighting, the dog boys that rode their hounds were too few in number to turn the tide in any direct confrontation, but as scouts and messengers they were critical. They could also pick off, or at least distract, the most troublesome elements of other tribes, like archers and shamans.


    Suddenly, his three war bands could be practically everywhere at once. Nowhere was safe anymore. Every prime watering hole and hunting ground became the exclusive property of the Golden Skulls, and any tribe that chose to test those boundaries quickly suffered for it.


    Grod had been infected by the darkness. Not just by its strength and inhuman healing either by this point. The greed had infected him too. In time, that would make him an ineffective leader. The swamp knew that, but for now it was a perfectbination. He not only coveted everything of any value, but he had the strength to take it from whoever was keeping it from him.


    Just like that, being a neighbor to the Gold Skulls became a death sentence as they expanded relentlessly, in almost all directions. Only the Burning Skulls were inexplicably spared after they¡¯d been neutered so violently, and that minor miracle was all thanks to the guidance of the swamp.


    Pieces that the goblins could never understand were slowly falling into ce. It would need human help to capture the angry fire god of that tribe, who fascinated the Lich at the center of that dark whirlpool so much. Thest thing it wanted was for his pet goblins to snuff it out before it could study the rival spirit. So they were left to suffer and lick their wounds in their few remaining warrens while Grod¡¯s minions focused on the rest of the hintends.


    They responded to that order with glee, cutting a wide swath across the hills with their nightly raids and wars. The blood soakednd felt almost as much like home now, as the swamp. Sped along by the constant death and the totems that its tribe put up obsessively now, the red y and rocky outcroppings had be a ce of power, and it would walk them at night, gazing off into the distance, always hungering for more.


    After the Dog Eaters fell, the Sharp Spearssted less than two weeks. It was almost anticlimactic. Even with their superior weapons, they simply had no answer to the Gold Skulls'' unrelenting bloodlust. Their territory abutted the western hills, where the boulder fields gave way to scrubby trees that eventually became a primeval pine forest. That darkness was outside the swamp¡¯s domain, but it would add to it eventually. From the towering pines in the west to the distant mountains in the north, it would allow nothing to exist beyond its reach.


    Though Grod and his inner circle continued to favor their teeth and ws as they devoured their enemies to feed the swamp''s hunger just as much as their own, the weapons of the Sharp Spears proved to be a bigger boon than even the dog boys of thest tribe to fall before them had been. With better weapons and stronger warriors than the Bone Gnawers and the Stone Fists to the north, the biggest enemy of all quickly became distance.


    Soon theirmand over all thends that were a night''s march in any direction was absolute, save only for the tiny cave systems that were still defended by the Burning Skulls. There was only so much territory that a warband could navigate in a single day, and only so much the swamp could do to aid its minions once they left its territory for the mountain foothills.


    The goblins and their bloodlust would not be denied though, so as they set about finding new tribes to war with, and marked their new territories with reckless abandon, the darkness focused its attention elsewhere. In six months the goblins had gone from a local danger to a regional threat.


    The size of the Gold Skull tribe had doubled and then doubled again in that time due to forced recruiting more than anything. They numbered over a thousand now, and more were flocking to their banner every day in an effort to avoid bing casualties. Grod was a boss of bosses now, and sat on a blood drenched throne that none of his rivals could hope to climb.


    As far as it could tell, none of the humans that he had studied had any idea. Lord Garvin certainly had no idea that a terrible army was growing on his doorstep. That man¡¯s kingdom might be running just fine, but it was no thanks to him. He was in a perpetual stupor as he sought to escape the dreams. Alcohol wasn¡¯t strong enough to keep the darkness at bay, though. All his drinking would do was turn his muscles to fat and the respect of people closest to him into apathy. That was fine with the swamp. The duller that man became, the brighter his recement would shine.


    Kelvun was a rising star in the court of Fallravea. While his brothers were away he had the spotlight all to himself, and as he showed off the new and more urate map which he¡¯d had very little to do with actually creating, he received des from everyone worth knowing in the city. The map itself didn¡¯t tell the darkness anything it didn¡¯t already know, but it was still rifying. The whole area was a minor penins in the grand scheme of things, and the Oroza snaked from north to south before emptying in the Sudder Sea. On the west the territory it could possibly control was bounded by mountains, but on the east side, across the river, were fertile grasnds that might hold all manner of human lives just waiting to be devoured.


    It wasn¡¯t long after that, the swamp began to give the boy dreams of his next mission. They always started out the same: as lonely, trackless ins far to the west of Fallravea, past the furthest farms that his father collected taxes on. Each time the boy wondered where he was, but as soon as he looked at the map in his hands, the answer was clear: he was in the west, and he was on a mission for his dark master. The map didn¡¯t show the political boundaries between the counties, and the cities and roads that were marked upon it were incidental.


    What really mattered was the gray stain that was darkest in the swamps and the foothills that bordered them. Fallravea had some darkness too, and much of the southern part of the Oroza was polluted by it too, but the focus was definitely the swamp. Amongst all the darkness, though, there was a single golden ¡®X¡¯ in the foothills of the Wodin Spine Mountains. It was an obvious enough goal, but night by night the dream changed. In some versions, the trek there was easy, and in others, the expedition was assailed constantly by goblins.


    After some research, Kelvun started to n, and night by night he argued with his father that they should add a map of their westernnds to go with the one he¡¯d just finished of the river. The argument that proved to be the most sessful was convincing him that it would strengthen their case about the disputed border region with Lindvell county to the west. In truth, it didn¡¯t matter who the hills belonged to.


    Neither Lord had bothered to build roads to them because of their terrible soil and questionable value. Besides that, they were well known to be infested with goblins and other monsters. In the end, all thend belonged to the high king, and the lords were merely stewards of it. It had long been a bone of contention between Lord Garvin, who was the undisputed master of the river, and Lord Hamish who controlled the western coast and the dark forests thaty upon them.


    Finally, one night at dinner, he relented. ¡°Alright,d - I hear you. I¡¯ll fund your little expedition on two conditions.¡±


    ¡°Thank you, father,¡± Kelvun said sweetly. At this distance, the swamp was forced to watch the exchange through his father''s eyes because of his weak hold on the boy, but it found it interesting that Lord Garvin could see none of his son¡¯s vicious nature that was so obvious to the swamp.


    Did that mean that the young viscount was an excellent actor, or merely that the father was oblivious? The swamp couldn¡¯t say, but it was an interesting detail worth exploring more.


    ¡°You know thosends are infested with goblins, and while they may not be much in the daytime, when night falls they can swarm by the hundreds,¡± the Lord cautioned. ¡°I¡¯ll let you go, but only with two score of knights at your back, and your solemn word that you will return as soon as there is trouble.


    The swamp took a sick pleasure in how far this man had fallen. There was a time, only a few years ago, when he¡¯d thrown caution to the wind, only to have all his fearlessness and bravado smashed against the undead of the swamps. Now he was afraid of a few goblins. The irony was delicious, especially since he had every reason to be afraid, even if he was only jumping at shadows now.


    ¡°Of course father,¡± Kelvun lied smoothly enough that his father couldn¡¯t see it, but the swamp knew who the boy¡¯s true master was. ¡°I want to expand ournds and help the kingdom grow. You and Leo are wee to keep all the adventure to yourself.¡±


    ¡°One day you¡¯ll learn that there¡¯s more to life than books, son,¡± Lord Gavinughed, even though the only part of the whole thing that was funny was the idea that none of it was true.


    Kelvun¡¯s eldest brother Leo the second might pretend to emte his father during his glory days, but they were almost a decade behind him now. The man would never pick up a sword in anger again, and it was only because of his power that everyone around him continued to humor him.


    Eventually ns were set and a few weekster the boy started west along with a cook, a cartographer, two surveyors, three servants, four wagons, six teamsters, nine horses, and two dozen knights under hismand. It was an extravagant, and ostensibly very safe expedition. After all, who would trouble the boy when he had his own personal army? They had a simple mission: travel west, update the maps, and if they encountered anything dangerous, they were toe home immediately.


    The swamp didn¡¯t care about any of that, though. Even Kelvun, as useful a tool as he was, was utterly disposable. All the swamp wanted now was that fire spirit, its gold, and as much bloodshed as possible. This expedition promised to give it all that and so much more. It had to wait only a little longer until everything was in ce.

 Chapter 21: Uncertain Promises

    Chapter 21: Uncertain Promises


    Kelvun removed the wide brimmed hat to wipe the sweat from his brow as he gazed out at the broken, brick-red bands in the distance. The hat was ugly, and he¡¯d refused it the first day because it in no way matched his riding outfit, but once it had started warming up, and they¡¯d run out of shade he¡¯d changed his mind. The heat shimmer made the boulder studded hills waver uncertainly, he was d to have it. Even its shade didn¡¯t help him to spot thest outpost of civilization they¡¯d see until their return trip.


    They were meant to reach Holt sometime around sunset. ording to what people said, it wasn¡¯t much. The vige was just a few farmsteads and animal pens clustered close enough together to merit a farce of a wall that would keep the creatures of the night at bay. He had no idea why anyone would choose to live out here when they could live close to the river or Fallravea, but he supposed that some people just liked to suffer.


    This part of the county, in the drynds, dealt mostly with sheep herding and cattle driving. Maybe that was easier than spending all day tending to your fields, and that made up for the stink. Kelvun hoped to never find out about more of the profession than that. The horse he was riding was bad enough.


    It would make for good bragging rights at least, he thought, trying to look on the bright side. To say that he¡¯d been all the way to Holt at the edge of the disputednds. To be so close to the Woden Spine Mountains that they seemed to touch the sky. Neither of his brothers would be able to say that. Even with that feather in his cap, this still seemed like aplete waste of his time. The expedition would have functioned just as well without him. He was only here to curry favor with his master, and his father, he supposed.


    Lord Gavin was an afterthought, though.


    He¡¯d already forced Kelvun to endure a month and a half of boredom on that boat ride, which would have been aplete waste of time that he could have spent carousing and gambling were it not for the ¡­thing he¡¯d found in the swamp. That had been the only valuable part of the trip, and now he was traipsing across the backcountry, between viges so small they were scarcely worth the name. They would have both beenplete wastes of time if it weren¡¯t for the darkness and its promises.


    With a nd smile pasted to his face while he looked into the distance, Kelvun let those dark thoughts tumble through his mind. He had no way to know if the spirit would keep those promises, or if they could even be kept. All he had were a few words and the asional vague dream, but as always his mind returned to that moment.


    There was a sense of power there. True power, and it dwarfed anything that he¡¯d ever experienced before. All the stories said that something dark and terrible dwelled in the swamp, so there was every reason to believe it would do what it said as long as Kelvun kept up his end of the bargain.


    It was an uncertain reward, but for Kelvun it had cost very little so far. If the darkness didn¡¯t do as promised, then the only thing that it had cost him was a little blood on his hands from the murder of the buggerer that Kelvun had been nning to make disappear somewhere before Tagel anyway.


    He shrugged mentally, and stretched. No matter how often he reviewed his situation, he reached the same impasse. Even if patience wasn¡¯t exactly one of his strong suits, he would just have to wait. His impatience wasn¡¯t exactly helped by the vague dreams the swamp sent him. The dreams promised blood and fire, but the only thing they ever found on this interminable trip were hot days and dull nights.


    He passed the time listening to the knights that were here to protect him. Their colorful jokes and war stories were far more interesting than the cartography lessons he was supposed to be studying with the mapmaker and the surveyors. Those had been deadly dull and almost put him to sleep in his saddle. A count needed to know nothing about optics or lines of declination. That was what he paid people like this to know!


    Even interesting stories grew dull after hours of listening to them, and eventually the most interesting thing to Kelvun was the promise of roast mutton and a safe ce toy out his bedroll. Almost lost in thest flickers of the blood-red sunset were the unimpressive walls of Holt, only a few miles away. Sometime in the next half an hour, they would be safe inside them to recover after their two-day-long ride. At least that was the n until they saw the fires and heard the screams.


    Suddenly the night was broken by gouts of me bursting from the dark to attack the sod walls of the structure, shortly after that the town¡¯s small church bell started to chime a shrill warning. The vige was under attack by something that could wield magic.


    ¡°My lord,¡± the eldest of the knights, Sir Farvus said. ¡°We should withdraw, or at least wait until we have some idea of what¡¯s happening before we join in the fray.¡±


    ¡°We¡¯ll never find that out from here,¡± Kelvun said, continuing to ride forward. He didn¡¯t need to know anything else. This was it. This was the fire and blood he¡¯d been promised. The dreams had told him it would be an easy victory against a scattered opponent. The dreams hadn¡¯t quite specified who that opponent was exactly, but he was sure it was no more than a small band of bandits.


    ¡°We need to¡ª¡± Sir Favrus began to patiently repeat himself.


    ¡°Men!¡± he shouted, ¡°Our people are under threat. We were told to avoid danger, but not to retreat from saving our fellow countrymen!¡±


    The line brought up a few raged cheers, but most of them stayed quiet. They knew that the old knight lecturing him was the one that was really leading the expedition. That was why Kelvun intended to force his hand. ¡°We ride for Greshen,¡± he yelled, drawing his sword and digging his heels into his horse¡¯s sides.


    The darkness had nned all this, and he knew they would follow to protect him. He had nothing to worry about.


    Krulm¡¯venor was outraged that it hade to this, as its minions crossed the ins to the settlement. In the fading hours of the day, they were intensely vulnerable, but there was nothing for it. The awful ck Teeth and their hideous yellow totems had taken over everything worth taking in the hills, and the only prey lefty in the farms and settlements of the humannds. The Burning Skulls no longer stood a chance against their own kind, and numbered barely a hundred anymore.


    Without meat the tribe would never recover their numbers, and without blood the spirit¡¯s mana would soon run dry. Once the tribe was without fire, they would be devoured by their enemy within a week, and the fire spirit would finally be reduced to nothing. For an entity like it that was almost a century old, the very idea of being snuffed for good was intolerable.


    So Krulm¡¯venor was forced to do desperate, stupid things. At least thanks to its tactical brilliance they¡¯d been paying off though.


    For thest few weeks they had raided the smallest, farthest ranches with full war bands of over 30 warriors. The prey had been caughtpletely unaware and was easily overwhelmed with almost no losses. The human settlement though would be more challenging. Even once the fire spirit had decided that his tribe should take it and burn it to the ground, the chief and shaman had resisted his decision for days, until they had been sufficiently tortured in their nightmares to do as they were bidden.


    This time they marched to war, not just against arger, more fortified enemy, but one that was a full two days from their prime warren. It was a desperate gambit, but Krulm¡¯venor was confident they would seed. By bringing both war bands to bear, they could pit three shamans and almost sixty warriors against what would be perhaps fifty humans, many of which would be the weak delicious creatures that they called women and children.


    This would be the victory that would set the Burning Skulls back on their proper course. This would be a night of violence and brutality that would make the stars quail in terror at the ferocity of goblin fury!


    The attack started off better than it could have hoped, and the war bands snuck from the farmhouse they¡¯d raided the previous day to the walled vige as the blood-red sunset slowly faded to ash gray and coal-ck. It was a good omen if ever it had witnessed one.


    The humans had barred their gates, but the thick bricks of dried sod were scarcely a barrier for its warriors, and a few fireballs quickly weakened their pitiful defenses before the guards could even bring their crossbows to bear. It would have been a quick, clean kill, but then out of nowhere the warriors came from the night with sword andnce like they¡¯d been waiting for this somehow.


    It was a rey of the marsnd rout all over again after that.


    The ground was sshed red here and there from fallen men, but green blood ran freely too. Suddenly, while the war band¡¯s best warriors were already inside the battered walls, and tearing at the soft underbelly of men, a line of warriors on horseback was making for the vulnerable shamans with no way for the fire spirit to save them. Few goblins were killed with the humans'' weapons. They didn¡¯t need to be. The most dangerous steel on the battlefield that night were the horseshoes of their mounts. The warriors that were not crushed or kicked to death were soon running in fear.


    Krulm¡¯venor used thest of his strength to try to force the warriors that remained to hold the line. Even with the loss of half their number, they still outnumbered the humans, but it was all for nothing. The goblins were ruled by fear now, rather than by rage or hunger. More than anything, they wanted to live. That made the stragglers easy to cut down, by the small force that was exterminating more and more of them by the second.


    As thest few goblins were cornered and put to the sword in the walled vige, all the small fire spirit that had once been so much more had to show for it were a few small fires on a handful of buildings. These could quickly be extinguished once the fighting was done. Then it would have nothing. Nothing but a few small goblins that were too puny or weak to fight with the war bands, and a vein of gold it would never have the strength to properly mine.


    One by one each pair of eyes that it could see out of were eliminated making it feel ever smaller. The rage and humiliation was bad enough. Worse than that, though, was not knowing how all this happened. There was some critical piece of the puzzle here, and Krulm¡¯venor was unable to determine what it was. In the end, that one galling fact burned inside his dark heart even more than the humiliating loss he¡¯d endured: he didn¡¯t know what had made it happen.

 Chapter 22: Extinguished

    Chapter 22: Extinguished


    The rider emerged even before the battle in far off Holt was finished. Its head breached the surface of the muddy pool at the north-western edge of the swamp just before its mount stepped onto the muddy shore. It wasn¡¯t the edge of the darkness¡¯s territory, but it was the closest ce that any of its undead servants could wait out the harsh light of day. There was no ce to hide in the ins, and though the red hills were drenched in death, they were still inhospitable to undeath.


    It didn¡¯t matter that the pool was only two feet deep or that, on its strange mount, the dark rider was almost eight feet tall. It had been nothing but a pile of bones and shadows until moments ago. It was more magic than man and scarcely counted as real ording to most definitions of the word. The core was necromantic, and its messenger rode on a steed made of bones, but the rider wasn¡¯t a ghost.


    It was barely a shade, and the souls had been stitched together with so many shadows to make it that the result was practically invisible to the eye. It had only one purpose: To move faster than all the other Lich¡¯s servantsbined. Even though it had emerged from its hiding ce less than a minute ago and was still dripping water, it was already devouring thend beneath it at a staggering pace.


    It had a goal and a limited time to achieve it. Aplishing that was the only thing that would keep it from being consigned to oblivion when dawn broke in eight short hours, and an errant ray of sunlight burned it away to nothing.


    The only sound as it moved through the night was the wind in its wake and the click-ck of the boney steed as it charged forward with all its might. The Lich that had crafted it had no horses. It had in a hundred adventurers and half as many knights, but not one had ever brought a mount into its domain, so it had been forced to improvise. The result was a monstrosity of function over form that would inspire nightmares in anyone unfortunate enough to see it. The body was formed from therge bones of a dozen men, with more than a few animal recements from crocodiles and otherrge predators to make them fit together, providing a sturdy ce to attach the six powerful legs of the beast.


    Though the human femurs and pates were used for the upper portions of those legs, they were too short for the lower limbs. There, elk bones dominated. Those longer tibias and fibias gave the thing¡¯s legs a spindly, spidery look that allowed it to reach farther than it would have otherwise with every stride. Cloaked in shadows as they were, it would have been hard for an observer to make out most of those details. The shod hooves, by contrast, were very visible as they sparked from the force of almost every step, leaving an angry trail of flickering lights in its wake. Each leg ended in a human hand drowned in molten iron. The results were nightmarish, letting the thing ride over incredibly uneven terrain without slowing and allowing it to grip the earth so that it could push off the ground powerfully with every stride.


    Powered by magic and the suffering of the souls bound within it, the steed was tireless and could travel nearly twice as fast as the mundane horses its very existence mocked.


    The rider carried no weapons or armor. It used no saddle. One hand gripped the reins while its body drifted behind the steed like a flowing cape, and the other held a tarnished bronzentern.


    As challenging as the other two constructs had been to design and build, they paled inparison to that evil little thing. It was for that evil littlemp that its rider was leaving the bounds of its territory for the first time. It was the key to everything, but as it glittered and rattled under the starlight, it gave no clue about its purpose, nor would it until it was time.


    It moved at speeds that humans would never know, but it still took two hours of tireless galloping for the nightmare rider to reach its destination. Even with the trip only halfway over, though, it was clear to the darkness that this servant might not be up to the task. Fingers were missing, fractures were appearing, and the boney head of the mount, an elk skull, was snorting frost with every breath. The Lich didn¡¯t care if the thing suffered. All that mattered was that itpleted its critical mission as the shadowy rider finally dismounted and glided above the abandoned battlefield.


    The bodies of the men had been dragged inside the pitiful walls they had died defending by their victorious allies. The goblins had been ughtered to thest and were left to rot where they had fallen. Their bodies were cool but not yet cold, and only a few embers were all that remained of their once formidable fire magics. That would be enough, though. The wraith drifted over the battlefield to the remains of a pyre. Then it opened its hoodedntern, selected a still smoldering ember, and ced it inside.


    Now that the darkness had what it came for, it finally let the Gold Skull tribe off the leash. For weeks, it had been struggling to prevent Grod from snuffing out thestir of the Burning Skulls. Punishments for trying to devour theirst enemy within an easy march had included pain, weakness, and nightmares, as usual. Eventually, the swamp had been forced to add debilitating diseases to that list, temporarily crippling its tribe to hold them at bay.


    That was all over now.


    As soon as its dark rider had begun its trip, the Lich let his goblins off the leash. After that, they needed no urging. Without fire magics to call upon and only a few warriors worthy of the name, their gold-riddled warrens fell in a few brutal hours. On one side, there were less than 50 Burning Skulls, and on the other, there were ten full warbands of Gold Skulls. It was a massacre. By the end of it, there wouldn¡¯t even be enough meat to justify the hunt. That wasn¡¯t what it was about anymore. It was about dominance.


    For the first time in generations, a single chief controlled the red hills, from the pine forests to the base of the mountains. There were still other tribes to subjugate and gather past that, but Grodd had grown into a brutal chieftain thanks to the swamp¡¯s influence, and no one would dare stand against him.


    The Gold Skulls were careful not just to purge the life of every goblin in those warrens, though. In addition to goblins, they hunted down everyst totem and effigy. They defaced every image of a ckened skull they could find. Once that was done, they extinguished every fire that was still smoldering. They didn¡¯t know why they did this, but they didn¡¯t need to. It was apulsion, and the goblins obeyed. In a single night, the fire spirit and the tribe he had guided for years were all but erased, as if they¡¯d never been at all.


    As soon as the shadow raised thentern, the ember within it caught fire and began to burn a dull yellow. Second, by second, that color shifted, slowly turning chartreuse, lime, forest, and ultimately a pale olive color as any real light or heat was bled away from it. It was the ghost of fire, in the same way, that the wraith was the ghost of a man.


    That trick had burned out two of his best mages in weaving the magic. Just as the opposite of life wasn¡¯t truly death but undeath, the opposite of fire wasn¡¯t truly water. It was stygium. Each element had an anti-element, the Lich discovered as it researched the subject more, though for now, at least he had no need for the other three. It turned out that past the veil of life and death, things got veryplicated.


    Of course, the fire spirit hadn¡¯t been converted into undeath, though that mighteter. It was just being bound in ce by its antithesis. It would make the experimentation easier.


    Once the color stopped shifting, all the remaining mana rted to that lonely ember drifted toward thentern in a slow spiral of faintly luminescent streamers. Souls rose from the corpses of its recently deceased minions in translucent cyan streamers that were dimmer than the waning moon. Sparks and flickers jumped from the ashes of its dying fires in whites and yellows.


    For perhaps five minutes, the dark rider was surrounded by its own dim gxy of strange lights. Fiery stars were scattered amidst the colorful neb, slowly orbiting the shade like a dark fulcrum. Eventually, all the light and color faded as they copsed into the void ember at the center of it all like the ck hole it was.


    Less than ten minutes after it arrived, the rider was remounting its still breathless steed and returning to the southeast. This time the travel was slightly slower to start and slowed down further as it went. When it reached the swamp¡¯s edge four hourster, the horrific mount was down to three fully functional legs and limping badly.


    It would have to be scrapped, unfortunately, the swamp decided, but it had learned valuable lessons on its failure points that would help when constructing its recement.


    The thing crumbled back into a pile of bones at the bottom of a pool of water once that determination was made, and the dark rider continued on its own. From where it stood, it had thirty miles left to cover by sunrise. That would have been an impossible distance for a human, but the shade¡¯s steps didn¡¯t sink into the muck. It ran effortlessly across the surface of water and quicksand alike as it struggled to reach the safety of the dungeon.


    For it, the water offered no safe refuge. Any attempt to hide there from the sun would extinguish its valuable cargo and make the whole night meaningless. The void ember was worth more than the shade. It knew that, and so it knew that failure would only be rewarded with oblivion.


    The swamp knew that too, though, and as dawn approached and the distance still looked too great, a mist began to boil up from the stagnant waters. The fog couldn¡¯t shield a creature of pure shadow from direct sunlight, but it could keep the predawn twilight from turning its servant into a puff of acrid ck smoke.


    The dark rider stepped into the sweet embrace of the Lich¡¯s dark tunnels only minutes before dawn finally broke. It had not only avoided a gruesome and painful death, but it had sessfully brought the Lich the thing it wanted most.


    Trapped in that small brassntern was the suffering spirit of Krulm¡¯venor, a petty godling that had once been so much more than the flickering spark that he was now. There was so much that it could teach the darkness now, whether it wanted to or not.


    The Lich was very pleased. It had not yet decided if the fire spirit would be a meal, an experiment, a toy, or a servant, but no matter how it chose to use it, it would always be a trophy that it could add to its hoard. It was one more piece of evidence that nothing could hope to prevail against its patience and cunning.


    Tonight it had conquered the red hills and united the goblin tribes under its banner. In time every scrap ofnd and everything that dwelled on it would belong to it, too, no matter how long that took toe to pass.

 Chapter 23: The Spoils

    Chapter 23: The Spoils


    Kelvun never made it to their of the ck Skulls, or to the gold vein that his dreams told him was there for the taking. The darkness didn¡¯t make him suffer too much for that decision, though. It wasn¡¯t his to make, after all. After the night of blood and fire, his expedition spent another few days in Holt as they helped to shore up the battered defenses of the vige, and then they left for the long trip home.


    It was just as well. With the fire spirit caged and awaiting all the experiments that the Lich could think of, and with the help of his library it could think of a great many indeed. With its new toy, both the Viscount and Grod got very little of its attention. Those pawns could think for themselves while it focused on what really mattered: power.


    Not the petty spread of influence it had been focused on up until now, where it managed to gain a few feet in this direction or another hillside in that direction. The darkness was not aiming to be the god of meadows and pastures. It wanted, no, needed to consume everything, and for that it needed more power, not more shepherds and trees.


    It turned out that quite a few spirits could use those things, of course. They put out a fair amount of mana, but it was the wrong vor for the darkness. The subtle trickle of mana from a tree was less than the dream of a suffering child, but it reeked of light so it was worthless. The darkness could only make use of it if thend itself was poisoned, in the same way that the fire spirit could only harness it if it was burning.


    That was why its grip on the river was shrinking instead of expanding. In all these months, the darkness hoped to have reached the sea by now, but instead its reach had almost been pushed back to the swamp. This had as much to do with the other spirits that no doubt dwelled within it as it did with the clean water resisting its corruption, but both things were problems that could eventually be dealt with, once they were understood.


    So the darkness learned, by destroying the fire spirit over and over again. In its cage it was separated from the whole world, so when a bit of tinder was lit from that wickedmp and used to start a natural fire, it created a copy of the original, rather than expanding the might of the spark it held hostage.


    Most of the time, the Lich would let it burn for a few minutes and watch as the mana current slowly stirred to life, gaining additionalplexity minute after minute, and then it would sunder it to pieces to better understand how the pieces fit together and what they looked like.


    Sometimes it would let the thing burn higher and faster before extinguishing it, or rending its soul apart, letting it gain full sentience and be a shadow of its former self. On those asions, it would speak to it for a time, alternating its blustering and raging with begging and pleading. The lich let it go on like this at length, just to see what the fire spirit might say. It learned some things this way, but less than it did by simply shattering its spirit and studying the pieces before they fadedpletely.


    It found out that its name was Krulm¡¯venor of course. It seemed strange to the lich that it should bother with a name, but it was fond of shouting it out whenever the darkness allowed it the strength to speak.


    ¡°I am Krulm¡¯venor and not to be trifled with!¡±


    ¡°You shall rue the day that you showed Krulm¡¯venor disrespect!¡±


    ¡°I shall melt you down and add you to Krulm¡¯venor¡¯s collection of the vanquished!¡±


    The spirit was a broken record when it came to such things, but it amused the darkness to hear it repeat itself so often. The Lich thought that it would have made the perfect court jester, if it had a court, and if that court had visitors. As it was, all it could do was teach the swamp how spirits worked by dying repeatedly, because it had no real knowledge of how it came to be or how it had fallen from godhood to the wretched little thing it had be.


    That fascinated the swamp as much as anything. If it had been a god, it would remember every detail. The days when whole seasons had slipped by it unnoticed were long past now.


    Trapped in thentern the core of the captured godling couldn¡¯t feel any of these torments of course, but the Lich let it watch, and it knew that it could see what was happening because of the tiny tremulous screams of outrage and anger that escaped thentern. It had seen the Lich casually dissipate it a hundred times, and worse, disrespect it on a number of asions.


    The lich thought that it might be able to do this every day and never grow tired of it, even if it hadn¡¯t been making terrific strides in understanding the nature of spirits and how best to detect and kill them. That had been its n - to murder the other spirits that called the Oorza home, but it was only after it started to n the weapons it could use to murder them, that it realized its time would be much better spent looking for ways to trap them.


    This was an oversight, but only a minor one. The swamp was growing bored with its pawns, and found the ideas it had stumbled upon while tormenting Krulm¡¯venor much more interesting.


    After all, the only victim more appetizing to the hungry dead than a suffering human was a spirit bursting with essence. It abandoned spiritual weapons for the moment, though, and instead sought to make traps that it could create to harvest them. While it did so the darkness finally took a moment to gaze at the outside world and was surprised to notice that over a month had already passed since it hadst viewed the world beyond this room.


    In that time Grod had subjected his northern neighbors, the Stone Fists, conducted severalrge raids of viges on the coast, and was now moving east, intent on finishing the raid on the humannds that the now dead Burning Skulls had started.


    That hadn¡¯t been a part of the darkness¡¯ n, and it considered stopping it, even though it would probably have to kill the goblin leader to do that at this point. In the end, it was a couple of thousand goblins, though, and the idea of that much bloodshed was too much to resist. It would just have to make sure that its human pawn, the viscount, was far from danger, in case Grod proved too sessful for his own good.


    Kelvun kept a nd smile on his face while he observed the dancers at the third and final g being held in his honor. Despite not actually aplishing his mission to map the bands, he¡¯d still returned home a hero, and his father had not yet gotten tired of celebrating that fact, much to both his and his older brother¡¯s annoyance.


    Sure - right after he came back to Fallravea, his father had been pissed off enough to demand to be called Lord Garvin, but he¡¯d gotten over that as soon as he noticed how the knights were looking at his son. After that, he wasn¡¯t a foolish young boy - he was a hero.


    Leo¡¯s obvious frustration was the only thing that was actually good about it, though. The man was almost as green as his crushed velvet doublet with envy. He¡¯d expected to return from the King''s court as the talk of the town, but instead he¡¯d barely been noticed, and instead he¡¯d been forced to endure the story over and over again.


    Kelvun¡¯s smile gained some genuine warmth as he thought about that and took another sip of wine. It was worth the temporary exile being forced on him to watch the pretentious little lordling squirm. He wasn¡¯t happy about being sent away, of course. Not when he¡¯d just caught the eye of so many young eligibledies of the court, but they would still be here when he got back.


    Leo might have prevailed upon father to send Kelvun back to the river with craftsmen and soldiers as part of a toll scheme that some aristocrat or another had proposed to him, but even if Leo was here by himself, he¡¯d be stuck in Kelvun¡¯s shadow for a long time toe. Not just with father, either, but with the people that mattered.


    Leo had spent a season lounging around court and learning to dress nicer, but Kelvun had led two sessful expeditions and beaten back thergest goblin raid that anyone had seen in a generation with nothing but a few knights and a pair of giant brass balls.


    At least that¡¯s how the story went when his father was in his cups.


    ¡°There he was - my youngest son,¡± Lord Garvin would say. ¡°Leading the charge, outnumbered ten to one? Do you know what he told Sir Farvus before he charged? Do you?¡±


    Kelvun had heard his father say that same thing almost a dozen times in the weeks he¡¯d been back. He¡¯d practically memorized it. It was embarrassing, really. For both of them.


    The truth was that Kelvun had never been more terrified than that night, and it was only because he¡¯d managed to get himself drenched in goblin blood that no one knew he¡¯d pissed himself. He¡¯d barely managed to hold on to his sword, when what was supposed to be a few bandits or something had suddenly resolved into dozens of gibbering goblins with spears and spells.


    It was only because of the protection of the darkness that he¡¯d lived. It had to be.


    There was simply no other exnation on how he could have ridden through such a mob with so little armor without suffering a scratch. That¡¯s what happened, though. He just kept going, and swinging his sword, and he just kept right on living while the knights charged along beside him.


    He hadn¡¯t even noticed the goblin mage he¡¯d run down until it was practically under his horse''s hooves. One second there had just been confusion and darkness, and the next - well, the thing¡¯s staff had briefly glowed with light bright enough to spook his horse as it shattered under a well-ced hoof.


    And now he was no longer Kelvun Garvin, third in line to the throne - he was Goblinsbane, protector of the west. It was enough to make himugh when he was alone with his friends, but in public asions like this he had to y the role of dutiful son, no matter how ludicrous.


    So he was going back to the swamp by his father''s request. Starting tomorrow he¡¯d be going down river with two boats, three dozen men, and all the supplies they could cram in to the boats without sinking them. It was another duty he wasn¡¯t exactly thrilled to be carrying out, but it would be fine. They¡¯d sail down river for a few days, then he¡¯d spend a few weeks watching other people work hard from the shade, and finally he¡¯de back with one more sess under his belt. With any luck, he¡¯d be back just in time to wee Theon home and rub it all in his face too.

 Chapter 24: Muddy Waters

    Chapter 24: Muddy Waters


    Everything was in motion now. The swamp was used to having days and weeks to n and decide, but for reasons not entirely within its control it didn¡¯t have that luxury now. One moment it was designing its first spirit traps, andmanding its dark messenger toy a few of them up and down the river, so it could test them, and the next it looked up and everything was burning.


    The Viscount at least was safe enough still, the swamp thought as it briefly checked on their progress. The men hemanded had spent days putting up temporary structures on the area that had once been the lizard men¡¯s camp, and before that the mage¡¯s ind. It was only now that they were getting ready to build something more permanent, although they seemed more interested in setting up a smithy and a kiln than building anything that had any true purpose.


    There was no time to study the folly of men now, though, because the Golden Skull horde had run rampant in the west, and vige after vige had been burned to the ground. The only people that had survived the onught were the ones that had fled.


    The first thing that the swamp did was to force the infernal creatures to slow their advances, and the second thing it did was to slowly pull the horde back together as it moved east and south. The green skins could only seed like this as long as they faced no real resistance. Against an army, or even arge patrol, they would be hopelessly shattered, but they were much too stupid to understand that.


    It was only when this was done, that it reached out to the minds of the region that had been infected with the Bard¡¯s songs to find out where the human warriors and adventurers were. It wasn¡¯t a difficult search. It found a few clustered around campfires, halfway between the fertilends around Fallravea and the viges that were currently being sacked by the bulk of the goblin forces.


    It wasn¡¯t just a middling group of adventurers, either. The minds he could peer through the dreams of were just men-at-arms in a muchrger force that numbered over a hundred men, including knights and a corps of trained crossbowmen that had loaders and pavises. Apparently, Kelvun¡¯s oldest brother had decided to step out of the shadow that the darkness had ced over him with his younger brother¡¯s victory in the most forceful way possible.


    That wouldn¡¯t do at all, the swamp decided as it felt anger circte through it like a deep current. Even if it wasn¡¯t already hungry for the older boy¡¯s death, and eager to drive another knife in to the old count¡¯s heart, he never would have allowed so many of his pawns to be disced without gaining something more valuable in their ce, and it had no hold on this man.


    There were no easy answers, though. Not without revealing its undead to the world so long after it had withdrawn them. No - it would need another course of action.


    After two days of deliberation, it woke Krulm¡¯venor with a bonfirerge enough that it had a mind to speak with. This time it did not toy with it. Instead, it made the prideful godling an offer.


    ¡°Serve me and I will allow you to live and prosper, Krulm¡¯venor,¡± the darkness intoned voicelessly. ¡°Cross me and you will only be of further use in my experiments.¡±


    ¡°Why would I ever give a monster like you anything,¡± the spirit crackled. ¡°You have already taken everything from me!¡±


    ¡°I did, and I can do it again. I beat you, so now I use you how I will,¡± the swamp agreed, ¡°But if you were useful to me, I might be willing to give you back a few of the things you held most dear. Fuel. Influence. Blood.¡±


    ¡°You think I would serve you for a single bonfire?¡± the fire spirit spat.


    ¡°You think that is all I can offer you?¡± the darkness would haveughed if it was capable of such a thing. Instead, it just pitied the poor limited mind that was barely more capable than the smoke it was made of. ¡°Even now, my goblins ravage the west. Soon they will take a human army. Every vige that burns could be your feast, and some of the blood that falls could be yours top up.¡±


    ¡°You would treat me like a dog?!¡± The idea seemed to enrage Krulm¡¯venor even more, but even boiling over, it didn¡¯t say no.


    ¡°Like a loyal hound,¡± the Lich agreed. ¡°As long as you obey mymands, I will give you your freedom, and you will feast almost as well as I do.¡±


    ¡°What must I do,¡± the fire spirit said, admitting defeat, even if its pride would never let it truly kneel.


    ¡°You must help the goblins raze the human kingdom to ashes until I decide they have created enough fear and death to suit my needs,¡± the swampmanded. ¡°Do this, and you will be a servant instead of a prisoner.¡±


    The ripples in the smoke and fire spoke of frustrated rage, but in the end it didn¡¯t argue further, and agreed to help the swamp in the battles that were toe. The Lich had no doubt that the spirit was doing this for its own selfish reasons and that its only hope was to gather enough power to escape the grip that the darkness had on it. Normally, fire and the light it created was the mortal enemy of the dark, but in this case the swamp wasn¡¯t too concerned. Such a paltry mind could never outwit the legion of souls that swirled within its core.


    A few dayster, when the cksmith¡¯s forges were lit at what the men had started to call Kelvun¡¯s Landing, it was done with a spark of Krulm¡¯venor¡¯s fire. Later that night the first of the goblin shamans started to feel its power flow through them, and as that poor little hamlet burst into mes, a dozen other goblins quickly harnessed the power as well.


    The fire godling was no longer just a flickering me. Even under the thumb of the Lich it was already more powerful than it had been in years. The darkness doubted that such a detail mattered to the haughty spirit. No matter how much power Krulm¡¯venor gained, its pride would always be the stronger force.


    That would be a problem for another day, though. Now all that mattered were that the goblins were unified, and they had the weapons they needed to boil the human knights in their own armor. It was something that the Lich needed, because even with all the gifts it had given Grod, the goblin¡¯s strength and viciousness would do precious little good against te mail.


    After that, the darkness began to steer his war bands north, and night by night they got closer to the Greshen force.


    The ce that the Lich ultimately chose for the battle wasn¡¯t special. It was just a hill, slightly taller than those around in the middle of the ins. The ground here was still fertile enough that farmers lived here and there, eking out a living. It was far away from anywhere that mattered, though, and at least two dozen miles outside the Lich¡¯s blood-soaked domain. That would have made all the difference in the world if it was using its undead minions for this fight, but the goblins could kill anywhere with equal ease, as long as it was night out.


    For the past few weeks, Grod¡¯s war bands had been moving from barn to hamlet to homestead, killing anything they could get their hands on before moving on to the next meal, but tonight they would get the fight they had been spoiling for ever since they¡¯d left the red hills. Grod was a brutal warchief, and he didn¡¯t just want death, he wanted victory.


    The night started off as quiet as any other, and the small army of menid out their camp quite sensibly on a defensible hilltop with picket lines, watchmen, and plenty of fires to keep the night at bay. They took no chances, but even their caution wouldn¡¯t save them. Shortly before midnight, a fog began to boil up out of the londs that shrouded the surrounding hills. It wasn¡¯t as thick or as overwhelming as the Lich would have been able to create in the bounds of its own territory, but it was the most it could do from this distance using its dark messenger and a few trinkets it had created in the course of its experiments on water spirit traps.


    That fog wouldn¡¯t have been enough to hide the torches and the horses of a human army, but for bands of goblins, it was more than enough. They crept through the dark, and the wily greenskins were practically on top of the men before they even knew to sound the rms. The horns eventually sounded, but not before screams of pain had already shattered the stillness of the night.


    A hundred men are a fearsome force, but only if they¡¯re wearing more than their small clothes before the battle starts. Some of the warriors had a chance to put on their boots and pants before they charged into battle, but most only had time to pull out their sword or load their crossbow before the fight was joined. Even then, a desperate man with a sharp de can kill his weight in goblins before he¡¯s brought down, but that hardly mattered when they were sopletely outnumbered.


    There were a hundred warriors when the fight started, and without anywhere to escape to, even the cowards fought bravely, but a few minutester, only half that number were still standing. Bravery wasn¡¯t nearly as effective as the charge of heavy cavalry or a suit of chain mail you were actually wearing. Lying with those fifty dead warriors on the ground were almost three hundred dead goblins, but that barely put a dent in a force that measured well over two thousand strong.


    In the flickering firelight of the final moments of the battle, the darkness noticed that the Count¡¯s eldest son fought exceptionally well. He was so like his father, the swamp decided, in both skill and vanity. The elder Leon Garvin had been able to fight well too, but that had availed him as little in his duel with the swamp dragon all those years ago, as it would help his son in his battle against the green tide tonight.


    In other circumstances he might have grown up to be a true hero, but that was not to be. He¡¯d gone west looking for an easy victory that he could use to return to the spotlight, but he¡¯d found only a painful death instead. Tonight he would be just one more body for the goblins to feast on.


    The goblins celebrated their monstrous victory until dawn began to color the sky in the east. Only then did they seek out ces to hide from its rays, leaving the sun to find only a corpse strewn field. The hill wasn¡¯t a battlefield, it was a massacre, and over the next few days the carrion eaters that circled would grow so thick that they would all but blot out the sun.


    No one but the Lich was ever to see such a beautiful sight, though, because now that there was no real military force outside Fallravea to stop the tide of blood that the goblins were unleashing as they once more moved in all directions to ughter the simple people of thend before word of the violence could spread fast enough to put the viges thaty ahead on the defensive.

 Chapter 25: Laying the Foundations

    Chapter 25: Laying the Foundations


    Kelvun hated it in the swamp. Even though the heat had dramatically decreased over thest few weeks as fall started to set in, and the biting flies and mosquitoes left him strangely untouched, he was still miserable.


    There had been nothing to do here for weeks besides watch other men work. Once the rains had started, things had somehow managed to be even more deadly dull, if such a thing was possible. In the evening he¡¯d found a few soldiers to y cards with, but that was it. Anything else his tutors quickly put a stop to, and with the rains he couldn¡¯t even leave the pavilion to escape them. It was truly his version of hell.


    Even the dreams had stopped, he thought glumly as he pushed away the grammar book he was supposed to be memorizing.


    He had no idea why it would be important to walk out into the swamp in the middle of the night to retrieve a guttering torch and use it to light the forge fires of their newly constructed smithy, but once he¡¯d done so, even the strange dark dreams he had so often finally stilled. That probably meant that he was doing exactly what the swamp wanted of him, of course, but all of that added up to a fate worse than death as far as he was concerned.


    Like a condemned man, every day he would listen to the smiths forge a few more links in the three hundred foot chain they were making. Meanwhile, any number of saws and hammers that were creating the timbers that were used in the construction of the tower added to the racket. In time, it would be the tax authority for the whole southern reach of the river. It was a shabby little building of timber and stone, and a poor start for what would inevitably be a vige, at the very least as far as he was concerned. If it were up to him, he would havemissioned something more beautiful and imposing to represent his family¡¯s authority.


    A keep, perhaps. Anything was better than the little drum tower they were building. Because they were mostly using the older stones of a tower that had been erected here previously, it was doomed to be an ugly, squat little structure. Some of the workers wondered about that, and rumors spread through the camp about the old stories. The fact that they hadn¡¯t been devoured by a ravaging horde of undead seemed to disprove that this was the site of the swamp dragon massacre.


    It was though. That was the only bright spot for Kelvun in all this. It was the secret he couldn¡¯t tell anyone. They were helping the Lich that they hated and feared by rebuilding the very tower that haunted his nightmares as a child.


    If not for that secret, Kelvun probably would have drowned himself in the river just to have something to do.


    He had no idea why the swamp would want a tower or a forge in the heart of its domain, or why it seemed perfectly okay for them to build a pair of sturdy docks, even knowing that those docks would doubtlessly bring more people. It wasn¡¯t his job to know why, though. His job was to do as he was told for another year, and then when the title and thends were his, he could do whatever he wanted to again.


    Well, within reason, he corrected himself, as he looked upriver at a small barge heading their way. You couldn¡¯t exactly double-cross the devil after you¡¯d made a deal with him, but once he gave Kelvun what he promised, it wouldn¡¯t be such a one-sided rtionship between them, where the swampmanded, and Kelvun did as he was ordered.


    He wondered if they had the paperwork and the stamp showing they¡¯d already paid the toll or not. If Tom or Denny had been around, he would have bet them ten obols that they¡¯d never find out. The Lich wanted them to finish this chain for the same reason his father did: to get their cut of the river¡¯s wealth. Every day the fishermen took a piece of the Oroza¡¯s infinite bounty, and his father collected some duties at the docks in Fallravea. Everyone that chose to deliver their goods a vige or two upriver dodged the taxmanpletely, and Lord Garvin was tired of not getting his due.


    The chain would stop all that. Everyone would have to pay to use the waterway to pass this single point, and whoever that unlucky tax collector was, he would have a small garrison to keep him safe from his unhappy customers.


    Kelvun had no idea what the Lich in the depths of the swamp would want a garrison of soldiers for, or what it would do with the brewers and bordellos that would surely follow, but as long as he was known as Count Kelvun Garvin the first by his next name day, he really didn¡¯t care. He would¡ª


    The cane of his letters tutor suddenly mmed down hard on the table in front of Kelvun startling him.


    ¡°And what is so interesting, Lord Garvin?¡± Temonen asked, peering down at him through his spectacles.


    Kelvun didn¡¯t answer. There wasn¡¯t a point. He just pulled the book close to him and went back to memorizing the conjugation for irregr verbs he doubted he would ever need, like obnubte and impignorate.


    The Lich watched the barge carrying steel ingots and other contraband beneath the thinyer of lumber as it passed down the river along with its young minion. The difference between the two was that the swamp would have its payment though, one way or the other, and since the boat had chosen not to pay in coin, it would send the swamp dragon to capsize the vessel and devour its crew instead once night fell.


    The steel, it could use, but everything else would wash down the river as a warning to the other sailors who might try its patience in the future.


    The swamp wasn¡¯t too concerned with such things, though, and had noticed its passage only by ident while it focused on the hidden currents beneath the water''s surface. In the weeks since it hadid its first traps, it had learned much about the water spirits that practically infested the river. It teemed with life, which had turned out to be the real reason why it was always slipping out of the swamp''s grip.


    But it had their number now. It could see the way they moved invisibly in the form of currents and waves.


    The first traps it had used were crude brass things, and hardly fit for purpose. Most of the spirits they¡¯d managed to trap had suffocated in the tiny vessels and passed away before it could send a servant to retrieve them. After a little trial and error, though, a few living samples had been brought back to the depths alive.


    Despite the fact that they were creatures of water and not of fire, they shared a great deal with Krulm¡¯venor, and the swamp had enjoyed devouring them once it had finished studying them. They weren¡¯t quite as delicious as raw and bloody man flesh, but each one had writhed and fought until the end and been full of a surprising amount of magical essence.


    Each one of them had also imed to be called Oroza.


    All of them seemed to think that they were the one true spirit of the river, no matter how big or small they were. It was an interesting question as to whether that was true for all or any of them, but not one that the darkness nned on focusing on right now. It didn¡¯t care what they were, beyond the fact that they were prey. Instead of trying to understand them, it was figuring out how it could use the chain that the humans were building to anchor a series ofrger spells across the breadth of the river.


    The only problem with that n was that it would need to rely on Krulm¡¯venor to burn the runes into the iron once the chain was in the water, and outside of battle, it had no faith in that miserable godling to do what it was told.


    If the spell was sessful, then it could feast daily on a whole new source of energy to fuel its underground army and their constant efforts to dig its circle. There would probably be some ecological cost to this for the viges and the fishermen down river to have so much energy removed from the world, but that was hardly its problem.


    If that didn¡¯t work, well, it had two other ideas to try.


    Now that it knew what to look for, the first was to stitch a few souls into the corpses of animals and build mobile hunting traps. It could make such things fairly easily from the preserved corpses of crocodiles. They would lurk beneath the waters waiting to see things that should have been invisible to them, and then bring their fresh quarry back to itsir through the new river entrance its zombies had built on the first floor before it closed the surface entrance, so the humans could build their tower in rtive peace.


    That would definitely work, but those minions would only ever be able to catch the smallest spirits, and never huge quantities the Lich thirsted for.


    The second option was far more ambitious, and a great deal more rewarding, but it would involve poisoning the very headwaters of the river itself. It would have to be done at the watershed far up in the Wodin Spine mountains, to the north of here where the river first took shape. If it could possess the river from the first moments it trickled to life, then it should be able to seize all of the energy that was within it for its own use and starve every other spirit in the river of life.


    That would require the distition and use of the unwater element cholerium, in ways that were simr to how it had used stygium to trap Krulm¡¯venor. The only thing that held the Lich back from this n was that it might have unforeseen effects on it. The river was a powerful force and introducing that much water energy into the dark heart of the Lich might only serve to dilute its darkness, at the same time it poisoned the water.


    It was a conundrum that would take more study before it was willing to try even a small test. The swamp wanted to consume the river, not be shattered into a thousand petty little spirits that each thought they were the swamp.


    Time was on its side, though. It could study the problem by day while it watched the goblins burn their way across the ins by night. In the weeks they had been on the move, they¡¯d burned a bloody swath to the west. News had only reached Fallravea a few days ago that his son''s army had been massacred, and Count Garvin hadn¡¯t been sober since.


    In time, they would formte some sort of defense, the swamp was sure, but for now all they could do was mourn and despair as they hid inside their homes in fear of what wasing next.

 Chapter 26: A World On Fire

    Chapter 26: A World On Fire


    The goblins tore through the soft underbelly of the county of Greshen for the next few weeks on their relentless journey to Fallravea. Wherever they went, smoke followed in their wake. Krulm¡¯venor made sure of that much. He was overflowing with power now, even if he bristled at the idea of serving anyone and made sure to point that out to the Lich in every conversation they had.


    ¡°But I am the stone burner,¡± the godling would say whenever the Lich ordered it to do something that it considered to be beneath it. ¡°The world once trembled before me!¡±


    ¡°And it will again,¡± the Lich agreed, ¡°but only if you do as you are told.¡±


    Some viges offered token resistance, but most of the people had long since fled, and only the most foolish of heroes attempted to stop the endless tide.


    None of them survived their own foolhardiness, and even after countless smaller battles and skirmishes, the goblins finally reached the capital with just under two thousand warriors baying for blood spread across ten war bands.


    Thest few months had seen their numbers reduced by almost a third, and they hade so far from the red hills that the swamp doubted very much that they could ever hope to find their way home without its help.


    Very few of them would make the return trip, though. They were here for two things: to kill and to die. Not just so the Lich and Krulm¡¯venor could feast on the carnage, either. The sheer amount of deaths involved in this impromptu war were terribly effective at poisoning thend so that the Lich could im it as his own. Nothing pushed out thepeting spirits faster than the unnatural darkness that suffering provided, and even though the darkness had lost much of the territory it had gained on and near the Oroza, almost all thends between the red hills and the swamp belonged to it now.


    Even normally troublesome ces, like temples, and consecrated grounds had been burned and desecrated to the extent that they belonged to it now too.


    Now, though, the goblins weren¡¯t just devouring backwaters that no one had ever heard of. They nipped and probed around the borders of Fallravea - the capital itself, and were thirsting for the battle toe. The Lich had no intention of letting them sack the ce, though, no matter how much they might want to. Goblins were useful for many things, but building cities and mining for gold were not among their talents. For that it would need men, specifically, its man, Kelvun Garvin, who was now second in line to the throne.


    This hadn¡¯t been the swamp¡¯s original n. It had intended to kill the boy¡¯s older brothers with poison and disease, letting his father watch his entire family tree wither to nothing before it struck down the old fool. Bloodshed was quicker, though, and the timing was convenient. This army would only exist until the darkness found Theon, and then after that it didn¡¯t care what happened to it, as long as its ending was as bloody as possible.


    Fallravea was a city that had been growing for the better part of a century. At its core was a building of stone, more pce than fortress. Since it hadn¡¯t suffered an attack of any kind in decades, many of its defensive features had slowly been supnted with more decorative ones. Around that was the old city, which was protected by a wall of earth and brick. The bulk of the cityy beyond that ring, though, following the river until it slowly faded out into farnds.


    It was thest part that the goblins assaulted, killing and burning as they went. They had no scalingdders, nor any real desire to be out in the open long enough to be shot by crossbowmen, so they stuck to the narrow alleys, and the streets farthest from the watch towers.


    Near the water front, few victims remained, since almost everyone had evacuated for the crowded city center. But each day, the small army they had still sallied forth from the gate to try to hunt down the menace that was destroying their city. They met with very little sess, because the goblins along with their violence evaporated until darkness fell once more.


    In order to appear less impotent, Theon Garvin finally led a nighttime raid to try to push back against the threat. That was the moment that the darkness had been waiting for.


    He wasn¡¯t half the warrior that his father or older brother had been, but he went out with almost fifty knights anyway, thinking that if they stuck close to the walls they would be safe enough. They were wrong.


    No sooner had the gates closed behind them, then goblins boiled out of the surrounding buildings and the sewer line. In the space of less than a minute, they¡¯d gone from empty streets to almost a thousand gibbering warriors. It was aplete bloodbath, on both sides, but the darkness didn¡¯t care.


    Arrows fell from the walls like rain, killing or maiming a dozen of its servants every second, but that only served to heighten the moment while the doomed warriors fought to thest man.


    The sheer amount of death made the scene glow to the eyes of the Lich. It had a terrible beauty to it as the souls evaporated, and the gutters overflowed with blood.


    Even unhorsed a knight in armor was more than a match for twenty goblin warriors, but he was no match for a single goblin shaman, and human warriors fell almost as quickly as their goblin counterparts as the darkness threw away its pawns in a frenzy of killing and death.


    Part way through the battle, reinforcements tried toe out of the postern gate in an attempt to save the young lord Garvin, but that only resulted in a small flood of frenzied goblin warriors making their way inside city walls before they could shut the gate again. Only four dozen made it inside, but it was enough to terrify the defenders, and for a time the archers turned to focus on their own problems.


    That was the turning point.


    After that, the shamans had nothing to fear and zed a path through thest of the humans. By the time they were finished with the little lordling, no one would even be able to recognize his body.


    It wasn¡¯t until almost a weekter that Kelvunnded on what remained of the docks to survey the burned out waterfront. He¡¯d known what was happening even before news had reached him at thending thanks to the relentless dreams of fire and blood that started the night Fallravea had been assaulted.


    With the small number of soldiers he had, he doubted there was much he could do, but even so, the dreams demanded that he return home to turn the tide. Most mornings he awoke to the image of him standing victoriously atop a pile of the dead. Even that hadn¡¯t been enough to sway him as he¡¯d made preparations to depart. Not until one morning, his older brother Theony atop that pile.


    That spurred Kelvun into action. All he had to do was go and rescue his father, and the Lordship would practically be his.


    The journey north took several days. At each vige andnding along the way, Kelvun stopped to gather more men. In the process, he had to promise an irresponsible amount of silver, but he was sure that his father was good for it.


    So, over thest few days his two barges were joined by a small armada of fishing ships and other small boats full of men that weren¡¯t quite eager to join the fight, but probably wouldn¡¯t retreat in a panic as long as they were winning.


    Kelvun had no doubt that he would win, thanks to the swamp¡¯s protection, and as long as he was confident, no one had any reason to doubt that Kelvun ¡°goblins bane¡± Garvin would once again be victorious.


    ¡°Today we fight not just for the Count, but for all our futures,¡± Kelvun said, trying to sound inspirational. ¡°If we fail today, then the whole of the west bank of the Oroza will be lost to the good people who have cultivated them for who knows how long. We cannot let that happen!¡±


    There were a few ragged cheers that went up at that, but by andrge the men were not impressed. Most of them people he¡¯d gathered lived on the east bank, and knew the goblins were unlikely to learn to build boats for some time. They were here for the money and the fame, in pursuit of what they saw as an easy victory.


    As the sun began to set, Kelvun and his nearly 300 volunteers and mercenaries began their long walk through the ruins of themercial district toward the gates of the old city.


    The Lich watched the progress of his servant and his ragtag army with dark amusement. It was shabbier than either of the ones his brothers had stood at the head of, and yet somehow it was going to be victorious where those better men had failed.


    The goblins watched them too, waiting for the right moment to pounce and rip them to pieces, but the darkness was unconcerned. It was focused instead on Krulm¡¯venor. The godling knew the n, but the Lich found it very unlikely that it would follow it, and everything hinged on that obedience. Without the shamans there to ughter the armored humans, the rest of them would quickly retreat under the withering barrage of arrows.


    The Lich watched warily as the fighting began in earnest in the main square, just far enough from the towers to avoid the worst of the arrows. At first, Kelvun¡¯s army acquitted itself quite well. Then the fire started, ring out from burned out market stalls in several ces along the east side of their formation in an effort to break it.


    It almost seeded, too, the darkness noted as it turned its gaze away from the battle and towards its servant.


    ¡°I warned you, Krulm¡¯venor,¡± the darkness intoned icily. ¡°I warned you of what would happen if you disobeyed me.¡±


    ¡°What can you do?¡± the dwarven demigod sted back in a shower of sparks. ¡°I am Krulm¡¯venor! I am free of your cage and more powerful than ever.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s true,¡± the swamp agreed, hiding its annoyance while it toyed with the fire god, distracting it from the battle at hand. ¡°You haven¡¯t been more powerful in a long time, thanks to me. You should respect that.¡±


    ¡°Respect? From the thing that put me in a cage? Nay!¡± the fire sputtered. ¡°Once I¡¯ve finished turning this city to ashes, I will take this army for my own and then march it here and burn you and all your corpses until they¡¯re naught but dust, and there is nothing you can do to stop me!¡±


    ¡°Nothing?¡± the darkness asked, its words full of venom. ¡°Be careful what you say to the one who holds your heart in their hand.¡±


    ¡°My heart! I will¡ª¡± Krulm¡¯venor screamed silently then, as the darkness had one of its minions close the door on the brassntern that contained the true spirit of Krulm¡¯venor. It had been left open for so long that the petty fire god had forgotten the significance of it, if it had ever understood it in the first ce.


    In a very real sense, the pathetic spark at the center of that bauble was the godling, and when the door was shut once more it cut him off from the whole world, instantly snuffing the thousand fires that he had started. The shamans that had most fully embraced him, likewise, fell over stunned or dead.


    It was like Krulm¡¯venor had been ripped away from the world, which, in a very real sense, he had been. He still existed and would perhaps be of some use to the swamp in the future, but only after he¡¯d learned a bit more obedience.

 Chapter 27: Slaughter

    Chapter 27: ughter


    For a moment, all was lost. They¡¯d fought their way to the gates of the city walls without too much trouble, but now Kelvun and his sell swords were surrounded. One minute there were only a few goblins amongst the ruins, and then at some unseen signal they poured out of the wreckage on all sides of the market square.


    Even then, the Viscount still thought they had a pretty decent shot. They were only outnumbered four or five to one, which would have been a death sentence against a real army, but was pretty close to an even match when it came to these pests. At least that''s what his men had told him. With this many goblins people would die, of course, but he was towards the center of the formation, so he should be fine.


    That¡¯s when the fires started. Kelvun shouldn¡¯t have been surprised, but he was. He¡¯d seen them use magic at Holt just before he¡¯d ridden that shaman down. Everyone knew the green skins had dark powers, he just didn¡¯t expect them to be so, well, powerful. Out of nowhere, a wall of me scorched everything on the east side of the marketce, and men died by the score, and he was lucky to be just knocked off his feet by the st.


    At that moment he lost hope along with most of the men he¡¯d led here. The dreams had promised him victory, but there would only be death here. There was no way they could face such terrible magics without spell casters of their own.


    That was when the rest of the goblins charged, and Kelvun almost ran for his life. It wasn¡¯t appearances that stopped him, though. He¡¯d rather be a live coward than a dead hero.


    It was a moment ofplete shock. For a few seconds the za had been as bright as day once more, and even after that, men and structures continued to burn, bathing the ce in a flickering orange glow.


    Then, just as suddenly as the fires had appeared, they vanished. Not just the ones that the shamans were casting, either, but the ones that had been left behind. In a single second, everyst fire was snuffed out, and the moment of pure terror was reced by a strange calm as both humans and goblins looked around, wondering what had happened.


    The assault that had almost broken the back of his men dissipated as quickly as it had appeared, and Kelvun rose shakily to his feet, grateful that very little of the blood that he was covered in was his as the fight roared to life once more around him. The first thing he did, was to stab an already dead goblin not once, but twice. It wasn¡¯t rage that this thing had almost killed him, or even vengeance for the man that the thing had killed. Kelvun was more pragmatic than that.


    Now that the fight was rejoined, the tide was already turning against the goblins, and even now they were starting to retreat on the west and south sides of the square now that those wretched shamans had stopped casting their terrible magics, and in another minute or two there might not be any goblins left to fight. So, Kelvun needed some green blood on his de before anyone looked around and noticed how little fighting he¡¯d done himself.


    The moment that he¡¯d cowered for his life as the gouts of me all but consumed him wouldn¡¯t be remembered by anyone. Not anyone that mattered, anyway. They would remember only that he had taken the field and beaten back the green menace. The bards that he would pay would make sure of that.


    Kelvun looked around, and spotted a group of goblins that were already starting to flee before the scything blows of a pair of hardened mercenaries, and shouted, ¡°to me! Let¡¯s beat the bastards back!¡± as he charged towards the retreating enemy. He made a good show of it, but never once got close to the goblins. He repeated this several times, never reaching a group of goblins before they¡¯d fled or been felled.


    In the dark of night, the sudden absence of fires made it hard to see what was happening at all times, but he was fairly certain they either were winning, or had already won. All that remained was to find out the butcher''s bill.


    That¡¯s what he was thinking about when a sudden blow from out of nowhere hit him on his blindside and sent him sprawling. Kelvun managed to hold on to his sword, and scampered to his feet, only to see the biggest goblin he¡¯d ever seen ripping out the throat of a warrior with his teeth.


    Most of the goblins of this fight stood between three and four feet tall. This one was a little under five feet tall, and across its dark green skin were a web of scars and muscles that covered it like an evil spider web.


    For a second, all Kelvun could do was stand there with his sword outstretched, but then the thing turned and locked its glowing red eyes on him, he did manage to piss himself as he stood there in utter terror. It jumped off of the dying man and charged at Kelvun, and suddenly he was filled with the certainty that he was going to die. The battle might be won, but this thing could still kill him before he could enjoy the fruits of his hard work.


    Then suddenly, the thing just froze.


    Less than a foot from Kelvun it simply stopped walking. Instead, it stood there, with straining muscles, but all it could do was snarl and snap. Kelvun was confused, but he wasn¡¯t about to waste this miracle, and he ran the monster through.


    Even with a sword in its chest, it took the goblin far too long to die, and in its death throes it did more than a little damage to Kelvun¡¯s armor as he bore it to the ground and pinned it to the cobblestones with his de. By the time it stopped squirming, and he looked up, it was all but over. A ragged force was riding out of the city, and the tide had clearly turned against the green skins.


    They were in full retreat.


    The fact that they were running didn¡¯t mean it was over. Not really.


    It would be weeks before the stragglers were dead, and months before there was even a semnce of normalcy in the city. For Kelvun, all it meant was that he¡¯d lived, even if he couldn¡¯t stop shaking.


    By the time thest of the visible goblins had been butchered, and the wounded men that might yet live were bandaged, it was pitch ck out. The torches that had been distributed didn¡¯t quite fix that problem. They just trapped Kelvun in his own little bubble of light as he walked with thest of his warriors to the gates of the city, and in that little bubble all he could see were dead goblins by the hundreds.


    Just getting rid of this many corpses would be a serious undertaking, he thought, smiling, as he tried not to step on any of the grotesque bodies scattered in front of him like a green carpet. If they¡¯d been closer to the swamp, Kelvun had a feeling that most of them would disappear in the middle of the night to serve some unspeakable purpose, but as it was, it would take weeks just dig the graves big enough to bury all of them and let them rot.


    That wouldn¡¯t be Kelvun¡¯s problem, though. He¡¯d never dug ditches in his life, but even if he had, he certainly wouldn¡¯t now that he was the heir.


    In spite of all the terrible carnage that surrounded him, that thought buoyed him. He was not only the savior of Fallravea, but also the heir to his father¡¯s title. Those thoughts made it hard for him to pretend to be somber and serious as he slowly made his way through the throngs of battered warriors and well-wishers to the pce. All he would have to do was wait until the old man keeled over, and then he¡¯d finally have it all. The title. The money. The power. Everything.


    Did he really have to wait, though? He asked himself as he climbed the familiar steps to his home. His father was growing old and feeble, and was drunk half the time anyway. A sudden fall down the stairs, a touch of poison, or even a pillow over his face while he slept.


    Any of those would be better than waiting, he realized as he walked into his home, ignoring the servants as he focused on more weighty matters. Kelvun realized he could easily hire a professional to handle this once everything had settled down. That came with its own drawbacks, of course, but none of those would be the reason he didn¡¯t have someone else do his dirty work for him.


    No, Kevlun wanted to do it himself. He wouldn¡¯t say he had a taste for killing. On the battlefield it terrified him, and off of it, it was only a middling thrill that couldn¡¯t hold a candle to girls or winning at dice.


    Killing his father though. That would be something. He¡¯d thought about it before, of course, but deemed it too risky. Here though - now, in the aftermath of these terrible battles while the city was still smoldering, who would know? Kelvun could me literally anything. The suffering of Lord Garvin¡¯s people, the death of his second son, or even just the will of the gods. Who would question any of those things on tonight of all nights?


    ¡°Right this way sir, if you coulde with me,¡± one of the man servants said, trying to grab Kelvun by the elbow, but the boy shook him off.


    ¡°I will visit my father when I¡¯ve taken care of other matters, Marcus,¡± Kelvun snapped, annoyed to be disturbed in his moment of triumph. He still reeked of piss and would not visit his father to hear his congrattions or to murder the man until he was clean and presentable.


    ¡°But, I¡­ He¡ª¡± Kelvun stormed off, leaving the servant sputtering in his wake while he went to his room to clean up and change.


    ¡°Wearing blood spattered armor and stained trousers was not the way to handle such an important moment in your life,¡± he muttered to himself as he shed his garments and used the wash basin to clean up.


    Once that was done, Kelvun returned to the hall, and strode confidently down it while he tried to hold a resolved expression that would effectively cover the joy that was swelling in his heart that he was so close to true victory.


    The servants, likewise, looked at him with respectful and somber expressions as he made his way to his father¡¯s rooms. Some even had tears of joy in their eyes as they looked at him, and he nodded to each of them in turn, giving them the dignified response that he imagined a Lord would.


    Since very soon he would be, not just a Lord, but The Lord. All those thoughts and ns came to a sudden stop, though, when he opened up the door to his father''s bedroom to find him surrounded by graybeards and other lords.


    For a moment, Kelvun thought that the man had summoned the leading luminaries of the city to praise him very publicly. It took a few seconds for him to realize that many of these men were doctors and priests.


    Which meant his father was dead already.


    Kelvun shook his head and lowered his face to hide his tears. They weren¡¯t tears of sadness, though, but of frustration. He¡¯d wanted to be the one to deliver the blow, but someone, either the gods or his patron, had stolen that opportunity from him.


    Kelvun should have been thrilled. He was finally Count Garvin, and ruled over the whole region. He wasn¡¯t though. On the day of his greatest triumph, everything tasted like ashes.

 Chapter 28: A Bold Vision

    Chapter 28: A Bold Vision


    As he rode beside his knights past yet another burned-out farmstead, Kelvun chose to reflect on thistest adventure rather than the reason so many were dead. He tried to tell himself the goblins would have attacked no matter what on earlier days, but it never felt entirely true to him.


    The other nobles had been none too pleased by his decision to ride west and crush the goblin scourge decisively enough that it would never threaten the region again. They¡¯d tried to insist that he stay, but as their new count and the still grieving man who¡¯d lost his whole family to green skins in thest two months, they could hardly tell him no.


    Truthfully, Kelvun wasn¡¯t much happier about the turn of events. He¡¯d wanted to focus his efforts on rebuilding Fallravea and returning life there to some vision of normalcy. His dreams of being count had involved pretty serving girls and afternoon hunts, not more bloodshed. The bodies had been cleared from the streets of his city already, but the market square still smelled of blood and burning more than of baked bread. That would need to be fixed, and soon, or the county would suffer terribly from it.


    Kelvun had wanted to be the count so badly. He thought that nothing would be too high a price to pay for that, but then he never knew the swamp would extract such a bloody toll. Thousands of vigers were dead, and almost a quarter of the cityy in ruins, including most of the docks. The tax collectors told him that his revenues might fall by a fifth for the next few years until things were rebuilt, and nearly all the existing funds would be spoken for by such a vast project.


    That wasn¡¯t a setback. It was an unmitigated disaster.


    That, more than their increasing levels of fear and vividness, was the reason he¡¯d ultimately obeyed the dreams the darkness sent him andunched this expedition. The men only knew that it was to y goblins and root them out of theirirs. They knew nothing of the gold.


    If the dreams could be believed, then the ce they were heading to had veins of the stuff wider than his fingers. It was a huge windfall that would do much to solve his potential problems. For now, that was Kelvun¡¯s secret alone to bear. He trusted these men with his life, but perhaps not with that much fortune. Money did strange things to people when they weren¡¯t as equipped as he was to handle such things.


    It hadn¡¯t been his only secret, of course, he¡ª


    ¡°Excuse me, your lordship,¡± an unfamiliar knight asked, riding up beside him and disturbing his reverie. Kelvun noted that the man had his metal helmet on instead of one of the broad-brimmed hats that were so popr among the men, even though there was no way there would be a goblin attack with the sun this high in the sky. ¡°Me and the boys. We was wonderin¡¯ how you knew where the goblins are and when they¡¯re going to attack?¡±


    Kelvun suppressed the knowing smile that always tried to creep onto his face and instead kept the wan expression of mourning firmly fixed on his face. ¡°My father warns me. In my dreams,¡± he said, managing, somehow, to keep a straight face. ¡°He¡¯se to me almost every night since he passed away and tells me that he cannot rest until we annihte the enemy.¡±


    The first time he¡¯d told someone this, Kelvun had meant it almost as a joke. He was shocked when they¡¯d believed him. His father¡¯s ghost was certainly very busy elsewhere. If the darkness really had taken him, then even now, his father was probably screaming in some diabolical torment that might never end.


    This soldier reacted with the same look of awe that the others had, and after another couple minutes, he rode off with a distant look in his eyes. The lie was probably more believable now than it had been a week ago, thanks to the dreams the darkness gave him.


    Those dreams had shown him where every nighttime ambush was about to happen, and several times they¡¯d revealed the locations whererge groups of goblins had attempted to hide from the daylight. Each time they massacred them, Kelvun wondered why the darkness was giving up his pawns so easily, not that he cared. The victories made Kelvun look like a master tactician as much as a visionary. How could you not look good, though, when you knew when and how your enemy was going to attack.


    It was child¡¯s y. It was easier than beating his brothers at chess when they¡¯d still been alive to y.


    Fortunately, that was almostpletely behind them. In two more days, they¡¯d reach the cave that was supposed to contain the gold, and if it was everything the dreams said it was to be, he¡¯d make building a new mine and mint a top priority. With a fresh source of revenue, rebuilding would be much lessplicated.


    He¡¯d studied the maps that he¡¯d helped make on the trip, and he¡¯d decided exactly what he would do with that wealth. The closest approach of the Oroza to the red hills was the oxbow that they¡¯d built the toll station. If they were really going to be hauling tons and tons of ore and equipment to and from a ce without roads, then a canal that started there and got as close as they could get would be the best answer. Not only would it unlock vast tracks of newnds in the freshly degoblinized area, but it could drain a great deal of the swamp and reduce the power of the only thing left in the world that could still tell him what to do.


    The only man above Kelvun should be the king, and distant as he was, he exercised that power rarely.


    With some luck, the darkness would fail to understand the significance of such a far-sighted move until it was much toote. Once the gold was flowing, hiring a few earth mages to cut the channel would only take a year or two.


    Kelvun looked down to give himself a second to suppress his smile again. Everything was going splendidly. They¡¯d dig up the gold, purge the goblins, and drain the swamp all in one blow. In five years¡¯ time, his county would be flourishing, and he¡¯d owe no one anything at all.


    It had been a delicious few months for the swamp, but now that the bulk of the goblins had been ughtered, things were returning to normal. It had made vast inroads on thends of Greshen, particrly in Fallravea, where everything but the temple grounds were now its private hunting grounds. It was an old city, and the darkness could feel theyers of spirits that dwelled within it.


    The vast majority of those were ghosts kept alive through myth and ancestor worship, but there were a number of petty household gods and other stranger creatures that were harder to identify. Other than Kelvun, who was currently away and making progress towards securing the darkness¡¯ gold, it had no servants in the capital. In time, it would fix that, but it wasn¡¯t a priority yet.


    With tens of thousands of souls massed together, the darkness did not need to feed on them very heavily to sate its hunger. For now, dreams inming their recent trauma, and forcing a few hundred residents to relive those terrible nights when the goblins had almost sacked the town, were enough.


    Finding the best victims and servants was a process that would take time.


    The Lich was still focused on the river, almost to the point of fixation. It caught and consumed water spirits almost every day now, but it still wasn¡¯t closer to understanding them. Inrge part, this was because they didn¡¯t seem to understand themselves. That wouldn¡¯t matter if it was gutting a man or an elk. The anatomy was the same every time. In the spiritual realm, though, things were more in flux. Krulm¡¯venor might be a pain in the ass, but at least he had a strong sense of identity that greatly benefited the Lich¡¯s study in a way that the water spirits never would.


    They wriggled and writhed but had nothing useful to offer it besides sustenance. Other than catching them to consume them, the small river spirits served no purpose. The chain might have allowed the Lich to catchrge specimens with better results, but Krulm¡¯venor¡¯s rebellion had made that impossible. The chain would only be used to stop mortal traffic for the foreseeable future.


    That was why the Lich had decided that it needed a new focus: polluting the river itself.


    While its dark rider explored the headwaters of the Oroza for the most likely spots to try its experiment, the Lich¡¯s servants were distilling the foul chemicals necessary for the unnatural materials it would need. Poisoning the waters themselves and watching all the nts and animals die wouldn¡¯t be a particr challenge, but that wasn¡¯t what it was looking to do. A dead river would eventually lead to dead cities, and the Lich would eventually need many more humans than those that were currently at its disposal.


    No, a more subtle perversion was necessary. Something that could taint the very spring that was the headwater of the massive river. It would be a slow process, but there was no hurry. The Lich had all eternity if necessary.


    While it waited for the sulfurous distites to reach maximum potency, so it could lead to the next step, the Lich turned its attention back to itstest experiment: splicing the souls of dead goblins together to see if it could make something more interesting out of them.


    The goblins that had served it so ably for thest year had very little in the way of mind, and not much more than that, spiritually. Their souls were thin and not much more substantial than the water spirits the Lich had been consuming. It could just devour them, of course, but the recent ughter had provided it with so many that it thought that now would be the time to try a few experiments in preparation for future works.


    It was much more challenging than working with a proper human soul, though. The spirit of a human was rich in texture and quite durable. It could be manipted like a piece of calfskin and could be cut and molded into any form the Lich might desire. The Goblins, by contrast, were barely more than shreds of bup. They had to be almostpletely unraveled and then held on a distaff of bone and steel until they could be spun into something the Lich could work with.


    It almost wasn¡¯t worth the trouble, but there was such a wonderful quality of violence and rage left over in the finished product that the Lich toyed with it anyway. It would never be as loyal or as tractable as the embalmed lizard men in its honor guard, but in terms of pure savagery, there was noparison. So far, both of the corpses that it had woven its goblins into had fought so ferociously in the tests that followed that they had torn themselves to pieces in less than a week.


    Next time, it would have its zombie fleshcrafters more thoroughly reinforce the limbs before it tried again. The fact that a body needed to be more steel than human when it was powered by undiluted rage struck the Lich as more than a little interesting.

 Chapter 29: Deeper Currents

    Chapter 29: Deeper Currents


    It was only after the Lich poisoned the headwaters that the river turned against it. What had been benign neglect, on the part of the river towards the swamp as the water spirits ignored the poaching in their midst, quickly became something more.


    There had been no reaction the day that its dark rider delivered the sieve of verdigris encrusted cholerium into the spring that was the first trickle that became the mighty flood that was the Oroza. That cidness didn¡¯tst though. In the days and weeks that followed, as the river began to taste the poison that slowly seeped into the main channel, it rebelled.


    Violent undertows rippled up and down the body as the thing became agitated. Its power was strongest in the ces furthest from its heart, though, and it could do nothing to dislodge the screen that perverted every drop of water that passed through it. It did what it could to hurt the swamp in other ways, though. It tried and failed to break the chain that belted it at the Toll station, but it did manage to capsize two of the many barges that Kelvun had sent down to assist as construction on various projects intensified.


    People died, but the swamp would shed no tears for them. To it, a single life was no more valuable than a drop of water flowing down the river.


    The Oroza didn¡¯t stop there, though. Even though it had ignored the Lich¡¯s spirit-hunting constructs for almost a year, they were all dashed in a single night asrger water spirits that took the form of translucent blue sea serpents began to prowl the waters of the swamp.


    Until then, the swamp had only ever seen spirits that emted fish and eels. These were new, though. They hade from the south, near the mouth of the river, where its power was strongest.


    The Lich outfitted the river dragon with wards and ws of tainted metal, lest it meet the same fate. That only extended the thing''s life by a matter of weeks, though. The decades-old titan of the swamp fought in battle after battle, but each time a new storm refreshed the river¡¯s strength, thebat would start all over again.


    In the end, the broken wreckage had to crawl three miles across the muck on a moonless night to avoid total destruction. With the handful of arms it had avable, it took most of the night, and by the end it was an exhausted, broken toy instead of the nightmare monstrosity it had been for so long.


    The Lich raged at the turn of events, and vowed to rebuild it to be stronger than ever, but adding cords of pure rage woven from the souls of goblins would mean that the whole skeleton would need to be reinforced, and a more powerful cor to control the thing from their poor impulse control would be required. It would be a massive undertaking, and risky too, now that so many humans were in the region.


    The fool of a boy, Kelvun had earth mages deep in the swamp surveying leylines for road building or some such too. Normally that wouldn¡¯t be a problem, but pulling massive amounts of magic for a new project would be something that was sure to arouse their attention. The swamp was just considering how best to make them disappear when an unwee visitor unexpectedly entered itsir through the river entrance.


    At first nce it looked to be nothing but the corpse of a drowned woman, but the way she swam through the hallways as the tidal surge carried her ever deeper into the fetid darkness while she surged with elemental power were more than enough indications that she was possessed by something far greater.


    Indeed, as the first of his servants engaged her, only to be torn to pieces he saw it - the river dragon that wore the woman as a skin to walk in his tainted domain, in the same way he had used aquatic corpses to travel the river for so long. She might look like a normal woman that had been pretty enough before the river had begun to warp her flesh. The ghostly ws that drifted near her hands, though, they were powerful enough to do even its swamp dragon in.


    The Lich had not been forced to deal with a threat in the heart of his own domain like this in over a decade, and the strains of panic began to rise in the symphony of souls inside it, though it was quick to push them back down. It immediately pulled back all of its minions of any value, moving its honor guard to its throne room, and feeding her only enough of his most worn-out zombies to slow the spirit down as its specters and chirurgeons retreated to other parts of the dungeon.


    She might never have been here before, but even still, she walked unerringly through the maze that it had spent so many years digging. It was maddening until the Lich realized that her blind, milky eyes saw nothing, and that she was just doing as all the river spirits it had ever interacted with were doing: swimming with the currents. In this case, the current was the tide of dark mana that it pulled constantly toward itself, revealing its location for anyone with the senses to see it.


    In trying to poison the river, it had revealed those dark currents to the river spirits, giving it the chance to finally see the undeath that had lurked within its waters for so long. Now it wasing for it, and the Lich had limited options.


    Limited options weren¡¯t the same as no options, though. As soon as the woman was far enough from the entrance that she wouldn¡¯t be able to stop it, the Lich mmed the stone door shut, severing her from the river.


    That stopped her swimming for half a moment as she considered her options. Tied to the river, her powers were practically limitless, but separated from it, she was only about as powerful as the Lich itself.


    In the end, she pressed on, and started swimming once more towards its throne room. The Lich had been prepared for that. With every second she was dyed, its minions moved and adjusted things, shifting the throne slightly to alter her path through the door, and then opening some sluices from the swamp to let in a few inches of its polluted waters to hide all evidence of the trap that awaited her.


    She came with all the force of the tide, descending through theplex, quarter mile widebyrinth in minutes. In the end she found the Lich where it always was, ensconced in its throne, while a dozen of its embalmed warriors were arrayed around it with their dark steel shields and spears. They would offer some resistance to even a powerful spirit like this, but both the Lich and the river dragon knew that it wouldn¡¯t be enough.


    ¡°You have tainted my waters,¡± it roared like a crashing wave. ¡°Remove your cursed implement, and I will make your end swift!¡±


    The Lich regarded the woman in his throne room with a mix of fear and anger. Even at the height of Krulm¡¯venor¡¯s insolence, he had never felt threatened, and it did not care for the feeling. It had note this close to true peril since the mage had toyed with it in those experiments so long ago, and it had spent all the time between then and now making sure that this would never happen again.


    ¡°You have a poor bargaining position, river god,¡± the Lich rasped through a fresh zombie that stood next to it. ¡°Even if you could kill that which cannot die, you will never be able to touch the knife I¡¯ve lodged in your heart.¡±


    The dragon¡¯s only response was to roar in outrage at the truth of its statement as it surged forward on a column of water. She nned to crash right through its guards and then smash the Lich into pieces, but she never got that far. Ten feet farther into the throne room, as soon as it crossed an invisible threshold, there was suddenly a wall surrounding the woman and her wave on all sides. That the wall was invisible made it no less imprable for her.


    ¡°You cannot stop me!¡± The river dragon raged. ¡°I am the tide and the storm!¡±


    ¡°No,¡± the Lich corrected. ¡°You are the Oroza, the same as every other spirit I have ever dragged from the river, and any spirit can be bound if you know its true name.¡±


    The Lich made it sound so simple, as if it was a Fait apli, but the ring of bronze was a thing that had been built for testing and toying with Krulm¡¯venor. His name had been effaced, and the new one had been hastily scrawled in its ce. There was no guarantee that the new runes that had been carved in the ce of the old would hold up to forces like this.


    It was only because the Lich was cast in metal that it was able to maintain a straight face as its soul groaned under the strain. The Oroza was the tide, and it was the storm. That much was true, and all that force crashed against the walls of the circle, and with only the barest amount of leverage, the darkness had to meet that force and push back.


    The binding circle wasn¡¯t the victory that it pretended that it was. It was only a battlefield. A ce where it could pit power against power. The swamp¡¯s resources were not limitless though. Though its guards and interpreter continued to stand motionless, and the Lich sat there quietly pretending that it didn¡¯t have a care in the world, in the background, every servant it didn¡¯t need fell to the floor as the power was drained from it for a more important fight. In the swamp above, whole flocks of birds fell from the sky dead, and workmen that had eaten of his game fell sick orme as the darkness drew from them. In the far away red hills, the goblins that were most attuned to the dark died sudden, silent deaths.


    Even Kelvun felt dizzy for a moment as the swamp pulled every erg of power it had from every pawn it had ever touched. None of them mattered. It would deal with the consequences another day. Right now, all that mattered was its survival.


    And there was no mistake about it. The very survival of the darkness was on the line. If it did not hold the water dragon back in a cage made of its own name, then the Lich would be sundered beyond repair. The darkness would still exist after that. So would the swamp that it had inhabited for so long, but it would be so much reduced that it would be no better off than the broken and caged fire godling that it kept in the corner as a trophy. Without the wizard¡¯s mind to direct the maelstrom, it would quickly lose track of the world around it, and turn it back into the slow, limited thing it was before.


    The Lich had to win. It was a fight for its very survival.


    In the opening seconds that had seemed doubtful, but when the walls held, the River Dragon pulled back to regroup. Even as it struggled, the water level inside the circle began to fall. It could feel itself weakening with every blow it tried to strike.


    This was no longer a duel, but an endurance match. Could the river overpower the darkness, or would the swamp oust the raging waters and the tormented soul of the drowned women it had used to invade the Lich¡¯s inner sanctum?

 Chapter 30: Tainted Waters

    Chapter 30: Tainted Waters


    In the darkness of the bedrock beneath the swamp, hours became days and days became weeks as the two struggled against each other in a test of wills that resounded through the whole region. The River dragon wouldy there quiescent for days at a time before bursting out with sudden unexpected attacks that were as deadly as any undertow. Their shes caused sudden thunderstorms to spring to life where there had been only overcast skies, and blights to spring into existence where there had once been healthy fields. The amount of essence being burned took almost as much of a toll on thebatants as it did on the world around them, though.


    Sometimes these outburstssted for only a single moment, like a lightning strike as she threw everything she had into a single fierce attack, and otherssted for week after week as she beat against his barriers with all the patience of crashing waves as she sought to erode his wards rather than shatter them. She proved to be a canny opponent, but in spite of almost losing several times, the Lich managed to retain control of her prison. It was only after the fifth storm surge, though, the Lich knew that it had won.


    The Dragon had tremendous power at its disposal, but it was separated from the river and had no way to replenish that power from where the Lich had trapped it, so day by day and outburst by frantic outburst, it grew weaker. Not so weak that the Lich dared to turn its back on it, though. It could feel the binding circle shivering underneath the opposing forces at times as it got so hot from the strain that it boiled the surrounding water.


    One of the heads in its library pointed out that without that water to cool it, the apparatus would have long since melted to g. It was a little irony that the Lich would have to address in the future. It hade too far to leave its fate to the merest of chances. The idea that its unwee visitor might have been a creature of any other element, and that it would have to face oblivion as a result, ate at it more than words could say.


    Some monthster, when the river dragon was no more than a corpse lying weakly in a few inches of remaining water, the swamp was finally able to look at the world again, but beyond starting itsboratories and returning their undead ves to life, the swamp didn¡¯t care. The opportunity was here. Kelvun could scheme and the goblins could fight and die, but neither one of them could help it to take control of a river and the titanic flows of energy that made their way through it.


    The first thing the swamp did when it was safe to look away from the dragon was to have a second ring built around the first, in case it should fail. That much was child¡¯s y, and the forges were relit at once. The second part was much more delicate though.


    It was going to weave a second cholerium sieve and use it to see if it could keep the river dragon from expiringpletely. After all, that was what the elemental wanted. The swamp could see her eyes begging for death when the woman stared at him from her position on the floor, but even if the Lich¡¯s servants now had a chance of killing her, it would never waste such an opportunity for mere bloodshed. She was more valuable than that.


    From here, it could taste the subtle pollution that already flowed through the Oroza. It was dilute enough that it wouldn¡¯t even sicken one man in ten thousand, but it was there, and already the river spirits were choking on it in the same way that a freshwater marsh would as the tides shifted, and the salt overwhelmed whole sections of bog.


    Soon the river dragon faced the same treatment, on a vastly elerated scale, as the swamp began to fill her dwindling pool of water with fresh poison. In small quantities, she justy there and tried to ignore it, but as the potency increased she once again stirred to life, this time howling with pain and rage at what it was doing.


    ¡°A monster like you does not deserve to live,¡± she screamed, shing the barrier with her newfound energy.


    She sought to use the energy to give her one more chance to tear the Lich¡¯s head off, but that was not to be. It counted on this impulse, and was giving her just enough power to think she had a chance, but every mote of essence she burned to power her attacks lodged a little more of his poison in her soul.


    After several more weeks of constant struggle, she finally sumbed to the cholerium and slipped into aa. The powerful river spirit had trapped itself in the body of a slowly rotting corpse, and it was so lost that even full immersion in the waters of its home might not be enough to ever let it wake up again.


    The Lich considered building her a vessel like he¡¯d made for Krulm¡¯venor, but it quickly decided that it would be pointless. Something as proud and angry as the river dragon would never bend the knee, so there was little point in holding it in captivity.


    It would have to be yoked to arger purpose or devoured in total. There was no third option. The possibilities shed through the mages of his library back and forth, but most had never even imagined that an elemental spirit could get thisrge, so their ideas were less than useless.


    The Lich considered devouring her and integrating her soul into his maelstrom, but she was more powerful than any single soul it had ever consumed before, and the results would be unpredictable at best. The Lich wasn¡¯t even sure what it would want if its thoughts and desires shifted to a point halfway closer to the water elemental. Would it want to stop poisoning the river? Would it be the river? It was impossible to say.


    Ultimately, there was only one vessel that it owned that could hope to channel such power: the swamp dragon. The Lich had already been reinforcing that ancient skeleton to deal with the fury of the goblin essence that was being used as tendons and ligaments in the newer version. The Lich had nned to use it to fight creatures such as the river dragon as they sought to stop it from seizing control of the river. It was ironic that instead of using it to y the river dragon, the two would be melded together to be one.


    It turned out that stitching her into ce at the heart of the monstrosity was easy enough. Adding enough countermeasures to ensure her control was somewhat harder. In the end, he bound the corpse hand and foot in ornaments of gold and onyx. The gold was an unfortunate choice that had to be borrowed from its hoard, but the Lich had to ensure that water could not corrode the fine lines and delicate inscriptions that went in to their creation. A single misstep could free the monster bent on its death. In the end the jewelry served two crucial purposes though. It not only forced the creature to obey its new master, but it prevented it from leaving the body and trying to flee into some distant corner of the Oroza.


    The river dragon remained in a stupor during the long months that the new rib cage of bronze was forged and bolted to the stumps of bone that remained from the original swamp dragon. It was only when the thing made the long crawl from where it had been repaired deep in a swampygoon back to the river on a stormy night that the water spirit woke up once more.


    ¡°Wh-what have you done!¡± the tortured spirit silently screamed beneath the water while it took stock of its predicament.


    ¡°I have given you a body to match the shape of your soul,¡± the Lich taunted. ¡°Do you like it?¡±


    ¡°I am not meant to be chained to flesh!¡± The elemental roared. The sound of its suffering wasn¡¯t enough to breach the surface of the water, but it was enough to wake up every mortal with a sense of self-preservation for miles in every direction. For a moment, each of them rightly feared for their lives. Most went back to sleep, sure it was a dream, but for the river dragon, the nightmare would never end.


    It was true, of course. That was the awful part. A creature of pure elemental majesty should never have tied herself to something physical. She¡¯d made a terrible mistake in trying to face a threat beyond herprehension, and she would pay for that mistake.


    ¡°You wore the body of a dead woman, so you could leave the river and challenge a master of death,¡± the Lich gloated. ¡°It is little surprise that you lost, and now you will suffer the consequences of defeat.¡±


    ¡°I will never serve you!¡± the river dragon tried to thrash and break her new body of metal and bone, but the wards glowed brightly as they were invoked to keep her from hurting herself.


    ¡°Your service is not optional,¡± the Lich responded. ¡°Starting tonight, you will do exactly what I require. You will prowl the dark water that you used to serve, you will devour the other spirits called Oroza that you used to share the river with, and you will bring me back their essence to fuel my other experiments until the whole of the river is a graveyard, and you are thest of your kind.¡±


    The river dragon¡¯s only response was a wordless scream of pain and tears of rage. ¡°Please, have mercy! Don¡¯t make me do this,¡± she sobbed, as she started to swim downriver. There wasn¡¯t an ounce ofpassion in the Lich¡¯s soul though, and the only thing that filled its heart as it watched her go was triumph. Boundless, overflowing triumph.


    She hated her orders with every ounce of her being, but she could do nothing to stop herself from fulfilling them. She might secretly hope that some bigger fish would be able to destroy her, just as she had helped to destroy the original swamp dragon, but that was unlikely. She was a master of water, fitted into a creature built to y her kind. Even a god of the ocean, if there was such a thing, would be hard-pressed to fight her in her current form.


    The swamp dragon had always been fearsome, but now it was a killing machine that would cleave a bloody path down river. It had the rage of whole goblin tribes, the strength of two dozen lizard men, and both of those things were powered by the ethereal heart of a captured water dragon that was wrapped inyers of runes and enchantments that made it utterly obedient.


    It was the finest work that Lich had ever done, but it knew before too long it would dream up some new dark servant that would make the dragon pale inparison. It only needed inspiration, because it had all the time in the world.


    After basking in its triumph, the Lich finally turned back to its other servants. It had been almost a year since it had started its fight with the river spirit, and in that time other matters had surely developed that required its attention.

 Chapter 31: Lost in the Dark

    Chapter 31: Lost in the Dark


    It was hard to believe the world had changed so much in the darkness¡¯s absence, but when it returned its focus to the world beyond itsir, it found the map practically rewritten. It wasn¡¯t just its influence, either. The patterns of both people and mana from the Wodenspine to the Oroza had shifted more than it would have thought possible. Its shadow was still spread across the world, but all the pieces had been rearranged in its absence to the point where the game no longer looked the same.


    As it ventured out into the night to gaze upon the world with fresh eyes, it saw that its territory had advanced farther than ever upriver, and the poisoned river slowly bent to itsmand, connecting the inds of bloodstained territory from the swamp to the capital. The swamp could touch a dozen fishing viges it had never even tasted before now, and through the traces of poison that it had lodged in the spiritual life of the river it could see the patterns of those spirits almost without trying.


    As it soared over the river it inspected the life it contained, and was pleased to note that among almost all of it there was the faintest trace of death. Only a year into its n, and already the mighty river was closer to the swamp than it had ever been before. It was a beautiful sight. Before its protracted battle with the river dragon, the cholerium might have only sickened one in ten thousand. It wouldn¡¯t be surprised if that number had doubled and doubled again in the meantime. Unless it further tainted the wellspring, the swamp didn¡¯t expect the taint to grow much thicker, but that was fine. This was enough for now.


    Fallravea showed fresh scars, but it was no longer in ruins. Throughout the city, rubble had been cleared, and new buildings were being erected on the foundations of the old. It was a slow process, but it was that slowness that spoke to the swamp. For the repairs to have advanced so far meant that it had withdrawn from the world for a very long time, at perhaps exactly the wrong moment. There were still wrecked blocks that it could carve out some sort of special purpose, but many of the most geomantically appropriate locations for a secondir were already being upied by half finished row homes and trading houses. It was a terrible waste. The swamp looked throughout the city for Kelvun, but found him neither in his pce nor in the city, so it shifted its gaze to the southwest, looking for him.


    In the red hills it still held sway over most of thend, but in their defeat the goblins had fractured into a dozen different tribes that warred against each other and posed no threat to the men of the region. It would take some time to put those little pieces back together, and the swamp wondered if it was even worth the effort. It still held sway over much of the region, and many of the tribes kept the yellowed skull totems even as they brandished their own. The Blood Smiles, the Dark ws, the Dog Boys, and so many others. These were the tribes that warred with each other as their numbers slowly regrew.


    None of these facts mattered as much as the new outpost of humanity that stood where the Burning Skulls''ir used to be. A mining outpost. The boy had finally done as instructed and begun efforts to mine the precious gold from the cave. As the darkness drifted effortlessly down the shaft, he found new shoring timbers and primitive tracks beingid for mining cars, even though they used donkey driven wagons for now. The efforts were crude, but the shiny ore was leaving the cave a little at a time, and the thought that some of that would eventually end up in its hoard made the darkness burst with greed.


    So much so that it couldn¡¯t help but notice how many nuggets were ending up in the miners'' tents and the overseers'' belts. As the men sat around campfires, they would roll dice and gamble little bits of food and unrefined metal with their fellows. They were drinking andughing while they yed with their stolen wealth that had been filched in its caves. It would have to do something about that, of course, but today was not the day. It would not let anyone get between it and its rightful share of the gold.


    The young count wasn¡¯t here either, though the darkness could sense his presence. He¡¯d been here recently enough that it could follow the trail across the moonlit ins toward the swamp. The darkness was neither omnipotent nor omnipresent, but at night in its own territory it might as well be. Nothing could hide from it. Certainly not a mind that the darkness had already touched.


    It eventually found Kelvun camped in a river on the edge of the swamp. The young man was snoring softly in thergest tent of the group. The darkness glided past the young Count¡¯s guards and his tent p and walked directly into his dreams to quickly rifle through his memories. It was surprised and even a little impressed by what it found. The pawn was actually thinking ahead, and rather than trying to manage the nonexistent roads from his new mine to the capital, he¡¯d hired mages to build a canal through the swamp. Between that and the river they were nning to divert, they¡¯d be able to make this ruggedndscape bloom. The swamp approved of such a slow, long term n.


    More people within its domain was always better, and if thousands of people lived clustered around the swamp, then it could easily afford to make a family disappear every now and again. The bloodshed would be med on the goblins, and not on it, so it would be all to the good.


    The darkness walked through the young cretin¡¯s mind, but besides the ns he had for what was now his kingdom, he mostly thought of women, and what the other nobles of the region thought of him. It was a shallow pool that was dirtier than the swamp water it called home, and the darkness quickly left when it determined that part of the gold that the Count was bringing back to the capital with him was intended to be delivered to it.


    That was the most important thing. The darkness had gone to great lengths to give this worm that power he ached for, and now it would be paid for that work, in gold or in blood. That was all the darkness needed the lording for now. To mine its gold and popte itsnd with more victims. As long as he was doing those two things, it didn¡¯t care how frivolously thed spent his time.


    Everything the darkness had seen was strange enough, but as it returned to the heart of its swamp, it was truly astounded by what it saw. What had been a tower and couple small buildings for collecting the river tolls had be a full-blown vige while it had been distracted fighting for its life.


    There wasn¡¯t just the rickety piers that Kelvun had sunk when he first arrived. Now there were three piers and several small fishing vessels moored at them. Next to those docks were fishmongers, menders, and two separate bars. For a moment, the swamp could notprehend so many changes, or the huts that people slumbered in behind them. Where would they have found enough earth to raise so many buildings above the water line.


    That was when it noticed the canal. It wasn¡¯t a particrly deep wound. It was only 5 feet deep and almost 15 feet wide, but cut by magic, it traveled straight through the swamp like a line to the north-west. What had once been an unimportant backwater was now the most important crossroads of the region, and it was drawing men to it like maggots to a corpse. The swamp had mixed feelings about that. Part of it wanted to snuff out everyst one of these interlopers and fill the new canal in a tide of blood that would be washed out to the Oroza.


    It stayed its rage as well as its minions, though.


    As good as that would feel, it would be incredibly counterproductive. In truth, nothing that the lordling had done was detrimental to its ns, but the fact that the swamp had not ordered him to take these steps still galled it.


    It disappeared into the caverns beneath the tiny boomtown in a puff of mist and re-emerged in its own darkness. Here at least it wasfortable, and it could forget that only a few dozen feet above it were men sleeping in what they thought was perfect safety. It would teach them otherwise, eventually.


    The Lich stared into the dark as it considered the variables. There were too many possible ns to consider, and a million ways it could let its attention be divided if it wasn¡¯t careful. In the end, it decided that it would have to gather the goblins back into a single fist eventually, but they were not the only minions in the region. As it surveyed the swamp, looking at the damage that the Count¡¯s canal had wrought on thendscape, it found the lizard men were flourishing once more in the ces farthest from man. The swamp would devote some attention to them, it decided, but not before the mages that had cut this scar. As soon as theypleted their great work, the swamp would devour them whole. Not only would it bring more elemental knowledge to its library on a topic that was sorelycking, but it was the only reward that seemed fair for all the hard work they¡¯d spent defacing its home.


    Yes, the goblins and the lizards would make fine servants, but the Lich had its sights set onrger targets. When Grod had brought the Stone Fists to heel it had learned much of the monsters that had preyed on the goblins deeper in the mountains. There were no true dragons unfortunately, but there had been ogres, chimera, and wyverns, and the darkness would dearly love to make some truly monstrous creations with the parts that those creatures could provide.


    All of that would require a separate entrance, though, it realized as it imagined the logistics. There was no way that it would be able to get the fresh corpse of an ogre down from the mountains, and through the small river entrance before it hadpletely purified. At a thought, it moved two dozen zombies from what they had been doing to a new task: building an entrance to the north-west. If the humans insisted on building a canal through the swamp, then the Lich could use it too.


    At least that would be true after it built a deathly ferryman appropriate to the task.


    Item by item, the list formed in its mind, getting longer and longer all the time. At first it was just a list of the things it needed to do, but slowly each of those became a seperate list of the things it would have to aplish to achieve therger task. Soon it was a long and wandering list that was still growing all the time like a cancer, but as each item was decided on, somewhere deep within its necropolis a servant woke from storage and started shambling through the empty halls in a quest to fufill its master''s desire. Sometimes that was a skilled fleshcrafter, but often as not it was amon drudge with simple steel tools.


    All of thembored in the sightless dark for the Lich. Its will would be done, no matter how many months or years it took to aplish.

 Chapter 32: Draining the Swamp

    Chapter 32: Draining the Swamp


    Kelvun woke shortly after midnight with a start. Despite the warm night and the sweat stains on his night clothes, he was shivering with cold and when he lit themp on his bedside he could still see his breath fogging. After all this time, the darkness had finallye back to pay him a visit, and it had not been gentle. While Kelvuny in bed paralyzed, he had felt the shadows rifling through his mind for anything of interest.


    He swallowed hard, worried at what that dark spirit might have found.


    It had been almost a year since the day that the fear and the pain had shot through him. One moment he was celebrating how easily they¡¯d taken the mine, and the next he was ovee by fear and nausea as pain shot through him. He¡¯d thought his vile master was going to kill him for his seditious thoughts, but after a few minutes, it passed like their connection was ended. The doctor they¡¯d brought with him decided it was nothing more than a fever that had already been sweeping through his men, and bled him to cure it, but even though Kelvun knew that wasn¡¯t what it was, he stayed silent.


    That silence had started out perfectly natural, after all, who could he tell? Even if he had someone he could talk to, what would he tell them? I made a deal with a devil in exchange for power, and now my family is dead, and my birthright is in ruins? There was no priest he could confess that to. Now that he was 18, they¡¯d just execute him and install one of his cousins in his house. It wouldn¡¯t matter if the death was a punishment for evil deeds or a mercy killing because he¡¯d gone mad. Either way, there would be no more Garvins, and a Gerwin or a Geldin would rule over Greshen county in his ce.


    Kelvun would never ept such a travesty. This was his birthright, and he¡¯d let no one steal it from him. He¡¯d not only defended the region against the goblins and crushed them, so they could never rise again to threaten him, but he¡¯d made a huge gold discovery that would be more than enough to finance all his future ns.


    Without the dreams and the other little reminders that he was chained to arger power, it had been easy enough for him to believe that he¡¯d aplished all of this himself, and after he¡¯d lied to himself long enough it wasn¡¯t even really a lie anymore. Everywhere he went, his people agreed - he was the hero his father never was, and had been sent by the gods to save them. Between that and the fact that there hadn¡¯t been a single report of a new attack by goblins or zombies, it was easy to believe that everything he thought he remembered about that grinning golden skull were just fairy stories from his childhood.


    He couldn¡¯t anymore, though, because it was back, and even after all this time, he¡¯d been powerless to resist it even a little bit. Kelvun wiped the sweat from his face with a sheet and then leaned forward, covering his face in his hands. It had been so tempting to believe that this was over, but that pleasant delusion was gone.


    Kelvun stood and walked across the tent to where the heavy chesty, and opened it. In the near dark, it was hard to see the lumpy bags that hid the lustrous metal, but Kelvun knew what was in those bags just as much as the spirit that had visited him tonight.


    ¡°I haven¡¯t forgotten,¡± he whispered, certain the spirit hadn¡¯t leftpletely. ¡°Ten bags of gold, and one of them will ¡®disappear¡¯ when we reach the river, just as I promised.¡±


    Even when he¡¯d been certain the swamp had been part of some desperate fever dream, he¡¯d still nned on tithing the river just in case. The toll ie had been excellent, but the geomancers that he¡¯d hired to n and dig the canal had told him that the river was ailing for reasons that they couldn¡¯t understand. The swamp itself apparently had terrible energies about it, but they expected that to get better once the water was flowing, and it was dr¡ª


    Kelvun cut off his thoughts forcefully there. That was the veryst thing he wanted to think about. He tried never to talk about it, and to avoid thinking about it wherever possible, but tonight it would be especially bad. If the darkness that he¡¯d sold his soul to thought that its pawn was double-crossing it, then he had no doubt that his life would be forfeit.


    Kelvun repeated why he was here. First in his mind, and then out loud, as he forced his mind to believe that this and only this was the reason he¡¯de all this way. ¡°I¡¯m here to ensure the first delivery of gold bars from the Leo mine, and on the way back I decided that I wanted to see how the third phase of the canal was going.¡±


    He said it with conviction, but his mind rebelled against it. It was all true. They¡¯d dug a trench clear through the swamp and were gathering rivers to keep the und stretches full, so they could use it, but that was hardly the only reason it had been built.


    Kelvun gritted his teeth. Trying to focus on what he could and could not think about in light of tonight¡¯s events was going to make it an especially long trip back to ckwaternding.


    In the morning, he reviewed the ns with the mages'' apprentices, as humiliating as that was. He hadn¡¯te all this way or paid so much gold to be talked down to by boys his own age. He¡¯d paid good coin for elementalists from the Magica Collegium in Abenend, but they were off studying the leylines and weaving the spells that would make the whole thing possible, and were not to be disturbed under any circumstances.


    Kelvun scowled as he studied the map again. ¡°So then these two streams and this river will be redirected to the channel here and here," he asked pointing to the map, "and that will get the channel to the mine?¡±


    He¡¯d helped draw two of these already, and he would have thought that would make them easier to read, but all the small lines the mages used just made the whole things swim before his eyes until they zed over.


    ¡°Unfortunately, no,¡± one of the apprentices answered, though Kelvun couldn¡¯t remember if it was Fredek or Lancel, and didn¡¯t want to embarrass himself by asking again. ¡°As my master¡¯s missives to you have stated, given the terrain a canal all the way to your mine will not be possible, but he can¡ª¡±


    ¡°And that¡¯s why I¡¯m here,¡± Kelvun interrupted. ¡°To make it possible. I¡¯m not paying a king''s ransom for ¡®most of the way.¡¯ Do you understand that?¡±


    ¡°But sir¡­ your Lordship, be reasonable,¡± the other one pleaded. ¡°If you look at the lines of elevation, you will see we¡¯re not lying. No magic can make water run up hill. The best we can do is to flood this valley and steer the canal to there. At only ten miles away, it will¡ª¡±


    ¡°Still be very susceptible to attacks by goblins and bandits now and in the future,¡± Kelvun yelled, mming his fist on the table. "I need you to do better, or I will find someone who can!¡±


    After that, despite his best efforts to exin himself, the meeting devolved into a shouting match, and Kelvun eventually stormed out of the tent and told his men to begin packing up. This had been half the reason for the trip, and it felt entirely wasted because these supposedly smart men couldn¡¯t understand his vision!


    Once he calmed down, and the servants had started loading the barge, he realized it was all to the good, though. Even though it hadn¡¯t ended as he¡¯d hoped, his annoyance would make good cover for the shadows inside of him. If he couldn¡¯t be bothered to remember every detail of a meeting like this, then why would the darkness that watched him pay any attention at all to it.


    Before the young Lord had even made it back to thending, the dreams returned. They were hazy things filled with dread at first, as he wrestled with a woman who was also a rotting sea serpent, and he slept very poorly as a result. By the third night down river, though, those dreams had resolved into something even more vicious. He was torn to pieces by work men that bet his teeth and fingers over games of dice. At first, Kelvun worried that the swamp had discovered that he was double-crossing it, and was taking its time to torture him. It came to him only very slowly that in the dream, the pieces of him were metaphors for real theft that was going on in his mines. It was a gold rush, and it was far more lucrative to smuggle out a few nuggets than it was to break your back for a few coppers every day.


    None of this stopped Kelvun from dropping a five pound bag of gold into the river on their first night on the Oroza, but it was only when he decided that something needed to be done that he stopped. He¡¯d meant for it to be a more solemn asion, but in the end he¡¯d just chucked it over the side between rounds of drinking with some of the mates.


    ¡°So if they¡¯re really gambling away your gold then why don¡¯t you cut off their fingers?¡± a sailor asked as Kelvun returned to the warmth of the candle lit cabin.


    He¡¯d been talking about his problem while they diced the night away, and he¡¯d probably said more than he should have, but there was nothing he could do about it now.


    ¡°If I cut off the fingers of every man that cheats me, then there¡¯d be not one man in a hundred left to wield a pickaxe to mine the gold in the first ce,¡± Kelvun answered as he picked his drink back up and smiled.


    Everyoneughed at that before they helpfully chimed in on everything he could do to stem the tide of the theft, which, if the dreams were to be believed, was abominable. Flogging, hiring more overseers, and paying better were the options that tonight¡¯s drinking partners suggested the most, but the one that stuck with him the longest was the strangest by far.


    ¡°You could invite the priests to oversee the mine for you. They¡¯re the real penny pinchers, they are, and they have no qualms with flogging a man until he¡¯s seen the light.¡±


    As odd as it seemed, eventually Kelvun decided that was the best response, if the darkness would let him get away with it. Not only would they be happy to provide some incorruptible oversight for a healthy tithe, but their influence and protection against the swamp in the future would be wee as well.


    In the end, it took Kelvun weeks to draft the letter, but that was only because he had so many balls to attend to celebrate his sessful return to Fallravea. The only darkness that intervened to prevent him from writing the missive sooner was the sort that urred in the bedrooms of all the women that wanted to personally thank him for saving the city. The shadow that haunted his dreams didn¡¯t seem to care that it had invited the servants of the divine to shepherd the idle and wayward souls of red hills. It wasn¡¯t the response that he would have expected, but if the dread golden eyes were busy looking at something else besides him, then he was hardly going toin.

 Chapter 33: The Tide of Progress

    Chapter 33: The Tide of Progress


    The county of Greshen didn¡¯t have a throne, per se, but if it did, Kelvun would have sat uneasily on it. It had an audience hall, but most of the important decisions were made around the table in his family¡¯s parlor amongst the real power brokers of the city, long before they were ever aired in the grand gallery.


    He couldn¡¯t shake the feeling that many of the decisions he was forced to make over the next few months had already been decided elsewhere, and that they were only brought to him to rubber stamp. Everything was just going a bit too smoothly that autumn, he decided. The waterfront was practically back to normal, the gold being sent from the mine was more than his treasurer had forecast, and the king himself had sent a royal decree by messenger, thanking him for avenging his father and putting down the goblin menace before they could do further damage to the kingdom.


    The only thing that had gone wrong is that the damnable mages he¡¯d hired to carve his canal had just disappeared one day. It wasn¡¯t his fault, of course. They¡¯d finished their work and been paid of course, but ording to the Magica Collegium in Abenend they¡¯d just disappeared sometime after that. Their entire party had. They¡¯d vanished without a trace. The collegium had med him of course, and weren¡¯t happy about the situation, but he was meless.


    Kelvun¡¯s patron might have something to do with it, of course, but if it had, he didn¡¯t want to know. That would lead to too many unthinkable thoughts, too much worry about why the swamp might have decided they should perish, and why he might be next on the hit list. That blow never fell though, and even though it was the worries about his court that forced the young lord to winter in Fallravea, the idea that he might just disappear one day was never far from his mind.


    The dreams still came through the winter, but less often, and they were less clear in what they wanted. The only one that even gave Kelvun something like a specific task, was that in the spring, the darkness wanted a temple built to honor the Oroza. That was an easy enough request that would have happened eventually even without his assistance. Many small shrines already existed up and down the river. The dreams were very clear though. It wanted a shrine to Oroza the flood-dragon, the most powerful and unpredictable of her forms.


    That at least was unusual, as this far north the river was usually venerated as the gentle water bearer or thenguid serpent, but Kelvun wasn¡¯t going to argue. It mostly just left him wondering. Why would an evil spirit that dwelled in a swamp want to venerate a river goddess? Had building the canal forced the swamp to change its ways or altered its elemental alignment somehow? So many warriors had tried to y the undead threat for so long, when the whole time, all that needed to happen to take the wind out of its sails was to drain the damn thing.


    It was a start at least, but his dark master took a back seat to his other worries. Even with the snows piled high, no one attempted to poison him during any of the midwinter balls he attended, and even on the nights where Kelvun slept alone, no one attempted to garrote him. Nheless, that gnawing sense of uncertainty and precariousness never left him. By the spring, he¡¯d doubled his spymaster¡¯s budget to make sure that everyone worth watching was being watched, but even that bore no treacherous fruit.


    ¡°Maybe the only one after you is me,¡± Adanna told him one frosty winter morning while they were in bed together. He¡¯d taken advantage of the pleasant afterglow to whisper some of his doubts to her in an unguarded moment, but she didn¡¯t see what he was worried about.


    ¡°Well, that can¡¯t be true,¡± he said, with a hollow smile as he tried to figure out whether he¡¯d made a terrible mistake by telling her anything at all. ¡°If that were true then how would you exin Fahraah, or Susanna, or ¡­


    ¡°Oh, you monster,¡± she said with a light p that was followed up by a kiss. Even if his imagined enemies at court weren¡¯t real, he certainly wasn¡¯t imagining the women that hunted him. He was the region''s most eligible bachelor, and if one thing had been true since all of this had started, it was that there had been no end to the marriage offers that had been proposed by the other families of the region.


    Once winter broke he would leave the city again for ckwater Landing for a few weeks, just to escape them, he decided, once Adanna had finally left to get dressed. A few secondster, he decided he should probably have her watched too. He trusted her, but jealousy could do strange things to people, and everyone was jealous of his sessestely.


    It was shortly before spring that he proposed his biggest n to date: freend for the peasants that would farm it. The nobles were against it, even after he assured them that none of their holdings would be reduced to make this region. That seemed to anger them further, which had been entirely unexpected until his advisor had exined to him the reasons why.


    ¡°Even if you increased their holdings, it would do no good,¡± Temonen said after he¡¯d pulled him aside. ¡°Their peasants will still flee for the better offer, leaving no one to work the existingnds.¡±


    That at least made sense to Kelvun. There was a critical shortage of strong, able bodies after the carnage the goblins had causedst year. Fields were already going fallow for ack of both plows and plowmen, but he wouldn¡¯t let that change his mind. Not only would changing his mind after making that kind of announcement make him look weak, but there would have been no point in draining that damn swamp if he wasn¡¯t going to be sending people to there to take advantage of the fertilend. Farmers would bring their gods and their shrines with them, and with a little luck Kelvun was sure that within a few years he could bury that giant evil with the prayers of thousands of the devout.


    In the end he mollified his nobles by announcing that they would use the newly vacantnd to recruit immigrants from other parts of the kingdom. They would rebuild Greshen and make it a home worth defending.


    ¡°Why should we have outsiders in our finends,¡± Baron Barrington boasted. ¡°Rhuzens? Duttons? They¡¯ll never be true Greshens like the rest of us.¡±


    Even if he wouldn¡¯t admit it publicly, he would privately concede that the Baron had a point, but that point didn¡¯t matter just now. ¡°Either we import the manpower to rebuild this great county, or we¡¯ll forever be known as ¡®that backwater that was burned to the ground by the goblins.¡¯ Is that what you want? To be aughingstock?¡±


    At that moment, he took the xenophobic pride of his fellow nobles and turned it against them. No matter how much he might agree that the people of the river were better than their rivals on the sea or the ins, thest thing any of them wanted was to see their local prestige lost to a string of defeats at the hands of mere goblins. The short but violent war had made Kelvun look good, but it had made the domain, and the previous ruler of it look both feeble and ineffective. They would have to change that lest he lose the favor of the king.


    In the end Kelvunmissioned several bards to spread the word of his new decree, and soon songs like ¡®the green hills of Greshen¡¯ and ¡®ck Earth Bliss,¡¯ were being spread from inn to inn to go along with his tales of goblin ying and the older tales like ¡®To The Last Man.¡¯ It would take time for this strategy to pay off, he was sure, but Greshen surely needed the new blood. The swamp receded half a mile since the canal had been cut, in all directions that weren¡¯t abutting the river. Even without all the newnd that had been reimed from the swamp, though, many of the viges that had been ruined in the hearnd between Fallravea and the Red Hills had never been rebuilt.


    If new farms andmunities weren¡¯t established to fix that, it would not only be catastrophically bad for his tax revenues in future years. It would let thends go wild, and if that happened then who knew what monsters would upy them. No, everyone knew it was better to handle this as quickly and decisively as possible, they just wanted him to bear all the costs. These expenses at least would be borne by all the nobles of the region, though, no matter how they might feel about it.


    After all of that was set in motion, Kelvun¡¯s fears redoubled, but it wasn¡¯t until a poison tester of his died shortly after he announced the new temple to Oroza the dragon, that he finally had something to hold on to. The doctors said that it was an acute illness, and not an allergy or a poison, but Kelvun was unconvinced, and shortly after that he made ns to relocate to ckwater Landing for a season at least.


    He was popr enough with the people of Fallravea, and did not fear his subjects, but the county capital also held almost all the other noble families, and one or more of them was definitely out to get him. He thought about asking the darkness for help, but decided thest thing he wanted was to owe that unknowable creature any more than he already did. If left alone he could smother it in its sleep, but giving it some new goal or intrigue might reverse all the progress that Kelvun had made so far.


    ckwater Landing was safe enough. It wasn¡¯t nearly asfortable as Garvin manor of course, but enough money and time would fix that, and in a few months once everyone had calmed down and his spymaster Wurmnth had figured out who had tried to poison him, he coulde back to be reunited with his stable of lovers. He might even find a few new ones while he was there, he decided, perking up at the prospect. A guileless country girl might be just what he needed to help him get over his brush with death.


    ¡°But what if it really was sickness,¡± the old fool had asked him, the night before Kelvun was to depart. ¡°What if no one tried to poison you?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ll be back in three months, Wurmnth. Five at the verytest. And when I get back I¡¯ll expect a very short list of names. If you don¡¯t have one of those for me, well then I might have to make one myself. You wouldn¡¯t like to see me pluck those from the air at random, would you?¡± Kelvun let the threat hang there in the air for a moment before he spoke again. ¡°Who knows who I might decide belongs on there. After all, I¡¯m not half the expert that you are in these things.¡±


    ¡°Of course not my lord,¡± the old spymaster said, swallowing hard.


    Kelvun had clearly made his point, and that fact alone made him smile all the way to his destination.

 Chapter 34: Regaining Control

    Chapter 34: Regaining Control


    The swamp was dying.


    It was a slow process that would be measured in years, but the darkness could feel it just the same. Day by day, the waters receded from the shallowest edges of its domain, and what had once been shallowgoons or deep pits of mud slowly solidified into soil. The grasses came after that, binding all that sand and silt to the ground like a thousand, thousand little ropes that sought to restrain the darkness and separate it from the world above. No matter how slow it was, it was a process that was impossible to hide.


    It wasn¡¯t a secret, even though his figurehead Kelvun thought it was. The reason was clear. A great gouge had been cut through the whole area, and every day a little more of its dark water left to poison the Oroza. Five years ago that might have been enough to y the darkness, or at least cripple it. Back then it had been the murky waters as much as it had been an unquiet spirit.


    Now it was merely a nuisance.


    The falling waters affected the flora and fauna of the region even more than the cholerium affected the animals that dwelled in the river as whole ecosystems were overrun, but none of that affected the darkness that had been incubated in its heart for so long. The boy had tried to y the monster that had haunted his dreams, but he had seeded only in striking at the sloughed off skin of a snake that had long since molted and metamorphized into something all the more terrible.


    In time the Lich would repay the insult with interest, but for now it merely bided its time. For so long it had been a region or a ce more than a person, but its lengthy duel with the river dragon had forced it to narrow its worldview to a single point for so long that it had started to identify with a body again. That statue-still body was nothing more than a gold-d corpse, though. It was one more thing that would have to be fixed. It hadbored at length to build ingenious creations like the swamp dragon, the dark messenger, and its new ferryman, but in all this time it had not improved the only corpse that really mattered in the whole dungeon: its own.


    Everything that its foolish Count had done was to the good anyway, whether the lordling knew it or not. The swamp needed blood and souls more than it needed privacy or seclusion now, and as the waters receded, they were reced with rich ck earth that the farmers were flocking to. In time those farmers would have families and build viges. Those poptions would grow evenrger until towns erupted, each with hundreds of souls waiting to be devoured. In that sense, the darkness was sowing seeds of its own, even if it would be years or decades before its bloody harvest arrived.


    The Count had apparently put out a call for all the poor andndless to move to the region, and in exchange for the hard work of taming thend they would be given tenancy for free. The darkness had neither known nor cared about the foolish and short-sighted offer until it found the offer in the dreams of hundreds, but it was interesting nheless. All these souls had left their homnd for a better life, and they hade like sheep to the ughter. They brought their own gods and faiths with them, but none of them found much purchase in ground that was already owned by the darkness.


    It was subverting existing faiths faster than the servants of those superstitions could even attempt to tie it down. Already the friezes that were being painted for the new temple to the river dragon Oroza depicted her as a drowning victim rather than the queen of the river that she usually was, and no one seemed to object. Why should they? They knew it to be true deep down. Especially the priestesses it had given visions to as to exactly how far she¡¯d fallen. She was neither a swamp dragon nor a river dragon anymore. She was a leviathan, and she relentlessly hunted anything that thought of itself as the Oroza from one end of the river to the other, leaving the spiritual ecosystem of the ce just as tattered and threadbare as her worshipers¡¯ faith.


    The Lich had thought that the river dragon was just thergest of the spirits in the river it had seen so far, but it had been wrong. At least ording to the cult that surrounded her, she was more than that. In the vernacr of the region she was a small god, a being of local and narrow powers, that was powerful nheless. That meant that she was closer to what Krulm¡¯venor had been, than the fallen wretch that the godling was now. It was an interesting idea that had provoked much discussion between the Lich and its ghastly library.


    Was the only difference between the highest gods and the lowest river spirit or faded ghost merely a question of magnitude? It would have thought that there should be more to it than that, but increasingly it appeared that that might be the case.


    She was a being of pure essence and water, well at least she had been. Now she wore the same decaying flesh as the rest of its servants and the chains that were both magical and spiritual in nature. She¡¯d once been the guardian of her ecosystem, but now she was merely an attack dog for his domain.


    She wouldn¡¯t be thest though.


    The same techniques that forced her to obey him were even now being tested on a skeleton of steel too strong for Krulm¡¯venor to melt, but even when the runes wereplete and understood, such aplicated work of art would take a long time to forge without the godlings help, and there was no way it would help the Lich willingly at this point. The tiny spark of life that fire spirit still had served two purposes: to bluster in rage and to scream in pain. Beyond that itsntern flickered in silence in the Lich¡¯s innermost sanctum like the forgotten toy it was.


    The darkness had moved on to other, more loyal servants. Right now it was in the midst of gathering the lizardman tribes and removing them from their habitat before the humans decided to mobilize men to purge the fierce hunters themselves. The Lich knew how that ended and had no desire to waste that strength in the embalming vats of the sprawling second floor of its dungeon.


    The ferryman was taking them north, in small groups to the foot of the Wodenspine Mountains. Theke valleys they were being delivered to were a little cold for the reptiles, but the swamp had already proven to its own satisfaction that they would be able to hibernate through the winter. That wasn¡¯t the important part. It didn¡¯t need them to flourish there, it needed them to kill.


    In the swamps the lizard men were the top of the food chain, but in those treacherous mountains they would be somewhat closer to the bottom. It was no matter. The swamp would gift them the same deathless strength that it had previously lent to The ck Teeth. They were being relocated for one purpose: to bring the Lich the corpses of true monsters that it could use as the raw material for even greater horrors. Their formidable strength alone wouldn¡¯t be enough to bring down a manticore or a griffon, but the darkness would make sure that they survived the attempt to try again. Their tireless devotion to it through the years had earned the tribes that much. This time, their totem poles would rise in their new home and reflect all the strange creatures that they killed in its name.


    There were only so many ways you could manipte the bones and spirits of men andmon beasts before they were warped beyond recognition after all, and it would need more than the zombie legions it had and the goblin tribes that were slowly being reformed under the leadership of the Dark Eye tribe for the wars that were toe. The goblins might be useful against their southern neighbor at least, though it would be a long time until the fingers of the tribes once more curled into a fist worth using against any opponent, and unless it tamed Krulm¡¯venor once more, that fist wouldck any real force.


    It could feel Lindvell stirring to the west, even as Dutton eyed its neighbor enviously from across the river to the east. The enmity between Greshen and the county of Lindvell which hugged the coast were well known and long-standing, but the discovery of the region¡¯s new gold mine in the red hills had added their other neighbor, the county of Dutton to the list. For a long time they had been the richer of the two river dominated regions. They had better soil and consequently, more people than Greshen. The poisoning of the river was affecting the other kingdom more though, if only because of the direction that the Lich drew the mana. The loss of poor share croppers to betternds merely added insult to injury.


    The fool Kelvun was more obsessed with treachery in his inner circle than he was with the enemies that were beginning to gather in all directions. Ostensibly they were all stewards of the king¡¯snds, and wars between thosends were supposed to be rare, but if the King felt threatened by the glorious ascent of Kelvun ¡°Goblins Bane¡± Garvin, then he might allow such a thing. And if a war came to pace, the Lich had no doubt that both of Greshen¡¯s neighbors would strike at once.


    Necessarily, such a war would have to be one fought between mortal powers, the Lich thought with frustration. It would be easy enough for it to field an army of the dead and crush either region, but that would draw in the church, and upset all the Lich¡¯s ns. No, since its pet lordling was busy chasing the skirts of barmaids in ckwater Landing, it would fall to the darkness to stop the war before it could get started.


    Normally it would be all in favor of a little war. Some infighting that left thousands dead while nothing else really changed was exactly what the Lich had just done to the county with its goblin army. A new army would remove his pawn though, and with it the gold that had been promised to it, and for the darkness, that was intolerable. Something had to be done, and for better or worse, the only tool it had that could work such a miracle was a gue.


    It had been cooking up several, using the gray shivers as a basis, but until recently it had been focusing on creating diseases that maximized suffering rather than contagion. That had changed. Now it wanted something that didn¡¯t just make the afflicted pray for death, it wanted something that made sure that where one victim fell with a fever ten more would soon follow.


    This would take time, so for every minute the Lich wasted on building the perfect disease that would kill off enough men to ensure another war free year or two, it increased the boy¡¯s paranoia just a bit more in his sleep. If the Lich wasn¡¯t going to be able to focus on what was truly important, then neither would its servant.

 Chapter 35: Every Single Body

    Chapter 35: Every Single Body


    ¡°I¡¯m telling you, it doesn¡¯t make sense,¡± Todd said, mostly to himself as he sat against the wheel of the wagon that held the bodies and took advantage of the scant shade that it provided.


    The other boys were letting him rest because he¡¯d gotten overheated from the work they were doing. That¡¯s what he¡¯d told them at least, but he doubted they believed him. Why would they? It wasn¡¯t a particrly hot day, so sun sickness was unlikely. Cowardice or enervation at the sight of the corpses that he and the other orphans had been charged with burying in the churchyard today was much more likely.


    That was doubly true considering he¡¯d fainted right after one of the sackcloth bags had ripped open, spilling limbs and viscera onto the patchy yellow grass. He was sure he¡¯d seen the man in the bag move though. The corpse had fixed him with its dead eyes and tried to warn him about the gold just like thest one had. So, now he was very carefully staring at his own feet to avoid seeing anything else unnatural while he recovered from his embaressing fainting spell in the shade.


    ¡°Is he still talking?¡± Bradwin asked Cole, pretending he couldn¡¯t hear Todd¡¯s muttering.


    ¡°Talk? All I hear is croaking. I don¡¯t speak animal,¡± Cole answered. They bothughed at that, but even their jokes at his expense didn¡¯t stop their digging. There were four corpses today, and if they had any prayer of getting all of them in the ground before dinner, they needed to hustle.


    ¡°Very funny, guys.¡± Todd answered, rolling his eyes. ¡°You see what I mean though, don¡¯t you?¡±


    He tried his best to y off jokes like that, because he knew that they would only get worse if he revealed that they got under his skin. He didn¡¯t think he was ugly enough to really bepared to a frog of course, but he was smaller than the other boys, and his name¡­ well no one would use theds that took their frustrations out on him of being clever.


    Garvin¡¯s gift, as the priests insisted they call the monastery, was still only half built, but even the red y walls that were slowly rising a little bit every day, and the tents that sheltered inside them from the wind were a kinder fate than he¡¯d be able to find anywhere else after his vige had been wiped out, and his family with it. He tried to be grateful to the gods for what little they gave him, even if he had to deal with this kind of nonsense every day¡­


    ¡°Okay TOAD, I¡¯ll listen, but when you¡¯re done with your fairy story your break is over and, and you¡¯re getting back in the pit to dig. I¡¯m not workingte because you¡¯ve been out of the water too long,¡± Bradwin answered, interrupting that train of thought. ¡°Exin it again, but this time use your small words. Cole - he ain''t so smart as the rest of us.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m smart enough to know I can kick your ass,¡± Cole spat back, but he did nothing beyond that because he was precisely smart enough to know that Bradwin would break his bones if he tried.


    In the little group of orphans that was slowly building up in this backwater gutter of human suffering there was no one stronger than Bradwin, and no one weaker than Todd. The older boy ruled over the rest of them when none of the adults were around. If that made Brad the King of the hill, then that made Todd the jester, because he was the butt of almost every joke.


    ¡°Think about it,¡± he said starting from the beginning because he couldn¡¯t remember how much of this he¡¯d said out loud and how much of it had been in his head before he¡¯d fainted. ¡°This month there¡¯s been what - 18 bodies including these one?¡±


    ¡°Sounds right?¡± Brad grunted, brining up another shovel full. ¡°But that¡¯s not so many. There¡¯s hundreds of miners and thousands of goblins - sometimes they¡¯re going to kill each other. It¡¯s bound to happen. It¡¯s the will of the gods, the priests said so.¡±


    That part was true. The priests had given many long sermons to the boys about the mysterious will of the divine. He was sure that the message was meant to reassure the orphans, given that the cause of their parents'' deaths had been goblin raids in nearly every instance, but that just raised other questions for Todd.


    ¡°Sure. People die,¡± he agreed, wanting to move on to his main point. ¡°But those 18 bodies are from four raids, and every one of them was on caravans going to the canal, not from the canal.¡±


    ¡°Ohhhh,¡± Cole chimed in. ¡°That¡¯s what you¡¯re croaking about. You¡¯re saying that the goblins are following them from here to the¡ª¡±


    ¡°Of course that¡¯s what he¡¯s saying. It¡¯s obvious,¡± Brad answered. ¡°Everyone knows the caravans to the mines are guarded better than the ones leaving it.¡±


    That wasn¡¯t true. It was actually the opposite of true. The groups that left the minesden with golden bars had almost double the guards of thoseing from the canal bringing fresh workers and food from civilization which made it even less likely they¡¯d be the ones to be attacked, but correcting the bigger boys would likely get him a bruised for his efforts, so he tried another tactic.


    ¡°But there are only a few more guards,¡± he lied, ¡°wouldn¡¯t the goblins be just as drawn to both groups? The peopleing here travel slower because they bring livestock with them, but they always seem to attack the ones carrying gold. I think goblins would be more interested in a pig than in¡ª¡±


    ¡°Why wouldn¡¯t the goblins want gold?¡± Cole asked. ¡°Everyone wants gold. Hell - I want gold, but the priests make us turn it all in. Sounds like your theory is full of holes to me, Toad.¡±


    ¡°Yeah,¡± Bradwin echoed as he stopped digging and climbed out of the half dug grave. ¡°Your facts are all wrong. Cole found two bodies just the other day that had no gold, because he¡¯s not as lucky as me. I think you''re just saying shit to get out of digging.¡±


    Todd stood up and grabbed the offered handle, but he was careful not to look at Cole as he climbed into the pit. He knew what kind of re he¡¯d see on the other boy¡¯s face. He¡¯d given away too much with that statement without thinking. Just because no one but him had noticed Cole filching didn¡¯t mean that it hadn¡¯t happened.


    But Cole was never supposed to know that he¡¯d noticed, and Todd had done a good job of keeping that secret, until now. Since Brad hadn¡¯t picked up on it, Todd hoped that the revtion would only earn him a little extra harassment until Cole felt like he¡¯d gotten his retribution. As the grave digging wore on, Todd seemed to be proven right. The older boys were a little meaner than usual, but it didn¡¯t escte to violence, so he just kept his head down and his shovel moving until he was so exhausted that he worried that he might actually faint from the heat.


    It was only after dinner, when everyone was preparing to go to bed that Cole cornered him while he was securing the shutters on the south wall.


    ¡°What are we going to do with you, Toad?¡± he growled, grabbing Todd by the scruff of the neck and pushing him hard into the wall. ¡°You¡¯re always noticing things. You keep it up and one day you¡¯re going to notice so much that a beating isn¡¯t going to cut it and someone is going to have to shut you up for good.¡±


    ¡°I-I don¡¯t know anything and I didn¡¯t see anything,¡± Todd blurted out, struggling weakly in the grip of the other boy. If he screamed now someone might intervene, but they would probably just watch, and if Cole had an audience he would feel obliged to put on a show, which would be so much worse than taking whatever wasing in private.


    ¡°Of course you don¡¯t,¡± Cole said, grinding his victim¡¯s face into the sunbaked wall. ¡°You didn¡¯t see anything, you don¡¯t know anything, and even if you told someone they wouldn¡¯t believe you. But worthless as you are, I do have one question for you, since you know so much.¡±


    ¡°Of course! Anything,¡± Todd said, willing to say whatever he needed to, to stop this from getting worse.


    ¡°You said that every victim of the goblins had gold? Do you really think they¡¯re drawn to it?¡± Cole asked. ¡°Let''s say I have this friend - and he has a few nuggets. Enough to get far, far away from this hellhole - how can he get to the canal safely if the goblins are drawn to his stash?¡±


    ¡°Of course,¡± Todd squealed, trying to choke out words from the way Cole gripped his neck. ¡°You can¡­ you can¡­


    ¡°Hmmm? What¡¯s that? I can¡¯t hear you¡­¡± he interrupted, pressing Todd painfully against the wall again by his throat. ¡°If you¡¯re such a smart little frog, then you¡¯ll know the answer to a simple question like that, won¡¯t you?¡±


    ¡°With coal dust!¡± Todd blurted out the first stupid thing he could think of. ¡°Goblins are attracted to shiny things because they live in the dark. If you cover them in coal dust there will be no shine to attract them!¡±


    For a moment Todd thought he was going to get his brains bashed in for saying something so obviously dumb. Instead, the grip ckened, and eventually Cole released him.


    ¡°Coal dust, huh? That¡¯s pretty smart for a Toad. That will fool the priests too if someone tries to search me. Maybe you¡¯re smart enough to stay quiet after all¡­¡± Cole looked at him appraisingly, obviously trying to decide if it would be more trouble than it was worth to silence the only other person that knew he had such immense illicit wealth hidden away.


    Todd said nothing. He just backed is far into the corner from the other boy as he could.


    ¡°I¡¯ll tell you what Toad,¡± Cole finally said, conspiratorially. ¡°I¡¯m¡­ I mean my friend is getting out of here in a few days. He ns to make a run for the canal on the morning the next boat is due. If you don¡¯t say shit between now and then, well then he won¡¯t have to gut you like the gobs gutted your parents. Are we clear?¡±


    Todd didn¡¯t trust his voice, so he just nodded vigorously until the other boy left. He wasn¡¯t even sure if Cole had a knife, but he was sure that anyone with eyes that dead could do what Cole had just threatened. People disappeared all the time in the red hills, and no one was going to save him. As it was, he was too shaken up and didn¡¯t even have the presence of mind to be angered by the crassness of Cole¡¯s threat until he was lying awake in his cot.


    He tried to be optimistic. There was no reason that a tough kid like Cole couldn¡¯t make it as far as ckwater or Tagel, not that it mattered to Todd. Whether Cole escaped or he got killed along the way, he knew he¡¯d never see Cole again.


    He knew in his bones that if the bully tried to leave with that ill-gotten gold the goblins would find him and rip him to pieces though. Todd didn¡¯t know why, but he knew that the goblins were drawn to the people that carried stolen gold from the mine. It had to be cursed or something.


    As hey there in the tent listening to the snoring of the other boys, Todd almost felt guilty enough to try to tell Cole the truth, but he decided against it. Trying to save him would be the right thing to do, but he didn¡¯t feel the need to do the right thing for someone that had brought up his parents like that. If he told the priests it might save the other boy''s life, but that good deed might just cost Todd his, and even if that''s what the gods would have wanted him to do, he had no interest in making such a selfless trade for such a miserable boy.


    No, everything in Todd¡¯s life would get a little bit easier if Cole wasn¡¯t around, he decided. It was better this way.

 Chapter 36: Big Game

    Chapter 36: Big Game


    The darkness didn¡¯t pay much attention to the tribe''s transnted lizard men for months, because it had more important matters to deal with. So, it missed how much they struggled at first in the unfamiliar territory that was the high valleys of the Woden Spine mountains, but even with those hardships, they were hardy creatures that still managed to thrive. At least, they did once their wanderings led them to find a series of hot springs and sulfurous vents that would help them survive the winter without going into hibernation.


    Even with that advantage though, building a new camp and erecting a new totem to their dark god was a process that took months, not weeks. The first creature they carved into that pole was an ogre that ruled the nearby swamp. It imed the lives of two lizard warriors, and injured several more so badly that they would have perished too if the Lich had not shown them its favor and blessed them with a deathless strength that made it all but impossible for disease or blood loss to im them while their bodies knitted themselves back together.


    Most of the lizard men did their best to resist the darkness that offered itself so freely to them in those moments of mortality, in the way that the goblins never did. Not Tsson¡¯vek though, that hunter embraced it, and the anger that came with it. This interested the swamp on several levels.


    In the past the lizard men had been so alien that it had only been able to touch their minds with great difficulty while they slept in a ce of power. Their minds had be no easier to read in the decades since that first summer, but the darkness¡¯ power had doubled several times since then. Until now, it had observed their habits, and even some of their religious ceremonies, but it had never gotten so deeply inside their head to find out an individual name. It didn¡¯t even know that individuals had names until that moment.


    What it did understand was the base desire he found lurking inside that primitive mind. Behind the sluggish thoughts and the ck and white vision that saw less than a fragment of the world that the Lich could see, it found a deep throbbing hunger. Tsson¡¯vek hungered for food and mates, he hungered for power, but most of all for dominance. The goblin mind wanted to devour the world for the thrill of killing and bloodshed, but lizard men, or at least this lizard man had a desire to possess and control thends that would fulfill its other needs more than it desired the killing that would take ce to ensure it was sessful.


    It was an interesting juxtaposition that left the darkness somewhere between the two viewpoints. It needed to murder the living to feast on their souls, but it wanted all thends it could see as well due to the primal covetousness that its dark heart of gold inspired. The payments of its little lording was helping with that of course, but no matter how much he paid, it would never truly be enough for the Lich. One day it would rule over the entire world, and nothing would stop it.


    Tsson¡¯vek had more reasonable ambitions, though. He didn¡¯t even want to rule over its tribe. Not yet at least. He was too young, and he hadn¡¯t made kills that were impressive enough for a mate, let alone one that would be memorialized on their nearly bare totem. The closest it hade was to narrowly avoid death after his ambush failed to y the swamp ogre. Even poisoned that behemoth had managed to swing its club with such force that all he could do wasy broken in the mud while the other members of its hunting pack finally brought it down. While the rest of the tribe celebrated the victory with a grand feast, he hadid there for weeks waiting for death.


    Death came for him eventually, but instead of iming him and dragging him from the mortal world to the hunting ground of his ancestors, it held the darkness at bay while he healed. A few weekster, all that he had to show for his foolhardy brush with mortality was a number of jagged ck scars that meandered through his dull green scales.


    It was a harrowing experience, but that brush with the spirits of darkness changed him forever. He became more aggressive after that, and more eager to prove himself. This wasn¡¯t just to secure mates and nests when spring came though: it was a desire to please the dark god that watched over them. Now that he had felt its strength course through his shattered body, even its limited reptile mind knew that it could have more of that power if it gave the darkness what it wanted, and what it wanted were the totems and the corpses that came from ever more dangerous hunts.


    If that was what those dark, deathless eyes wanted, then Tsson¡¯vek would bring them down. The chimera, the wyvern, and even the griffon - he wasn¡¯t as strong as any of them, but he would be. He would bring all of them down, or die in the attempt.


    The desire to please it was so strong that it was hard not to think of the lizard men as its most loyal pets, the Lich thought idly while it watched its fleshcrafters at work. Zombies only obeyed because they had to. They were literally powerless to say no to it, much as some of the spirits that were bound to their own rotting corpses might want to. The lizardman''s level of loyalty would have been enough to warm its heart, if it had one. They were practically like the hounds that the humans seemed to love so much, albeit ones that were significantly more useful and deadly.


    Generosity wasn¡¯t an emotion that the darkness was capable of. It was even rarer than happiness or gratitude in its dark and flinty heart, but as it watched the fleshcrafters meticulously skin the ogre that the reptiles had brought down for it, it felt something almost that strong for the first time in a long time.


    The beast was over nine feet tall, with thickly muscled limbs that were each as wide as a normal man. Even if it had been resurrected like this, it would have been a terror, but the Lich wouldn¡¯t dream of doing something so wasteful. The raw potential was nothingpared to what it would be when it had tainted and reinforced every inch of the Ogre and filled it with so much rage that it would never know peace. Right now they were in the earliest stages of preparation. The skin had not yet been tanned, nor had the hundreds of steel tes that would eventually make up its second skin been riveted to it yet. That would take weeks, and all the while, the fleshcrafters would be carving the creature up, dissecting one muscle at a time to be embalmed and treated, so they could get to the skeleton and reinforce it.


    Of course, not all the flesh would be worth preserving, and the bones would be moved into the beetle vat until they were entirely flensed. Even though the rest of the process took weeks, the final step took only hours. A living body could be devoured down to the bones in less than a day, but a thoroughly butchered corpse took far less time. It was only after all that was done that the entire skeleton would be submerged into molten bronze, and then rebuilt ayer at a time until it wasn¡¯t just an unstoppable juggernaut, but an undying one as well.


    The Lich didn¡¯t need to be involved with any of this of course. That was why it had created its fleshcrafters to run its abattoirs. They handled all the mundane tasks like this one. Creating a war zombie was nothing special. The Lich had amassed dozens like this in the vaults where they awaited use. In the ogre''s case, the only thing that was special was the specimen, not the technique. That was why it built all of its most skilled necromantic chirurgeons with the souls of doctors and healers. Their souls might twist and rebel at being forced to do such grisly work, but they had a talent that was impossible for almost anyone else to match.


    It certainly didn¡¯t hurt that their own bodies were modified to make them even better at these tasks. Their necks were longer and more prehensile than any living man, and their arms each had an extra set of joints. The only way that one might tell one from another was the number of eyes and fingers each had. Five eyes was the least number of eyes a servant could have in a role like this to get the proper depth perception of course, but some of the newest ones had almost twice that. Fingers though - fingers were purely a function of skill. Not counting the four armed lovers that stillbored here in the depths, its first chirugeon only had 13 fingers, some of which ended in fine mps and des, but the famed doctor Zumassen who had disappeared one spring on a voyage down river - he had 19 fingers, and though he might wail and gnash his teeth at his current fate, that grief and horror never stopped him from making perfect cuts every time.


    That was why he was assisting the Lich and his library on the most delicate of tasks: the forging of a human spine. Each vertebra was invested with a single human soul that had died violently due to fire. The pieces were cast in bronze before they were carved into perfect shape, and fitted together. It was only after the runes of binding had been carved into them, and they had been gilded so that they would never tarnish, that ligaments of thin wire had been attached and woven together into patterns that were a nightmarish mockery of real muscles. The webs of steel had one important advantage over preserved tissue though: they were entirely fireproof.


    If all went well this would function as the prototype for its own new vessel, but more testing was required first. This project was less than a quarter done, the Lich would leave it to its minions once it hadpleted the most critical steps. It was even more critical than the cyclopian skull that was being formed from steel at the forges even now. The skull would merely house the thing that powered this terrible body. It was the spine that was the leash that would bind the automaton to its will. The Lich had learned much in the year since he¡¯d bound the river dragon to its swamp dragon in a match that was truly made in hell. Even as strong as that creation was, the Oroza had threatened to crack it on several asions already, necessitating further upgrades. She was simply too strong and defiant to be tamed, just like the river that shared her name.


    That was even more true now that worship of her was resurgent. Gone were the temples to thenguid serpent or the verdantdy though. Now the people focused on the raging tide, or worse, the hag of the delta or the crone of the tide waters. Where once the stories of her were about how she brought life and washed away evil with her purifying waters, now they were about the terrible gifts she would grant to those who sacrificed to her. The people of the area still believed that river would give them what they needed, but in the back of their mind they understood that someone would have to pay for that bounty.


    It was almost a pity that the energy from all those sacrifices, and the power from all those prayers was stolen from her as soon as she received them. Instead, it was channeled to her captor, making it ever stronger while she writhed and withered, just like her namesake at the turning of the seasons.

 Chapter 37: Forged in Fire

    Chapter 37: Forged in Fire


    Krulm¡¯venor had no idea how long he¡¯d been kept in istion before thentern was opened, and he was allowed to re into being once more, but he knew it had been a long time. It had been at least months, and possibly years since he¡¯d tried to defy his jailer and had his legs cut out from under him in the attempt. Even sitting in the throne room, able to watch everything the Lich did, it was very hard to understand any of it when he was reduced to the size of a single forsaken spark that cast a blue glow so faint it barely reached the golden corpse that he hated with every ounce of his being.


    The treatment would have enraged him if he¡¯d had the energy for such a powerful emotion. Instead, he just watched the world flow past as a flickering of events. The only image he¡¯d been able to hold onto for any length of time was the golden bastard that had imprisoned him meeting with a woman clothed only in water. She had radiated power until the Lich had drained her dry and forced her to submit just like it had forced Krulm¡¯venor so long ago.


    He shuddered at the humiliation, stiring while the fire that the Lich had built in the crude summoning circle slowly rose higher and his mind returned to him.


    ¡°Why do you wake me?¡± Krulm¡¯venor barked silently at his tormentor as he stirred to life and looked around the dark and changeless throne room. ¡°What fresh torments have you prepared this time?¡±


    There was nothing he could do to stop the Lich from hurting him, but he would not give it the satisfaction of begging or submitting to the monster. Even the short thrill of glorying in fire and blood for the first time in decades hadn¡¯t been worth that terrible price, and that had been truly grand.


    ¡°Torments?¡± the Lich asked silently. ¡°I don¡¯te to hurt you again stone burner. I have woken you to give you a gift.¡±


    ¡°Gifts? Pah!¡± the spirit crackled, ¡°I want nothing from you.¡±


    ¡°Nothing? Not even your freedom?¡± the Lich taunted as one of its many zombie minions approached thentern, and picked him up from the hook he¡¯d hung on ever since he¡¯d been brought to this ce.


    The fire spirit felt a flicker of worry, wondering where this monster was taking him after all this time. He didn¡¯t even bother to dignify the Lich¡¯s offer with a response. The only freedom that he was ever likely to receive was when his jailer finally tired of toying with him and snuffed him out for good. He doubted that would be any time soon though, because the foul creature fed on suffering the way that he fed on kindling. He could only watch as the slow movingntern bearer left the room and began to walk through the dank maze that was the Lich¡¯s home.


    These weren¡¯t proper tunnels. Krulm¡¯venor knew that much from his dwarven history. Everything was wrong about them. The ces where they turned weren¡¯t square, and neither were the junctions where the walls met the ceiling and the floor. Everything was crooked and rough-hewn. There was no artistry at all in anything the Lich did, and it grated on him to no end. He¡¯d only let things slip as badly as he had because he¡¯d been forced to rely on goblins, but the Lich had all the power it would ever need, and minions that existed only to follow his orders to the letter. It was just sloppy, and it was one more thing the fire spirit would never forgive it for.


    ¡°You¡¯ve sat as a trophy in my throne room for too long, Krulm¡¯venor, and your potential has been wasted because youck the obedience to do what you¡¯re told. That changes today.¡± The Lich¡¯s silent voice echoed through the halls sourcelessly, following the fire spirit as hisntern was carried along.


    ¡°I obeyed you once and I still regret it. I will never¡­¡± The words vanished into smoke before Krulm¡¯venor could finish expressing them as he beheld the sights of the room he was brought into.


    The room was vast enough that he couldn¡¯t hope to see the walls with the wan blue light of his adulterated form, but what he saw was enough. It was an abattoir, but the gore wasn¡¯t what disturbed him so much that for a moment he flickered hesitantly. Around the rooms were bodies in different stages of disassembly or reassembly, and each of them had been modified to the point where they were no longer strictly human. All except for the thing that stood in the center of the room. It looked human enough, if one had their bones dipped in molten iron and bronze of course. The fire spirit was sure that such a vessel had something to do with him, if only because there was very little of it that looked mmable.


    The metal skeleton had a skull of steel and a spine to match, but both of those were gilded so that they blended in with the bronze limbs of the rest of the body. It urred to the spirit only once he was close to it that it wasn¡¯t the skeleton of a human, but a mixture of human and goblin elements that were most visible in the height and the hunch of the spine.


    ¡°You will obey me, and in time you will even thank me for this gift,¡± the Lich intoned. ¡°Not today or tomorrow I think, but one day you will beg me for more orders, no matter how humble and demanding. You will crave them.¡±


    ¡°Arger, stranger cage, is still just a cage,¡± the fire spirit blustered, trying to ignore the bad feeling that was building inside of it. ¡°Yourntern didn¡¯t break my will and neither will anything else!¡±


    As Krulm¡¯venor spoke, the zombie that had carried him into the room reached into thentern with its bare hand and removed the ember that was the true spark of his being. For a single second he was free, but before he had a chance to revel in it or feel the warmth that came with it, the ember was inserted into a small opening on the back of the monstrosity''s skull, which was then shut and locked, plunging him once more into the terrible void that the stygium created.


    ¡°That zombie will burn to ashes,¡± the Lich said while the fire spirit tried to adjust to his new surroundings and see what mischief he could get up to in this strange body. ¡°Void fire burns unlife just as easily as true fire burns pitch. It¡¯s a pity you don¡¯t have more control, or you could destroy all my creations just as easily.¡±


    ¡°Oh?¡± Krulm¡¯venor said, flexing his new hands as he imagined throttling thest spark of unlife from the Lich¡¯s dead eyes. ¡°I¡¯ll remember that when I use this to¡ª¡±


    ¡°Stop!¡± the Lich yelled in a voice that thundered through his skull. For a moment Krulm¡¯venor tried to keep moving despite the orders. That was a mistake. Instantly the whole body came to life and revealed its true purpose as he was assaulted with a dozen varieties of pain.


    ¡°I made that body just for you. I made sure it would be the perfect fit for an insolent, disobedient spirit like you, and each bone in it will be loyal to me until the day I finally let you die,¡± the Lich gloated. ¡°One day you will be too, though not too soon, I hope. I¡¯ve devoted too many days to this particr torment, so you¡¯ll have to suffer for decades at least to make it worth my while.¡±


    ¡°Wh-what did you do to me!¡± the fire spirit screamed. This time, rather than silently speaking from the fire in the throne room, he actually put his new mouth to use and let out a thin, grating voice as sparks spewed from his empty throat.


    Right now, he was experiencing the worst pain of his entire existence, and he couldn¡¯t understand why. It was heat, and fire, but it felt like skin that he didn¡¯t have was melting from his bones. Normally fire was a wee sensation, but right now, even as the traceries of blue fire began to spread across the runes that decorated his ribs, spine, and the long bones of his leg, all he felt was an unquenchable desire for it to go out.


    The pain only ended half a minuteter when he finally did exactly what the Lich said and stood there perfectly still without even thinking about moving. The runes dimmed slightly when he was still and obedient, but stayed lit. Even thinking about disobeying was enough to cause them to burst into mes once more and make him wish for death.


    ¡°I selected the souls that empower your body with great care Krulm¡¯venor. Please know that,¡± the Lich taunted. ¡°Each one of the bones in that body has been bound to the spirit of a human that you have personally burned to death. Each one of them want nothing more than to make you suffer, and they have permission to do just that whenever you do anything but obey my instructions to the letter.¡±


    ¡°You what? That¡¯s maddnaaarggghhh!¡± the fire spirit wasn¡¯t even able to finish the sentence before the pain assaulted him again. Itsted for almost a minute before he was finally able to still his mind enough to quell it.


    ¡°You won¡¯t be alone with them though,¡± the Lich continued. ¡°Since I know how much you love goblins, I¡¯ve distilled the spirits of hundreds of them into the sinews and ligaments that make that strange machine move with such fury. Right now, you can scarcely feel them, but in time their darkness will seep into your soul and help you to be the true warlord that you were always meant to be.¡±


    This time Krulm¡¯venor managed to stay silent, but internally the fearpeted with rage in his cold heart. He could feel the power flowing through him, but he could also feel how dirty it was. He felt tainted by it already, and it had only been five minutes since they¡¯d beeningled.


    They stayed like that in a silent impasse for several more minutes, watching the zombie that was burning with blue fire slowly burn down to nothing but a pile of ashes. Finally, when the Lich had proven his point he said, ¡°I have a job for you. You may speak, but you may not disobey.¡±


    ¡°What do I need to do to return to thatntern,¡± the fire spirit asked, repressing his rage.


    ¡°You really think I would be so merciful,¡± the Lich asked, almost amused at the idea. ¡°I wish to know more about your past. I want to understand how gods fall to better know how they rise.¡±


    ¡°I will tell you all I know,¡± Krulm¡¯venor answered, gritting his teeth as he studied the abomination he had be.


    ¡°But you do not know enough!¡± the Lich dered in a voice so loud it echoed in his skull. ¡°So you will return to the depths and rediscover them for me. You will tell me of Ghen¡¯tal and Mournden. You will discover why you were once called the stone burner, or you will die in the attempt.¡±


    Even as the Lich spoke the words, Krulm¡¯venor felt thepulsion to start walking, but he hazarded a few words anyway, ¡°But the way is blocked, there is no way into the deeps any longer.¡±


    ¡°The miners in the red hills following the gold vein have found tunnels so deep the goblins never explored them. They were almost certainly how you found your way to the surface, and they are how you will find your way back,¡± the Lich answered smoothly. ¡°You will walk back to where this all started, avoiding contact with men where you can, and killing anyone who sees you when you must. I will see through your eyes, and let you know when it is time to return.¡±


    ¡°But¡ª¡± the fire spirit protested, feeling the pain already starting to blossom in ces in his new body.


    The Lich interrupted him though. ¡°If you do not go now I will have you stand in the bottom of the Oroza for a year and a day, and we can satisfy a different curiosity of mine: to see what it feels like as you drown while you are burned alive.¡±


    The wave of fear was enough to overpower the pain that was coursing through Krulm¡¯venor, and he started to move immediately.

 Chapter 38: Spreading Plagues

    Chapter 38: Spreading gues


    For years the Lich had been content to feast on the dreams of the simple people that dwelled in the towns and viges in its domain. A drop of anguish from the thousands it afflicted nightly added up to a tide of suffering, and it drank greedily from both the nightmares of mortals and the very specific pain of its enved river dragon. It was overflowing with power now. Neither of those was truly enough though. It would never be enough.


    So, one day, as the armies of Dutton gathered on the east bank of the Oroza, the Lich decided that itstest creation was ready, and it unleashed it in the dead of night. It was not as mighty as its juggernaut or its river dragon, but it was more deadly than both of thembined. Unlike the vessel that contained Krulm¡¯venor, itcked obvious artistry, but it still represented years of painstaking work. The tiny mote was little more than a miasma - a breath of sickness. It was just a wicked little curse that it inflicted on the least of the swamp¡¯s denizens, but in a few months in would spread over half the continent.


    It started small though.


    The sickness first spread across thends and down river, affecting almost everyone to some degree as the disease that the Lich had nurtured and developed for years finally appeared. It was first noticed in the crew of boats bound for port cities like Bridigem and Tagel in the county of Dutton. Both of those cities were regional crossroads, though. They could never hope to contain the disease. Instead, they would amplify its spread.


    Two weeks after the first sailorined to his mates about not feeling too well as he went to bed early, dozens were dead and thousands were sickened while the new disease spread its tentacles down every trade road and tributary, searching for new victims. At first, it was treated as the gray shivers always was, with rest and water, but soon enough they called it something else, and boarded the victims in their home as new cases were discovered in a desperate bid to avoid the same fate.


    The Drowning.


    The word and the rumors associated with it spread even faster than the illness itself. Those who caught it still ran high fevers, and their skin still turned pale and ashen, but in their final days their lips turned a distinctive blue color, and their wracking coughs began to resemble the gurgling sounds of a drowning victim as their own fluids slowly filled their lungs. It was an awful way to go, but most survived. They simply waited at death''s door for several days before they managed to break free from the undertow that wed at their soul as much as their body with its mmy hands.


    Even though it was a magical sickness created by the Lich, the people of Greshen were not spared. It could only control its release from the biting flies that weremon to certain river sandbars in its ever-growing domain. It couldn¡¯t control its spread. It didn¡¯t even want to. In due course it came to Fallravea, and burned through most of that city just as it had the rest of the region. Though the deaths there would be an order of magnitude less than in the surrounding counties, the suffering would be almost as great, because that was what the darkness desired. With the waning of the swamp and the storage of its undead minions the world had forgotten it. Its evil had been relegated to dreams and stories.


    That was a mistake.


    Even if it wanted to hide its existence, it still wanted the people that dwelled within itsnds to fear the dark powers that lurked in the darkness each night. Not that the disease was simply a lesson in vanity of course. The Lich had thought long and hard about when to release its terrible gue, but it was the lord of Dutton that had decided on the timing. When he had begun to marshal troops to his cause and draw mercenaries to Bridigem with an eye on its gold mines it had sealed their fate. Those warriors would be some of the first to be infected in their crowded barracks while they waited for orders to cross the river, and fully half of them would die gasping for air without a single sword being unsheathed.


    That this whole war had almost happened and been prevented without Kelvun ever finding out or raising his own armies was an amusing irony for the darkness. Normally it would be happy for the two neighboring regions to fight themselves to a bloody standstill, but not today. Not only was the Lord of Dutton targeting its gold, but it would be a great distraction to the ongoing building projects. The Lich needed the peoples surrounding its ever dwindling swamp to be fruitful and multiply, not die in pointless squabbles. Those could wait.


    Only those loyal few who worshiped at the temples to Oroza werepletely spared of this blight because it had used the river¡¯s own strength to fuel its foul spell. The other priests could heal it with their magic of course, but even they still feared walking into the neighborhoods where the mdy had taken hold. The water bearers had no such fear though. They would journey into even the worst of the outbreaks to bury the dead and tend to the dying.


    At first this charity caused some bacsh as the stricken popce feared that the river goddess had something to do with the outbreak, those thoughts were quickly quelled with the right fever dreams given to the right people. The water bearers weren¡¯t the cause, but the cure, and everyone should give thanks to the pure waters of the Oroza for that.


    She was neither of course. She hadn¡¯t been a queen for years; she¡¯d been reduced from guardian deity to attack dog, and all the prayers that were sent to her were siphoned away by the Lich through the runes that chained her to the dead flesh she was trapped inside. None of that mattered to the Lich right now though. All that mattered was he wanted the cults in her name to grow. They would need to if it ever wanted to get the holy city to take the area seriously in a way that didn¡¯t involve it sending temrs to y it.


    The religious fanatics that worked for the gods of light took the small gods and the order of such things very seriously if the dreams from the red hill''s monastery were to be believed. As dangerous as it would be to y with the one group of people still capable of ying it, they would be necessary eventually.


    The sickness had one wee side effect that the Lich hadn¡¯t nned on though, and that was when Krulm¡¯venor walked into the gold mine to journey into the depths, there was no one there to see him. The Lich had made sure of that. Two days before its ferryman had delivered the godling to thending, the whole area had been struck with a bout of the drowning so severe that they¡¯d closed the mine until further notice.


    It pained the Lich to think about dying its portion of that delicious gold of course, but it would bepensated in other ways by its minion¡¯s trip into the darkness. It had no idea how deep the tunnels went or what it would find down there, but it wanted to. Did dwarves still live beneath itsnds? Would they be a threat? Those were important questions, but neither was the reason it had spent so many days building Krulm¡¯venor such a work of art.


    More than anything the Lich wanted to know how a demigod could fall to be a lowly spirit. There were valuable lessons there that it would require, and soon. In perhaps only a decade or two its ns would reach fruition and such pitfalls were at the forefront of its mind. The tunnels beneath ckwater Landing were done, and the runes and blood gutters were being carved toplete them. In only a few more years all of that hard work would be finished, and its terrible mand would beplete, but the town itself still had a long ways to go.


    It was almost unique in the region, in that, despite the poor hygiene and nutrition of its residents, not a single person died to the drowning gue. There was still the smattering of deaths rted to drinking and duels of course, including some that were caused by the Lich itself. As disease went though, it was a blessed ce, and it was said to be holy to the Oroza even though it was palpably the opposite. Such rumors were wee by the darkness though, and they did wonders for the growth of the city. It had grown by leaps and bounds since it hadpleted its year long duel with the river dragon, and was hardly recognizable.


    Where once there had been only muddy streets and ramshackle buildings crowded into the shadow of the toll collector¡¯s tower, there was now the beginning of a real city starting to take shape, and it was slowly recing the dirty boomtown that had been here thest few years. A brick street now connected the docks on the Oroza side of the small peninsrmunity with the docks of the canal across town, and nearly every building along that street looked almost respectable. The constant draining of its precious swamp continued to expose more and more buildablends, and as soon as thosends dried out, the men that flocked to ckwater busied themselves with carving out their own little piece for themselves.


    Sometimes that involved clear-cutting the dying mangroves for lumber, and sometimes that involved digging up the y to make whole piles of bricks, but it always meant that the area was a hive of activity. It wasn¡¯t just that the darkness didn¡¯t recognize the seat of its own power anymore, it was that each time it looked away it didn¡¯t recognize the new monstrosity that had reced the older one from several months earlier. The town was just as impermanent and changing as the river it relied on, and almost as poisonous too.


    Farther out the immigrants that had taken Kelvun up on his generous offer were takingrger patches ofnd, and taming them with the primitive human magic of controlled burns and plows. In time those farms would feast on its rich ck earth, and the darkness that had been fermenting in the water for decades would take the form of fruits and vegetables that nourish a whole generation that would belong to it, and it alone. The gods could not touch what they had not nourished after all, and even though the water level fell every day, the darkness that was left behind only grew more concentrated.


    A piece at a time, the mortal world was getting smaller and more crowded, but the Lich had long since learned to ignore its noisy neighbors that existed only twenty feet above its head. They were nothing but cattle, awaiting the ughter, and it didn¡¯t care what they did with their time so long as there were a few more of them each week. After all, it would take thousands and thousands of souls to reach its bloody goals.

 Chapter 39: Nightly Raids

    Chapter 39: Nightly Raids


    Kelvun flipped through the briefs not quite sure why he should bring himself to care about their contents. His spymaster had brought them to him while he lounged half naked in the study of the little house he kept for these sorts of indiscretions. His wife was as frigid as her family was wealthy, and though she was important to him in the grand scheme of things, she would never understand his needs any more than Paulus seemed to understand what it was he was being paid for.


    ¡°Well, what is it I¡¯m supposed to be seeing,¡± Kelvun demand, looking up at the fearful expression of his intelligence chief. ¡°None of these even discusses the county of Greshen. Noden. ck Pine. Svendon. These are all viges in Lindvell. Coastal. Fishing. Viges. Do I need to get you a map to your job properly?¡±


    ¡°No sire,¡± the old man said, not entirely able to keep his voice from trembling. ¡°I just - you said that you wanted to know about any goblin attacks as soon as they happened, and word of a recent rash of conflicts just reached from us down river, so I thought¡ª¡±


    ¡°So you thought that I would care more about goblin attacks in the ass end of nowhere more than I would care about spending time admiring Lady Margaret¡¯s ass?¡± he asked mming the sheaf of papers hard enough against the desk he was sitting next to, to make the older man flinch slightly. ¡°No one would think that would they. Certainly not my spymaster. Someone that I ce such trust in would without doubt have more sense than that.¡±


    ¡°Well that¡¯s not the only reason my lord¡­¡± Paulus said, fumbling, even though it obviously was all he had. The man wrote everything down, and he¡¯d already given Kelvun every paper he¡¯d walked in with. Anything past this point was the old fool just looking to curry favor with his lord, when he clearly didn¡¯t understand that every extra minute he kept Kelvun from the arms of his mistress waspounding the damage he¡¯d already inflicted on himself. ¡°There¡¯s also word in ckwater that¡ª¡±


    ¡°To the pits with ckwater. Until and unless you can point to a credible threat on my person I¡¯m not going back to that flea bitten hellhole until it¡¯s time to tithe the river goddess herself. Anything that doesn¡¯t rise to either of those thresholds can be handled by you, or you can send a bird to the local governor and have him handle it for you.¡±


    ¡°But¡ª¡± the spymaster protested.


    ¡°No buts - not from you anyway. You¡¯re as wrong about this as your predecessor was about an imminent attack from Dutton,¡± Kelvun said with a smile as he stood unsteadily. He¡¯d tried to make that a joke, with all the charm that the two bottles of red he¡¯d shared with Lady Margaret could make him, but it hade out as more of a threat, which worked almost as well. ¡°When you have something more important than my lover¡¯s butt you may return to me, until then though - spies work best when they are neither seen nor heard. Do you understand?¡±


    Paulus opened his mouth one more time to speak, but thought better of it, and he closed it again before quickly bowing and taking his leave. It was the smartest thing he¡¯d done in weeks, Kelvun thought, taking one more look at the papers before he turned and walked back toward the bedroom where he belonged. His wife would be expecting him home from his "hunt" in a few hours, and he would have to make sure he caught his prey another time or two before then.


    He shook his head, ruing the day he¡¯d had to get rid of his first chief spy Wurmnth. Despite the disloyalty that had eventually forced Kelvun to kill him, the man had beenpetent at least, but in the years since his passing, it seemed like every recement had been worse than the one before. At the rate things were going now, he doubted that Paulus wouldst more than a year, but that was hardly Kelvun¡¯s fault.


    Despite the nest of traitorous vipers he ruled over he¡¯d managed to make a fine show of things over the better part of his decade as Count Garvin, and that was no thanks to his ipetent help. The county had prospered under his rule like it never had under his father, Count Leo Garvin, and the old man had never had to deal with a gue half so bad as the Drowning. Despite everything, the county hade through everything almost unscathed whenpared to their neighbors, all things considered.


    Kelvunughed to himself as he opened the door to his darkened bedroom. His previous spy had warned of an imminent invasion from the east, and instead their army had been decimated by fever.


    ¡°Is something funny my Lord?¡± Margaret asked. Her sonorous tones drifted in from the shadows.


    ¡°I¡¯m just thinking about how hard it is to find good help,¡± he said smiling wider as she leaned forward, letting the crimson sheets fall seductively away from her as he spoke. ¡°I¡¯m afraid Paulus might not work out.¡±


    ¡°No? Isn¡¯t he your wife¡¯s cousin? I thought he was supposed to be quite perceptive. What a shame,¡± she answered, but she didn¡¯t seem saddened by the news.


    If anything she loved the vicious streak he had. That was good, because as his little secret she saw his ruthlessness more than anyone else, and it made him love her all the more.


    He wasn¡¯t going to lose any sleep over Paulus¡¯ instincts just yet. After all, things were looking up: it had been years since the darkness had troubled his sleep which spoke to its powerlessness, and in a year or two when the swamp finished drying up it would be well and truly dead along with everything else that had ever threatened his rule.


    Paulus hurried through the streets back to the room he kept on the water front. Not the main one where Count Garvin might think to look for him if his irritation hadn¡¯t subsided in a few hours, though. He¡¯d gotten rid of servants for less, including his predecessor, and Paulus was under no illusions that his family ties would save him from one of Kelvun¡¯s fits of drunken pique.


    A pithy slogan that a particrly clever bard had coined to describe the current state of the county of Greshen was ¡°The best of rulers governs least, by that measure Count Garvin is thend¡¯s highest priest.¡± The man¡¯s words had outlived him, and even if Paulus didn¡¯t dare say them out loud he thought about them often.


    Just like his father, Kelvun had little interest in actually governing his kingdom, but unlike his father hecked the ability to trust in otherpetent nobles to do it for him. It was aplete mess that was hidden entirely by the revenues of Garvin¡¯s gift, if the notes he¡¯d obtained from the master of coin¡¯s private books were to be believed.


    Everyone from the highest Baron to the lowest cksmith knew that the kingdom was horribly mismanaged, but few besides the Count¡¯s loyal spymaster could see the true shape of the problem, and that was likely one of the reasons that the good Count went through spymasters like other nobles went through mistresses. As long as he had a steady supply of gold and the love of the people from his youthful exploits though, no one was inclined to do anything about it.


    Indeed, several of the Barons were getting quite rich as a result of their Lord¡¯s folly, and as long as they bought him shiny gifts and made the proper obediences before their lord, Count Garvin wasn¡¯t overly concerned. Indeed, all the time that should have been spent running the county from day to day was spent chasing down secret enemies. The Count was sure these existed, even if he could not name them and could provide no evidence except for his feelings on the subject, but almost every real threat that his spymasters brought to him was shrugged off as unimportant.


    Last year his predecessor had warned Kelvun that the county of Dutton was preparing an attack on the pretext of their resurgent river goddess worship, but when the gue brought everything in the region to a halt and the attack never materialized, poor Gelwin had paid for it with his life. That had made things very clear to Paulus from the very beginning: if he was going to tell the Count anything then he¡¯d better be right, or else.


    And he was, at least when it came to the goblins. After years of rtive silence where they had done no more than attack supply convoys in the red hills, they were suddenly resurgent. Instead of attacking the farming viges again like they did a few years ago though, they were attacking the logging and fishing viges on the coast. His spies said that it was because there simply weren¡¯t enough farms to the east anymore for them to bother attacking the same ce for a second time, but he didn¡¯t buy that exnation.


    Paulus was a religious man, and he could smell a greater evil involved, even if no one else could. His master might see traitors everywhere without being able to point to anything specific, but Paulus was in just the opposite position. He could see dozens of individual instances of evil, but he could find nomon thread to connect them. The goblin attacks, the barges that disappeared on the river, the stranger rumors concerning the cult of the drowned goddess, and of course the nightmares were all the most obvious examples, but there were so many more, and most people never seemed to notice.


    Even the waters of the Oroza stank of evil to him now, which he would have thought impossible if he hadn''t been so sure. The river water had made him sick often enough that Paulus only drank from deep city wells now, and he never ate fish anymore. It wasn¡¯t worth the risk even if he didn''t understand why.


    The nightmares were the thing that troubled him the most. Paulus didn¡¯t get them too often, but after he¡¯d discovered that one of the men he was to make disappear was also suffering from them, he¡¯d made a point of asking everyone who was going to die about them.


    To a man, every person on the wrong end of his knives suffered from simr dark dreams. Some had them nearly every night, and some like him only had them once or twice a moon, but everyone had them, and they were all the same imagery. They all had dark grasping hands, and darker suffocating water. Paulus would have been inclined to me the swamp and the ancient evil that was said to lurk there, but it was all but gone now, so there had to be something else.


    That was the one great thing that the wastrel, Kelvun had aplished. He¡¯d drained the darkness from that blightednd once and for all and made it into tible earth instead. In a few more years it would be nothing but a fertile valley, and in a generation or two ckwater might be arger city than Fallravea proper because of that bounty.


    Paulus had drawn up all these details into detailed reports. Reports that made it all seem a little less crazy when all the facts were collected together in ck and white like that. When the reports on the cults werebined with the river dragon sightings and the entrail readings he¡¯dmissioned from the local temple, it was clear: there was a growing darkness in the heart of his beloved homnd. He considered giving that report to his lord many times. It was only his fear of what would happen next if he couldn¡¯t substantiate them, and give his Count a target for his angst. Well, there was that fear along with another, deeper one.


    What if instead of simply being the neglectful ruler that darkness blossomed under, Kelvun was somehow part of its machinations? To Paulus he seemed much too ipetent for such a thing, but perhaps that was his role to y. It was his strong suit after all.

 Chapter 40: Walking Back Through Time

    Chapter 40: Walking Back Through Time


    Krulm¡¯venor¡¯s walk was endless, but boredom was more of a concern than fatigue would ever be for him. No matter how far he walked into the bowels of the earth, he did not tire. He couldn¡¯t. He was a deathless creature of fire and bone. He was shackled to his tormentor by the thin thread of magical energy as much as he was by the runes that bound his new body to the Lich¡¯s irresistiblemandments.


    While he was on the surface, the godling had stumbled across a few prospectors to vent his volcanic wrath on. Even when he had gone deeper, he had found a goblin nest that had blocked his way. He had seared the flesh from their bones without a second thought in both cases. While this body limited him in many ways, the destructive power he could marshal had only been enhanced. It wasn¡¯t his power he was wielding, though. It was the Lich¡¯s, and it melted stone and steel as easily as it burned bone to ash in vicious bursts of blue me that ckened any who would oppose him. That part at least should have been a thrill, but it wasn¡¯t, not even when he got to wring the life from a particrly fierce goblin warrior with his own hands.


    It had been an awfully long time since he¡¯d gotten to do that. He¡¯d been without physical form for so long that he¡¯d forgotten what it felt like. Before now, he assumed he¡¯d been missing something as a creature of flickering fire that could only touch the world to destroy it, but that turned out not to be the case. At least, that wasn¡¯t the case as far as this body was concerned. There was no sense of taste or touch, and even the joy of burning a creature that threatened him to ash felt thin and far awaypared to his time as ruler of a goblin tribe. There the sacrifices of their fallen foes had been stringy and greasy, but at least they tasted like something while he devoured their essence. Now he didn¡¯t even get to enjoy that.


    He was alone and disconnected, walking ever deeper into a ce he was sure he¡¯d been before, even if he had no memory of it.


    Before he¡¯d been a spirit of fire, he¡¯d been the stone burner. He¡¯d been the god of forges in over a dozen cities of the deeps, but he could remember only the faintest details about any of that. The shape of an arch here and the breaching of a fortress there. The memories were less than smoke, dissipating as soon as he focused on them.


    Even though Krulm¡¯venor loathed being ordered to do it, he didn¡¯t hate being forced to return to the roots of the mountains. None of his kin were left for the Lich to hurt. He didn¡¯t know why he knew that, but he was sure that they¡¯d died long ago, which was part of why he¡¯d fled to the surface. It was maddening that he couldn¡¯t remember any details, but he¡¯d been reduced to bare embers too many times. If he ever hoped to rekindle those parts of himself, he would have to go back to the scene of the crime, and even as deep as he¡¯d gone, that was still somewhere far below where he was now.


    Less than two weeks into his trip below ground, he was still in the dead zone that marked the area that was out of reach by the surface creatures but was still much too shallow for the beasts of the deeps. But they woulde. The rock eaters, fungus dwellers, and the shadow crawlers - all types of horror woulde for him as he descended deeper and deeper. They¡¯d never be able to resist the flickering blue light that illuminated each tunnel he walked down.


    On the rare asion that dwarves needed to travel to the surface, they would extinguish all their lights and travel silently in all but the safest tunnels to avoid fighting such monsters. It was said that¡ª Krulm¡¯venor¡¯s thoughts trailed off suddenly as he realized that his thoughts were not things he¡¯d been able to remember before now.


    Rock eaters? Shadow crawlers? As quickly as the ideas had appeared in his mind, they were gone again. He could remember thinking about them, but the words had no meaning to him. At least he was remembering things, though. It was a reassuring realization.


    That thought alone was enough to stop him in his tracks until the spirits that infested his bones threatened to unleash their mayhem on him once more. Those threats started his feet moving again, but slower this time, as the fire spirit reflected on the moment and tried to gauge whether or not anything else had been jarred loose from the dim recesses of his mind.


    The cities were still ghosts, but he better understood how deep they were now. Though there were some more shallow fortresses and trade hubs in critical areas, any self-respecting dwarf lived deep enough that his only enemy was time. That time was measured by the ceaseless forges where his worship had been centered.


    As he considered it, a cascade of details came flooding into his mind. The tolling he always heard at the back of his mind hadn¡¯t been battle as he¡¯d thought it had been, but the blow of hammers on anvils as steel and mithril were worked into something timeless and deadly.


    Beyond that, though, there was nothing. No matter how hard he tried to force his memory, there was only void, and Krulm¡¯venor was frustrated all the more for being able to remember such trivial and insubstantial things.


    Dayster, he found his first Kobolds. He remembered the lizard creatures as soon as he saw them. In his memories, there was a hint of fear and revulsion associated with them, but he wasn¡¯t sure why. Today though, he wasn¡¯t impressed.


    There were three of them gnawing on a vein of rose quartz. They were intelligent humanoids with rust-colored scales and a tapered snout that held three rows of metal teeth for grinding their favored ores and crystals into dust. In his foggy recollection, they were big for their species, but none were over five feet tall. When they saw him, they hissed and began to slowly back away from him. At least, that was until they noticed how the light glinted off his metal skeleton.


    That gave them pause. After that, they conferred with each other with a series of whistles and clicks of their teeth, changing their minds and readying themselves for battle. They had no idea what they were facing, but they knew how good the gold and steel that made up his cage would taste. So, two of them extended their crystalline ws. The third drew a knapped obsidian de that would be less useful against it than their crude leather armor that looked like goblin skins.


    For a moment, Krulm¡¯venor was tempted to let them try to kill him. He knew they wouldn¡¯t be sessful, but if they were to do enough damage to some of the runes that bound it, perhaps it would finally break free.


    Ultimately, he wouldn¡¯t be able to follow through with that thought. Not because of how the spirits in his body howled in outrage that he would dare rebel, but because of the revulsion, he felt as they got closer. Corpse eaters. Grave robbers. Vermin.


    Seeing the beady red eyes of the lizard man up close as they thought they were about to score an easy meal sickened him. He no longer had a sense of smell, but even without it, he could smell the coppery scent of death around these bottom feeders.


    Krulm¡¯venor stepped back, pulling his arm out of the way as he suddenly remembered that their ws could damage even the sturdiest metal armor his forges had once produced. Creatures like this were best dealt with at a distance via crossbow. He didn¡¯t have one of those exactly, but he didn¡¯t need such a toy to deliver death at a distance.


    He red the fires that flickered around him in a constant aura in a burst wide enough to scare the one that hadshed out at him further back. These things lived their whole lives in darkness, and though they could see in the light, they did not enjoy it.


    The fire spirit extended his hand and unleashed a torrent of fire just as he felt a new presence enter his mind. He¡¯d known that the Lich¡¯s connection would allow it to check on him at any time, but this was the first time that had merited its deathless gaze in weeks. It weighed almost as heavily on him as his disgust as he turned the first creature into a bonfire.


    ¡°What are these things. These Kobolds?¡± the Lich asked silently in his mind. It was an invasion, but he could do nothing to stop it, especially while he was focused on the fight.


    ¡°They are lower than rats or even goblins,¡± Krulm¡¯venor growled back as he poured out white-blue mes that made the Kobold¡¯s flesh boil beneath its scales so that as it fell to the tunnel floor, the only thing that escaped its dying body was steam and smoke. ¡°They devour civilization itself, and even stone walls will not keep them out forever.¡±


    The other two bolted at the sight of their smolderingrade, but before Krulm¡¯venor could burn them to ashes as well, the Lich stopped him short.


    ¡°You want them to live?¡± the fire spirit asked, feeling the rage boiling up inside him.


    ¡°No. I want you to follow them back to theirir and murder them by the score. I want you to kill everyst one you can find so that I can study their souls further. As creatures who have never seen the sun, they seem eminently suitable to one of several tasks, and their draconic bloodline¡­¡± The Lich¡¯s voice trailed off after that. ¡°Well - you have your orders, hound. Go - fetch.¡±


    And just like that, Krulm¡¯venor was striding forward again, regardless of the anger and resentment building inside him even as the Lich disappeared. No matter how much he wanted to ughter those creatures, the embarrassment of being forced to do so had utterly ruined the moment for him.


    They didn¡¯t lead him very far, and he probably would have been able to find their warren even without the dumb things leading him right back. This deep underground, there were only so many tunnels they could have gone down, and at a nce, he could see which were natural and which bore the telltale teeth marks of these rock eaters.


    Then suddenly, he turned a corner, and he was there, in a Kobold warren. It was thest ce any sane dwarf would have wanted to be. They would have considered such a n suicide, of course, and rightfully so. It was a nightmare to have dozens of the things close enough to reach out with their ws and gut you in a room that was riddled with holes like a slice of soft cheese. What good were the hundreds of hours spent drawing mithril into wire and forging that wire into link after link of sturdy chain mail if a monster like these could cut their way through it without much of a struggle?


    Even as Krulm¡¯venor looked around and found dozens of pairs of glittering eyes hidden in those holes, the fires in his ribcage and around his fist began to build. He wasn¡¯t going to let the Lich ruin this for him. If there was one thing in the world he wanted to destroy more than that cursed golden skeleton, it was the bone eaters of the deep.


    ¡°All right, you bastards,¡± he growled as he looked for the inevitable ambush. ¡°Who wants to be the first to die?¡± Their numbers were effectively endless, but then, so was his anger.

 Chapter 41: Seen and Unseen

    Chapter 41: Seen and Unseen


    Thanks to the drowning, Todd lingered on death¡¯s door longer than the other orphans at Garvin¡¯s Gift. For better or worse, that was the reason for everything that came after.


    That far from civilization, the little town had almost been skipped by the gue entirely, but in the end, all it took was a sick caravan guard toy everyone else low in a cycle of sickness and recovery that had taken weeks longer than the other towns of Greshen county because the Cult of the Drowned Woman had note to help them.


    He hadn¡¯t been the sickest of course; several of the other young boys had died in the grip of the bone-breaking fever. He was just the sickest one to actually survive. As stunted and malnourished as he¡¯d been, it was no surprise to anyone that he¡¯d almost lost his grip on this life. The only surprise had been that he had lived at all while many stronger boys had died, but while he¡¯d lingered in the darkness between life and death, he¡¯d seen her, and in his delirium, he had been foolish enough to tell the sister that had tended tirelessly to his dying body about her.


    He¡¯d told her about the drowned woman and the way she had harvested the souls of those that hadcked the strength to swim to the surface. He doubted that anyone would have taken him seriously, except for what happened in the days that followed. While he was still too weak to stand, he could see which of those that struggled to breathe in the infirmary was going to be the next to die. In his feverish state he hadn¡¯t been smart enough to keep his mouth shut, and each time he saw that someone was about to die, he¡¯d tried to warn the sisters about the darkness swirling around the next victim.


    That was why Brother Faerber had traveled all the way from the holy city for the opening ceremony of the temple here. He said it wasn¡¯t, but Todd knew better, even if he didn¡¯t know exactly why, or why he knew. The brother wasn¡¯t like any of the other priests he¡¯d seen. He didn¡¯t have a small glow, or sparkles of light when he made an invocation. The lights around him glimmered all the time, and when he beseeched Siddrim, lord of heavens for a boon, he truly shone with power. Driving all the darkness from the room away with his blessings.


    Even before the brother pulled him aside to speak with him in private under the noonday sun, Todd knew that it was going to happen. In all the days before, during the ceremony, and the mass after, he could feel the weight of his gaze upon him.


    ¡°Tell me about the drowned woman,¡± Brother Faerber said simply as they walked up the hill behind the small temple, so he could get a view of the town. Todd was hesitant, but the brother reassured him. ¡°You¡¯ve done nothing wrong child. I only seek to know the truth, in all things.¡±


    ¡°Well, if that¡¯s true, then why are you taking me to the cemetery,¡± the boy asked nervously, making the priestugh.


    ¡°I didn¡¯te all this way to execute you Todd,¡± he said patiently. ¡°Even though there¡¯s some blood on your hands there is not nearly enough darkness in your soul to justify such a thing. You¡¯ve lived a hard life for one so young, and I won¡¯t second guess that. I have merelye to learn about the woman you saw and your sight. Everything else can be forgiventer.¡±


    Todd cringed at the realization that just as he could see lighte from the priest that gave him clues about his godly nature, the priest might be able to look at him in the same way. He sped his hands behind his back as if that could hide the way he¡¯d let Cole die, or the way he¡¯d encouraged Bradwin or Leo to follow in his footsteps once their bullying had be unendurable.


    ¡°I¡­ It was like she was right there, in the room with me,¡± he faltered, not sure exactly what else to say. ¡°We were all lying there in our beds, floating on the surface of that dark water, but there was no floor, instead there were just monsters moving through the depths, and the sicker you got, the harder it became to keep your head above water, and sometimes they would grab someone and drag them below until the bubbles stopped.¡±


    ¡°So you couldn¡¯t see her clearly then?¡± the priest asked fishing something out of his pocket.


    ¡°No I could,¡± Todd swallowed hard, and his eyes flickered towards the sun for reassurance. The only darkness on this rugged slope was what they¡¯d brought with them, and between its light and the priests, even the darkness of his own shadow was barely there any longer. ¡°But she was hard to look at. She was a prettydy, but she was so sad, and she was chained to somethingrger in the deeps. I couldn¡¯t see it, but, but - I didn¡¯t want to.¡±


    ¡°Did she look like this?¡± he asked, handing Todd a folded piece of paper.


    He was hesitant to take it at first because darkness dripped off it like the ink was still wet, but he steeled himself and did just that, reassured by the priest¡¯s gentle presence. Earlier he¡¯d thought that the man was going to execute him for his strange gift, or perhaps his crimes, but after their short walk to the top of the hill, he found the priest¡¯s presence strangelyforting.


    The paper was a piece of parchment folded into quarters, and when he unfolded itpletely, he could see that it was a page of a book. The writing was meaningless to him because he only barely knew enough letters to write his own name, but the picture that dominated the page didn¡¯t rely on any of those to get its message across. His grip tightened as he studied her. The picturecked the detail to give her eyes the sadness that he knew was there, but he was sure just the same.


    Todd nodded, handing the drawing back to Brother Faerber as quickly as he could. ¡°That¡¯s her, only she had long chains instead of the long hair the picture shows.¡±


    ¡°And were there any other differences you can remember? Anything at all?¡± the priest asked, studying the picture. ¡°Was there anything else that should be in the picture?¡±


    Todd thought long and hard as they trudged up the hill, trying to figure out what he could say to make the priest happy before he finally said, ¡°What about the jewelry she was wearing?¡±


    ¡°Jewelry?¡± the priest asked.


    ¡°The thing the chains were attached to. She had golden bracelets on her wrists and ankles, and¡­¡± Todd answered, but the priest cut him off.


    ¡°That¡¯s enough for now, thank you,¡± he whispered, making the sign of penitence. ¡°Any more and we¡¯ll draw the evil eye upon us.¡±


    ¡°Am I cursed then?¡± the boy asked, as he felt thefort that he¡¯d held for most of their trek begin to fall away.


    ¡°No,¡± the priest insisted. ¡°It¡¯s just the opposite. You¡¯re blessed by the gods with a terrible gift. You¡¯ve been given the sight, and you¡¯ll be able to see and do things that few others will ever be able to. Unless we develop your gift though, and sanctify it, you¡¯ll probably just go mad.¡±


    ¡°But, I don¡¯t want to go mad,¡± the boy insisted, feeling fear shoot through him. ¡°Just tell me what I have to do, and I¡¯ll¡ª¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s why I¡¯ll be taking you back to the holy city with me,¡± the priest said talking over him. ¡°The church does not waste such gifts, even when theye in the form of sickly young orphans like you.¡±


    After that, they prayed together on the hilltop, and for the first time in a long time, Todd wasn¡¯t afraid to gaze out at the wider world rather than staring at the dirt beneath his feet. From here he could see theke that the mages had built and the canal that linked it to the Oroza far to the south. From this distance, he couldn¡¯t see the evil wafting off that water, but he knew from trips to gather supplies that it was there. This close to town he wouldn¡¯t be able to see the elemental spirits of mud and dust that sometimes wandered the red y hillsides either.


    On the hilltop, he could see the spirits of the dead trapped in their own graves though. He could see how they would sometimes stagger up from the ground or reach out, even in daylight, though with the priest here studying him, he tried not to flinch at the sight.


    ¡°Even if this wasn''t hallowed ground, they still wouldn''t be able to hurt you,¡± Brother Faerber reassured him. ¡°They''re too weak, but it''s a rare graveyard that doesn¡¯t have some spirits, and murder victims are always the most active.¡±


    ¡°You can see them too?¡± Todd asked.


    ¡°Of course,¡± the priest said, staring at Todd like he was looking right through the boy. ¡°I see more than you can possibly imagine. My gift was not so strong as yours, but it has been nurtured by the church for longer than you have been alive. Such diligence pays off.¡±


    ¡°Can I learn that too?¡± Todd asked, feeling excitement rise in his heart for the first time in a long time.


    ¡°If the gods allow,¡± Brother Faerber shrugged. ¡°That is why I am bringing you and the cursed gold that the brothers have collected off the corpses of the dead over thest few years. We will see if either can be forged into a useful weapon for the fight that is toe.¡±


    ¡°The gold? You mustn''t,¡± Todd said. In an instant both his sense of safety and excitement were banished by fear. ¡°The goblins can feel it. I don¡¯t know how, but they can. If you try to leave the red hills with any of their ore, then they¡¯ll tear you to bits!¡±


    ¡°I know,¡± the priest smiled. ¡°I would love to see them try.¡±


    He didn¡¯t have to wait long. They stayed at the temple just long enough to consecrate the new building properly, and two dayster, he and Brother Faerber along with his guards and his servants made their way back toward the dock where the ferry would arrive.


    They made no effort to move quickly, and when the night came, they did not attempt to seek shelter in a cave or defensible outcropping. Instead, they camped in a wide t area that was almost entirely defenseless, and roasted meat that was sure to attract the goblins'' attention, even without the gold.


    The little monsters came just after midnight, but Todd was too worried by the prospect of being murdered the same way his parents had been to get much sleep. He saw theming in the night as their malice began to bloom red well past the edges of the firelight, and he went to warn Brother Faerber, but the priest was already aware, and already praying. He seemed utterly unconcerned that they were already outnumbered 20 to 1, but Todd didn¡¯t understand why until he unsheathed a sword that shined with almost as much light as the fire did.


    ¡°Wait in the light with the servants,¡± he told Todd, and then he was striding out into the dark while his men stayed behind to guard those who couldn¡¯t fight and their animals. Some of the goblins thought to try the men grouped around the campfire, but they met a swift end at the hands of the soldiers there.


    The rest of them attacked Brother Faerber in a tide of blood. Normally Todd shied away from such things, but he couldn¡¯t help but watch the hypnotic violence that happened over the next few minutes before the goblins were utterly routed by a single man.


    The way his holy de glowed made it easy to watch every scything blow and brutal strike, but the way that he mowed down the goblins two and three at a time was not the most brutal part of the show. It was what they did to the priest in turn that Todd found hard to watch. Despite the ease with which he dispatched the goblins, he did not walk away uninjured, or at least he shouldn¡¯t have. Time after time, their spears and arrows found their mark, but each time the priest refused to die, healing almost instantly instead. In one case a warband leader riding a mangy boar managed to tear through the brother¡¯s armor, goring him so thoroughly that the man was almost disemboweled, but even that wasn¡¯t enough to keep him from beheading the foul beast.


    Five minutes after he strode off into the darkness the forces of evil were in retreat, though only at half the strength they¡¯d started the night with, and the priest was returning to the light wrapped in his own aura of golden, coruscating light. As he sheathed his glowing sword it quickly became apparent that only his clothing and armor were the worse for the wear.


    When he saw Todd gawking at him, he simply said, ¡°Don¡¯t worry Todd, our god of light and righteous battle would never allow me to meet such an inglorious end at the hands of vermin.¡±


    ¡°B-but, how?¡± the boy sputtered, making the soldiers around himugh.


    ¡°Our god rewards those who spit in the face of death,¡± one of the other soldiers answered, causing everyone else to nod in agreement.

 Chapter 42: The Drowned Woman

    Chapter 42: The Drowned Woman


    When Paulus watched the Temr¡¯s party leave via the muddy road to the north instead of by riverboat, that was his first real evidence that something was wrong with the Oroza. Until that point, he¡¯d convinced himself that it was in his own head, at least partly. After all, just because the gue had been called the drowning didn¡¯t mean it actually had anything to do with the water, and plenty of people besides him were allergic to shellfish.


    But something would have to be done if the devoted could feel the poison in that river enough that they knew to avoid it. His first thought was to go straight to Kelvun, but his Lord was already downriver, giving the river the tithe he gave yearly for her annual bounty.


    It was a strange sort of way to throw gold away as far as he was concerned. Still, the bards credited his generosity as the reason that the river had taken mercy on theirnd alone and shielded them when so many others had suffered previously. From the reports he had received now that the worst was over and the graves were being dug, as much as a third of the city had expired in some parts of Dutton. It was a monstrous thing, but just because Fallravea had seen less than two hundred burned on the gue pyres didn¡¯t mean that the river goddess had their best interests at heart.


    So Paulus did his job and built a new spywork over the following weeks. Lord Garvin was always eager to pay for those, and fabricating a fake threat to hide the investigation¡¯s real target was easy enough. Paulus hired spies and paid informants, and he started digging. It turned out that sending his men to join the mystery cults blossoming in the city was easy enough, but keeping them from finding religion in the process was much more challenging. He chose snub-nosed realists - men that cared more about coin than miracles. Men who were past redemption by anyone¡¯s measure, but time and time again, within weeks of joining the cult, they woulde back to him to proselytize instead of inform.


    Cutting them into pieces before he was done with them didn¡¯t reveal much, either. They sang like men with nothing to hide, which baffled him to his core.


    ¡°How did a minor cult that worshiped a small god as the healer and the water bearer be this?¡± he demanded, mming a paper down in front of the subject of histest interrogation.


    Brynn hadn¡¯t been a bad sort. He¡¯d been reliable enough for following the Count¡¯s mistresses to ensure they weren¡¯t being unfaithful to their Lord in between the times he was unfaithful with them. Still, it had only taken three weeks as an acolyte at the temple of the water dragon to begin to show the worrying signs of disloyalty.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know!¡± the man cried. ¡°It¡¯s just what¡¯s on the wall! I swear it.¡±


    The paper had the charcoal sketch that the man had drawnst week when he¡¯d been admitted to a temple underground the temple that was open to the public. It was the first time that one of his men had gotten so far without showing signs of reverence for the very thing he was supposed to be spying on. Still, a weekter, everything had changed.


    ¡°I know it¡¯s on the wall, you fool,¡± Paulus said, holding the hot iron close enough to the other man¡¯s face to watch him squirm, even though he couldn¡¯t get far because he was bound to the same chair that everyone who was put to the question sat in. ¡°You told me as much - what I want to know is how they¡­ How you could worship this. It¡¯s not a goddess; it¡¯s a monster!¡±


    ¡°Monster? She is the goddess - the river dragon. She protects us all from¡ª¡± Paulus grew tired of the other man¡¯s babbling and prodded him in the chest with his brand just enough to get him to shut up. ¡°Ahh, please¡­ no more, I beg of you.¡±


    ¡°This is not a goddess or a dragon,¡± Paulus shot back, holding up the picture again. ¡°It¡¯s an abomination.¡±


    Though the sloppy lines and poor drawing ability of his spy hid many of the details, he had no idea whether that made the creature depicted more or less hideous. The description that Brynn had offered him at the time had been hideous enough to give him a sleepless night. It was even more frightening that the man saw beauty where he¡¯d seen only the grotesque before.


    ¡°You told me that they worship a corpse,¡± he said, jabbing his finger at the part that was supposed to be the decaying body of a woman in the center, ¡°A corpse that is being devoured by a monster that lurks beneath the river.¡±


    ¡°The drowned woman is not a corpse,¡± Brynn said, flinching as he eyed the poker. ¡°Notpletely, anyway. She¡¯s not dying¡­ she¡¯sing back to life as the waters regenerate her and conquer death. She¡ª¡±


    ¡°And what about the monster then?¡± Paulus asked. He was tired of going over the same ground over and over, but it was gettingte, and he was out of questions. Soon enough, he would end this conversation by granting a merciful death to his former agent. Then after he dumped the body, he would get well and truly drunk to blot out the dreams that always seemed to follow the discussions like this.


    ¡°That¡¯s not a monster any more than she is a corpse. They are one and the same. She is the goddess but also the river dragon, and she has nothing to fear, for death can never truly im her as long as the water flows.¡± After that, Paulus stopped paying attention to what Brynn was saying and walked behind the man, putting the red-hot poker back in the fire before he mercifully snapped the man¡¯s neck mid-sentence.


    That made four good agents that had been swallowed up by this dark devotion in just thest month and probably another dozen before that. The worst part was that he couldn¡¯t understand how this strange goddess could swallow up a man¡¯s soul as easily as the river would swallow up this bodyter. It managed to make almost instant believers of hard men, which was a miracle that was more generally reserved by fat sacks of silver.


    Paulus shook his head, baffled as he tried to make notes while the interrogation was still fresh in his mind. Why was there one painting of the goddess for public consumption and another altogether more gruesome one in private? Why did they seem to be digging mysterious tunnels underneath Fallravea, and what were they for?


    The more he learned, the more questions he had, but he still didn¡¯t have quite enough to go to Kelvun and ask the guards to storm the temple. Without actual evidence of treachery, the lecherous young fool was as likely to execute him as he was to act on the information.


    Paulus knocked loudly on the door three times. That was the signal for his henchmen toe in here and start wedging Brynn into a barrel for easy transport down to the south dock. Once there, they¡¯d tip it into the water, and it would be the problem of someone downriver. As they wrestled the barrel downstairs and into the back of the wagon, he wondered if acts like this had caused the problem. The river had never struck him as tainted before the goblins had tried to burn down the city and devour everyone in it. Maybe the sheer amount of dead that had been dumped into it over the years finally turned it from the clear water he¡¯d taken for granted his whole life into something darker.


    It was an interesting thought, but it wouldn¡¯t change anything, just like he wouldn¡¯t change anything unless he figured out a way to delve deeper into the mystery. He kicked himself for not trying to reach out to that Temr surreptitiously before he¡¯d left the city. Kelvun might have skinned him for such initiative when he found out, though, and he would find out because the servants of Siddirm were anything but subtle.


    If they decided that there was true evil afoot, inquisitors would surely follow, and righteous though he might think he was, Paulus was under no illusions that he would fail to measure up to their standards.


    No, the better n was to keep siphoning extra funds from Lord Garvin while he gathered string, he decided, taking the opportunity on the short ride down the waterfront to scheme. That way, once he was safely outside the reach of all parties, he could send an anonymous message to the holy city and watch the whole thing burn down from a safe distance. That might be another year or two. Then he would fake his own death and disappear somewhere quiet in the mountains, far from any rivers and scheming nobles.


    Paulus didn¡¯t even bother to dismount from the wagon, which was parked halfway down the pier before it narrowed enough that horses weren¡¯t. He never did on nights like these. His hands were already dirty enough, and he saw no need to help the burly men he paid for this sort of thing do their job.


    If he trusted them a little more, then he wouldn¡¯t even be here to watch them, but he knew all too well what happened when a body that was supposed to be gone forever reemerged somewhere it wasn¡¯t supposed to, and he would make sure that didn¡¯t happen on his watch.


    ¡°Come on then,¡± he called out after them as they rolled the barrel down the pier. ¡°We don¡¯t have all night.¡±


    There were a few trading barges moored further down, but any guards they might have seen knew better than to see what strangers might be up to, even on a clear night. With the fog spreading across the river as it often did at thiste hour, they wouldn¡¯t be able to see more than silhouettes taking cargo back to their boat in the same way that he could only dimly make out the lights of the city behind him. Regardless, he watched the dim shadows of his men push the barrel into the water with a ssh he could hear from here before they started turning around and making their way back.


    But no sooner did he look away than the quiet night was suddenly shattered by a sudden, terrible crunch that sounded like shattering timbers. He looked around, but there was no obvious source. All he could say with any certainty was that it hade from further down the pier.


    Paulus hopped off the wagon and stood there, torn between going to investigate and going back to shore. Only when he looked to his men to see if they were running back or taking their time did he realize they had vanished.


    Part of him wanted to stare in disbelief, but the rest of him wanted to run. He settled for backing away very slowly while he studied the night for any clue as to what might have happened. He was sure either of them might have been stupid enough to blunder off the pier into the water, but both at once? That seemed unlikely.


    ¡°Sten? Walten?¡± he called out hesitantly. ¡°Quit your bumbling and get back here right n¡­¡±


    The words died in his throat, and the fog cleared enough that he could see something huge looming out of the water. From this distance, it was impossible to say, but it looked almost like the silhouette of ake serpent or a ¡ª


    Paulus started to run as fast as he could towards the shore. No sooner had he sprung to life than the monster behind him thundered to life and started to chase him, smashing the docks to flinders as it approached.


    In the dark, he tried to focus on the uneven nks before him, but his mind was haunted by what he¡¯d seen. Even though it was like Brynn¡¯s picture, he still couldn¡¯t believe it. The monster rising up out of the river behind him. The thing smashing boats and wrecking the waterfront wasn¡¯t just a river dragon. It was The River Dragon, and embedded in its chest, locked behind ribs of what looked to be rusting steel, was the drowned woman caged inside its terrible corpse.


    It wasn¡¯t a metaphor. It was real, but the way it was gaining on him, though, he doubted he¡¯d ever get to share that terrible truth with anyone¡­

 Chapter 43: Bait

    Chapter 43: Bait


    Tsson¡¯veky there on the rocky overhang above the creature¡¯s nest for almost two days without moving a muscle. Covered in the dried mud, he was invisible to the eyes and the nose of even a cautious hunter. However, the drake that had be his obsession for thest few months was hardly that. It was a dumb beast but an impossibly strong one. It would disappear for days at a time only to return with an entire elk or goat in one of its ws. Every attempt to hunt it until now using the tried and tested pack-hunting tactics of the tribe had ended in the deaths of several of his fellow lizardmen.


    This time he would not fail, though. Even if the thing slew him, he would still win. He had already won, he thought. He had helped to bring down the wyvern, and he had survived the manticore even though he¡¯d been poisoned by both of them in turn. Neither had forced him to linger as long at death¡¯s door as the ogre¡¯s blow had, of course, but they had gotten him what he truly desired: a mate. So, even if the drake slew him, his hatchlings would be raised in the shadow of a father worth remembering.


    The ogre¡¯s blow had shattered his bones, and it was only thanks to the darkness that now flowed through him that he¡¯d survived at all. All of them hadn¡¯t healed right, including his skull, which gave him the crooked gaze that many in his tribe found unsettling. He didn¡¯t care, though. They had no idea how poisoned his blood had be after surviving not one but two fatal poisonings. The manticore¡¯s stinger had made him vomit blood, and the wyvern¡¯s acid had made his blood burn in his veins for a day and a night, but he was stronger for it.


    He was stronger for all of it. The tribe had better hunters and wiser leaders, but there was no one stronger than him anymore, and that was why he alone would y the drake where three separate hunting packs had failed. Only he had the strength to do what needed to be done.


    That victory would, of course, onlye with the perfect amount of surprise, so Tsson¡¯veky there and waited for the thing to feed and sleep before he sprang his trap. When night fell, and the thing had been asleep for over an hour, he slowly rose to his feet. He was painfully aware of every small sound he caused, from the way the mud that coated him broke as he moved to the way the butt of his spear scraped against the rock he had waited upon for so long.


    The moon was only a sliver, and his prey was asleep just beneath him. No one in his tribe would say this was an honorable hunt, but Tsson¡¯vek did not care. He would trade the secret shame for the benefit that the kill would bring to the tribe. With this ebon drake finally dead, the whole valley would be theirs, and the tribe would grow. The glory he would get would only be a side effect to salve his wounded honor. There was simply no other way.


    He examined the razor-tipped spear of obsidian in the starlight. It was a point that he¡¯d carved just for this moment. It was too fragile to prate the leathery scales of his quarry, but it would be perfect for a single vicious strike through the eye and into the brain. The hunter looked down at the sleeping form of the drake and watched as its chest rose and fell while it slept secure in the idea that no threat could harm it.


    Tsson¡¯vek smiled toothily at the idea that he was about to take thatfort away from it forever as he leapt soundlessly down towards the giant lizard. The fall was less than twenty feet, but that was plenty of time to build speed as he fell silently toward the sleeping creature.


    It wasn¡¯t asleep, though. No sooner had he made the jump than it stirred. In that instant, the hunter had all the time in the world to try to puzzle out whether he had done something to wake it or if it had been the oneying a trap for him instead. He would never know because even as he fell, the head rose upward on its sinuous neck to meet him while he was helpless in midair.


    Tyson¡¯vekshed out twice with the spear in the blink of an eye, but both of them missed the eye, and the second blow shattered the spearhead on the thick bone of the creature¡¯s brow as it snapped at him. In a moment of heart-stopping panic, he pushed against the beast¡¯s jaws with his feet and kicked free of the bite that would have cut him in half.


    Using the momentum, he whirled around and attempted to smash the creature¡¯s near eye with the reach of his tail. Such a blow likely wouldn¡¯t be enough to take its eye from it, but it would give it a blindside long enough for him to use that advantage to escape.


    The blow nevernded, though. The drakeshed out with a second quick snap before Tsson¡¯vek reached the ground, and its teeth firmly embedded in his tail, removing most of it in the blink of an eye. It was a painful shock, but the pain ended almost immediately and was reced by the shame that it had happened and the thrill of battle. He was wounded, and his tail would take many months to regrow. He was not dead, though, and he would not die tonight. If he survived, the wound where his tail used to be would stop bleeding.


    All he had to do was escape.


    The hunter ran for his life, though not as fast as he would have if he¡¯d still been able to use his tail for bnce, but even so, the danger didn¡¯te now. The danger would arrive in perhaps half a minute. Right now, the drake was taking to the sky because it was as slow as it was powerful onnd, but in the air, it was a graceful predator, and as soon as it had some speed, he was done for.


    Tsson¡¯vek looked longingly to the surface of theke. That would be the perfect ce to hide and wait out the ebon drake¡¯s wrath, but the ground between here and there was entirely open, and it was much too far away. That might be where the predator was expecting him to go. As he scrambled down the slope, he veered towards a little crag between boulders he¡¯d scouted while the giant lizard was off hunting. He hadn¡¯t nned for his hunt to go quite so poorly, but he¡¯d been on more than enough failed hunts and knew well enough to n for every situation.


    The gap was justrge enough for him to squeeze into, and the level of ustrophobia was terrifying, but figuring out how to get back out was a problem forter. The only problem he had right now was staying alive until then.


    Seconds after he had finished burying himself alive in the narrow crawlspace, the drakended, shrieking in rage as it found its prey out of reach beneath the stone. Its ws struck the stone as it attempted to get to him, but as strong as it was, its teeth were no match for the granite surrounding him. The thing raged at him for almost half an hour before it stopped. Tsson¡¯vek spent every minute of that time worried that while it might not reach him, it might seed in shifting the stone enough to crush him or, worse, bury him alive.


    The hunt ended as it started, only this time, the drake waited outside the den of the creature that defied it rather than the hunter waiting above the nest of the drake. For a day and a night, they stayed like that, and finally, when Tsson¡¯vek could take it no more, he slithered out, half expecting to be eaten. That wasn¡¯t what happened at all, though.


    Instead, he found the cooling corpse of the drake coiled just outside the crevice. The creature was stone dead, and though he didn¡¯t quite understand how only one possibility came to mind.


    It didn¡¯t bother the Lich that it would have to wait until the following sunset to dispatch its ferryman along with the juggernaut to drag the corpse of the drake to the water¡¯s edge and load. It had waited long enough for someone to finally end this creature. That it had been done so cleanly and with so little damage by the poison in the lizard man¡¯s tail was cause for celebration. Without physical damage, its flesh crafters could do whatever they pleased to the beast.


    That was the whole reason that it had saved that hunter¡¯s life over and over again: to let the poison in his system build up to a genuinely toxic level that even a dragon might not be able to tolerate. Not that there were any dragons in the Wodenspine Mountains, sadly. He would be the perfect bait for the drake or even a giant if one of them ever came down from the peaks.


    The Lich would have been more than happy for the creature to devour his hunter whole. It had wanted it to ensure that the drake received a high enough dose of poisoned meat, and it still puzzled the Lich that the hunter managed to survive. It was no matter, though. The tribe had another animal for their totem, and it had another corpse to fabricate a new nightmare from.


    The real shame was that it hadn¡¯t managed to capture or locate an air spirit to power such an abomination. They were even more elusive than river spirits because their domain spanned the whole sky. It would have to find a way to bait them in time, but it still wasn¡¯t exactly sure what would attract them. The Lich made a mental note to locate and kill mages that might better understand the nature of the storm and the wind. Once, long ago, Albrecht had been a master of such things, but those parts of his mind had long since rotted away as the Lich focused on other, more important things like necromancy.


    For now, it didn¡¯t matter because once it added the wings of the wyvern and choice bits of the manticore to the drake, it would create a hunter of its own and then send it out in search of prey of its own. The whole world still belonged to the Lich; it was just nibbling at it slowly, devouring the choicest bits instead of trying to gorge itself on things that didn¡¯t matter.


    It was still annoyed that it had to show off its Leviathan so publicly just to get rid of the nuisance trying to infiltrate the cult of the drowned woman. In the short term, it was just an exercise in understanding how easy it was to taint the human spirit. Still, on a longer time horizon, the cult was a valuable form of camouge and control.


    It had seeded in taking over a minor religion and subverting it to its own ends. It thought that boded well for the future as it sat there dreaming of its inevitable ascent to godhood. There were few enough forces in the region that could stop it, and none of them even suspected that it continued to exist.

 Chapter 44: Paying the Toll

    Chapter 44: Paying the Toll


    "Truly?" Kelvun asked. Until herst sentence, he''d only been pretending to be impressed by the religious nonsense the woman had been going on about, but now she had his full attention. "You''ve seen the water dragon yourself, with your own eyes?"


    He took another drink of his wine as he tried to remember the woman''s name. Alison? Arrissa? He was pretty sure it was the former, but it didn''t really matter. Until just now, he''d been far more interested in getting her drunk enough to see what a priestess of the cult of Oroza wore underneath their drab blue robes. That was the whole reason he''d brought her back to his cabin. To the best of his knowledge, their order had no rules demanding celibacy, and if they did, then he very much doubted they would apply to a Lord like him. Why would they? They worshiped a goddess of fertility; surely, with all the fertility she''d given hisnds, Oroza would appreciate him returning the favor with a member of her flock now and again.


    "I have, my lord, not just in prayers in the temple either," she giggled nervously before taking another sip of wine to steady her nerves. Amon girl like her had obviously never been in the presence of real nobility before, and it showed. "I was there - that night on the waterfront. That''s what made me convert. As soon as I witnessed the true power of the river dragon, I knew that I must give up my sinful ways and focus on serving her."


    That admission forced Kelvun to raise an eyebrow. When the priests of the Orozian temple in Fallravea had asked for permission toe with him on his annual trip to tithe the river goddess, he''d epted, but only because it would have seemed strange not to. Thest thing he would have expected was to meet someone along the way who could shed some light on the mystery that had happened just over a year ago. "You were there that night? You saw what happened."


    When Kelvun had returned fromst year''s tithe, he''d seen the devastation on the southern end of the waterfront even before he''d returned to the city proper. His underlings had told him that it was evidence that they''d done something to upset the river, but a few coins in the right pockets and Kelvun had quickly turned the me in the story to a barge captain that had upset the goddess instead. In that time, he''d received a few stories, but not the one he wanted most: that of his spymaster, who had been missing ever since.


    "I was, my Lord," the priestess answered, nodding her head in an awkward sort of sitting bow as she tried to observe protocol she didn''t truly understand. "I was on the docks that night, ummm¡­ plying my trade with a couple of sailors when it all happened."


    Normally he''d have a lot of trouble not staring at her generous cleavage when she leaned forward like that, but her words banished his lust in an instant. On any other night, talking about any other topic, Kelvun would have focused on the lewdness of what she''d just said. He would have asked for all thescivious details and then paid her double what her rate had been just to relive the moment with her. His wife was still recovering from their firstborn, after all, and there wasn''t a man alive who didn''t understand that a leader like him still had needs in times such as these.


    But his true need was to finally know the truth.


    "Tell me," he breathed. "Tell me everything you saw."


    She blushed, and for a moment, she started at the beginning, with exactly how many ducats she used to charge, but Kelvun rushed her past that part. "No, no, no - The crash, tell me about the crash. Was it truly a dragon?"


    "It was my Lord," she agreed, obviously a little annoyed that her attempt at seduction was starting to go sideways. "She was as powerful as she was beautiful, and she towered over most of the buildings on the waterfront."


    "That big?" he asked incredulously. He''d known that anything that would shatter the broad south dock had to be monstrous, but he found that when he tried to imagine a river dragon like the one in the murals that was two or three stories tall, his brain just wouldn''t ept it. "Describe it to me, please. I''ll pay you; you need only name your price."


    "Not all, my Lord. You donate so much to honor the river every year. You needn''t pay me for anything. I''d happily do whatever you ask for free¡­" She let the moment of sexual tension linger, but when Lord Garvin didn''t bite, she continued. "My Lady Oroza was beautiful, my Lord. I wish you could have seen her. She had such pale skin and wide eyes, and the way that she rode on the dragon, she¡ª"


    "She rode the dragon?" Kelvun interrupted. "I thought she was the dragon?"


    He''d been so busy trying not tough as she mentioned him tithing the river goddess that he''d almost missed that point. This would be the eighth year of his reign and his seventh trip to ckwater, but he''d never once tithed her goddess. Not in truth, and this would be the first time that he felt brave enough to reduce his usurious payments to a creature that no longer seemed to exist, though.


    From everything he''d seen in thest few years, the likeliest exnation for why he no longer got those terrible dreams was that his efforts to drain the swamp had finally paid dividends and starved the spirit of its strength. Between that and the fact that the river goddess had reasserted her im to the area so oftentely, he no longer felt that he needed to honor his oath to pay the loathsome spirit that he''d bargained with so long ago. Surely she would protect him should the worst happen, wouldn''t she?


    "Well, the water is muddy here, and I confess that I was so shocked by the sounds of shattering wood that I remember it both ways," Alison agreed. "She was at once the majestic river dragon with gilded scales rising out of the water and simultaneously a rider upon it. She wasn''t in a saddle, though, like you might ride a horse, you understand? She was in a gilded carriage of silver and gold, like in a fairy story."


    As the woman spoke, her eyes clouded over like she was struggling to remember something or, more disturbingly, struggling not to remember something.


    "I didn''t see the first boat that she crushed," she remembered. "But I saw the second and the third, and it was only after I thought that I should run that I noticed that she was chasing someone down the docks."


    "Who was she chasing?" Kelvun asked. Trying to imagine the carnage of that scene was difficult, but trying to think of who might be important enough for even a small god like her to personally hunt down and kill was even harder. Small godscked the powers of true divinity, but even so, it was a foolish person who would ever dream of crossing them.


    "I have no idea," she said. "I was frozen in fear as I watched him go though. The wagon he was running from was smashed into flinders, and just before he reached thend, foolishly thinking that such a ce would be out of mydy''s reach, he tripped and went tumbling to the ground."


    "Did she kill him then or drag him into the water while he was still alive?" he asked, leaning forward. His wine was forgotten now, and he was sitting on the edge of his seat. Kelvun could hardly contain himself as she continued her tale as a nameless dread came over him. Suddenly he felt foolish for trying to cheat the swamp even though it was dead and gone. He no longer had a real fear of the darkness. Perhaps this goddess now felt that his payments were owed to her instead? Could this whole story be some sort of message in that regard, he wondered?


    "Neither, actually," the priestess said, surprising him. "She just sort of loomed over him for a long moment. At first, I was sure she would destroy him like she had everything else in her path, but instead, she just stood there frozen for the better part of a minute and gave him some sort of message. After that, he fled as quickly as he could, and then she turned her gaze to me instead."


    "What did she say?" Kelvun asked, feeling ufortably reminded of the night that he''d made his pact with the darkness. Was this the source of his paranoia all these years? Did the goddess Oroza have servants of her own working against him the same way he''d once carried out the orders of his own demon?


    "To me? Nothing. She just looked at me with those dark, sad eyes from her gilded carriage and then turned and¡ª" she answered, her voice mixed with both fear and awe.


    "No, not to you. To the man!" It took all that Kelvun had not to throttle the woman. If not for being in the right ce at the right time, he wouldn''t care a whit for her beyond the bedroom.


    She looked at him, obviously unsure of what to say, before she finally opened her mouth. "Well, you have to understand that I was terrified, and they were far away, so I really didn''t hear anything, but even so, the priestess told me that I shouldn''t repeat it."


    That at least made Kelvun smile, and he ced his hand on her knee to reassure her. "You didn''t hear anything, and you shouldn''t repeat anything you heard are two very different things, Alison. Now which is it?"


    "Ummm¡­" She realized she''d said too much and was looking for a way to back-peddle her way out of this trap.


    "Come now, I''m Count Garvin, the Lord of the whole region. Surely you can tell me anything," he said in his most sincere tone of voice. "I promise you, I can make it worth your while¡­"


    The moment of indecision stretched a few seconds longer before the priestess finally said, "Alright, but you mustn''t tell a soul that I told you; I could get in real trouble."


    She waited for him to promise before she continued. "Mydy Oroza said something about how the temple depths were invible and that he must instead seek the headwaters to be truly cleansed. I think she was forcing someone to repent from some terrible deed they must havemitted honestly."


    "The headwaters, hmmmm, that''s very interesting," Kelvun lied. He pretended to consider what she said, but in reality, he had absolutely no idea what that might mean.


    They talked for a while after that, and Kelvun considered bedding his interesting little priestess just for something to do, but in the end, he just dismissed her to brood alone. Another man might dismiss her words, but he knew well the touch of the spirit world, and even if he''d seeded in throwing off the shackles of his old master, there was nothing to guarantee that the river goddess wouldn''t seek to enve him in the same way. Did that mean that the greater risk was in continuing to venerate her and pay her tithe or in not doing so and cracking down on her worship? One would cate and strengthen her, while the other would starve and anger her.


    Both seemed like poor decisions to him, and in the end, he decided to split the difference and hope that she would reward him with indifference rather than wrath. This year he would tithe the river goddess instead of the vanquished spirit of the swamp, but less than he had paid before. If she wanted more than that, then she could bargain with him the same way the darkness had.


    That wasn''t all that Kelvun decided on the final two nights of his trip, though. He also decided that he would be returning to his home in Fallravea via horse. One way or another, he would be steering clear of the river going forward. To date, it had served his domain well, but after lurid dreams about river dragons ravaging his city, he did not think he would sail on it again any time soon.

 Chapter 45: The Drought

    Chapter 45: The Drought


    Even though the darkness felt the ripple as soon as the ingots touched the water, it did not notice the discrepancy immediately because it was consumed with other things. The swamp that had been its birthce was all but gone now, and as a result, it had lost focus on that singr point. Instead, it focused on the entire region that was touched by the Oroza. The entire watershed was its domain, from the headwaters to the delta.


    Even to the north, the Wodenspine mountains were no longer off limits to it thanks to the tireless work of lizard worshippers and the strange totems they erected to celebrate their victories. Where once its territory had been a blood-stained archipgo stretching from Fallravea in the east, the swamp in the south, and the red hills in the northwest, the darkness now enveloped the whole region. It was so lost exploring the air currents of the surrounding mountains with the ckbirds it had manufactured by the dozen, designing wicked new monstrosities that were as much shadow as flesh, and monitoring the seemingly endless journey of Krulm¡¯venor that it scarcely had time for the gold.


    All that changed when the drudge that had been assigned eventually fetched the gold and brought it down through thebyrinth of tunnels to the hoard that was the darkness¡¯ treasure vault. If there was a single source of light in that room, it would have shone with an unmatched brilliance. Every coin that it had ever stolen from a corpse and every magical weapon that had not been melted down and put to other uses in its growing army of the dead ended up there. It was a wonder, and these days it contained almost as many captured souls that had been set aside as it did jewelry or anything else. The world contained an untold bounty, after all, and all of it belonged to the Lich.


    No matter what else it might covet, though, the Lich would never care about anything as much as gold. That tainted metal was the seed from which it had blossomed, and someday it would possess everyst ounce in the world. So, when it discovered that its minion had delivered less than it had in previous years, it bellowed until the halls of itsbyrinth shook with rage.


    ¡°How DARE he,¡± the Lich roared in outrage, screaming voicelessly to his minions so loudly that birds all around ckwater took flight in an attempt to escape from its explosive rage.


    Normally the bird''s behavior would have distracted it momentarily as it struggled to learn more about the creatures of the air by their movements. Weaving together the wyvern and the drake into a single terrifying monster had proven more difficult than it would have imagined, and the Lich had spent months trying in vain to understand what it was doing wrong. To date, only its red-eyed ravens had flown, but they were clumsy things, and they didn¡¯t survive long in the outside world as it tried to use the little wind-up toys to better understand the currents of the air.


    If the Lich had been more powerfully connected to the little brat, it would have snuffed his life force out on the spot and stolen his soul to sit on a shelf beside his bard. It would have been happy to torment the two of them for the rest of time whenever the mood struck. Though, for better or worse, the ungrateful little lordling was outside his reach at the moment because the darkness had maintained only the lightest possible touch on Kelvun''s soul for thest decade. It had done so because it had been certain that the forces of light were going to be a bigger problem than they had been up until now. Even if it did nothing obvious, it was only a matter of time before some sort of inquisition was dispatched to root it out the growing darkness of the region. It was sure of that.


    That was ironic, of course, because anything it did to the Count now would almost certainly draw the attention of the church, but the darkness couldn¡¯t make itself care. It was ten times more powerful than when itst touched the light, and this time it would be the victor. So, instead of crushing him like an insect, it had time to contemte ever greater horrors that it could inflict on the man. If it was finally going to have to bear the cost of a true battle with the lords of light, then it was going to have to be for something that was worth it.


    With every day that passed after that, its desire to humiliate and destroy the man for everything he¡¯d done only increased. The Count had dug a canal through the swamp intending to weaken the Lich, and then he had invited priests of the light to the very heart of its domain. Either one of these would have been sufficient cause to tear the flesh from the traitor¡¯s still-living body if the Lich hadn¡¯t found a way to turn both events to its advantage. But trying to deprive it of its rightful share of the gold that was mined? Trying to break their pact? That was an unforgivable insult.


    At first, the darkness thought that the best solution might be to continue to ramp up the child¡¯s paranoia until he executed all of those around him. That would be an amusing way to pass the time, and it would no doubt end in a pce coup and some sort of bloody civil war, which it would find entertaining. That wasn¡¯t enough for it, though, not anymore. Count Garvin didn¡¯t just need to be humiliated. He needed to be humbled and destroyed. Ultimately the Lich would have been willing to spend more days than it would ever consider reasonable just nning and watching the lordling¡¯s dreams to discover what it was he loved the most, so it could turn all those things to ash.


    Though the obsession took months as it considered all of its terrible options, ultimately, such an investigation only took a few nights because, in the end, the answer was obvious. Kelvun loved himself more than everyone elsebined, but just below that, there were other things that he appreciated, like his kingdom, for one. Despite the fact that the Count had even less to do with Greshen¡¯s greatness than his drunk of a father had, he was very proud of it. After that came the love of the people and a few of his favorite mistresses.


    Yes, it decided, feeling its vengeance flow through it. Those would be its targets. First, it would destroy the man for daring to defy it, and then it would use the disaster that was about to befall his kingdom to escte its n further.


    For the next few weeks, its ferryman made nightly trips to Fallravea. Its minions were delivered to the second tunnel entrance just outside of town. It, of course, led to the warrens that the worshippers of the drowned woman had already started digging in their perverse quest to build her undertemple as she''d been forced tomand them. They were so far under her spell that when the zombies flooded the tunnels and began their relentless digging, the humans could only see them as fellow devotees to her shining divinity. How could they not? They saw her as an baster maiden riding a river dragon in a silvered carriage instead of the bloated corpse of a drowned woman trapped in a rotting monstrosity by a rib cage of steel.


    They were blind enough that they only truly saw what the Lich wanted them to see now, and day by day, that turned to resentment for the powers that be. Once, the priestesses and the worshippers had been Kelvun¡¯s strongest supporters, but now they turn against him almost as one.


    At the same time, the level of the river began to fall precipitously. This was a normal behavior that happened every year. In the spring, when the snows began to melt, the river would flood, and in the summer, it would slowly shrink. This year, with the unwilling help of the river goddess, it was worse than it had been in living memory. One by one, the springs that fed it trickled to a stop, drying up the streams that would go on to be tributaries of the mighty Oroza.


    This not only weakened the River Dragon but it also forced her to flee her nativend. For the first time in her life, she was forced to go to sea to prowl for death. Even in her weakened state, there was nothing that could challenge her, and she went on to bring ocean traffic to a standstill out of sheer rage at being denied her river. The Lich saw no reason to rein in her behavior, though it could have, of course.


    One by one, the sandbars emerged, and then day after day, the river began to narrow. At first, it affected only river traffic, slowing and snarling the normal flow ofmerce and depriving the Count¡¯s coffers of much-needed duties and taxes. By the time it brought all river traffic to a stop until the rains started again in the fall, though, the people were getting restless. Eventually, the giant chain that had served as a symbol of prosperity for so long hung over a dry river bed, and wells dried up while crops withered in the fields.


    It was a devastating blow to the ecosystems, but the Lich didn¡¯t care. Besides the loss of power that it derived from its chained god, the only way that it was affected was that it had to put up illusions over its various river-facing tunnels it had dug beneath ckwater, so they wouldn¡¯t be discovered. It was no longer of the water after all. The darkness had soaked so deeply that the ground itself was now permanently stained with blood, cholerium, and other darker things.


    By the time the people were starting to me the Count openly, in taverns and on the street, even the lordling¡¯s newest inept spymaster couldn¡¯t help but notice the discontent. There was nothing to be done this time, though. No amount of intentional rumors or coins in the pockets of popr bards would turn public opinion without water, and the sisters of the Orozian temples were adamant in their belief that this was the doing of the young Count.


    ¡°Come to our temple,¡± the high priestess beseeched him in public one day while he was going about his business. ¡°Come to the blessed house of the water bearer and beg for absolution, sir! Surely if you repent, then she will take mercy on all of us in our time of need and unleash the flood!¡±


    It wasn¡¯t the first time that Kelvun had heard that particr message, but it was the first time that someone disappeared after making it so publicly. His henchman was just supposed to torture her until she saw the error of her ways and learned not to embarrass Count Garvin in public, but sadly he didn¡¯t know his own strength, and she perished while she was being made to see the light. The Lich didn¡¯t allow her corpse to stay buried in its shallow grave for more than a night, but it did make sure that the man that had done such grievous harm to one of his servants was made to suffer for it as she ripped him to pieces.


    Kelvun¡¯s mistresses disappeared shortly after that in retaliation, adding further fuel to the fire. In the Count¡¯s world, they were his only remaining joy, and one night they just vanished. In a single night all of them disappeared, and no one could say to where. This caused pain and fear to course through him like he hadn¡¯t felt since the goblin wars. The Lich was kinder to the women than they deserved, though, but only because it wanted their beautiful bodies to be as well-preserved as possible for the final act. After months of preparation by the Lich, everything that Count Kelvun Garvin loved most in the world had been taken from him. Thend was dying, the people hated him, and there was no one left tofort the lordling in his hour of need.


    Even the drudges hadpleted their work beneath the city. Truly, the stage was atst set to rob Kelvun of thest thing that mattered to him: his life.

 Chapter 46: Fever Pitch

    Chapter 46: Fever Pitch


    After the speech had started to go sideways, and the heckling began, Kelvun didn¡¯t even bother to try to get back to his carriage. The way that the mob just kept growing, and he was sure that even over the short distance he needed to travel, he¡¯d never be able to force his way through the streets without making things worse. Instead, he barked a few orders and used his personal guard to force a path through smaller side streets. That way, with only the asional beating to force their way through, he and his party managed to weave their way back to his pce.


    Thest time that he¡¯d used armed men to clear the streets and imposed a curfew, it had backfired worse than he¡¯d expected and led to riots. With things this dry, a repeat performance might burn half the city down. So, with the fall rains due to start any time now, it wasn¡¯t the time for heroics. Angry as they were, he could just wait for a few days and let this all blow over.


    ¡°Just keep moving,¡± he growled at one of the other nobles who¡¯d stopped and was steeling himself to try to speak to the crowd that followed them. Lord Leonin hade with him to try to get the people to see reason and feel self-important, but Kelvun had known that one more viscount wasn¡¯t going to make a difference in the eyes of a random peasant.


    ¡°But if we don¡¯t teach them there¡¯s a price for this, it will only embolden the rabble further,¡± Lord Leonin muttered, pausing once again to look balefully at the mob that was lurking sullenly past the men with halberds that were protecting them.


    Kelvun couldn¡¯t say he disagreed with the man¡¯s sentiment. He was almost certainly right, and at any other time when their guards weren¡¯t surrounded and outnumbered by thirty to one, he would have dly made any one of half a dozen examples out of the miscreants. Now was not the moment, though. After the rain started to fall, it would be simple enough to use his spies to suss out the ringleaders and make them regret the part they¡¯d yed in all this, and once the Oroza was flowing again, no one would notice if they just disappeared.


    For now, he just ignored the old fool as they made good time back to his estate. There the high walls would keep the jackals at bay. Well, the lower-ss jackals, anyway. The ones with fleas. The Garvin estate barely had a room to spare just now since most of the nobles worth the name had fled the riots either to his demesne or to their estates in the country, and the constant presence of strangers lent a festive atmosphere to the usually drab ce.


    Of course, the jackals that wore fine clothes were an entirely different breed than the starving, mangy mass of humanity that followed them while they worked up the nerve to do something bold. That didn¡¯t mean that they were any less dangerous, though. Here his subjects wanted food and rain, while the rich constantly petitioned him for concessions and tax relief. The former was impossible, of course, but thetter was too expensive to conscience. The rebuilding of Fallravea had note cheap, and the constant construction in ckwater was almost as expensive. These were the reasons he always had dreams about endless digging, he was sure, because of the endless construction that was always threatening to undermine everything he had nned.


    Still - there were advantages to having so many people around.


    His wife had never been kinder or sweeter to him than she was right now when she couldn¡¯t hope to escape the eyes of her peers. Of course, the fact that he had to work so hard to coordinate his secret rendezvous and that they were now under his own roof made them all the more exciting too. His favorite mistresses had all apparently fled the city, but there were plenty of noble women in his house right now looking to curry his favor no matter what it took to do that.


    That made him smile, even if nothing else in this wretched day did. The Baroness Hilfta had implied she¡¯d be open to some very tough negotiations tonight after the dancing had wound down, should he be inclined to hear her petition aboutnd rights once more. He sighed as he walked through the gate and noticed the preparations that were taking ce in the garden. It seemed like every night, they had some sort of g at this point, and he couldn¡¯t remember if this one was the masquerade sort or just the normal kind.


    Honestly, he was almost sick of the parties, even if it was all there was to do. Kelvun resolved to spend a whole week in bed once he¡¯d sent the freeloaders packing after the rains had calmed things down. He could pass the time by counting all the favors that so many of the most important men in the region would owe him.


    Kelvun looked at the preparations, but all he was really focused on were the clouds hanging above the city in wispy grey streamers. Any other year those would have held the promise of rain, and no one would have dreamed of hanging bunting and arranging flowers without pavilions, but in this cursed season, they were nothing but a terrible tease. For weeks now, they¡¯d hung above the region, but the scattered showers had done nothing to help either the farmers or the fishermen.


    Kelvun stood there just long enough to trigger the knots of people to start walking toward him. When he realized he was about to be enmeshed inyer afteryer of hangers on and their imprable gossip, he started walking purposefully towards the front door once more. He¡¯d had more than enough talking for one day and would leave it to Viscount Leonin to exin how restless things were bing outside the gates. Maybe a little fear would blunt their gossip tonight, but he doubted it.


    ¡°How did it go, my darling,¡± Kelvun¡¯s wife Arnisste asked, bringing him to a sudden halt as he strode through one of their parlors.


    He¡¯d been intent on going to the chapel so that he could get a little solitude to calm down. There at least, he could pretend to pray for rain as he¡¯d promised the people he would, but it would seem that the gods were enjoying ying with him because today¡¯s conversation was almost entirely inescapable.


    ¡°Oh, everything was lovely,¡± he said, pasting on his best fake smile as he took stock of the women she was having tea with. ¡°I believe the best way to describe the mood of the average man in Fallravea just now is uproarious, though excitable and morous would also describe things almost as well.¡±


    ¡°That good then?¡± Her answer dripped sarcasm, but the brightness of her tone hid it almostpletely. ¡°Well - that¡¯s certainly better than expected. We were just discussing how things might take a turn for the ugly out there if we don¡¯t have rain soon.¡±


    ¡°My dear, that is impossible,¡± Kelvun said with a slight mock bow. ¡°I assure you thatmon people couldn¡¯t get any uglier if they tried.¡±


    That at least caused a burst of politeughter, though Kelvun did not stay long enough to bask in it. After a few more exchanges, he made his apologies and left them to while away the day while he tried to decide what, if anything, he could do to improve the plight.


    In his bedroom, he found a costume allid out for him. The coat and hose were crushed ck velvet, and the mask had a skull motif to it. He wondered if that was supposed to reflect the specter of starvation that was stalking so many right now or if it was a mythological figure. He was just d the artist had gone with white instead of gold leaf. A golden skull on his bed would have given him nightmares.


    He took the paper mache mask into the small private chapel with him, but he was at a loss on who to pray to. He¡¯d tried to beg Oroza for her mercy in private, but because of his feelings about the river these days, he¡¯d been unwilling to go pray publicly at her temple as the priestesses¡¯ requested. None of the other gods,rge or small that he¡¯d sacrificed to, in turn, had done any good either. As far as he was concerned, there was really only one power left to try, and it was better left dead and buried.


    Kelvun reflected on everything that had happened and tried to figure out what he could have done to improve things, but as usual, he found his past actions quite correct. Truthfully, he wouldn¡¯t have changed a thing, he decided. Any other choice would have led to an even worse sort of ruin, too horrible to contemte.


    As day faded to night, his manservant finally chased him down and badgered him into preparing for histest g. It was supposed to be to celebrate the end of the dry season, but no one really believed that. They¡¯d had three previous parties in thest week with simr themes. Tonight was just another excuse to get everyone drunk and keep the most powerful lords anddies in the region from tearing out each other¡¯s eyes for sport.


    It worked fantastically well at that, at least. After a few bottles of wine and enough masks to give the identity of the person making the insults usible deniability, everything faded into the background of revelry, albeit a revelry that had overstayed its wee and grown a bit stale around the edges.


    That was how the Baroness found him, he was sure. How could he hide from someone who had seen him almost every day for thest two weeks? He was in much the same boat. Just because he didn¡¯t <em>know</em> that his wife was dressed as the goddess Arden didn¡¯t mean that he couldn¡¯t recognize her favorite blue dress while her face was hidden behind that golden mask.


    It would have been so tiresome, of course, had it not provided the perfect cover for these little assignations and trysts. That was why when Lady Hilfte, who wore the mask of a beautiful fairy queen in what he could only assume was a touch of irony for the aging woman, he was happy to follow her into the hedge maze. He¡¯d been nning to add her notch to his bedpost already, of course, but he would almost certainly enjoy it more if he had her keep the mask on.


    In the darkness, they had no trouble separating themselves from the guests or the light. Indeed, the light of the papernterns did not reach past the second bend in the path. After that, the only way he could keep track of the other woman was by holding her hand as they slipped deeper into the darkness until they finally stopped at a dead end somewhat off the main path through.


    ¡°Have you reconsidered my proposal about the logging rights then?¡± she said in a voice that promised a smile that he couldn¡¯t see in the night.


    ¡°That they were yours was never in doubt,¡± he answered smoothly. ¡°I¡ª¡±


    For a moment, Kelvun imagined that he heard the distant peal of thunder over the sound of the string quartet that was filling the background with sweet notes. That was impossible, of course, since any hope of rain was still weeks away, so he didn¡¯t let it deter him and instead stepped toward the Baroness, pressing her against the wall and kissing her hard enough to make her melt. She wasn¡¯t as pretty as the women he¡¯d been bedding before he was forced into this deadly dull house arrest, but then, those other girls had never offered to let him take them in the middle of his own hedge maze, and tonight that made all the difference.


    He¡¯d only started to pull up her skirts and petty coats when the rain started. It didn¡¯t start with a few drops and slowly get worse. Instead, a wall of water descended on the city in a vicious downpour. Kelvun shock quickly turned to disappointment that he was going to be denied his conquest, but only for a moment. After that, he startedughing, and a momentter, thedy he¡¯d been kissing was, too, as they reveled in nature¡¯s grand joke. After all, how could he possibly be disappointed that the drought had finally ended, and soon enough, things would be back to business as usual?

 Chapter 47: Taking Shelter

    Chapter 47: Taking Shelter


    Inexplicably, spirits were still high as the nobles and the servants rushed into the grand hall to escape the unexpected downpour. Even though hairdos and outfits were ruined, along with most of the food, everyone was smiling andughing. They¡¯d all been feeling the tension of the heat and the unrest of the people every bit as much as Kelvun had, he realized.


    It was a pity they hadn¡¯t had this party indoors. It would have been wonderful to have in the grand hall while they watched the lightning flicker and sh and listened as the rain drowned out everything except the thunder.


    ¡°I suppose this means I¡¯ll finally be able to take the missus back to our home and finally stop imposing on you,¡± Lord Leonin said, offering Kelvun his hand. ¡°Once the river has refilled and traffic is restored, we were talking about taking a trip to Abendend or¡­¡±


    The servants were still running in and out of the side doors closest to where the remains of the evening¡¯s festivitiesy in their watery grave amidst the gardens, so Count Garvin had been straining to hear his Viscount¡¯s groveling when the main doors to the entrance hall suddenly mmed open, shattering the dozens of conversations that had been taking ce moments before with a wave of silence.


    Kelvun looked toward the sound along with everyone else, but despite the lit candbras, the light did not reach their guest, and all he could make out was the silhouette of a single person. For a moment, the fact that there was only one person there was a relief; he¡¯d worried that, despite the rain, the mob had finally worked up the nerve to escte things.


    That relief didn¡¯tst long, though. As the figure strode forward silently into the hall, the nearby candles andmps that had withstood the sudden gust of wind began to flicker and gutter. Then they went out one at a time as the light shrank from the spreading shadows that seemed to growrger with every step forward.


    Kelvun hadn¡¯t felt like this in years - not since that night he¡¯d met with his mages on the eve of the canal¡¯spletion - but he recognized it immediately. The darkness hade for him. For a moment, anger red inside him as he realized the darkness hadn¡¯t juste, but it was doing it in a ce where his peers could see him.


    ¡°Seize him,¡± Kelvun said, drawing the sword he¡¯d been wearing and advancing two steps. His weapon was ornamental, but everyone else didn¡¯t know that. The intruder certainly didn¡¯t.


    Kelvun almost backed down when no one else moved. Finally, two guards began to advance on the shadowy figure, giving Kelvun the strength he needed to keep going. The stranger kept walking until it reached the table closest to the door, and then they stopped. It seemed oblivious to the three men with swords advancing on it and instead produced a box from nowhere and ced it on the table. Then, without a word, it turned and began to walk back the way it came.


    ¡°You there!¡± one of the guards shouted, ¡°halt by order of Lord Garvin!¡±


    It ignored themand, angering Kelvun further, though he tried not to let his impotent rage show through his mask of calm as he studied the box. It was golden, and even from this distance, he could see that it was engraved with many strange symbols and only a littlerger than a man¡¯s head.


    The strange calm of that moment was finally broken when the second guard reached for their uninvited guest, and his hand went right through it like it was nothing but a ghost.


    ¡°Witchcraft!¡± the second guard yelled out as the first one tried to run it through with his sword. The sword strike was no more effective than the mailed fist had been though, and the shadowy form continued to retreat in slow, measured steps, apparentlypletely unconcerned about the panicked whispers and fidgeting that was rising in its wake.


    ¡°You fools - get a torch and¡ª¡± Kelvun was shouting out orders to try to stay in some sort of control, but before he could tell his men to fight the thing with fire, it had crossed beyond the threshold, and the doors mmed forcefully behind it. That was followed almost immediately by the side doors mming, then the windows and the interior doors. One by one, every single exit from the hall had shut, and the count had a terrible feeling in his stomach.


    Panic was rising now and spreading like fire among the nobles. Some of them were trying to force the doors open now, while most of the others were busy demanding answers or praying.


    ¡°Everyone, please remain calm,¡± he yelled, trying to sound more confident than he was. ¡°The servants will restore the lights in a moment, and then we will deal with the prankster behind this very harshly.¡±


    Even while he spoke, he kept walking toward the box though. He was drawn to it in a way that was almost maic. He considered trying to burn it unopened, but he doubted that just taking a quick peek would hurt. After all, the darkness needed him. This was probably just an attempt by whatever dregs were left in the deepest part of the swamp to bluff about its strength or beg for mercy.


    He never quite touched the thing, though. When his hand hovered inches away, it opened by itself, unfolding like aplicated work of art to reveal a golden skull. It was stylized and expensive but obviously not real. The slight asymmetries present throughout it kept it from being quite beautiful, though. Instead, it was off-putting. If it were up to him, he¡¯d have the thing melted down immediately.


    It wasn¡¯t up to him. He¡¯d have to humor the darkness, at least until he could drive a stake through its foul heart. He just had to¡ª


    Kelvun¡¯s mind came to a screeching halt as the skull rose into the air, and a glowing, ghostly body began to materialize around it. The figure was just translucent enough that he could see the skull flickering beneath the handsome face of the dead man, but otherwise, it was a convincing illusion. He hadn¡¯t seen better outside the capital. There was something about the man that it portrayed that looked familiar to Kelvun, but he couldn¡¯t quite ce it, at least not until the disembodied spirit began to speak.


    ¡°In thanks for all you have done for it over the years, Count Kelvun Garvin, my master has offered you a boon: one final performance so everyone might know your greatness.¡± The ghost¡¯s voice was uncertain and wavering like he spoke underwater, but it was still loud enough that Kelvun was sure all could hear.


    This was the ghost of a bard that he¡¯d heard y in his father¡¯s court when he was young. He couldn¡¯t recall the name, but he was sure that he¡¯d known the man in life, however briefly, and the swamp had dared summoned him into his house where people could see? Kelvun could hear his heart pounding in his ears now as the rage flowed through him. How was he supposed to deflect or minimize such a terrible charge? He was ruined! Perhaps if he could y this off as a message from the Magica Collegium, he could make everything think this was the work of mages instead of evil spirits.


    Kelvun tried to think frantically, noting with only vague interest as several stringed instruments flew out of their owner¡¯s hands and took to the air, orbiting the strange apparition. He didn¡¯t give a fig for any performance. He only wanted this to stop, but there was neither a mage nor a priest in attendance who had any hope of sending this abomination back to theherworld.


    The sound of the instrumentsing to life was melodious at first but in an inhuman way. As first the lute and then the violin joined it, they struck a discordant melody that was at oncecking in harmony and using minor keys in a way that was unnerving. None of thatpared to the sound of the ghostly singing that came next.


    <em>¡°There once was a boy who thought people were toys,</em>


    <em>and his father was a lousy drunk.</em>


    <em>He sold hisnd for a song but didn¡¯t think it wrong,</em>


    <em>For where his heart should be was only junk.</em>


    <em>As ruler Kelvun had his season but for almost no reason,</em>


    <em>He chose tomit this treason.</em>


    <em>Now an unblooded hero, the callowest zero,</em>


    <em>He¡¯s much too good for the gallows...¡±</em>


    The note lingered here for a few seconds for the tension to build before the final line shattered it with a hand full of sybles.


    <em>¡°So now he will die in the dark.¡±</em>


    The dissonant music horrified Kelvun as much as it did everyone else, but once the signing started, he stood transfixed as all his sins were suddenlyid bare before everyone. His wife. His servants. The other lords of the region. There would be no way toe back from this.


    Upon reaching the end of his song, the ghost kept ying the instruments, but as the word ¡®dark¡¯ was spoken, every light in the pce that he could see was extinguished in unison. It was terrifying enough that it made his heart seize in his chest, but half a dozen women screamed as a result.


    Kelvun should run. He knew that, but he couldn¡¯t make himself move from where he stood, gazing up at the ghost, which was the only source of light left in the room. It was dark enough that no one would see his cowardice. He could escape via one of the servant exits or maybe a second-story window. If neither of those worked, he could always lock himself in his chapel until this was over, he thought desperately. The ground there was consecrated, and that should be enough to keep evil out.


    The sound of splintering wood from somewhere close in the darkness gave him hope for a moment. ¡°Those good-for-nothing guards must have finally gotten off their asses and done something,¡± he muttered to himself. Kelvun was about tomend them on their work and order everyone to evacuate, but the blood-curdling scream he heard next changed everything.


    It wasn¡¯t the sound of someone being startled but the sound of someone being murdered.


    Kelvun stood there breathing heavily to keep from fainting even as the panic spread through the crowd of nobles, and many of them started running.


    ¡°Run for your lives!¡± a shrill male voice shouted. Others shouted simr things, but the first voice was the loudest.


    ¡°The dead have risen! They¡ª¡± another person screamed. This time it was a woman. What caught his attention, though, wasn¡¯t what she said; it was the awful tearing sounds and breaking sounds. They weren¡¯t the sound of doors or furniture but the sounds of meat and carnage.


    At that moment, he was suddenly transported back to the battlefield on that terrible day when the goblins had surrounded him and threatened to eat his impromptu army whole. It was that extra jolt of fear that finally gave him the impetus to run towards the closest staircase.


    Along the way, he shoved several bodies out of the way and almost tripped over one on the ground, but Kelvun didn¡¯t let that stop him. Somehow the swamp had unleashed monsters among them as some sort ofst-gasp revenge, and he was going to lock himself in the only ce in the entire pce that he knew for certain was safe.

 Chapter 48: The Betrayed

    Chapter 48: The Betrayed


    <strong>Author''s Note: </strong><em>This chapter is one of the darker ones to date. Probably not the darkest, but certainly top five. Reader discretion is advised.</em>


    Kelvun didn¡¯t stop for anyone or anything as he ran up the stairs in the dark. He was in such a hurry to make it to his rooms that he didn¡¯t even bother to find a real sword. Along the way, he briefly considered running to the nursery to fetch his infant son but decided against it because of how far away it was. He didn¡¯t need a weapon or a child. He needed a safe ce to hide until morning¡¯s light would burn away the evil that had somehow turned up in his own home.


    He idly wondered if his wife was safe and tried to remember where she¡¯d been before the lights went out, but he couldn¡¯t recall for the life of him. Remembering anything was impossible, with blood-curdling screams rising from the grand hall. There were closer ones too, but with the discordant symphony that the bard was still ying, he couldn¡¯t figure out exactly how close any of that was from him.


    It didn¡¯t matter, though; nothing did. Once this was over, he could find a new wife, and he was sure he¡¯d grow to love little Leo the Sixth almost as much as he loved Leo the Fifth. He just had to keep running; he would either stay ahead of it and get to his chapel, or he wouldn¡¯t. He simply had to trust that the gods would protect a righteous man like him.


    They did too, and as he closed and barred the door of the tiny room behind him, he was forced to admit to himself that he¡¯d known they would the whole time.


    ¡°If there¡¯s a silver lining in this, it¡¯s that everyone who heard the message of that awful phantasm won¡¯t live long enough to repeat it,¡± he assured himself as he lit a few of the candles in the room to try to dispel the darkness while he thought of some possible story he could spread in the wake of this event to divert the me.


    A peasant uprising might work, he supposed, but it would make him look weak as a leader. A goblin attack would be very appropriate for the goblin¡¯s bane, but he hadn¡¯t seen any reports of goblins within leagues of the city in years, so no one would believe it. Perhaps he could dere it to be an assassination by Dutton agents that was only partially sessful, he thought to himself, brightening slightly as he paced back and forth in the tight confines of his chapel.


    ¡°I¡¯m sure I still have those ridiculous papers from Gelwin about those raids that were supposed to happen,¡± he mused. ¡°If I were to¡ª¡±


    Kelvun¡¯s words were cut off by the sound of someone pounding on the door. He raised his flimsy weapon towards the sound as he quietly backed away from it, but whatever was out there didn¡¯t sound strong enough to get through.


    ¡°Kelvun, you unbelievable coward, open the door!¡± a woman that sounded an awful lot like his wife shouted.


    Kelvun only stood there quietly, trying to decide if this was a trick. If it was, then the door certainly needed to stay closed, but what should he do if it wasn¡¯t? Should he take the chance?


    ¡°Kelvun,¡± she shrieked again. ¡°I know you¡¯re in there, and I know you¡¯ve got a secret door for when you go see your whores; now let me in before those things find me, or I swear to all the gods I¡¯ll never stop haunting you.¡±


    For a moment, Kelvun thought about leaving the door closed, even though the pettiness in the face of death was more proof than he ever would have needed that it was really her. If she died, she would definitely haunt him until the end of his days, he admitted grudgingly as he lifted the bar on the door. That wasn¡¯t the reason he was letting her in, though. He was saving her because it would make him look more sympathetic.


    ¡°Darling, I¡¯m so d you¡¯re safe. I¡­¡± the lie died on his lips as he opened the door enough for the light to spill out on the malformed shape that was waiting for him. He only saw it for an instant before he decided to m the door shut again, but that glimpse would be enough to haunt his nightmares for the rest of his days.


    Only pieces of his wife were waiting there to greet him with open arms. Even in the darkness, it was clear she¡¯d met a violent end and that whatever had done this to her had gone to great lengths to make sure that her face had beenpletely untouched. But the strange shadow that lurked behind her and talked through her mouth had a body that defied description entirely. It was a mass of tentacles and disjointed limbs more than a man or a monster.


    The door swung shut, and the tentacles came forward, immediately pulling it open once more and pitting him in a terrible tug of war that Kelvun was slowly but surely losing.


    ¡°Kelvun - my darling husband, why didn¡¯t you save me?¡± the thing that was using his wife¡¯s corpse as a hand puppet called out to him. ¡°Where were you when we needed you? Where was the hero that the bards sing about while your guests were being devoured by zombies?¡±


    He gritted his teeth in the face of the horror, but the taunts sapped his strength, and slowly but surely, the sinuous limbs found their way through the gap, and finally, before they could grab him, he let go of the door, leaped backward, and picked up his flimsy sword.


    ¡°You can¡¯t touch me here, vile demon!¡± he yelled in defiance. ¡°Return to the pit that spawned you, or face my righteous wrath!¡± Defiance was the only emotion he had left that could overwhelm the terror and sadness that flooded his body. It was one thing to let someone die, but it was something else entirely to view the result like this.


    ¡°Darling,¡± the head of his wife whispered as the thing that wore her skin took a step forward. ¡°Consecrated ground doesn¡¯t stay quite so holy if you use it to bang the maids. Everyone knows that you weren¡¯t praying all those hours you were locked away in there¡­¡±


    The abomination slowly ignited with flickering white bursts of holy fire here and there as it advanced into the room. It didn¡¯t seem too disturbed by this, and the end result only gave him a better view of the inhuman puppet master as it moved toward him.


    Kelvun considered himself a brave man. He¡¯d ridden into battle on countless asions and was beloved by the people for his deeds, but this was too much, even for him. As much as he might not have loved his wife, seeing her like this broke fragile parts of his mind, and with one sh at the air to try to keep the thing back, he turned and ran for the far wall. With his free hand, he fumbled with the candbra that was the switch for the secret door and pulled it. If he could just escape until morning, then he could¡­


    The passage that opened up behind the small altar was dark, and it should have been empty, but as Kelvun charged in, he ran into something soft and cold almost immediately. He raised his sword to strike without knowing quite what was blocking his way, but the grip of slender fingers on his wrist stayed his hand for a moment as whoever it was pushed him back into the room that he was so desperate to leave.


    ¡°No!¡± he yelled out, somehow powerless before the shadowy creature¡¯s gentle grip, ¡°I have to¡­ We have to run before it¡ª¡±


    ¡°Shhhh, calm down, Kevvie¡­¡± a familiar voice soothed.


    ¡°That¡¯s right - rx. Everything is going to be just fine¡­¡± a second voice agreed.


    For a moment, Kelvun experienced a wave of relief as he realized that Beatrice and Emalin were safe after all. He¡¯d feared the worst when they¡¯d gone missing weeks ago amidst the heat and the mobs, but now, when he needed them most, they¡¯de to save him. Then he realized that was impossible. Not only would they have no way to be here right now, but it would have been impossible for these two women to work together in anything.


    This had to be some trick of evil, he decided as he brought his sword down as hard as he could against the creature that barred his path. ¡°Kevvie - why would you hurt us after all we¡¯ve been through?¡± Beatrice¡¯s voice warbled in a cruel mockery of her normally sonorous tones.


    The first blow bent the bejeweled ornamental de, but that didn¡¯t stop him. The fear and the rage boiling up inside him demanded an answer, and this was the only weapon he had. It took two more strikes to snap it off at the hilt entirely.


    ¡°It looks like my little lord¡¯s sword gave out again,¡± Emalin tittered.


    ¡°Doesn¡¯t it always, though?¡± The thing wearing his wife¡¯s skin answered from behind.


    The monster that was holding himughed at that in both of her voices as it finally stepped into the light. After what the evil had done to his wife, Kelvun had steeled himself for the worse, but the result was more terrible than he could have possibly imagined. Something had killed these women and stitched together the pieces of their corpses in a way that was as asymmetric as possible, leaving him with a two-headed five-armed shambling horror. The fifth arm hinted that more than two bodies made up this monstrosity, but Kelvun tried very hard not to think about how his third mistress Annise might fit into that answer.


    ¡°Wha-what do you want with me?¡± he demanded of the horror as it started to smoke in ce, and the remains of the holy incantations made it smolder slightly.


    ¡°I just want to be with you, Kevvie,¡± Beatrice answered, ¡°Forever and ever and ever¡­¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s right - the darkness promised us that after it was done with you, we could spend all eternity together!¡± Emalin agreed.


    ¡°No!¡± Kelvun screamed. He was trapped, but he¡¯d be damned if he¡¯d let them take him alive. He still had the useless hilt of his sword in his hand, but the cheap metal had fractured at an angle, leaving a few inches of steel on the hilt. He swallowed as he jabbed it toward his neck. He wasn¡¯t sure if it would be enough to kill him quickly, but he hoped it would be. It would be better to drown in his own blood than to endure any more of this horror show.


    The blow nevernded, though. Inches before the steel would have buried itself in his right jugr, one of the tentacles from his wife¡¯s puppeteer wrapped around his wrist and stopped him. ¡°Now, now darling,¡± she cooed. ¡°If you died now, you couldn¡¯t share eternity with each other. You¡¯ve loved making all of us scream for so long. Now it¡¯s time to return the favor.¡±


    Kelvun didn¡¯t have a chance to finish wrapping his mind around that awful idea before he was dragged into the darkness by the two monstrosities. He was halfway down the winding private passage before he realized the sound he was hearing were his own screams, and they only stopped when he saw that the passage now intersected a new rough-hewn tunnel that someone had built to invade his home.


    That shocked him. How had someone dug a tunnel underneath his pce without his notice? How long had this plot against him been brewing? Suddenly the memory of the moment he¡¯d short-changed the swamp forced itself into his mind unbidden. That was when he was certain he was damned.

 Chapter 49: An Inexplicable Aftermath

    Chapter 49: An Inexplicable Aftermath


    When the morning dawned and the only evidence ofst night¡¯s vicious storm were the puddles in the streets, Bar Geldin was overjoyed. Well, he would have been had someone from the guard not seen fit to send a messenger that woke him up at the crack of dawn. That was an entirely uneptable turn of events, especially considering everything he¡¯d already been through in thest few weeks.


    With theing of the autumn rains, the danger of riots and fires had finally stopped! This should have been the one night he¡¯d been able to sleep in with his wife, but no, instead, a mailed fist had woken him up to tell him he was needed. These riots were already well past anything he should have had to deal with already as Fallravea¡¯s Captain of the Guard. He¡¯d bought this post with a few well-ced bribes and pledges of eternal loyalty to his dear cousin because of the respectability that came with it. Normally it was practically a ceremonial position. Beating rioters bloody and getting up in the dark to deal with things personally was never supposed to be part of that deal. He had a whole web of underlings for exactly this reason.


    At least, he was supposed to, but as he made his way from the local watch station to the city constabry, the mystery only deepened. No one knew, it seemed, what he¡¯d been woken up for. All anyone knew was that he was urgently needed by the next person in the chain ofmand, so one at a time, he was handed off to the next highest-ranking officer on the list in a way that would have beenedic if it wasn¡¯t so frustrating.


    ¡°If you can¡¯t tell me where we¡¯re going, I¡¯ve got half a mind to go back to bed until you find someone who can,¡± Lord Geldin grumbled. Walking beside thed that had been sent to fetch him to the pce for reasons no one would exin.


    ¡°Please, sir - the night captain is at the pce gate. I¡¯m sure that he knows just what¡¯s going on,¡± the young errand boy pleaded, knowing he¡¯d be the one punished if Lord Geldin failed to appear.


    ¡°At the gate? Why in the devil would Bruden be waiting in the damp when he could just as easily wait for me in the guard post or the entry hall?¡± the Bar wondered, mostly to himself though his escort answered anyway.


    ¡°I¡¯m sure I can¡¯t say, sir,¡± the messenger answered. ¡°Everyone is standing outside the gate. That¡¯s all I know. No one in or out until you get there.¡±


    That at least mollified Lord Geldin. He¡¯d much rather be in bed sleeping with his wife, but if he had to be out and about at this ungodly hour, then the least he could expect was for everyone to treat him like the important person that he was.


    Minutester, they arrived at the wrought iron gate, and there was an obvious pall over everyone, but there were no clues as to why. ¡°Why in the name of all that¡¯s holy did you get me up this early, Bruden?¡± he demanded. He¡¯d learned that when you had authority, you should throw your weight around as early as possible so there was no confusion about who was in charge when he was young, and the lesson had only gotten more important as the years had gone by.


    ¡°Sir,¡± the way that the night captain came instantly worried the Bar. Unlike him, Bruden had been in the guard for almost two decades. He was a professional, and he was very obviously spooked. ¡°It all started a few hours ago when there was a message for Lord Reigen at the main gate.¡±


    ¡°So - did you have the message delivered to him?¡± the Bar asked, trying to be patient.


    ¡°We tried to, my lo- sir, but he was at the Count¡¯s pce, you see,¡± the man answered. Yes, he was definitely spooked and trying to avoid something, though, for the life of him, the Bar couldn¡¯t imagine what would make such a sturdy fellow teeter on the brink like this.


    He looked past the gate to the pce grounds and garden, and the only thing he saw amiss was the wreckage of a drowned party between the hedge maze and the fountain. That made Lord Geldin smile. He¡¯d been to precious few of the parties that Count Garvin had thrown since everything had started to spin out of control, and the nobles - the ones that really mattered, had sought to put some distance between themselves and themoners. He liked to think they¡¯d left him out because he was too busy with his official duties, but he knew the truth: he was the third son of a lesser family, and this was as far as he was ever likely to rise.


    ¡°So - they had a little rain on their parade - they won¡¯t bite the head off your messenger,¡± he answered, still smiling that their fun had been ruined. ¡°I still don¡¯t see how you need me for any of this.¡±


    Captain Bruden didn¡¯t answer immediately. Instead, he gestured to two of his men that were standing by with torches and started walking toward the pce, leaving the Bar to catch up. Something about their grim silence made him stay quiet, and eventually, it proved to be enough to kill even the smile that had been inspired by the drooping flower arrangements and soaked tters of food that had been left out all night.


    The realization that all of that was something the servants should have addressed by now was his first clue that something might actually be terribly wrong, and it came to him moments before he saw the bloodstains on the front door. Lord Geldin reached for his sword immediately at the sight, only to realize that he hadn¡¯t belted it on in his hurry to get dressed. Reluctantly he pulled a dagger from another sheath and held it like a protective talisman.


    ¡°What happened?¡± he asked, finally working up the nerve to speak.


    ¡°We don¡¯t know,¡± Captain Bruden answered. ¡°The messenger took one look inside and ran back out into the pouring rain. We haven¡¯t been able to get much out of him about who or what he saw.¡±


    The way the men stopped, it quickly became apparent to Lord Geldin that they expected him to do the honors and open the door, or at least to chicken out and order someone else to do it. He was determined not to do that, though, in case this was a prank. So, he pushed the door open without the slightest hesitation and stepped inside to show his decisiveness.


    That decision almost immediately backfired as he windmilled on the slick travertine tiles of the entryway and only avoided falling onto his ass in a pool of blood thanks to his right hand¡¯s death grip on the front door.


    Lord Geldin didn¡¯t have time to get over that first shock before arger second one hit him like an ocean wave. Dawn¡¯s light was only just starting to shine through the windows on the east side of the building, and many of those still had their drapes drawn, but what light crept into the room was enough to see that the ce was a charnel house.


    In recent years Count Garvin hadvished money on his own vanity, and the grand entryway to his pce had been refurbished twice. The first effort had seen the stairs reced with something broad and sweeping to match the new stonework, and the second had covered half of everything in ayer of gold and gilded scrollwork.


    This third renovation had covered the other two in ayer of blood. That was the first thing that struck the Bar as he struggled to put on a brave face in front of his lessers. Everything was covered or spattered in thinyers of partially congealed blood. It was only after that shock started to fade that he realized there were no bodies to go with it.


    How could one end up with so much blood and no bodies at all? He had no idea, but he knew what needed to happen next before the panic that was slowly making its way up his spine forced him to flee. Ever so carefully, so he wouldn¡¯t slip and fall, he walked to the east windows and began opening the curtains one at a time. Every extra bit of light made the horror show that much worse, but it was necessary, and it made him seem more decisive. That¡¯s what he told himself, at least.


    ¡°Light banishes the darkness,¡± he said, mostly to himself. ¡°All the priests say it, and light is the only thing that could possibly protect us from whatever did this.¡±


    Once he started, the other men began to help him, flooding the room with dim morning light that was still brighter than any torch. It was only when he had opened up everyst window that could be opened that he was forced toe face to face with the facts: no one had survived whatever happened here. They couldn¡¯t have.


    Here and there were scraps of fancy dresses and costumes of the rich that had been herest night, but there were also serving trays and parts of uniforms that spoke to the servants that would have been attending to their needs. Even though Lord Geldin wasn¡¯t an imaginative man, he could see how this bloodbath would have yed out. The only thing that was missing was who did it.


    ¡°Who could have done such a terrible thing?¡± he asked the other men at aplete loss. Captain Bruden shook his head in silence, unable to speak, and one of the soldiers that apanied them in tried to suggest goblins, but they¡¯d all fought goblins in recent enough memory to know the signs. The room would be stacked with bodies, and all of them would bear the marks of the green skin¡¯s hunger.


    No, it didn¡¯t make sense, but then he doubted anything ever would.


    ¡°We need to find evidence of something,¡± Lord Geldin said firmly, using his dignity and his title to prop up his failing bravery. ¡°I won¡¯t send letters to the king and the holy city with nothing more than blood to go on.¡±


    He only realized after he said it that he would probably have to do exactly that. The Geldins were pretty far down the lists of ession for Greshen County, but then, anyone who was anyone had been herest night. There were likely still some of the elder Gerwins at their estate in the country, and of course, Baron Laxly was in his manor outside the city, but it would take time to call them back, and in an emergency, like this, everyone would be looking to the captain of the guard for answers, so he¡¯d better damn well have some.


    They spent the next hour searching the lower floors, but in the end, the only thing there was to find was a terrible hole dug into the basement. It was where all the bodies had been dragged to. That much was obvious, but how it had gotten there or how long it had been there, no one would even guess. It had been dug right up through the foundations of the castle - right through solid stone, and though one of the soldiers dropped a torch into it to verify there was a ramp they could walk on, no one dared descend the stairs for a closer look.


    In the end, they moved as much furniture as they could in front of the basement door to keep whatever it was from getting out again, but as they did that, Lord Geldin heard a distant whining. He silenced the men that were with him, and slowly they followed it up the stairs to the west wing.


    There at least, the blood thinned out significantly, eventually bing nonexistent. From a distance, he¡¯d had no idea what the strange, painful sound had been, but once he got closer, it became obvious. When they opened the final door to the small nursery, they found nothing more or less than a squalling infant. Lord Garvin¡¯s son Leo the Fifth, was the only survivor of everything that had happened here. It was a sort of miracle to find a baby untouched amidst this terrible disaster, but there was nothing to tell them why they would let a baby live when everyone else had died so gruesomely.

 Chapter 50: Comeuppance

    Chapter 50: Comeuppance


    Of all the lords dragged screaming and bleeding into the darkness, only one truly mattered to the Lich. Oh, it tried to take as many of the preening peacocks alive as possible, of course, but only so his favorite Count could have an audience for all the indignities to follow. Only Kelvun truly mattered, though. Only he got an ounce of gentleness as the region¡¯s nobility was herded into the dark for what came next.


    He was kept there, in the undertemple of Oroza the undying, and forced to choose who would be butchered next in the voices of his lovers until he lost the ability to speak. After that, the sinuous, longarmed, multiheaded Puppeteer merely told everyone why they were being forced to suffer on his behalf before they were unceremoniously transformed from people into parts. Sometimes these executions were surgical, and sometimes they were more brutal, but only to keep the horror fresh. Kelvun¡¯s mind was shattered by the Lich¡¯s Puppeteer after less than a day, though, which had been entirely expected.


    The Puppeteer was an interesting creation that the Lich had made to better understand humanity now that it had drifted so far from those now foreign shores. It wasn¡¯t enough to kill its victims after all. It wanted them to suffer, and for that, it needed something in its service that understood emotions and deceit almost as well as the mages of its ever-growing library understood magic.


    The Puppeteer started as the braided tongues of several liars. Then slowly but surely, the Lich infused the parts of bards and swindlers along with a singrly disreputable mage that had disappeared on a lonely road between liaisons to create a work of singr deceit. The result was something that could say anything you would ever want to hear and everything you didn¡¯t. It could find all of your weak points at a nce, and if it had a fresh corpse or two, it could even tell you your deepest, darkest secrets in the voices of those you loved the most in this world, as Kelvun had already discovered.


    That entertainment only had tost long enough for the water levels in the Oroza to rise to the point that the Lich¡¯s ferryman could once more travel down the muddy waterway to bring his prize forth. It didn¡¯t care about the fate of the rest. They would be turned into undead pawns or used as parts to create something worse. None of them would go to waste as the Lich began to prepare for the inevitable reprisals that were bound to happen in Fallravea after everything it had done. The Lich didn¡¯t care. Its ns were much too far along, and even its enemy¡¯s actions would y into them now, whether they knew it or not.


    All it wanted to do now was to spend the next few weeks torturing the lording that thought it could cheat him until no amount of magic could hold body and soul together. Only then would he put Kelvun¡¯s soul in his trophy case until he had tanned the boy¡¯s skin for a very special new project he¡¯d nned for the young fool.


    When the zombies dragged the broken remnant of the Count before the Lich, it was more disappointing than satisfying. He didn¡¯t respond to the braziers of blue me or the golden rictus of the magus that was its core. He justy there whimpering as he looked sightlessly around the unfamiliar room.


    ¡°All those schemes of yours,¡± the Lich whispered through a freshly severed head. ¡°All that nning and plotting, and where did it get you?¡±


    Kelvun said nothing, so after a moment of silence, it continued. ¡°You thought that you could ever defeat me? YOU?!¡± roared the Lich¡¯s surrogate. It was inhuman and made Kelvun shudder as he curled himself into a ball while the voice echoed off the cold stone walls, and the room slowly fell into silence. ¡°You were only the shepherd of my flock, and it was always bound for the ughter. Had you done your job well, you might have merited a position in the darkness, but now you will serve only as an object lesson in what happens to traitors.¡±


    The lips of the Lich¡¯s speaker curled briefly into a horrible parody of a smile at the small joke that was entirely wasted on his audience. ¡°Your life is forfeit, your wife is dead, your line is gone, and yournds will¡­¡±


    The Lich¡¯s voice trailed off as it heard the barest whisper from the broken man, and it paused to listen.


    ¡°Those are mynds,¡± Kelvun rasped, ¡°They are thends of my father¡¯s father - and you will not touch them!¡±


    The Lich thought it was odd to get worked up about only the final point, but the strange utterance caused it to do something new and entirely unexpected. For the first time in its entire existence, itughed. It was an awful croaking sound that did not adequately reflect its disdain for the pitiful creature in front of it, but just the same, it boiled out of some dark ce in the whirlpool of souls that swirled deep within in.


    This only enraged Kelvun further, and he rose unsteadily to his feet, making the embalmed lizard men that served as the Lich¡¯s personal guard twitch restlessly for the first time in years. They''d stood there timelessly for so long without moving, but before they could inflict the punishment that his guest deserved, the Lich stilled them with a thought. There was nothing that this whelp could do to him, even if he had been armed. Despite his reputation as a hero, he¡¯d never struck down a single enemy in anger, and he wouldn¡¯t start now at the heart of the Lich¡¯s dark power.


    ¡°You can¡¯t be here!¡± Kelvun shouted raggedly, finally finding his voice. ¡°I killed you! I killed you and drained your whole damn swamp! There¡¯s nothing left of you now but farmers¡¯ fields and bad dreams!¡±


    ¡°How little you know, worm, everything you¡¯ve done - every falsehood and betrayal you attempted to foil me with has only been woven into my n. There is nothing¡ª¡± The Lich was stopped in its gloating as Kelvun tottered forward and lunged at the Lich, sending the head spiraling into the darkness.


    The human then did the unthinkable and brought his fists down, seeking to break through the thin metal shell and damage the Lich itself. Such a feat was impossible for the weakling, of course, but its guards still trembled with rage at the other end of their leash. The Lich only barely kept them restrained as it grabbed Kelvun by his soul, holding him there with his flesh in contact with Albrecht¡¯s ageless golden body.


    ¡°You will never forget this,¡± the Lich growled voicelessly directly into Kelvun¡¯s mind. ¡°After I show you what a terrible mistake you¡¯ve made, you will never forget anything again. I deny you even thatfort. When I am done with you shall be forced to remember every trauma and every outrage that Imit to this world, and it will all start with your preciousnds.¡±


    Kelvun tried to talk, but the Lich wasn¡¯t interested in the Lordling¡¯s words. Instead, the dormant wraith inside the Lich came to life and yanked Kelvun¡¯s soul out of his body as it soared through the bedrock ceiling of the throne room, through thebyrinth thaty above, and finally through the buildings of ckwater thaty just above the Lich¡¯sir. After that, there was nothing above them but the night sky, but the wraith did not slow down. It soared ever higher and ever faster until it reached the very limits of its domain more than a mile above the fertilends below.


    ¡°You¡¯ve never even seen all thends that you im to own, insect, but I have,¡± the wraith whispered. ¡°From the Fallravea to the Red Hills in the north to where the Oroza empties into the sea at Tagel, every inch of thesends has been explored, and most of them already belong to me forever.¡±


    Kelvun¡¯s spirit could only gaze in mute awe as it looked at the impossible scene of the worldid out before him like a map one would hang on the wall. That was when the blight began to spread, showing him not just the physical world but all the ces that the Lich now controlled forever. It appeared as gray stains that were strongest in the area that had once been the swamp, the red hills, and all thends near the Oroza River. There were spots in other ces, of course. Fallravea was his, but there was also a spattering of gray blotches spread across the ins where the goblin army had once waged its campaign of fire and death. Almost half the county still wasn¡¯t under its sway, though, and very little of thends in Dutton or Lindvell belonged to it.


    ¡°The darkness spreads no matter what you do, you ignorant fool,¡± the wraith raged. ¡°The water might be gone from the swamp, but with every farmer¡¯s harvest on thosends, it bes a part of every loaf of bread and every child who eats it.¡±


    ¡°That can¡¯t be,¡± Kelvun¡¯s spirit gasped, his eyes full of terror. ¡°You couldn¡¯t¡­ the Temrs. They would see - they would notice¡ª¡±


    ¡°Let them,¡± the wraith growled, slowly drifting lower and lower now that its point had been made and the pitiful human finally understood. ¡°I was always going to have to fight them, but it will be at a time and ce of my choosing, and there is no ce in thisnd that has been more prepared for my victory than thends of ckwater!¡±


    As the wraith spoke, the tunnels carved beneath the town began to glow darkly so that the two of them could see them for the giant seal of binding and the slowly filling reservoir of dark power they were. They were a blight on thend, but until the Lich activated the spells that it and its library had spent years crafting, it was nothing but a shadow that even the gods would not be able to detect until it was far toote.


    The wraith and the soul fell intertwined from the heavens, picking up speed as they went until they fell through the same earth they¡¯d risen from, impacting their bodies like thunderbolts. The Lich was unperturbed by this. It had endured the same sensation thousands of times in thest decade as it entered and left the material world. Kelvun, though, had no such experience. As he entered his body again, he was knocked backward by the Lich, flying several feet beforending hard on the cold stone of its throne room.


    ¡°Thends are mine by right!¡± the overgrown boy sobbed as two of the lizardmen each grabbed him by a limb and began slowly dragging him to the den of the flesh crafters.


    There hisst few days on this world would be filled with unmitigated agony until the moment the Lich finally let him perish. Nothing was his by right any longer. Not hisnds, his flesh, or even his soul. The Lich would see them all put to good use, of course, but it would also ensure he would not enjoy the experience.

 Chapter 51: Darkest Past

    Chapter 51: Darkest Past


    The gates of bronze were familiar to him, even battered and tarnished as they were. Krulm¡¯venor had been here before, even though he did not remember when or why. He was sure of that much. The stonework in the tunnels that lead to the twenty-foot tall doors was wide and open, presenting multipleyers of defenses and lines of fire in an unmistakably dwarven way. However, the shapes that moved behind the walls - the shadows he could see flickering from gap to gap in the shadowy recesses of the firing slits were unmistakably goblin.


    He was thankful that he couldn¡¯t smell anything because, as befouled as the entrance was, the sight was almost enough to make him gag. Seeing the glory of the past desecrated like this was truly tragic, but the presence of goblins did worse things than sadden him. It made him itch. He could feel them crawling inside his bones now. That monster had locked the frayed souls of dozens of their kind in here with him, and they haunted him, muddying the edges of his precise dwarven soul with their filth and hunger. It was a disgusting process but one he could do nothing about. All he could do was take out his frustration on the still-living goblins he encountered.


    That thought made the blue mes that licked his skeleton re brighter. Boiling these creatures alive in their skin was the only thing that would make him feel better.


    The interior of the ancient fortress wasn¡¯t in any better shape than the exterior had been. Only the highest parts of the tapestries remained unshredded, and any ornamentation near the ground had been ravaged and ruined; the frescoes on the ceilings werergely intact besides the ck stains that had umted from countless small fires in this room.


    The rooms of the dwarven fortress were nests or battlefields, and sometimes they were both at once as the goblins constantly waged war with each other one room at a time. As Krulm¡¯venor moved from room to room, the tiny creatures that infested the ce ran before him, eager to flee his eerie blue light. That just gave him more time to study the ce and wrack his mind for some clue as to why he would have walked these halls before, though.


    It wasn¡¯t until he reached the library, or at least what was left of it on the second floor, that he discovered that answer. The leather tomes had long ago been devoured, and the pages and scrolls were only ash now. The stone shelves carved into the exterior walls could never be erased by such crude creatures, and the mosaic of All-Father on the ceiling was equally out of reach. It was the beauty of that piece that brought him back. The ancient, white-bearded dwarf stood there in a finely appointed smithy wearing an apron of dragon leather and a look of judgment.


    Such was the skill of the nameless artist, though, that if you looked past the obvious, you could see that the All-Father was made up of hundreds of tiny dwarves, each a seamless part of the greater whole that had been found worthy. That was the dwarven afterlife. Krulm¡¯venor knew that because once, long ago, he¡¯d been a part of that. He¡¯d been¡­ a jolt of pain assaulted him as fragments of discordant memories assaulted him.


    In his mind, he could see ossuaries stacked with the bones of dwarves. The youngest who died in battle were honored in their own way, but their gleaming white skulls would never achieve unity with the divine. It was only the older skulls that had lived hundreds of years and tested their mettle against every adversity that were free to join him in the afterlife. All the other dwarves would have to take another trip to the fire to have their mettle tested once more because only the crystal skulls of the ancestors could genuinely connect with the divine.


    If that was true, though, then why was Krulm¡¯venor not still in the afterlife, helping the All-Father to forge creation forever more? A loose thread of a memory pulled at him - something about how in times of dire need, a dwarf would be selected and¡ª He almost had it, but in the time it had taken him to remember these things, his fires had begun to dim, and it was in that near darkness that the goblins crept closer and closer.


    He could feel them, or at least the goblins locked inside this cursed cage could, but he was so focused on trying to remember that he did nothing and so emboldened they crept closer and closer. It was only when the first one attacked him that those memories drifted away like smoke, leaving Krulm¡¯venor with only the coals or wounded pride and raging resentment that was all that was left of his dwarven soul.


    The sharp stone that the goblin struck his steel femur with could never hope to scratch this terrible body. However, the single clear note of the impact rang out, and like a single drop of water in a still pool, it rified everything. Revtion could wait. Knowledge and memory could wait. Even revenge on the Lich that had done these terrible things to it and trapped it in this bag of rats could wait. What couldn¡¯t wait was killing these disgusting, insignificant vermin.


    ¡°Do not touch me,¡± Krulm¡¯venor rasped.


    For a moment, the goblins that surrounded him flinched in unison, wavering at the sound, but when no action followed. They surged forward, emboldened. At that moment, the world burst into mes. They emerged from where Krulm¡¯venor¡¯s heart should have been, like a nova, and flooded the room with liquid fire.


    For the first time in decades, this room was lit brightly enough for every detail to be seen, but the only thing anyone would ever see here was a massacre. The goblins closest to him could touch him with their weapons, but that was all. Even as they achieved that remarkable victory, the hands that held them burned to ash. Those goblins that were further away had a chance to scream as the heat of the fire made their rancid green skin steam before the mes reached out to crisp them to shades of brown and ck.


    The goblins that were furthest away tried to flee, but the magnitude of Krulm¡¯venor¡¯s fury kept rising, so that was impossible. He paced through the three-story structure, burning away every goblin, as well as every sign that they¡¯d ever existed. The totems and graffiti they used to mark the ever-shifting line of their territory vaporized almost as easily as the warriors that fought over them, along with any remnants of the dwarves that had once lived here.


    Only when all that had burned away did Krulm¡¯venor start to feel clean again. He couldn¡¯t erase the many stains on his soul that the swamp had put there, but the purity of fire could hide them with its all-consuming light for a time. He would dly stay like this forever if he could have, as the heart of his own tormented sun. However, when he saw the bronze fixtures were starting to melt and the perfectly dressed blocks of dwarvish stone were cracking under the heat, he couldn¡¯t keep going.


    Being buried alive by the copsing structure wasn¡¯t his concern either. He was happy to die. He was getting to the point where he weed true death and the oblivion awaiting him, but he wouldn¡¯t harm dwarves. Even as tarnished as this building was, an ambitious n could one day reim it. Their job would be that much easier now that he had purged it of vermin and filth with fire, he thought, looking for some silver lining to all of this.


    Now he could go back downstairs and examine the mosaic to his heart¡¯s content until he remembered what he¡¯d forgotten. The Lich wouldn¡¯t even protest such an activity. It was precisely what that foul creature wanted him to do. Thest thing he wanted to do was give that evil ess to more information about his people, but in this matter, he couldn¡¯t resist his own terriblepulsion to find out more about himself. For years now, all he¡¯d been was a spark of the divine, and for who knows how long before that, he was reduced to little more than smoke in a filthy cave. He needed to understand why he would ever subject himself to such a fate; part of that answer was why he¡¯d been separated from the Allfather; he was sure of it.


    When Krulm¡¯venor reached the library once more, his spirit sank. In his mind, he¡¯d been expecting to see a now cleansed room that had been turned from the midden heap it had be into the shrine to the only god that mattered it should have been.


    Instead, he found he had cleansed the whole ce entirely too well. The goblins were reduced to ash, and the trash had been vaporized as well, but he¡¯d burned too hot for too long, and the artwork that had managed to survive the goblins for who knows how long had been sted to ruin by the full force of his dark fires.


    Krulm¡¯venor could have wept for the feeling of loss he felt then, but there were no tears left to cry. Indeed, there was nothing left at all. Just an empty skeleton in an empty fortress surrounded by the new and the old dead. He turned to leave, and that was when he finally felt his master¡¯s dark gaze upon him.


    ¡°That picture. The one you destroyed. What was it?¡± the Darkness in the back of his mind asked.


    ¡°That was the Allfather, lord of the dwarves, and I bitterly regret its loss. I wasn¡¯t attempting to hide anything from you.¡± As he responded, Krulm¡¯venor realized that perhaps it was for the best that it was gone. The Darkness couldn¡¯t quite read his mind, but it couldpel the truth from him and leave him suffering in agony until he told it everything that it wanted to know. Less evidence meant fewer questions to ask.


    ¡°The dwarves only have one god then, while the humans have multitudes. Why is that?¡± This time the Lich pressed harder like it suspected something, but Krulm¡¯venor merely shrugged.


    ¡°Who knows why the humans do anything,¡± he rattled. ¡°The dwarves have one god because there is only one way to do anything right. That¡¯s as true for stone cutting and steel forging as it is for worship.¡±


    There was a long, uneasy moment where it worried the Lich would press harder still, but as quickly as it appeared, the dark pressure on his mind eased. His master was gone, leaving him alone in the infinite dark to worry in private.


    He desperately wanted to know more about his past than the growing pile of scraps he had, but the more he learned, the more the Lich would too. What terrible deeds could such an entity do with the knowledge that the dwarven god was made up of the souls of all the dwarven elders who ever lived?


    Krulm¡¯venor prayed silently that it would never find out as it exited the ash-filled fortress and continued his long silent walk into the deeps.

 Chapter 52: Dark Missives

    Chapter 52: Dark Missives


    When the messenger arrived in the holy city of Siddrimar, the seat of the light God Siddrim¡¯s earthly power, with his ill news, he was forced to wait almost a day before the guards could be bothered to admit him. This was good and proper, of course, as he was not a member of the church and had note at the request of any of the priests. He came bearing only the seal of temporal power and a minor one at that. The Count of Greshen was not a well-regarded name. Their river heresies were only tolerated thanks to the generous tithes they¡¯d given to the church.


    Few small gods were granted such benign neglect, and only when all evidence showed that they were an unmitigated good for the region¡¯s people. Despite his unlimited power, neither Siddrim nor his servants needed to hunt down every stray spirit. After all, there were more than enough evils to banish in the world.


    So, the tired, saddle-sore man was allowed to rest and wait in the perdition courtyard. This was the outermost enclosed area, just inside the main gate. It was a drab, undecorated affair crowded with penitents and petitioners. While he waited, his request to be seen by a member of the Temrs was filtered slowly up the chain ofmand between meals and scheduled prayers. That he didn¡¯t even know enough to call them by their proper name, The Order of Purgative me was no help to his case. Any of the rank-and-file members of the order would have epted Temr just as readily, of course. They seemed somewhat attached to the name even if it was officially frowned on in favor of the formal title. However, they would never be the first to hear an unknown petition.


    Such requests were only ever passed through the priesthood for proper deliberation. The more important they were, the more priests would have to be involved in ensuring that whatever was decided was the right decision for the church. In this matter, the request of a minor noble was deemed too unimportant for the Hierarch of Purgative me or even his aids. After all, what need would a country fief have for such a prestigious branch of the Siddrim¡¯s pce? Their elite forces were busy stomping out the brush fires of heresy across the country, as they always were. Whether those came in the form of hedge witches or raucous bards, there were never enough of their cadres to go around. So, the request fell to the high priest of the Regency, who in turn was too busy and sent it on to the high priest of the Penitent. He was too ill to take guests that day, though, so it was sent to his underlings.


    Ultimately, after more than a dozen quiet conversations and thoughtful reassignments to someone who might be better suited to the task, it was delivered to Verdinen, A priest-candidate acolyte. Unlike everyone that ranked higher than him in the pecking order, he was eager to please, though. He might not have had the sight or some of the gifts that his fellow priest-candidates had. Still, he was eager to work hard and advance, and he was confident that alone would take him ces, even if his divine blessings and healings could use a little more work.


    Brother Verdinen found the messenger sitting alone on a stone bench shortly before sunset in the outermost courtyard. He¡¯d spent thest few minutes rehearsing a speech about all the reasons why the messenger had to go through proper channels and why it would likely be a week before a man in his ce would be allowed to see the Underkirker to arrange a more personal audience. Of course, he secretly hoped that the lord of such a rich county would have sent his man with a little coin to spread around and expedite things. Brother Verdinen would have been happy to take his cut and help the man find an audience with an acolyte of the holy me the day after tomorrow at thetest with that sort of incentive. After all, he was owed a few favors for all his good works.


    But the man didn¡¯t argue or haggle. He just looked up at the priest with haunted eyes as soon as Brother Verdinen started to make his apologies and said, ¡°Read it, your holiness, I beseech you,¡± as he pressed a ratherrge sealed scroll into Verdinen¡¯s hands.


    Typically These requests were about bandits as often as cults. Still, something about the desperation that clung to the man in front of him affected him. Rather than delivering the rest of his speech, he checked the golden seal that featured a river and chain for integrity and then cracked open the wax.


    The scroll was perfectly normal velum written in unremarkable ink with a slightly shaky hand. There was nothing evil or magical about it, but with every word he read, his mind recoiled in horror as the words and their evil meaning invaded his brain. Even though it rebelled, the priest-candidate acolyte forced himself to continue, and a picture slowly resolved in his mind. Gresham was a region being punished by the gods for their misdeeds with a severe drought and an unseasonable storm. Suddenly everyone of any importance had gone missing, and all that had been left behind was a house full of blood, a squalling child, and a hole in the basement.


    Brother Verdinen didn¡¯t know what could have done such a thing, and honestly, he didn¡¯t want to. He wanted to administerst rites to rich old men andfortely women during their times of trouble. He wanted to advise princes of the realm as a prince of the church. He knew without doubt that there was evil in the world, but he hadn¡¯t joined the church to deal with such things. Those details were best left to the Order of Purgative me, the Brotherhood of the zing Harrow, or even the Inquisitors, though he¡¯d never mention thatst one in public.


    Suddenly, despite the almost mortal danger, he couldn¡¯t help but imagine what sort of yawning evil must have welled up from the depths to drag so many sinners into the darkest hell. His mind conjured up something slimy, like a dragon or a serpent, and an involuntary shudder went through him. He was no seer, but he could only take what he¡¯d experienced as a sign regarding the machinations of the dark god. Perhaps Harquines or Tallethin were at work here. He couldn¡¯t say, but his superiors would know.


    He closed the scroll as soon as he decided what had to be done next and brusquely ordered the messenger, ¡°Come with me. I will find you a ce to sleep while my superiors deliberate.¡±


    That part was easy enough. The church kept bunks year-round for pilgrims, and the end of summer was hardly pilgrimage season. With so much work to prepare for the harvest, they had more than enough room. Seek an audience - that would be another matter entirely. Usually, Brother Verdinen would have gone to great lengths to avoid drawing that kind of attention to himself, but this was a chance where the spotlight could only benefit him. After all - it was he that had seen the genuine danger and he that had felt the taint radiating from the page. Surely if he could see that, then everyone else would too.


    Ultimately, he decided the most expedient route was approaching the Priest Varquaress. The old man was undoubtedly amenable and much more sensitive than he and began to shake with the first signs of a fit almost as soon as he opened the scroll and closed it immediately after reading only a few lines. That was all the convincing he needed.


    After that, a conve was called for dawn, and it was scheduled for the room of eternal dawn. Its murals of light and life would do wonders to keep the evil they would be discussing at bay, though it would have to be scrubbed hard by the acolytes afterward just the same.


    The message was locked away in a sanctified chest to prevent its taint from spreading. This turned out to be both a brilliant and terrible idea because, in the morning, when the priests and high priests had all assembled to examine the document and decide what needed to be done, all they found was ashes. Sometime during the night, the holy power of the city had proven too much for the implement of evil, and it had withered before the might of their god.


    ¡°That should be all the evidence that we need to dispatch a cadre to root out this filth,¡± Gantrin, a high priest who dealt more with tomes than people, argued. For him, anything rting to writing like this was a miracle from their god directly to him, and he would not budge in interpreting that.


    ¡°I remain unconvinced,¡± Armuth answered, making sure the trace of arrogance in his voice was obvious enough to be unmistakable. As the Hierarch reasserted his dominance in the conversation. ¡°Tell us priest-candidate everything you can remember about this cursed missive, and then we shall make our decision.¡±


    Brother Verdinen swallowed hard. He¡¯d been dreading this moment since they¡¯d found the heap of ashes in ce of the scroll earlier. He¡¯d wanted to be the center of attention, but only as the person with the wit to escte this as soon as possible. Now, as the only one to read it, that role was inescapable, and he began to sweat as he stood and bowed before the assembled leaders of the wing of the church militant. He hadn¡¯t nned to actually speak to his betters, so he¡¯d made no attempt to memorize that damnable scroll, but here he was, suddenly expected to recite it from memory.


    ¡°Thank you, your glory,¡± he said, his mouth dry as he realized he had no idea whether the Hierarch wanted him to exaggerate or downy the danger for the audience with the pointed way that the man was ring. ¡°I shall give you all everyst detail, so you may make the proper judgment.¡±


    Brother Verdinen began to speak, but not a word of it was what he remembered from the scroll. He couldn¡¯t remember a single thing he¡¯d read verbatim, so he just made it up. He started with a simple greeting that was respectful but not respectful enough. He described the eerie scene of a pce where decadent nobles had danced into the night, never to be seen again. He mentioned the blood, but since it didn¡¯t seem to have the desired impact, he added a few ritually butchered servants to the description for color. If he was going to stand up here speaking in front of so many influential men, he would make sure his words left an impact.


    When he was finally done describing the horrors unleashed in Fallravea, he took grim satisfaction in the number of men around the table who looked stricken. There was only a brief debate after that, and in the end, everyone agreed that a sworn cadre should be sent with all haste to root out this terrible blight. It was going as well as Brother Verdinen could have hoped until the Hierarch said, ¡°of course, you¡¯ll need to go with them too, priest-candidate.¡±


    ¡°M-me sir¡­ I mean your glory. Why would the Tem¡­ the warriors of The Purgative me require the assistance of a lowly acolyte?¡± Brother Verdinen asked. Normally he was loathe for anyone to reduce his meager rank, even in passing, but this time it seemed best to make himself as small and unimportant as possible.


    ¡°Why, of course - you were the first to recognize the danger, so it is only right that you are there to share in the glory,¡± the Hierarch smiled. ¡°And with your fine words, I can think of no one better to document the brave deeds of our holy warriors.¡±


    Brother Verdinen forced himself to smile and thank the man for his obtuse punishment. Deep inside, though, he felt like something had already died.

 Chapter 53: Squire Todd

    Chapter 53: Squire Todd


    Fear mixed with excitement the day that the priest-candidate stormed across Todd¡¯s path to see Brother Faerbar. There could only be one reason for such a visit: to bring them orders that he was to ready his men for another mission. Even after being here for over a year, Todd was still on edge whenever one of the lower priests crossed his path. They were a fickle bunch in their red robes and much more likely to scream at him and his fellow acolytes for imagined sins than to praise hard work. Worse - those beratings usually ended in lengthy punishments. As Brother Faerbar¡¯s squire, he was often singled out for those while he was told how he needed to ¡®hold himself to a higher standard.¡¯


    By contrast, the priests and high priests barely noticed that he and his fellow acolytes existed. Anyone that had been elevated to the white no longer seemed to see the gray and brown robes of the acolytes, even though many of them had worn them for much longer than they¡¯d worn the white or the red. Todd thought it was funny, but he didn¡¯t really care beyond the extra chores. He had less than zero interest in ranks and titles. All he cared about was that Brother Faerbar had been good to him, and he was teaching him how to fight. One day he would no longer be a squire but a full-fledged warrior, and then he could go back to the broad ins of his birth and finally get his revenge on the goblin tribes that still lingered there even now.


    That wasn¡¯t what would happen today, though, based on the sense of urgency on disy. The red-robed man barely nced at him long enough to scowl before he hurried to speak with his master. A priest candidate would never hurry half so much for a lowly goblin. He was almost certainly here because some heretic or bandit needed to be dealt with like usual.


    Being ignored suited Todd just fine. He¡¯d just finished mending his master¡¯s chain mail after their expedition northst week. Right now, he was rolling it back and forth across the small courtyard of the guardians, where most of the sparing practice took ce to get thest of the rust off. The swamp they¡¯d trudged through to track down theirst fugitive had been tougher on everyone¡¯s armor than the self-styled bandit king of the Greenwood had ever been. Besides a single ambush where Todd had taken his first arrow, they¡¯d barely put up a fight.


    Todd paused in his exertions to scratch the ce the wound had been on his arm. There was barely a mark now, thanks to the pdin¡¯s healing magic, but sometimes it still tingled. Pausing for a quick break to stretch was just a cover, though. He¡¯d chosen his spot well. It was almost directly outside Brother Faerbar¡¯s window. The rumbling of the barrel made it impossible to hear anything, but as soon as he stopped, he could listen to them speaking again.


    ¡°...nothing beyond that. The letter ims that the pce was filled with evidence of a ughter, and we have been ordered there with all speed,¡± the strange priest-candidate said.


    ¡°Well - if it¡¯s a rebellion and not something darker, we could well be walking into a trap. The light will not avail nearly as much against mortal enemies as infernal ones,¡± Brother Faerbar responded thoughtfully.


    ¡°There is definitely a taint here. I could feel it through the ink,¡± the other man said stiffly. ¡°Make sure your cadre is ready because, in Fallravea, we will face true darkness.¡±


    Afraid of being caught, Todd started rolling his barrel once more as soon as he heard that. The details didn¡¯t matter. They could wait until his master felt like dolling them out. All that mattered was that they would finally fight real evil, and his heart thrilled at the news. That wasn¡¯t to say what they¡¯d done in the past wasn¡¯t important and that they didn¡¯t help people, but there was a world of difference between a ghoul or a demon and an old witcher-woman.


    The rest of the morning passed without incident. Once Brother Faerbar¡¯s armor was clean and his sword was sharpened, Todd devoted himself to his drills even more than usual. After all, he would have to be ready. He¡¯d grown stronger over the past year as the dual magics of age and training had done their work. He¡¯d begun to feel the light flow through him with purpose now, even if he still had no control over his sight. When it would show him things he¡¯d rather not know, it was great progress, and he felt more than ready to charge into battle with the other Temrs. His master saw Todd sweating as he battered the poor training dummy and smiled that knowing smile of his that told Todd that he already knew exactly how much he¡¯d heard and that he was pleased with his squire¡¯s eagerness.


    That silentbination ofpliment and rebuke kept Todd working hard throughout the day. It was only when the entire Cadre sat down to evening prayers and bowls of hearty vegetable stew that he announced the n.


    ¡°We¡¯re off to Fallravea at sunrise,¡± he dered. ¡°It will be a hard four-day ride. n ordingly; bring your full kit. This isn¡¯t going to be another exercise in bandit hunting.¡±


    Everyone took a minute to absorb the words. He¡¯d probably left out the key details so as not to spoil anyone¡¯s appetite, but it was easy enough to read between the lines and hear what he was actually saying to the veterans. ¡®Our enemies are infernal, not mortal.¡¯


    ¡°Why can¡¯t we take a ferry downriver,¡± Brother Darrius asked, ¡°It would save the horses and a whole day besides.¡±


    ¡°You know my stance on the river, Darrius. It¡¯s been tainted, and I believe it might have something to do with the rest of the mission,¡± Brother Faerbar answered between bites of his meal. ¡°I aim to cross as far upriver as possible and stay well clear of it until we get to the city. Too many ships have disappeared to risk it.¡±


    Brother Darrius nodded but made no argument against his leader. Hecked the sight, so while he respected Brother Faerbar, he¡¯d always been skeptical of the man¡¯s stance on the broad and Meandering Oroza. Especially since that fixation had cost all of them quite a few extra days in the saddle. Todd understood too well, though. Even though the river might look picturesque, he could see the gray-green film that clung to it like an oil slick. His master had petitioned the Hierarch on more than one asion that he is allowed to go upriver and investigate the source of the taint. However, to date, it had not been deemed to be worth the church¡¯s time.


    Perhaps this mission would change that, Todd thought hopefully as he wolfed down his meal. He would sleep sounder if they could find and fix such an apparent evil, but truthfully the world was full of them, and they couldn¡¯t be everywhere at once. He¡¯d even felt the taint of the monastery at Garvin¡¯s gift sometimes. So much blood had been shed in the world that it was hard to find true purity outside the walls of the fortress city of Siddrimar.


    While Todd might enjoy his new home¡¯s clean air and holy aura, he loved being out of it almost as much. Until he¡¯d been taken away by Brother Faerbar practically two years ago, he¡¯d hardly traveled at all in his whole life, now they did it constantly, and he¡¯d grown to love it. As they traveled west on the high road, he looked around at sights he¡¯d already seen a dozen times with fresh eyes. Siddrimar wasrge enough that small viges crowded every road that led to it for miles and miles in all directions, but after a few hours of riding, they came only every hour or two, and eventually not at all, as the fields gave way to forests.


    He¡¯d been told more than once that before the Drowning swept across thend, there were twice as many viges and that the forest never crowded this close to the main roads. It would be years before that was true again, and everything was in its proper ce, though. Now you could see the thickets encroaching on the overgrown fields, and asionally, you could pick out a cottage all but engulfed in ivy, but mostly themunities that had been swept under by the sickness had all but vanished.


    On the third night, they camped in what used to be a town on the far side of the river. There were dozens of buildings that were no longer upied, and the only part that had any life to it was the inn and tavern that stood at the crossroads. They ate there, giving Todd a chance to listen to a bard sing a song about some heroes in a swamp, which seemed appropriate given that they¡¯d just fought in a swamp themselves, even if there hadn¡¯t been anything as exciting as zombies waiting for them.


    This was enough for his master to decide that the run-down ce was too worldly for them, and as soon as everyone had finished eating, they quickly paid and left. Instead of nice warm beds, they slept on the dusty floor of an empty cottage that still had a working firece in their bedrolls. The roof had begun to sag badly in the middle, but it was still enough to keep the rain off, which was all that mattered. The constant drizzle had shown that the autumn had finally begun and that the mighty Oroza would soon fill its banks rather than the muddy trickle it was now.


    The most exciting thing that Todd did the rest of the night was gathering firewood, though, even as run down and empty as the area was, he didn¡¯t feel afraid. Not even the rain or distant thunder was enough to make him jump at his own shadow these days, and this ce still smelled too much of man for the monsters to move in yet. He still carried his mace with him at all times, of course, but he never once felt the need to lift it from where it hung on his belt.


    Things didn¡¯t start to grow worrisome until they were less than a day outside Fallravea. There the sun-ravaged fields had yet to heal, even after all the rain they¡¯d gotten in thest week, and they were greeted by stunted crops and starving people in every little vige. Only the viges right on the river had been spared the worst of it, but those families had an evil look that Todd didn¡¯t care for.


    Since Brother Faerbar¡¯s trip to the red hills, most of their questing had taken them north and east, but the short conversations that he heard the Stoic Temrs sharing amongst themselves certainly agreed with his assessment: things had been much better when they¡¯dst passed this way.


    At the end of their journey, all that awaited them was a city in mourning. Their Cadre entered just before sunset, with cloaks covering their armor and as little fanfare as possible. ¡°Evil rarely wees our arrival,¡± Brother Faerbar said as a reminder as they rode down the side streets single file. When they reached the pce, they closed and locked the outer gate,missioning the city watch to hold the public at bay while they dealt with whatever darkness was contained within in private.


    They would sleep in the garden until morning, and only then, after prayer and fasting, would they finally enter the pce proper and discover the truth of the matter.

 Chapter 54: Gone

    Chapter 54: Gone


    Brother Verdinen was slow to rise every morning, even though it was a small sin in of itself not to get up at dawn and greet the sun god Siddrim when he graced the mortal realm with one more day of light and life. Normally he justified such bad behavior by telling himself that he was up far toote studying the scriptures, but today he had no such excuse. All he could say was that several days on the road had done him no favors, and several nights of sleeping on rocks had been far from restful. By the time he was dressed up and out of his tent to greet the dawn, the Temrs and their squires were just finishing their dawn prayers, instantly banishing that fig leaf.


    If he never took another trip on behalf of the church, it would suit him fine, he thought, chastising himself for failing to maintain his focus on dawn¡¯s cleansing glory. The truth was that he was exhausted, and today was certainly going to be one of the longest he could remember.


    When Brother Verdinen finally finished the slow ritual movements of his prayer dance, he went to the campfire looking forward to breaking his fast but found only squires that were helping their masters to put on their chain mail hauberks and breasttes. Brother Faerbar gave him a knowing look that seemed to go right through him and simply said, ¡°After. No one is going to want to eat before we go inside. Nausea will foul your helmet.¡±


    The priest-candidate tried to hide his annoyance because, however, he might outrank the veteran Temr on paper, it was never a good idea to get on the bad side of a well-liked veteran warrior. Pdins had their ce - it just wasn¡¯t in the halls of power.


    ¡°As you say,¡± Brother Verdinen agreed quickly, noting the way that Brother Faerbar¡¯s squire kept giving the nearby pce fearful nces like he expected something toe rushing out of it in broad daylight. It seemed quite out of character for a pdin to pick a cowardly squire, but for now, he reserved judgment. After all, he could feel the fear too, however distantly and unlike this boy, he was a grown man.


    When they finally set out, there was no one to bar their way, and the doors were not locked. The smell of death and putrefaction that came boiling out of the entrance hit him like a physical force, though, and he gagged, finally understanding what it was that the Pdin had meant with that knowing nce. He¡¯d obviously checked the pce out before the rest of them had woken up, at least to this point. It was a dirty trick not to warn him more thoroughly, Brother Verdinen thought, but he was still grateful on some level that he hadn¡¯t vomited.


    ¡°Open every curtain and every window squires,¡± Brother Faebar ordered grimly. ¡°Everyone else spread out in groups of three on the ground floor only and look for the hole that the message spoke of. That is where we begin our search!¡±


    As if to further illustrate his point, his sword began to grow dimly at that point as he invested lord Siddrim¡¯s holy light into the ancient de. It wasn¡¯t a trick that everyone could do, but it was one of the few things that all the great Pdins throughout history had inmon, and Verdinen felt pangs of jealousy as half of his men did the same. This was clearly a blessed group, loved by their creator, and he should be grateful for that, but as he watched the cadre splinter and drift off to explore the entrance hall, he couldn¡¯t help but feel exposed. With every passing minute, the dark hall brightened, but that only made his feeling of dread worse, and eventually, the priest candidate was forced to return to the Pdin¡¯s side simply to feel safe again.


    He couldn¡¯t help it. This ce looked like a butcher¡¯s floor, and each step he made on the stone floor made awful sticky sounds that said everything about where he was, even though he purposefully looked away. They went room by room, and other than the evidence of violence, the ce waspletely untouched. Nothing had been stolen or defaced. Whatever had done this had neither an axe to grind nor pockets to line. Anyone of that bent would have taken the golden candbras or the silver dinnerware. Instead, all they had taken were the people that had once popted this beautiful building, and all they had left behind was evidence that they hadn¡¯t gone willingly.


    It was a sobering thought; he oscited back and forth between that and the idea that no matter how many rooms they searched, they couldn¡¯t find a trace of the creatures that had done this. It wasn¡¯t long after that that the floor was pronounced clear, and everyone joined together to descend into the basement. It was there that they immediately found the hole, almost as he¡¯d pictured it days ago. It was like an open wound in the basement¡¯s stone floor.


    There were only 17 of them there in that basement, but Brother Faerbar didn¡¯t even pause to dy. He just red his sword a little brighter and went into the darkness without a word, along with another Temr. The opening was huge and easily big enough for two men to walk abreast, and they went in a few at a time without any preparation or discussion, which struck Verdinen as more than a little rash. Each group that followed waited only long enough to give the pair in front of them enough room to maneuver before joining them in the darkness. So, moment by moment, the once crowded room got emptier and emptier while he stood aside. At first, he¡¯d considered finding an excuse to stay behind, but now that he was almost alone, that sounded like a terrible idea, so he joined thest of the squires and descended into the stinking pit with a silent prayer on his lips.


    There was still a blood trail, though it got thinner and less consistent as they went along until it was lost in the darkness along with everything else. After that, the silence quickly became the most chilling part of the whole ordeal. It spoke to the professionalism of the Order of Purgative me, and it should have been reassuring. Instead, the crunch of rocks and dirt beneath their feet as they descended lower and lower into the earth made his thoughts race with imagined evils. If the shadows worked through the idle hands of men, then they traveled into their minds on taut and empty silences like this one.


    Brother Verdinen was almost tempted to hum a hymn tofort himself. Only knowledge that the silence was a tactical decision and that making unnecessary noise would earn him a rebuke kept him quiet. Instead, he tried to focus on the surrounding details to keep his flights of fantasy at bay. His vision of this ce had been reptilian and slimy, but reality hadn¡¯t borne any of that out. Even so, he couldn¡¯t help but imagine that the rough surface he was walking on was the scales that some titanic snake had sloughed off, mixed with the bones of its victims, and no matter how many times it tried to shake it by reassuring himself that this tunnel had been carved by men, not even touching the tool marks on the wall as they walked couldpletely shake that fear.


    After almost two minutes of walking, they finally paused as they came to a room. Well, it wasn¡¯t a room, really. It was an intersection of five different passages that met in a messy, ovepping intersection without any apparent rhyme or reason. Despite the tool marks he¡¯d seen earlier, the priest-candidate began to doubt that humans had been behind this after all. Just looking at the way that the corridors met gave him a headache. All of them met at uneven angles, and none seemed to be the continuation of the others. It was as if someone was just digging around beneath Fallravea almostpletely at random.


    The leaders debated the best course of action quietly for a few minutes there, giving Brother Verdinen a chance to push his way closer to the front of the line.


    ¡°Well, what¡¯s the n then,¡± he said softly after making sure that the man he spoke over wasn¡¯t anyone important. ¡°Clearly, getting lost down here could easily be a factor. Perhaps we should go fetch extra members of the guard and chalk so that we can¡ª¡±


    ¡°We continue ahead, acolyte,¡± Brother Faerbar said, with just a hint of annoyance in his voice. The only question is if we make ourselves more vulnerable by exploring the auxiliary branches first or if we move directly down the primary one.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t see a difference,¡± Brother Verdinen hissed back, snatching a torch from one of the nearby squires and looking from one rough-hewn tunnel to the next, looking for drops of blood or other clues that might point such things out but seeing nothing.


    ¡°It¡¯s not in the seeing,¡± the Pdin whispered, taping his ear. ¡°It¡¯s in the hearing.¡±


    For a moment, the priest-candidate looked at the three tunnels that were roughly ahead of him, letting his gaze drift back and forth as he tried to decide. All three passages looked the same: they were empty, dusty, cooked, and asionally spattered with blood. It was true that there was the faint sound of water down the one that drifted off to the right, but as he moved the torch back and forth, he saw it flicker slightly when it moved in front of the leftmost tunnel, and his smile of superiority reasserted itself.


    ¡°It looks like this one goes back to the surface. Perhaps if we cleared it first, we could¡ª-¡± Brother Verdinen started to say, trying to prove his worth to the veterans. But as he spoke, his words trailed off because the torch began to gyrate and sputter wildly.


    ¡°Get back,¡± the cowardly squire said, ¡°something ising!¡± The boy spoke at a normal volume, but the silence had smothered them all for so long that it might as well be a shout, and the idea that a lowly squire couldmand him to do anything, especially when the passage was clearly empty raised Verdinen¡¯s hackles. He started to turn to rebuke the boy when something moved in the shadows.


    No, it wasn¡¯t moving in the shadows. It was the shadows. Almost faster than he could see, the dark, shimmering outline of a snake that was almost as big around as his whole body struck out from the wall of night that began where his torchlight ended, and with a mouth full of jagged obsidian teeth, it bit down on the right forearm holding the torch and yanked him forward hard enough that it pulled himpletely off his feet and began to drag him down the tunnel almost as fast as he could run.


    He shrieked as everything happened at once, but it was more in surprise and horror than pain. In truth was that the pain of being dragged across the rough stone floor was much worse than the pain ofing from his arm, which was almost numb.


    Brother Verdinen forced himself to stop screaming, and for the first time in his life, it wasn¡¯t for appearances either. It was so that he could focus on reciting the words to invoke Siddrim¡¯s holy light.

 Chapter 55: Things that Should not Be

    Chapter 55: Things that Should not Be


    Things happened all at once after that. One second the haughty priest-candidate was arguing with his master and the next, he was being dragged off into the shadows too quickly for anyone to understand what happened, let alone stop. His panicked screams echoed off the walls, and the light that he managed to hold onto got further and further away. The very first thing that Todd had noted when they were getting ready this morning was that the man had only bothered to bring what was obviously a ceremonial weapon with him, which had struck Todd asughable when one considered where they were going. Even someone that thought that going almost unarmed into a bastion of shadows like this pce didn¡¯t deserve this fate, though.


    Before he could react, Brother Faerbar and Brother Lucius were charging down the hall after the wailing priest. Their chain mail rattled as they went, and Brother Faerbar¡¯s sword glowed all the brighter as he prepared to engage the enemy, but they didn¡¯t even get halfway to the priest before there was a sudden explosion of light rippled outward, and his motion ceased. That was when Todd started to charge, too, with his mace in hand. He didn¡¯t know what that was, but he knew what would happen next and what his master would want him to do. Brother Faerbar would y the vile pit spawn that had dared to attack a servant of the light, but while he was doing that, someone would need to save the priest.


    As Todd ran to aid the fallen priest-candidate, he tried to puzzle out what that abomination might have been, but he could think of nothing that he¡¯d been taught which could match that description. For a split second, he¡¯d seen it. It had appeared as a viperrger than a horse made of almost pure shadow, which meant that it had to be what? A demon? A work of clever and malicious sorcery? He knew that it couldn¡¯t be natural, but he wasn¡¯t sure of anything beyond that, and he didn¡¯t have the time to wish that he¡¯d focused less on swordy and more on learning his letters.


    When Todd arrived, he¡¯d thought for a split second that the red-robed acolyte was practically unharmed. It was only when he grabbed him to pull him into a sitting position that he realized that those robes were soaked with blood, almostpletely hiding the extent of the man¡¯s injuries. Todd quickly peeled them back from the priest-candidate¡¯s obviously broken arm and pushed him back against the wall when he started to squirm.


    ¡°By the light, that hurts!¡± he yelled, but Todd ignored him, trying not to gasp audibly as he saw the ruin that the priest-candidate¡¯s arm had be. The st of holy light had annihted the beast that was attacking him, at least in part, but it did nothing for the crushed bones or the portions of the jet-ck teeth that were already buried in the man¡¯s pale flesh.


    Todd mumbled a prayer of healing, and he saw the flesh try to knit together, but his strength wasn¡¯t nearly enough to override the trauma that the injured man had received. His efforts did little, if any, good, though. Even with the gift of sight, he had little talent for healing and none for summoning the holy light. So, rather than try again, he pulled off his belt and wrapped it tightly around the injured man¡¯s bicep to stem the flow of blood. This took longer than it should with all his squirming, but once he stopped cursing and passed out from the pain, it became easy enough to finish the task.


    It was only when the priest-candidate¡¯s life no longer hung in the bnce that he looked up to his master¡¯s fight. Though the thing had only seemed to have a single giant head moments ago, it had three now. One was half the size the previous one had been and would have had trouble making the sorts of marks that the injured man bore, but the two smaller heads were only big enough totch onto perhaps one of his hands rather than the entire forearm as it had done. For all their reduction in size, they were no less threatening, though. Instead, single strikes with the shocking sort of power that could drag a man to his death, they now struck in a series of dizzying patterned attacks that were almost hypnotic and no less dangerous than the single giant head had been.


    The only thing that was faster were the swords of the Temrs that fought it. In the dim light, Todd couldn¡¯t really see Brother Lucius¡¯s de, but his master¡¯s blurred like a living thing, leaving streaks of light that wove patterns that were almost arcane as he smoothly switched from attack to defense and back again, holding the monstrous threat at bay in a grudging stalemate.


    Todd had no idea what was going on, but as Brother Faerbar parried a barrage of attacks, Brother Lucius charged in and cut off one of the two smaller heads. Almost immediately, it grew back into two more heads that were each half the size of the original. That was what finally made the pieces fit together for him. He hadn¡¯t known that there was such a thing as a subterranean species, but this was very clearly a hydra of some sort. The reptiles were said to be creatures of flesh and blood that were almost as dangerous as the trolls that dwelled in the same swamps, but this one was practically incorporeal.


    As he struggled to think about how he could help, his eyes fixed upon the torch that the priest-candidate had managed to hold onto. Instantly, he knew what to do. Fire was said to stop the creatures from regenerating, but even if he didn¡¯t know how that would work for a creature made of shadows, he had to think that such a state would be even more vulnerable to the purging me. So, without thinking of his own safety, he picked up the guttering torch and ran forward between the two Temrs, plunging the ming end of the torch deep into the spongy wall of shadows that was the thing¡¯s body. The smallest heads burst into me and then ashes. Itsrgest remaining headsted a few seconds longer, giving it a chance to snap at Todd, but its teeth didn¡¯t get through his leathers before his master had a chance to push him back and out of the way.


    The thing smoldered on the ground for a few seconds after that before dissolving into smoke and ash. It left no trace to study, making him think of the nightmares that haunted himst night. This pce was cursed. Anyone could see that much, but in his dreams, the shadows tore at his flesh, trying to drag him down and drown him. He wasn¡¯t the only one that had slept fitfully, he was sure, but he didn¡¯t truly feel clean again until dawn¡¯s light had cleansed him during morning prayers.


    ¡°Brace yourselves, men,¡± Brother Faerbar called out as the sounds of shuffling and moaning grew louder. ¡°The light will protect you!¡±


    As soon as the shadow finished dissolving, it revealed a wave of zombiesing down the hall behind it. No, he realized as he rushed towards his mace. The sounds of battleing from behind him weren¡¯t just echoes. There were zombies there, too, now. Coming from two, no three other corridors. For a long moment, Todd was conflicted about which group needed the most help, but then tightening his grip on his mace, he ran to his master¡¯s side.


    The bulk of the cadre was facing far more zombies, but they had 13 people, and right now, Brother Faerbar only had his glowing holy sword and a single Temr to support him, which was enough to face any single evil, but it might not be enough to face such a horde. The next few minutes would be both critical and terrifying. Todd had been lectured many times about fighting the undead, but after all the mundane opponents he¡¯d faced to date, he wasn¡¯t sure he¡¯d ever see something so fantastical. In thest year, as they¡¯d dealt with nothing but bad people, he¡¯d grown increasingly sure that the more fantastical opponents he was trained to fight were just myths. He was wrong.


    ¡°Hold the line!¡± he heard someone yell behind him, but there was no time to turn around and see how the rest of the cadre was doing. Not when half a dozen dead men were wing and biting at the three of them, with who knows how many more lurking in the darkness behind them.


    These were old dead, and they fought with strength and brutality, but without the speed of the living, that would make them a truly fearsome opponent. The real danger was how many of them there were. If there were dozens, they would finish cutting through them in minutes, but if there were hundreds, then they might well drown beneath the waves of the enemy no matter how many they slew in the process.


    Todd held his master¡¯s left nk, beating back every monster that came at him with his mace and shield until his arm began to feel like lead from the repeated, almost mechanical blows. They were so regr that they made him feel like he was practicing on the dummies back in Siddrimar rather than fighting a deadly evil, but the moment certainly put those rigorous drills into the proper perspective. These enemies were easy to hold off but hard to kill, andcking Brother Faerbar¡¯s height, he had to content himself with breaking arms and knees - maiming the undead into harmlessness rather than beheading them outright and granting them the peace of true death, which required almost more endurance than he had.


    Fortunately, after only a few minutes of desperatebat, the tide of the dead began to wane until there were more dead bodies scattered on the floor than there were standing against them. Once the endless flow of the dead peaked and stopped, the battle was over in seconds. Without infinite reinforcements, the zombies were barely a threat at all to properly trained warriors. After that victory, the cadre quickly reformed in the intersection and counted only two squires, a pdin, and their priest candidate among the injured, but except for the red-robed acolyte, no one was seriously hurt.


    ¡°Brother Samael - take the others to the surface and tend to the priest. We will continue without you,¡± Brother Faerbar ordered. ¡°Should the worst happen, then I trust you will put the torch to this pce so that none of this filth escapes.¡±


    Samael nodded tersely, and a whole conversation was exchanged in that gaze. Of course, he could be healed and stay in the fight, but if he stayed, the priest would surely perish, so ultimately, no matter badly he wanted to fight, someone had to go, and his bloody wound made the choice an obvious one. He was obviously not pleased with being ordered to withdraw but knew better than to argue, and the wounded squires quickly made a litter with a cloak to carry the unconscious priest candidate to safety.


    While Todd was securing the acolyte to the makeshift stretcher, he bandaged the man¡¯s shattered arm and noticed that the terrible broken teeth that had embedded themselves had vanished. Though the most likely answer was that they had simply ceased to exist when the monster they belonged to was in, he couldn¡¯t help but visualize those broken shards of shadow burying deeper and deeper into the dying man¡¯s flesh until they disappeared from view.


    With a shudder, he shook the image from his mind and stood, readying his mace and torch as they prepared to head even deeper toward the sound of running water.

 Chapter 56: The Under Temple

    Chapter 56: The Under Temple


    They continued deeper into the darkness after that. As the sound of water got louder, the hair became more humid until water began to drip from the ceiling of the narrow winding passage. They waited for the next attack toe at any moment. Instead, the terrible fury of the zombie¡¯s attack had been reced with an unsettling silence so oppressive it made Todd¡¯s hands tremble, at least that was until he heard the sound of distant chanting. The words were too faint to be understood, but the darkness behind their terrible rhythm was clear.


    He could not let himself be ovee by the fear that boiled out of the dark and mouthed a silent prayer to the light bringer to drive it back. At the same time, he followed Brother Faerbar deeper into the darkness. Even the holy light radiating from the Temr''s and their weapons did not prate far into the cursed shadows they were walking through, so when the room opened into arge cavern, it surprised everyone. One moment the winding path seemed like it would continue forever into the bowels of the earth, and the next, the walls fell away to reveal a wide hall that was very dimly lit by a number ofrge brass braziers lined up down the center of the hall.


    It was entirely different from the tunnels they¡¯d traveled through so far. Not only was itrger, but the floors here were smooth and the walls painted. Someone had taken great care in their construction. In ces, there were grooves cut to channel something from the broad, t surface, but he had no way to know if they were meant to keep water from pooling, or if they existed for some darker purpose.


    Brother Faerbar led them along the left wall, toward the nearest of the small doors that lead away from the great hall. This made sense Todd reasoned, since they shouldn¡¯t stray far from their only known exorcist until they¡¯d found another. Instead of finding more attackers, though, they found a wall and a series of rooms which resolved themselves into a nightmare more awful than anything they¡¯d seen in the pce above. There, there was only the blood as evidence that something horrible had happened. Here though,y the bloodless corpses - pieces of them, anyway. The Rooms were packed with stacks of body parts, and on tables, there were corpses in different stages of disassembly or reassembly. That most of them wore the remaining shreds of fine clothing told him that they had found the final resting ce of the missing nobles.


    All the squires had made signs of warding as soon as they¡¯d caught a glimpse of these sights, but the muttering began when they saw one particr corpse, with five extra arms grafted onto it and a sixth sitting there just waiting toplete the horrible symmetry. Barbaric. Butchery. Abomination. The words were quiet, but the disgust in the sybles was unmistakable. This ce needed to be cleansed, and the people responsible needed to be brought to justice.


    There was no one to hold to ount, though. Wherever the chanting voices wereing from, it wasn¡¯t here. Here there were just mutted corpses that had been modified until none of their humanity remained. At least, that was the case until they reached the final room. There they found a man with his back to them, busily stitching away on the corpse before him like they weren¡¯t even there. His back was to them, and they couldn¡¯t see his face, but because of the fluid nature of his movements, Todd was sure that he was a living person, and if he was persuaded properly, he could finally give them the answers they sought. So, he was surprised when Brother Jakobous approached with his glowing sword raised high to split the stranger in half without asking his name.


    Todd understood the rage as much as anyone. He could see the evil roiling off the cloaked figure in waves and knew a swift execution was too good for such a man. It was only when the Temr was bringing his sword down like a vengeful god that Todd finally saw the third hand that it had been using to hold the stitches and understood the truth: it was just one more corpse that happened to be busy making other corpses.


    Everything happened at once after that.


    The blow nevernded as a corpse next to the strange surgeon suddenly came to life and grabbed the brother¡¯s arm. The undead¡¯s hand began to smolder on contact with the Temr¡¯s holy aura, but its death grip held firm nheless. Even as that happened though, all the partially finished and halfpleted zombies suddenly came to life on all sides of them as the room erupted into chaos. Not even the zombie that began reaching for Todd distracted him from the gruesome sight that would remain burned into his mind for as long as he still drew breath.


    With Brother Jakobous¡¯ sword held over his head and his arm restrained, there was nothing to stop the strange zombie¡¯s fourth hand from plunging through the Temr¡¯s chest and ripping out the man¡¯s heart before suddenly withdrawing. For a second, Todd struggled to understand how something could rip through the warrior¡¯s blessed chain mail like it was little more than paper. However, that single image of the hand holding a still beating heart answered his questions and would live in his nightmares forever. The seven fingers on that hand had all been knives of one shape or size, and they glowed with a foul aura that made them glitter violet and ck in his sight.


    After that, he didn¡¯t have time to rush to Brother Jakobous¡¯s body. No one did. They were all fighting for their lives, and though many of these half-finished monstrosities were effortlessly in a second time, some of the more monstrous creations proved quite a challenge. No matter how hard Brother Faerbar and the other Temrs fought, they couldn¡¯t quite reach the surgeon that had struck down their friend and swornpanion.


    Each time they got close, there would be a new surge of monsters to push them back, and it only ever had to move to parry their blows a handful of times. It didn¡¯t even bother to turn around and face them as it had its ragged little army attempt to tear them to pieces. Ultimately, the Temrs were forced to retreat from the relentless, murderous insanity. Such a maneuver was not without cost, though, and warriors were wounded and maimed as they fought their way free from the insane ughterhouse to regroup in the main hall, where they weren¡¯t surrounded.


    They¡¯d expected to have to hold the door against a wave of dead, but in the end they weren¡¯t followed as they left those cursed rooms and returned to the eerie orange glow that was reflected in the puddles that spotted the floor. There was an argument then, in that rtive moment of safety. Some of the men argued that they needed to go back to secure the bodies of the fallen before that thing could bring them any harm, but Todd was having trouble paying attention to that as he noticed one simple fact: the chanting was getting louder.


    ¡°They are brothers,¡± Brother Harnin swore. ¡°We owe them nothing less than this!¡±


    ¡°It pains me to say this, but the light will protect their souls, but their bodies are already dust, and we will have to mourn themter.¡± Brother Faerbar said softly, ¡°The light will protect us too, but we need to keep pushing deeper. We have not yet found the true source of evil in this ce, and people will keep dying until we.¡±


    A few moments were spared for the pdins to use the light to heal the most injured of their brothers. Once they were done, the only evidence they¡¯d been wounded were rent clothes and damaged armor. Even these miracles were a trade-off, though. Every one spent healing the dying was one less they could use against the darkness, so those with lesser wounds made do with bandages. Then they were back to pushing deeper into the cavern.


    ¡°Why would there be light?¡± Brother Samael asked as another brass brazier bloomed to life in the distance with no apparent cause. ¡°Surely the damned would do best in the dark.¡±


    There was some quiet debate about witchcraft or it being a trap before Brother Faerbar interjected. ¡°It¡¯s because they want us to see this sacrilege,¡± he said, pointing at the barely visible wall on the far side of the light. The way was narrowing as they approached a pool, and the walls were covered in sphemous murals of aquatic scenes, which were barely visible in the dim light.


    Todd wanted to study the pictures but couldn¡¯t take his eyes off the almost circr pool of water in the center. Its dark water was perfectly cid but so full of evil that it might as well have been acid or poison. Nothing had happened yet, but he was sure that it would.


    It was only when he saw the murals on the far side that he finally turned and looked to his master, ¡°Look - it¡¯s Oroza - the water dragon!¡±


    The mural depicted her as a giant, sinuous blue-gray water dragon, but no sooner had he spoken that name than the pool began to boil and froth. For a moment, he worried that the water dragon herself would burst up and devour them all.


    But instead, tentacles show out of the water, aiming to drag every nearby warrior into the depths and drown them. When Todd felt the first two tentacles crunch beneath his mace, he realized they weren¡¯t tentacles at all but arms sewn one to another until they stretched over a dozen feet and made a mockery of life itself. The monster might not have revealed itself yet, but this fact told him a great deal about it. He shouted a warning to his brothers, but he wasn¡¯t sure if they heard him over the roar of the leviathan that finally rose from the bloody pool.


    It rose along with the pitch and volume of the hellish chanting that echoed through the hall. This wasn¡¯t a man or a beast; instead, it was a monster made into the shape of a beast out of the parts and pieces of countless men. Todd would never be able to describe it better than that. Its wide mouth was filled with row after row of teeth, and innumerable tentacles were attached to its bloated body. He would remember those details in his nightmares for years. As it dragged itself ontond with its wavering tentacles and wed limbs, it used its grasp to entangle and then devour two of his fellow squires almost immediately. A Temr followed soon after.


    It was all Todd could do to keep from hyperventting as he battered the grasping arms and pseudo tentacles from him as he tried to fight his way to his master¡¯s side. He couldn¡¯t, though. Even if he could fight through this forest of flesh, he never would have been able to stand so close to Brother Faerbar¡¯s brilliance.


    The Pdin shone like a tiny star as he advanced on the horror, with no fear on his face. There was only determination as he struck at it time and again. Three of the other Temrs did the same, as they fought in a long crescent, absorbing most of the attacks. Still, none could get so close as his master, which filled Todd with a strange sort of pride as he struggled to do his part.


    In the end, it was their holy light that did the creature in. No matter how many limbs they lopped off or rents they created in the creature¡¯s bloodless skin, more tentacles ending in dead men¡¯s hands always rose out of the water to assault the warriors. Still, slowly but surely, the thing began to smoke and smolder before it finally burst into pale-yellow mes of holy fire. Todd had been taught that evil could never stand against the might of good, and he had never doubted that.


    It was one thing to believe and quite another to see with his own eyes. As the strange aquatic creature switched fromshing out in a never-ending storm of attacks to iling in agony as it became a slowly deting spiritual bonfire, Todd praised Siddrim for his protection and strength, vowing never to forget this moment of triumph.

 Chapter 57: The Purge

    Chapter 57: The Purge


    When then aquatic abomination was no more than a melting pile of flesh sloughing off a jigsaw puzzle of a skeleton, it was finally over. Another four brave warriors had died in that final fight, and twice as many had been seriously hurt, reducing the martial strength of their cadre to half of what it had been at dawn. Most of those hurts would be healed within a few days with the proper rituals, but the dead were set aside together respectfully in a bloodless part of that foul hall until the danger had passed enough that they could be brought to the surface. Already though, Todd could feel the change. Everyone could. The blight that existed in these dank caverns had, inrge part, vanished with the death of that monstrosity.


    The chanting that had throbbed in the darkness was gone now, and the dreadful stillness had once more reced its unnatural rhythm. Was it possible that they had really in Oroza, he wondered. The Oroza was said to be a mighty river dragon, but the way that these people worshiped around that pool, it wasn¡¯t impossible, was it? Perhaps she¡¯d never been a dragon at all, and that had just been a myth to cover something darker. From its size, he could easily believe that it was linked underground to the nearby river.


    That was the thought he returned to over and over again as they searched the side rooms after they¡¯d skipped until now. In them, the holy warriors found prayer rooms filled with unresponsive cultists who seemed to be able to do nothing moreplicated than breathing and small libraries that were overflowing with sphemy about the nature of their gods. The Temrs would not even allow the remaining squires to look at thetter and had them end the suffering of the helpless cultists while they alone reviewed the profane material before burning it. In their search, they found several altars dedicated to the Oroza in all her aspects. Still, they found no one who could exin what had happened here. The leviathan had died, and somehow it had taken everyone¡¯s minds with it.


    The living worshipers weren¡¯t much different than the remaining zombies in that sense. The zombies still moved and attacked if you got close enough for them to sense the spark of life that burned within Todd or his fellow warriors, but theycked the strange teamwork that had made them such a formidable threat before. Now they were just thrashing menace somewhat less challenging than a rabid dog.


    The Temrs made quick work of the ce after that. In killing the abomination these heretics had worshiped, they¡¯d torn the heart out of this web of darkness just as it had torn the heart of Jakobous¡¯ body. In the end, they retrieved the bodies of the warriors that had died in the butcher¡¯s den, but the strange surgeon that had made all of them had vanished without a trace. In the end, that zombie and the heart it had stolen from Jakobous were the only missing pieces of the puzzle, in a physical sense. Still, the mysteries only grew deeper as they found the routes that led from this underground temple to the buildings it was connected to on the surface.


    That the set of winding stairs closest to the river leads to the main temple of Oroza, the Storm Bringer that looked out over the river was a foregone conclusion. The only ones that were surprised that was where the first tunnel led were the priests. They interrupted when they burst into the ce. After taking several priests into custody, they quickly summoned the city guard of Fallravea to handle their prisoners and put the ce to the torch.


    ¡°Rotten from top to bottom,¡± Brother Garrand said, scowling.


    Todd was forced to agree because, to his eyes, the whole edifice was tainted. The beautiful marble building might not have been as obviously evil as the temple below. Still, it was easy enough to see the shadows lurking in the corners and on the faces of the devout. The entire edifice of the Oroza¡¯s worship was as contaminated as the river, and he had no qualms in helping to light the fires himself.


    Things happened quickly after that as Brother Faerbar tookmand of the guard from a weaselly-looking noble named Bar Geldin. He was locked in a tower with the rest of the captured priests until each could be questioned and tested individually. It was a priority, but there was too much work to be done to take care of that just now. The smoky plume from the waterfront temple was drifting over the whole city by the time they had sealed the old city¡¯s gates. Now they could descend again into the darkness and root out all the other filth that had to be purged by fire.


    Watch Captain Bruden had worked hand in glove with the now-arrested guard captain. Still, he¡¯d shown no reluctance in obeying every order the remaining Temrs delivered to him. Todd couldn¡¯t say whether that was because he was a devout man or because he knew the kind of scrutiny such resistance could bring to him. He¡¯d heard that inquisitions were an ugly business, and there was no doubt in his mind that Brother Faerbar would send for those fanatics once the danger was past.


    While the holy warriors were busy rooting out the nests of filth below, the watch captain carried out his mandates on the streets above. Curfews were being established, checkpoints were being manned, and anyone that seemed the least bit foreign or strange was being rounded up so that his master could look hard at them for the taint of evil. Each new path led to a new tunnel and a new den of vice and evil that needed to be purified by fire. A brothel, a butcher, a warehouse on the docks, and three noble houses all went up in mes before sunset. It was only once that was done that the Temrs brought their dead to the surface to give them theirst light rites by the glow of the setting sun.


    ¡°We honor the fallen with the full knowledge that someday we too will fall as well,¡± Brother Faerbar entoned as he looked from hisrades to the setting sun and back. ¡°They are only a step ahead of us in the eternal struggle, and we shall meet with them again in the next world.¡±


    The ceremony continued until dark, and each surviving Temr said a few words. Todd could tell from the way several spoke that he wasn¡¯t the only one concerned by Brother Jakobous¡¯ missing heart, but he said nothing because it was not his ce. He, like everyone else, was just grateful to have survived. They¡¯d gone into the darkness of the pce with 17 men: eight Temrs, eight squires, and one priest candidate. Now two Temrs and three squires were dead, and another 6 people were dead, including Brother Verdenin, who was still only barely clinging to life.


    By tomorrow half of those injured would be so wholly healed that it would be as if their wounds had never existed, but that was tomorrow. Tonight there were only five members of their cadre that were uninjured, and there was still much work to be done. The smell of smoke was heavy in the air, and the prisoners were overflowing the city jail and three other defensible buildings that had been set aside for that purpose.


    Todd had always thought that he would have been thrilled to be doing the work of the divine on such a day, but this evening excitement was the farthest thing from his mind. Between the exhaustion and grief, he felt like he was about to pass out on his feet. Unlike so many others, though, he was uninjured, so he owed it to everyone to do whatever he could for as long as he had to. As the night wore on, that mostly turned out to be running messages back and forth across the city through empty streets to let this unit of the city guard know to reposition here or inform the watch captain that all boats were to remain moored pending a thorough search.


    ¡°Don¡¯t you see? This is the most crucial time,¡± he heard Brother Faerbar yelling at the watch captain after he hurried back breathlessly from delivering another message to the jailers. They were to start bringing prisoners to the temple at first light for questioning. Usually, his master would have another errand for him as soon as he arrived, but this time he had to wait for this argument to subside¡­ or escte, he thought grimly.


    ¡°Wasn¡¯t that when you set half of Fallravea ame this afternoon?¡± The man asked, not bothering to hide his irritation. ¡°I¡¯m telling you, the day watch needs to sleep, or we¡¯ll be adding mutiny to our list of problems.¡±


    ¡°They can sleep when the checkpoints are all manned,¡± the pdin answered. ¡°We have burned the viper¡¯s nests and rounded up as many of their colleagues as we can find, but tonight is the night that the rest of the vermin will try to flee. Every man that escapes is another vige that we will someday have to purge and burn in the exact. Same. Way.¡±


    Whether it was the strength of Brother Faerbar¡¯s argument or the way his eyes glowed as his righteous anger gathered, eventually, the Watch Captain relented. ¡°I¡¯ll see what I can do, but I ain¡¯t promising any miracles,¡± he grumbled.


    ¡°Siddrim will provide all the miracles we could ever ask for,¡± the brother said with a smile, which quickly disappeared when he turned to Todd and gave him his next assignment.


    Todd didn¡¯t talk back. He just took the note and was off again on another jog through the moonlit city. He would deliver two more messages before his work for the day was finally done. It was almost midnight when he finally went to sleep on the floor of the tiny chapel to Siddrim that had be their base of operations in this godless city. They couldn¡¯t be sure anywhere else was safe until they knew how deeply the rot had already spread. So, like everyone else, he fell asleep in his armor, waiting for an attack that never came.


    Instead, he was greeted by dawn¡¯s light and freshly baked bread that he greedily devoured after morning prayers wereplete. There was still much to do, but now that the light was again on their side and the Temrs had enough energy to heal the wounded, there was no chance that they would lose, Todd told himself.


    When what healing could be done had been done and everyone had finished eating, Brother Faerbar addressed them all. Though he wasn¡¯t a handsome man, as he stood before his assembled warriors in torn armor, silhouetted by the rising sun, Todd couldn¡¯t help but be stunned as he took in everything his master said. The church of Siddrim forbade iconography of their god, preferring to think of him as pure white light. Still, in that moment, Todd couldn¡¯t help but think of the man as the living embodiment of all that was good and just.


    ¡°You may or may not have realized it already,¡± his master said, speaking mainly to the assembled squires, ¡°but we have already won. Last night was evil¡¯sst chance to strike us down, and they failed. Instead, they are routed, and we are victorious.¡±


    A cheer went up after that, but Brother Faerbar kept talking for quite a while as heid out the n. By the time the sun was set again on the city, there would be a messenger on their way back to Siddrimar to ry everything that had happened and request more assistance and public promations would be read to exin what had transpired to the fearful townspeople. After that, those with the sight would use it along with some harsh questioning to sort the genuinely guilty from those that had merely been standing too close and cut their number of suspects by at least half before they started putting people to the question. He continued, enumerating a long list of specifics they would focus on and who exactly was going to do what, but Todd didn¡¯t worry about that. All that mattered to him was that they had fought evil, and they had won.

 Chapter 58: A Fitting Sacrifice

    Chapter 58: A Fitting Sacrifice


    This was the second time it had caused the city of Fallravea to burn, and it was glorious. The Lich had done little else but watch things unravel once the Temrs had made their appearance. The fighting and the dying had been interesting in their own way, but the longer things unraveled, the better things got. Even though the scents of death had barely begun to mingle with the thick smoke and rank fear that suffused the city, it already made for a better sacrifice this time than it didst time its minions had sacked the town.


    This time things were only getting started, too. Previously the goblins had butchered at random, which had its charms. However, the genuine malevolence and corruption that it had been brewing beneath the city for years had finally beennced by the Temrs. The methodical nature of the way they did things turned the whole affair into almost a ritual sacrifice. Now that evil was flowing out into the streets and fleeing from the city under the cover of night. As contagious as The Drowning had been, panic was the faster of the two gues.


    The Temrs hadn¡¯t just killed the evil that the Lich had been cultivating, though. They had destroyed the religion that even the untainted members of thend had taken heart in for generations in one form or another. The worship of Oroza touched every life in the small city. Fishermen prayed to The River Dragon for still waters before they set off each day, the sick prayed to The Drowned Woman not to take them, and midwives prayed to The Lifegiver for a healthy birth.


    For every member, the Lich had converted to The Cult of The Undying, a hundred people worshiped one of Oroza¡¯s more benign aspects. However, that didn¡¯t matter to those that walked in the light. They smashed every other god with equal fervor. It made for an enlightening lesson for the Lich. However, that was less important than the fact that they had ripped the heart out of thatmunity by their actions almost as surely as its chirurgeon Granzarious had ripped the heart out of one of theirpanions as they had tried to purge the underchapel of evil.


    Even now, the heart still beat slowly as it hung by a slender silver thread in the center of its fleshworks. So captivated had the chirurgeon been by the clean way it had cut it out of the warrior that it had been unwilling to let it stop just yet. Though the Lich did not know what they would do with it at present or how it would pry the holy spirit out of the lump of flesh without damaging it. For now, the Lich was content to let it reverberate alone in the dark while the darkness watched itsrades blunder around, making a bad situation worse.


    The Lich had been slightly surprised at how easily they cut through the leviathan. Asrge and powerful as its flesh crafters had made it, it had been little more than a clumsy parody of the River Dragon. Even if the monstrosity hadn¡¯t been its best work, the Lich had still expected to kill more of the holy warriors before it finally sumbed to them. Either way, it had learned a great deal from both the way the forces of light had fought and the way that its creations endured that terrible brightness, of course, but next time wouldn¡¯t just be a test. It would have to improve its creatures if it wanted to crush the enemy utterly.


    Its undying army was deadly andrger than ever, but in the fight, it had not been the swords that had struck the mortal blow but the radiance of their wielders that had boiled them from the inside out. The Lich had felt the revulsion and the fear surge through the hardened warriors at the sights they had been forced to endure in those fights and vowed to make its creations going forward even stranger than they had been to date to make better use of both emotions. Why wouldn¡¯t it? Those dark emotions paralyzed and weakened its foes almost as well as its magic did, and they cost it nothing.


    Everything was in motion now, and most of it was going splendidly. Its minions had managed to peel its pet Lordlingpletely before the quivering mass of flesh that had been left behind was finally allowed to expire. The only change to its original n was that instead of keeping Kelvun¡¯s spirit amongst its other trophies, it was currently bound in a skull set aside to observe exactly what was being done with the parts of his body step by step. It would, of course, be reunited with them in time, but only when its newest abomination wasplete.


    Its dragon continued to make progress in that regard, but it still could not fly. The Lich was tempted to rece the scales with hardened ck iron, but its chirurgeons rightly cautioned against such changes for reasons rted to weight. The beast was so massive that each time they tested it for flight, it had to be taken apart to be brought outside and then put back together for testing, which had thus far been fruitless.


    That had been frustrating to no end. Even with three sets of wings: Manticore, Wyvern, and Drake, it simplycked the energy to take to the sky. All it could manage was to leap from hills or to glide from the top of a boulder pile near the area where it did its testing. Its fiery servant burned without issue, and its aquatic servant had no problem swimming, but the winged servant that was being built to swoop down from the darkness and smite its enemies simply couldn¡¯t get airborne.


    At this point, it couldn¡¯t stop the Temr¡¯s messenger even if it had the inclination to.


    Its shadow raptors that had been stitched together from darkness and appropriate swamp fowl had found a dozen minor air spirits. Generally, these fast-flying servants took the form of four-winged ravens, thoughtely, vulture corpses using two wings that had been lengthened and modified showed excellent results too. Sadly when it came to the magic of flying, symmetry appeared to be a core part of the process, which was not aplication that mattered to any of its other servants.


    Symmetrical design was an alien idea to the mind of the Lich as well as its servants, and it struggled with it. How much different would they have turned out if it had been forced to build its dungeon or its swamp dragon with such principles? The Lich tried to imagine what that world would look like, but it could not. Every glimpse of the perfect symmetry that Krulm¡¯venor offered from the dwarven city had baffled it in much the same way.


    No matter how many aerial spirits were stitched into the wings of its greatest creation to date, it had yet to solve the problem. The bird¡¯s prey had not been enough to buoy it into the skies. Normally they would be busily out hunting even now, even though half of them never returned to the rookery from their dangerous night flights. That wasn¡¯t the case tonight, though. Tonight they hung thickly over Fallravea. Dozens of them circled the city in low,zy circles. Most of them basked in the fear and distrust that was radiating throughout the city, but some of them watched the positions of the Temrs and the city watch, whispering their information to the Lich as it changed.


    Though darkness was everywhere, its attention couldn¡¯t focus on everything at once. With the help of its servants, though, the Lich could keep an eye on the whole city, whispering into the ears of its agents and any other evildoers that might show promise on how best to escape the tightening noose. Many of its agents would die in the prisons and the torture chambers of the just in theing weeks, but many more would be innocents, and the Lich hungered for those terrible travesties almost as much as it hungered for the public executions and pyres that would certainly follow.


    Other than perhaps its torments of the Late Kelvun, and everything that was going to happen to him in theing months while his new body was shaped to purpose, it could think of nothing it wanted more than to watch good men dirty their hands with the blood of those who had done nothing wrong. Even the light could not blot out the spots of darkness on the souls of the just.


    The Lich could see them even now. It could see that one of the most dangerous Temrs tended to do terrible things when he was drunk, which was most nights, and that another¡¯s body was riddled with venereal disease as much as his soul was riddled with perversion. Even the young child that seemed to be the apprentice or servant of the band¡¯s leaders had blood on his hand from the children he had murdered. All of these things were things that it could touch and manipte if the circumstances were right. They made the Lich¡¯s mind race with possibilities, but none of the servants of the god of light were as filled with darkness as the unconscious priest was.


    That man still stood on death¡¯s door, even after two days of healing magic. It was not the light that saved him, though - it was that the Lich nned to hold back death and disease as long as it would take for the weakling to recover. The priest hadn¡¯t been a particrly bad person before this adventure. His worst sins had been greed and pride, which were things the Lich understood well, but its shadow hydra had bitten deeply into the man, and even after the priest had eradicated the thing¡¯s first two heads with a powerful spell, the teeth that had been buried in the man¡¯s arm had stayed behind, burrowing ever deeper into the man¡¯s necrotic flesh. Even though the Temrs had wisely removed the arm the next day, that darkness had already traveled through the priest¡¯s bloodstream and into his heart.


    The priest might not be the Lich¡¯s creature exactly, but only because the Lich wanted him to keep his connection to the light. When the time was right, it would take the pawnpletely, but now it would let the wounded man fester spiritually in equal measure to the way that the disease refused to take root in his physical wounds.


    Few others would merit its mercy, though. The thin trickle of death that was leaking from the city now was nothing but the appetizer for a promised banquet. It would im the souls of the few who had died on its cursed earth, but they would serve only to whet its appetite for the carnival of death that was sure to follow.


    The servants of the light had already sent a messenger back to the holy city they resided in, and it was certain that messenger came to beg for reinforcements, so the Lich would do nothing to bar its way. After all, when it had finally decided to devour his puppet ruler in such a public fashion, it had known that a day of reckoning for such a brutal piece of theater was inevitable. All it could do now was learn from it but let the priests and pontiffs show off as many of their tricks as they liked so that it would be prepared for the great war toe.

 Chapter 59: At Long Last

    Chapter 59: At Long Last


    ¡°Purify the headwaters!¡± echoed in his mind with the same cold, tormented voice as always, startling Paulus awake. He recalled everything else she said, too, of course. It almost never changed. So, it would have been impossible to forget, but none of her other strangled ravings that she made while gripping the bars of her steel cage burned right through him as much as that impossiblemand. The darkness? The dead? Even the moment when she told him to flee tond before the dragon overpowered her once more hadn¡¯t mattered nearly as much as those three simple words.


    He pulled himself into a ball, huddling his legs against his chest under the thin nkets as he shivered in the chilly predawn darkness. The reaction was more from fear than the cold, but itforted him just the same. The winter had stopped his search for months, but with the spring flood, he¡¯d returned to the Wodenspine Mountains, even though the cold still lingered there. His patched clothes and thin nkets might do little to warm him, but his urgency kept him from freezing each night. He would find the poison the Goddess spoke of because he must. There was no other option.


    Why would he do anything else? In the viges where he¡¯dbored for little more than food and ce in the barn, all that awaited him were the nightmares as he recalled that awful night. At least when he was out here searching, he felt like he was outrunning the terrible Goddess that had issued him this burningmand. That was doubly true on the days like today when he felt certain he was getting close. It didn¡¯t matter to him that he¡¯d felt that way for almost a week now. It seemed like the higher he rose following this stream, the cleaner his soul became. It was like he was slowly but surely rising above the world¡¯s corruption with every step.


    There was real relief in the search, and he secretly believed that if he seeded, he could finally be free of the dead eyes that haunted him. On the days he couldn¡¯t search as she¡¯d ordered him, though, all he could do was relive that terrible night as his mind connected dot after dot in an endless and expanding web of evil. It always started sensibly enough - with the priestess and the Count. However, if he obsessed on it long enough, he could inevitably connect everyone from the fishmonger to his mother in a n that was too vast for anyone to understand. Anyone but him, of course. He might no longer have the spies or the purse of a true spymaster, but his mind was sharp, and his notes were expansive. No one could take either from him, no matter how far he fell.


    Even now that he was free of both the city of evil Fallravea and the cursed county of Greshen, he still imagined that the conspiracies he¡¯d started to uncover followed him. He could never stay with a family more than a week or two now. Even when he was with good god-fearing people that rewarded him with extra portions when he worded until his hands bled, he couldn¡¯t shake the feeling that the washerwoman was watching him. He didn¡¯t know who she was reporting back to, but he wasn¡¯t sure he wanted to if they were strong enough to enve a river goddess and poison a whole river.


    A thin strip of light clung to the horizon, but he would need more than that before he could build himself a fire. Still, he stared at it like a ward against evil until the sun finally peaked above the earth, dispelling most of the shadows on the high slope. This gave him the light he would need to decide which of his pages he could steal an inch of paper from so that he could shred it to kindling.


    His overstuffed journal was all he still had after his year spent fruitlessly searching for the source of the taint she¡¯d spoken of. He¡¯d explored four tributaries and three watersheds but found nothing definitive. All he¡¯d aplished in that time was wearing out the soles of his boots and filling thest of his clean pages with detailed maps of ces that few people had ever been to and no one, but shepherds cared about. He no longer had the paper to document thistest trip, but that was okay. He could no longer afford ink either.


    ¡°Soon,¡± he told himself. ¡°Any day now, and you¡¯ll be done with this. Then you can finally rest.¡± He still had caches in the city. When he was done looking for the source of the sickness, and the river was pure and clean, he could finally return to Fallravea and retrieve them. Then he¡¯d return to the vige of Bellmor and disappear; of all the ces he¡¯d been on this insane quest, it had been the most picturesque. He could see himself retiring there under a different name as a trader or bookseller while he waited for the world to forget he¡¯d ever been born.


    None of that mattered right now, though. All that mattered was which pages he could tear a bit of paper from. Even though he didn¡¯t need the book to remember, Paulus still treated it with a reverence that was more appropriate to a holy text than a scribbled notebook. He tore the thinnest strip he could stand to part with from the side of a sketch that showed the imprisoned Goddess. He then shredded that, using it to catch the sparks from his flint.


    A minuteter, he was feeding twigs to the tiny me and trying to put the image of the Goddess trapped inside that giant corpse out of his mind. To him, that image always looked like the strange decaying dragon she was chained to had swallowed her, but something like that obviously didn¡¯t eat. Its giant maw full of rusting steel teeth was only for murder.


    Paulus only stayed by the warmth of his fire until the sun was entirely above the horizon. By then, his feet and brain both itched too much to sit still, and he set off for further up the mountain. It didn¡¯t matter to him that his feet were bare or that his few remaining possessions were stuffed into a satchel made of his best nket. All that mattered was the destination, and like yesterday and the day before, he was certain that today would be the day.


    Once he started walking, he didn¡¯t stop except to eat old snow that he found in the shadows of trees and boulders. That was one of the reasons he was so sure that this stream was the tainted one: drinking from it made him violently ill. It was a technique he wished he would have figured out sooner, but it had eluded him on his quest until recently. This time he was sure. This was the tainted water, and he would follow it to its source.


    Still, once it warmed up, the day was lovely, and other than the asional cloud of gnats, it was as close to paradise as he¡¯d ever known. From this high, he felt like he could see all the way to Dutton, and though he didn¡¯t let himself stop to appreciate the view, he frequently nced over his shoulder at it.


    Paulus continued like that until he reached a fork in the road a little before noon as the stream split into two. This time he didn¡¯t even need to taste it to know which of the two was tainted. He could smell it. Therge flow to the left might look as crystal clear as the smaller stream to his right, but it had a faint whiff of death that only got stronger as he went further up the slope.


    He knew he¡¯d found the source of the poison half an hour before he finally set eyes on the cursed pool. It was easy to see because everything in the area was dead. The trees were brown, the birds were silent, and animal life was entirely absent. As soon as he set eyes on the pool, he understood why. In the middle of this glen sat a small spring-fed pool. Instead of being the crystal clear artisanal spring that he¡¯d seen half a dozen times before, though, it was a bubbling pool of murky green that made his eyes water to approach.


    He¡¯d heard that there were smoking mountains across the sea that burned at night and stank of sulfur, but even this strange mockery of nature was as close as Paulus ever hoped to get to seeing one. As he stood on the bank, afraid to touch the water, he looked into the shallow pool and saw something bubbling and fizzing at the bottom. It was arge metal object that was too flimsy to be called a grate. It looked like a buckler of thin woven metal, which was full of holes. That made no sense, of course, because the thing couldn¡¯t stop a single blow. Regardless of what it was, though, it was the only thing that didn¡¯t belong, which meant that it was definitely the source of the problem.


    After studying it for as long as he could bear, he decided there was no way he was reaching in there to grab that thing. Instead, he went off in search of fresh air and a long enough branch to fish the object out. The dead trees scattered throughout the glen had plenty of branches to offer. That wasn¡¯t the hard part. The hard part came when he tried to use them to pull the thing out. They started falling apart on contact with the water and had fully dissolved in only twenty or thirty seconds. Paulus was incredibly thankful that he hadn¡¯t just waded in there to retrieve the object and instead went off to find another branch.


    After four branches, he was finally able to drag it near enough to the edge that he could reach in to pull the thing out with the tip of his short sword. Once it was firmly pierced, he pulled it out and carried it very carefully to the nearest rocky slope, where he ced it on a small boulder to inspect the oddity. From the damage he¡¯d done to it just by poking it with sticks, it very clearly wasn¡¯t meant to be armor. He wanted to bring it down the mountain to deliver it to the church so they could deal with the cursed thing themselves, but one look at his sword showed that to be an impossible task.


    His de had been made of fine steel, and until today it had been pristine, but now it was pitted in ces and spotted with corrosion. Everywhere it had touched the strange shield, it was falling apart.


    ¡°What in the hells am I supposed to do now?¡± Paulus asked empty valley as he set his sword down to dry. There was no way he was putting it back in its sheath until it was dry as a bone.


    While he waited, he tried to figure out what he could do. Hecked the ink to draw it or any tools to carry it. In the end, all he could do was dig a hole in the scree and push it in with arge rock. Then he covered it up and marked the spot with a stack of t stones. There it wouldn¡¯t contaminate much water, and if he found someone that could help him investigate, he could always escort them back here, even without a map.


    In the end, he belted on his sword and inspected the pool. Even those few hours had made a real difference, and the water was now merely murky rather than hopelessly polluted.


    ¡°I did just what you told me to,¡± he said barely above a whisper while he looked at his bare feet with something approaching reverence. He knew she couldn¡¯t actually hear him from here as he spoke to the water, but he was sure she would feel the difference as the pool became clearer and clearer. ¡°You hear that, Oroza? My task isplete. Let me rest now, I beg of you. That is my only prayer.¡±


    Then he turned, and itching a stray bug bite on his hand, he turned and began to walk back down the mountain. Paulus could finally close the book on this insane chapter of his life.

 Chapter 60: A Public Spectacle

    Chapter 60: A Public Spectacle


    Though it was hard, Todd forced himself to watch as his superiors put the people of Fallravea to the question. It was an ugly business that went so slowly at first that they could only redeem a few souls each day as the cultists and sphemers denied they were ever involved in any of the terrible activities that the Temrs had uncovered. The butcher who had been trafficking in corpses denied knowing that the tunnel dug into the rear of his shop was even there, and the noble families whose manses were also connected to that darkwork insisted that they had despised the Count and his toadies more than anyone.


    ¡°If my family was really as close to that disreputable swine as you say, then why weren¡¯t I or my daughters at all of his unseemly little parties this summer?¡± the Granddame Rockmira demanded angrily after a series of less than courteous questions.


    Unlike the butcher¡¯s tale, it was a story that had initially made sense to Todd, though he would have never contradicted his seniors by saying that. Eventually, the priests forced her into the light of truth, kicking and screaming by using brutal techniques that made Todd wince. Ultimately, both confessed and gave the names of all other local luminaries that had helped them with their misdeeds. The former eventually signed a statement that he sold human meat to unsuspecting customers for reasons rted to both profit and devilry. Thetter admitted that the only reason her family wasn¡¯t fornicating with all of the other nobles as they usually did the night of the massacre was because they had been forwarned by their dark Mistress, The Drowned woman.


    No one called her Oroza anymore. That was the name of a river, not of a goddess of the underworld. In private, Brother Faerbar was conflicted, though, in public, he never wavered. He¡¯d seen signs of the river¡¯s corruption for years, but at the same time, he¡¯d never known any of the healers that worshiped the river goddess to have anything but spotless souls, especially during the year of the gue. It was a conundrum that he wrestled with often, but ording to him, even prayer couldn¡¯t resolve it.


    ¡°How was it that so many good people could worship such an evil thing?¡± he asked them all at dinner one night, but no one had a good answer.


    Fortunately, there were still good people in the city, and the weight of the witness statements that their neighbors buried them with was usually enough to force a blubbering confession before it was time to bring in the thumb screws or the hot irons. That all changed a weekter when their reinforcements arrived from Siddrimar.


    Though the Temrs might be the best-known arm of the church militant, they were not the most feared. That distinction belonged to The Pient Seekers of Truth, or the Inquisitors as everyone called them. A hush followed in their wake when their convoy entered the city, and after that, a muted anticipation about what would happen next hung over Fallravea like a cloud.


    It would not take too long to answer that unasked question, though. The Inquisitors differed from their brethren in that they preferred to do all their questioning and the associated penance under Siddrim¡¯s light, so they only waited long enough for a scaffold to be built in the city center before they began their bloody spectacle.


    Fortunately, Todd was not expected to watch them work. Still, he caught glimpses often enough while he was out and about performing other tasks for his Master as they carried out their ever-expanding carnival of mortification. For the first week, there were almost no spectators, but gradually that changed for reasons Todd didn¡¯t really understand. He knew that people often gathered to watch hangings, but torture? That seemed too far, even if the crowd¡¯s true interest was in justice and salvation.


    Still, day by day, the crowds grew, taking some kind offort from the public nature of the proceedings. After that, though, things got weird. Brother Garrand had said that they would, but Todd had not fully believed him. On the ninth day of the Inquisition¡¯s attempt to turn over everyst stone of sin, people began toe forward from the crowd and confess without anyoneying a finger on them. Sometimes these crimes were significant, and other times they were only private shames, but soon enough, the Inquisitor¡¯s cages were overflowing with those in need of salvation.


    Most of those that confessed spontaneously weren¡¯t executed, which was more than he could say about those that had been dragged kicking and screaming into Siddrim¡¯s light thanks to a tip from their neighbors or someone that had already spent their time on that bloody stage. Todd thanked the divine for that. More than enough intersections were decorated with the yed body of the guilty already. If his brothers started to kill everyone who had confessed to sphemy or adultery, then eventually, there would be nowhere left to put them all.


    It was a dismal time. At first, he¡¯d been excited to strike such a blow against evil, but now he couldn¡¯t wait to be free of this ce. It was one thing to strike down the animate dead but quite another to wake up each morning to the smell of corpses and the sound of screaming. Even those things were only slightly better than acting as a nursemaid to priest-candidate Verdinen while he recovered. While that task had been easy enough while the man was unconscious, he¡¯d be a petnt nightmare once he¡¯d awoke to find that he was missing his right arm, and since Todd was one of the few squires that knew his letters, he was frequently forced to sit with the bitter man for hours, scribbling reports. No mark he ever made on the page was good enough, of course, but all of them were better than what Brother Verdinen was capable of with his left hand.


    Thirty-eight dayster, The Piant Seekers of Truth pronounced the city clean of all of its taint. To celebrate, they held a midnight mass in the center of the city, burning everyst vestige of The Drowned Woman that they could find. Every holy symbol and tapestry in the city that was left with a river theme was thrown on the pier that night.


    ¡°So does this mean we finally get to go back to Siddramar now, sir?¡± Todd asked his Master the next morning after they finished their sunrise sparing session.


    ¡°I¡¯m afraid not,¡± he said. ¡°Now that the city no longer needs our swords, we travel south to ckwater to see if the rot has spread downriver.¡±


    ¡°ckwater?¡± Toad asked, confused. ¡°But the taint on the river has toe from the north, doesn¡¯t it? Shouldn¡¯t we be following it to its source to finally purify it once and for all?¡±


    That answer made the older manugh louder than he should have. ¡°You would think, wouldn¡¯t you, but that isn¡¯t how they see the world. To them, the water is polluted by the souls of the people that worship it when they should be worshiping the light.¡±


    ¡°But what if it¡¯s the other way around?¡± Todd asked. ¡°What, it¡¯s something in the water that poisons the hearts of those who drink it?¡±


    ¡°Who can say?¡± Brother Faerbar asked philosophically. ¡°You and I - the church relies on our strong sword arms. It would be hubris not to trust in the learned men who use their minds to do the same. The learned priests say the devil is in the heart, but my nose tells me that there is something rotten in the Wodenspines, and it will have to be addressed eventually, but if it happens after we gauge the darkness of ckwater, it makes no difference to me.¡±


    Todd nodded, understanding why his Master was correct, even though he knew that neither of them agreed with those morally upright words deep down.


    After that moment of silence, Brother Faerbar continued. ¡°They say that the whole area around that little port town has an evil reputation. Even the song we heard in the inn on the way here was about dead rising from the bog to protect its ill-gotten treasure.¡±


    ¡°I didn¡¯t see a swamp when we traveled through,¡± Todd retorted after searching his memories for a moment.


    ¡°No,¡± his Master agreed. ¡°You wouldn¡¯t have. Thete Lord of the region paid a king¡¯s ransom to the mages at the Magica Collegium in Abenend to use their earth magic to dig him a canal to Garvin¡¯s¡­ I mean Garmoore¡¯s Gift.¡±


    Brother Faerbar sat down so that Todd could uce his Gambeson. Last week they¡¯d started renaming everything in the region that had been named for thete Lord¡¯sLord¡¯s family in an attempt to erase his sphemies. Everything that had once been named for Leo, Kelvun, or Garvin was now named after an appropriate saint of Siddrim or another lesser god, though it was hard to remember so many recent changes.


    There had even been a petition sent to the king to rename the whole county to something more appropriate in light of everything that had happened. The priesthoodcked the power to make those changes unterally; Todd struggled with a particrly stubborn knot as he recalled just how frustrated the Priest Cawleon had been frustrated by that fact. As temporary governor of the whole area, he chafed at any limit imposed on Siddrim¡¯s vision.


    In the end, the only thing that would be left to bear any of those forbidden names was little Leo Garvin the Fifth. Though only an infant and the spawn of a heretic, he would be well-taken care of for some time toe. This was because, through his guardianship, the church couldy im to the whole area, at least until he came of age.


    ¡°It¡¯s my understanding thatte Count wasn¡¯t specifically trying to rid himself of the swamp so much as build a path free from goblins so he could extract the riches of the earth,¡± Brother Faerbar continued, interrupting Todd¡¯s wandering mind and pulling him back into the conversation.


    ¡°But if the swamp was evil, and he was evil, then why would he seek to drain it?¡± Todd asked, meeting the other man¡¯s eye. ¡°I just¡­ Something about all this doesn¡¯t seem to make sense, don¡¯t you think?¡±


    That protest brought the patient smile back to his Master¡¯s face as it always seemed to when he¡¯d said something that was unintentionally smart or stupid. ¡°The only people in the world that everything makes sense to are the ones that are truly crazy. We should just be grateful that in the midst of all his other debaucheries, thete Count of Greshen cleaned up one mess and reced it with verdant farnd. That¡¯s one less ce that evil can hide from our Lord¡¯sLord¡¯s light. Right?¡±


    ¡°Thank the light for that,¡± Todd mumbled, unconvinced.


    That would be thest time they would spar in that benighted city because the following day would be spent packing and provisioning, and then why were back underway, traveling south on the main road, which was ufortably close to the river as it parallelled the Oroza south and west to their destination.


    Even though it was only four nights by horse, Todd slept fitfully. For weeks he¡¯d been forced to battle that awful tentacled abomination over and over in his sleep, but this was something new. Now in his dreams, he imagined something lurking just beneath those oily waters. It waited there each night, and though it never broke the surface, he was certain that if it had, it would have crushed the life out of all of them without issue. Even Brother Faerbar was no match for that much darkness lurking in those still nighttime waters.

 Chapter 61: Petty Little Lives

    Chapter 61: Petty Little Lives


    The Lich watched its finest craftsmen as they made the final few stitches on the spine of its dread book with some small part of its mind even as it gazed out over the turmoil of its kingdom. Now it was drinking deep of that suffering, but as soon as the blood-red sun finished setting, it would be time toplete the spells and unite itstest victim¡¯s body and soul once more. For now, though, it was content to enjoy the view. The Shrines were burning in every town and vige along the length of the Oroza now, and the Lich¡¯s pet goddess was struggling against her chains even as she burned with them. She could feel the suffering of those who loved her most in the same way that she¡¯d been able to feel it as the Lich had slowly poisoned the souls of her most devout.


    Both the darkness and the light had vited her in this sense, but she could do nothing about either, not as long as she was merely a focal point for such a terrible master. She still managed to resist the magics that chained her from time to time, but years of captivity had all but broken the river Goddess¡¯s spirit. Her purpose was to constantly absorb torrents of power only to have them stripped away while the Lich filled whole reservoirs with her tears, drop by drop. Usually, this suffering was a private treasure, but today it shared the view with someone who would soon know his own personal brand of hell as a hint of things toe.


    ¡°She will remember this moment forever,¡± the Lich intoned to his audience of one. ¡°Whereas I will forget it ever happened in time, I always do. A month? A season? A year? How could I ever hope to remember every torment I inflict on this miserable world? When the darkness overshadows everything, these small sadnesses will be erased like everything else.¡±


    The maelstrom of souls that was its heart of darkness was so tumultuous and chaotic that it often had trouble remembering anything but its current obsession and the next steps of its great work. Today in between thoughts about the mysteries of flight and breaks to enjoy the continuing efforts of Siddrim¡¯s dogs as they ravaged the countryside, all it could think about was its newest creation which was nearingpletion, hour by hour. The tome was weighty by anyone¡¯s measure, but it wasn¡¯t the size of the thing that would define it when the construction wasplete. It was the infinite darkness that would fill its pages, one ck word at a time.


    ¡°But I cannot bear to lose even the smallest of my treasures anymore, and that is why I have created you. From now on, it will be your job. To remember everything that ever happens. You shall document my every whim and whisper so that nothing is lost. Likewise, every debt, every grudge, and every obligation will be recorded along with all the ways those debts are eventually repaid in blood so that everyone will get what it is they deserve when the timees.¡± As the Lich¡¯s poison-drenched words echoed voicelessly in the darkness, the soul that was the target of that terrible message trembled from the skull that it was still bound to. Thest thing it wanted was to be put to such a purpose, but it had no choice in the matter.


    When the world above finally drifted into night, the Lich turned away from the spectacle to find that its book now sat finished in the middle of the heptagram binding circle as it had been for the best part of thest hour, awaiting the next step in the process.


    An ugly thing, therge ck tome measured a foot and a half tall, nearly a foot wide, and several inches thick. Though that wasn¡¯t enough space to fit an entire corpse, the Lich had done its very best to waste nothing. The book was bound in Kelvun¡¯s flesh so that his face could still be made out on the cover, his sinew had been used to stitch the thing, and even his bones had not gone to waste. Not only had they been used to make the glue for the binding, but they¡¯d also been pulverized and added to the pulped pages of religious scrolls and rare spell books to make up the terrible paper that was at the heart of this project. Though it might seem that the slender volume had perhaps 200 pages, there were a thousand times that many hidden inside the clever working, or at least there would be once the Lich¡¯s magic had activated the rest of them.


    Though its library of heads had served it well for decades as a repository of knowledge, they were not portable, and it would soon be time to centralize that power into a single implement that it could bring with it to the battlefields of the world above. The living might not realize that the darkness would soon be upon them. Still, every day drew closer to that dread confrontation whether they knew it or not.


    At an unspoken signal, zombies brought in seven severed heads and set them down at each corner of the star. In life, none of them had known a single thing about magic, but in death, all that mattered was that they were fresh meat that was less than a week old. They had been pilfered from the local graveyard shortly after the ceremonies ended and brought here to be dissected for parts.


    The locals of ckwater might think that such ces protected the dead, but the evil here ran deep, so only the first few feet of ground was truly consecrated. Beneath thaty the Lich¡¯s domain, and every week new bodies were delivered to it only to disappear into the depths like they had never been.


    Their arms and legs would yet be used for new, outrageous war machines, but tonight their heads were nothing but extensions of the Lich¡¯s will. As one, they began to sing aplex seven-part harmony. It was less of a sonata than sacrilege, and note by note, it pulled Kelvun¡¯s screaming soul from where it had resided thest few weeks and into the infinite pages of the Lich¡¯s new library. In time, he might be joined in there with other souls as theplexity of their task increased, but for now, his little lordling would suffer alone under the burden of transcribing everything the Lich knew.


    Minute by minute theyers of enchantments andpulsions built up in aplex symphony of arcane cruelty that would have hurt the ears as much as the souls of any listeners if there had been anyone in that empty room to hear. Each line was a prohibition; it was a brand on Kelvun¡¯s soul. The book must do this, but it couldn¡¯t do that. It was a form that had been borrowed from Krygain Mundi, a book that was meant for dealing with the diabolic, but there was no reason it couldn¡¯t work on the dead, so long as small alterations were made to reflect the true nature of the bound.


    Eventually, after several minutes, the singing reached a crescendo that verged on screeching as one of the head¡¯s vocal cords started to fray, while two more were beginning to smolder even as they screamed theirmandments louder and louder. Just before its tiny little implements could burst into me, the ritual was done, smothering the room in an eerie silence thatsted until it was disturbed by the brief shuffling of pages as the book stirred briefly.


    Judging the spell a sess, a drudge was then allowed to bring the book to the Lich¡¯s throne room. It held it there motionless until the thing suddenly sprang to life in its lifeless hands, opening on its own to a random nk page as it waited expectantly for its first order.


    ¡°We will start the volume with your own terrible end, Kelvun,¡± the Lich gloated. ¡°You forgot that I existed, so we shall make certain that nothing else ever goes unremembered regarding our encounters.¡±


    Suddenly the book sprang to life as line after line of dark script appeared on the page. The ink was a mixture of blood and shadows, but the handwriting was Kelvun¡¯s formal penmanship. He¡¯d hated those lessons his tutors had forced on him over and over with a passion, and now he would spend the rest of time doing just that. Creating short lines of text that captured every detail of an event with clean loops and tight, well space letters, the book started the section with ¡®The Life and Death of Kelvun Garvin.¡¯ It went on ceasly for seven pages, making notes about things that Kelvun had never been aware of in life as it gathered clues and facts from the vast darkness that was the Lich.


    In the end, it noted correctly that it had crossed the Lich three times and ¡®in his final attempt to cheat the darkness of its due, Kelvun met with a sudden violent end, which is the only possible way to pay back such debts when dealing with forces of this nature.¡¯ Obviously, if Kelvun had known that, he would have happily paid double for the rest of his days in an effort to be as helpful to his dark benefactor as possible, but it was the Lich¡¯s knowledge that lent to rash man the only wisdom he¡¯d ever had in the afterlife. The Lich was pleased to note that the document didn¡¯t fail to mention that Kelvun¡¯s surviving son was the product of an affair that his wife had one of the many bards the house entertained while he was off on his own dalliances.


    That was one of the only reasons the Lich had spared the child, of course. A mewling infant would have made a lovely morsel in its banquet of death that night, but as the only living member of Kelvun¡¯s ¡°lineage,¡± the Lich knew that would forever irritate the tormented spirit and that the church would use the child to cement their legitimacy, as any group seeking to usurp power in the region would.


    To most, it would make no sense at all that the darkness was doing everything it could to invite the light into its domain, but it knew something they didn¡¯t. It was the first lesson that it had ever learned: the safest ce to hide a treasure was a few feet under an empty treasure chest. The forces of light had already found and vanquished an evil in the form of the cult of the drowneddy. They would have no need to dig deeper and find out that she was little more than a hand puppet in the grand scheme of things. She''d never been at fault in the same way that the Garvin family had never really been in charge.


    Neither had done anything, yet it was their names that would bear the shame in the histories that would be written about such things. Not that history portrayed the reality of such events any more than bardic song writers did, of course. After all, ckwater wasn¡¯t even a swamp anymore. It was the name of a growing river port and a style of beer that was brewed there now more than a ce that no longer existed.


    Where once there had been a swamp brimming with disease and the unquiet dead, there was now only rich ck earth and more farms every year as the poption continued to blossom like the crops in the fields. People sometimes disappeared, of course, and to a man, the region experienced terrible nightmares that no one was willing to talk about openly, but that was the price that they paid for their peace, and no one seemed to think it was a high one.

 Chapter 62: Dead Man Walking

    Chapter 62: Dead Man Walking


    Paulus stumbled down the dark foothills, toward the light in the distance. He didn¡¯t know what the building was, or who might be living there, but it didn¡¯t matter. He was dying. He had been for days actually, but he knew that he didn¡¯t have long left now. His heart was pounding in his chest and his breathing was erratic and shallow. This morning he had left almost all of his meager possessions behind when the throbbing in his arm had woken him up. All he wanted to do now was to give his book to someone, anyone, who would get it to the proper authorities before the poison ran its course.


    It was almost a week ago that he had pulled the strange object from the mountain spring. In doing so, he had finally freed himself from the river goddess¡¯s finalmand, but in the process, he¡¯d let a single drop of that poisonnd on the back of his left hand without noticing.


    For the first day it had only been an itch, and he¡¯d thrilled in the beautiful weather and had thest of his bread to celebrate thepletion of his quest. He hadn¡¯t even known there was a problem yet. He¡¯d just scratched at the spot now and then like his other bug bites as he walked down the mountain.


    However, what was a red bump on the first day, had turned into a painful canker by the second, and after that, the ck tracery lines began to crawl slowly up all the arteries and veins beneath the surrounding skin, reaching closer and closer to his heart. At first the process was slow, but by the fourth day, the necrotic skin advanced with that darkness. It looked like some kind of snake bite, and hour by hour, and inch by inch, his arm began to rot away.


    At first Paulus was terrified by what was happening. He¡¯d tied his belt around his bicep as a tourniquet, cutting off blood to the arm, but that had stopped working tonight. Now he could feel the throbbing as the poison traveled deeper and deeper into his body. He was no longer afraid though, because now he knew what he must do.


    ¡°The records must be saved,¡± he murmured as he traveled inexorably forward staggering the whole way as he weaved back and forth like a drunkard. ¡°They have to know. They have to know the truth about everything that¡¯s happened, and everything that¡¯s going to happen¡­¡±


    Speaking was exhausting now, but it still moved him forward through his haze of pain. It reminded him of why he couldn¡¯t justy down and die right there on the wet grass, even if it would have been the easiest thing in the world to do. That part he couldn¡¯t say out loud, because he might listen to himself. He was sure that if he paused long enough to undo the belt that held back the rot that had already ravaged and mummified his left arm, he would be dead before he hit the ground.


    He paused a moment to listen. Hearing the sound of distant crows. He was sure they¡¯d been following him for thest few days. They might be gone every morning, but they were there every night he made camp, waiting for the day he would fall asleep and never wake up. They were ready and waiting to pick his bones clean and devour his brains for all the secrets he contained to spread them to gods knew who, but he wasn¡¯t going to let that happen.


    ¡°At least the poison in my veins will make sure that they didn¡¯t live to tell anyone,¡± he whispered to himself with a chuckle that quickly became a racking cough.


    Paulus forced himself to keep walking though, even through that. He had to; he knew that if he stopped it was all over.


    He¡¯d thought about cutting the hand off days ago, but he¡¯dcked the will to do what was necessary, and now he was paying the price. That, and the fact that his de had almostpletely rusted through by the time he¡¯d noticed there was a problem.


    ¡°Almost there,¡± he reminded himself as he stepped onto a dirt footpath. That meant that lots of feet had been though here, he realized, and at least a few people would be connected to those feet, so he was definitely going the right way.


    Soon he found walls he could stagger against. A waist high fieldstone enclosure was the first, but soon there were thatched outbuildings too. Soon enough cobblestone appeared beneath his feet, and he could see other,rger buildings looming up out of the dark as he approached some kind of small-town square.


    ¡°Help!¡± he called out, as he continued to stagger forward. His voice didn¡¯t carry very far. It wasn¡¯t even loud in his own ears because he couldn¡¯t quite catch is breath anymore. ¡°I-I¡¯m dying¡­ and I need¡­ I need¡­¡±


    Now that he was in the square proper, he looked into a second story window to see a woman. Paulus opened his mouth, but his words were taken away by the look of disgust she¡¯d given him. Rather than help him, she made a sign of warding and then pulled the shutters closed, leaving him tottering in the dark. Part of him wouldn¡¯t believe that a decent person as that woman so clearly had been could have turned him away like that, and he reached out to her even as he copsed backwards onto the cobblestones.


    From his view on the ground, he could finally see what it was he¡¯d been walking toward. It was one of Siddrim¡¯s eternal mes perched atop the little white temple that they so favored. They didn¡¯t have them in every small vige temple, but there had been two in Fallravea, and it was a point of pride that they had been lit since the end of thest King¡¯s mourning period. It had been a point of pride for his city and his family, and it was that pride that forced him to roll over and force himself to his feet instead ofying down next to the well there and dying.


    Clutching his papers to his chest, he staggered stiff limbed to the reinforced wooden door of the temple, and he pounded on it. There was no strength left in his arm though. Instead, all he could do was bang on it with his head while he leaned heavily against the cold wood, and slowly slumped down to his knees as the world began to swim around him.


    . . .


    Sister Annise stumbled down the stairs half asleep to see what all themotion was about only to find Priest Mallen and his acolytes wrestling the body of a hermit onto a table in the small clinic that the temple ran for the vigers of the area. Thankfully it was empty but for the four of them, but that still did nothing to exin what was happening at thiste hour.


    ¡°What in the name of the light are you doing at such an infernal hour?¡± she demanded as she swept a few stray brown hairs out of her face. From all the noise she¡¯d heard, she¡¯d feared they were under some kind of attack, so she¡¯d only put on her cream-colored robe and left her white apron and shawl upstairs to investigate.


    The priest noticed immediately and rebuked her with his eyes, but he said nothing about it. ¡°A dying hermit was found on our door. He¡¯s been bitten by a snake I think, though it¡¯s much toote to save the arm.¡±


    As Priest Mallen spoke, his acolyte Theo moved out of the way for just a moment, but it was long enough to see the ghastly shriveled thing the old man''s left arm. No, he wasn¡¯t old, she corrected herself as they started to strip him. He was just haggard. From his birdsnest hair to his gnarled, cked feet, he was every inch the holy man. Right down to his dangerously slender waistline and emaciated ribs.


    ¡°Well then, if you¡¯re here make yourself useful and burn these,¡± the priest said gesturing to a pile of wadded up robes and a sheave of disintegrating papers that might have once been a book. ¡°We¡¯ll do what we can for the poor bastard but I¡¯m not expecting much.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re going to heal him?¡± she asked hopefully. It would have been a strange thing for the priest to attempt. He almost always horded Siddrim¡¯s light, iming that the recipient wasn¡¯t worth it, so this time she wasn¡¯t surprised when he shook his head and picked up a cleaver.


    ¡°Maybe if he survives the night,¡± the priest answered, cleaning the meat cleaver with a rag, ¡°but even with a tourniquet, I don¡¯t expect a man in his condition will survive the blood loss. Still - we must ce it in the lord of light¡¯s hands.¡±


    Sister Annise brought her hand to her heart and bowed her head in reverence at the mention of her lord''s name, but only for as long as was necessary. Then she quickly scooped up the garbage that the priest had pointed out and fled the room. Though her heart went out to the man, she had no wish to see any butchery this evening. She was certain it would give her nightmares.


    She had only just gotten out of the infirmary door and shut it behind her when she heard the dull impact of metal on meat and gagged at the mental image that was briefly conjured up involuntarily in her mind.


    Though she was sure that the sh she saw wasn¡¯t the sight, she med that gift for the vivid imagination she was cursed with. She couldn¡¯t see anyone sick or in pain without knowing exactly what it would feel like, and when she was trying to assist someone who was vomiting, it was all she could do not to join them. It was a curse that she¡¯d lived with her whole life, and tonight she was grateful for Priest Mallen¡¯s low opinion of her as she went to the main firece and threw the lice infested robes onto the bed of coals, quickly making the mes leap to life for a moment in a burst of greasy brilliance.


    She was about to add the papers too without a second thought. After all, as soon as they were ash she could return to her bed. Sunrise would alwayse sooner than she would have liked. Something stayed her hand though, and instead she decided to flip through them first.


    At first she expected them to be mad religious ramblings, and at ces, where the writing was still legible, they sometimes seemed to be. ¡°The poison river continues, no matter how far I travel into the mountains today. She follows me. Her and her storm clouds and only the light of the heavens keeps her lightning at bay,¡± she read to herself.


    Did that make the hermit some mad Orozian prophet then? If that was true then should she hold on to these for The Penitent Seekers of Truth? She wasn¡¯t sure, and ultimately it was hardly the ce of a sister to decide these things. Still, she couldn¡¯t help but flip to another spot and read again.


    ¡°But the Count has no enemies. None I can point him to. He¡¯s already had me kill the few he had, which makes him both the viin and the hero of his own story. Still if I do not find a name to give him by our next meeting mine is certain to move a few ces higher on the invisible list that the shadows put into his head.¡± This passage was almost nonsense, and if the words weren¡¯t enough to convince her that the man that had written it, the doodles around the edges of the book were certainly enough to do it. Random words were circled and linked to other random shapes. It was insane.


    She decided that more than anything she didn¡¯t want to deal with whatever this mystery was, and was about to flip the book closed, but as she gazed transfixed at the madness on the page, she felt herself start to freeze up. Then suddenly she could feel the edges of her brain quaking as a vision boiled up out of the edges of her mind and her body began to tremble. She was having a fit, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.


    Suddenly the fire fell away, leaving her in the dark room that expanded into an endless web and expanding web of darkness. She could see people she didn¡¯t recognize connected in ways that she didn¡¯t understand in an infinite web of causality that spread further and further until it was thendscape itself, from the Wodenspines to the Oroza. From here she could see that the river flowed with blood, and that a town far to the south was on fire as a ck sun set in the distance behind it all.


    It was a terrifying image, and almost as soon as it was done she found herself on the floor, gasping and sobbing at a feeling of loss and fear too terrible to understand.

 Chapter 63: City of the Dead

    Chapter 63: City of the Dead


    His walk ever deeper was a timeless monotony, punctuated only by death, as Krulm¡¯venor slew each and every creature that crossed his path. Neither the slow-acting slimes nor the dreaded stone borers could hope to match the fury he could draw upon at any moment, thanks to the nearly limitless power of the Lich that he was tethered to. At first, the fire spirit weed these terrible bouts of violence because they were all that could distract him from thinking about the Allfather and wondering about all the other things he''d forgotten.


    Even thoroughly fireproof enemies like belchers and emberkin could not stand up to the strength of the steel skeleton that was his body. No matter how satisfying it was to rip his opponent¡¯s limb from bloody limb, though, the dwarf eventually grew to hate and then dread the encounters. This wasn¡¯t because it disliked striking down all the terrors that lurked in the dark, though, or purging the rust funguses and the acid spitters from the tunnels with fire the way that every dwarf wished they could.


    No, it was because every time there was violence, he could feel the goblin spirits that powered the bones of this bodye alive and pollute his soul a little more. Each time they were roused by violence, his rigid, perfect dwarven soul was suffused by the slime of their simple existence, and even when the fight was over, some measure of that filth stayed behind.


    It was inescapable, and no matter how many kobold dens he destroyed or spider nests he cleansed, it wouldn¡¯t be enough to make up for the terrible poison sliding inside him one drop at a time. He could hear the whispers all the time now, even when he was at peace and the goblin tribes that dwelled within him were asleep. He thanked the All-father that at least he did not yet understand their gibbering, for he knew that when he¡¯d fallen that far, he would begin to grow truly mad.


    He didn¡¯t even feel the need to resist the Lich¡¯s orders anymore. There was no point. With this terrible punishment, the proud godling was slowly being hollowed out in the same way that the dread kobolds might ruin a city: with one small hole at a time, undermining what had taken a lifetime to create with their irresistible hunger. With each day and each fight, Krulm¡¯venor could feel the inevitability of what was happening to him, and it was with growing despair that he realized that even if he found a way to escape this body, it was likely that the taint he carried within him was permanent now, no matter how brightly he burned.


    So, he walked in misery, and it was only when Krulm¡¯venor reached the gates of the Ghen¡¯tal that he knew this was where it had all started. From the very moment he spied the tarnished crest of the city on the huge brass doors, the sundered mountain eclipsing the world axe, he knew he was home, just as he knew that behind those open doors stood a dead city popted by only dust and shadows.


    He''d barely stepped past the threshold when he felt the darkness boil up inside his skull.


    ¡°What is this ce,¡± it whispered as they gazed out of his eyes together at the shadowed ruins of what was once one of the greatest cities beneath the world. ¡°You know it. You¡¯ve been here.¡±


    ¡°Aye,¡± Krulm¡¯venor agreed, looking out into the darkness. Unlike some of the previous ces he¡¯d been that were devoured by kobolds or ruined beyond recognition by goblins, Ghen¡¯tal was still just as perfect as the day he¡¯d left it for thest time. The city itself had be a mausoleum, and the bodies stilly where they¡¯d fallen when thest of the lights had been extinguished. ¡°I was born here, I lived my whole life here, and when I was raised again from the clutches of death to fight the darkness, I was born here a second time.¡±


    It wasn¡¯t until the words had left his mouth that he realized he¡¯d said far too much. These were the secrets that could truly hurt his people, but he¡¯d dwelled in the darkness alone for months now, with only the whispers in his head forpany. So, when the darkness had asked a question, he¡¯d answered it automatically, and now he could feel the Lich salivating as it awaited more details.


    Krulm¡¯venor was extremely grateful when he saw movement in the darkness to distract both of their attention. For a moment, he thought it was goblins, but the red glowing eyes gave it away. Goblins wouldn¡¯t still be alive this deep with nothing to devour. It was just one of the silent wearing a goblin¡¯s shadow. Of course, the silent ones would still be here. Why wouldn¡¯t they? They¡¯d been the ones to sack the city so long ago.


    Just like the Lich, they weren¡¯t living creatures but a parody of life that existed only to snuff it out. Like other cities before it, Ghen¡¯tal had dug too deep and paid the price for it in the form of these horrors.


    Fortunately, these creatures of darkness were very susceptible to light. When he red to life, he saw the closest creatures that were slinking through the rubble to ambush him, burst into greasy smoke as the light of his fires erased the darkness they needed to survive.


    Then just as suddenly as his fires had kindled, they vanished, preventing him from bing a living inferno. A momentter, Krulm¡¯venor realized it was because the Lich had cut him off from its dark power.


    ¡°No,¡± the darkness hissed painfully in his mind. ¡°Do nothing while I study these wonders, you ignorant swine, or I will find an even deeper pit of filth to bury you alive in!¡±


    With amand like that, the fire spirit could do nothing but stand there as more of the dark spirits began to swarm him. First, there were dozens and then hundreds, but he was not alive, so they could do nothing to him except wonder at the strange new thing that had invaded their home.


    When the boldest of the wretches, wearing the shadow of a venerable old dwarf, finally reached out with its magic to drain the life essence from his body, Krulm¡¯venor trembled in rage and revulsion. He was only mollified slightly when the Lich grasped onto that magical thread and absorbed the caster instead of the other way around.


    That little reversal was amusing the fire spirit at least, even if the sudden chill of the alien soul going through him was incredibly disconcerting. What happened next, though, was that much worse. As soon as the Lich realized it could devour the silent in such a straightforward way, it began to do so voraciously.


    The creatures were only spirits of darkness wearing the shadows of their victims. There was nothing to them that one could touch. So, at first, the darkness that dwelled within him began to devour them one at a time, but soon that wasn¡¯t enough as its greed expanded to fill the size of the cavern. Five spirits, then ten¡­ The Silent were fleeing now, which was not something that Krulm¡¯venor had ever seen except for in the face of fire. Now that the Wraith knew what it was looking for, though, and it stalked the city, hunting the creatures that had been hunters their whole lives until a moment ago.


    That idea might have filled the fire spirit with some measure of joy if it wasn¡¯t being forced to endure the torrent of dark magic from the very center of the vortex of darkness. Even if the cavern¡¯s light had grown too dim for him to see what was happening, he could certainly feel it. The first one of the silent shadows to be devoured had made it feel chill, but now the skeleton was frozen solid as its mes guttered until it was once more reduced to a single spark in its skull shapentern of a head as it tried to endure the torrent of darkness that threatened to snuff it outpletely.


    Of course, Krulm¡¯venor longed for such an oue, but even as the metal skeleton that was its body got colder and colder and icicles began to grow on its ribcage, the final ember that was his tainted consciousness would not be snuffed out, no matter how much the Lich feasted on the souls of its enemies.


    Then, just as suddenly as it started, it was over. In only a few minutes, the Lich had defeated an enemy that tens of thousands of dwarven warriors had been unable to best. Only when that was done did it restore its power and allow the fires that burned within Krulm''venors bones to light once more.


    When he began to move again, he ignored the sounds of cracking ice that broke off him and fell to the stone floor below as the Lich spoke. ¡°Now that the pests have been taken care of, you begin again. Tell me of your rebirth here, hound.¡±


    Krulmvenor chaffed at that, but after the harrowing experience he¡¯d just endured, hecked the strength to fight the Lich. ¡°When a dwarf that has led a good life dies, they go to their promised reward in the afterlife. To Vargaren, the eternal forges, tobor on greater things than mortal minds can even imagine.¡± As he spoke, the fire spirit began to walk toward the now cold forges of Ghen¡¯tal in the center of town. ¡°But sometimes, when there is a great threat, as with the silent ones, a soul is brought back to this world as a spark of the divine to help the living and ensure a future for all dwarves.¡±


    It wasn¡¯t the whole truth, but Krulm¡¯venor desperately hoped it would be enough because it was treading right on the edge of terrible secrets that the Lich must never know.


    Krulm¡¯venor¡¯s dread rxed slightly when the Lich finally whispered, ¡°Show me the city¡¯s cemetery. Show me where you keep your dead.¡±


    Silently the fire spirit moved to obey. There was no harm in it. He walked to the far wall and showed him the deathless halls of the mausoleumplex. It contained tens of thousands of dwarven dead, but to amodate so many, all of them had been burned to bone and ash and ced in n ossuaries.


    The Lich had him rip open several, which was an unconscionable act of defilement for the Krulmvenor, but he obeyed just the same. In the end, that wasn¡¯t enough for the dread voice in his head, though, and the Lich finally said, ¡°You¡¯re hiding something from me, Krulm¡¯venor, but since you have given me such a banquet of darkness to feast upon, I will give you one final chance to tell me the truth before you are made to suffer for your defiance.¡±


    ¡°This is the only ce in the city where the dead should ever be,¡± Krulm''venor swore, ¡°Right now, there are bodies in the streets, but normally¡ª¡±


    ¡°Silence,¡± the Lich¡¯s voice thundered, freezing his disobedient body in ce once more. ¡°There is another ce then. Outside the city perhaps, because I see no statues of kings or ques for heroes in this dingey ce. Tell me where the dwarves take the bodies of their elders and their hallowed dead.¡±


    Krulm¡¯venor didn¡¯t answer the question because doing so would have terrible consequences. He simply stood there as the pain started to rise, and the goblins boiled up out of his bones to gnaw at the corners of his soul.


    ¡°You will tell me what I wish to know, and if you wish to suffer until you are ready to do that, then so be it,¡± the Lich whispered.


    Krulm¡¯venor wanted to say something defiant. He wanted to tell the Lich to go to the pits and that he would never betray his people. He couldn¡¯t do any of that, though, because once the fire started to re in earnest, he couldn¡¯t stop screaming.


    ¡°Then stay here and burn with your secrets until you¡¯ve learned the error of your ways.¡± The Lich said as it began to fade from his mind. ¡°Unlike your kin, no matter how long the mes assault you, you will never be allowed death''s sweet release.¡±

 Chapter 64: Blight

    Chapter 64: Blight


    Once the rain started, it didn¡¯t stop until the parchednd was transformed into mud. The Lich hadn¡¯t been the one to cause such widespread destruction, of course, but once he¡¯d given Oroza free rein to refill her river, it hadn¡¯t felt any need to hold her back while she thrashed and raged inside the abomination it had inflicted on her. Even as its underground reservoirs had filled, the river emptied, and no matter how many tears poured from the sky in memory of all of the good and loyal priestesses that had died for the sake of its schemes, it didn¡¯t care. So while the people suffered as a consequence of her suffering, the Lich merely reveled in both.


    At first, the long-suffering people of Greshen weed the rains. All they wanted in life was mild weather and healthy children. It took weeks for the torrential rains from the constant storms that swept in from the sea to the south that the goddess had mastered during her exile for relief to be torment. In the summer, boat traffic had ground to a halt in the face of a vanishing river, but in the winter, even as the barge traffic resumed, the roads had be almost impassible to wagons. Only small groups of riders with good horses could move about with any freedom as the whole world seemed to flood in an overreaction to everything the earth had endured earlier in the year.


    This caused no end to mudslides in the rural viges that dotted the Wodenspine range¡¯s foothills. Not all of these tragedies were random, though. The Lich targeted Garhaam and Bellmor to be swept away specifically. The former had to be buried in eight feet of mud because of the monastery it hosted, and thetter was devastated in a sh flood from the river it hugged in the hopes of discing them because it was too close to the ever-expanding range of its pet lizardman tribes. The Lich¡¯s dark hand would never be noticed amidst all the other very natural tragedies that urred that season, though. Everything would be med on their evil Lord, and all of that me would be recorded by Kelvun¡¯s ghost.


    No amount of rain could wash away the blood that had been spilled in gutters for thest few weeks, though. Just like no amount of inquisition or persecution could purge the rot that was taking hold in granaries around the county. Indeed, even as tortures continued in the capital where the devout and the corrupted were sifted and judged, the ergot that blossomed amongst the grain stores of the city would only add fuel to the pyres of distrust.


    It would make good honest people see horrible things, and even if they weren¡¯t real, they would still damn others in their life to slow, painful deaths until they finally confessed to dark deeds they¡¯d never done. Trust quickly became rarer than food as once kind, happy neighbors would me sicknesses in both their household and their farm animals on each other.


    Soon it wasn¡¯t just the official witch hunts that were being undertaken. Thanks to thete Lord¡¯s many ns, thousands of strangers had moved to the county in thest few years. They spoke to each other in unfamiliar dialects and ents that did nothing to help with mutual understanding. Sometimes they even worshiped foreign gods. It took only the slightest push from the darkness in the form of dreams for the people of every vige and town to begin to me their misfortunes on the new arrivals or the bitter old spinster that lived at the end of the road. Even with all of that, though, the darkest winter in memory had yet to truly explode while the rains tamped down the building fury.


    It was only when the cold started to arrive that tribunals were quickly put together and blessed by the local priests. Sometimes this was done in earnest fear, and other times it was with a jaded eye toward newnds and old grudges. In Isiqha, while winter flurries hinted at the heavy snows toe, olddy Fotenoi was fed to the mes because she was a midwife and an herbalist that had charged too much for her remedies during the drowning years ago. Elza Brom joined her for the crime of having dark eyes and two ck cats that were said to feast on the souls of sickly children. The two were roasted in the town square by a group of vigers as eager to stay warm as they were to see the women punished.


    That winter, there would be few Yule feasts. Not even the mild weather could offset theck of food and goodwill. They were hard, bleak times, even for the good and the righteous. To the Lich¡¯s annoyance, it did make the light burn brighter in a few as they sought redemption for the things they¡¯d done wrong. Most turned to envy instead, though, ming others for everything that was going wrong in their life.


    In the span of little more than a year, the region that had been perceived as one of the richest of the southern domains had been brought to its knees. In truth, it had suffered for years in the wake of the goblin attacks, and only the outrageous revenues from the Count¡¯s gold mine had been able to hide all of that human misery behind a gilded veneer.


    The gue had touched Greshen only lightly, but nothing could stop the brewing famine, and this pleased the Lich greatly. Only in the area directly around ckwater did it make even the smallest efforts to stem these terrible trends as the ck mold and red rust spread amongst thest of the crops that still lingered in the fields and those that had been quickly harvested at the start of the storms.


    The farmers had prayed for months for rain and left the crops in the ground until the veryst minute in many ces in the hopes that some miracle might save their harvest. The result was that their often requested blessings built up and were delivered all at once as a curse. Though most families would survive for another nting, not all of them would, and that was a lesson that was hammered home by the children scavenging the empty fields for grains of wheat and barley along with the birds each day until the snows fell.


    As the world slowly turned to ice, people¡¯s hearts were no exception, and the Lich watched with undisguised hunger as viges turned on their weakest members in an effort to save enough grain for the spring. Many people just disappeared into the snow that winter, and a rash of the elderly and infirm passed away in their sleep with a pillow pressed into their faces.


    The fact that the Lich had not been the one to force these once-good people to take such drastic action only pleased it more, and it rewarded the culprits for such things with unending dreams filled with guilt at what they¡¯d done and dread that they might yet be caught.


    The only area spared from the fog of distrust was the region immediately around ckwater. It was a rtive oasis of peace and plenty as the rest of the region descended into chaos. This was because of the Temr presence, of course, but there were also more pragmatic reasons. The Lich wanted to consolidate power and prestige on the heart of its growing empire, and while its tools for encouraging the men that dwelled there were limited, it had many, many tools to crush the smaller surrounding towns and viges.


    Fallravea itself would need no further efforts on the part of the darkness. By the time the holy men had finished with it, it was a broken husk of a city. All its buildings would still be standing, of course, but its heart had stopped beating, and its reputation was cursed by people as far away as the capital. Almost all of its best families were ruined, and its harsh governor that ruled in the name of the infant count, was a brutal tyrant that would soon crush all the joy that could be found within a days ride as he forced the River Goddess¡¯s worshipers to convert to his Lord of light.


    The Lich considered murdering the man just to see what the church would do about it, but for now, it stayed its hand and chose not to inme them any further. Forcing a confrontation before the time was right would not be advantageous, and it was still concerned that it might have to disappear the temrs roaming the area should they dig too deeply. After all - they foolishly thought they¡¯d already fought and defeated the worst monsters in the region, but nothing could have been further from the truth.


    They¡¯d beaten only what it had built specifically to test them and nothing more. It had other weapons in its arsenal that would easily grind them to dust. The juggernaut had been built specifically to counter light wielders. Its flesh had been soaked in darkness before it was reattached, and the eighth-inch verdigris-covered scales that had been riveted to its hide would resist the re dozens of times better than the thin skin of its leviathan. Besides, if it seeded in its current tests with its shadow dragon, then it could simply immte the warriors from the sky whenever it desired, leaving the church no leads to chase it down with.


    The dragon flew now, but only because of the innumerable air spirits that had been woven into its cured flesh to render it as light as a feather. It was almost as fragile as one too now, and the Lich might have set the clumsy project aside to focus on other things were it not for its breath weapon.


    Drakes had no ability to belch fire naturally like their cousins, the true dragons, but thanks to the shocking influx of shadow energy that Krulm¡¯venor had located for it, the ck fires that its creation could belch defied belief. Though they were not a limitless font of me like the godling, the shadow dragon¡¯s breath was more devastating, erasing even towering trees in seconds as the darkness unmade the physicality of creation and whatever was caught in it effervesced into nothingness. In that sense, it was an acid, not a fire, but no matter what it was, it was lethal, and the Lich would horde it until just the right moment before it unleashed it on an unsuspecting enemy.


    The only thing that stayed its hand now was the one-armed priest. Despite the darkness that so obviously festered in the wounded man¡¯s heart, hisrades had yet to drive a stake through it. This made the Lich wonder how much corruption they really saw and much he could taint the man before they decided he had to be dealt with. It was an interesting experiment that the Lich would not rush, and since it could keep tabs on the troublesome group through the man¡¯s dreams, it saw no need to strike them down just yet.


    For now, it would do just what it had done for thest few months. Nothing. It would let the world think that good had won while it nned for the next phase. Darkness could never move openly until it had a way to banish the light in the same way that man currently used light to push back the dark, but that day wasing. All that the darkness needed was time to breed more sheep for the ughter and the way that ckwater was growing and would continue to grow as the famine took hold further ind. It would only be a few more years now before it was ready to challenge the gods themselves.

 Chapter 65: A New Order

    Chapter 65: A New Order


    The trip to the red hills had gone without issue, and the rains hadn¡¯t affected their ride across the grasnds nearly as much as they¡¯d affected the roads to the east, which had been brought to a halt by the river. For Todd, it was a thoroughly nostalgic experience, and he reveled in the half-remembered views of the distant mountains that could only asionally be seen through the stormclouds.


    The nights were miserable, so they stayed in the barns of righteous vigers where they could find them and in burned-out ruins or ghost towns that were still left over from the goblin war where they could not. One night they even stayed in the overgrown remains of Todd¡¯s old vige so that he could pay his respects to the rough stone marker that had been erected after all the fighting was done. The inscription was the same as all the others he had seen, save only for the name of the vige. ¡®The good people of Widinreach will be avenged.¡¯ It was simple and a little trite after he¡¯d seen so many simr monuments, but Todd appreciated it just the same.


    His parents would never have a proper grave, of course, because only a single mass grave for the victims that had been found was erected, as was the case with all of the ghost towns they¡¯d passed on the ride so far. Still, Todd left a bundle of wilting wildflowers and purple thistles he¡¯d been able to find. He even said a prayer to guide them into the light, though he had no evidence that they were actually buried here.


    Still, it gave him closure, which in turn gave him the confidence he¡¯d never had when they finally arrived to rename Garvin¡¯s Gift into something more appropriate. The temrs had discussed it at length, and by the time they arrived to give the news of everything that had happened in Fallravea to the priest who ran the temple and orphanage, they¡¯d chosen Gelhome¡¯s Gift both because it sounded simr and because it was named for a saint as famous for being a pauper all of his life as for his good works.


    There were plenty of memories there, too, for Todd, and even some old friends that he could share his adventures with, but there were shadows as well. They stayed in Gelhome¡¯s Gift for only three days, and Todd spent half the time in the graveyard, thinking about all the awful things he¡¯d done to the people that had been so cruel to him. He hadn¡¯t killed anyone, of course, but still, every one of the boys that had made his life hell had managed to end up here because of his bad advice. Even if the goblins had been the ones that had killed the boys, Todd had still been the one to put them in harm¡¯s way.


    The fact that he knew for certain that if they hadn¡¯t ended up in this cemetery, then he certainly would have didn¡¯t help him at all, which puzzled him. If he¡¯d killed a man that was trying to kill him today, he wouldn¡¯t have felt the least bit guilty about that, but this seemed more duplicitous somehow.


    Todd thought about that on the long rainy canal ride back to ckwater. Even while the other temrs worried about what they might find in such a den of viiny, he could really only focus on his own guilt and on helping priest-candidate Verdenin. The ride had been hard on the injured man, but in spite of all the exertion and the damp, his injuries hadn¡¯t gotten reinfected and were slowly healing. The worst was definitely behind him, and he was gaining strength every day.


    Todd helped him with writing his missives, but also more basic things like helping him to dress and changing his bandages. He also watched him, though, and wondered at the darkness he saw growing in the man. At first, he thought it was just rage and despair as a result of the horrific injury that had been inflicted on him while fighting Siddrim¡¯s enemies, but as the days passed, he decided that there had to be more to it. So, the day after they arrived in ckwater, he approached Brother Faerbar about it.


    ¡°Master, when should the darkness in the hearts of your allies worry you more than the darkness in the eyes of your enemy?¡± he asked while they sat alone under an awning waiting for the rain to cken so they could continue their sparing.


    ¡°And which of our allies troubles you so, Todd?¡± he asked patiently, as he always did.


    ¡°Can you not see? It has be so obvious that¡ª¡± Todd protested.


    ¡°There will be some darkness in the heart of almost everyone you ever fight beside,¡± Brother Faerbar cautioned him. ¡°You cannot fight evil for long and stay clean. No one can. Our priest candidate has only just regained his physical health after a grievous wound. Surely you can begrudge him some time for his soul to mend as well, can¡¯t you?¡±


    ¡°Of course, Master,¡± Todd answered, feeling suddenly ashamed at the very gentle admonishment. It was natural, he knew that, but like so many other things, that didn¡¯t stop him from worrying about it. ¡°I¡¯m not saying anyone is perfect or that they should be, except Siddrim, of course. Certainly, I¡¯m as wed as anyone.¡±


    ¡°Well, maybe not anyone,¡± the pdinughed. ¡°But I wouldn¡¯t let you serve me if you didn¡¯t have a good heart. Knowing that makes me certain that whatever you¡¯ve done to stain your own soul was done for the best of reasons, and with time and effort, you may yet wash that taint away, just as the Oroza is already recovering.¡±


    ¡°You noticed it too?¡± Todd asked, surprised by the sudden shift in topic.


    ¡°The spiritual poison seeping from Fallravea upstream will take years to be cleansed,¡± Brother Faerbar said, looking past the courtyard they were sparing into the water of the flooding river beyond it. ¡°But the healing has already begun. Do you see how the river floods? It is almost like it knows that the source of the poison has been removed and that, with enough water, it can flush it all away. It is nature healing itself as it should.¡±


    Todd considered that as he watched the river flow by. It was high enough now that it was only a few feet from the top of its channel and was threatening to overtop the piers. The toll chain that was andmark for the area had long since disappeared under the murky brown waters, and though it would be ridiculous to call the water clean now, it was certainly cleaner than it had been on theirst visit.


    Then the water had been a clear blue-green color. Though not clear enough to see the bottom, there had also been a patchy grey oily slick of spiritual taint that clung to the water''s surface that was almost entirely absent now. If he stared hard, he could still see a spot now and then, but it would appear that purging that awful temple was already doing some good.


    Ufortable with the lull in the conversation and the slowly building ufortable silence filled only by the drizzling rain, Todd finally said, ¡°The whole city is cleaner than I thought it would be. Spiritually, I mean.¡±


    ¡°I agree,¡± Brother Faerbar answered. ¡°For all the evil stories that center on this area, it seems no worse than any of the other parts of the kingdom I have been to and a better than a great many of them. There are problems that need to be fixed, of course. The poverty and the prostitution most of all, but if there is hope for the country of Greshen, it likely lies here.¡±


    ¡°Not Fallravea?¡± Todd asked, surprised. ¡°It¡¯s the bigger city.¡±


    ¡°Fallravea existed as the seat of governance and culture for the region for decades,¡± he agreed, ¡°but only because it was where the main sources of ie met. The harvests traveled east to the city each fall, and all the trade traveled by it on the Oroza. Even if we hadn¡¯t had to purge the city of half its leading lights for dealing with unclean spirits, ckwater still would have eclipsed it in a decade or two.¡±


    ¡°Because of the gold?¡± Todd asked.


    ¡°The gold and the canal,¡± the pdin nodded. ¡°What viges remain bring their goods south to the canal now instead of east to the capital. It¡¯s a faster, safer route without a swamp and its foul creatures to threaten them.¡±


    Todd opened his mouth to speak again, but his master interrupted. ¡°Alright,d, let¡¯s work on your reposts. I¡¯m sick of waiting for the rain. It¡¯s likely to drizzle like this for the rest of the day if we let it.¡±


    It did rain the whole day and the next one too, but the Temrs didn¡¯t let that stop them from doing what they needed to do. They proceeded to round up the pimps and the pushers of vice and drink and then punished them publicly. Those that were the least tainted were invited to confess their sins publicly so that they could give testimony against the worst of the lot. Then they would be shriven and flogged before the true scum was hanged and left to dangle until they¡¯d rotted enough that their neck would no longer support the weight of their torso.


    Beyond busting up the brothels and the gambling dens, though, there was little for them to do. A review of the warehouses and the shipping records revealed little that was amiss, and even the tax collector, Jurgen, seemed like a man more obsessed with making sure the numbers were right than enriching himself in the process.


    There weren¡¯t even any rumors of evils or cults, and apparently, the zombies and the lizardmen that featured in so many stories about the swamp hadn¡¯t been seen in almost two decades since Count Leo Garvin, the Third, had been the ruler of the area. While Todd didn¡¯t doubt that the stories had a basis in reality, two decades without a monster, even before the swamp had been drained, making it difficult to believe that either one of those creatures had ever been a real threat.


    Once all of that was done, and there was seemingly no one left to bring to the light, they made a show of burning a small shrine to the Oroza at priest-candidate Verdenin¡¯s suggestion. It only had one full-time priestess, and she was a kindly old woman who was full of light that did little more than cry as they shattered the shrine that she had spent years tending. They decided not to kill her or even to flog her since she was deemed to have been the part of the goddess¡¯s cult that had worshiped the good and the true.


    The decision didn¡¯t save her, though, and a few dayster, she was found dead in the river. Rumors said that she¡¯d killed herself in grief for what the Temrs had done to her goddess, and the town¡¯s attitude toward their saviors soured a bit after that, but Todd didn¡¯t care. Like everything else, he felt grief over her death just as keenly as if he¡¯d caused it, and he spent the afternoon digging her grave by himself in the rain as penance for the tragedy.


    The following day, Brother Faerbar announced that they would stay here the full month to root out evil as they were told to, but every man in the cadre agreed that there was little need for such thoroughness. Soon enough, they would be going back to the holy city to bury their dead and report the horrors they¡¯d seen to their superiors.

 Chapter 66: Purified

    Chapter 66: Purified


    It was on the next tost day before they journeyed north to Siddrimar that priest-candidate Verdenin had a vision. Not far from the warfs, where the squat and ugly toll tower that held the near end of the chain stood, he saw a beautiful temple to Siddrim rising up to shine its light onto the polluted river. To hear him describe it, it was a building of pure light that would transcend anything that had ever been created before in all the reds, oranges, and pinks of a beautiful sunrise, forever showing the people of the region that Siddrim would light the way.


    No one doubted the priest-candidate¡¯smunication with the divine. However, it did ur to Todd as he helped the one-armed priest with the initial drawings and what he called the elevation that it was oddly specific. He¡¯d heard of many visions in his lessons about important saints and battle priests. Though some of them had been incredibly vivid, especially in regards to the bloody and terrible end times, none of them that he was aware of hade with measurements.


    As more details fell into ce on the way back home, it was unlike any of the other temples he¡¯d been in over the years in a number of major ways. It featured the holy number seven quite strongly and would be built as a giant domed edifice with pirs in the outer apise, as was tradition, but somehow the details were off. Todd had trouble putting his fingers on the differences at first, but he could not escape the way that the subtle reflected symmetry was unnatural.


    ¡°It will purify the river, I¡¯m sure of it,¡± the priest candidate had told them around the fire one night while he tried to exin the fountains that he¡¯d chosen especially strange cement for on the roof and near the outer walls. ¡°You see when the spray of water hangs over the oculus like a cloud, day and night, all you¡¯ll see from the inside is the rainbows of that prismatic spray!¡±


    That detail did sound lovely, although Todd had no idea why the priest-candidate thought that such a touch would be needed for a town like ckwater when a city the size of Fallravea didn¡¯t even have a full temple. It made do with a small shrine, and Todd doubted that arger, more beautiful edifice would have kept the deprivations of the Oroza at bay.


    This was one of many small conversations that the priest-candidate had either to share some strange detail or another or to ask the brothers to pray with him so he might have a better understanding of how this door should be oriented or what scene should y out on this stained ss window. Publicly everyone humored the man, but privately they worried that he¡¯d gone quite mad to develop such a strange fixation. That was a fair worry for Todd because he could see in Brother Verdenin in a way most of them could not, and to him, it looked like the darkness had taken root in the other man¡¯s heart and was slowly growing.


    That merely brought back the words of his Master about giving the man time for his soul to heal, and so he tried to be patient with Brother Verdenin. After all, until the day of his vision, the priest had not seemed particrly interested in anything but recording the minutia of the day for his superiors to readter, Todd thought. It was entirely possible that all of this was merely a coping mechanism.


    However, it was enough to make him seem like he was a different person. He didn¡¯t evenin about his missing arm or the quality of Todd¡¯s linework anymore. He was just a man possessed, and by the time they reached Fallravea, he had something resembling a n. Drawn on all the spare pages of the notebook he¡¯d brought with him to record the events of the trip.


    The cadre stayed there almost a week to resupply and make their reports to the governor, and in all that time, Priest-candidate Verdenin was almost nowhere to be seen. Toddrgely stuck with Brother Faerbar, and though they did examine the city more than once, Todd found that hopelessly depressing. The ce was a shell devoid of happiness and light now.


    Ironically, one of the only truly happy people he saw the whole time he was there was the infant count that was kept in the governor¡¯s house. Todd would have expected that a child like that, who¡¯d survived such a terrible massacre, to be permanently stained by it. Instead, the child glowed with an inner light that seemed to defy the darkness that hung over everything else, and to him, that was inexplicable.


    Todd only found out what had happened to Brother Verdenin as they were preparing to leave the city. The man had found a few artisans that were suspected of evil acts and promised to intercede with his superiors on their behalf if only they would help him with his designs as penance. So he had spent thest week ving away unceasingly with them to better realize his great work.


    The result was a giant set of scrolls disying delicate linework that made the disturbing designs look somehow beautiful. A normal temple to their God was a bright, sunny affair, and few of the buildings outside or Siddrimar or the capital had much ornamentation. This building was quite ostentatious byparison, containing fountains on the outside and golden decorations on the inside to demonstrate various important moments in the history of their religion. The entire building somehow managed to be a parable. Though the priest candidate exined that this was necessary to honor both the gold that Siddirm had blessed them with, as well as the river, which was not their burden to bear, it still seemed like an extravagant way to embody those important messages.


    Todd didn¡¯t really care either way. He was happy enough to pray anywhere. To him,muning with his God under an open sky was just as good as kneeling beside a simple altar, and he was sure such funds could be better used in other ces like the beleaguered Fallravea or any number of the dying viges that they¡¯d passed on their way here. To him, it looked like half of the region might wither and die without help.


    Ultimately it didn¡¯t matter what he thought, though. He wouldn¡¯t get a vote. Neither would priest-candidate Verdenin. Only the high priests could decide such things, and given the low opinion of the whole county of Greshen right now, he thought they were unlikely to lift a finger to help the people of the area. The following month he would find out how wrong he was.


    . . .


    The first thing that had to happen when all of them returned to the Courtyard of the Pant, other than the funerals that were held immediately asrge triumphant bonfires, was that all of them were purified. The weapons and armor of every member of the carde were taken to be cleansed and given in grey vestments while their clothing was burned. Then all of them stood a midnight vigil and fasted for 48 hours. It was only then that the darkness of everything that they¡¯d in was said to be shriven from their scarred flesh, and they were permitted to travel deeper into the giant temple city for additional cleansing.


    From there, they were confessions to be made and bathes to be taken, but from there, things were quiet for the next few weeks. Brother Faerbar wasuded for the bravery of his men, and a feast was held in their honor that Todd had gotten more than a little drunk at.


    They¡¯d been back less than a month when he heard the news. ¡°Your favorite priest-candidate has been promoted,¡± Micah teased after their first round of sparing. ¡°He¡¯s priest Verdinen now, but the next time you see him, I guess you¡¯ll just be calling him your grace, or sir!¡±


    ¡°Why would I be seeing him again?¡± Todd asked, genuinely confused. The other boy gave him no answers, though. He just smiled like he had a secret and used it to tease Todd relentlessly as they fought, using that dread to gain an advantage.


    He hoped that was all it was, of course, but the exchange nibbled at the back of his mind, and it was only when his Master pulled him aside to chat the following evening that he knew it was true.


    ¡°But I don¡¯t want to go with him,¡± Todd protested after Brother Faerbar spent five minutes telling him about everything that was going to happen next.


    Apparently, the priest had not only been sessful in petitioning the high council to let the man try to save the Oroza, but he¡¯d been promoted and requested Todd apany him as part of the team, so Todd would be taking a few years participating in that great project instead of going out into the dark ces of the world at his Master¡¯s side.


    ¡°All squires that serve The Order of Purgative me must spend some time serving another part of the church before they will be deemed worthy to be a Pdin,¡± Brother Faerbar said, sitting down next to his disappointed squire. ¡°You know this. You¡¯ve known that this day woulde for a long while now.¡±


    ¡°Yes,¡± Todd agreed, ¡°but I was hoping I could serve in the guard and stay here.¡±


    ¡°So you don¡¯t have to see the shades?¡± his Master asked.


    Todd nodded at that. ¡°So I don¡¯t have to see the shades,¡± he agreed.


    ¡°Such gifts were not made to hide behind these walls,¡± his Master said, putting his arm around Todd¡¯s shoulder and bringing him closer. ¡°We found nothing in ckwater, but that doesn¡¯t mean that there was nothing to find.¡±


    ¡°But¡ª¡± Todd tried to interrupt the older man.


    ¡°And in all the weeks that Priest Verdenin has healed and regained his will to live,¡± Brother Faerbar continued, ¡°He has gained a newfound lust for design, but the darkness in his heart has not diminished.¡±


    They bothughed at that for a moment before Todd hazarded a guess. ¡°So you¡¯re saying¡­ you want me to keep an eye on them?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m saying that since a full-fledged Temr would never be allowed to loiter in such a ce, you might see things that others will not,¡± Brother Faerbar said, ¡°And if there is nothing to be found, then in a few years, you will return to the city and take you ce here where you belong in my cadre.¡±


    That mollified Todd, and though the conversation turned to other things, they spent the next couple hours talking about all of the perils and hazards that the Palidin thought the church was facing, both from the outside as well as from within and by the time Todd went to bed his heart was heavy with worry. Though he never would have reduced his Master¡¯s order in the first ce, now that he had a better sense of perspective, he could see the wisdom in the older man¡¯s actions. Though it was obvious he hadn¡¯t told his apprentice everything, it was equally obvious that even the Holy City wasn¡¯t quite so safe as he imagined.


    The next week they set out on the long trek back, and Todd thought it was quite telling that, unlike his former Master, his new one had chosen to return to ckwater by boat. It was equally telling that voyage was uneventful, and apart from the stink of corruption from the still-fetid waters, Todd was untroubled, though, toward the end of the voyage, he did start to develop strange dreams.

 Chapter 67: The Shadow of Dishonor

    Chapter 67: The Shadow of Dishonor


    It was on the night of winter¡¯s first full moon while he was bathing deep in the pits of warm mud in the ce of honor he¡¯d earned that Tsson¡¯vek saw what the darkness had done to the drake he¡¯d killed years before. Its once-mottled scales of emerald and olive green had been transformed into a shimmering coat of inky ckness, and its wings had multiplied, but he was still sure of what he saw.


    The fearsome hunter that had been a living embodiment of grace and death was gone. In its ce was a strange mockery of those characteristics. It flew neither as fast nor as far as the original drake had, and that saddened the lizardman.


    He thought about it often for weeks and then months, both when hey with his kin and when he went off to hunt for food. There was no joy anymore when he looked to the top of their totem and saw the image of the drake¡¯s head that had been carved in his honor.


    For years Tsson¡¯vek had endured the secret shame of knowing that it was the poison gifts the darkness had given him that had killed the monster and not his own spear, but he¡¯d lived with that decision. Seeing it alive once more, though, was too far, and day by day, it ate at him.


    His only joy was in looking at his mate and his own hatchlings and seeing that they were perfectly happy and healthy. He was d that the darkness was not something that passed in the blood or through touch and contact. It was a choice, and Tsson¡¯vek had chosen poorly.


    He was preupied with these thoughts for a long time, but it was only when he saw the abomination once more on another spring night that he flew into an inconsble rage though. There were no greater creatures left to prove to himself that he was strong enough to merit his undeserved honor, and he gnashed his teeth and howled at the sky. That was when he decided he would have to start killing if he wanted to cut this cancer out.


    Tsson¡¯vek waited until the light of day so that the darkness that dwelled within him all the time now was at its weakest, and then, during a hunt, he challenged Tsgrun and Vzsst each in turn. The two of them were the nextrgest and most tainted hunters of the tribe, and Tsson¡¯vek could no longer bear to look at their ck, mottled scales that were so simr to his own. They might not have had the crooked bones or as many of jagged scars, but they still stank of the unnatural corruption that he was surrounded by.


    The hunter fought his first rival with spears and parried the deadly blow that aimed for his heart before he impaled Tsgrun through the throat. He left him there choking on his own blood even though he knew that probably wouldn¡¯t be enough to kill him in the face of the dark gifts that they all had, but he had no time to finish the job properly as he was suddenly matched w for w and bite for bite with Vzsst.


    Fights for dominance within the tribe were not umon, though they were rarely fatal. This was not about dominance, though. This was about fixing a terrible mistake. Even as he used his unnatural strength to rip the head off of his opponent while the smaller lizardman struggled feebly, he felt nothing but revulsion about what he¡¯d be. They¡¯d conquered thisnd and made it their own, but at what cost?


    Lost in thought for a moment, Tsson¡¯vek was brought back to reality as his other opponent recovered enough to stab Tsson¡¯vek in the side with an obsidian dagger. He quickly broke it off inside the wound, which would make healing harder, but it wouldn¡¯t be enough to turn the tide here.


    Staggering, Tsson¡¯vek turned back to the mortally wounded Tsgrun and yanked the spear in his throat in the other lizard man¡¯s throat out before he ripped it out with his teeth. Even then, the strength that the darkness had lent them was still strong enough that Tsgrun struggled weakly until Tsson¡¯vek¡¯s spear was lodged in his heart.


    Wounded, Tsson¡¯vek turned to fight other members of the tribe that were showing signs of the corruption he now hated. The juveniles fromst year¡¯s hatching had seemed particrly vulnerable, and Tsson¡¯vek knew that if he didn¡¯t expunge such a stain now, then soon it would envelop the whole tribe.


    He would never get the chance toplete that task, though. Partway through his bloody purge, the darkness woke and turned its eye on him long enough to understand that this wasn¡¯t about bloodlust or ambition but about rejection. As soon as it discovered that fact, Tyson¡¯vek found himself unable to move. He copsed bonelessly by the main firepit andy there looking up at the totem pole he hated so much while the remaining members of the tribe restrained him.


    He didn¡¯t live in fear of what was going to happen to him. After all, Tyson¡¯vek was happy to die in exchange for the cleansing he¡¯d unleashed for the good of the tribe. In time he hoped that they would healpletely. After all, now their valley wasrgely safe. What need to have any of them for the gifts of their dark master?


    He didn¡¯t have to wait long to find out what was going to happen to him. It was only just after sunset that he was bundled to the shore of theirke by four strong warriors and set upon the ferry that he¡¯d seen so often after they¡¯d brought down a particrlyrge creature that the darkness wished to feast upon.


    This time the juggernaut was not here, but there was no need for it. Even without the vines that bound him hand and foot, Tsson¡¯vek could not move. All he could do was watch as the skeletal hooded bargeman poled out into the deeper waters.


    This part of the journey had always confused the lizardman, for there seemed to be no navigable waters between their high mountain valley and the swamp they¡¯d left below. There were streams that connected the two, it was true, but they were full of rapids and waterfalls that would make a vessel of this size dangerously impractical.


    Still, it didn¡¯t seem to matter. They spent the next hour going deeper and deeper into a fog bank, and then suddenly, the mist had cleared, and they were somewhere else entirely. They were now poling down a small canal toward a dark tunnel entrance, though there seemed to be no sign of the swamp he remembered. Instead, there were only tilled fields and distant mountains. It didn¡¯t seem possible that they¡¯de so far from the ce he¡¯d called home so quickly, but he wasn¡¯t aware of any other mountains in the area, so surely magic was at work here as well.


    The canal continued underground for a few minutes, and when it finally came to dock at its tiny stygian port, the ferryman waved his hands over the vines, and they shriveled into dust as it gestured for its passenger to proceed through arge verdigrised door.


    The inky darkness of that ce was almost absolute when the ferry docked. The whole area was lit by a single brazier that burned with blue fire. As soon as Tsson¡¯vek walked toward that light, it began to dim, and another one further down the hall proceeded to light in its ce, guiding him ever deeper into abyrinth of twisted stone hallways from which it knew it would never escape.


    The lizardman followed the light as it moved, unable to resist thepulsion. His limbs were no longer his own, and all he could do was walk helplessly toward his ultimate fate; he did not know what that would be, but he still felt no fear. The only sensation left was the painful feeling of the knife twisting in his guts with every step, but there was nothing for it.


    The walk took longer than the ferry ride had, and the twisting path that he was led through seemed almost impossible to map or even traverse without a guide. It was only after almost half an hour of walking that he found a ramp that descended to a lower level. Here the tunnels were just as twisted and ustrophobic, of course, but they were also bustling with activity. In every room it passed, something was being done. Strange surgeons were splicing corpses together in one, and forges were being worked by dead men in another. Here was a room full of golden treasures, and there was a storage room full of nothing but rank upon rank of dead warriors who¡¯d been riveted inside their armor.


    Tsson¡¯vek couldn¡¯t understand many of the details or purposes behind them, but he didn¡¯t care. All of this only reinforced his view: he¡¯d made the correct decision. None of the zombies that crossed his path carrying this or that tried to stop him, and it was only when he reached a small, quiet room with a strange golden idol that he felt he could finally stop.


    Here the walls were gold, in strange patterns that reeked of magic to him, but that wasn¡¯t what caught Tsson¡¯vek¡¯s interest. In front of those odd walls were fellow lizardmen. Or rather, corpses of them. They were so old and so still that they had ayer of dust on them. Tsson¡¯vek knew that they were no mere trophies or decorations, though. They were warriors with cruel bronze des that could easily hack him to pieces.


    Was this how he was to die, Tsson¡¯vek wondered. That was when he heard the deathless voice in his mind.


    ¡°You disappointed me, Tsson¡¯vek,¡± the darkness whispered. ¡°You were such a diligent warrior until today, but now you will be made to suffer for your betrayal.¡±


    Tsson¡¯vek growled, casting his gaze around before he looked again at the strange golden lump in the center of the room. Was that the darkness? Was that what he¡¯d feared all this time? It was nothing but a screaming drizzled in molten metal. There was nothing to fear here, he realized, and he tensed his muscles, trying to break free of the control that had been ced on him so that he could rip the heart out of the thing that was polluting his people and save them once and for all.


    ¡°You will get the chance to save them,¡± the darkness whispered. ¡°After all, I¡¯ve finally figured out where your confused ferocity can be put to the best use in my ns.¡±


    The words came with an electric jolt of pain that brought the lizardman to his knees, but with that pain came rity, and he slowly pushed himself back to his feet as he reached his wed hand down to his wound.


    ¡°Impressive,¡± the darkness crooned in his ear, ¡°Even after all that, you think a traitor like you could ever hope to strike me down?¡±


    As the darkness spoke, Tsson¡¯vek pulled the jagged piece of obsidian from his side and raised it high. He would end this. Even as the pain blossomed into agony and those agonies multiplied until every single one of his scales was on fire, he fought it and took another step forward.


    He never got the chance to strike, though. While he dragged himself toward his goal an inch at a time, one of the lizardmen behind him that had stood there for uncounted years strode forward, and with two quick strokes, it severed Tsson¡¯vek¡¯s head from his body and then split that body in half from neck to nail, leaving its corpse a bloody ruin on the ground.


    No death came for him, though. Not even unconsciousness came to grant him mercy. Instead, the darkness let his severed head sit there and watch as the blood pooled before it finally whispered. ¡°Soon, you will serve me as loyally and as long as your forebearer who just ended your miserable life, for atst, I have found my shadow dragon.¡±

 Chapter 68: Mournden

    Chapter 68: Mournden


    Though he did not know whether the Lich left him for a week or a year, his screams echoed through the dead city for a long time as Krulm¡¯venor suffered in the same way he¡¯d made his own victims suffer. He¡¯d always enjoyed the brief screams that his victims would make until their lungs were too charred to breathe anymore, but the fire god was given no such relief. Instead, he screamed for an eternity in the dark, and the goblins trapped in his body with him feasted on his pain.


    By the time the Lich came back, he¡¯d bathed for so long in those guttural, chanting voices that he could no longer block them out, and only the touch of darkness as the Lich entered his mind was enough to cool the mes that had heated his metal bones until they¡¯d glowed a dull red-orange. When the question followed, the fire god had no more resistance to give, and could onlyy there in defeat while the Lich asked his terrible question again.


    ¡°Are you ready to tell me where the dwarves take their honored dead?¡± it hissed in his mind, obviously enjoying the terrible pain he¡¯d endured for so long.


    ¡°Mournden¡± Krulm¡¯venor said, trying not to whimper as he struggled to get control of his spasming body. ¡°It is a city built for the dead. It is a nless fortress monastery, where the best of us from all the great cities of the region are interred. Even in the midst of war it lies forever at peace.¡±


    ¡°Then this is a ce you must visit for me,¡± the Lich whispered, obviously pleased with the idea that it had found more souls to devour. ¡°If I am to defeat your All-Father one day, then I must know more about the dwarven soul. Proceed there at once, hound!¡±


    This terrible utterance was almost enough to put the steel back in Krulm¡¯venor¡¯s spine, but at soon as he opened his mouth to speak, a jolt of fear at the memory of all he¡¯d endured shot through him. Instead, all he could bring himself to say was, ¡°Yes¡­ master.¡± For years he¡¯d fought this thing inside him, and every attempt at resistance had made it worse. Now he couldn¡¯t imagine anything that would make him say no to the Lich again.


    The darkness vanished along with his self-respect, leaving him only with shame, both at what he¡¯d just done, and what he was about to do. Krulm¡¯venor stood immediately lestying on the cold stone be interpreted as defiance by all the spirits that dwelled within him now. There would be no dying this. Now that he knew he was in Ghen¡¯tal, he was no longer lost, he was home.


    He was at the heart of everything that had been lost because of his pride and his folly. He¡¯d attempted to usher in a golden age of perfection, but instead he¡¯d ended up here, with no one left to worship a city god, or to offer their prayers in the form of regr blows on the anvil. It was a tragedy, but it was going to get worse soon. Even the fact that the Lich had finally done what he¡¯d long thought impossible didn¡¯t help. It had evicted the shadows that had stolen this city for decades, but even that did not cheer him, because Krulm¡¯venor, knew better than anyone in the world what that monster would do with the souls of his kin, and it disgusted him.


    As Krulm¡¯venor started walking a step at a time toward that hallowed ce where he himself had once been interred, he would have wept if such a thing was possible. Instead, all he could do was listen to the voices in his head that feasted on his despair.


    ¡®Murderer! Traitor!¡¯ one whined particrly loudly, using him of doing terrible things he knew to be true.


    ¡®Bring us to the darkness. Let it help them as it has helped us and helps you¡­¡¯ another whispered, sending a shiver of revulsion up the fire god¡¯s spine. The darkness had done nothing to help him, and the fact that he could understand the goblins that had burrowed deep inside his soul was revolting enough. He hoped to die before they finally started making sense to him.


    They went on an on like that for hours. Even after he left the city and got his emotions under control they still whispered to him.


    ¡®Find us more to fight and to kill,¡¯ a feverish voice demanded. ¡®We want to kill and maim!¡¯


    Krulm¡¯venor had to grudgingly agree with that one. The only thing that would make him feel better was finding a nice kobold warren to exterminate or fungoid patch to burn down. That would slow the inevitable at least and give him a few hours.


    No matter how far he walked though, he found no victims to fight. That wasn¡¯t unusual. At this depth, monsters were few and clustered near the underground rivers. The rest of the deeps were a desert of cold, dark stone. If one went a few hundred feet further down then the world was full of shadows, and a if they instead went a few hundred feet up, there was only a was a maze of goblin dens and kobold warrens. That was why dwarven settlements that were higher up were fortresses, and why there was basically nothing below them. Well, nothing but Mournden, but it was protected by the eternal me, and no matter how the shadows circled, they could not hope to taste the souls that dwelled there.


    So, other than the asional shadow that Krulm¡¯venor turned to ash, it was an uneventful journey for the most part, and though he did his very best to walk as slowly as possible, he eventually saw a light in the distance. Only then did the Lich rejoin him.


    ¡°Is that your city of the dead?¡± the Lich asked.


    ¡°I thought it was, but it is moving, so it might yet be a procession leading there,¡± Krulm¡¯venor answered, hoping he was wrong.


    ¡°Show me,¡± the Lich rasped.


    A funeral procession to the sacred city was supposed to be the pinnacle of a long life well lived and thest thing Krulm wanted to do was disrupt that. Still, he couldn¡¯t disobey, and he sped up so he could get a better look.


    He¡¯d been wrong. It was both a procession, and the city of the dead that he¡¯d seen. The thing was built as a tower that practically held up the earth in a giant cavern, but the thousand tiny windows radiated holy light into the darkness to keep everything that lingered there at bay. His heart sank as he realized he was already where he least wanted to be. Even as he got close enough that he could start to make out the familiar details of the ritual, he saw the gilded gates beyond them slowly swinging open. Still, as the Lich asked question, Krulm¡¯venor exined.


    He told the darkness in his head about thentern bearers that were as much tradition as protection at the beginning and end of the procession. A King¡¯s procession might have three or four of the giant many lensed oilmps, but this group only had two, and each was carried on long poles between two stout dwarves. They couldn¡¯t fight much while they were holding the delicate things, but this deep, light was the most powerful weapon at all.


    Not that it would have stopped Krulm¡¯venor to turning the lot of them into charred meat at the Lich¡¯smand, but then, something like him shouldn¡¯t even exist. He should have died with the forge fires of Ghen¡¯tal. If he didn¡¯t exist than the Lich would never have dug this deep. Arguably it might not have ever left the swamp without his help with the goblin armies. No - it was his desire to survive no matter the cost that had caused all this pain, and it was about to get to much worse, unless there was a miracle.


    By the time they reached the doors, Krulm¡¯venor was thankful that they¡¯d shut once more, and even as he approached crossbow bolts began to rain down on him from hidden arrow slits, but such toys were useless and those that did not sail cleanly through his ribs, bounced harmlessly off his steel skeleton. Deep down, he hoped that one of the warriors here would have the temerity to pick up one of the hallowed mithril weapons that were interred here along with their wielders and finally put him out of his misery, but he doubted that he would be so lucky.


    Instead, at the Lich¡¯smand he red outward, and bathed the arrow slits in waves of unnatural blue me, blinding and burning the dwarves that hid on the other side of the stone. He could hear bellows of shock and pain, but he could do little besides feel guilty about them before he turned the true power of his fire on to the near door.


    The gates of Mournden were giant 30-foot-tall doors of bronze covered in almost an inch of gold, so they were resistant to heat, but not immune to it, and by this point the Lich¡¯s magical reserves were practically limitless, so minute after minute he poured out the cold fire from his soul. It slowly intensified, as it shifted from blue to violet and finally an eye-searing white cyan. The cooler colors only sshed harmlessly off the doors, but the white me was much more powerful. Not only was it bright enough to weaken the Lich¡¯s hold on him for a moment, but in drilled right through the metal, letting him slowly cut his own entrance through the foot-thick doors.


    After the better part of an hour of cutting, he finally stepped onto the consecrated ground of dwarven kings and smith-saints, and he could feel the change immediately as the holy power red around him and arced painfully from his body to his limbs, but the Lich didn¡¯t care. It feasted on his suffering even as it stared out his eyes in wonder at the scene before it.


    Mournden was a thirty-story rotunda, with nothing more than a simple dais and a brazier glowing bright white in the center of the room. On the ground floor near the walls were the tombs of the region''s greatest heroes, and ques marking their deeds for all to see, even though only the dead came here. Most of those tombs were decorated with the weapons they¡¯d use to achieve them, and axes of adamantine and mithril could be seen just as often as rune scribed forging hammers.


    For those dwarves who¡¯d lived good, long lives, but failed to achieve such a pinnacle, their skulls were ced in positions of honor in one of ten thousand thousand cubbies that lined the wall in row after countless row of crystalline skulls. That was why only the old dead came here. It took centuries for dwarven bones to crystalizepletely, and by the time a dwarf died of old age after almost four centuries of life, the skin and soft tissue practically dissolved on death, leaving only the mana dense bones of centuries as a testament to that life, and all of that energy was given to the All-Father for generation after generation.


    What the Lich hadn¡¯t understood when it glimpsed the mosaic of the All-Father was that the art was not metaphorical. In a very real sense, their god was literally made up by the dead here, and in other ces like Mournden. The All-Father was a fortress of dwarven spirituality, but even the mightiest fortress could be torn down brick by brick.


    Here at least though, there were defenders, ready to fight to thest dwarf to hold off the attack they didn¡¯t understand. Including the already injured monks, there were perhaps 50 dwarves ready to bring him down. Krulm¡¯venor prayed that would be enough and continued to move forward despite the pain of the smoldering ground beneath his feet and the coruscating holy fire that arced between his ribs. The light weakened him, but he knew it would not be enough. The Lich¡¯s flesh crafters and artisans had done their work too well.


    There was only one thing left to do, and though he knew not what the Lich would do to him if it failed, he still had to try. ¡°Kill me!¡± he yelled out, speaking in dwarven for the first time in a very long time. ¡°Kill me or the thing that did this will poison the All-Father and¡ª-¡±


    Krulm¡¯venor was interrupted by a cold agony, and not the burning sensation he¡¯d expected after such an act of defiance, as he felt the Lich putting him back into the little cage he¡¯d been kept in for years.


    ¡°You are always such a disappointment, my impotent godling,¡± the Lich whispered in his mind. ¡°Did you really think you could just endure the pain for a few minutes while you let them kill one of my servants. Just like I control every drudge and abomination, I control you, down to your fingers and toes. If you¡¯d prefer to watch as I ughter your kin, rather than help, than so be it. I¡¯ll do this myself.¡±

 Chapter 69: The Eternal Flame

    Chapter 69: The Eternal me


    Even as the first waves of dwarves charged at him, the Lich began to flex and move in the unfamiliar body. It had only been thest few months that it had begun using drudges to practice walking and moving for the day when it finally had a body again. Not that it saw a need for such things normally. It was more efficient for it to sit there on its throne as the nerve center for the vast web of activity than to focus all its attention on a single ce like this, but this was too important to let Krulm¡¯venor deny him such a prize. So, the Lich would tear its enemies apart itself.


    It was clumsy and slow as it moved but not as slow as the creatures of flesh that surrounded it. Krulm¡¯venor could have burned them all to ashes, but itcked the mes of the other spirit, and its shadows would not be effective until the infernal light was doused, so it would do this the hard way. T


    he Lich taped his vast magical reserve to damped the effect on him, as the infinite well of shadows in his soul counteracted the light. It would not make for an offensive weapon just now, but it would ate the damage that the searing radiance inflicted on it so casually.


    The first warrior to attack it with a heavy war hammer managed to actually hit the Lich because it was too distracted with adjusting mana flows and trying to stay upright as it integrated with the metal skeleton. The blow was hard enough to crush a normal man¡¯s skull, but it just made the Lich take half a step back as it threatened to fall over before itshed out in rage, taking his attacker¡¯s head clean off with a casual backhand.


    ¡°You will not touch me!¡± the Lich shouted loudly enough to echo.


    This was another reason that it didn¡¯t care for bodies. Safe in its throne room, it could never be harmed, but here? Now? One of these filthy creatures might actually damage it, and that was intolerable. It had touched tens of thousands of lives, but none of them were permitted to do the same to it. The thought waspletely uneptable, and the Lich would not stand for it.


    When the next dwarf swung his axe at it, the Lich was ready and stepped to the side before he snapped the presumptuous warrior¡¯s neck. Looking around the room, it grew weary just thinking about just how many times it would have to do something so demeaning. There were dozens of warriors still alive, and except for a few priests praying at an altar near the far wall, they were all bent on chopping the Lich into pieces if they could. If it only it had full ess to its shadow magic, it could have already ripped everyone¡¯s souls from their bodies.


    The Lich grabbed the nearest warrior by his arm and swung him about like a club, knocking the others out of its way as it continued toward the center of the room. It had made its decision. It would destroy the light first and then fight the dwarves in the dark. They tried to stop it, of course, but their attacks, though well coordinated, were far less threatening than the intensity of the light as it got closer and closer to the man-sized brazier in the center of the room.


    The Lich left a trail of corpses in its wake as it climbed the dais, and by the time it stood at the very threshold of the eternal me, its steel bones were smoldering and sparking, while the annihtion of opposite elements of dark and light that were urring, emitted a foul ck smoke from the parts of it that were steadily burning away. This forced the Lich to pour out even more power just to keep its hands from disintegrating as it grasped the lip and flipped the thing over. As it did so, it could hear Krulm¡¯venor screaming in its mind, which was a wee sound. But Lich was so focused on gloating to the godling that it almost missed the sound of the warhammer flying towards it.


    The Lich saw the danger at thest moment, but it was toote to dodge. That was just as well because it was toote for whomever had thrown the glowing weapon to stop the Lich. At the moment of impact, the incandescent object was the only light it could see, but as it mmed into the Lich¡¯s chest, knocking it off the dais and sending it twenty feet across the room, it could see a second source of light, too: the thing that had thrown the weapon.


    ¡°Begone, foul demon!¡± the glowing dwarf roared. ¡°My light is not yours to dampen!¡±


    The Lich forced itself to stand, noting that several of its ribs had been cracked as it felt its own pain for the first time since the day that it died. It didn¡¯t like the sensation, though it did feel a sh of fear. Was a god itself confronting it? That wasn¡¯t supposed to happen yet. It wasn¡¯t the n, and the Lich wasn¡¯t sure it would be able to handle such a thing. However, when it looked more closely, it saw what had happened. This was not a god. This was a mortal that had been infused with the powers of their deity in the same way it channeled its shadows through Krulm¡¯venor and Oroza so often.


    That was a more manageable threat, it decided as the glowing dwarf walked towards it.


    ¡°You stand on the bones of heroes, and you shall die for desecrating them!¡± it called out, mming the but of its warhammer on the ground.


    That was no mere gesture. The Lich could feel the wave of energy that rippled outward in all directions. Then, secondster, the ghosts of the very heroes that were buried in the ornamental tombs around the edge of the temple began to rise from their graves and pick up their weapons.


    ¡°You cannot kill me,¡± the Lich said as it walked towards its enemy, noticing that it was now limping slightly from the mighty blow. ¡°You cannot kill death, nor can you use the dead against it!¡±


    The Lich reached out and began to vie for control of the legion of translucent warriors advancing on it. If nothing else, it was a good gauge for the power of the thing that opposed it. It wasn¡¯t impressed, though. Standing there in the nearly dark room, it couldn¡¯t quite usurp that power because of the consecrated ground that weakened it, but its dwarvish enemy couldn¡¯t seem to fight it off either, and one by one, the ghostly warriors froze in ce as the two of them tugged at the souls in a contest of control in which they were for the moment fairly evenly matched.


    ¡°Impertinent dog!¡± the avatar of the All-Father yelled. You dare to touch the souls of my heroes!¡±


    ¡°You imperious buffoon,¡± the Lich responded. ¡°Dare you fight me in a ce so dark?¡±


    The avatar realized its mistake and red its aura all the brighter for it, but the Lich was already nning a terrible attack. It opened its mouth, and instead of screaming, a thousand of the shadows it had devoured in Ghen¡¯tal vomited forth. The shadowy warrior flickered to life and charged at the glowing avatar, each wearing the face of a dwarf they¡¯d devoured.


    Warriors of pure shadow would never reach their goal with that much light pouring off the dwarf. They weren¡¯t supposed to, though. They were just a distraction to weaken the light¡¯s hold on the ghosts it had raised. While they swarmed the avatar, it cast its gaze around the room until it found one of the ghosts with a crossbow. The weakness of the avatar was not in the god that puppeted it but the fragile vessel that held so much power.


    So, the Lich poured its indomitable will into that single spirit, crushing its ability to resist. Then, in a single instant, it turned and shot its bolt not at the metal skeleton on the dais but as the servant of its own god. The Lich would have smiled then if it had possessed lips. It watched the bolt fly through the air just as the heavenly avatar was finishing off thest of its shadowy horde and prated the protective bubble of light, piercing the mortal beneath just above the sternum.


    ¡°You monster!¡± the thing cried out. ¡°You think this can stop a god with healing powers that you¡¯ll never understand? You¡ª¡±


    The bolt had just been one more distraction. It had seen the healing magics of Siddrim in great detail now, and it knew such a blow was nowhere near mortal, but every wound and distraction further weakened its hold on its own ghostly minions, and as the avatar paused to pull out the bolt and heal the wound the Lich was turning one ghostly warrior after another to its side.


    By the time the avatar of light was aware of what had happened, it was badly outnumbered, and the Lich¡¯s new forces were advancing. What happened next was not a battle but a ughter. The living could not hope to face the dead, and some wouldn¡¯t even raise a weapon against a hero they had such a high opinion of, but that would not save them, and one by one, life was massacred in the room until the only person still breathing was the dwarven avatar.


    He¡¯d done everything he could to save himself, and his skin was now bronze, and the healing magics kept a dozen fatal wounds from overpowering him, but he no longer had a chance. Even as the Lich closed in on him with an utterly normal battle axe, the dying avatar tried to overwhelm him with sts of holy light and forge fires. Thetter was useless, and the former was painful, though hardly dangerous.


    ¡°The All-Father will hunt you down, you monster!¡± the avatar of the divine said while the cruel, twisted skeleton stood above him. He will find you, and you¡¯ll¡ª¡±


    Those were itsst words, and the Lich clumsily brought the axe down on the man¡¯s head, splitting it in two.


    ¡°I hope he does,¡± the Lich rasped, ¡°You can tell your All-Father that I¡¯ming for him next.¡±


    As the avatar died and the Lich devoured thest of the glowing spirits, it was finally once more alone in the dark with only the tiny guttering me of Krulm¡¯venor to provide any light at all.


    The godling had mentioned that the shadows were only kept away by the light that the Lich had now extinguished, so it had expected that something might happen next, but the scale surprised even it. As the lights went out, suddenly, a tide of shadows swept into the building. Windows shattered, and some of the crystal skulls were knocked from their ces of honor onto the catwalks in front of them as an umbric tide swept into the building like a physical thing.


    These creatures had no idea what it had done to their kind in thest ce it had found them, as there had been no survivors, but here the things were much more numerous. How many centuries had they stirred and paced at the edge of the light, waiting for their chance to devour the dwarven soulsid to rest here, the Lich wondered.


    It didn¡¯t know, but it knew that they would not have a chance to steal its feast, and just likest time, it opened up the yawning whirlpool of power in its soul and devoured the endless tide before it even understood what was happening. After the first few seconds, the furthest shadows started to flee. They would be the only ones to escape because even as the Lich was enveloped in hoarfrost and ice, its hunger grew, and its reach expanded. It hadn¡¯t even touched the dwarven souls, but it would once it had finished dealing with these delicious creatures.

 Chapter 70: Foundations

    Chapter 70: Foundations


    The first several months Todd spent with Priest Verdenin was a dull and lonely time that made him miss the brothers he¡¯d spent thest couple of years fighting beside. There was nothing wrong with the man that Todd could put his finger on precisely, but his presence and the way that his superior did things chaffed at him.


    It wasn¡¯t even the imperious way he used to treat Todd because he no longer seemed to value of ordering him around to do menial things. Instead, the priest practically lived in his own world. He was constantly designing strange new plumbing fixtures or deciding what parable would be the most uplifting in the south facing stained ss windows. If Todd hadn¡¯t known better, he would have been certain that Brother Verdenin had died and been reced by someone else during their trips into the depths of Fallravea.


    From the riverboat trip to ckwater to the way he organized things once he¡¯d arrived, he had Todd perpetually on edge. When he started unterally razing buildings for the site of Siddrim¡¯s future temple without so much as discussing it with the head of the city guard or the mayor of the burgeoning town, he¡¯d thought there would be a riot. Instead, people just epted it, which struck Todd as odd.


    He¡¯d known that Brother Faerbar and his fellow temrs had put the fear in this town, but he hadn¡¯t expected it tost for months in their absence. Todd and a few of his fellows could hardly be expected to stand against dozens or hundreds of angry men, but they never materialized.


    Instead, Priest Verdenin began to hire the excess riffraff asborers to clear the area and install new brick streets to rece the crude rotted boards that were the current standard throughout the town. Todd wanted no part of that, of course, though he did take two trips up the canal in the following weeks to escort the one-armed priest while they looked at likely sandstone quarries near the banks of the waterway.


    It was a tense time for Todd, as he was made the leader of the small band of warriors assigned to protect the priest and his artisans. Every night he went to bed in his armor, fearing there¡¯d be an ambush from the dark, and every morning he woke up unharmed. It was a mystery, but one he eventually chalked up to his childhood fear of the monsters that called the red hills home.


    ording to other members of the church that he¡¯d spoken with, the stones of Siddrim¡¯s temples were usually brought down from the mountains to the north, where there was a quarry with marble of the purest white. For the structure they were going to start building soon, though, the priest had received special dispensation to use sunrise colored sandstone found in the area.


    ¡°Don¡¯t you see, it¡¯s not just about cost, but the beauty!¡± the priest said, setting several of the rock samples they¡¯d retrieved on the way back to the city. ¡°The only way we ever inspire those ne¡¯er-do-wells is to give them a taste of Siddrim¡¯s grace they can¡¯t help but look at every day!¡±


    While Todd did have to admit that the shades of orange, pink, and red sandstone that the priest had chosen did look lovely together, and that they might create a very sunrise-like effect, he still harbored private reservations that he didn¡¯t know how to express. The importance wasn¡¯t just the color white, after all; it was the purity of the stone that came from such a high and distant field. It was the opposite of the red hills.


    If you¡¯d told him that the red color of the stone came from centuries of goblins murdering anyone that happened through there, Todd would have believed it. Centuries of mindless ughter were pretty much the opposite of purity as far as he was concerned, but the only time Todd brought it up, the priest hadughed at him. ¡°There¡¯s one crucial fact your theory forgets, young man. Goblin blood is green. If it was really tainted by the cycle of death you describe, then the stones we¡¯ve spent thest week looking at would be olive, emerald, and forest, nor orange, salmon, and coral.¡±


    Chagrined, Todd hadn¡¯t brought it up again, but the point festered. Eventually, he started to think he was going crazy. After all - they¡¯d been out in the red hills for more than a week all together but they hadn¡¯t suffered a single goblin attack. That seemed very unlikely to him. The Gift was still attacked almost every month, and the few viges left in the region also reported asional attacks, but the small group of humans traveling alone in the wilderness had received almost no attention at all. It was almost as if the goblins had been ordered to leave their group alone, but that was impossible, wasn¡¯t it?


    While the first stones were being cut toy the foundations, Todd spent those weeks consecrating and reconsecrating the ground upon which the temple would rest. Each time he finished, he felt his god¡¯s peace, but each morning he felt as if it had somehow faded a bit overnight. And the faint light he saw no longer shined as brightly as it once had. It was a conundrum, but one that he was forced, ultimately, to associate with the low quality of people that were doing the work of clearing the space and bringing in the stone.


    Until the day that they held the ceremony for theying of the cornerstone, Todd tried to stay away from his superior as much as possible, though he wouldn¡¯t have admitted it. He cleaned Siddrim¡¯s shrine, patrolled the back alleys looking for signs of viins, and took long rides through the countryside just to get away from the smell of the river, but the priest never seemed to care. Now that he had those artists, he¡¯d found in Fallravea, he no longer needed Todd to write his letters, which frustrated him to no end since that was the reason, he¡¯de with the priest in the first ce.


    Lately, he¡¯d been lost in the minutia of setting up a small workshop for the production of ster casts and molds for all the ornate decorations that he¡¯d nned. Todd would have thought that they should focus on having walls to decorate first, but the priest obviously disagreed. This was on top of the stone carvers he¡¯d brought in from the capital to begin carving likenesses of the saints that the temple would be dedicated to.


    To Todd, all of this was putting the cart before the horse, but in the end, it wasn¡¯t his problem. His duty was to keep Brother Verdenin safe and to keep his eyes open for any hints that the evil inside the man might be growing. The priest was in no danger as long as he kept spending such vast sums of money to build his vision, though. Todd was sure of that. The residents of ckwater were wealthier than they¡¯d ever been, thanks to the church¡¯s spending. At this point, perhaps a third of the growing town was connected to the project in one way or another.


    Todd never really appreciated that until he saw all of them at once, gathered on the prepared ground in front of the cornerstone where the priest gave his invocation for the dedication. There were hundreds of people in attendance, and though many of them were dull-eyedborers that were obviously being forced to attend as they stared at their feet, the rest of them seemed to ardently believe in Brother Verdenin¡¯s great project. Todd found that shocking, but not as shocking as the blood he found on the cornerstone the next day.


    ¡°Brother Verdenin, you muste at once,¡± Todd said, waking his superior.


    ¡°Wha-what¡¯s happened?¡± he asked, still drowsing in his bed when he should have already been awake.


    Priests of Siddrim were required to wake with the sun, but due to Brother Verdenin¡¯s injury and the pain and weakness it caused him, he was permitted to sleep in as necessary, which turned out to be almost every day, much to Todd¡¯s dismay.


    ¡°Someone has desecrated the cornerstone!¡± Todd said breathlessly. ¡°You muste at once!¡±


    That at least got Brother Verdenin out of bed, and as he quickly dressed, Todd ryed to him what he¡¯d seen. ¡°Despite the drizzle of light rain, I¡¯d gone to the building site to say my prayers. When I got there though, I saw the sun rose over the water. That was when I noticed the cornerstone drenched in blood. There were footprints in the wet sand too, along with an aura of evil. I fear thatst night some cult conducted some dark ritual there to taint our work.¡±


    They arrived only a few minutester, but it had already begun to pour, and by the time they reached the stone, most of the blood he¡¯d seen just ten minutes before had washed away.


    ¡°Are you sure that what you saw wasn¡¯t just red stone dust?¡± the priest asked him skeptically. ¡°Because after carving in the words of¡ª¡±


    ¡°I know what I saw,¡± Todd shot back angrily, hurt that the priest would ever doubt him.


    ¡°Acolyte, I¡¯ve been veryx with you and your assignments, but this behavior ispletely uneptable,¡± the priest admonished him. ¡°Once you are dry, you are to copy the Psalms of Sorrow until you¡ª¡±


    ¡°But Brother Verdenin¡ª¡± Todd tried to interrupt, but he was cut off immediately.


    ¡°You will copy the Psalms of Sorrow, in seclusion, until you regret the way that you have treated a priest of your god!¡± he repeated himself in a way that would brook no argument before he stormed off, leaving Todd alone with no evidence but his own gut instincts that something was amiss and that somehow the priest that was admonishing him was in on it.


    Todd spent the next three days in his small room copying the same few pages over and over as he tried to find some amount of regret for his actions. He couldn¡¯t, though. In the end, the only thing he regretted was that he hadn¡¯t thought to somehow take the evidence with him or shelter it from the elements.


    Once he¡¯d decided that collusion was the only possible way, he could exin what had happened, he managed to create the mien ofpliance and contrition. He felt like a fraud for lying to his superior so, but he could no longer trust the man enough to tell him the truth.


    So instead of working with him, he began to spy on him. Instead of wandering around the town in search of some hidden conspiracy, he began to look for one in the construction site he¡¯d sword to protect. Each day he got up and helped the workmen with their tasks or simply supervised them as they brought the stones in from the barge while the walls steadily grew, and though he saw nothing untoward, he was sure that he was on the right trail because the longer he persisted in helping, the more Brother Verdenin found excuses to send him away.


    ¡°Todd, please fetch these manifests from the tax clerk¡¯s office.¡±


    ¡°Todd, please ride upriver to see if my next shipment is on its way.¡±


    Every week it was something new, and almost always toward dusk. Even on the nights Todd doubled back and observed the masons hard at work on their ever-growing project, he still couldn¡¯t see anything obviously wrong, but his certainty only increased. Something was deeply wrong in ckwater, and he needed to find out what, just like Brother Faerbar had tasked him.

 Chapter 71: Brick by Brick

    Chapter 71: Brick by Brick


    From less than a hundred feet away, the Lich watched the structure rising just above itsir with great interest. Even though it should have hated the idea of a rival god building a grand temple on its very doorstep, it was fascinated by the process. This fascination wasn¡¯t limited by the physical ether. It included the way the structure and the devotion of its builders resonated into the ether, trying to change the entirendscape. Anywhere else, it would have already dominated the region, but not here. Here no matter how powerful the beacon, it was the Lich that held sway.


    Every day something about it changed, and a new course of stones was set into ce, or another pir was erected. It couldn¡¯t look away because if it focused on something else, even for one night, opportunities would be lost. Compared to its usual efforts, the construction proceeded quite quickly, and day after day, the temple grew. That was only during daylight hours, though. Once the builders went home, its servants desecrated in a thousand little ways night after night.


    Of course, some of the people who worked on fitting the stones together with great care knew that, but most did not. None of them knew they were working for it exactly. They just felt the need to obey and carry out their little acts of defiance. It was a game of shadows, and the darkness had been getting better about manipting people without being too heavy-handed. When one was attempting to undermine the holy without making the entire work seem profane and tarnished enough for the foolish humans to start anew, one had to proceed slowly and carefully.


    An animal sacrifice here. A curse etched into the underside of a block there. Every piece of work was marred and blighted in ways that no one might ever notice. It would, though. It could see the house of cards that was being erected, as every part of The Sunset Temple was turned into a house of cards so that it would be the perfect vessel for what came next.


    It knew how thin theyer of consecrated earth was and how little energy it would have to use to burn that flimsy barrier away to nothing. Gone were the days when the Lich needed to fear the might of a single temple. The priests might feel like they were building a fortress of faith, but there were already rats in the walls, and they had knawed out most of the strength that should have been there, recing it with nothing but darkness.


    Viting the new temple wasn¡¯t the only project the Lich was working on, of course. In the time since it had returned from the depths weeks ago, it had been very busy. It would have been content to leave the traitorous Krulm¡¯venor in a block of ice for decades as punishment for histest slights, but the Lich found it difficult to stay angry at one of its favorite and most useful toys. Krulm¡¯venor might not be loyal or obedient, but he did have a knack for bringing new and interesting toys into the Lich¡¯s possession, and the anguish that the godling felt over the desecration it had been forced to y a part in was utterly exquisite to behold.


    After the Lich had killed the dwarvish avatar of the All-Father with Krulm¡¯venor¡¯s hands, devoured everyst shadow, and shattered the ice that had restrained it while it devoured the darkness, the Lich had used the broken limbs of its enemies as paintbrushes to open a portal of shadows from Mournden to the depths of his ownir. Then it sent a small army of drudges in to loot that hallowed ce until there was nothing left. It would never forget the way that the army of the dead poured into that distant ce from so far away, grasping and wing for every sacred dwarven relic that they could get their decaying fingers on.


    The dwarves had thought that an infinite distance from the surface would grant their dead eternal peace. They¡¯d been wrong.


    It had felt Krulm¡¯venor quailing in the back of its mind as The Lich dug up the bodies of heroes, their weapons, and stole the bones of ten thousand elder dwarves. It had taken only a few days, and in the end, when the temple was nothing more than a dark and empty room with nothing but a few profane bloodstains to hint at what had happened, the Lich relinquished control of the godling and left it there with themandment to go ever deeper into the dark.


    Krulm¡¯venor would venture deeper and deeper still. Even the dwarves had no idea what to expect beyond a certain point, but the Lich hungered to better understand the element of earth and the creatures that dwelled within it. It was certain that past theyer of darkness, where there were no more souls to steal, it would find something even stranger that it could use. Maybe even something that could finally unlock the secrets aetheride.


    The Lich still only had two anti-elements in the form of Stygium and cholerium, and it would need more information if it ever hoped toplete the equation and distill aetheride and strangulite. Sadly, without any spirits of those elements to study, the Lich had made little progress. It doubted it would have ever figured out theplex nature of the other two substances with power example, spirits of both elements to study, though. That made sense, though. You could only ever understand unlife by watching what happened to a human when it died, and everything inside it that existed to keep its heart beating slowly came to a stop.


    The magic of the portal was only viable in two locations of perfect darkness, sadly, and even a hint of starlight without at least a dozen feet of bedrock to block out the irritating light would be enough to disrupt it. Still, it would be effective when it came time to confront the All-father and the cities that worshiped him directly. For now, that could wait, though, as the Lich focused on its inevitable showdown with the lord of light.


    Tsson¡¯vek had been growing used to his new body, too, though he was filled with nothing but hate and revulsion at the idea. The Lich¡¯s instincts, in this case, had been correct: it needed the spirit of a hunter to upy the fearsome body of the dragon, and since it had no powerful air spirits to chain to it the way it had melded its river dragon and swamp dragon together, the mind of a reptile hunter was the next best choice.


    Of course, none of these minor projects were as important as the artifact it had focused most of its attention on for thest several months: its own body. Though the Lich generally saw no need for movement, it knew that when it came time to do battle with Siddrim, such things would be required in the same way that a mortal might don armor. The core of the Lich was a fragile mummified shell of a dead wizard, and it wouldn¡¯t be able to stand up to an armed mortal, let alone an angry god. Its encounter with a shard of the All-Father had made that very clear.


    Krulm¡¯venor¡¯s body had been built to take a surprising amount of abuse from the goblin souls that ran amuck inside it, and even so, two blows overflowing with divine might had been almost enough to shatter it. And those were just the physical attacks, the Lich reminded itself. Even worse than those hammer blows was the memory of the holy fire itself. It tried to burn away its steel fingers to nothing and would have seeded, too, if the Lich hadn¡¯t had an ocean of darkness to draw upon.


    It had been a harrowing thing, but only a taste of the crucible that was now on the horizon. It was an inevitable conflict, of course. The Lich might have hidden away from it if it could, but it had already taken all of thends and the souls that no one was likely to notice. Anything beyond the bounds it currently controlled would have to be fought for.


    So, it wielded its fleshcrafters as one, and they all stopped what they were doing and turned to the special section of its mortuary that was set aside for the bones of holy men that it had dared not touch for so long. Men like Kaligos had taught it to fear the light, but now it would use them to snuff it out for all time.


    The project the Lich envisioned was aplex one, all centered around the slowly beating heart of the Temr that he¡¯d never let die. The man¡¯srades might have burned the body and scattered the ashes, but they had no idea that the person they inflicted that torment on was still alive. It had been a delicious moment of idental betrayal, and the Lich had feasted on it for days both during and after.


    What it needed now, though, wasn¡¯t betrayal but raw materials. A body built from ingredients enured to the light would be painful, but not so painful as being burned to dust in a congration of blinding incandescence. The Lich would happily wear an iron maiden into battle if it was enough to ensure victory.


    So it would start with the heart of a hero and the bones of devout and holy men, and then it wouldyer those in steel and gold before covering the entire abomination in ayer of mithril armor. The result would be the mockery of the Temrs that fought it at every turn, but that only added appeal for the Lich.


    It would need more than a body and armor that could hold back the light, though. It would need a weapon capable of prating its opponent without being annihted by the forces of creation too. That had been the most important lesson in its proxy duel with the All-Father. If the thing hadn¡¯t foolishly attempted to use ghosts to fight a lord of death, then the Lich would have struggled tond a clean blow.


    Even as its flesh crafters began to select the best bones for the task and bring them to the forges so they could be dipped in molten metal and then polished, the shape was already forming in its mind. It wasn¡¯t the clumsy armored form it had seen so many times on the heroes that had tried to invade its swamp, though. No, this would take more inspiration from the exquisite efficiency of insects that made up its most numerous branch of followers. The Lich would give its body three legs and four arms so that it could better defend itself in the fight ahead.


    Two eyes were likely too limiting as well, and it would have to decide how to cope with that after a few more experiments. Even the eyes would have to be tested lest it be blinded mid-dual. Even sapphires were likely too weak, so faceted onyx or obsidian would make a better choice. Of course, if it¡¯s helmet had louvered blinders that it could manipte to avoid the worst of it¡­ The Lich¡¯s mind trailed off as each improvement spawned ten more ideas, and each of those had iterative improvements of their own that might be implemented.


    The Lich passed those ideas off to be further explored by its library. It might not need such a creation for years yet, and there was no need to rush things. The head could wait until the body had been built and battle-tested. It might only ever be needed for a single fight, but that was a fight that the Lich could not afford to lose.

 Chapter 72: True Form

    Chapter 72: True Form


    It wasn¡¯t until Todd had finally found the coven of cultists amongst the workers that he realized that his sight had somehow dulled in thest few months of being here. The workmen were from different regions and on various shifts. Still, following a hunch, he entered their campte at night and found them worshiping a queer idol by firelight. He was, of course, outraged that these men were using their dirty hands to help build Brother Verdenin¡¯s great work, but he was more baffled that he could barely detect any evil in their dull eyes and wicked hearts.


    The next day when they reported for work, Todd had the guards arrest them. As much as he hated torture, he looked forward to putting them to the question so that they might tell him more about what other vipersy in their midst. Priest Verdenin had other ideas, though, and ordered their execution almost immediately.


    ¡°But sir¡­ I¡ª¡± Todd protested.


    ¡°Silence,¡± Verdenin said in a voice filled with uncharacteristic authority. ¡°These currs have tainted our holy site, and all of their work must be cleansed. They deserve no mercy.¡±


    Though Toddrgely agreed, he watched in disappointment as the guards carried out the priest¡¯s order. He understood how personally the priest took this project, but he felt certain that they¡¯d made a error here, but now he could do nothing to fix it.


    Todd spent much of the rest of the day trying to understand why he hadn¡¯t seen more darkness on them as he watched the river go by. There was less taint there than there had ever been, or at least that¡¯s how it seemed. ¡°Maybe I¡¯m just going blind,¡± he said to himself as he sat there. Maybe the water was as toxic as ever, but he just couldn¡¯t see it.


    That was when he decided he had to fast and purify himself if he wanted any answers. It was only once that decision was made that he went back to the Temple of Dawn to consult with the priest where it was impossible not to notice how much the building was taking shape now. In the six months since they¡¯d started work, a great deal had been done.


    The floor was in ce now, save for a few mosaics where the strange plumbing needed to be connected first, and the fountain basins were all assembled on the outside of the growing walls. When all of this was done, the round building would practically be surrounded by its own moat, and the spray of crystal waters would be constant. Todd still thought that those details were utter folly; he had to admit that it would be a sight.


    The walls, too, were growing higher, and the effect of the vivid colors of sandstone was very striking, though perhaps a little darker than Brother Verdenin had intended. Though during the day, the waist-high walls looked like an especially vivid sunset, at dusk, it looked more like the sight of a bloody massacre to him. Only the central columns wereplete now so that they could start to build the scaffolding for the dome, but in another year or two, the exterior would beplete, and not so long after that, the inside would be finished as well.


    And all it would cost was a small fortune, he thought ruefully.


    In the midst of the temple, in a tent that sat where the altar would eventually go, sat Brother Verdenin. For thest two months, it had slowly be his office, and these days it was rare for him to leave the site for more than a few minutes at a time. His work had be an obsession, and though Todd would have liked to believe that this was an act of sincere devotion, he secretly believed it was about vanity more than anything at this point.


    When Todd said he wanted to take a leave of absence tomune with Siddrim, the priest practically insisted. He told him that he should take as long as he needed. Brother Verdenin blew off his concerns about his sight with general aphorisms about how ¡°the powers and gifts of their Lord ebbed and flowed as needed, and near such a holy site, you obviously have no need for such things.¡±


    Todd thought that answer was especially self-serving for a man with so much darkness in his heart, but right now, Todd could barely see it, so he was hardly one to judge. He also worried that the priest so obviously wanted him away from this spot, though he still had no good answer as to why. Neither of these things stopped Todd from gathering his meager possessions and taking a ferry across the river. There was a monastery only a three-day ride from here, and Todd would pray on those questions there after he¡¯d been shriven and purified.


    . . .


    The order of St Thedocious was a penitent order, and they weed him. Though many of the brothers had taken vows of silence, the Abbot took the time to hear his confession and listen to his doubts.


    ¡°Many are the follies of the holy city,¡± he agreed after Todd finished exining the extravagant nature of the new temple and his misgivings about it. The Abbott did not borate further but put Todd to work weeding vegetable beds and sheering sheep. It was pointless, menialbor, but Todd found it infinitely more satisfying than anything he¡¯d done in ckwater. The old brick building of the monastery would never hold a candle to the Temple of Sunset, of course, but that didn¡¯t matter. There was a holinessing from its whitewashed exterior that no amount of gilding could ever hope to improve upon.


    Every day he worked hard, and every day he prayed for guidance, and slowly but surely, his senses began to sharpen and improve again. As soon as he noticed that he could see the holy light radiating from the Abott, he was tempted to go right back to the ckwater and test his vision, but he forced himself to wait. He¡¯d told Brother Verdenin that he would be gone for a full moon, and he aimed to do just that.


    So, day by day, he cleansed himself of whatever the taint was that clung to him during his time at ckwater. These purges took the form of a series of bouts with an illness and increasingly strange dreams. Though he still worked in the fields with a fever, only prayer kept the sickness at bay. Between the vomiting and the sweating, it was as if his body was trying to remove some terrible poison.


    Eventually, after three weeks of suffering, the Abbott decided that he had been purified, and any furtherbors would only exacerbate his worsening condition. ¡°There was a shadow on you when you arrived, acolyte, but you have purged it. Now you must rest your body lest the Siddrim take you before it is time.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s fine,¡± Todd insisted, ¡°I can do more. I must do¡­¡±


    As he stood to make his point, he very nearly copsed. The Abbot said nothing beyond a knowing smile when Todd added, ¡°Well, perhaps I should rest more.¡±


    Ultimately Todd bowed to the older man¡¯s wisdom and rested for two full days before he made his long journey back. Though he hadn¡¯t enjoyed being treated like a child at the time, eventually, he was grateful that the man had stopped him because his rising fever made it quite apparent that he might not have survived another week of hard work like this. Neither healing magic nor bleeding had done much good, though sometimes that was the way with sickness. A wound was easy to heal with Siddrim¡¯s light, even if Todd wasn¡¯t particrly talented there, but sickness - well, that could indicate deeper problems in the body.


    Two days from the monastery and more than a day from the river, he began to hallucinate. If he was well, he would have been sure that the sight was showing him how evil and twisted the world around him had be, but because he¡¯d just ridden this way only a month ago, he knew that was impossible. There was no way that the trees had turned to bone or that the shadows danced at the signposts and crossroads. For that many unquiet dead to exist in this area, there would have to be untold numbers of mass graves, which simply wasn¡¯t possible.


    His mind would y tricks on him at random, and that was most noticeable when he passed groups of people on the road back to ckwater. Some of the men he passed would look perfectly normal, and a few even flicker with the light of a life well lived, but others were stained so ck by evil or were so withered by sin that they looked as grey as the zombies he¡¯d fought not long ago. In one case, Todd almost pulled his sword from his sheath to run someone through, but when he blinked and shook his head, he could see that it was not a gang of monsters but a man and his family. That moment terrified him, and he prayed for forgiveness that night before he drifted off into a dreamless slumber.


    The next day he reached the river, but he knew it wasing long before he arrived. He could see the beam of light from the heavens illuminating the area around the Temple of Dawn in pinks and reds, which were a stark contrast to the grey and beige that the rest of the world had be. Todd was so weak and feverish at this point that he was having trouble staying on his steed and clung weakly to its neck while he gazed off at the horizon.


    Where the shaft of light met the earth sat the walls of the temple, and there, the ground was so red it looked like a bloody war had been fought in his absence. He stared at that spot, and for a moment, he glimpsed something truly terrifying. Though the light radiated up into the heavens and across the ins holding back the evil of this fallen world, the darkness beneath the temple only festered and grew, and the light merely contrasted against it to make the darkness even darker. For a moment, Todd thought he could see something in that darkness. A dark, dread master pulling strings from the depths of its bit¡­ Then he fell off his saddle, vomiting blood.


    Toddy there until nightfall, certain he was dying, with a trader found him and rushed him across to ckwater. Todd was only awake intermittently during all this, but he was as weak as an infant. During the short ride and ferry trip before he was rushed to Brother Verdinen, Todd tried to warn them about what he had seen, but hecked the words to announce his fears properly. Instead, he just babbled while the priest sought to heal him with the power of herbs and magic.


    The whole time he did, though, Todd could only see a monster wearing the priest¡¯s skin. He tried to pull away from his treatments as one vile concoction after another was forced down his throat, but between the leaches and the fever, hecked the strength to do so. Todd imagined that he could see the one-armed priest as a man with two arms. That was impossible, of course, especially considering that one of the arms was made of pure shadow and confiscated with a poisonous violet sheen. While he was standing at the death¡¯s door, he saw many strange things.


    Brother Verdinen was by his side for days, ¡°Don¡¯t die on us, Todd, that¡¯s an order!¡± the priest said at one moment when Todd was at his weakest. Todd would have felt better about such a statement if it hadn¡¯t been said by someone with a dark, almost hungry look in their eyes.

 Chapter 73: Anointed

    Chapter 73: Anointed


    The next few weeks were among the worst of Todd¡¯s life as he tossed and turned feverishly in his sick bed. Sometimes he felt like he was receiving divine wisdom in the strange things he saw, and other times he was sure he was going quite mad as his mind turned inside out. One day he was being taken care of by a demon in the guise of a man, and then next, it was by the priest he¡¯d once nursed back to health in a simr way. Todd didn¡¯t know what to believe, but he was in no shape to take any action, regardless.


    When he was through the worst of it, Todd could no longer remember half of the things he¡¯d seen nor most of what he¡¯d said. They were the ravings of a mad man though, of that he was certain, and he¡¯d said things worth being ashamed of. He knew that he¡¯d condemned everyone for being tainted by the darkness, though, from the priest down to the doctor that treated him and the washerwoman that took care of him while the priest was busy elsewhere.


    It was only when his fever went down that the world started to return to normal. Instead of seeing everything as radiating light and darkness, the world slowly returned to the rtive normalcy he¡¯d seen for so long: A little darkness clung to most of the residents of ckwater, along with the river and the priest, but it was nothing like the apocalyptic vision¡¯s he¡¯d seen when he was on death¡¯s door, and he regretted his usations.


    Even though he hadrge gaps in his memories, a few images still haunted his dreams. He remembered the dread ck hand of the priest extending from his stump like a creature that was made of shadows that lived inside the holy man and only crawled out when no one was looking. He also remembered the Temple of Dawn bleeding from its walls as the infinite darkness extended beneath it. He had no idea what to make of those things, but they filled his nightmares for the next few months while he recovered.


    He took it easy for a long time, letting even his practice slip as he focused on getting better, and even after his deathly pallor lessened, he still spent most days in the shade, watching the construction while he looked for details that might give him insight into why something still felt so wrong.


    It was during this time, too, that he realized that the town had grown into a small city in its own right. For months Todd had been so focused on rooting out imagined evils that he¡¯d still pictured ckwater as the town he¡¯d first visited over a year ago with Brother Farbaer. It was so much more than that now. For every brothel or shrine to the Oroza that they¡¯d destroyed between now and then, five new artisan workshops had sprung up. Of course, each of those provided Brother Verdenin with theplicated fixtures and decorations that were needed for every stage of construction, and of course, for every new group of artisans, another bakery or bathhouse opened up to amodate the needs of so many wealthy clients. Todd couldn¡¯t walk down Brackenwald Street on the way to his boarding house each night without tripping over a barber or a bookseller.


    ¡°It¡¯s amazing how much growth happens just by spreading a little gold around,¡± had muttered in surprise one day when he¡¯d watched a fancy carriage rattle over the brick streets for the first time, unsure of who it belonged to.


    ¡°Gold is the seed corn of civilization,¡± Brother Verdenin said smoothly like he was reciting a proverb. ¡°Every spring, the farmer nts a crop and watches it multiply, and every fall, he saves part of that miracle to do the same the following year. Cities are grown in much the same way, and we will harvest their souls. For Siddrim, of course.¡±


    Thatst part sounded almost like an afterthought, and Todd thought that it was just one more sign of the priest¡¯s growing hubris, but he thought about it for days afterward for reasons he couldn¡¯t quite say, even after Brother Verdenin had mentioned that an important visitor would be arriving soon. If one wasn¡¯t harvesting souls for Siddrim after all, who would they be harvesting them for?


    Even though he still hadn¡¯tpletely recovered from recent events, a few days after Todd celebrated his neenth name day, he was anointed and finally became a full-fledged Brother of the Light. This wasn¡¯t because of any achievement of his own, though. Sadly, it was because the Archbishop that was visiting ckwater to check on the Temple of Dawn¡¯s progress wanted to conduct a ceremony worth recording for the sake of bragging rights.


    ¡°Henceforth, my boy, you shall be known as Brother Graff, and when the history of written of this beautiful ce, it will say that Archbishop Dobriven was the first one to invoke the divine here on your behalf. Isn¡¯t that exciting?¡± the portly man asked as if that was supposed to mean something. ¡°You¡¯ll forever be a part of this ce!¡±


    That Brother Faerbar hadn¡¯t been here made the whole thing almost meaningless in Todd¡¯s eyes, but the quality of the priest that had recited the words had somehow managed to make thempletely worthless. It didn¡¯t matter what he said to men such as this. He didn¡¯t need his sight to see the corruption blossoming off of him.


    The Archbishop was a lifelongdder climber in the holy city. He was so banal that he made Brother Verdenin look contrite and humble byparison, which was a hard thing to do, Todd thought wryly.


    In the end, Todd felt no different, and even though he thought he might feel cleaner or lighter once he¡¯d finally achieved the ranks of the elect. He was still the same old Todd, though, just with a little fragrant oil smeared on his forehead.


    Still, he¡¯d obeyed because that was the ce of a warrior of light, but he hadn¡¯t been happy about it, not about escorting the two of them around the room as the Priest and Archbishop discussed the motif for the stained ss windows, which were still half a year from instation.


    ¡°You think that Saint Etroven¡¯s temptation would be best here?¡± The Archbishop asked skeptically. ¡°He¡¯s a bit of an odd choice. Why not Saint Frank or the sisters of Karavar?¡±


    ¡°Well, - that¡¯s easy,¡± Priest Verdinen said with a smile. ¡°Because his temptation was said to start at sunset andst all through the night. What better symmetry of symbolism could you ask for?¡±


    They bothughed at that, but Todd stood there quietly. He didn¡¯t know all of the stories that the two of them discussed that afternoon as he stood there in his polished armor as an unnecessary honor guard, but he did know that one. It was an evil, libidinous tale, and though the moral was restraint and resistance, he had no idea why Brother Verdenin thought that was an appropriate tale to ster on the front of his masterpiece.


    The question was answered that evening, at least in part when Todd was summoned the Brother Verdenin¡¯s tent. It was funny to Todd that the priest still slept in such a ce given that the forms that would support the building of the dome made the whole thing more of a house than many of the buildings in town, but habits were habits, he supposed.


    ¡°The Archbishop asked if you will be returning with him to Siddrimar, you know, Brother Graff.¡± Brother Verdenin said casually, feeling him out. ¡°I¡¯m inclined to agree. You could finally be reunited with your old Master, but this time as an equal.¡±


    Todd¡¯sst name still sounded foreign to his ears. He¡¯d been called toad, Todd, acolyte, or squire for so long that it was practically anothernguage.


    ¡°I thought he might,¡± Todd answered cryptically, ¡°But just the same, I would prefer to stay here. At least until this Temple isplete.¡±


    ¡°You would?¡± the priest asked, folding up his papers as he looked at Todd directly. ¡°I would have thought that you¡¯d want to go back to the light as soon as possible, so you could use your strength to fight against the darkness where you are most needed.¡±


    Todd gritted his teeth, annoyed by how transparently the older man was trying to manipte him. Brother Verdenin might address him with the title of an equal, but it was clear that the priest still thought of Todd as a child and someone to be kept away from whatever secrets he was still keeping about this project.


    ¡°As much as I¡¯d love to fight the dark elsewhere, I have to see this projectplete as I¡¯ve sword I would,¡± Todd answered curtly. ¡°No one can release me from a vow like that once sworn. Still, it shouldn¡¯t be too much longer, right? Another year? Two?¡±


    ¡°Closer to two,¡± Brother Verdenin sighed. ¡°If you¡¯ve made up your mind, I won¡¯t force you, but I think you¡¯d be happier if you were back fighting alongside the rest of your cadre.¡±


    ¡°Thank you,¡± Todd said currently before leaving.


    The exchange only further reaffirmed for him that there was still something here. Though Todd might owe the priest for saving his life when he¡¯d returned to ckwater a few months ago on death¡¯s door, that didn¡¯t mean he was going to turn a blind eye to whatever Brother Verdenin was trying to aplish here.


    It was unnatural, and Todd would sniff it out; somehow, he swore to himself with frustration. All he ended up with for his efforts, though, were sleepless nights as he stalked among the construction site looking for miscreants and jumping at shadows.


    He never found anything, though, except for the growing collection of statues that were popting the shrines and fountains. On this, at least, he thought that Brother Verdenin was doing some good. Some of them were so realistic that it was like they were people trapped underyers of ster, stone, and gold.


    That was impossible, of course, but still, the effect was startling. Those works of art were lovelier than any of the marble statues he¡¯d seen in Siddrimar. They could look disturbing by the flickering light of a torch, but by the light of day, those same expressions were almost beatific.


    In the end, Todd was forced to conclude that perhaps the priest¡¯s sins were limited to the merely mundane. Perhaps he acted so strangely because he was embezzling some small part of his enormous funds for his own gain when all this was done. After all, if one gone in twenty or thirty went missing during such a costly project, who would know?


    Todd was even less interested in those sorts of crimes than he was in the games of status that determined rank in Siddrimar¡¯s pecking order, and he had no interest in going through the man¡¯s ount books to try to catch him in a lie. In the end, despite his ardent desire to stay here and unwind some grand conspiracy, he was forced to conclude that he was the one that had clearly been imagining things, and spent more and more time to the west of ckwater hunting down goblins small goblin dens and destroying them.


    That, at least, was satisfying work, and though he earned himself a few new scars over the months that followed, he never did manage to shake the feeling that he¡¯d missed something, and though he wrote several letters to Brother Faerbar in that time, he was never able to share anything beyond progress reports because Todd¡¯s doubts were far too flimsy for the light of day.

 Chapter 74: Heart of Darkness

    Chapter 74: Heart of Darkness


    Krulm¡¯venor was a wretched, broken thing in mind, body, and soul. He¡¯d stood up to the Lich that held his leash for as long as he could, but after thest abomination, he was empty. His ribs were cracked, his pelvis was bent, and he walked with a perpetual limp that didn¡¯t hurt, though the endless echoing sounds of his step-drag, step-drag gate did eventually start to grate on him.


    That annoying, repetitive sound was a sweet melodypared to the sound of the goblins running rampant in his head. They hadn¡¯t stopped their incessant screaming and whispering, and there were times when Krulm¡¯venor bellowed in rage just to shut them out for a few seconds.


    ¡°Where are we going?¡± one hissed.


    ¡°When will we get there?¡± another one rasped.


    Then they would argue and rage about how close they were to whatever was next and when they would next be able to rip something limb from limb. There were times when they discussed more visceral topics like that, that his hands would twitch, and he found himself throttling the neck of something that didn¡¯t exist.


    He¡¯d long since lost control of his mind, but day by day, and trauma by trauma, Krulm¡¯venor was losing control of his mind as well.


    That it hadn¡¯t even punished him for trying to warn his people galled him more than anything. The Lich never forgot to punish the disobedient. That it hadn¡¯t bothered to do so yet meant only that it was biding its time and letting that axe hang above Krulm¡¯venor¡¯s neck for as long as the undead monster wished.


    He still walked though, ever deeper into the bowels of the earth, because he had no say in the matter anymore. He was deep in the eternal deadzone where nothing with a soul could survive for long against the vast darkness that dwelled there. He might have been deeper than any dwarf had gone before, but he took no pride in it. For all he knew this was his punishment: to walk forever into the darkness until he stopped existing.


    ¡°Feed us or we will feast on you instead,¡± a voice repeated over and over frantically in his mind, but he swated it away.


    Schools of the empty swarmed around him sometimes, and asionallyrge things moving in the darkness like unseen leviathens, but in both cases the Lich would assume control and devour them with Krulm¡¯venor¡¯s mouth before leaving him to wander again. After a time the denizens of this strange world learned to steer clear of the pale blue light that apanied him as he wandered deeper into the cold dark tunnels.


    Truthfully, he didn¡¯t expect to ever find anything again. He expected that he would just limp for an eternity, gnashing his teeth at the idea of what the monster that own him must be doing to the sacred dwarven dead. Then he saw the glow.


    Krulm¡¯venor was miles underground, and knew for certain that there should be neither light nor life here, and yet, there, far in the distance of the titanic cavern he¡¯d found, was a speck of light. He found it strange, but he didn¡¯t let his shock stop him. The only thing that would await him for stopping without reason was pain.


    The light turned out to be a luminous fungus that glowed white blue. It was incredibly faint, but in the absolute darkness he¡¯d just endured for weeks or months it might as well have been a beacon fire. First it was only here and there in small patches, but eventually the whole tunnel was full of the stuff, pushing back against the dark, and preventing the shadows from passing this way, he realized.


    For the first time in a long time that raised the specter that he wasn¡¯t alone, though he had no idea what could possibly live this deep. Though he didn¡¯t discover what was down here, he did see movement several times amongst the rocks and stmites of the tunnels he explored, but he could never quite see what it was. Slowly Krulm¡¯venor grew certain that he wasn¡¯t alone down here; that¡¯s when he discovered a sign.


    ¡°What is thisnguage?¡± the Lich whispered in his head.


    ¡°Yessss¡­ tell us. Read it. Read it!¡± a voice in his mind sprang up, to repeat the Lich¡¯s order.;


    Krulm¡¯venor could not give either of them a good answer though. ¡°It looks vaguely like dwarvish,¡± Krulm¡¯venor said hesitantly, though, that could have just been because it was carven into stone, or that he was losing his mind. ¡°It¡¯s not though. Too many curves. Too many spirals. Each of these is almost a dwarven letter but they don¡¯t add up to form any words.¡±


    ¡°If you cannot read it, then find me who wrote it!¡± the Lichmanded, and then it was gone again, Leave Krulm¡¯venor alone to wonder what he was supposed to do next.


    Though the sign was unreadable, it had two vaguely arrow like shapes pointing two different ways at the fork in the road where he now stood, so he went left, following the path of therger word. The result was more walking down dimly lit corridors. Though sometimes the color of the moss would shift from icy blue to an almost white or an aqua color, the intensity of dull, uniform light never changed, lending the entire ce an air of sureality.


    ¡°Why should there be so much light down this far,¡± he grumbled to himself.


    ¡°So we can find our prey,¡± a goblin hissed.


    ¡°Yes, find it, kill it!¡± more screamed. Krulm¡¯venor was horrified to find that he¡¯d mouthed those words, but before he could react to that, he noticed a small movement in one of the stones upahead. The sounds he¡¯d made had started something, but he was quite sure the stone had moved not something behind it.


    Krulm¡¯venor approached the small stgmite near the left wall of the winding tunnel, and when he got within a few feet, it took off running. It wasn¡¯t a stone at all, but a tiny little person, dressed as one.


    With all the bloodlust in his system, Krulm¡¯venor couldn¡¯t help but give chase like a hungry predator.


    His body couldn¡¯t hope to keep up though. Not with his foot dragging, so, grudgingly he bent forward and starting scrambling on all fours after the thing in giant, lopping strides as his twisted from ate the ground. The Lich had always designed this skeleton with the proportions of goblins in mind, so it¡¯s arms were a bit too long, and its lets were a bit too short to befortable for a dwarf, the result was something perfectly suited to the monster he was slowly bing as the goblins muddied his once clear mind, and made him third for the blood of his tiny little prey.


    Even running as fast as he was, Krulm¡¯venor did not catch the tiny little dwarf-like creature until after it had reached a small hidden passage in the stone and sealed it behind it. The fire god was not about to let it get away though, and the secret door only intrigued the Lich that was now watching him all the more.


    Krulm¡¯venor pried the door open with his steel fingers, and shattered the small entrance. He then pounded against the walls to widden it slightly, before he crawled through the gap. What he saw next would have taken his breath away, if he still had lungs to breath.


    The strange cavern was a tiny little world, with fields and houses. There were even fields, and a fortress that the inhabitants were streaming toward, and it was all lit up by arge clowning crystal, mounted in the ceiling. The whole cavern had been molded into a tiny work of art, and the stone had been bent and melded with magic to create flowing, organic shape which the small parts of his mind that were still wholly dwarven found beautiful in their simplity. The rest of him simply wanted to destory it all.


    The strange little things which he¡¯d decided were almost certainly gnomes, were screaming as they ran. The dwarves had legends of the tiny creatures, but Krulm¡¯venor had never seen any evidence that they were real, in life or death. He¡¯d assumed that they¡¯d existed at some point before the goblins had hunted them to extinction, but somehow, a few of them at least had jounreyed so deep into the depths that no one could ever find them or hurt them.


    Most of them were running anyway. Some were on the walls of theirpletely ineffective fortress that were a little taller than he was, readying their tiny little ballistas while he stomped through their tiny little world. Some of the small things were charging toward him too with weapons not much longer than his fingers. Their bravery didn¡¯tst long though, and all of them died within seconds without him even having to resort to mes as he crushed their little bodies in an orgy of bloody violence.


    They wouldn¡¯t have stood a chance against him at all, unless they¡¯d unleashed their golem. Well - maybe it wasn¡¯t a golem, he thought as the creature began to congeal from the debris in front of him. One second he was tearing down the curtin wall of the tiny fortress with his bare hands, and then next all the shattered stone and the bodies of the gnomeish dead were congealing into a giant man shaped thing that was almost asrge as he was.


    Krulm¡¯venor rose to his full height, and looked at it, unsure of what was going to happen next, when it suddenlyshed out with a solid upper cut that lifted his several hundred pound body of steel and bone off the ground and sent him sprawling. It hadn¡¯t hit him quite as hard as the All-Father¡¯s avatar had, but it hard enough to hurt, and Krulm¡¯venor rolled out of the way before the thing could stomp him.


    He was fighting like a filthy goblin now he realized, scrambling to his hands and feet as he manuvered out of the way. Their battle carried on across the cavern, and everywhere they went they left wreckage and death in their wake as the two foot tall inhabitants tried to find shelter. There was none though. Not once Krulm¡¯velor started to breathe fire.


    It did less than nothing to the golem or the elemental or whatever it was, but it seemed to pain the thing to watch the gnomes die, and fire reached into the tiny nooks and crannies they were hiding in quite well.


    As the fight went on, the thing congealed from a thousand tiny rocks, into a single creature made of a single b of stone, and it got stronger as that happened.


    ¡°Fascinating,¡± the Lich whispered.


    ¡°Murder! Death! Fire!¡± the goblins screamed.


    Krulm¡¯venor didn¡¯t listen to either of those voices though. All he did was try to shatter its opponent. For several minutes that was a fruitless endevor, but finally it struck some weak spit in the things exterior and it cracked like an egg, creating a long thin rift that revealed the hollow, geode like interior of the thing.


    After that weakness was exposed, Krulm¡¯venor dodged the thing¡¯s blows, getting in close and grappling with the thing until he could pull it apart at the seams. Even if his mind was no longer truely dwarven, he understood how the weak spots effected even the mostplex creation, and now that he had an opening, the creature soon splintered into a hundred pieces, and all that was left was the thing¡¯s head in its hand.


    Krulm¡¯venor looked around at the holocaust it had created. Everything was death and smoke, which it gloried in enough for the goblins that burrowed into its mind to finally be still for a while. Only then did the fire spirit move to crush the quietly whimpering thing in his hands to dust, but the Lich stayed his hands.


    ¡°No you fool,¡± it shouted. ¡°Carry that back to Mourden and I shall bring you home. Be careful not to let it touch stone the whole way, lest the earth spirits trapped inside of it escape! If you fail me in this I will make your next body out of goblin shit. You¡¯ll need one since you¡¯ve ruined the one I built especially for you.¡±

 Chapter 75: A One Armed Priest

    Chapter 75: A One Armed Priest


    As he made his way down the mountains that spring, Paulus gave the city he once lived in a wide berth. He hadn¡¯t skipped Fallravea because he feared that he¡¯d be recognized but because he could see from a great distance that the ce was even more fouled than the waters of the Oroza itself even after the Temr¡¯s supposed purges.


    It didn¡¯t matter to him that he still had bags of gold and silver coins tucked away there, in ces that were unlikely to ever be found. That wealth was nothing but bait for a trap as far as he was concerned. It was impossible for such things to stay pure in the face of so much death. Instead of marching through that cursed town, he journeyed from hamlet to vige as he slowly worked his way around it before continuing south.


    ¡°They said the ce had been purged, but I told Sister Annise that was no longer possible,¡± he muttered to himself as he went. ¡°If she¡¯d just read the figures and done the math herself, she would have seen that!¡±


    His trip had not beenfortable, but his life at the small temple he¡¯d stayed at for thest half year had hardly been better. Now that his health had improved enough that he could sleep in a barn without being taken by a fever, he needed to move on. There was so much to do but so little time left for him to do it.


    ¡°Doom ising for us,¡± he muttered.


    He muttered that all the time now, often without realizing it. It was one of the reasons Priest Mallen encouragements for him to leave had been so vociferous ofte. Well - that and the priest was jealous of Paulus¡¯s exalted rank.


    He might wear the simple brown robes of a penitent, but that was just a disguise. He knew that as thanks for all his efforts, Siddrim had made him a secret high priest of his flock. The Lord of Light had told him so in a vision the night he¡¯d lost his arm. Though it would never bemon knowledge, it was an honor he¡¯d been forced to ept, even if his health was no longer the best.


    Despite his elevated rank, Paulus didn¡¯t let things go to his head. He carried nothing with him on this trek but a walking stick which he leaned on heavily, and a begging bowl which he used to share the wealth of thend with the generous people who worked it.


    Despite the hard times, the people were kind. Paulus had yet to go hungry. Instead, he¡¯d blessed infants, healed the sick with his one good hand, and feasted on the finest leftover food as he made his long slow journey south.


    He was going to the one ce where a tragedy of unimaginable proportions might be stopped: ckwater. It was an inauspicious name for a ce where he hoped to save the world. It sounded more like the ce where river pirates might spend their time between raids or where lizardmen might lie in wait to ambush unwary travelers, but all his notes had pointed to this critical crossroads, and if nothing was done, he feared that was where the world would soon end.


    ¡°My poor books,¡± he sighed. ¡°They must be so lonely without me.¡±


    He¡¯d left them in Sister Annise¡¯s care, but only because Paulus knew that if he left them with the priest, they would be burned as heresy.


    ¡°Not heresy,¡± Paulus had corrected the other men of the temple regrly, ¡°Historic. This is why Siddrim saved me, to help you understand how the cmity about to befall the world might yet be avoided!¡±


    No matter how many times Paulus had exined it to them, no one had ever been convinced enough to join him on his quest, so he would do it himself. Well, he would find the one who must do it himself, he corrected himself mentally. Even in his prime, Paulus had not been a fighter. He¡¯d wielded toughs and secrets like a lesser man might wield a sword.


    This time he wasn¡¯t going to have to pay anyone, though, because Siddrim was a generous God and had given him a champion. He just needed to find thed. From the sketch he¡¯d made, the boy wouldn¡¯t properly be called a boy anymore, but he still had a childish, virtuous heart. More importantly, he had a strong sword arm, and if someone like Paulus could seed in removing the blindfold that had been tied around his bright hazel eyes, then they might yet avert the catastrophe that Paulus had seen so many times in his sleep.


    He tried not to think about it, but the very word ¡®catastrophe¡¯ brought terrible images to his mind. A shattered sun. temples on fire. monstrosities boiling out from the depths, and corpses rising from their own graves. It might have been the end of the world, but Paulus was going to stop it from ever happening. He had to, because no one else was going to.


    So, day after day, he continued south, and eventually, he found the fabled city itself. Well - it wasn¡¯t really a city - not like Fallravea. It was arge town on the verge of bing something more, but itcked the taint that the hoary old city he¡¯d grown up in always had. There were newer buildings along the waterfront, but even so, most of the town seemed to be made of hastily built shacks.


    It didn¡¯t even have walls or a gate, he scoffed as he slowly approached the one small watch tower that passed for security in the backwater.


    ¡°I¡¯m looking for the chosen one,¡± Paulus said to the first guard heid eyes on. ¡°Do you know where I can find him?¡±


    ¡°Ummm¡­ I don¡¯t know who you mean, sir. If you could be more specific¡­¡± the young man with a spear answered nervously.


    ¡°Well, he¡¯s about your height,¡± Paulus sighed. ¡°He¡¯s either fair-haired or has hair the color of dun. He might have a secret birthmark, and he¡¯s a holy warrior whose mother was born on an auspicious day that was strongly in tune with the element of air. He has¡ª¡±


    ¡°If you¡¯re looking for a holy warrior, there¡¯s only one in these parts that I know of,¡± the guard said, cutting Paulus off just when he was getting going. ¡°His name is Brother Graff, and you might be able to find him at the temple.¡±


    ¡°Might? Might?!¡± Paulus shouted, annoyed that he¡¯d been interrupted when he had so much more to say on the subject. ¡°And if he¡¯s not, what then? I¡¯m on urgent business for the temple, and the fate of the very world hangs in the bnce, and the best you can do for me is might¡­¡±


    Paulus would have continued that rant a good deal longer as well, but this time it was coughing thatid him low, and he spent the next minute hacking up a lung. That could happen sometimes when he got too excited.


    ¡°I suppose I could send a messenger around to find him for you if you like, sir, since it¡¯s temple business¡­¡± the guard answered uncertainly as he looked at Paulus like he was about to keel over at any moment.


    ¡°You do that, boy,¡± the old man said, patting him on the shoulder. ¡°You do that. I¡¯ll be at the temple. I¡¯m eager to see what you all have been building so hard down here.¡±


    He took thest leg of his long trip extra slowly while he recovered, which gave him a chance to appreciate the squat domed building as he slowly approached it. Though it was still obscured by a great deal of scaffolding, its sunset-colored walls and its gold dome were impossible to miss.


    ¡°It¡¯s okay,¡± he said to himself with disappointment. From the way people had been going on about this magnificent work of art, he¡¯d honestly expected more. Honestly, the whole thing had a strange aura about it he couldn¡¯t quite put his finger on, at least not until he got inside and noticed the way the gazes of the statues lined up and he¡¯d cross-referenced them by the number of pirs and the contours of the light beams. This ce was cursed.


    ¡°Can I help you,¡± a man said, walking up to him as he stood there, taking in all the strange new information that was pouring into his brain.


    Paulus spared the new voice a nce and was surprised to see another holy man addressing him. ¡°Well, look at that,¡± he mused, ¡°another one-armed priest. We find a couple more, and we can have ourselves a convocation.¡±


    ¡°Very amusing,¡± the stranger said, gesturing widely with his sole hand. ¡°I¡¯m Brother Verdenin, the priest of this temple; how may I address you, sir?¡±


    ¡°I am the secret grand high priest of the Order of the Ever-Present Watchers, but you may address me as Paulus on ount of our shared disfigurement,¡± Paulus said glibly, returning his gaze to the walls as he started to notice something odd.


    ¡°The Order of the Ever-Present Watchers?¡± Brother Verdenin asked. ¡°I don¡¯t believe I¡¯ve ever heard of such a thing. Do you¡ª¡±


    ¡°Oh, I see now,¡± Paulus interrupted as his eyes widened in horror. ¡°This is where it will begin. I see the blood on the walls and the fire from the sky¡ª¡±


    ¡°Leave us,¡± Brother Verdenin ordered the few craftsmen in the room. They¡¯d stopped working anyway, so their absence would be no loss. ¡°I will handle this. My poor brother has just lost his way. There¡¯s no blood here, Brother, only beautiful pink stones and brilliant red ss to light the way to those who still dwell in the dark.¡±


    ¡°Blood,¡± Paulus insisted, pointing around the room. Everywhere he looked, he saw blood. It was on the stones that made the walls, the pirs that held up the ceiling, and it was even on the gilded decorations.


    Paulus walked over to where the men had been getting ready to hang an angelic figure from the wall near the door and looked at it as blood started to seep out from under the ster and the gilding. That was when he finally understood.


    ¡°Oh - these have bodies inside them to perfect their forms, don¡¯t they? They have¡ª hhhkkk¡­¡± As Paulus spoke, wheeling about the room and looking at the terrible depravity of the ce they were in, the other priest suddenly attacked him, wrapping both his hands around Paulus¡¯ neck.


    Both hands? Paulus asked, struck by the strange thought, even in this moment of peril. He momentarily stopped his struggles even as the life was being wrung from him to stare at the other priest¡¯s newly grown arm. It was an abomination made entirely of shadow, and Paulus knew if he could just drag the other man a few feet into the light streaming down from the oculus, it would vanish like morning dew.


    He couldn¡¯t, though. He was too weak and getting weaker with every passing second. His salvationy only a few feet away, but it might as well have been waiting for him in the temple with his papers and Sister Annise.


    ¡°Why,¡± Paulus gasped with his final breath. ¡°We both serve the light¡­¡±


    ¡°My master has ns for you and your devious mind,¡± Brother Verdenin answered without malice or regret. It was thest thing that Paulus ever saw before the lights went out for good.


    It was only a few minutester after the priest dragged the lifeless body of the madman from where ity in the shadow of the pir that Brother Verdenin had pinned him against into the pavilion he used as his personal chambers, that Brother Graff showed up. His spiritual arm had faded only seconds before the other man had entered the room, and Priest Verdenin was grateful for that. Such a thing would have been even more impossible to exin than the body.


    Todd didn¡¯t say anything at first. He just looked around the room expectantly before he asked.


    ¡°Is there¡­ was there someone here waiting for me?¡± he asked sheepishly?


    ¡°Should there be?¡± the priest asked, feigning disinterest.


    ¡°Well, a messenger from the city guard came to me while I was studying the scriptures at the book seller¡¯s and told me that a¡­ a one-armed priest wished to speak with me,¡± Todd said, trying and failing not to look at Brother Verdenin¡¯s missing arm.


    ¡°Do you know any other one-armed priests?¡± Brother Verdenin said with augh.


    ¡°Well, no, but the messenger described someone older and said¡ª¡± Todd started to answer.


    ¡°He was almost certainly confused,¡± Brother Verdenin said, letting his tent p fall into ce behind him. ¡°I was the one who sent for you.¡±


    ¡°Oh, okay,¡± Todd agreed uncertainly, ¡°What is it you need?¡±


    ¡°A number of tools have gone missing from the stone mason¡¯s tents, and I fear there might be something darker at foot,¡± the priest lied. ¡°As you know - We are only weeks away from holding our first service, and it would be a shame if that were disrupted because we weren¡¯t vignt enough.¡±


    ¡°I won¡¯t let that happen, sir,¡± Todd said, saluting before he rushed off to find the culprits that existed only in his imagination.


    That wasn¡¯t unusual. Brother Graff had spent the better part of thest two years chasing ghosts, Brother Verdenin thought with a smile. The man was hopeless. He couldn¡¯t even find a dead body a few feet from the corpse itself. Of course, all of the terrible medicines he¡¯d given thed while he was dying the terrible symptoms of his cholirum withdrawal had muted any supernatural gifts he might have once possessed.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know why I have to let him live,¡± the priest muttered to himself as he went inside to hide the body a little better. ¡°But the lord works in mysterious ways, and if he says that Todd is needed, then who am I to second guess such things.¡±


    Brother Verdenin doubted that Todd woulde into his tent, but regardless, it wouldn¡¯t do for him to find the corpse of the raving lunatic to be found so close to thepletion of the temple. That would raise too many questions which would be impossible to answer. Regardless, the priest was sure that sometime tonight, it would simply disappear all on its own anyway.

 Chapter 76: Saint Erdins Day

    Chapter 76: Saint Erdins Day


    Even though he spared a little time trying to locate the mysterious priest that the young guard was quite certain he saw, in the days following his meeting with Brother Verdenin, he never did find anything else. It was as if the strange one-armed man had appeared, spoken to exactly one guard, and then disappeared. Todd never did find the culprit behind the rash of thefts, either, which was frustrating. He was sure that his extra scrutiny prevented the thievery from metastasizing into something worse, though, and that was all he could do.


    In the weeks leading up to Saint Erdins Day, he did everything he could, not just to look for signs of evil that would seek to disrupt the temple¡¯s first service but to make sure it was a sess. He worked tirelessly in Siddrim¡¯s name. He helped the workmen when they were short-handed, booked the rooms at the local inns for the visiting dignitaries, and even helped with the strange plumping that was required to finally show off the temple in its full glory.


    Todd had known that plumbing existed, of course. The city of Siddrimar had lead pipes to bring in fresh water and sewers to remove the waste, of course. The capital city did, too, at least ording to rumors. This far out in the country, though, very few buildings had such features. Though the Greshen pce had running water in the kitchens and to the fountains, even it had relied on chamber pots, and even though it was right next to the river, only the old city had even an open sewer, and it was a stinking cesspool in the summer.


    ckwater, at least, didn¡¯t have that problem. Surrounded by water on two sides, it mostly just smelled of damp and mud year round. Even if Brother Verdenin¡¯s fountain project would do nothing practical, Todd did have to admit to himself that it looked pretty once he¡¯d seen it turned on for the first time.


    The Temple of Sunrise was almost 80 feet in diameter. It was actually seventy-seven and seven-tenths across, and it was ringed by thirteen fountains, evenly spaced along the outside, along with four smaller ones on the gilded dome of the roof. He¡¯d never seen all of them active at once, but Todd had to admit that they were lovely works of marble and baster and that the statues that had been chosen to depict different mythological scenes were lovely.


    None of the fountains that were built into the red and orange colored walls were as lovely as the ones on the roof. They didn¡¯t shoot streams of water like the lower fountains but instead depicted the handmaidens of light releasing a mist that cascaded over the dome¡¯s oculus in a way that could fill the whole temple with a prismatic spray of rainbow light, depending on the time of day.


    The first time Todd had seen that effect, it had taken his breath away, and he thought that perhaps he¡¯d misjudged the priest he¡¯d spent thest few years doubting. Brother Verdenin¡¯s tent was finally removed from the templest week when the altar had been moved into ce. Now Siddrim¡¯s light would fall onto it squarely at noon during the midsummer solstice, and even though that effect wouldn¡¯t be quite so pronounced during Saint Erdin¡¯s day, it would still make for a striking first service.


    ¡°This is a true masterwork,¡± Todd had confessed to the older man one day while he looked on in awe.


    ¡°And it¡¯s not evenpleted yet. After this, we still have the build the pews, carve the pirs, and paint the ceilings with the story of creation,¡± he said in a tone that was exhausted but satisfied. ¡°Only then will we have built a tiny slice of heaven here on earth that we might use to purify the Oroza and restore order to the region.¡±


    As far as Todd was concerned, the river was getting close to purified as it was, but once these festivities were over, he nned to travel to the northwest with a few men and go on another goblin hunt. There were rumors that they were getting bolder in the red hills, as well as along the coast, and Todd wouldn¡¯t stand for that. Not with what had happened with his vige. He was going to purge them from this world if it was thest thing he did.


    Still, for now, he had to focus on the task at hand and s the final day got closer and closer, the scaffolding was removed, and everyone¡¯s focus turned to cleaning. It was a mundane task for a blooded warrior like Todd, but he didn¡¯t mind. He¡¯d spent more years cleaning under the supervision of priests and acolytes than he had swinging a mace or sword, and in Siddrim¡¯s eyes, cleanliness was almost as important as light. So they scrubbed and washed and made the main chamber ready, and once that was done, they hung the maroon banners, and all took a well-earned rest for the day before the ceremony.


    On thatst day, Todd lingered in the temple after everyone else had gone to bathe and change for the feast to wee Bishop Runsslow and his entourage into the city, It was the first time he¡¯d ever been alone in the building, and as he let himself take in all of the majesty of the nearlypleted structure, he couldn¡¯t help but feel empty. It was odd.


    The light that he expected to radiate off of such a masterwork simply wasn¡¯t there, and no matter how much he groped for it, the most he could find was a few thin trickles of holy fire flicker from the altar. The ground didn¡¯t even feel concecrated to him anymore. That at least he understood. There was something about this old swampy ground that drank in the light and had since before the first cornerstone wasid, but he could only assume that in time the light would drive all of that darkness out of thend and then the river.


    At least, Todd hoped so. He walked away from the temple that night feeling empty, though he couldn¡¯t quite understand why. He kept a smile on his face during the feast that followed in the pavilion that had been set up for the asion, but he felt hollow the whole night.


    Even when Priest Verdenin raised a toast to the assembled guests of priests from Siddrimar and important people from as far away as Fallravea, the words did not move him. ¡°Thank you all foring. Please, eat and drink the fruits of thend so that you might better understand our great work. We havee a long way, as you will see tomorrow, but there is still much further to go if we wish to im this whole world for our god!¡±


    There were cheers at that and a few chants of ¡®down with Oroza¡¯ and a few other gods that it was not considered bad luck to speak the names of aloud. Todd got drunk enough as he sought to fill the growing void inside him with something and briefly got into an argument with one of the elder priests about the nature of gods and spirits, even though he didn¡¯t mean to.


    ¡°The small gods thrive and multiply from Siddrim¡¯s light, my child,¡± Priest Karrick insisted. ¡°Do you not see? Once we have built temples across this great continent of ours, and even across the sea, his light will shine across the world, and evil will be eradicated forever after!¡±


    Todd insisted there would always be darkness and that it would just find smaller corners to hide in and cleverer tactics to worm its way into the minds of men. The priest used Fallravea as an example of the good work they were doing, and Todd was about to rebut that before Brother Verdenin wisely changed topics. He was more familiar than anyone with Todd¡¯s feelings on that cursed city and did not wish to see a drunken argument foul the evening.


    After that, Todd made his apologies and spent the rest of the evening speaking with his peers that guarded the Bishop¡¯s entourage about how Brother Faerbar was doing and how frequent the goblin attacks were bing. He found sce in that at least, and in the fact that the rest of his martial brothers would also rather be doing anything but watching the Bishop christen yet another temple.


    ¡°Even fighting bandits, waste of time that that would be, would still be better than dealing with all this pageantry,¡± one of them swore toward the end of the night. ¡°I joined the church to fight evil, not polish statues!¡±


    Todd would me thatment for the dreams he had that night. Between the wine he¡¯d had too much of and his foul mood, he dreamt that he spent his entire life doing nothing but cleaning floors and polishing statues until he, too, became one. Then another young man came and started to polish him for decades until he was so old that he, too, became a statue. The process continued, even as he struggled to wake up until the whole world was nothing but people worshiping statues of those that had spent their life worshiping statues.


    It was not the right mindset to have when he woke at dawn for prayers and found Brother Verdenin there to join them for the first time in a long time. ¡°Today¡¯s an important day, Brother Graff,¡± he said as he greeted the sun with Todd. ¡°We must start it off right.¡±


    Though the ceremonies that followed were long and involved, Todd didn¡¯t have to do much during them. Mostly he stood at attention in his freshly polished chainmail against the wall in neat ranks with the rest of the warriors while the priests made various invocations and gave speech after speech once all the guests had arrived.


    By the time the bell was rung and everyone was in their ces, there were almost 300 people crowded into therge temple. About twenty of them were guards, and another twenty or so were priests, but the rest was made up of the luminaries of ckwater as well as some of themoners that Brother Verdenin had taken a liking to during his time in the city. Some were here to receive the light¡¯s blessing and be purified, and others were here because they¡¯d just spent thest several years building some part of the temple or another. At a nce, Todd could see masons, stone carvers, painters, and metal workers, and he idly wondered what all these people would do once the temple was finallyplete and there was no more call for their services.


    Those thoughts faded as soon as the service started, though. First, they turned on the fountains and gave a demonstration of the beautiful lighting they could create, then they sacrificed a pure whitemb as they invoked the east and a goat that was as ck as night when they honored sunset in the west. Then they drew that sacred arc that the sun traveled every day with the mixed blood of the two animals on the heads of all the worshipers in attendance before they finally proceeded to give a lengthy sermon about the importance of patience and mountains could be torn down and rebuilt into fortresses by someone with enough time and devotion.


    Todd had heard Brother Verdenin give this speech a dozen times in preparation for today, so he wasn¡¯t paying much attention to the words, but when the priest suddenly ended the monologue with an unfamiliar phrase before the altar started moving.


    ¡°That is why we must all journey deeper into the darkness, so we better understand not just ourselves but our role in the great n that awaits us all,¡± he said as he depressed a hidden switch that Todd hadn¡¯t noticed before, and the alter started to sink downward.


    When it reached the level of the floor, Brother Verdenin stepped onto it and said, ¡°Follow me, everyone, and I will show you the path to true salvation.¡±


    The altar was arge round ck of basalt that had been imported for its contrast with all the whites, reds, and pinks that otherwise dominated the chapel. It was precisely as big as the oculus that stood above it, and now it was disappearing into the darkness, which was not a mechanism that he¡¯d seen anyone work on at any point in thest few years. The wedge-shaped stones that radiated out from it quickly followed suit, though they stopped at different levels.


    Todd quickly realized that the thing was forming a spiral staircase that was slowly getting wider and deeper as Brother Verdenin disappeared from sight.

 Chapter 77: Well of Darkness

    Chapter 77: Well of Darkness


    What had just happened was impossible. Even stranger than the fact that the altar had suddenly vanished to some secret basement beneath the temple or that Brother Verdenin had vanished with it was that everyone seemed to listen to the priest¡¯s words. For the better part of thest hour, they¡¯d all stood there raptly, hanging on every word of the ceremony.


    No sooner had Brother Verdenin spoken, though, than everyone started to crowd forward, eager to follow the man into the unknown. It was a surreal sight, and for a few seconds, Todd was certain he was still dreaming. It was the only possible reason why everyone wasn¡¯t freaking out as much as he was.


    Everyone wasughing and smiling like this was just another part of the normal ceremony as they slowly descended into the earth in a casual, single-file line. It wasn¡¯t just the townspeople either. Everyone descended into the depths, including the visiting priests and the Bishop.


    It was only when the room was almost empty that Todd finally figured out what they¡¯d all had inmon: every person who¡¯d been anointed by ram¡¯s blood. By the time he¡¯d figured that out, though, only the guards were left, while a few stragglers waited for the stairs to clear enough that they could follow their peers below.


    Todd shifted ufortably, gripping the hilt of his sword though he did not yet draw it. For reasons he could not fully understand, the widening hole reminded him of the bizarre hole they¡¯d found in the basement of Baron Garvin¡¯s pce all those years ago. It was a chilling thought, and even though that distant memory was a rough-hewn hole drenched in blood instead of a neatly carved set of stone stairs, once he made the connection, he couldn¡¯t unsee it.


    He looked from his left to his right and saw that despite sharing his growing apprehension, no one seemed willing to do anything to stop what was happening, so finally, Todd stepped forward and grabbed the closest person by the shoulder.


    ¡°You don¡¯t have to follow them, you know,¡± he said, ¡°I don¡¯t think going down there is a good idea.¡±


    ¡°But without me, how will they push back the darkness?¡± the man said with an empty look in his eyes. He struggled for a moment in Todd¡¯s grip. Todd was just about to grab him more forcefully and fling him to the ground when the main doors opened, and other people started walking into the room.


    At some unseen signal, the people of ckwater began to stream through the doors and started to descend below just as everyone else had. They even had the same nk look in their eyes despite the fact that they hadn¡¯t been anointed by the ceremony.


    ¡°What in the name of the light is going on,¡± Todd said, abandoning his effort to stop the surge of townspeople from descending two stories into that well of darkness to go talk to the group of now visibly nervous soldiers.


    No one knew. No one even had an idea. Suggestions ranged from mass hysteria to some sort of demonic attack to ruin their holy day. Some said they should wait for it to stop on their own, and others said they should send a messenger to Siddrimar, and the more people disappeared without a sound, the more worried Todd became.


    ¡°I¡¯m going to bar the doors,¡± he said finally. ¡°I¡¯m going to keep any more people from giving in to whatever is affecting them, and then I¡¯m going down there to get some answers.¡±


    ¡°But if this is part of the ceremony, won¡¯t we¡­ I mean, get in trouble for interrupting it?¡± one of the younger warriors asked.


    Todd ignored the question and moved to the door. Not because it was stupid but because thed was probably right. He ignored it because he didn¡¯t care. He¡¯d been here for years. If a second temple had been built underneath the first, that might exin where all the extra expenses had gone, but it wouldn¡¯t exin why Brother Verdenin had never told him about it or why he¡¯d never seen any work taking ce there.


    As Todd started pushing the heavy wooden doors into ce, the people trying to get in pushed back. ¡°Please, let us in!¡± a man cried out.¡±


    ¡°We need to be saved!¡± a woman pleaded, ¡°Let us push back the darkness!¡±


    Todd had no idea how or why they had all gone berserk, but he ignored all of them though. After a brief struggle, he overpowered them and barred the door. They continued to pound on the thing and wail after that, but he ignored them.


    He was sure that nothing good awaited anyone that went into the darkness, and he would have bodily restrained everyone in there to keep them from moving on if he could. Sadly hecked rope, but as he wished for some, he suddenly realized that the banners and the bunting would do just as well.


    ¡°Help me with this,¡± he shouted as he moved to the walls and began to rip down the decorations that he¡¯d just spent hours hanging the other day.


    ¡°Have you gone mad,¡± the captain of the Bishops guard asked. ¡°They¡¯ll flog you for defacing a temple, especially on today of all days.¡±


    ¡°I sincerely hope they do,¡± Todd said, moving to the next banner before he started to shred it with his bare hands. ¡°I truly hope that today ends normally, that this was all some terrible misunderstanding, and that when the Bishop returned to the surface, I am flogged for my insolence.¡±


    ¡°Right now, I am giving you an order, though,¡± he said as he tackled the closest person to the mysterious stairs. ¡°Help me restrain these people for their own good before it¡¯s toote.¡±


    They moved slowly as they looked at each other uncertainly, but eventually, whether it was the urgency of his tone that convinced the rest of the men or the certainty that they could me whatever happened next on him, they allplied and working together they trussed up thest eight people that hadn¡¯t quite made it down to the stairs.


    Once that was done, Todd walked to the edge of the hole in the temple¡¯s floor. It was almost two stories down, and from where he stood, he could see thest person that had made the trip down exiting through a single arched doorway. Because of the angle of the sun, everything else was lost in shadow, and he could make out no details. Still, there was something about it, even from this distance, that was unnatural. He tried to focus on it, but just as he was resolving it, someone addressed him, breaking his concentration.


    ¡°Well,¡± what do we do now? ¡°The captain of the Bishop¡¯s guard asked, forcing Todd to look away from the darkness.


    ¡°There¡¯s only one thing we can do,¡± Todd said, looking around the group, disappointed to see just how few of them had steel left in their spine, considering the fight hadn¡¯t even started yet.


    ¡°Well, maybe we should send for help first,¡± one of the men said nervously. Todd noted that it was the same man who¡¯d beenining about how he wanted to get back into the fray instead of babysitting dignitaries between important events and rolled his eyes.


    ¡°Don¡¯t you understand? We are the help. The only ones that areing to save those people are us. The question you need to ask yourself is, is that armor just for show?¡± Todd asked, drawing his sword, ¡°Or are youing with me?¡±


    Todd focused hard for a minute, offering a silent prayer to Siddrim as he squeezed his eyes shut, and when he opened them again, he was pleased to find his sword was gently glowing as it became an undeniable symbol of righteous power. He still didn¡¯t have a tenth of the power that Brother Faerbar did, but even if his sight had weakened, the strength of his devotion was growing, and though he could not yet heal the sick or wounded with Siddrim¡¯s love, he was now trusted to wield his god¡¯s light as he charged into battle.


    ¡°While we are servants of the church, this is really beginning to look like a job for The Order of Purgative me; I think that perhaps we should seal this building and wait for¡­¡± The warrior¡¯s words died in his throat as Todd¡¯s sword began to glow with the deep white light of the divine.


    ¡°We are the light,¡± Todd said with onest look before he turned and went down the stairs. ¡°And the light reveals all traces of cowardice and despair. We will send your youngest warrior back to Siddrimar to warn the powers that be of what happened should the worst befall us, but everyone else fights. Do you understand?¡±


    Shamed by his example, they all agreed. Some were more enthusiastic than others, but every man that stood there eventually nodded or said some word of assent.


    After that, they faced the challenge of opening the door wide enough to let young Mardem out without letting the manic townspeople back in the temple, but with twelve strong warriors, they managed easily enough.


    ¡°You understand,¡± Todd said to their messenger. ¡°To Siddrimar straight away. If you keep a good pace, you should be able to reach it in five days. Go straight to the Temrs if none of the priests will see you, and tell them everything you saw.¡±


    He promised that he would, and with that, they mmed the door shut again and then turned and descended into the depths. Even though Todd went first, and his sword lit the way, most of those that apanied him were afraid, and none of them were certain of what they would find in the dark.


    The stairs circled the rim of the wellpletely twice before they reached the bottom. Todd had imagined he would find a ughterhouse down here on par with the scene from the Garvin Pce ballroom, but instead, he found the ritual implements of the alter sitting just where they¡¯d been left, the undisturbed bowl of blood, and an empty doorway leading further into the dark.


    ¡°Are you sure this isn¡¯t just more of the temple?¡± the Bishop¡¯s guard captain asked as his men formed up with Todd at the bottom of the well. ¡°It looks like someone has put a lot of work into this ce.¡±


    ¡°They have,¡± Todd agreed, eyeing the walls with concern. These were not the same rough-hewn walls that he¡¯d found beneath Fallravea. Someone has spent a great deal of time and care creating whatever this was. These were polished smooth, and iid with gold and precious stones. Beyond the doorway, he could see the hints of murals painted on both of the walls.


    It was clear this had been a project that had been worked on for at least as long as the temple that loomed above them, but it had one more thing that would never be found in a temple of Siddrim: darkness.


    Not the sort that made it hard to see. The kind that radiated in evil ces. It flowed like a river down this unknown hallway, and Todd was so desperately afraid of what he would find at the end of that torrent of evil that, for a moment, he went weak in the knees.

 Chapter 78: The Fourth Horseman

    Chapter 78: The Fourth Horseman


    Passing through the shadows back to the Lich¡¯sir was a miserable experience for Krulm¡¯venor. During that brief trip into the dark, he felt like every bone in his metal body had its marrow reced with ice, and even though the process was almost instant, he felt deeply disoriented by the lingering feeling that he¡¯d been lost in the darkness between Mournden and summoning circle the Lich had built on the fourth floor of its ever-expandingir for weeks not seconds.


    As bad as that little jaunt was, though, it wasn¡¯t as miserable as spending weeks walking back to the surface while he held the severed head of the rock creature he¡¯d in though. The defeated monster couldn¡¯t, or wouldn¡¯t die, and it looked at him with such sad eyes whenever his fires red to life to fight off anything that thought to cross his path.


    The thing tried to speak, but no matter how many times its mouth moved, there were no words. Krulm¡¯venor didn¡¯t envy it, but itcked the motivation to disobey the Lich. Not anymore, and certainly not for this. Maybe if it had been a dwarven construct, he could have found some flicker of defiance, but now all he could do was use thest vestiges of his willpower to try to block out the worst of the voices that echoed in its skull.


    They didn¡¯t even sound like goblins anymore. That was the worst part. Every deranged, half-broken soul in his mind sounded like his own voice now. Like he was talking to himself, or maybe that he sounded like a goblin now. It was hard to say, and that was a subject that didn¡¯t bear too much thinking about.


    It was only when he finally reached the Lich¡¯s experimentalboratory that he could set down his burden in a dish of lead prepared for this purpose. The Lich did not trust that even that formidableyer would be enough to imprison the earth spirit until it understood its nature better, so it was held separated from the ground by three drudges that would hold that burden uiningly for all eternity if necessary.


    As Krulm¡¯venor watched, the thing¡¯s face began to twist into an expression of agony, and its voiceless mouth opened in a silent scream. That was a moment that the fire spirit understood only too well. The Lich had torn him to pieces and then picked through the ashes for enough of a spark to rekindle him a hundred times as it pried the secrets out of his soul.


    All any of them could hope for was that the Lich killed it on ident in the course of its experiments. That was unlikely, though, especially on such a durable specimen.


    Krulm¡¯venor stood there nkly, waiting for new orders. He worried that if he turned away too soon, the Lich might force him to watch the whole thing, but that was not to be, for he was quickly ordered to another room, and the dancing blue mes showed the way.


    ¡°I¡¯ve been busy while you¡¯ve been gone, Krulm¡¯venor,¡± it whispered darkly in his ear. ¡°All these months, I¡¯ve been thinking about how I could best reward you for all the loyalty you showed me on your recent mission to the dwarven kingdoms.¡±


    Krulm¡¯venor shuddered at those words, certain nothing pleasant was going to follow them. The only thing he¡¯d been loyal to was his own kin, and that would cost him now.


    ¡°It¡¯s been such a lonely time for you, and I must confess that your body has held up poorly under the strain. I thought it would do better, but then I thought that about you too,¡± the darkness in his mind gloated, momentarily quieting the chorus of other voices. ¡°So I¡¯ve decided to make sure you¡¯re never lonely again.¡±


    As Krulm¡¯venor opened the door that was indicated with numb fingers, he beheld a series of goblin skeletons cast in metal. There had to be at least fifty of them, and each was more twisted than thest. Krulm¡¯venor realized that the Lich must have gone through many iterations to find something truly terrible to repay him for his resistance, and that sent a shiver of fear down his spine as he looked at the ugly bronze things and tried to figure out which one he was going to be trapped inside.


    For a moment, as the fire spirit looked at the slumped and twisted metal figures, he considered apologizing and swearing that he would do better. Only his pride stopped him from pleading. Well, his pride and his certainty that it wouldn¡¯t do any good.


    Instead, he asked, ¡°Which is to be mine, then,¡± tly.


    The only answer came in the form of a drudge that moved out of the shadows and opened thentern. Krulm¡¯venor tensed, and he almost ripped the thing¡¯s head off rather than letting it do what it had been ordered to, but before he built up the rage necessary to defy the shadow that was smothering him, it was done. With a single crude motion, the monstrosity plucked the glowing blue coal from his skull and rendering him nothing but a helpless disembodied spirit once more.


    Then he was carried over to thergest of the goblin bodies and forced inside of it. A head shorter than his old body, but a head taller than the rest of the bodies in the room, it felt somehow ustrophobicpared to his old body. It was like his fire wasn¡¯t getting the air it needed to truly breathe, and he started to hyperventte, even though he had no lungs.


    ¡°Yes, it will be a tight fit,¡± the Lich whispered. ¡°I had to make room for a lot more than you in there, after all.¡±


    ¡°What¡­ what did you do?¡± Krulm¡¯venor asked as the fire began to spread to his bones, and the goblin souls hidden away inside slowly came to life to feel his heat. In hisst body, they had been processed, and so they were iplete and fragmented, but here every one of them was whole, and it hungered for him.


    ¡°I¡¯ve made sure that you¡¯ll never be alone again,¡± the Lich responded. ¡°Now that you¡¯ve had a chance to bathe in the souls of your old tribe, I trust you¡¯ll have no problem integrating this much strength into you for the dark days that lie ahead.¡±


    Krulm¡¯venor wanted to answer, but he couldn¡¯t. The first goblin had alreadytched its teeth into his throat and was trying to murder it. The fire spirit fought back with every ounce of strength he had as an all-out melee quickly developed in his soul between the part of him that was still mostly dwarven and the dozens of tainted goblins that were trying to devour those parts.


    Physically he only stood there trembling as his violent and inhuman screams echoed down the hallways of thebyrinthineir. As he struggled, the fire in his eyes and in his chest began to burn brighter and brighter, and soon he erupted into a nova of me that filled the room with a blue fire and burned away everything mmable into ash.


    The shadow of the Lich retreated briefly from the brightness, but even as Krulm¡¯venor started to get a handle on the unruly parts of his soul, he noticed something strange. All of the other goblin skeletons came slowly and shudderingly to life as their eyes filled with fire and their limbs began to spasm and jerk.


    A few seconds after the first one came to life, it charged Krulm¡¯venor, leaping into the air to pounce. He raised his arms to defend himself, but it vanished almost as soon as it touched him, filling up part of the empty space inside of this strange body that he¡¯d found so constricting until now.


    While he struggled to understand what had just happened and why his soul was being flooded with even more goblins bent on devouring him, another one of the smaller goblin bodies merged with him, followed by another and another.


    Less than a minuteter, the fire spirit was lost in a sea of screams and pain inside his own head. He¡¯d been able to subdue a dozen of these creatures, but there were a hundred now, and they were all trying to murder him. The only shame was that none of them could die, not on the battlefield of his mind. They could only keep killing each other over and over as he endured both the agony his tormentors inflicted on him as well as the pain he inflicted on him in return.


    All he could do was fall to his knees and scream as the Lich left him to get acquainted with his new body.


    Once that little game was over with, the Lich turned his full attention from the tormented godling and back to the interesting specimen he¡¯d brought with him from the deeps. The Lich could easily exin the purpose of Krulm¡¯venor¡¯s new body another day, but the dwarf wasn¡¯tpletely stupid, and it was confident that he would figure it out in time.


    The whole thing had been created using tricks it had discovered as it studied the strange shadow entities that Krulm¡¯venor had been kind enough to feed it. The 66 bodies were one, but they were also many, and thanks to the divisible nature of fire, they were also many. The godling would be a terrifying army unto himself. At least, he would if the process of integrating so many other souls that were needed to operate and drive so many other hands and feet didn¡¯t drive himpletely mad first.


    The Lich believed that the experiment would be a sess, though, and if it wasn¡¯t, he had many other dwarf souls stockpiled now. It could just keep trying until it found someone strong enough to endure the unendurable, and then it would have its third horseman of the apocalypseplete.


    Now it needed to figure out how to yolk this earth elemental to a body of lead and stone, and it would have a fourth, which would give it the weapons it needed to battle with any champion of any god that might oppose it.


    The Lich studied its trembling soul and noted that it, itself contained many smaller pieces that might have been the souls of its gnomish summoners or ancestors, locking it into ce. It would start there, in its examination, and expand outward. After all, when unraveling an intractable knot, one needed only to find a single loose end, and eventually, everything would unravel, and all would be made clear.


    Clear was a hardener concept when working with stone than with fire or water, though, and it couldn¡¯t even chain the thing to a body until it understood the creature¡¯s true name for the binding spells. There was a monstrous strength, though, hidden in that pathetic, half-shattered head, and the Lich desperately wanted to add yet another element to its dark collection.


    No, it just didn¡¯t want to. It needed to. The stormclouds of war darkened the horizon now, and as soon as the first battle was fought, all the other gods that were in league with the lord of light would send their followers to strike against it. The Lich needed to be ready for anything because hiding would never be possible again in a few more days.


    After that, it would consume the world, or it would be struck down in the attempt. There was no third option.

 Chapter 79: -Cautious Decent

    Chapter 79: -Cautious Decent


    The hallway that left the well they¡¯d descended quickly split again and again, branching in all directions. There was no danger of getting lost just yet, though. This wasn¡¯t just because of the river of darkness he followed as his heart pounded in Todd¡¯s chest. It was also because all of the side passaged quickly developed an unfinished and irregr look to them. Only this main passage had been carefully fitted with red tiles and gold trim.


    Before they¡¯d decided to go deeper, Todd had ordered some of the men bringing up the rear to grab red candles from the alter so that they could mark the path in case they needed to beat a hasty retreat. That seemed almost unnecessary, though, as their procession cautiously made its way down a passage that really did seem to belong to The Temple of the Dawn.


    Todd wanted to believe that was true. He wanted to turn the corner and find Brother Verdenian and all of the other visiting priests delivering some sacrament in a second chapel. To remind the people of the importance of pushing back the darkness or some such. Other men were whispering about such things behind him as they moved forward, but Todd couldn¡¯t, though. He could see evil bleeding from the walls here, held back by a thin veneer of artistry. Sometimes the ck clouds were so thick he felt it might choke him, and when he considered just how much his powers had waned in thest year or two, he knew that meant something terrible awaited them.


    Ironically, if he¡¯d possessed the power of sight he¡¯d had as a boy, he¡¯d likely be unable to even set foot down here, he thought darkly. Still, Siddrim¡¯s gifts had not deserted him. They had merely transformed. He could wield the light better every year, and healing himself with it was also possible. That hadn¡¯t been true even a year ago, but still, he worried that it wouldn¡¯t be enough.


    They¡¯d passed perhaps thirty side passages and walked for several hundred feet in an almost straight line before their gilded walkway came to an end in a chapel that mocked the one above. It was there they found the first bodies, and Todd¡¯s heart sank.


    The Temple of the Dawn was a bright room dominated by the color white and ented with red, pink, orange, and gilded statues. Thisrge round room was simr in many ways but inverted. The white pirs were ck, the gold statues were tarnished bronze, and the sunset color scheme was reced with dark indigo and violets. It was aplete inversion, and though they hadn¡¯t yet found the parishioners, it was decorated with the bodies of the missing priests.


    Above the altar, the Bishop had been crucified, and his red robes were stained almost to ck by arterial blood. Strangely, though, he¡¯d died with a smile on his face. He wasn¡¯t the only one that had been murdered here, though. All the other priests had been hung by their feet on each of the pirs and bled like cattle with their throats slit. Only Brother Verdenin was absent.


    ¡°What in the name of sweet merciful light is this!¡± one guard wailed. Todd looked over to see if he¡¯d cracked ad saw tears in the eyes of the guard captain as he looked up at his now-dead charge.


    Sadly, Todd realized the warrior was at least as upset by how bad this would make him look as he was by the man¡¯s death, and he shook his head in disgust. He looked around the room at the men with him and the growing certainty that none of them except for perhaps him was ready to fight whatever it was they might find down here.


    ¡°Alright, everyone,¡± Todd said, ¡°I think this is officially more than we can handle on our own. We¡¯ll cut the bodies down, bring them to the surface and then post sentries on the stairs until¡­¡±


    Todd¡¯s words trailed off as bells somewhere above him began to ring in the dark, and the bodies that were apparently strung up to the ppers of them began to sway like morbid wind chimes. He couldn¡¯t feel a breeze, but he could feel somethinging. Something dark.


    ¡°Brace yourself, men! Its¡ª¡± his words were lost as a torrent of darkness filled the room, extinguishing every source of light except for the dimmest glow of his sword. That was barely enough to see his hands, though. It was the barest ribbon of light, but Todd held firm and resolved to use it like apass needle to find his way back.


    ¡°Steady, everyone. It¡¯s some kind of illusion,¡± Todd cried out, trying to overpower both the flow noise of whatever this was as well as the panics, screams, and shouts of his own people. ¡°If we just stick together, we can make our way back out, and we¡¯lle back for help.¡±


    That seemed to calm a few of the men down, and as he walked back the way they came, he heard a few people yelling for others to join them, and the tter of mail and booted feet quickly followed him.


    Todd was petrified. He hadn¡¯t even seen a single zombie, and he was already more frightened than he¡¯d been while his temr brothers were fighting the tentacled beast in Oroza¡¯s undertemple. How could he have missed this, he wondered? How could anyone?


    The image from his sickness about the open wound in the earth overflowing with evil came back to him then. Had Siddrim been trying to tell him something? Had his own mind? Surely if the god of light had known that something this dark lurked beneath the surface, he would have warned the church.


    That meant he didn¡¯t know, Todd realized. Perhaps the depth that it was buried, and the pollution of the nearby river had been enough to hide it even from the eyes of the divine. Todd was no theologian and could not speak on such things, but it seemed to be the only answer. They¡¯d stumbled onto something terrible, though, and they had to warn someone, even if that someone was only the Lord of Light himself.


    That meant that Brother Verdenin had to be part of this, though, didn¡¯t it? He¡¯d built the temple. He¡¯d chosen every specification. He¡¯d hidden the altar area for months beneath his tent for months while this strange underground mechanism was installed. He¡¯d done everything, and the person that was supposed to be watching him the whole time had missed it somehow.


    Todd sighed in frustration as the pieces only fell together toote, but after a moment of self-pity, he forced himself to refocus. He¡¯d led these men in here thinking he could be the hero, and he had to lead them out of here.


    ¡°We¡¯ve got to be getting close,¡± one of the men called out, ¡°Right?¡±


    ¡°We need to get out of here before whatever is down here finds us!¡± another called out.


    ¡°I feel like there¡¯s something in here with us,¡± a third warrior called out with a voice that sounded like his spirit was about to break.


    ¡°Strength, brothers!¡± Todd called out, trying to rally them. ¡°We¡¯re almost out of this pit. I see a light up ahead, and if we¡­¡± his voice trailed off as he realized the color of the light was wrong. Was something waiting there for them, or had he led them astray.


    The gloom slowly faded, receding like a tide, and Todd entered a room sorge he couldn¡¯t see the walls with the dim lighting from the blue fire of the brazier that sat there balefully. Todd had been sure that he was following the same richly decorated passage they¡¯de in through. He¡¯d been able to glimpse the glimmer of its gilding from his sword, but as he looked to his side, he saw that illusion was fading, revealing nothing but the rough-hewn walls of a tunnel that looked shockingly simr to those he¡¯d once delved into beneath Fallravea.


    ¡°Something strange is here. I think we need to turn around and¡­¡± Todd spoke as he turned all the way around the face of his men.


    They weren¡¯t there when he turned around. Rather, there were only pieces of them. Something dark and sinuous, made of tentacles of shadows, was holding the heads and feet of several men.


    ¡°Oh no, Brother Graff - we¡¯ve been sliced to pieces; whatever shall we do?¡± the headless guard captain asked in a voice that was a perfect mimicry of the man¡¯s voice that he¡¯d spoken with when he¡¯d been alive.


    ¡°You killed us all, sir!¡± another head shouted in mockery, ¡°Whatever shall be of you now?!¡±


    Todd gritted his teeth and ignored their words as heshed out with his glowing sword in a fierce lunge. The thing that was holding the objects didn¡¯t drop a single one as it deftly wove to the side of Todd¡¯s sizzling de. He followed up with a powerful sh, hoping to catch at least a few stray tentacles, but the monstrosity danced out of reach with ease.


    ¡°Let¡¯s not fight among ourselves,¡± the guardmander¡¯s head begged. ¡°I am, but a simple messengeres to deliver you the good news.¡±


    ¡°You are an unclean spirit, and I shall purge you by fire and light!¡± Todd roared, taking two steps forward as he tried hard to bring this monstrosity down. How many men had left that awful chapel alive with him? How many had died while he led them in the wrong direction? Todd did his best to ignore these questions, but they ate at him with every swing and every miss.


    ¡°You¡¯ve been chosen to see what no living eyes have ever glimpsed before, Todd Graff,¡± the abomination said from all three mouths at once, creating a horrible chorus. ¡°Behold - the true power of what is about to be unleashed on the unsuspecting world of light.¡±


    ¡°I need to see no more than you to know¡­¡± The words died in Todd¡¯s throat as suddenly the lit brazier near him and several further back red violently to life.


    Blue mes taller than him lept ten feet in the air, and Todd could feel the chill radiating off of them from here. That alone would have been enough to give him pause, but the things that they revealed made him stare ckjawed and the abominable sights.


    The room was massive. It wasrger than thergest warehouse in ckwater, and it was filled with rank after rank of the living dead. There were hundreds of the monstrosities, or perhaps thousands standing there at perfect attention like they were in hibernation. They weren¡¯t, though.


    Todd could see the evil magic that animated them and knew that with a single word from their master, they would all swarm him. Even with Siddrim¡¯s light, he wouldst only seconds. These were not the simple reanimated corpses he¡¯d fought previously. These were made for war, and no two were made identically.


    Some had extra arms, or extra legs, most had weaponsshed to their hands so they could never be disarmed, and all of them had heavy armor riveted to their body. Each one of these would be hard to kill, and as soon as they did, they¡¯d be reced by another.


    It was a terrifying sight.


    ¡°What in the name of the light,¡± Todd gasped. As he spoke, every head in the room swiveled to face him in a single motion.


    ¡°And that starts the timer,¡± the mocking monstrosity told him on all three voices as it produced an hourss full of gold dust from somewhere. ¡°You now have one hour left to live. After that, my master will scourge your soul from your flesh. Do try to enjoy it.¡±


    Todd swallowed hard, not sure of what to make of such a strange threat. If he was going to die, why not just strike him down on the spot like it had all of the other men that hade down here?


    Todd didn¡¯t have the answer, but that didn¡¯t stop him froming back the way he¡¯de, ignoring his tormentor as he desperately searched for the way out.

 Chapter 80: Kingdom of the Dead

    Chapter 80: Kingdom of the Dead


    The next few minutes of Todd¡¯s life were stark terror, and he remembered nothing of them beyond his surprise that he didn¡¯t hear that massive legion of the dead mobilizing to follow him. Instead, the silence was almost deafening as he raced back to the chapel and from there to the surface.


    At least, that was the n. The chapel wasn¡¯t there, though. Even though he was sure he¡¯d walked here in a straight line, the way back was anything but, and eventually, he had to pause and breathe as he forced himself to calm down.


    ¡°Running blindly will only get you more lost,¡± he chastised himself. ¡°Think. How can you find your way back to where you were?¡±


    Todd pictured the sphemous room in his mind¡¯s eye, studying every detail for something that might help him, but the only thing he could think of was that river of dark energy, and it was much too muddled here to be much help. Then he remembered the bells. Perhaps if he listened carefully, he could hear their gentle swaying and find his way back.


    Todd stood there for several minutes, barely breathing, as he closed his eyes and tried to pick up the sound of anything in the darkness. There was nothing clear, but eventually, he thought he heard the sound of something metallic and made his way toward it.


    Progress was slow, though. Each time he found a new intersection, he would have to stop and strain his hearing to decide which way he should go, and the intersections were constant.


    Fortunately, as he walked, the sound he was listening to slowly got louder. Eventually, he realized it was not the bells he was looking for, though, but the sound of a smithy. Still, he kept going. He wasmitted now, and perhaps he could find a way out through the chimney they vented their forges through or something.


    He wasn¡¯t sure exactly what he was expecting when he made it into a room that was lit by the dull red glow of half a dozen forges along with the light of his sword, but whatever it was, it wasn¡¯t what he found.


    Each forge was hard at work, and each smith that worked them was different and terrifying in their own way. The only thing more terrifying than the flickering, bizarre shadows they cast while they worked was the creatures themselves. Three were dwarven skeletons hammered in perfect sync while the spirits that were chained to their bodies struggled visibly to escape. They were in the midst of creating beautiful weapons that Todd could admire even from here, which was in sharp contrast to the other abominations.


    The other three smiths were misshapen entities that had been burned time and again. Each had a different number of limbs, hands, and hammers, and one of the abominations bent the red hot metal with iron hands rather than use any tools at all.


    A few of them looked up at him briefly as he entered the room but then went back to what they were doing. The zombies that were bringing them pieces of metal and taking away finished pieces paid him no mind either.


    It was surreal. To Todd, this almost had to be a nightmare because if it wasn¡¯t, then he¡¯d managed to descend into the underworld that he¡¯d read about in the scriptures.


    There was simply no third choice.


    Todd walked quickly and quietly across the room to the far exit because it seemedrger than the way he¡¯de, which was as good a reason as any to think he was going in the right direction. He wasn¡¯t, though.


    He found that out quickly as he followed the zombies carrying away freshly forged pieces of armor. Even if they paid him no mind, the ces in this area were just abyrinthine series of storerooms that appeared increasingly insane until he turned around and went back the other way.


    The whole area seemed less like a fortress and more like a wasps nest or a bee hive. The rooms rarely had just four sides, the ground was almost but not quite t, and the walls were never flush nor square. It was a madhouse, and every detail he noticed proudly disyed that it was amicable to human life, and yet so far, nothing had struck him down.


    Todd¡¯s thoughts turned to that strange mocking monstrosity as he wandered blind. How many minutes did he have until that hourss ticked down, he wondered. How much longer until they released the hounds and unleashed a tide of death that he could never hope to fight against.


    It was in that moment of reflection that Todd made his peace with the fact that he was going to die. There was nothing that could stop it, no matter how hard he fought. All he could do was hope that he died well and took a few of these things down with him.


    It was a nice thought, and he almost believed it. Then he saw the thing lumbering through the shadows. Todd froze for a moment but reminded himself that he needed to at least die well. That was enough to get him to lift his sword as the thing strode toward him across therge room.


    As it got closer, Todd could see that its skin had been reced with some sort of bronze scale mail and that its eyes burned with a dull hatred. It might have been an ogre or a troll in life. Todd couldn¡¯t say.


    Too many of its features were gone. Something had carved this monster to pieces and then put a siege engine back together with them, and no human could have a chance again it. Sill Todd stood there, ready to strike.


    And then it just walked by him like he wasn¡¯t even a threat that merited its grim attention. Todd hated himself for the relief he felt at that moment and began running in the other direction as fast as he could. He¡¯d been brave enough to stand his ground, but the moment was gone, and bravery was quickly bing a scarce resource down here.


    After that, he found more rooms. Most were filled with more legions of zombies, or maybe it was the same room he was crossing at different points. Todd couldn¡¯t be sure. This much darkness was making him feel ustrophobic and short of breath. It was bing hard to think, and for the first time since the chapel, he started to pray.


    ¡°Lord of Light, hear me now and know that your world is in jeopardy. Know that even in this pit, I speak your name and remember your words,¡± he said to himself, first haltingly and then with confidence as he began to push away the evil that pervaded everything, and his sword started to glow a bit brighter. ¡°You have not abandoned me, and I will not abandon my duty. We will shine in the darkest of ces and burn away the shadows¡­¡±


    Todd¡¯s words trailed off as he noticed the darkness flowing around him again. Until now, the wholeplex he walked through had been so suffused with evil he could barely see it, but now that his devotion had pushed it back, there was an ind of stillness in the midst of the dark, and it was that stillness that finally allowed him to see how it was flowing once more, so he decided to follow it.


    Trying to go upstream to find a way out might not work, but all of this evil was slowing to a single point, and he would y whatever it was he found there. He would do at least that much.


    ¡°In your name Siddrim,¡± he whispered as he started to walk forward.


    The darkness was almost flowing around him now. Like a tide. Like a force of nature. Slowly it led him through twists and turns into what he imagined would lead him to the very center of the earth. He doubted he¡¯d survive the experience, but then, he¡¯d already decided he was going to die. Now it was just a question of where and how.


    If he was going to die, then he would at least spend his life destroying whatever foul creature he could. Step by step and turn by turn, his body began to feel a dread that was almost paralyzing. Every part of Todd¡¯s body screamed for him to turn back, but he pushed through it until he finally found what he was looking for.


    In a small, dark room, there was a strange sort of shrine. Against both walls stood the mummified corpses of lizardmen that had been there a very long time, judging by the coating of dust on them. Was this some sort of an ancient temple to a forgotten god, he wondered? Was that why no one had known it was here?


    That certainly made at least some sense, judging by the details. Behind those vignt corpses were carefully crafted strands and sheets of precious metals that decorated the walls and ceiling, and every part of the rough-hewn walls they did not cover was covered in splotches of mold and decay. None of that tore his eyes away from the strange metal sculpture in the center of the room, though.


    It was a man or at least something like a man made of gold. Todd gripped his sword tighter with both hands as he forced himself to advance one more step against some impossible force that made the very air freeze solid.


    If this had been one of his nightmares, right now would have been the part where you couldn¡¯t escape no matter how fast you ran. He was determined not to let that happen, though. No matter how slowly he moved, he would move, and step by step, he approached the unnatural idol as he raised his sword so he could cleave the gaudy thing in two.


    Todd took a deep breath and then exploded downward, letting out all of the tension and panic that had built up inside him into a single powerful blow that might have been enough to strike a cksmith¡¯s anvil in two.


    Only the blow nevernded. As his sword de arced down toward the idol, suddenly, two of its arms shed outwards and caught the strike effortlessly between its palms before twisting slightly and snapping the de off just above the halfway point. Where the glowing de met the profane metal, it smoldered briefly, and then after the de was snapped, the light went out in the portion, darkening the room as the metal ttered to the floor.


    Todd stood there in disbelief at what had just happened. Lit by only half his sword, the room was darker than it had been, and when the idol suddenly stood, he stumbled back, falling on his ass in the process. Though he¡¯d thought that the Lizards might spring to life at any moment, he¡¯d never suspected that the statue itself would move. But it did, and as it stepped toward him, he felt a level of malice that made it hard to think.


    ¡°Yes, you¡¯ll do nicely,¡± the thing rattled in a dry, metallic voice. ¡°You are thest man that shall ever touch me, and I would cleave your soul from your flesh if I did not have another use for you. I¡­¡±


    Todd didn¡¯t stay to listen. He couldn¡¯t. Every word made his mind ache. It was worse than fingernails on a chalkboard. So he fled, gripping onto hisst shard of light as he sought to find some escape from this madness.


    As he ran, zombies started to appear,ing from this way and that, like they had him surrounded. Fortunately, though, there was always at least one way free of the news that the abominations were attempting to draw tightly, and he was able to break free.


    Eventually, his random path managed to lead back to the under temple, and from there, he knew the way. He darted back toward the surface and the hint of light that was promised at the far end of the tunnel. He could hear the monsters behind him, though. Their terrible moans and groans overwhelmed almost everything now, and the only sounds he could hear above that was the hammering of his own heart and the metallic footsteps of the evil incarnate that was slowly walking toward him.

 Chapter 81: Incarnated

    Chapter 81: Incarnated


    Even as he ran up the stairs, Todd was sure that something would grab him and drag him back down into the darkness. It was inevitable. This had all just been a game, somehow. Monsters like this would never let him free. They would just torment him, and all he could think about was the mocking creature with the tentacles he¡¯d seen earlier and how easily it could grab him and rip him to pieces just like it had done to everyone else.


    That¡¯s not what happened, though. Somehow, some way, thanks to divine providence, he managed to break free into the light of the Sunrise Temple once more. It was a miracle, and almost certainly due to how high the sun still hung in the sky, but he didn¡¯t stop to thank lord Siddrim. Instead, since the altar was still sunk 30 feet into the ground, he ran to the nearest shrine and began to pray as fervently as he ever had in his life.


    One miracle wasn¡¯t going to be enough for today. If he and every other soul in this town was going to survivee nightfall when the pit began to vomit forth abominations that should never have been created, and certainly shouldn¡¯t be allowed to exist.


    At first, those prayers were silent affairs as he tried to hide the fear that made his voice quaver like a coward. Soon enough, those whispers became mumbles, and then after a few minutes, he was shouting and begging to be heard by his divine lord.


    ¡°Lord of Light, hear me, even if you never have before nor ever will again. They areing,¡± he pleaded. ¡°They have murdered your priests, killed your men at arms, and soon they will rise up to the surface and take the life of every soul in this thriving town that we have sworn to safeguard. You are the only one who can prevent this. You are¡ª¡±


    The shrine to Saint Kellerus, the benighted, that Todd was praying at, was a simple affair. It was a statue of the blind old man gazing out sightlessly into the world from where he sat in the shade near the wall, but something caused the sun to shift, and slowly its rays climbed toward Todd, where he knelt and wept. When they reached him, touching just the heel of his right boot, suddenly he felt a peace that he had never known before as Lord Siddrim personally intervened in his life.


    ¡®Peace, my child, for I am with you,¡¯ the deep voice thrummed through Todd. ¡®Show me this dire threat, and we shall see what we can do to stop it.¡¯


    Todd wanted to answer. He wanted to exin. He couldn¡¯t, though. Instead, he knelt there transfixed as the Lord of Light began to sift through his memories. The process was slow at first, as he was forced to relive all those terrible moments he¡¯d suffered through in the dark.


    The mocking under temple. The martyred priests. The beheaded guards. Room after room after room of godless monstrosities. Moment by moment, those visions sped up as Siddrim looked deeper and deeper into the darkness for a true understanding of what it was he would need to purge.


    It was an awful experience for Todd. Even with his devotion and his own gifts of the light, he was experiencing too much of Siddrim¡¯s might at the same time as he was being forced to remember too many awful things, and inevitably, he began to wretch. He simply didn¡¯t have a choice.


    When he was done, he felt better, then his god spoke to him again. ¡®This is a task befitting of a crusade, but weck time for such an undertaking.¡¯


    ¡°What should I¡­ I mean, we do, then?¡± Todd asked.


    ¡°Even at times when an army would be better suited to the task, all I truly need is one righteous man so that I may burn away the dark with heavenly fires,¡± Siddrim preached, ¡°But you are frail, my son. Your soul is poisoned, and you may not survive the experience.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t care,¡± Todd answered calmly as he remembered his terrible sickness and the visions he¡¯d experienced a year ago. ¡°If I am to die, then let it be for this moment and in this cause. We must do everything we can to cauterize this wound before it festers further.¡±


    ¡®Then walk toward the light, my son, and let it embrace you,¡¯ the Lord of Lightmanded him.


    Todd did so without hesitation. Even without a weapon and the clear knowledge that this might kill him, he strode toward where the sunbeams streaming through the ceiling¡¯s oculus rested on the floor.


    It was after two now, so it was nted far from where it had been when it had still touched the altar. Instead, it now rested near the feet of the shrine to St Ruthrin the Executioner. Todd smiled at that irony. For the amount of death that was going to follow whatever happened next, there could be no better choice than an executioner.


    As Todd stood in the light, breathing deeply to calm himself, he felt a warmth began to creep across his back and around his body as the light suffused him. In his mind, he imagined that it was burning away the darkness within him, but as he watched, his clothing and armor burst into mes and melted off him as ash and g, leaving him unharmed as the light itself began to harden around him into a full suit of glowing te mail.


    As this happened, he felt himself starting to fade and diminish as he finally understood. He wasn¡¯t to be strengthened by Siddrim but taken over by the god. Todd didn¡¯t struggle or fight as the deity took possession of him, body and soul, and he faded into the background. It was a strange experience, and it was only when that waspleted that the giant wings of molten gold sprang from his back.


    He doubted that even the strongest could have survived this. Siddrim had taken everything and made it his own. When he was gone again, Todd would be nothing but a husk of the man that he¡¯d once been.


    He did not feel angry or cheated, though. He knew that he might be able to y five of those zombies or perhaps ten. As Lord Siddrim¡¯s avatar, though¡­ Together they would y everyst monster in that ursed hive and purge it with fire before there was nothing left of him, and that was a sacrifice he was willing to ept.


    . . .


    As Siddrim¡¯s power coalesced within the wed vessel, it struggled to focus as it slowly took control. Todd was devout. That was beyond question. However, something about him was off. That troubled Siddrim much less than the struggle it took toe to grips with being so much less than he¡¯d been moments ago.


    He knew that the rest of his glory still lit the world, guided his flock, and protected the world from the darkness, of course, but the fragment of him that was now bound to the body of this mortal thought of itself as Siddrim as well, and that was always a confusing moment.


    Still, it passed, and as soon as it was done, he began to focus on the battle toe. He had not seen a hive with so much death and decay in decades or perhaps a century. Perhaps it had been when his forces had rallied an army and driven north to purge the cursed city of Zackeir¡¯syon from the malignancy that had been growing there for decades and the army of shades it had devoured in all those years of solitude.


    Evil collected in lonely, forgotten ces. Siddrim knew that better than anyone. What he didn¡¯t understand was how this ce had gotten so bad without anyone noticing. He¡¯d seen the taint in the river growing until his followers had struck down Oroza and her wicked flock, and he had rejoiced as the influence slowly left all the ces that the river named for her touched slowly began to heal.


    But not even in all that time had he noted that ckwater was any more tainted than the rest of the world. If anything, it had been healing for decades longer as its tainted, stagnant waters slowly dried up, and the foul mud became fertile soil.


    In the end, he was forced to agree with the theory of his warrior. This had to be the work of something ancient that hadid dormant for a very long time. If that was the case, though, why would it pick now to strike? What was to be gained by it?


    One thing was certain, though. Whatever the evil was down there, it had managed to get its hooks into the priest that had designed and built this temple. It was still holy ground, but Siddrim could feel the cracks. When the battle whichy ahead was done, he would have the ce leveled and built again from scratch with more traditional techniques.


    For now, though, it was as good a battlefield as any. Would it be enough, though? Would his enemy be stupid enough to try to face off against a God in his ce of power, or would he have to descend into the darkness to face his enemy there?


    He¡¯d gone into the depths a hundred times to face other foes, but it wasn¡¯t his preferred strategy. Not only were his powers much more limited in such foul ces, but the enemy had likely spent decades toy any number of terribly lethal traps.


    Though any weapon would have a hard enough time trying to prate the armor of righteousness that Siddrim was cloaked in, the magics of the dark were an especially bad choice. He reviewed the dim memories of the leviathan that the temrs had fought years before and smiled. His aura alone would be enough to burn away anything made in that image.


    Brother Graff believed that both of these dungeons bore the same fingerprints, and Siddrim was inclined to agree with the man¡¯s assessment. Perhaps it was the evil below him that had somehow managed the taint the small goddess Oroza after all, he mused. Still - these things could be investigated by his priests once the abominations were dead.


    As Siddrim considered all of these things and tried to decide what the correct course of action was, he heard a grinding of stone on stone and knew that his enemy, or at least some messenger on its half, was approaching. It used the tainted altar as a sort of lift to raise it slowly back to ground level.


    Given that the sun was still out, it was a strange choice, but Siddrim would notin. It was probably just a feint to close the door before he could go down there and kill every piece of necromantic scum that had been resurrected by his enemy, but he would wait and see.


    After all, if need been, he could focus the light until it melted the very stone or rip those giant stones out of the earth and forge his own path into the depths.


    As a hunched figure cloaked in ck sackcloth began to appear on the dias, Siddrim red his wings out and summoned a sword giant broad sword in the form of a semitransparent beam of crepuscr light that was sharp enough to cut through any steel. Then he steeled himself. Whatever what going to happen next, he was ready.

 Chapter 82: Divine Fury

    Chapter 82: Divine Fury


    The altar glided to a stop, fixing in its original ce as the hunched figure began tough. It was a rasping, dry sound that sounded utterly forced. That only made it more bizarre, though. Then the thing began to point at Siddrim¡¯s avatar, though it did not hesitate.


    Instantly, the room filled with light as a zing pir of holy light descended from the oculus in the roof and consumed the dark creature in a cascade of divine retribution. With so many unknowns, he wasn¡¯t about to take chances. For a moment, everyone was blinded, and it was only when that light faded that the avatar could see the golden skeleton that Todd had seen before rising to his full height. The mantle it had worn to hide its true form from the light had burned away to nothing, but otherwise, it appeared strangely unharmed.


    Skeleton might have been the wrong word, though. Like everything else in this ce, it was a bizarre mockery of life with three legs and four arms, and worse, a suit of armor built to match the subtle asymmetry that seemed to twist the whole monstrosity and leave its body and posture slightly off-center.


    Armor might have been the wrong word too. After another moment of examination, he decided that it had much more inmon with a crab¡¯s carapace than it did with a suit of well-crafted te mail. The joints seemed almost organic in the way that the tes rotated and moved around each other rather than covering the gaps with an underlying sheet of chainmail. None of them seemed to stop it from spreading its arms wide in a mocking bow.


    ¡°You fight when you should have run, and you chose this ce of all ces as your battleground¡­ a very foolish move for a god,¡± it used him, irritating the avatar further.


    ¡°When I strike you down, I will descend into the depths and y everything you¡¯ve built before I purge it with holy fire!¡± Siddrim¡¯s avatar shouted before gesturing with his sword and consuming the foul creature in a torrent of mes.


    That was when the pumps started again. The avatar ignored them, but it could feel the building shudder as somethingrge beneath his feet began to stir. For a moment, the room was filled with rainbow as the spray over the oculus filled the afternoon light, but then, that prismatic cascade was reced with darkness as something darker and opaque began to spray in its ce.


    Suddenly, for the first time in centuries, the avatar felt himself cut off entirely from his own godhead. Even though avatars were given enough of a divine spark that they didn¡¯t need that connection, it had always been an ever-present thing until now.


    Instantly its assessment of the danger in this ce increased dramatically. No other viin in living memory had been able to cut it off from the light before, but somehow this creature had, and that meant it had to get outside.


    As soon as the avatar¡¯s mes ckened off and it prepared to leap to the main doors and out to the safety that the setting sun would provide, though, the skeleton spoke again. ¡°You should be careful. We are in your sacred ce, and such magics will only harm the beautiful decorations I have made for you!¡±


    The avatar looked around and could see the truth in the abominations¡¯ words, but he didn¡¯t care. Let all the statues melt, and all the decorations burn. This ce was an abomination on more levels than it could understand, and he would be happy to reduce the ce to rubble and ash and build something more proper in its ce.


    ¡°Well, for us, really,¡± the golden skeleton continued. ¡°We will be spending a lot of time together going forward. Forever, actually.¡±


    The avatar ignored the grating words, and instead, he spread his wings and bolted across the room. Well, he tried to. Partway across the room, though, one of the melting angels that decorated the pirs in the center of the room reached out unexpectedly and grabbed his wrist.


    The hand broke off immediately as he glided by it, but the very act that something had grabbed him sent him spinning as hended in a defensive crouch, giving his opponent all the time in the world to interpose itself between the angelic avatar of light and the door.


    ¡°You¡¯re not going anywhere,¡± the skeleton asked. ¡°You can¡¯t. All of this is for you. Decades of effort and nning. All for you, in this moment in this ce.¡±


    Siddrim¡¯s avatar wanted to shoot back about how ridiculous this all sounded, but he couldn¡¯t as he watched the horror show unfold all around him. He¡¯d known that this whole temple was corrupted, but once the gold started toe off of the scorched pirs and melted statues, it showed all of the foul corruption thaty under that thin, gildedyer.


    Each man-shaped figure hid an undead construct. Some of them were skeletons made to mock the religious figures they depicted, and others were utterly inhuman. They were the only abominations hidden beneath gold and ster, either. Under every king copy of Siddrim¡¯s holy sign was a defaced copy or a sphemous symbol waiting to be revealed. As each symbol of its power faded and was reced by its enemy''s mockery, the avatar could feel the very air turning to poison.


    A moment ago, this was a temple of light. A strange one that bore all the hallmarks of heresy and sabotage, to be sure, but a home of Siddrim nheless. Now it was an abomination. The walls writhed with mocking corpses, and every symbol worth mentioning was degrading into something terrible before his very eyes. Even the oculus on the ceiling that should have let himmune with the rest of his own divinity was blocked by foul water and blood so dark it was almost ck.


    It was a trap, and somehow he¡¯d managed to fall into it without ever suspecting its existence. There was only one answer for this, it decided grimly as he lifted his right hand to the bottom of hisrge hilt. He would have to cut his way out.


    The avatar¡¯s first impulse was to turn to the side and cut through the two-foot-thick sandstone wall that separated him from freedom with his de of light, but now sooner did he pivot than the mocking abomination lunged toward him, forcing him to parry the shards of darkness that the thing was suddenly wielding in all four of its hands.


    ¡°You cannot hope to best me inbat, you monster,¡± the avatar yelled, beating him back. ¡°No matter what trickery you n, this is still hallowed ground and¡­¡±


    His sword struck a ncing blow on the silvered carapace but barely left a mark. Since ance of light could easily piece steel, he was left wondering what enchantments had been used to fend off his blow. That¡¯s not what distracted him, though. What distracted him was the feeling of the light fading from the earth beneath his feet.


    The avatar had no idea how the monster he was facing had done it. In fact, he was fairly sure it shouldn¡¯t even be possible, but unless it was a foul illusion, he couldn¡¯t deny it was happening. A moment ago, the ground beneath his feet had added to his strength with every beat of his heart, but now it felt like he was wading through polluted mud with every step.


    ¡°Is it?¡± the monstrosity asked. ¡°I confess, I look forward to better understanding that little trick after I have devoured your soul.¡±


    A single shard of fear shot through the avatar at such a vile statement. That was something else that should be impossible, but with everything else that was happening, well - he needed to end this.


    This time he didn¡¯t try to strike out at the wall. He struck out at the vile creature that seemed to be in charge. He rained a series of savage blows that would have been enough to sunder an iron-bound gate or any suit of te mail he¡¯d ever seen before now, but the construct shrugged off blow after blow. Twice he shattered the short dark des that continuously moved to parry his wild shes and thrusts, but each time a new weapon of the same design appeared in the monster¡¯s hand.


    Without a conduit to the sky, striking him down with pure, holy light again wasn¡¯t an option, but then, neither that st nor the holy fire he¡¯d tried several times since had done much to slow this monster down. All it had done was remove a few of its abominable gilded servants from the battlefield. The ones that were left were still assaulting him, and even though they were little more than a nuisance, their grasping hands and ws were enough to slow him at critical moments in the fight.


    Even so, eventually, his superiority in both weapons and skill became obvious when his four-armed enemy was forced to sacrifice his lower left arm to keep his skull from being cleaved in two. The severed arm ttered loudly to the floor as he raised his sword again to cleave the vile monster in half. He was careful to avoid the spray of dark fluid that came out of the hollows of the ulna and radius bones, though.


    ¡°The only fate that can possibly await darkness when it meets the light is death! You¡ª¡± The angelic Avatar¡¯s firey wings flickered for a moment as it felt a jolt of cold fire in his back, somewhere near his left kidney, just before the whole area started to go numb.


    Even as he avoided giving the creature the satisfaction of crying out in pain, he instantly knew what had happened. The monstrosity hadn¡¯t lost an arm on ident. It had lost it on purpose, and once it had fallen to the ground, one of its other servants had picked it up and thrust it between a joint in his armor.


    The avatar reached down with his left hand to pull the de out but found that there was nothing there. It instantly worried about where the thing might have gone, but it didn¡¯t have too much time to think about it because as soon as he had only one hand on his hilt, the necrotic abomination lurched forward again, attacking with its remaining three weapons to press its newfound advantage.


    Todd¡¯s body was, at this moment, an embodiment of the concept of light. It was a vessel filled to the brim with an avatar of his god, and that powerful radiance spilled out of him everywhere. It took the form of the fiery wings behind him and the glowing armor that encased him. It even made up his giant five-foot-long de that was a source of sr radiance itself.


    He was also the only light left in the room now that everything else had been polluted and plunged into darkness, and now he was flickering. Even though he continued to fight, cutting stone and bone in his quest to purge his vile opponent, he could feel something twisting and changing. He was the avatar of Siddrim, but increasingly he remembered that he was Todd too. Underneath the divine might was another hero, one that would not waiver and would not fail.


    At least, that is what he would have said a few minutes prior. Now though. As the light faltered, his eyes were ying tricks on him, somehow. The bodies thaty all around him were no longer the shattered mocking corpses he¡¯d dispatched or thest few bound worshipers that he¡¯d tried so hard to save a few hours ago. In the fading light of his wings, they were the fallen temrs from years past and all the other people he couldn¡¯t save. To his left was a miner that had gone missing when the goblins came for thieves, and to his right sat his mother holding his father¡¯s mauled body in her arms.


    Todd ignored the obvious trick, continuing to attack his shadowy opponent with a newfound rage. ¡°This will not save you,¡± he shouted, ¡°You toy with my memories at¡­¡±


    His words faded as he brought his sword to a halt inches above the mutted young boys that stood in front of him. He instantly recognized them as Bradwin and Cole, and even though he knew it was some strange sort of trick, the guilt that he felt over these two deaths, in particr, left him unable to attack them.


    ¡°Go on, Toad,¡± Bradwin said, taking a step forward. ¡°You already killed us once. Doing it again shouldn¡¯t be so hard.¡±

 Chapter 83: Devoured Whole

    Chapter 83: Devoured Whole


    It had taken the Lich more than a decade of nning before the first stone for thisplicated building had beenid. Hundreds of souls hadbored on the subject until they ceased to be, though. Dozens of bright men and women had set themselves to the impossible task of building this singr work of art, and all of them had perished after moving it only a few steps forward because of the dozens of contradictory goals it had to aplish.


    It had to be full of darkness but appear untainted. It had to be a perfect trap yet somehow appear inviting. Every part of it had been designed to appear holy, but even the most frivolous decorations had always had an ulterior motive in mind. It wasn¡¯t even built to be a trap primarily.


    That was only ever the first step of the n. It was also to be the arena where it fought the true might of the God of light and the ce of its birth, where it would It had originally intended to build the whole thing in secret and spring it upon the world as a fully formed temple of Siddrim, but the tainted priest had made a more public n possible.


    The Lich had only avoided killing him initially to distract the temrs that fought beside him, but he¡¯d been d that he¡¯d let Verdenin live after he¡¯d taken a peek into his grasping, greedy little mind on his death bed. Men that lusted for power were the easiest of all to control, and the Lich had filled his dreams with not only the grandeur of this ce but the respect and esteem he would get for being the one to imagine it.


    It was true that his name would live throughout history after this, though perhaps not the way that he¡¯d originally intended. Even now, the one-arm priest was down in the under temple praying for his God to see the truth along with a few dozen of his fellow broken worshipers. The Lich had not yet decided if they would live, but for now, their tainted and discordant prayers were one more weapon in his arsenal that he would neede sunrise.


    The fight between his inanely lethal body and the wounded avatar would notst all night after all. Indeed, the battle was already more than halfway over as soon as the first blow had been struck. The champion of light was still swinging its sword, of course, but blindly because the Lich had already used the slender shard of darkness that it had worked past the man¡¯s armor to obscure the link between the mortal and the divine.


    This disconnect made conversation all but impossible just now, of course. Not that the Lich had much to say to the Lord of Light. Its initial taunts had only been to keep the man¡¯s interest so he would not immediately try to flee. Now that the two of them were stuck together, conversations could wait until it had burrowed deep inside the other man¡¯s mind.


    That, more than anything else, would be Siddrim¡¯s undoing. It wasn¡¯t that he¡¯d picked a fight in a ce where the Lich¡¯s power was absolute, though he had. It wasn¡¯t even that he¡¯d beenpletely blindsided to find an enemy where none existed. His real mistake was that in his rush to fight that newfound enemy, he¡¯d chosen a deeply wed vessel, and you could hardly build a bastion of light on a foundation of shadows.


    Todd had been every bit as important to its n as this formidable structure. The darkness had found several boys in the region with enough of a connection to magic that the temrs might have taken an interest in them, but they¡¯d only ever found Todd. It had tormented all of its candidates, of course. As suitable as they might be to join the light, they were useless to the dark without at least a little blood on their hands.


    Even now, Todd was too busy struggling with the souls of the boys he¡¯d killed so many years ago to keep fighting with him in the here and now. That was why he was bleeding both blood and light from half a dozen ces now.


    The Lich bore a few wounds, too, of course, but this body was just another tool, and the sooner it could return to the heart of thebyrinth for the final battle, the better. Its mithril shell had not been breached, though it was dented in half a dozen ces now. That wasn¡¯t a problem, and neither was the severed arm. Not really. It had served its purpose. The real issue was that it had already used up more than half of the shadows it had loaded this body with.


    Before this fight had ever started, every bone was filled with darkness where its marrow should have been, and every st of light or fire was offset by boiling some of that away in equal measure. Oh, the Lich could have used some of it for a few abilities of its own, of course. This was an endurance match, though. It might asionally use the shadows to flicker just out of reach of that terrible de or to rece a de of its own when it shattered, but that was all it could afford.


    Even cut off from the rest of his God, the avatar was a powerful thing, and its light tried hard to burn through theyers of mithril and steel in their attempts to st the Lich away into nothingness. Only thebination of holy bones and the unholy blood that cycled through its inhuman body thanks to the resentful beating of a temr¡¯s heart enabled it to resist the terrible energies.


    The wings were flickering now, and the internal fires were dying, and more and more knives crawled their way inside the flesh that was now only protected by the avatar¡¯s fading armor. Even this much light would have been enough to boil his leviathan in under a minute. Only the Lich¡¯s juggernaut had any hope of withstanding such prolonged exposure, and the Siddrim¡¯s avatar would have cut that behemoth to ribbons within a minute or two.


    No, the Lich needed to be the one to bait the hook, and even as its reserves began to drain, it could see its enemy faltering. Moment by moment and blow by corrupting blow, the avatar weakened, and after its wings faded to the barest flickering mes on his shoulder des, its de slipped from his fingers and vanished before it even hit the ground.


    After that, the room was plunged into darkness, but the Lich could see just as well as it ever could. More importantly, it could breathe a sigh of relief as it silently ordered its remaining minions to drag the wounded body to the altar and chain it down to the hidden manacles there.


    It was only once all these things had happened that he let the mind of the man inside this shell of a bodye back to the surface. By that point, the temr had been reduced to little more than a sobbing child, and the ghosts of his bullies had done more damage to him in there than the Lich had done physically to his body in the real world.


    Forcing the sobbing, sniveling brat to wake up and realize that while he¡¯d been indulging in his weakness, the battle had already been lost would have been enough to make the Lich smile if it was capable of such a thing. It wasn¡¯t, though. All it could do was look down coldly at the man while he realized he was bound and tried to break free.


    ¡°I will never serve you!¡± Todd spat as he realized what was probably about to happen next.


    ¡°You won¡¯t,¡± the Lich agreed. ¡°Your soul and the piece of Siddirm¡¯s essence that you still carry inside you will be irrevocably destroyed by the ritual that happens next.¡±


    Reminded of Siddrim¡¯s avatar, Todd tried to invoke it briefly, but the only evidence of that was that his eyes glowed briefly while he struggled. Then hey back, temporarily exhausted.


    ¡°You lost before the cornerstone was everid here, boy,¡± the Lich gloated as it tripped the switch, and the altar began to sink back into the earth. ¡°I chose the vessel. I chose the ce. I chose the stakes and the weapons. All you ever did was y your part!¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s not true!¡± Todd yelled, ¡°I would never do what you wanted!¡±


    The Lich ignored him for a moment as he mentally ordered his pet fire godling to begin channeling fire into all the ruined gold up there. It was a slow process, but it needed toe pouring down this shaft toplete the final circle.


    ¡°You fed on mynd and drank of my waters,¡± the Lich countered. ¡°I never forced you to do a single thing, and you still did everything I needed you to do. I showed you horrors, and you ran straight to your God for help as I desired. Now I only have one task left for you. To die, as painfully as possible.¡±


    ¡°If you¡¯re going to kill me, then just do it now and get it over with!¡± Todd screamed from fear as much as bravery. He wouldn¡¯t snivel, even at the end, but then the Lich had already known that.


    As the altar slowly sank into the ground, the Lich looked up and saw the first of the gold just starting to trickle down the shaft. Though it had been impossible to notice the pattern in the grooves of the dark stone up until now, they were one of the most critical parts of the whole design.


    The pit the altar descended into was only forty feet deep because that was the amount of space that had been required to inscribe the spell. It contained the seven secret names of Siddrim as well as all of the moremon ones, and though it suspected that none of them were the Lord of Light¡¯s true name, they would be enough to make the circle nigh unbreakable.


    As it descended, so did the molten gold. It drizzled smoothly through the grooves hidden in the rock face and slowly but surely made its way down. They followed theplex paths that wereid out for them, and as the altar finally reached the bottom of the pit, they were nearly halfway down their course.


    When they wereplete, the winding circle of binding would be one of the mostplex works of applied archaeology to ever have been built ording to the voices in its library. No one, not even a god, would be able to see iting.


    ¡°Why rush?¡± the Lich asked. ¡°We have all night to make you suffer and marinate you in darkness. When the sun next rises, I will unveil you to the light and the force the tainted shard of the divine that you carry back into your God at my leisure. It will be an attack that will be utterly impossible for him to escape and just as fatal as sewing a gangrenous limb back onto the body of an otherwise healthy patient.¡±


    Todd¡¯s eyes widened in horror, though the Lich did not linger to hear what he would say next. It didn¡¯t matter. Nothing did until the next phase of the battle was truly joined. As the Lich¡¯s body left the pit and began the long walk back to the foundry with its severed arm in its remaining left hand so that it could be repaired, the Lich¡¯s soul fled back to his throne room and to Albrecht¡¯s moldering, mummified body. At the same moment, the stone door slid down from above and mmed shut.


    The Lich would have liked to stay to watch the shadows pour into the pit to properly marinate its victim, but there was nowhere else it would rather recuperate until the time of the final battle was at hand. The Lich wouldn¡¯t let him drown in that darkness, of course, but it doubted very much that he would still be sane when the sun rose above the horizon once more in ten hours.

 Chapter 84: The Circle

    Chapter 84: The Circle


    Despite the titanic conflict that was taking ce between two inhuman powers, it might have been any other day as far as the world was concerned. Barges passed through the canal, craftsmen plied their trade, and though people still loitered around the temple, of course, wives still served dinner, and men washed off the grime of the day. The only things that were amiss in thest few hours before sunset were the ck water fountaining from the top of the temple and the people from the more rural reaches of the region streaming toward the heart of ckwater.


    The former was certainly obvious enough to draw the attention of everyone, but other than a boat captain and his crew that wasn¡¯t from around here, no one seemed to pay it much more attention than a passing nce would warrant. The Lich was sure that the Gods looking down on the situation had noticed the strange goings on at the temple, even if they hadn¡¯t yet noticed the families dropping whatever they were doing and abandoning their farms toe and worship it properly.


    By morning, there would be thousands gathered there, crowding the square and the streets, and all illusions of normalcy would be gone in favor of the collection of power as every person under the sway of the darkness sought to obey apulsion they couldn¡¯t understand. They need not understand, though. Understanding was not required.


    It already understood everything. All they needed to do was obey.


    The people of the region had eaten its bread and drunk its waters for so long that they belonged to the darknesspletely now. There would never be any escape for them, but the Lich would only seek to save those who truly loved it and the twilight world that was promised in their dreams. Everything and everyone else was expendable.


    So far, the Lich was entirely pleased with the oue of the unfolding events. Siddrim, as it predicted, had grown so used to winning all of his challenges that the foolhardy God could no longer even imagine a situation that might be too much for it, and though it did not know it yet, it had already paid the price for that.


    After the sunset and the moon started to rise, the pumps that powered the dark fountains finally stopped, and the doors were reopened to allow as many of the waiting people in as possible. Brother Verdenin was there to lead them in strange songs and give speeches about the true ruler of the world, but the altar was still missing.


    Well, not missing. It was still submerged forty feet beneath the ground, and the well that it created was still filled with shadows, but no one that crowded into therge temple paid any more attention to that than they did to the scorched and melted art that had been pristine earlier that day.


    Just like the worshipers of the Oroza, these people could only see what the Lich wanted them to see, and what it wanted them to see was glorious. In that distant future, all were one, and there was no war. Of course, the part where all the peoples of the world were owned by the Lich, and the peace was the peace of the grave were left out of these visions. It would need loyal subjects for a long time. They would be thest ones left breathing on this world.


    They would be thest ones still breathing until all of his enemies had been snuffed out, and so the Lich¡¯s servant, Brother Verdenin, called them forward one at a time throughout the night and took them below so that they could be protected from the carnage that was going to ur next. The disloyal ones, though¡­ the ones that harbored doubts or concerns¡­ they were left there to sing its praises until they were hoarse. The Lich would need all the strength it could muster for what was going to happen next.


    The same might have been true for Todd and the spark of the divine that he still harbored deep within his breast, but he was past that point now. In the hours spentying there soaking in the toxic nightmares that the Lich had hoarded for decades, he had grown quite mad, and though his screams could not be heard over the singing, they never stopped anymore.


    The singing and the screams weren¡¯t quite enough to cover up the deep and rumbling sound of the pumps when they started back up. This time, they were not powering the delicate fountains that decorated the Lich¡¯s temple. This time, they were filling the great circle with the final catalyst it needed to activate: the polluted and bloodstained river water of its river.


    The great circle wasn¡¯t a thing to bind its enemy; that was the small well at the center of the temple. It was an amplifier. It was the only ce in the world where the true name of the Lich had been recorded. It had even ordered it stricken from Kelvun¡¯s pages lest someone one day discover such a powerful secret.


    The giant, nearly circr tunnel ran the full length of its oldest territory and would ensure that, unlike the time it fought the Oroza, its power would be unlimited as it tore the Lord of Light to shreds.


    The Lich always felt deeply connected to thend because it was thend. It was the water, the soil, and the insects that lived in both. It was the thick, boggy earth and all of the food that came from it to feed the people of the region. This only intensified as the precisely cut channels filled with the foul brew and activated the runes that were carved there one at a time.


    It would take hours and certainly be visible to any gods or wizards that might investigate, but then it had already tipped its hand by activating the temple and seizing Siddrim¡¯s avatar. All forces would now be arrayed against it now. It would be ready, though. Even if it had not spent decades murdering boat crews, adventurers, and stealing the soul of every person foolish enough to die in its domain, it still had the endless carnage of the goblins and the looted remains of the dwarven crypt to keep it well fed for this moment.


    The gods thought that challenging them was impossible. It would correct that error.


    All through the night, the Lich made preparations as he moved his pieces into position across the board. A whole army of the dead marched out of the main entrance and into the muddy waters of the Oroza by the thousands. When they reached the bottom of the river, most turned left and began to march north toward Bridigem and the other port cities of Dutton County, while a much smaller number marched south toward Tagel.


    Nothing would stop those cities from burning, and even though all of these battles would be fought in a day or even a week, but the blood and fear they caused would be crucial to replenishing the Lich¡¯s stores after sunrise. No matter how things yed out, it expected to use years'' worth of resources that it had painstakingly stored for just such an asion.


    The undead would take time to move into position, but of course, the goblins had already started their bloodthirsty rampage, even now. They¡¯d been gathering for days in the dark woods along the coast, and though they weren¡¯t as mighty as they¡¯d beenst time without fire magic-wielding shamans, it was certain no mere fishing vige could stand up to the screaming hordes of death and destruction that had been unleashed at sunset.


    This time, the Lich had not condensed them into a single powerful tribe but instead left them as squabbling siblingspeting for its affection and favor. The result was that they were as bloodthirsty as ever, and almost as many goblins died from infighting as from the enemies they battled.


    The Lich did not mind this, though. Death was death, and unlike many of its crafted servants, it did not require that the goblins be effective; it only required that they be eager.


    Effective was a requirement of its four horsemen, of course, which would finally be fielded together, it thought hungrily. It had no way of knowing how well or poorly they would work together, of course, since they were all still willful in their own way, but their target would demand more strength than any one of them could hope to provide. The earth titan was still reluctant to fight no matter how much the darkness tried to enme its soul, and even now, all these yearster, the river dragon continued to resist her bonds.


    In that sense, only Krulm¡¯venor could be called a true sess. He had struggled until he¡¯d shattered himself, and now he was a tribe of bloodthirsty monsters more than he was a fire godling. The others could learn from his example, though, or they could be reced when the Lich found more capable servants. It didn¡¯t care either way.


    Normally, the Lich was content to let everything y out in its own time, but tonight, or all nights, it grew agitated and restless as it watched the stars wheel slowly across the sky. Surely, the church had already suspected something, and even now, an army or temrs was moving against it, or perhaps a small, talented bad of adventurers would try to employ some hidden magical gambit against it.


    Even at its most paranoid, the Lich found nothing though. There were no unusual deaths among the Red Hills, and no strangers mixed in with all of its loyal subjects on the roads to ckwater. Though Siddrim had almost certainly ryed the day''s strange events to the elders of the church and his chosen champions, they would certainly be toote to intervene.


    Without the assistance of its magical ferryman, it took days to travel from one city to another, even with spare horses, and what was going to happen next would be decided sometime between sunrise and sunset tomorrow.


    Somehow, it had managed to pull off its grand design in secret, and the surprise was nearlyplete. Now, all the Lich needed to do was wait, but that became more challenging with every hour that passed as it looked for more and more things it needed to do to make itself as ready as possible.


    It had never felt this way in the leadup to its revenge on Kelvun. Not even when the night dawned, and the storm broke. It had been calm and amused until the very end.


    It was that understanding that finally made the Lich understand what it was feeling. Fear. Anxiety. Dread. All the emotions it whipped up so frequently in others but never experienced itself.


    The realization was unwee. Fear was not something the Lich should have experienced. It was an emotion it had not felt in a long time. Perhaps not since those Lizardmen had begun to worship it all those years ago, but certainly not sense its battle with the Ozora.


    It should not have to fear the light, but it still did, somewhere, somehow. Its most recent dual with Siddrim¡¯s avatar had only increased that fear. It might have shrugged off those attacks, but there had been no denying how painful they had been, and it was certain that the worst was yet toe in that regard.


    Yesterday, it had fought a star, and tomorrow, it would fight the sun. The Lich wasn¡¯t worried, though. The night devoured the sun every day. Today, it would just happen earlier.

 Chapter 85: The End of Days (1)

    Chapter 85: The End of Days (1)


    It was a tense, still twilight, but when dawn first colored the horizon, nothing happened. Not right away. It wasn¡¯t until the upper limb of the sun made its way above the horizon and slowly colored the muddy waters of the Oroza with dawn¡¯s morning light that an errant sunbeam made its way to the temple and searched for the missing piece of itself.


    The light would have expected Siddrim¡¯s champion to be standing outside triumphantly to greet the dawn, but instead, it found dark, empty streets. The light found a temple that was almost unchanged on the outside but filled only with a paradoxical mix of ruin and worshipers on the inside.


    His avatar must have won, he realized, even if the surroundings offered few clues about what it was that had happened. The worshipers sang his hymns weing the dawn, but the notes were off-key, and something felt off. He¡¯d taken the strange scene in an instant, but it was only when he found the body of his avatar at the bottom of a well that should not have existed that he knew something terrible had happened.


    Slowly, the errant sunbeam bent, moving ever deeper at an impossible angle so that it could reach the devout young warrior he¡¯d empowered. It was only when Siddrim could feel Todd¡¯s weak heartbeat and the information of thest day¡¯s events that it had reached down to touch what appeared to be his in avatar that the trap was sprung.


    That connection was enough to reim the avatar¡¯s spark of divinity. In fact, that was itself a necessary step in essing the memories of his shard. Even before Siddrim began to make sense of the terrible images that flooded out of that twisted, broken mind, though, it was already toote. The darkness had forged a connection, and that connection was trapped at the center of a series of concentric binding rings that only throbbed with power when he tried to escape.


    The first time that Siddrim tried to pull back, he felt himself unable to do so, and in a panic, he pulled harder, but all that did was cause the runes to re to violent life and increase their grip. Several things happened at once after that.


    The first was that whatever was controlling these actions behind the scenes allowed water to start flowing into the well. Apparently, it no longer mattered if their bait drowned now that he¡¯d been caught.


    The second was that the sun began to fade where it kissed the horizon. It was a small change, and even if the average person would have been awake, he doubted that most would have noticed it. Still, for a god of light, this was a worrisome moment.


    Third, and finally, the worshippers that had been singing so discordently up until now all fell silent in unison. Then, as one, they said, ¡°I wee you, Lord of Light, and thank you for christening your new temple personally.¡±


    Siddrim did not respond, nor did he try to pull back again. That was a painful thing that seemed to redirect all the force he used to escape right back at him. He would deal with that in a moment. For now, he turned inwards, ignoring all the other distractions as he tried to understand the darkness that was surging through him so he could bind and purge it.


    It was not an attack. It was an infection.


    Darkness should not be able to exist in the presence of the light, and yet even as it burned away moment by moment, it flowed deeper inside the Lord of Light. Just being able to see darkness made him feel dirty. Such things were normally banished by his very arrival! Whole mountain ranges of shadows were supposed to flee into caves as he rose each day, and it was only when he rested from those exertions that they finally came out to cover thend once more. But now they were inside of him, and no matter how brightly he red, he could not dispel thempletely.


    ¡°I once feared you, you know,¡± the voice inside him whispered even as the water levels in the well continued to rise, and his dying servant started to choke and cough. ¡°I once had reason to, though. A little patch ofnd blessed in your name was all that was required to destroy me utterly.¡±


    ¡°All of thisnd is mine!¡± Siddrim roared, bombarding the temple with light so fierce that steam began to rise from the damp rooftop. ¡°I will burn you away, foul spirit! Not even dust will remain to mark your grave!¡±


    For a moment, he did. Light bombarded the whole area. First, it was in the temple, and then the streets of ckwater, and finally, all the surrounding fields and glens. It burned all the way to the bottom of the Oroza as it made those murky waters translucent and bent to move around curtains and under doors.


    For a few seconds, shadows simply did not exist anymore. That should have been enough, he thought. Nothing evil could survive such intense focus, but still, the darkness flowed in his veins, and as soon as he relented so as not to catch the people and the homes of this town on fire, it surged with a vengeance.


    ¡°Light is strong,¡± the darkness whispered once more. ¡°Strong enough to burn away everything, but it is a slender, fragile thing, and even if it is everywhere, it is a shallow ocean. Darkness, on the other hand - it descends for hundreds of miles. It goes to the roots of the mountains and the bottom of the sea.¡±


    There was a pause, just long enough for the god to consider the words that were being hissed so insistently in his ear, and then he felt something shift inside him. Until now, the darkness that swirled inside him was a hazy mist that was being burned away almost as fast as he flowed in from the damaged soul of his servant, but as the drowning mad became a corpse, that trickle became a flood and raced toward his core like a dagger in the night.


    ¡°And that¡¯s enough to swallow even the Lord of Light¡­¡± Thesest words were said with a sneer, but the tone did nothing to disguise the threat.


    Siddrim shrank back from the attack even as he tried to pull free from the trap that held him here. Both actions caused the light to dim further as it slowed its ascent. A moment ago, it had been sunrise, but now it was twilight once more, and the sun was no brighter than the moon as the stars again became visible in the sky.


    The darkness closed upon the center of the light God¡¯s being, like a fist wrapped around his heart as it began to squeeze. Until a moment ago, he had all the light in the universe at his disposal. Now, he felt like a guttering oilmp as he strained against his invisible bonds.


    For a ten-thousand years, since he had cast off mortal flesh and be the strongest of all the gods, his heart had been a temple, perfect in its purity. Today, that changed. Today, it filled with sludge, and the restless dead inside it grasped and wed at everything, ruining his peace and sancitiy with their touch even as the Lord of Light burned them to ash.


    Then, even that holy of hollies was plunged into darkness as the eternal me at the center of his being was snuffed out. No, not snuffed. Such fires could never be truly extinguished. It burned yet, underyers of filth, where no one would ever see it again.


    Siddrim felt the rage growing inside of him at the very idea. Other divinities and lesser gods would still light the night sky when he was gone, but neither Lunara nor her sisters would be able to keep the ice at bay. The lesser gods and the small gods would do no better. Without him, the whole world would die; he knew that. That was why humanity honored him so. He kept the snows from falling and the dead in the ground.


    It was the certainty that gave Siddrim the strength to dig deep one more time and burn away the sticky, foul substances that continued to pump inside him. It was viscous like tar and lit by his rage, it burned even better than he might have imagined.


    The sun on the horizon red briefly to life once more, and with it came fire. This time, the Lord of Light didn¡¯t hold back. Siddrim focused his fury on ckwater, and once more, the light swelled, and one at a time, things started to burst into mes.


    At first, it was the thatched roofs as well as clothing and cloth curtains. Within a minute of enduring the sun¡¯s gaze, most of the buildings were on fire. Those who fled the ming structures for their lives burst into mes immediately as they reached the outdoors, but those who stayed in their homes only managed to keep breathing a little longer.


    Soon, the whole city was on fire, with the notable exception of the temple. The worshiper¡¯s songs had long since turned to screams, and then silence, and the tattered tapestries and carpets zed away to ash. The stone structure endured, though. Even when the water in the central well began to boil from thebined heat of the runic binding circle and heaven¡¯s mes, nothing changed.


    The river steamed, the docks burned, and the animals in the fields smoldered, but nothing changed. No matter how much damage the Lord of Light did to the area, he could not cauterize the source of the darkness that poured into him, and when the power of his indignant rage curdled into hopelessness, he was again overpowered by that dark tide and copsed inward, like a dying star.


    ¡°So much for the vaunted Lord of Light,¡± the darkness murmured. ¡°You control the very heavens but can do nothing to stop the darkness that seeps from the depths. All you can do is murder your own followers and feed me their souls.¡±


    Those words struck Siddrim like a hammer blow. No matter how hard Siddrim fought, he couldn¡¯t escape. The strange trap that held him merely tightened and strengthened as he tried to resist. As his mes guttered, though, and he drifted down into the darkness, he realized that there might be no way out of something that had been created especially for him.


    The sun ceased moving in the sky, lingering at the horizon as the sunrise quickly became a sunset, plunging the world into a suddenly unexpected night.


    The men who had awoken early to begin their work fell to their knees and began to pray. The watchmen and acolytes hurriedly began to wake bishops and pontiffs who routinely slept through the morning prayers to let them know that disaster had befallen the world.


    The Gods saw what was happening, too, of course. There was no hiding it. Siddrim¡¯s cousins and his enemies both gazed at the unthinkable disy, wondering what it was that had happened and, of course, what was going to happen next.


    All of them knew one thing, though: the age of light was over. The dark ages had begun.

 Chapter 86: The End of Days (2)

    Chapter 86: The End of Days (2)


    Their invisible, twisted struggle urred in an arena spanning dozens of square miles in the physical world. It stretched from the heavens to deep underground as the two entities fought their battle of wills in the ether. No one but the most sensitive could have even glimpsed what had urred. To mortal eyes, the sun dimmed and set, but to those with vision, the sun was pulled from the sky and tumbled to earth.


    Each time Siddrim had burned away the Lich, it was forced to retreat underground, only to re-emerge when the light faded. It had prepared well for this contest and would not easily be dislodged, no matter how painful the light was. Now, in the darkness, though, the sun was no longer where it should be. Siddrim should have been in his chariot, riding across the sky and spreading his light across the world.


    Instead, his chariot was smashed to flinders, his fiery horses had escaped, and hey there, sprawled across the leagues of londs near the charred ruin of ckwater as an invisible giant of a man. The God of light would never rise again. Anyone would have been able to see that, but inside the boundary that the Lich had long ago marked as his territory, no one would. Not even the far-sighted Goddess of secrets could prate the veil that had been drawn over that portion of the world.


    Even she¡¯d never be able to see the Eidolon of darkness feasting on the blood of a fallen god or the fact that it was growing all the time as it swelled with power. Even as the shrinking,atose form of the Siddrim withered, the Lich rejoiced and thrilled in the strange connections it was able to forge inside the mind of the dying God.


    It could see the kingdoms of the world spread out before it and all the territory that the Lord of Light held sway over. The connections were strongest in holy sites andrge cities, but even outside of those, the Lich could see that he held some sway everywhere. Even ckwater and Fallravea were part of the deity¡¯s domain, and that enraged it.


    That territory was shriveling and receding, though, moment by moment, as Siddrim slowly bled out, and the Lich drained him dry. Some areas would stay under his protection much longer than others, though. The darkness that invaded the dying God¡¯s spirit allowed the Lich to probe these points.


    Each time it reached out to touch a follower or a hallowed relic, that connection was severed, but there were so many terrible things that the Lich could do in that moment. It could shatter sacred five-hundred-year-old stained ss windows or make the reliquaries of a martyr burst into mes. It could make the devout cry tears of blood or suddenly develop the stigmata and writhe in pain. The Lich could even corrupt hallowed ground and force whole churchyards to rise from the dead, thirsting for blood.


    It was a tenuous, temporary connection that would vanish entirely in minutes or hours, but the Lich was determined to use it to wreak as much havoc as possible on the living, even as it learned more about the wider world. From here, it could see everything, and in every major city, it forced the crypts and selpuchurs open so that they could vomit out their dead on a frightened and confused poption.


    These weren¡¯t the powerful, brutally efficient killing machines its fleshcrafters hadbored for years to perfect. They were merely moldering corpses and rusting weapons. That would be enough to strike terror into the hearts of every man on the continent. What had once been a refuge was now another danger, and there would be no hiding from the storm that followed.


    As the light died, the Lich¡¯s heart swelled in triumph, and it drank deeply of the mana that made up Siddrim¡¯s dying form. It was an electric sensation, and even though the mana was far outside of its elemental alignments, the nature of the murder,bined with the poison and the agony that tainted it, made it ptable enough to the Lich. It had hungered for godhood since it¡¯s birth, and it would pay any price to achieve it.


    The vast reserves of dark power that it had hoarded for decades in preparation for this day had almost run dry, and the binding rings that had kept the God from fleeing had all but melted as the torsion caused by the immense power they had sought to constrain them had almost ruined them.


    Once, years ago, the river dragon herself hade almost as close to shattering her binding ring, but it had been a much cruder implement that had only seeded by ident. The ring that had bound Siddrim was a work of art that had taken years to design, and the Lich had watched in pure fascination and unadulterated greed as the deity had reached down to help his servant, only for the bear trap to hold that appendage fast. After that, it had been child¡¯s y.


    The right move would have been to sever the arm or finger or whatever appropriate appendage the avatar had been, but Siddrimcked the brains or the courage for such a move. One needed no courage when you could simply smite any real foe you faced from on high. That,bined with the spiritual obesity of his church, had been the defining feature of Siddrim for thest century. He was a god who had defeated all of his enemies, so he had nothing to do but ride his chariot each day and bask in the adoration of his worshipers.


    That was a mistake, of course. The moment you stopped growing, you started dying, and Siddrim had been a dead man for more than a decade. He just hadn¡¯t known it yet. The Lich would never hesitate to make the right move, though. Even as it plunged the world into endless night, its forces had already begun to ravage the world. Goblins burned coastal cities, and tendrils of its zombie armies erased whole viges. Without the sun to oppose them, it was unstoppable. Even so, though, it gave themand, and its ferrymen set out with two passengers.


    If there was to be any resistance left or any hope of strengthening the dying God of light, it woulde from Siddrimar. So, the Lich would send its four horsemen to raze it to the ground. Even as the ferry set off, its shadow dragon took flight, and its swamp dragon swam toward its goal. A single night would not be enough to destroy everyst vestige of a god normally, but if that night were tost forever, then it could get a lot done.


    It would need to. History was littered with dark gods and would-be gods that had been discovered by the light before they were ready and ground to dust. The stories it had gleaned from the bards and artists that it had wormed its way into the hearts of over these many years were a series of cautionary tales. The spirit hive of Zackeir¡¯syon, the cults of Gharnehr, and the fallen pantheon of the Malzekeen were all examples where the dark forces that were hiding from the light had been found and burned away until there was nothing left.


    That was why the Lich had struck first. In any normal conflict between darkness and light, the light would always win. It was the nature of things. The Lich was far from normal. It hadn¡¯t even had a name until it had made a bid for its divinity, but it was a name that was unlikely to be written in the history books if it even allowed any of them to be written.


    Tenebroum was a secret name that would not be uttered by the living. It was only meant for the dead and for the magical works it created for its own benefit. Technically, it defined thend more than the shadow that had enveloped it, but the power of that bond made the name inescapable. Even now, the power that it siphoned from Siddrim¡¯s spasming spiritual corpse was flowing into the vast ring that it had carved so long ago in preparation for such a day, and with every moment that passed, the Lich could feel itself growing in power.


    Asrge andplex as itsir had grown, it was outgrowing it by the moment now. Even as it drank deep of the cosmic energies that were before it, it roused its drudges from their years-long torpor and set them to new, more powerful projects. It already ruled the depths and the waters, but if it added the nearby mountain range to its domain and added a series of towers in key locations, then the very skies would¡­


    Even as Skoetomikos struggled to keep up with the words that were pouring out of the Lich¡¯s mind and Kelvun worked tirelessly to document its ns, its theories began to spiral out of control. All of that came to a stop when the corpse that it had been feeding on shuddered violently, pulling Tenebroum¡¯s attention back to the matter at hand.


    The God was still alive. He had been reduced to a single flickering candle of light at the heart of a mountain-sized corpse, but he still lived. Then Siddrim did something entirely unexpected and shattered. His thick bronze armor gave into the corrosion that ate at it, and the ghostly flesh crumbled like overcooked pottery shards. Where once there had been a single sun, which was the immense spirit corpse¡¯s beating heart, now there was only a swarm of embers as it copsed in on itself. The lights swarmed out of the body in a swarm of shooting stars. Only five of these were of any size, but they sat at the center of a cloud of lesser lights as they drifted away in the night.


    None of them were Siddrim anymore, though, because only the dark husk that they had all escaped from stayed behind when they fled the well of souls that had been created for him without issue. The Lich grasped for these creatures, though it did not know what they were precisely. Were they avatars? Aspects of Siddrim¡¯s power? It did not know, but it knew that it hungered for them just the same as it had for the God that had spawned them.


    The Lich had no luck in trapping them, though. It had not prepared for this eventuality, and though it snuffed a few of the sparks before they managed to cross the river and a few more as they arced over Fallravea, the brighter stars escapedpletely, disappearing over the horizon as they burned their way through every and binding that the Lich thought to cast.


    It simply had no hold on them, but it was no matter. Though it had not yet drunk the dregs, Tenebroum had consumed the lion¡¯s portion of Siddrim¡¯s power, and in time it would have the rest. Truthfully, it realized that it might have been better to stop feasting some time ago, as its mind had started to be distractable, and its senses had grown disconnected.


    It never could have done that, though. The darkness hungered, and it would always gorge itself in the presence of a meal. If it had tried to resist that impulse, then even more of its quarry would have escaped. No, the proper response was not denial. Even with its primary banquet gone, the raging battles that were taking ce across the region continued to feed it blood and death.


    They would continue even in its absence, though, the Lich thought drowsily as its humming, now mountain-sized spirit slowly began to drift off and melt into the earth as the need to digest and incorporate all that it devoured became more pressing than any possible danger. It would sleep while its minions rained destruction down on its enemies, and in time, it would arise refreshed and reborn.

 Chapter 87: A Night of Blood (1)

    Chapter 87: A Night of Blood (1)


    For a brief moment, there had been hope. Despite the fact that gates were in mes and deady in the streets, the sun was rising, and the goblins would not stay once they faced the light of day. Markez had not joined in the cheers when the bloodthirsty raiders had begun to retreat toward theforting darkness of the thick pine forest. He¡¯d merely offered a silent thanks to his father¡¯s fathers and tossed another javelin into the back of a fleeing monster.


    ¡°Cheer up, old man,¡± we¡¯re saved, Brannon said, sheathing his sword.


    ¡°Until we repair the breaches in the wall and the reinforcements from the Baron arrive, we aren¡¯t saved,¡± Markez countered, feeling even older than his 50 years at that moment. ¡°Without a miracle, tomorrow night¡¯s going to be worse than today.¡±


    Brannon just shrugged. ¡°Maybe with that attitude. The light provides. Anyone can see that.¡±


    ¡°It provides a reprieve, nothing more,¡± the grey-haired man said tiredly.


    He was a fisherman, not a fighter, and though he could use a spear better than most, he¡¯d much rather brave one of the summer squalls that came of the Relict Sea than he would fight an enemy of flesh and blood. He had no choice in the matter, though. Tonight they were all defending their home.


    It was not the men of the Stoney Shores that had started this conflict. The goblins had been growing bolder all year. Last week, they had almost sacked Gerdin¡¯s Cross, and before that, they¡¯d seeded in burning Olovar to the ground. Now it was their turn, he supposed. Anyone could have seen that they were next if you looked on a map, but everyone had said that goblins didn¡¯te to the beach and that the sound of the breakers would keep them away.


    Everyone had been wrong.


    Markez could tell he was about to get another lecture from his young oarsman on the importance of the light god when the younger man¡¯s face went ck. Markez turned to follow his gaze, worried that some new monster had emerged from the woods. Instead, he only saw thest few retreating goblins and the sunrise.


    ¡°What¡¯s wrong?¡± the old fisherman asked, but as soon as he said the words, he could see it himself. The light was dying.


    The sun had only just started to rise, and now it looked like it was starting to set. That was impossible, of course, but just because it was impossible didn¡¯t mean that it wasn¡¯t happening. It was like Siddrim had changed his mind and was going home for the day.


    The cheers died away as more people realized what had just happened. As much as Markez didn¡¯t care for the gods, he prayed that it was just a stray cloud, or a momentary shadow, but he couldn¡¯t help but notice that the goblins had stopped running and were lingering in confusion now and the edge of the woods.


    ¡°Siddrim would never abandon us!¡± Brannon said with a voice full of fear as he rebutted a point that no one had made.


    Markez wanted that to be true, but it didn¡¯t seem likely. The sky was back to full dark now, and the light blue blush of twilight that had been making the stars disappear one by one was gone. There was no longer enough light to see what the goblins might or might not be up to, but he was certain they were out there waiting for whatever came next.


    The dark stillnesssted another few minutes as people talked and worried. Some, like Brannon, were in denial that this could be happening, but others were on the edge of panic even before the terrible scratches of the goblins rang out in the night, indicating that the attack was going to start again.


    Markez doubted very much that the faltering palisade and the handful of men left meaning it would survive another hour the way things had been going before, so when Brannon said, ¡°I¡¯ve got to save my kids!¡± Markez didn¡¯t even try to stop him. Instead, he tossed one of the few remaining javelins at the closest shape he could see, then followed his neighbor down thedder.


    Brannon was a lousy fisherman, but he had a strong back and a good heart, and that was really all Markez had ever needed from the younger man. Between the two of them, they could manage a few good catches a week in Durgen¡¯s Cove or off the point. Brains and brawn had made a good team until the goblins got out of control.


    Now, they were running down the short street that connected the jetty to the main gate, and from the looks of things, they weren¡¯t the only ones. While Markez waited for Brannon¡¯s wife to unbar the door and then bundle up their youngest, he saw shadows flitting in between the drying racks.


    For want of anything else to do, he picked up the jagged haft of a broken fishing spear he hadn¡¯t yet gotten around to mending and held it to ward off the darkness while he watched other families stream by to make good their own escape.


    The idea of leaving the strand behind hurt him as the group rushed toward the water, but not as much as the goblin¡¯s ws did when one leapt at him. The thing only grazed his arm, and as Markez reacted without thinking, he moved the broken shaft into the thing¡¯s path, and it impaled itself. That was enough to make it let go before it could w out his eyes or rip out his throat with its yellow teeth, but it wasn¡¯t enough to make the thing stop screeching in agony as it writhed in agony on the ground.


    ¡°You see that, Brannon?¡± Markez asked, turning to face the other man. ¡°The bastard tried to get me, but¡­¡±


    It had taken three of them to bring the bigger man down, but even with his sword in his hand, he was still lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood. Brannon¡¯s wife Karina looked on in mute horror even as she stood between the monsters and her three children, but Markez wasn¡¯t about to give her any time to greave.


    ¡°Run!¡± he told her as he pulled out his fishing knife. ¡°To my boat. Thest one on the left! Hurry!¡±


    Despite being ancient and barely a match for the two goblins that still seemed to be in fighting shape, Markez charged the closest one, making it shrink back in fear. That wasn¡¯t because he thought he could take it with this flimsy little scaling knife, though.


    It was because it wanted Brannon¡¯s longsword. It was much too heavy for Markez. It would have been too heavy for him twenty years ago, but that didn¡¯t stop him from casting aside his knife, picking up the weapon, and swinging it in great scything motions as hard as he could while he roared at the creatures in anger.


    This at least got them to retreat, and he quickly tossed aside the weapon and ran down the pier to join the man¡¯s family without even stopping to see if Brannon was still alive. There wasn¡¯t time for that. With that much blood, there was nothing anyone but a holy man could do to save him, and today wasn¡¯t shaping up to be a good day for the gods.


    The best he could do was apologize to the corpse as he ran away from it. ¡°I¡¯ll make sure your sons remember you,¡± he swore, though not loudly enough to draw attention from the goblins that were obviously swarming the vige.


    Screams rang out in the night, though the little bastards seemed to have at least some aversion to the water, and none followed him out onto the pier. There were already two boats leaving, and Markez could see their shapes fading into the distance, but he didn¡¯t call or shout to them. He¡¯d be joining them soon enough with any luck.


    Along the way, he saw Franko¡¯s two sons. That their father wasn¡¯t with him was a bad sign, and he scooped them up. ¡°Come with me, kids - there ain¡¯t no way you two can handle that boat without your dad.¡±


    The sadness they looked at him with said it all, and together, they made their way down to his little skiff. Even though they regrly took it out with two, it was built for four, but eight was asking a lot out of the old girl. Still, it wasn¡¯t like he could just leave any of these kids behind to get gobbled up, so he hopped onto the boat and immediately started pulling everyone down to their ces, mindful of the bnce. First was Karina. He set her and her baby back by the rudder to keep things steady.


    Little Sarazha started to wail then, and he reflexively looked down at the pier for goblins that would be drawn to the babe like a normal man might respond to the dinner bell, but there was only darkness there, and he breathed a sigh of relief.


    Next, he pulled down her kids on board and sat them down on the appropriate benches one at a time and, forcing them back into their spot when they tried to move. With this many people on board, it wouldn¡¯t take much to capsize into the cold water, and he was sure less than half of the people on board knew how to swim.


    While he exined the n, he undid the mooring line. He would have just cut it because there was no way they wereing back, but he¡¯d lost his knife. So, Markez hurried as fast as he could while he tried to remain calm, and then he pushed off from the low pier with his hands and settled down onto his bench just as he started to hear the sound of ws on the wood of the pier.


    ¡°Come on, kids,¡± he said, unlimbering his own oar. ¡°Get those oars in the water and work together. We need to¡ª¡±


    ¡°I want my daddy¡­¡± one of the girls whined pitiously, breaking Markez¡¯s heart.


    ¡°He¡¯s buying us time right now, but don¡¯t you worry, you¡¯ll see him againter¡­¡± Markez mumbled as he tried to keep everyone where they belonged on his overburdened skiff.


    It wasn¡¯t a lie. Not really. Her daddy, along with almost everyone else in their little hamlet, would certainly be dead within a few hours, but she¡¯d meet him again one day, in the life hereafter. Not that he could exin such things to someone so young. Those hard truths could wait untilter. For now, he had to get enough speed to pull free of the breakwater, or they¡¯d all be joining their ancestors a lot sooner rather thanter.


    His words quieted the children, though that was likely because he was the only man aboard. He¡¯d put Franko¡¯s boys across from him with the hope that their dads had at least taught them the basics, but there was no way he could pull at full strength, which meant that as soon as they got to sea, they¡¯d be dependant on his small sail until they reached Tagel by the sea.


    Markez did the math in his head and decided that it would be at least two days. He struggled to remember if he even had enough water for so many mouths. He wasn¡¯t sure, but there was no time to fix that. All they could do was clumsily stroke out into the calm morning waters as the tide came in and put as much distance between themselves and the burning houses as they could.


    He would have cried then if not for the children as they went out into the darkness. No, that wasn¡¯t an option, he told himself as he watched one of the other boats tied to the pier not a hundred feet away from him catch fire as shadows moved along the ce they¡¯d just pulled away from. The children would need him to be strong.

 Chapter 88: A Night of Blood (2)

    Chapter 88: A Night of Blood (2)


    He¡¯d been awake to watch the sunrise stop and transform into sunset, unleashing a wave of apoplexy upon the assembled priests and acolytes. Brother Faerbar had only spent a few seconds taking in the panicking and the disbelief before he left the Courtyard of Retribution and walked to the south gate. He¡¯d known for a long time that the priesthood hadrgely be a vestigial part of the church. It was rather like a peacock¡¯s tail in that regard.


    It might have once served a purpose, but now it only got in the way of unleashing its talons. And in a moment of crisis like this, they would need to be ready to strike. Though he could still feel the light inside his breast and see it emanating between the stones, he walked quickly across like a bright mist. Their god was not dead, but something was dreadfully wrong, and they needed to be ready for what came next.


    ¡°Sir,¡± the guard on duty snapped to attention as the Temr approached. Brother Faerbar looked past him at the open gate. The drawbridge was down, and the only thing that prevented entry was the steel portcullis. This would not do at all.


    ¡°Raise the drawbridge and close the gates,¡± he demanded. ¡°And send messengers to make sure the same is done on all six of the other gates as well.¡±


    ¡°On who¡¯s authority, Sir?¡± the guard asked, taken aback.


    ¡°On my authority!¡± the Temr snapped.


    ¡°But sir, if I don¡¯t have the watchmander¡¯s say so, then he¡¯ll¡ª¡± the guard started to protest as the knuckles on Brother Faerbar¡¯s hand turned white, but he would never get a chance to finish his protests, because that was when the Rose Window exploded.


    Sidrimar was a vast Heptagram on the north bank of the Toleden River before it fed into the Ozora and continued its journey south. Its outer walls were impressive, and they sheltered several small cities worth of servants and craftsmen within their protective walls, but they were dwarfed by the castle-sized inner walls that shielded the grand temple from the fallen world. Even without Siddrim¡¯s blessing, such a building should have been able to stand unflinchingly against a dozen armies.


    But on this wicked, wicked morning, something had already managed to prate all their defenses and shatter a vast thirty-foot stained ss window that had stood for almost a thousand years since itspletion. Even as both of them watched in awe and horror at the sight of hundreds of pounds of colored ss raining down the city below, Brother Faerbar still barked, ¡°Close the gods¡¯ damned gates and send those messengers on mymand before this gets any worse!¡±


    ¡°Y-yes ssir,¡± the guard stammered, obviously shaken.


    The Temr didn¡¯t fault him for that, at least. Who could possibly me him for fear? The sun had not risen, and the church was under attack. Brother Faerbar was not a particrly deep thinker. He saw evil, he fought evil, and he trained the next generation to do likewise. Right now, the evil he saw was overwhelming, and he and his men would be ready for whatever happened next. Even if the world was ending around them, they would die with their swords in their hands.


    By the time he reached the small training courtyard that led to his cadre¡¯s barracks, the entire city was awake. Everyone seemed to be frantically doing something, even if they didn¡¯t know what it was they were doing. In that sense, Siddrimar reminded him of an anthill that someone had kicked over, but he didn¡¯t let it deter him from what needed to be done.


    Then he opened the door to his barracks, but the orders he¡¯d been about to shout died in his throat as he saw blood everywhere.


    ¡°What in Siddrim¡¯s name?¡± the man cursed, but the scene of carnage gave him few answers until he approached the body kneeling on the floor in a pool of blood and saw Brother Harnin¡¯s bloody hands sped in prayer.


    ¡°Our god¡­ he has abandoned us and plunged us into darkness¡­¡± the kneeling man cried out as he wept.


    Though it didn¡¯t exin the blood, Brother Faerbar thought that his Brother was talking about the darkness outside and was about to bring him back to his senses with words or a swift p across the face. That urge died the second his sworn Brother turned his head and was crying tears of blood from empty eye sockets.


    Despite hisposure, Brother Faerbar quickly pulled away from the injured man, wondering what could have happened. Even as he pulled his sword free from his scabbard and tried to decide whether he should try to strike the man down or heal him, a low bass rumbled passed through the stone walls of the building that was felt more than heard. They were under attack. By something huge, by the sounds of it.


    ¡°Please¡­ please make this stop,¡± Brother Harnin begged, groping blinding toward Brother Faerbar.


    That was when his apprentice and some of the other temrs started to enter the room.


    ¡°Wha-what happened to him?¡± someone asked.


    Brother didn¡¯t know what to tell them. Under the circumstances, he might have tried to heal his Brother or at least understand what had happened to him, but he could feel the cloying, oily touch of evil from here. So, he didn¡¯t hesitate. With a single smooth stroke, he brought his sword down at an angle, separating the man¡¯s head from his body and sending it rolling across the floor.


    ¡°We are under attack, both from without and within,¡± Brother Faerbar said as he flicked the de, spattering the blood on the floor before he resheathed it. ¡°On this dark morning, remember that there isn¡¯t time to save everyone. There might not even be time to save yourself. If you are to die, though, do it defending Siddrim¡¯s holy sanctum.¡±


    ¡°For Siddrim!¡± some of his men shouted while others echoed, ¡°For the light!¡±


    Brother Faerbar could see that they All had questions, but he wasn¡¯t going to answer them right now. Even if he¡¯d known whether they wanted to know about the sun, the battle, or their dead Brother, he wouldn¡¯t have wasted the time. Right now, the only thing that mattered was arming themselves and preparing for the battle thaty ahead.


    With his squire¡¯s help, Brother Faerbar donned te and chain, and by the time he was striding out the door to see how much worse things had gotten, more than half his cadre was ready. He gave thest few another minute so that the squires couldce each other up and took advantage of that moment to watch the fires spreading on the west side of the city even as the worst sounds of battle came from the south.


    ¡°Where are we going?¡± one of his brothers asked finally, forcing a decision.


    ¡°Toward the sound of battle as any warrior of the light should!¡± hemanded, sounding much more confident than he actually felt.


    They started jogging after that, and stride by stride, they made their way toward the sound of rumbling. It wasn¡¯t long before they started to find ruined buildings that had copsed under their own weight, but there was no clear answer as to what caused the copse. All he could say for certain was that it was unnatural.


    In ces, the finely fitted stones appeared to have melted under intense heat like dragon fire. That wasn¡¯t quite right, though. There was no scorching. Potters y might have been a better metaphor. Brother Faerbar was still struggling to wrap his mind around the damage he was seeing when they finally spotted the first thing that didn¡¯t belong. It was a giant, hulking creature, at least twice as tall as a man.


    The behemoth was made of stone, or perhaps it had the thick grey-brown leathery skin of a zombie. It was impossible to say which from here, but what was unmistakable was the tarnished bronze armor.


    ¡°That must be our quarry,¡± Brother Faerbar said, unsheathing his de and pointing it at the monster. ¡°Attack as one. Give it no quarter¡ª¡±


    His words were drowned out by a shriek from above. He turned, lighting up his sword to strike whatever was about to attack them just in time to see a dragon soaring only twenty or thirty feet above their heads. It was an ebon monstrosity that radiated evil, but before they had the chance to do much else, it suddenly sprayed a gout of pure darkness down on them. It looked like me and was hot like fire, but it erased the light.


    For a few seconds, Brother Faerbar was smothered in that dark. It cut off everything. The power to speak, breathe, or even think were all too much for him. In the end, all that remained was his glowing sword. Then, light returned to the world. The dragon was gone, and so was the behemoth. He turned to the closest Temr to see if they knew which way it had gone but found that almost half of his men were in the process of boiling away to nothing.


    ¡°Si-sir¡­¡± his own squire gasped, holding up his hand as it, as well as the mace he¡¯d been holding, crumbled to dust.


    ¡°Be strong, Aeldric,¡± Brother Faerbar said, reaching out to heal the wound even as he looked at the horror around him. The Dragonfire had melted everything, even the stones they trod on. All that had survived were those things that were closest to the warriors wielding holy light.


    It was an insight he would have shared had a pair of screaming goblin skeletons not suddenly charged at them from out of nowhere. Though their skulls and hands glowed with a strange blue fire, white holy fire erupted wherever these things touched the ground.


    Siddrim obviously cursed them, and that was enough for him, for Brother Faerbar, and he charged without a moment¡¯s hesitation. Meeting the first one¡¯s steel ws with his holy de. The fight that followed was short and brutal as he and his men faced the two of them.


    Neither of them was much bigger than a goblin, and they weren¡¯t especially strong, but their bodies were more formidable than any knight in te that he¡¯d ever faced, and then there was the fire to consider. Though the temrs parried almost every blow, even their shields did little against the gouts of vicious blue fire that these constructs flung around so casually, and by the time Brother Faerbar managed to chop the second one into small enough pieces that it finally stopped moving, his chest was heaving, and more than a tenth of his body was covered in painful burns. Some of them, like those on his left leg, went all the way to the bone, and he turned his attention to those first.


    Siddrim¡¯s light seemed weaker than usual since the moment sunrise had faded, but it had still been there to call upon, though. They wouldn¡¯t have survived this insane battle without it. Under normal circumstances, Brother Fearbar¡¯s wounds would have healed almost as fast as they were inflicted. Partway through healing his own burns after those monsters had been dispatched, though, the light inside his just vanished.


    He could tell that every warrior still standing felt the same thing as him because, as one, all of their swords were suddenly extinguished. It was unheard of. It was impossible. Suddenly, they looked to each other in confusion, but the pain was written all over everyone¡¯s face, including his own.


    The loss of light hurt more acutely than his remaining burns. For almost three decades, he¡¯d carried thentern of Siddrim¡¯s light inside of him, and now that it was gone, the world no longer looked the same.


    Brother Faerbar nced down at his no longer gleaming sword and past that at the shattered skeleton on the ground. This changed nothing, he realized. Even if their god had withdrawn his light from the world for some grave sin they did not fully understand, he would keep fighting until hisst breath.

 Chapter 89: The Infinite Dark

    Chapter 89: The Infinite Dark


    Tenebroum slept as the world burned, but it still dreamed, and through those dreams, it watched fitfully as events yed 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 ofnd 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 inds 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 ckness 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 unsuspectedyer 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 asrge and as powerful a predator it had be, 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 ind of rtive 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 tness of a map, and their connections and distances were charted andbeled in a constantly mutatingnguage that made no sense. Later, as it got close enough that it could finally, once again, see the continent where itsir 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 hadsted for three days, and it showed no sign of ending. The stars still twinkled, but the smaller nts 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 dayster, all of the summer had been skipped, and winter wasing. 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 in, and Siddrim¡¯s bonesy 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 seeded in ughtering the living of those cities mattered little to it.


    If this wave of dead did not seed, 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 thest struggles of humanity, it would not miss them when they were gone. Instead, it would reach out with its bony hands and grasp everrger 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 ve, then it could establish caravans to collect and gather all the wealth of the dead world and bring it back to ckwater, 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 therger cities.


    There would be no safety there, though. Tagel-by-the-sea was already overwhelmed with the dead that had spent thest few days marching along the bottom of the river. Now, the imcable 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 ces had resisted Tenrboum¡¯s grasp with any kind of sess, and they were either far away or ces 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 annihting 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 yed 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 annihtion 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 schrs 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 darkbyrinth, 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 andpletely inste 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 imed. 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 beneathyer afteryer 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 d 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 irreceable resources.


    Just imagining the irreceable 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 ces 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 Temr 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.

 Chapter 90: An End for Abenend

    Chapter 90: An End for Abenend


    As a fifth-year apprentice, Jordan would never be privy to the conversations that the venerable mages of the Collegium would have had the day the sun didn¡¯t rise. They¡¯d cloistered themselves away in the Chancellors office while the trumpets had woken everyone else as always. However, by the time the students had risen, there was neither a sun nor sses to greet them. Instead, he¡¯d gotten dressed in silence and waited in the auditorium along with everyone else for answers that would nevere. Like his friends, though, he could imagine what it was those grey beards had said, though. From the way they spoke in hushed tones while they all sat together at their favorite bar, Jordan¡¯s friends had even more vivid imaginations than he did.


    Oh, for the morning, the orders hade down eventually, and they¡¯d all buttoned up the school as tightly as possible to prepare for the seconding or whatever shoe was going to drop next. However, when nothing happened, they¡¯d eventually opened the gates after dinner to allow for reprovisioning and other pressing tasks.


    He, along with all of theds, had taken that opportunity to go out and have a pint or two. They¡¯d have to be back before midnight when they sealed everything up again, of course, but they were wizards after all, so there was no real danger. They could always teleport back to their rooms if worst came to worst.


    Well, some of them could, he thought to himself with a smile as he took another drink of the warm beer in front of him and looked around the table. Artem and Besmr certainly could. Jordan knew he¡¯d never be as good as either of them when it came to casting spells, but he¡¯d made his peace with that years before. Thom though¡­ he was even more hopeless than Jordan, and if not for the fact that his uncle was a duke, the man surely would have been given his walking papers some time ago.


    That was fine, though. The world took all kinds, and for now, they were blowing off a little steam at the Dragon¡¯s gon while they tried to pretend that the world was still normal. They traded gossip and reassured the locals that the world wasn¡¯t ending. The former was much more fun, but thetter continued to dominate the conversation even after he¡¯d sprung for a round for everyone just to try to get everyone to calm down.


    Abenend, for better or worse, was the final destination for third and fourth sons, as much as anyone who might have actual magical talent. Sadly, Jordan was in the former category and not thetter. His two older brothers would ensure that he¡¯d never hold the title of Baron or rule of Sedgim manor, and sadly, they had no smaller fiefs to give him. At 21, he had no good marriage prospects, and his skill with spells was erratic, as his teachers had so gently put it.


    So, slowly but surely, he wasing to terms with the fact that he would have to make his way in this world with his mind instead of his name or his arcane talents. That was fine. His writing was good, his sums were excellent, and his alchemy was eptable. Once all this was done, he had no worries that he¡¯d be able to find some lesser house in a variety of ways to keep his pockets full when he was one day forced to take his leave from this cozy life a year or two from now when the money ran out.


    For now, his family provided him a healthy stipend at least, so he had to be grateful for that small blessing. Even if the world was ending.


    ¡°I¡¯m telling you - the gods have not abandoned us,¡± Thom said loudly. ¡°It¡¯s just a peculiar astral phenomenon called eclipsing. Somethingrge stands between us and the sun, and it blocks¡ª¡±


    ¡°What¡¯srge enough to block out Sidrrim¡¯s light that isn¡¯t a dark god?¡± one of the vigers shouted, interrupting his friend.


    They¡¯d gone round and round about this several times now, but it was clear to Jordan that no one had a good answer for why there had been a day without a sun. They¡¯d discussed it from spiritual, astral, and philosophical perspectives, but all of them had told Jordan only one thing: despite being some of the smartest and most educated people in the whole world, the teachers of the Collegium had no idea where the sun had gone, and to Jordan that was the most troubling answer of all.


    He was just working up the courage to propose that to his friends when the first explosion echoed out into the night. They all looked at each other, wondering why a spell of serious power had been cast, but before they had a chance to discuss whether it had been a me strike or something worse like eradication, there was a crack of lightning somewhere closer. After that, they were up like a shot, rushing out the door like everyone else to see what was going on.


    Abenend was not arge town. In truth, it was smaller than the Magesterium Collegium that it served. The difference was that the Collegium was a giant old fortress packed full of students, teachers, and reagents from across the world, while Abenend was two main streets, some craftsmen, groceries, and innkeepers, along with a few hundred houses spread around the institution of magical learning, and right now it was burning.


    No, that was wrong, he realized as he continued to study the situation. It was the army that was marching on it that was burning, and the mes only made it seem like the Collegium had caught fire.


    ¡°Would Siddrim¡¯s Church really try to take advantage of this chaos to attack us?¡± Artem asked.


    No one answered, but just thinking about it made Jordan feel sick. A surprise attack by the forces of light wasn¡¯t impossible since it was their god that controlled the sun. That theory onlysted until zombies began to spill out into the main street and start shambling their way like a human tide.


    No, it couldn¡¯t be the church, Jordan realized. They¡¯d never abed this sort of evil. It was they who used the Mages of Abened even though such dark magics were strictly forbidden.


    As one, he and all the other mages began to cast the most powerful or appropriate spells they knew as the tide of zombies approached. Shards of ice and sprays of fire shed in the night as the townspeople ran for their lives, though it did not escape Jordan¡¯s notice that they did so almost as much to escape the destruction the mages were causing as the zombies that were approaching.


    Over the next few minutes, Jordan couldn¡¯t pay much attention to the fireworks that were happening in the background. It was all he could do to try to remember the words and gestures to simple spells like spray of mes and castigation as they struck down the undead by the dozen. It urred to him only slowly that no matter how many they killed, though, there were always more behind thest rank. They were getting closer, too.


    Soon, they were too close, and his friends, along with a few townspeople who were brave enough to fight or too afraid to flee, were copsing back into the tavern and baring the doors and the windows shut with anything they could. As grown men around him started to weep from fear, Jordan realized that running might have been a better option.


    ¡°Where did Thom and Besmr go?¡± Jordan asked Artem, realizing btedly that they were down to only two mages left in a room full of people that could muster no more than a dagger or a wine bottle should the dead manage to break down the door.


    ¡°They left,¡± Artem said quietly. ¡°Just like we should probably think about doing¡­¡±


    ¡°We can¡¯t just leave these people!¡± Jordan said as much because it was the right thing to do as he was because he was terrified of his spell, which was the only way out.


    Arten just shrugged at that and began to cast a warding spell to try to shore up their barricades, leaving Jorden to reassure the defenders that this would all be over soon.


    ¡°We¡¯ve killed at least a hundred already, and the Collegium has to have killed another thousand, right? How many more can there be?¡±


    The answer turned out to be at least one more because no sooner had he said those fateful words than another shadowrger than any three menbined loomed outside the partially blocked windows. Everyone held their breath, hoping it would move past them, but they weren¡¯t that lucky.


    It stopped in front of the door, and once the big one started bashing down the door, though, all hope was lost. It did more damage than all the other zombiesbined. It smashed the thing to flinders with its great nobby club and the jagged shards of wood that sprayed across the room, stabbing several men he knew, including the barkeep, and they quickly fell over into pools of their own blood.


    Jordan began to enchant the words to spray the dead with fire, but he stopped partway through and started to cast a lightning spell instead so he wouldn¡¯t hurt too many other people while he was trying to save them. Even as the spell went off, though, he could feel that he fumbled it, and it only caused therge zombie to stagger a moment while the three closest to it dropped to the ground smoke.


    ¡°Alright, Artem hit it with¡­¡± Jordan¡¯s words trailed off as he looked to his left and saw that his friend had vanished. He didn¡¯t know if he¡¯d run up the stairs in all of themotion or use a spell to escape. He just knew that it stung and that somehow, some way, he was thest person here who could help these people.


    That was coldfort as he saw the armor-d behemoth striding towards him and cutting down the men between the two of them like they weren¡¯t even there. That was when Jordan ran. He told himself that he¡¯d done his best but that they¡¯d need to regroup upstairs, but the truth was simpler than that. He was terrified, and one look in the soulless ck eye sockets of the monster advancing on him had told him that he was going to die.


    He¡¯d pray for forgiveness in the morning if there was ever going to be another morning. For now, he just tripped over the stairs as he took them two at a time. From the windows, he saw sprays of light still emanating from the Collegium¡¯s towers and upper floors, so they hadn¡¯t fallen yet. It didn¡¯t look good, though.


    Jordan had seen demonstrations of powerful magics before, but never so many at once. Gouts of fire were raining down on zombie hordes, momentarily illuminating them before they were reced by another wave of death. shes of red and white were the mostmon, but asionally, Jordan saw the violet wards of high-level arcane magics re as well.


    Even as he mmed the door in one of the smaller rooms and barred it, he wondered if that would be enough. He was not a strong mage, and the few spells he¡¯d already cast had taxed him greatly. If he were to cast a distant step, and then the Collegium¡¯s defenses fell, what would he do then?


    The door thumped as something outside banged against it, and Jordan realized that he¡¯d worry about thatter. He needed to focus. The spell he needed was dangerous and took several minutes; it also just happened to be only barely within his abilities to cast it in the first ce. Teleportation magic was very vtile and dangerous, and he¡¯d scrambled many an egg in his attempt to send them across the room.


    So, he turned all that out and began to recite the words as he pictured his threadbare room, only a thousand yards from here. Trying to ignore the sounds of danger and death around him was almost impossible, though, and at thest moment, he almost abandoned the spell to try again. He would have to if the zombies hadn¡¯t seeded in breaking the door down. Instead, feeling the magic straining inside of him and only just barely holding it together, he whispered the final sybles before the monster could rip his throat out.


    He did not find himself in the Collegium, though, or indeed, anywhere in the town of Abendend. Instead, Jordan found himself in a dark, muddy field with absolutely no idea where he was.


    ¡°Great,¡± he muttered to himself. ¡°Just great. What in all the hells am I supposed to do now?¡±

 Chapter 91: Safe Harbor

    Chapter 91: Safe Harbor


    Tagel-by-the-sea was burning on the horizon well before they reached it, creating a macabre lighthouse of sorts. Even though that was the case, they were still going to have to stop, however briefly, to try to find something to eat and drink. Normally, the biggest city in the county of Lidvell being put to the torch would normally be considered an unmitigated disaster, but as the sun had not risen in two or three days now, and the winds were growing so cold that at the time, he had frost in his beard, it ranked low on the list of problems.


    Despite the heavy use of his boat¡¯s tiny sail, Markez was exhausted from rowing for so long, and the boys who had been helping both had their hands covered in blisters. They were the lucky ones, though. The girls and the infant had spent almost a full day crying before they¡¯d finally run out of tears. Now, they simply sat despondently and shivered under the damp fishing they used for a nket and looked at the stars while their mother prayed to Gods that no longer seemed to be listening.


    Water, food, and hope were all bigger problems than danger. He might not starve to death this week, of course, but after another day or two of this, he¡¯d run out of strength to row, and another few days after that, the children would start to die. Brannon¡¯s wife honestly didn¡¯t look too much better than them. She just stared nk-eyed into the dark as she whispered to anyone who would listen to save them.


    So far, only Lunara had responded. It was only by the rise of the moon that he¡¯d kept track of the number of days that had passed or the direction that she was going in. Her light was not enough to ward away the cold or give them any new information about the world beyond the fact thatnd was still off to his right as a patch of looming darkness differentiated from the sea only by the fact that it held its shape.


    As they got closer to the burning city, Markez could smell death as well as smoke. That wasn¡¯t surprising. What was was that some of the dead seemed to be moving. Originally, he¡¯d feared goblins had attacked here just like they had on the strand, but that didn¡¯t seem to be the case. Instead, the living dead could be seen fighting against thest of the city¡¯s inhabitants, even as they continued to burn.


    Maybe it really was the end of the world, he thought to himself, careful not to say that part out loud. Markez was old, and he was tired, but everyone was looking to him, women, children, everyone - and all he could do was try to keep them safe while everything burned down.


    Trying up to those docks definitely wouldn¡¯t be a safe thing to do, though, so as quietly as possible, they stayed a couple dozen feet away fromnd and pier as they slowly examined the grisly scene. Here, at least, the darkness was on their side. There were lots of debris and pieces of other boats in the water, but nothing seemed to be living out here, and if there was, he didn¡¯t know how they could reach him.


    As far as Markez knew, there was no such thing as a zombie that could swim, and though evil things had been said over the years about the Oroza, they weren¡¯t exactly in her devilish waters yet. Honestly, he wasn¡¯t sure what he would do when that happened, but it wasn¡¯t something he had room to worry about just now while he worried about the dead milling about on shore.


    It was only when they were halfway around the city that he saw a glimmer of hope in the form of a ship drifting free a few hundred yards off the coast. It wasn¡¯t a little fishing raft either. Instead, it was a single-masted trading vessel that looked to be abandoned based on the way its rigging was scattered and its sail hung limply.


    A vessel like that would have fresh water. He was sure of it. It might even have some food tucked away. Even as Markez¡¯s mouth began to water at the idea of stale ship¡¯s biscuits, he cursed and reminded himself that there could just as easily be a hold full of dead down there, too.


    ¡°W-Where are we going?¡± Karina rasped unexpectedly as he started to move away from the shore, scaring the shit out of him. ¡°I thought we¡ª¡±


    ¡°Shhhhh¡­¡± he shushed her, wanting to avoid attracting any attention as a note of hysteria started to creep into her voice. She was desperate. He knew that. They all were. ¡°We¡¯ll get you¡­ I¡¯ll take care of all of you, soo, I promise, but there ain¡¯t no way anyone is going it that city anding back alive, so we¡¯ll have to nibble around the outside, and right now, I mean to take a long look in that cargo hold there.¡±


    Given how tired they all were, it took some time to row against the waves to where the ship was drifting. Still, as he got closer, he saw no blood stter on the decks and no bodies strewn about. It looked like it hade loose of its moorings and just drifted away. The name on the side was <em>Dawn¡¯s Light</em>, which was almost certainly an omen, though he had no idea if it was a positive or a negative one, given the current state of things.


    ¡°You boys push off once I¡¯m up,¡± Markez said as he brought them aside as quietly as he could. ¡°I¡¯m going to take a quick peek, and if I find any trouble, I¡¯ll just jump right off and swim out to you.¡±


    He very much doubted things would work out quite so neatly, but he wasn¡¯t about to worry boys too young to shave about such things. Instead, he smiled and climbed over the railing of the vessel, and as soon as he was on his feet, he pulled out a bying pin and held in like a club.


    Rope was literally everywhere, and other than one suspicious blood spot near the sternhouse, he saw no signs of violence. The top deck was mostly abandoned, though he did find and pocket a half-eaten apple. As badly as he wanted it, Karina would need it more.


    The ship was too crude for a wheel. Instead, it had a tiller attached to arge rudder. A vessel like this was meant for rivers and coasts and was only barely seaworthy. It wasn¡¯t so different from his own boat, but it was still pretty alien to him.


    ¡°Not as alien as the rest of this benighted world, though,¡± he muttered to himself as he opened the door to the below-decks area.


    Markez stood there for several seconds then, steeling himself against the darkness below and straining his hearing before he descended the stairs one creaking step at a time. The hold was full of barrels and boxes. So much so he was sure they¡¯d find something edible if they looked hard enough. That wasn¡¯t what caught his attention, though.


    Beyond the sloshing of water and the rhythmic p of the waves, there was something else in that inky darkness. It took him a long moment before he could figure out quite what it was, but when he recognized it as sobbing, he said, ¡°You cane out. I¡¯m not going to hurt you.¡±


    Nothing happened at first, but eventually, a head bobbed up briefly from behind a crate before disappearing again. The only light down here came from the distant moon and stars as it filtered through the cracks in the deck above. It wasn¡¯t enough light to see any details, but it was in to see from the shape that the head belonged to a child.


    He repressed a sigh. The veryst thing he needed right now was more hands to hold and mouths to feed. What was he going to do, though? Loot their ship - steal theirst crust of bread to feed the kids he¡¯d brought with him and let the ones down here starve?


    Lots of people were moving around now, but in the darkness, counting them was impossible. So, he didn¡¯t try.


    ¡°I want to see the adults or whoever¡¯s in charge upstairs. Now!¡± As he finished, Markez let a little annoyance seep into his voice. That was okay. It was okay to be annoyed at whoever was in charge here. He was old enough to be a little crabby. That was his right.


    Slowly, several people followed him up onto the deck: a dandy, a street rat that he thought was a boy but who turned out to be a girl and a maid that might or might not have been the mother to a couple of the children clutching at her skirts.


    ¡°If someone is in charge around here, then it is I, Dian Larrintin, the third, but you may address me as¡ª¡± the fob said with a minor bow.


    ¡°How about we skip the formalities for now. I¡¯ll call you Dian, you can call me captain, and we can get to the part about what your n was going to be.¡± Markez enjoyed twisting the knife when dealing with people like this, but the shock on the noble¡¯s face made it that much better.


    He was apoplectic for a few seconds, but eventually, the girl ryed what had happened. She skipped the worst bits on ount of the children, but it was easy enough to read between the lines. When the dead had attacked, everyone panicked. Those who could flee by ship did, but in their case, they were just a few stragglers who happened to get on this tub with no idea how to use it. They¡¯d spent half a letting the current drag them from shore, but the most productive thing they¡¯d done so far was tangle all of the rigging before giving up.


    ¡°Well, we can¡¯t just stay here,¡± Markez said finally.


    No matter how many times he asked the group what they were going to do, they just told him more about what they¡¯d done up until now, and since that obviously wasn¡¯t working, he was going to takemand.


    ¡°But we don¡¯t know how to use the ship¡ª¡± Lara answered softly.


    ¡°Then you¡¯ll learn,¡± Markez said curtly, interrupting her. He wasn¡¯t any more pleased than she was that his crew was about to consist of a sniviling nobleman, a girl, and a handful of boys, but it was that or die, so he was going to do what he had to do.


    ¡°We¡¯re going to get these sails up, and we¡¯ll make for the river before¡ª¡± he started to exin.


    ¡°But the Oroza is¡ª¡± Dian started to exin, but Markez ignored him.


    ¡°We all know exactly what the Oroza is. It¡¯s dangerous, and if you say anything worse than that in front of the children, I will toss you off this boat,¡± Markez shot back gruffly. He¡¯d give anything to have Brannon back right now. ¡°It¡¯s dangerous, but it¡¯s our only way. You can¡¯t drink seawater, and those barrels down in the hold will onlyst for a few days.¡±


    The argument continued after that, but it changed nothing, and slowly but surely, everyone fell into line. After that, he got everyone and everything of value from his little boat before they tied it to the stern rail, and then he showed his tiny crew what he needed from them if they were going to set this sail.


    It should have taken three trained men five minutes to get the sail up and another five to get underway. With this lot, though, he had to spend an hour teaching them basic skills while they cleaned up the mess they¡¯d made of the rigging.


    That was fine. It was a good time for Karina to drink her fill and then spend some time with Adrianna, rounding up all of the children. He¡¯d count just how many of them there were after they were making way. While he was at it, Markez made a mental note that he¡¯d also need to inventory their supplies, their weapons, and anything else that they might have on board.


    He tried to continue to be grumpy about it, but the way that Karina¡¯s face had lit up when he¡¯d give her that half-eaten fruit cheered him up too much to keep it up. They were going to make it. They were going to be okay.

 Chapter 92: A New Dawn

    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 thatsted 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 thatsted 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 itsir, 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 thinpared 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 gued 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 hourster, 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 onerge 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 snuffedpletely. For hours, the Lich was inconsble 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 muchrger 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 toplete 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 im 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 towardrger, 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 rece 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 itsir, 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 nned 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 atst true darkness, but it onlysted for five hours before the first sun started to rise all over again.


    The Lich set a dozen schrs 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 y 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 ughtering.


    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 ns to ount for their losses in its ns and move its terrible swamp dragon and its earth titan into more important roles in their ce.


    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 evilsbined. 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 schr 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 constion 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 theirnds 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.

 Chapter 93: Ten Thousand Candles

    Chapter 93: Ten Thousand Candles


    Even with the great dome of the temple toppled and the sun missing from the sky, the surviving leaders of the church would not listen to him. He, like so many of the other veterans who had survived the onught of monsters they¡¯d all faced, urged their leaders to act with all the strength they had left and strike at the heart of the evil that had silenced their god and almost eradicated his temple. The lesiarch refused, though.


    He wasn¡¯t the only one. They all refused. The Hierarch of Purgative me refused to fight the decision, and his few surviving high priests did likewise. ¡°We must defend this sacred ce! We do not have the men to hold the walls, let alone strike out with an expeditionary force!¡± they said as one, no matter how many times they were petitioned by the surviving Brothers of the Purgative me in the long silence that followed their terrible tribtion.


    For the strongest holy warriors to huddle behind the walls of their fortress city while the world was plunged into darkness was folly, of course, but what could he do? He could not even make the argument that they must defend the farmers who fed them as long as the sun no longer existed to ripen the grain.


    Every bone in Temr¡¯s battered body told him that staying on the defensive was the wrong decision, but he would have epted it because that was his nature. Then, the sky filled with shooting stars.


    To most, it was seen as an omen, though people could not agree on whether it was a sign of hope or something more sinister. Just the same, everyone watched it, including Brother Fearbar, who was praying at the ruined altar high on the temple mount for more guidance.


    That was when he was struck by a star that came careening out of the night sky and hit him like a lightning bolt through the giant hole in the roof above him.


    He barely noticed the stars and didn¡¯t remember being struck. He¡¯d looked up briefly at the start of the shooting stars through the ruined tangle of the nearest stained ss window but quickly focused on his prayers to Siddrim. Those efforts were earnest and fervent enough to block out the talking and chanting that otherwise filled the holy ce for the next several minutes, and then the world was suddenly lost in white light.


    For a moment, Brother Faerbar thought that he had died, but it wasn¡¯t heaven he¡¯d been gifted with, but a vision of hell. He saw a struggling, dying god, as well as the terrifying evil that he had fought, as well as the suffering that creation faced without a light to keep the terrors of the night at bay.


    He woke up on the floor of the chapel surrounded by other acolytes and warriors, miraculously healed from the injuries he¡¯d still been suffering from. More importantly, though, he woke up filled with light. He literally glowed with power.


    Brother Faerbar had always been sensitive. Most people would have considered him too sensitive for the role of a Temr, but he¡¯d reveled in it. What he¡¯d seen before paled inparison to the sights he saw now, though. Until tonight, he¡¯d been blind, and it was only now that he could see. The light that filled his soul shone with a purity that let him see right through the men that surrounded him.


    It was a depressing moment of exaltation as he saw the amount of cowardice and sloth on disy. The church had not been defeated by an army of darkness. They had been defeated by themselves long ago. Some part of the aging Temr had always known this. He¡¯d struggled with his orders many times throughout his career, though he¡¯d always eventually obeyed and done what he¡¯d been told.


    That was his sin, and he knew that. He also knew the truth, though. Siddrim was dead, and this was one of hisst gifts to the devout. The Temr couldn¡¯t make sense of all the details that had befallen his god, but one word stood out above all the rest: ckwater.


    Something terrible happened in that ce, and he personally needed to go and end it. That was all that Siddrim had asked for in return for this power.


    Everyone waited for him to speak as Brother Faerbar rose to his feet, but as he absorbed all of this information, he was struck dumb, and slowly but surely, the entire room joined him in silence. ¡°Tomorrow, the sun will rise, but not as we have known it,¡± he said finally, unwilling to share the full truth with his brothers just yet. ¡°Then, once everyone has seen what has be of our world, we march to war.¡±


    They asked more questions, but the Temr ignored them. Instead, he walked to the ruined window, well aware of the fact that he would glow like a beacon in the dark night. Light shot out of his eyes and mouth, and his every word seemed louder than before, so he did not waste them.


    Instead, he repeated his message again to the audience that was gathering below. It was only once he¡¯d done that that he began to preach from the Book of Dawn, trying to give all those who heard him hope that he no longer had. ¡°We must share our light and spread into the darkness in the same way that the me of one candle might light a thousand more without ever really depleting itself. We must be generous with that light, not miserly!¡±


    As The Temr continued on, he couldn¡¯t help but notice that it was true literally as well as figuratively. Normally, Siddrimar would be lit brightly, even at midnight, but today, he outshone the few candles and guttering torches that were scattered around and doing a remarkably poor job of illuminating the white city. However, here and there, he could see other pure white lights milling amongst the masses in the courtyards below.


    He was not the only one who had been chosen for this task, and he was sure they would join him soon enough. They had to. They¡¯d seen what he¡¯d seen and knew what he knew.


    Once that wasplete, he returned to his room to gather his weapons, armor, and the surviving men of his cadre. The rules and the rulers of the church no longer applied because the church was no more. Broth Faerbar would only stay in these lightless walls long enough to prepare, and then he nned to camp outside of the main gate and wait for the rest of his army to show up.


    By the time dawn once again touched the frigid world, he was already dressed in his full te regalia and walking out of the main gate with a growing mob behind him that was trying to heap all sorts of unearned des upon him. Prophet. Messiah. He was none of these things. Eventually, he allowed them to call him Paragon, though. That was an ancient title for the leader of crusades, and this is surely what this was to be: the church¡¯sst crusade.


    By the time the third sun had risen, they had built their camp just across the river from the city, making their opposition to the church elders very clear: there was no safety to be found in those walls. For a time, they were ignored. However, by the time the first two suns had set and the third one was descending, a trickle of men started to join them in twos and threes. That trickle didn¡¯t be a flood until nightfall, which was also when Brother Faerber noticed something peculiar for the first time.


    By the time full darkness had set in, most of the men that were most loyal to him now had glowing eyes of their own. They¡¯d spent the day telling scripture and stories, and it was that spark that he somehow managed to spread to them without diminishing his own. The other men present, who had mostly discussed fears or concerns about the fragmented nature of the sky, still had dark eyes, and Brother Faerbar thought that was fitting enough. It showed him that he still had work to do.


    He¡¯d hoped that exining how each of the lights in the sky was one of the horses from Siddrimar¡¯s chariot running free would have been enough to buoy them, but it was not. ¡°Agrathixus, Nimeia, Dronicus, and Bosperon cannot light the world on their own,¡± he¡¯d told them. ¡°They need a strong hand to hold their reigns and a world awash in the prayers of good men to graze on.¡±


    It wasn¡¯t until morning that the church elders came with orders and admonishments. They¡¯d obviously been unable to work up the courage to do so in the dark when the growing camp of the Crusaders was lit more brightly than the holy city. Now though, by the wan bluish light of morning, when the frost was still heavy on the grass, they came with banners and censers and all the pomp that they could muster to reassert their authority.


    The council of Hierarchs from the different branches of the church started with bluster, but when that failed, they were reduced to reason and then finally pleading.


    ¡°Would you dare risk your immortal souls by defying the lisearch?¡±


    ¡°Marching off with so few men in times such as these would be the height of foolishness!¡±


    ¡°Please, Don¡¯t you understand? For the sake of church unity, you must obey us. The men respect you too much. Anything less would cause a rift in the church¡­¡±


    Each time, Brother Faerbar rebuffed them, and each time, they returned only slightly more humbled than before.


    Finally, though, during dinner, after his following had doubled and then doubled again, he denounced them. ¡°Siddrim has left us, and it is because of old men like you!¡± he yelled. ¡°I no longer take orders from men that have no light in their souls.¡±


    That was something everyone could see. There were over a hundred men in the camp now, and most of them had a little light in their eyes. The church fathers, though, were a notable exception to that, and they left almost immediately once that was pointed out.


    ¡°Humility could still save them,¡± he told hisrades that night by the fire, ¡°But that is a straight the church hasn¡¯t prioritized in truth for a long time.¡±


    All the confrontation did was cause the powers that be to shut the main gate to the best of their ability, but that was, in a sense, an admission of defeat, and over the following day, the trickle of men that had left Siddrimar to join Brother Faerbar¡¯s crusade became a flood, but he never left his growing camp, nor spreading the tales that would inspire hope in the beleaguered men.


    It was only when his dozens had be thousands that the Temrs finally started to march to the west. He knew that others would join him along the way, both from Siddrimar and from every city that they passed through, but he could no longer wait. The evil they sought to vanquish continued to grow every day, and if they hoped to drive a stake through its heart, then time was of the essence.

 Chapter 94: Slowly Stirring

    Chapter 94: Slowly Stirring


    Tenebroum slept fitfully, dreaming of the tide of overwhelming death that it had unleashed on the world. It was a pleasant dream, and even as it struggled with the churning changes deep inside itself, it was lulled back to sleep by the symphony of screams and the gurgling rattles that followed them. Light had returned to the sky once more, but it was chaotic and weak, and it could not stop all that the Lich had set in motion. At best, it could only slow it down a few hours at a time, and in most ces, it did precious little good. Only Siddrimar and Abenend were exceptions to that.


    The mages had survived its assaultrgely intact, thanks to their dangerous magics, marking them as perhaps the most dangerous of its enemies. Another mass attack without its shadow drake or its titan to bring down the walls would be an exercise in futility, so they would be allowed to live a while longer. It had made them afraid, though. It could smell that fear wafting over the walls of their castle even as they tried and failed to understand what it was that they were up against. They now seemed disinclined to leave their walls for fear of what was toe next, and scrying was of very limited effectiveness when you did not know what exactly it was you were spying upon.


    By contrast, the cursed city of Siddrimar had been ground halfway to dust in a bloody night that hadsted for day after day, but still, they insisted on bing a problem once more. Krulm¡¯venor had been allowed to tear apart the city until scarcely any copies of him had remained. That had been a battle worth watching to the Lich, and it reveled in the suffering of its ve almost as much as it did the deaths of its enemies.


    Its most powerful servants were still grievously wounded by the terrible battles they had just endured, so they would be of little help in the days toe. By the end of the battle, Krulm¡¯venor had escaped all but depleted, the shadow drake had been held aloft by only the magic that imbued it despite having one wing shredded and the other broken, and its titan had limped away from the battle missing an arm.


    Even the death and destruction that the Lich¡¯s four horsemen had rained down to earn those scars hadn¡¯t been enough to fully extinguish that fervor, apparently. Amongst the ashes, some fresh spark had been relit there, lighting a new brushfire that was even now spreading south and west.


    The darkness had made no progress in understanding the new lights that gued it, nor the erratic movements they made as they moved from horizon to horizon by different paths each day. The tiny suns danced, doing their best to stave off its evil, but they were failing miserably. Just like its own servants, they werergely ineffective, though the Lich worried they might grow over time.


    If each were to grow into a proper sun in its own right¡­ the Lich worried, but it dismissed the thought. It would not let itself fret over hypotheticals until it had more information from the minds it had set to studying the new phenomena while it roused itself from slumber and focused on the dangers at hand. It would focus solely on the resources it had right now and not the ones it would like to have or those that mighte avable soon.


    Only Oroza still functioned at anything close to full strength, and the Lich unleashed her without a second thought. Itmanded her to smash bridges and sink boats in the northern end of her domain, wherever she found them, to buy it time.


    The warriors were visible to it even before they made much progress into its territory. That was how bright they burned. It wasn¡¯t just the relics and the blessed armor that they wore, though. Their fervor would have been obvious even without that. Many of them burned with an energy simr to that which it had only experienced before in Siddrim¡¯s avatar, and that made the Lich nervous. It did not have many tools that could stand against that might.


    It was that realization that finally pushed it from its slumber and back into the world of men. It could feel that it had been changed by the changes to its soul, though it would take a long time to truly understand those changes. Shadows and death were still there, of course, but beneath those murky waters, there were new currents. It was reminded of the strange things it had seen as its mind roiled with the chaos that undey the world, but experiments on those subjects would have to wait until this danger had passed.


    It had ten thousand undead warriors but few good options in fielding them against its current enemy in a timely manner. Its deathless soldiers were making great strides in reaping a crop of blood and death each night, but they were spread out in all directions, sacking everything in their path at points that were far from here, and it needed the strength that seeped into the darkness from corpses they left in their wake badly enough that it was hesitant to end their rampages entirely.


    Royal Road''s content has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    There was no denying that the darkness was weaker than it had been in a decade, but that was only because of exhaustion. It was confident that within a year, or perhaps two, it would be stronger than it had ever been before.


    Some of them would have to return for the battle thaty ahead, though. Of that, there was no question. In ces where deep mines for coal and ore existed, it could create shadow gates to bring home portions of the vast horde it had unleashed on the world. The rest of its forces would take time to draw back to where they were now needed most, though.


    So, it summoned all of the allies and monstrosities it had built over the years. With the exception of the specialized creations, like the fleshcrafters, and the abominations that manned its library and its forges, it emptied its storehouses and tunnels of everybody that could stagger forward.


    Most of these corpses were drudges that had already been worked to the bone for decades, but they would be enough to slow down the attack force and give it pause, buying Tenebroum a few more days. With luck, the waves of ineffective dead might even buy it the element of surprise in the attack to follow, though it would not bet on it. Not against veteran holy warriors who had already managed to survive their might in the first attack on their holy city.


    After that, it reached out to the goblins in the west and the lizardmen in the north. Both groups had grown fat in the shadow of its protection, and they would now be called upon for service once again. It would take time for them to arrive, but the Lich was hopeful that the Goblins would arrive as the Temrs reached Fallravea just so that unlucky city could have a chance to live through their deprivations all over again.


    Those actions alone should have been enough to ensure its victory, but it was not enough to set the Lich¡¯s mind at ease. It had tried to kill god and only partially seeded; it had tried to steal the sun from the sky, but all it had managed to do was shatter it, and it had tried to raze Siddrimar to the ground, but all it had done was awaken a hos¡¯ nest.


    A failure this time, or even a partial sess, might mean that they would breach its temple or, worse, the mazes below. So it did everyst thing it could think of to tilt the battlefield to its own advantage. It dispatched its shades by night to poison all of the wells between ckwater and Fallravea, and while that was being done, it forced its titan back to the surface to use its earth magics to turn roads into bogs and erect a wall across the main approaches to its domain, just inside the veil of eternal night that protected it.


    Once all of this was done, it unleashed a gue on the survivors that huddled inside the damaged and damaged city of Fallravea. The Lich had directed small attacks on that hollow shell of a city several times, but it had never been for the purpose of conquering it. It hadn¡¯t needed to. They would never be a threat. It just liked to keep the popce afraid enough that they looked for new victims to me this on and burn in effigy. That had been their way for thest few years, and Tenebroum would never grow tired of the smells of the innocents roasting on a pyre.


    The gues weren¡¯t about killing people either, though a great many would die. Neither the red, bleeding sores of Weepers Rot nor the Grey Fever it had been improving over thest few years would be even a shadow of The Drowning. They would both do an excellent job of weakening the city as well as the army that was about to pass through it, though.


    In the long term, it had hoped that hunger would do the majority of its work for it, but as powerful an ally as starvation was, it had one terrible drawback. It was slow. It would make no difference in a battle that would be over in weeks instead of months. The holy warriors that advanced on it might never have another meal for the rest of their short lives, and they would still be strong enough to put up a good fight by the time their emaciated forms reached itsir.


    That stray thought was enough to trigger a whole cascade of thoughts about what it might be able to do concerning rats. Vermin like that would be the ideal carriers of gues, and they might elerate its push for famine by months or years if given metal teeth so that they could chew tirelessly through stone granaries.


    The Lich had but to think it, and almost instantly, its servants began to draft ns for the disassembly of living subjects as well as the pieces that would have to be fabricated to improve them. It could not spare the resources now, of course, but it would be a good experiment to toy with another time, especially if it filled them with tox poisons for them to vomit into dwindling foodstuffs.


    Tenebroum¡¯s shadow raptors continued to function well as spies and test subjects for the mysterious magic that was flight. Even now, they watched the army of light¡¯s advance each night, and it watched their progress through those red eyes as they grew both in terms of numbers and light. It had never before thought to use them to intentionally spread pestilence.


    That was one more thing it would do once the battle ahead was won. Diligently, its tome recorded all of these ideas, though the Lich doubted it would return to them for many months. For now, all that really mattered was how many war zombies could beat the army of light when it arrived and what strange new surprises its fleshcrafters could create in the weeks that remained.

 Chapter 95: The March to War

    Chapter 95: The March to War


    In a world of darkness, a man with a little light was king. That¡¯s what they said about him, though Brother Faerbar downyed it. No matter what des his brothers tried to ce upon him, he would only ept Paragon. That was why they marched, after all. They were a vengeful crusade that would see justice done for their fallen god.


    He had almost ten thousand men with him now. Less than half were true warriors in any real sense, but most of them had Siddrim¡¯s light in their eyes, and they walked with purpose. No matter how many detours they had to make because the roads were washed out or bridges were toppled, they found a way.


    On peaceful days, sometimes whole viges would join their numbers as they passed toward Fallravea. Those were the minority, though. Most days now involved minor skirmishes with the dead. They seemed to have erupted from every passing graveyard and family plot that they passed through now.


    None of the small bands of zombies and skeletons were particrly dangerous, but they were a nearly constant nuisance. They no longer even waited for full dark to harry his men and would often attack as soon as there was only a single star left in the sky, slowing their march more than causing casualties.


    ¡°That¡¯s the real aim,¡± Brother Faerbar insisted around the fires of his war council at night. ¡°The evil has been sorely wounded by the light, and it fears us. Even now, it waits for arrival.¡±


    ¡°How could it possibly know we areing,¡± someone asked. ¡°How could you know that?¡±


    ¡°Because it is inevitable,¡± the Temr spoke, gazing into the coals of the fire. ¡°Because darkness exists to be purged by the light, and it knows that we will never be safe until all the flickering candles of the righteous are snuffed for good and all.¡±


    They were still two days out from the capital of Greshen County, so the conversation devolved from that into pure theology after that. It was a conversation that Brother Faerbar weed, even if he was no theologian. He¡¯d told his men days ago that Siddrim had been struck dead in a titanic battle by an opponent that hadin in wait for him like a spider or a viper, but most still did not believe it.


    How could they? Did they not still all shine with Siddrim¡¯s radiance? Could they not still feel his love? None of that changed his certainty, though. Their god was lost, and this terrible gift left Brother Faerbar reliving that losing battle every night, though he was not sure if those dreams were meant to warn him about what awaited or to goad him to action. It did both, though he was pleased that no one else was forced to watch what had happened to his apprentice.


    Brother Faerbar¡¯s heart went out to Todd. He¡¯d tried too hard to fight the darkness, but in the end, he¡¯d fallen victim to the sins of his youth, and in doing so, he¡¯d be a weapon himself. By the end, it was obvious he¡¯d been driven half-made and was little more than a gibbering stake being driven through the breast of their god.


    Still, he vowed not to let the same thing happen to him or to any other holy man who traveled with him. Cadres were always stronger because of their strength in numbers, and ultimately, it was Brother Faerbar¡¯s mistake to send his young protege on a mission alone. He would rectify that, he vowed. He would rectify everything.


    They were less than a day away from Fallravea¡¯s gates, and he expected to make it before it was truly dark when they encountered a processioning toward them. Their growing crusade encountered refugees almost every day. Usually, they were small family groups or the survivors of some massacred vige, and they rarely numbered more than a score. This was some two hundred armed men, though, and when they got close enough, Brother Faerbar could finally make out Priest Cawleon at the head of the line of horses and wagons that he understood what this was.


    It was the procession of Siddrim¡¯s forces from Fallravea slinking back to the church out of fear of what had happened or, more correctly, rats from a sinking ship.


    ¡°Thank goodness you¡¯re here, brothers!¡± the priest called out as soon as the forces met. ¡°You are a sight for sore eyes.¡±


    They spoke at length, and Brother Faerbar let the priest do most of the talking, but there was little new information to be gained. Darkness had enveloped thend here as badly as it had everywhere else, and the sepulchers that were filled with the dead of ages past had vomited them forth in the terrible days of darkness. Once that was done, though, the goblin attacks on outlying viges had be relentless, and they produced a constant stream of refugees producing only hunger and disease to the point that the ancient city was about to copse under its own weight.


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    More than anything, though, what Brother Faerbar learned was that the priest was a coward. ¡°It is men like you that brought the church so low,¡± the Paragon said, startling everyone. It was dark enough now that the fire was burning in his eyes. ¡°You have been charged to protect and guide this city, and yet you run with their meager foodstuffs for the safety of the church¡¯s walls!¡±


    ¡°Who dare you speak to me like this!¡± the shocked priest gasped. ¡°I am a priest of¡ª¡±


    ¡°The walls have fallen, and Siddrim is dead,¡± Brother Faerbar roared, ¡°And men like you are the reason why.¡±


    The priest was still sputtering when Brother Faerbar ordered his men to seize him. His own guards drew their own weapons, and for a moment, Brother Faerbar worried there would be bloodshed, but as the day dimmed further and they could see that they dealt with thousands of men who had been enlightened rather than a single one, they quickly surrendered, and fell into line with the rest of the soldiers and returned to the city they¡¯d only marched from so recently.


    As bad as the priest had made it sound, it was worse than Brother Faerbar had expected. The city was thick with smoke, and the wailing cries of the dying, and that was by night. He didn¡¯t even want to imagine how much worse it would look during the day.


    Still, they were not going to wait for the weak light of day to begin to rectify the problems, and he quickly devoted his men to all the important tasks. Some were dedicated to hauling the bodies outside the city gates, and some to guarding those gates and ensuring public order. The most devout were tasked with healing the sick or using their miracles to turn one loaf of bread into many and feed the hungry.


    They could not afford to stay here long, of course. There was still a week of marching ahead of them, but a few days would be enough to right this shambles. It was only a few years ago when he¡¯d bled to purify this ce from Oroza¡¯s taint, and he would be damned if he¡¯d let all of that effort go to waste.


    The following day, they had a brief trial for the priest, as tradition required, before finding him guilty of dereliction of duty and the abandonment of his post in the face of the enemy. Normally, such charges would be met with a public bonfire so that he would be allowed to repent with his final screams, but given the acute shortage of firewood and the vast number of bodies that needed to be burned outside the walls of the city, a simple hanging was had instead.


    It brought Brother Faerbar no joy to hang one of his own, but cowardice in the face of what they were facing was thest thing that they needed. The tragic waste of the day did have one silver lining, though. It brought those with an excess of darkness from their soul crawling out of the woodwork to watch the spectacle.


    He had as many of these as he could see rounded up and executed as well, though he had to be selective, of course. If he¡¯d lined up a date with the headman for everyone with a little darkness, the city would be scourged clean, but it was easy to look someone in the eyes and see the difference between a fallible man who indulged in a little theft or whoring, and a demon wearing the flesh of a man that was a blight upon the world. He no longer needed the inquisition to make such choices. He was the Paragon now, and as he spoke, the world moved to obey him.


    Slowly, over the next three days, peace was restored, and though hunger was not wiped out by any means, the number of men and women who died each day slowed to a trickle as light purged the darkness from the bodies of his people. Along with the help and hope they offered, his light spread further, too. Most nights, he could walk and see lights in the eyes of those who took a peek at his procession as he walked through the streets.


    ¡°Hope is contagious,¡± he liked to say whenever one of his me asked him about the sight. ¡°All one needs to do to let the light into their soul is to see the good it does in the world. Remember that, even if I should fall.¡±


    He hoped that they would because his survival was hardly guaranteed. Men who led from the front rarelysted long. That was why, even before all this, the only old men in the Brotherhood of the Purgative me were those priests and high priests who stood at the apex. He was past forty now, and it was starting to show.


    Still, he wouldn¡¯t let his age slow him down more than he¡¯d let the gue or the zombies, and he walked everywhere he went in his te mail so that he was constantly ready for attacks. Still, he announced that they would leave on the morrow. He just had one more thing to decide on: the baby.


    Priest Cawleon had at least had the good sense to bring the child with him when he¡¯d fled the city in shame, but there were no good answers regarding Leo the fifth, thest of his name. Brother Faerbar could send him back to Siddrimar or leave him here, of course, but both of those felt wrong. Leaving him in the care of anyone else felt like something he should not do. There was something to this child, and if the Temr had been able to find even a scrap of evil in its soul, he would have killed it himself.


    There wasn¡¯t any, though, so in the end, he was forced into the only decision that made any sense to him: he would have to take the child with him. On his face, it was ridiculous, of course, but his army was over ten thousand strong now, and there was no end to the number of orphans and camp followers that tagged along at the rear and the fringes. One more squealing mouth and a nursemaid would not add to that in any appreciable way.


    It was a decision he agonized over, but by the time he was ready to depart, it felt right. That child was important, and when the time came, he would find out how and see justice done.

 Chapter 96: Penumbral

    Chapter 96: Penumbral


    Jordan would never know how long the night had trulysted because it wasn¡¯t until he¡¯d wandered for days in the dark, frost-covered stretches, as he went from vige to empty vige, that he discovered the edge of the night quite by ident.


    Teleportation magic was dangerous as a rule, and if you screwed up something minor like he¡¯d done, it could send you all sorts of crazy ces. Honestly, he was lucky he hadn¡¯t ended up a hundred feet in the air or at the bottom of the sea. However, attempting to use it when you had no idea where you were was downright insane. Unfortunately, this meant very sore feet after countless hours spent walking, searching for any sign of life. By the time he¡¯d found the first vige, he was numb and exhausted, and all he¡¯d cared about was the bed with a nket on it.


    It was only in the morning, or at least what would have been morning if the sun still existed that he realized the whole ce had been abandoned. He¡¯d screamed himself hoarse, yelling for help, but was not the least bit surprised when no one answered.


    The fact that whoever had lived here had left in quite a hurry, leaving all of their worldly possessions behind, was more interesting than the fact that they were missing. He¡¯d balked at that little detail the first time, but by the time he came to the third vige where everything was intact but the inhabitants, he simply epted it. With everything strange going on, who was he to quibble with the fact that they¡¯d left bread on the table when they vanished?


    ¡°Perhaps the gods have whisked everyone away to their bosom, and the world has ended,¡± he grumbled to himself as he struggled to start a fire in his new abode. ¡°And left only the mages and other sinners here to rot just like the priests always said that they would.¡±


    Jordan was sleeping in his third temporary home, and despite the cold temperatures, he was finding less and less to eat as he continued along on his journey into the darkness, but as he went outside to check the hen house to see if there were any eggs on offer, he found the strangest possible thing: the sun.


    No, even stranger, there were two suns, but one was on the other side of the wall of darkness, and its rays reached him only faintly. Still, it was baffling, and for a moment, he just stood there dumbstruck, sure he¡¯d gone insane.


    ¡°What in the name of the light¡­¡± he whispered, as he took two steps back the way he came and found that the light vanished once more.


    It was like there was an invisible wall, and somehow, it separated the ce he¡¯d been from the rest of the world. That theory was borne out with further exploration. The further he walked away from the thing, the longer the wall stretched until it very clearly became a singr tower of darkness that stretched from horizon to horizon and all the way up to the faint sky itself.


    On the one hand, Jordan was overjoyed that the light had returned to the world. Even if the sun looked strange and seemed to have divided into two, it was better than the darkness that was slowly freezing the earth solid in the ce that he¡¯d been in, and he was hesitant to go back inside, even briefly, to retrieve his meager supplies and a ming brand so that he could light a new fire outside.


    The reality of the thing, even after the sun had set and he could no longer see the difference, was almost enough to send him running as far and as fast as he could. The mage inside of him would not let him shrink from such a strange sight, though, and he knew he must learn all he could to share with anyone else who might have survived that terrible assault on Abenend.


    So, making sure to stay outside of the bounds of the evil thing, Jordan began to travel slowly south, day by day, looking for more information, but all he found was madness. Still, as he went, he made notes of the madness with scavenged paper and tried to do his sums to calcte the total size of the area epassed by darkness, but it was inconclusive.


    He discovered that there were four different suns now, but none of them had the warmth or light that he was used to, that his pir of night went all the way to the Oroza, and most importantly, he found out that the undead abominations that had already almost killed him once could be out during daylight hours now.


    Jordan wasn¡¯t sure what that meant or how that was even possible, but it was. He¡¯d been lectured on the subject of the unquiet dead in sses before, and he¡¯d always been taught that light was their greatest weakness, but if he hadn¡¯t been able to cast invisibility and slip away while the small mob of decaying creations hunted for him, he would most certainly be nothing but a cooling corpse himself.


    Light or not, the world really had ended, he decided, and he was left alone with the damned. That was when he started walking away from the evil thing along the banks of the Oroza. If there were any people left in this world¡­ real, live people, and not just their shades, they would be in a big city like Fallravea, or gods help him, in Siddrimar.


    He shuddered at that thought. Thest ce on earth any mage wanted to end up was in the holy city, but he didn¡¯t see what choice he had. If it was a choice between the zealots and the walking dead, he would choose thetter. At least if the priests of Siddrim killed him, they would pray for his soul and send him to heaven, he thought cheerfully as he continued to walk north along the course of the river.


    It wasn¡¯t the first wrecked ship that Markez had seen on their way up the Oroza. Even without having to fight the dead or the eternal night, it had been an ugly week, and he¡¯d barely gotten any sleep as he tried to keep his crew of children and ipetents from doing anything stupid. However, when he spotted the wreckage in the thin blue light of morning, he knew immediately that it was the dainty little two-masted brigs that had passed them on its way upriver the day before yesterday. The crew of the vessel was smart and professional, and unlike so many of the other ships he¡¯d seen over thest few days, Markez had never once worried they might be pirates intent on boarding them.


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    In fact, from their bearing and direction, he would have guessed that they were after the same thing that he was ¡ª the safety of Siddrimar. The only difference between them, of course, was that they were certainly some dignitary or messenger. They might even be from the king himself, but that wasn¡¯t Markez¡¯s business. His only task was to manage their dwindling food supplies, try to find somewhere safe for all the children he¡¯d been saddled with, and somehow keep the hopelessly inept lubbers from beaching them either shore.


    That was just one of the many reasons he was so worried now, even if no one else noticed the wreckage of the ship as they glided upriver. No one was paying attention to anything but that damn pir of darkness.


    It had loomed on the horizon for days now. Every night, it disappeared against the night sky, and every morning, it reemerged as an imprable column of darkness. And it was getting closer.


    Hour by hour and day by day, it grew, but now it was almost dead ahead of them, and it took up half of the horizon. He was fairly sure they would hit it today. He just didn¡¯t know when.


    Markez would have loved nothing more than to slow them down a bit and give the problem a good thing, but that wasn¡¯t really an option.


    For thest few days, some unsavory-looking boats had been gaining on them. He hadn¡¯t made a fuss about it to everyone else. He¡¯d just watched them as he manned the rudder, but he¡¯d seen the look in the eyes of those men yesterday. Before his sails had caught a more favorable wind and left them in the dust, they¡¯d almost had them, and he was convinced that it was only Lunara or some other goddess that loved children that had saved them, but he was equally sure that wouldn¡¯t work a second time.


    Now the dogs were back. They were only an hour behind, or perhaps two, and Markez only had two choices: he could go with the devil he knew and prepare to be boarded, or he could choose the devil he didn¡¯t want to know and go headlong into the wall of night that was expanding ahead.


    Given that he knew what would happen in the case of the former, he knew for damn sure that there was no one on this craft who could help him fight off someone that wanted trouble. Some of the older kids would try, of course, but that fop of a nobleman would be no help at all.


    Like thinking about him managed to summon the man, Dian came over. ¡°What do you think we should do about the darkness?¡± the noble asked almost conspiratorially.


    ¡°I think we should pray,¡± Markez said tiredly, not even bothering to look at the greater danger that was closing in behind them or the hints of what might happen to their ship when they crossed that threshold spread out on the waters before them.


    ¡°Pray?¡± Dian asked in disbelief, ¡°Isn¡¯t there something more we can do?¡±


    ¡°You could go below and gather thest of themps so we can see what we can see, but beyond that¡­¡± Markez let his voice trail off. Thest thing he wanted to do was to encourage the man to draw the sword on his hip. He¡¯d probably just hurt himself with it. Lamps would be enough of a challenge for him, though he¡¯d send one of the girls with the noble to make sure he didn¡¯t burn the ce down, and if they were all very lucky, he would still be somewhere below when they finally crossed the threshold.


    And that moment wasing faster all the time. Even as Markez stood by the rudder, the wall of night seemed to approach faster and faster, though since that seemed true of the nearest vessel behind them, it could have just as easily been the sense of danger knawing at him. In the end, he beat the thing into the dark by 100 yards. For a moment, he was tempted to extinguish allmps to try to hide from the other boat, but even with all the light they mustered, he could barely see the near shore of the river. Without light, they would surely ground the craft.


    ¡°Ease up on the starboard line,ds!¡± he called out, trying to get them to tack the ship to boost the speed a little bit without causing a panic.


    The children did as bid, though clumsily, and they spilled so much air from the sail that they lost as much speed as they gained. Markez sighed as heshed the rudder into ce and picked up his boat hook as he watched the other vessel drawing closer and closer along their port side. If there was going to be a fight, then it was going to be now.


    The determination was momentarily interrupted when he heard the sounds of screaming and the nks of wood cracking. Markez spun around just in time to see the twomps that had illuminated the barge and its rowers, though he¡¯d wished that he hadn¡¯t forever afterward.


    <em>Something</em>rge, sinuous, and utterly inhuman hade up out of the water and effortlessly snapped the boat in two. He didn¡¯t know what it was, but he knew that it had a giant maw and that it could bite a man in half almost as easily as a ship.


    The noise was impossible to hide and sent a flurry of people running to the stern to see what had happened, but the show was over, and even the sshing sounds of whoever was left breathing were quickly drowned out by the dozens of feet running across the deck and the shouting. By the time they reached the back rail and began to pepper Markez with questions, there was nothing back there but darkness, and the danger lurking behind it.


    ¡°What is it?¡± one of the older boys shouted.


    ¡°What happened?¡± Lara asked. ¡°Did you see? Can you see?¡±


    He ignored them. ¡°See? See?! You see here. All of you. The boat that was behind us ¡ª they¡¯ve run aground on the rocks there,¡± Markez lied. ¡°Now watch the sails and the rigging, or we¡¯ll meet the same fate before we¡¯re clear of this cursed dark!¡±


    He opted not to worry about the monster lurking behind them. If that thing wanted to eat them next, there was nothing he could do to stop it, so he decided it was best not to worry anyone about it and focus on getting away from here as quickly as possible.

 Chapter 97: Between the Darkness and the Light

    Chapter 97: Between the Darkness and the Light


    When Jordan first saw the lights on the horizon, he thought that they were torches, even if they were a bit too small and a little too bright. Morning was approaching, and though it was no longer bright enough to make the horizon glow with that long-lost blue line of hope or reveal the source of the lights, he still moved toward them. All he had now were the cold, distant stars and the approaching candles to ward off whatever evils skulked in the darkness.


    When Jordan got close enough to them to discover what they were, he wished he hadn¡¯t. They were¡­ they were what exactly? Priests? Temrs? He wasn¡¯t sure, but there were thousands of them, and most of them marched with little flecks of sunlight radiating from their eyes. For a mage who had studied both of the burning times in detail, it was a terrifying sight, but even as he stood there and the ranks of marching men moved to meet him, swords stayed in their sheaths, which was as much as he could hope for.


    On the front rank, one man stood out over all the rest, though. He was an older warrior who had burn scars on his hands and face, and his te armor was a bit finer than most. All of those details paled inparison to the most important one, though: he was glowing. Like everyone else, he had eyes of fire, but he was the only one with a flickering aura of the long-lost sunlight that the world missed terribly.


    And he was looking right at Jordan. This was enough to make the mage swallow hard and step off the road he¡¯d been following to allow them to pass, but as they closed the distance between them, the army stopped with a gesture from the glowing man, and he strode forward to meet Jordan. Hisrge kite shield stayed on his back, but Jordan couldn¡¯t help but notice that the man¡¯s right hand stayed on his sword¡¯s hilt the entire time.


    ¡°You are a sorcerer,¡± the man dered ndly, telling Jordan that whoever this was, he clearly had the sight and that it would be difficult to hide anything from him.


    ¡°An apprentice, my lord,¡± he said, bowing nervously. ¡°I am Jordon Sedgim, son of¡ª¡±


    ¡°I am Siddrim¡¯s Paragon, and I care not who you are, only that you have no taint of true evil on your soul,¡± the Paragon interrupted, ¡°I only wish to know what you are doing here.¡±


    Jordan suppressed a gasp. ¡°So this is a crusade?¡± he asked. ¡°I¡¯d thought that Sidrimar would send help!¡±


    ¡°Siddrimar is gone,d,¡± the Temr lord said softly, ¡°But my question still stands.¡±


    ¡°I¡­ I got lost,¡± he confessed. ¡°The Collegium at Abenend was under attack, and I was trapped in the city when the zombies tried to attack, but my spell went wild and¡­ I ended up lost in the dark for days until I found that.¡±


    As he spoke, Jordan pointed toward the southwest, to the giant pir of night. It was just bright enough now that you could see the edges against a sky that was imperceptibly brighter.


    ¡°And what is that?¡± the Paragon asked.


    ¡°I-I don¡¯t know,¡± Jordan confessed. They started walking after that, and Jordan told the Temr lord and his men all he could about his brief exploration of the empty spaces. ¡°It epasses at least part of the Oroza, the canal, and all of ckwater, the mage said quietly, but beyond that, I know little. I never saw a single living thing, though, be it animal or man.¡±


    They listened to his words and didn¡¯t seem inclined to burn him at the stake or torment him with hot irons until he confessed his sins and repented of magic. So, he tried to do everything to make certain that continued.


    By the time the first sun had risen fully and was moving across the sky, they were miles closer to the Temr¡¯s goal, which made Jordan profoundly ufortable. Still, he could hardly refuse. They hadn¡¯t said that he was their prisoner, of course, but the way he was nked on all sides by armed men certainly seemed to imply that he was.


    While they walked, the old warrior who led the assembled army told him that the fortress city had fallen along with their god and that the church was dead. It was a staggering admission. Despite the danger to himself, he¡¯d hoped to rally the full might of the church to end whatever had done this. That was impossible now, though; this was it, and honestly, he wasn¡¯t sure that it would be enough to face an evil that stretched to the sky.


    By that evening, they¡¯d almost reached the darknds. It was like a ck curtain drawn across the whole of the horizon to their west, and though the sun was setting somewhere behind it, the thin, reddish light didn¡¯t reach the campsite they were building. The Temrs had apparently made the decision for what was going to happen next a long time ago, but they were implementing it now.


    In a few hours, most of the army would journey in the dark, leaving only the warriors without the gift of the light to defend the growing collection of camp followers. It was folly. Even Jordan thought so, but he was benefiting from it, so he said nothing. He¡¯d be happy to stay behind and help defend the rump of the army. Even though he said nothing aloud, many other warriors did. The Paragon ignored allints.


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    He didn¡¯t see things the same way. ¡°Attacking at night has no meaning, since all is night past that line,¡± he dered, gesturing with his glowing sword, ¡°and in the eternal night, there is no ce for those without the light of Siddrim in their eyes!¡±


    ¡°If that is true, then why do you n to take the mage inside with you?¡± one of his war council asked, annoyed that so many good men were being left out of what was toe in a few hours.


    That was news to Jordan, and a shiver of fear went down his spine as he realized he might have to go back in there.


    ¡°He¡¯s a mage,¡± the Paragon spat, ¡°his soul is damned already, so there is no saving him. He might prove useful in understanding what is in that foul ce.¡±


    Jordan thought about asking if he had any say in any of this but decided that would not be a wee interruption. That was fine. Once the fighting started, he could weave an illusion of invisibility and run or perhaps teleport back. He made a note to count his steps back to camp. Over level ground, that piece of information would drastically increase his options.


    The warriors argued a while longer about his fate and the other details, but nothing changed, and a few hourster, they started marching. Intellectually, he knew they¡¯d lost a third of their number, but from where Jordan stood, he couldn¡¯t see it. He was still surrounded on three sides by armed men for further than he could see.


    It was reassuring, on some level, to be surrounded by almost eight thousand of his worst enemies. A student of the Collegium knew better than almost anyone how brutal and powerful the Siddrim¡¯s church could be. There were other gods that persecuted mages too, of course, but none did so with the same fervor as the sun god, and in their rage and grief, the children of the Lord of Light inspired a sort of awe. Jordan couldn¡¯t imagine what it was that might be able to beat them, but as soon as he crossed the boundary, he found his answer.


    The only match for the army of light at his back was the army of night that loomed out of the night toward him. Hundreds of zombies were only dozens of feet away, and as soon as they crossed the inky curtain, a hideous battle cry rippled along the ranks and surged forward.


    Jordan did exactly what he expected he would in that situation: he froze. Before all this, he¡¯d been hoping tond a position as an advisor or alchemist to a backwater Count or an Earl. He¡¯d never dreamed of bing a battle mage. So, even as the temrs surged forward with a deafening battle cry, he stood there, forcing them to flow around him like a river of violence.


    He needn¡¯t have been worried, apparently. The line of zombies was only a few ranks thick, and it was crushed almost immediately by the wave of men in steel and their glowing swords.


    The zombies had scarcely fallen into the collection of body parts that they were when something sinuous and shadowy soared over the assembled mass of milling warriors. Despite himself, Jordan ducked as one of the things soared too close to him. It was an unmanly reaction, but it saved his life when the man just to his right was snatched up instead and was carried screaming into the sky.


    Jordan whispered a few arcane words and called the lightning, trying to strike at least one of the unseen creatures, but the result was stranger than than expected. The electrical force did nothing because there was nothing for it to hit. The light that the pulse radiated, though, was enough to make the nearest two creatures evaporate in a chorus of keening screams as they dropped their prey back to the earth.


    Jordan did not get a good look at the things that had flown above them, but they looked vaguely aquatic. They were something like a skate or a ray made out of nothing but an oil sheen and shadows. It sent a wave of goosebumps across his flesh as he tried to imagine what horrors could fester and grow in a ce that the sun never touched.


    ¡°Come now!¡± a voice taunted from the shadows not so far above them. ¡°If you y my little friends, you¡¯ll ruin the show!¡±


    The warriors looked around guardedly for what said that, but the sound was everywhere and nowhere, and Jordan could do nothing for the three remaining warriors who were much too far out of his reach. All anyone could do was watch as they were carried screaming into the dark sky, growing ever fainter.


    ¡°Show yourself spirit!¡± The Paragon roared as his sword red to violent life, bing a fountain of fire.


    ¡°You have no interest in me. What I have been ordered to show you though¡­¡± it quipped. ¡°You will forgive the light I have borrowed when you see what it illuminates.¡±


    While those words hung in the air, each of the temrs that had been carried away in the night suddenly detonated like fireworks. Jordan recognized the traces of arcane magic in what had happened, but he wouldn¡¯t have the time to study it. No matter how interesting it was that something had catalyzed a spell that released all the light and strength their souls possessed in a moment, it was what the sudden sh of light showed that stole his breath.


    For a moment, the explosions of blood and light turned night into day. As bright as the explosions were, though, they only illuminated a hip, the lower sections of a rib cage, and the spine they were attached to. The bones themselves were unremarkable, save for the fact that they were the size of cathedrals or fortresses. The ribs themselves were longer than any bridge or taller than any tower Jordan had ever seen. Doing some quick math, he realized that the corpse had to be miles long, which left little doubt as to who it belonged to.


    The bones seemed to phosphoresce, briefly absorbing the light. They continued to glow softly for the next several minutes, serving as a macabre backdrop for the assembled forces.


    ¡°It is my honor to inform you that your deity is grateful that you have decided to die on the same ground that he did,¡± the voice taunted. ¡°So, we wee you to the realm of darkness and promise you that none of you will leave here alive.¡±

 Chapter 98: Godfall

    Chapter 98: Godfall


    Initially, Brother Faerbar had been nning to march straight for the Temple of Dawn and the festering well of evil thaty beneath it. It had been his mission from the very start, but all that changed with the sight of his own Gods remains, though. That was a sight that the Temr had never expected to see. It was one thing to know that Siddrim was dead because the Gods own memories of that moment that burned inside of him said so. However, it was quite another to see hisrger-than-life remains fall to the earth, and his eyes stayed fixed on that point even as the giant bones disappeared once more into darkness.


    Tears unexpectedly came to his eyes after that, and his sword dimmed a bit as dark emotions rushed through him, but the taunts he expected from the mystery voice never came. It vanished along with everything else, and the army of light was left alone to deal with the aftermath of the things theyd seen. Even though the Paragon knew that the effect was still impossible to avoid, he knelt there on the icy road. Then he began to pray, even though he knew there was no god to hear him. Over the course of the next several minutes, the whole army knelt with him to pay their respects. It was all they could do.


    After that, there was no way they could continue on their crusade without going north, paying their respects, and learning what they could about what happened. After an hour of marching, though, all they learned was that physically, there was nothing there to enshrine or bury. Most of Borther Faerbars men couldnt see anything except the crater that Siddrim had made when hed fallen, but with his sight, he could see the cathedralesque remains towering above him into the darkness.


    They hung there like an aura without an owner, and even though he questioned the mage harshly, the young man had nothing to add to the situation. So Siddrims spirit is just stuck here forever? He demanded of Jordan.


    I mean - I would th-think his spirit was in the small suns that reappeared Jordan stammered.


    Those are not the remains of our god! Brother Faerbar roared. Those are his horses, running free of his chariot with no one to guide them. I fear that without his steady hand, they might eventually tire and flee to a different pasture or stop and graze one mid-day and burn part of the world while the rest freezes!


    His horses? Jordan asked, a look of obvious confusion on his face. Id always thought that was a metaphor


    And what would it be a metaphor exactly? the Paragon demanded. What would light and heat the world if not his four ming stallions?


    The mage had no answers for that, which was fine, Brother Faerbar supposed. He had never read the scriptures, so teaching him would be nigh impossible anyway. Handling the disposition of Siddrims corpse and his steeds only had one thing inmon: they were problems that would never be in his power to solve.


    Brother Faerbar had always been a simple man, and part of him resented having to be the one to make these decisions. Even as he debated what they should do next with his lieutenants and if this development actually changed anything, he reflected on that.


    He did not seek this power or this army, but now that he had it, there was only one use for it. He needed to rip out the ck heart of the evil that had inflicted this scar on the world and in his God by treachery under a shroud of darkness. Which meant fighting. No amount of dys or strategizing would change that.


    The longer everyone talked, the harder it became to hear them, though. All he could hear was the pounding of his own heart as it beat with rage at the very idea that there might be an alternative to what wasing next. So, Brother Faerbar gave the order, and they began to march once more. This time, though, it was for ckwater itself - the very heart of darkness.


    He could see the fear and indecision beginning to grow in even the hearts of veterans. The mage looked like he was about to piss himself or run in fear at any moment. Brother Faerbar could understand those emotions, but they no longer reached him. There was no fear in a soul already suffused with a need for vengeance.


    On the long slog back to the river through frozen fields and small snow drifts, they found a few more smaller groups of zombies, but they tore apart like tissue paper. To this point, the weather and the darkness had proved to be a bigger obstacle than the forces arrayed against them, and that worried the Paragon. How could an enemy be strong enough to defeat a god but weak enough to fall before them like wheat?


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    It wasnt until they reached the edge of ckwater that they met any real resistance, and for Brother Faerbar, that only deepened the mystery. The zombies before them were obviously different from the ones theyd faced until now. They wore crude armor and wielded weapons that wereshed to their hands. More than anything, they bore a resemnce to the warriors that hed faced years before in Orozas under temple, but they proved only to be a distraction.


    By the time the Paragon had in his third zombie, a shaperger than five men together lurched out of the night. For a moment, he thought it was a troll. That was the only thing hed ever faced that was this size, but this was even bigger. In the end, as it charged him, all he could do was charge it in return before he crushed the men around him into paste.


    The thing was more than twice his height, but he was infused with the strength of a god and jumped as they met, mming his shield into the chest of the thing, staggering it. Even glowing with Siddrims light, though, it wasnt enough to kill the thing, and as he swung his sword hard at the neck, looking for a quick kill, it deflected off the crude iron cor that had been put there. Someone had done their homework, he realized bitterly as he pressed his legs against the things chest and lept away before the thing could grab him and crush him to death in its giant three-foot wide hands.


    Is that the best you can do? the Paragon roared as he was knocked off his feet by a backhand and sent flying back toward his own lines.


    Up until now, hed seeded at weaving just at the edge of its range and striking at each blow directed his way with his ming sword in a bid to sever a finger or a tendon, but it had done very little good, and on hisst strike hed gotten a little too close, and hed been knocked off his feet for his troubles.


    He could feel the pain spreading throughout his body. A broken hip, a twisted knee, and a fractured leg. Each of these wounds healed before he even had the chance to rise, though.


    His words were almost as effective as his sword, though. The glowing des made quick enough work of the lesser zombies, but so far, every sh and trust hed attempted tond on this monster had done nothing but gouge the metal beneath its skin. Something had taken the time to skin this giant, install bizarre bronze scale armor, and then sew the skin back on as if that made any sense.


    It baffled the Temr, but then he supposed the motives of evil wouldnt always make sense. This also held true for the words the mage began to chant somewhere behind him. For a moment, Brother Faerbar thought that he was about to be betrayed, but even as he braced for impact from whatever foul sorcery the mage behind him was casting, ance of fire arced up over his head and sshed across the face of the behemoth, making it roar in anger.


    Brother Faerbar doubted that was enough to kill it or even blind it permanently. The dead didnt need their eyes to see. Not truly. Still, as long as it was on fire and distracted, he could afford to try something moreplicated. Circling around behind the iling giant with all the speed he could muster, The Paragon struck hard at the base of the things spine, but the bone there had been reced with steel as well.


    He took a two-handed grip on his de and struck the same spot twice more to no effect, and even as the monstrosity began to clear the fire to circle around and grab him once more, he switched to a softer target: the inside of the left knee. Because of its need to flex and move in a way that was at least somewhat natural, Brother Faerbars de cut deep there for the first time, releasing foul ck ichor even as the things leg went out from underneath it, and it fell on its side roaring in outrage.


    Itshed out again and again from its prone position. Sometimes, it seeded in grabbing a warrior and crushing them so hard that blood poured out of the twisted te mail before it lobbed them back into the army. It never seeded in grabbing the Paragon, though, and with each attempt, it only exposed another vital piece of its underbelly to him, now that he knew what he was looking for. The warrior struck at every joint it could with his de, and with every ligament he severed, the thing grew slower and clumsier until it was nothing but a turtle lying there harmlessly on its back.


    A ragged cheer went up from the nearby men who had been doing what they could as Brother Faerbar climbed on top of the monsters head. Then, without flourish or fanfare, he plunged his fiery de into the things eye socket to finally destroy the brain, and it exploded,unching the Temr a dozen feet back toward ckwater.


    He had briefly expected that the thing might spring to life once more or that a second wave of zombies would arrive to save it. What he never imagined was that the creatures death would trigger some alchemical st deep in that things body.


    Suddenly, that bizarre armor made sense, Brother Faerbar realized just before he hit the ground hard. When defending against blows, every hit had been absorbed by the scale mail, but when this thing detonated, most of those same scales went flying, and all of those sharp pieces of shrapnel hit with the force of a thousand arrows as it flew in all directions, shredding those closest to the st.


    Brother Faerbars te mail spared him the worst of it, but he felt the pain race through him from half a dozen punctures and knew that he wouldnt be able to begin to heal until the cursed metal was removed from his body.


    He rose shakily to his feet and began to pull out the pieces. Then he surveyed the damage and the dead, wondering what other terrible surprises awaited him between here and the Temple of the Dawn.

 Chapter 99: Pure Futility

    Chapter 99: Pure Futility


    It watched the army approach with a calm feeling that bordered on amusement. The army itself was impressive enough for being a mass of flickering candles surrounding a single bonfire, but the Lich had nothing to fear here. It had watched the mass of men grow at every step of the way as they marched from the battered husk of the holy city to the southwest through the red eyes of its ravens and other, more shadowy minions, but Tenebroum was no longer concerned. Their window had already passed, though, and they didnt even know it.


    A small group of swift riders that had gotten here three or four days ago could have done far more damage to it than the lumbering force that was arrayed against it today. Now, it had left Tagel by the sea and all the other cities across the river in Dutton as burnt-out husks to stand as a warning to any humans who might try to venture this close again and reunited the fingers of its vast army into a single fist once more.


    Even now, the fools that were marching on ckwater had no more of an idea of what awaited them there than they had of the fate that was already befalling the men theyd left behind. This brash general had thought that the dividing line was the difference between danger and safety, but theyd made a horrible miscalction. Tenebroum was awake now. It was more awake than it had ever been in its entire unlife, perhaps, and safety was quickly bing a scarcemodity everywhere.


    It had devoured the Lord of Light, but that feast had only rified things, making the shadows of its soul that much darker by contrast. What it had gained from the God that had ruled the skies until so recently, though, was a newfound appreciation for a sense of order.


    The Lich had managed to stumble on some of those precepts in thest decade, but all of those had bent toward the end of trapping and ying a god. Beyond that, it had simply worked as nature willed and unleashed its creations based on whim.


    For a long time, chaos had served its goals. It had been as natural as the swamp that had been a part of it for so long. Now, though, it understood the limitations. Chaos could not form clean battle lines, it could not execute orders simple enough for its drudges to obey, and it could not execute pincer attacks.


    But Lich could do all those things now. It was a new rity that it had stolen from the God that now made up almost half of its oversoul. In some ways, that was worth more than the sheer amount of power it had gained from itstest conquest.


    It watched the battlefield now, not as a hungry observer but as a cautious general. For days, it had been sending small waves of useless drudges to slow the march, and now, after the Temrs had wasted precious days curing the sick and feeding the hungry, it had them boxed in on all sides. Once its ambushing force massacred their rear guard, it would outnumber them two to one and grind them to dust.


    The early victories it allowed them were meant only to test their mettle and increase their overconfidence enough that they felt strong enough to venture into the depths. When they finally seeded in killing its juggernaut, the Lichs interest became all the more intense as it watched the wave of shrapnel shred the nearest men in a hail of green fire and cursed metal. The leader survived, but that was unsurprising. The man fairly glowed with divine light, though the Lich had watched with great interest as it had flickered when the man had viewed the corpse of his God.


    As with so many things in the world, it seemed to Tenebroum that the human heart was the weak link, and it wondered how many of the mans soldiers it would have to ughter before that light went out for good. It was a question that the darkness was hoping to find out soon, though for now, all it could do was watch as they healed the dying and counted the dead.


    That little skirmish had cost almost 50 lives, and most of those hade from the juggernauts explosion, but the Lich was unconcerned by the loss. Those bones were dipped in molten iron - it could easily build the thing once the fighting was done. It would build others like it now that the concept worked. It had only built the bomb to st open the doors of a particrly resilient keep, but it had worked wonderfully to flense the living as well.


    When they reached the Temple of the Dawn, it did not bar their way. It let them gaze upon the mockery that had been made of their holy site without any obstacle to bar them. The sight of the golden saints reduced to nothing but necromantic abominations pinned to the walls was enough by itself to make the light go out in more than a few of the Crusaders all by itself. And they quickly smashed many of the decorations before they started down the winding stairs into the darkness.


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    The Lich could have stopped them here. It was sure of that. There were two armies on the surface right now, and both wererger than the Temr force. The former stood silently five hundred yards to the west near the river, in neat rows and was made up of eight thousand war zombies, and thetter group was made up of almost four thousand and was drawing slowly into a tighter ring around the outnumbered defenders that were being methodically ughtered.


    In truth, the Lich could have likely wiped the second, smaller group out already if it wanted to. In this case, though, the fear that was radiating from the women and children that were clustered there in the center that stayed its hand. The temrs had faced a difficult choice, of course - leave the stragglers they found undefended to be killed by the first mob of zombies that found them or keep them close to protect them. They had tried to be heroic, but there was no heroic defense to be had on a battlefield where they could not even save themselves, and in time, it would ughter them to a man.


    Well - to a boy. It amused the Lich to spare the son of his favorite tome, so when the bloodbath wasplete, only one squalling cry would be done. As far as the Lich was concerned, he was wee toy there until exposure took it and serenade the drudges, bringing corpses back to itsir for resurrection once the battle was done. It didnt know what it would do with the childs corpse, but it was sure it would think of something appropriate.


    And though it would be hours before the battle was done, the Lich was already confident of the oue. Orozay just offshore, waiting to catch any soldiers that managed to flee so far when its army had broken them. The Lich just wanted a few hundred more deep beneath the earth so that their army was spread out as much as possible.


    That was only minutes away, though. Every few seconds, another soldier descended those stairs in a tightly packed and intensely vulnerable formation. Theyd checked the nearby buildings and thought that theyd secured the area, but they were wrong. Theyd been trapped by it.


    Once the vanguard waspletely below ground, the altar mechanism was tripped, and the stairs began to slowly rise back into position, cleanly splitting the army yet again. Now, it could leave its war zombies to massacre the leaderless group on the surface while its menagerie of monsters devoured the elite in the depths.


    As the second battle started in earnest, the screams and battle cries were inaudible to those whod already descended into the depths of itsbyrinth, but that didnt mean that they didnt happen. Unlike the battle that was justing to a conclusion just outside its domain, this one was only beginning and would take time.


    At first, it was a simple thing with te mail-wearing warriors against temail-wearing warriors. The zombies moved slower, but they were almost impossible to bring down while wearing steel gorgets that made beheading impossible. This turned the whole thing into an ugly grinding deathmatch, with the warriors of light using pikes to try to help their front ranks while the zombie warriors took blow after fatal blow without falling while the warm blood of the living slowly turned the icy ground they were battling on into dark, sticky mud.


    This was just a feint, though. The Lich was merely checking to see what use of divine magic those that remained might have, and the answer proved to be almost none, which filled it with hunger. That would let it unleash the second part of its n without fear of reprisal.


    Sadly the shadow drake was still lying in pieces on the floor of itsrgest fleshcrafting shop, but it had other shadowy servants that it could bring to bear to break the ranks of these brave holy men. That distraction came in the form of a flock of ckbirds that descended on the bright-eyed men. Up until now, theyd shown such bravery, but it was one thing to face down amon zombie armed with a sword bolted to its hand. It was quite another to deal with a flock of undead, skeletonized birds soaring out of the dark to peck out those bright, glowing eyes from your skull.


    Paroxysms of panic and fear shot through the assembled men as those without their visors down who thought they were safely in the third or fourth rank were suddenly forced to defend themselves against a threat that should have been little more than an annoyance. In truth, its ckbirds were hardly a threat to a prepared enemy, but it had thousands of them to spare at this point and a flesh crafter who did nothing but make half a dozen every day, so it was worth wasting a few hundred for a moment of advantage.


    While the Temrs were distracted, the zombies surged forward, breaking through the ranks of their enemy in several ces. Given time, the Temrs would close ranks and fill the gaps, of course, if it let them, but the Lich had no ns of doing that. Now that everyone was hopelessly locked into ce, it released the few hundred dead goblins it had been holding in reserve. Many of them had been originally intended to be incorporated with Krulmvenors form to increase his multiplicity further, but the loss of so many of himself in the battle of Siddrimar had driven its favorite fire spirit quite mad, and so for now, the Lich held off until it could incorporate it with some of the dwarven dead to bring the mixture back into bnce.


    Though not as fast as they were in life, the goblins mored atop the zombies and ran through the legs of their enemies, attacking anything with a pulse with wicked steel ws. For an already besieged enemy. This was enough to force them to start blowing the horns and sound a fighting retreat, which suited the Lich fine. If they wanted to wait until both of its armies could fight them at once and crush them between the hammer and the anvil, then it would oblige them.

 Chapter 100: The Vanguard

    Chapter 100: The Vanguard


    They were already hundreds of yards from the entrance when it started to close, as Jordan knew it would. It had to. A narrow set of stairs down into the darkness to defeat the thing that had done all this without a single guard in sight was obviously a trap.


    Still, that certainty hadnt been enough to stop him from obediently following the Crusades Paragon. His only act of defiance had been to count his steps as they went because Jordans backup n was never far from his mind. Hed sworn to himself that he would fight alongside these brave men until the end, but at the same time, he had no wish to be the very thing that they were fighting once he died.


    He hadnt really wanted to stay behind in the Temple of the Dawn either, though. Hed never personally been to a ce that reeked of evil and death as much as that ce. Well, at least not until he descended the stairs and made his way to the temple beneath it. There, amidst the miasma of evil that was so strong it was almost palpable, he made sure to stay close to the Paragons light even as the darkness crowded around them.


    Fear not, my brothers, Brother Faerbar said as the stone door theyd entered slowly rumbled shut somewhere behind them. We are not trapped down here. It is the monsters of the pit that are now trapped in here with us!


    There was a rallying cry from the other men to apany that, which was frighteningly loud as it echoed into the dark. After that, Jordan could hear the other men talking about how the Paragon had done exactly this sort of thing before when he purged Fallravea of the degenerate Oroza worshipers.


    He found it hard to concentrate on that, though, with the dull echo of their earlier. In fact, as he listened, he realized that the echo was getting louder again like it wasing back to them.


    Sir ummmm, your Paragon-ness, I think that Jordan started to say, but the gruff older man interrupted him.


    Theyreing, he said quietly.


    Jordan could hear it now. Even as everyone around him drew their swords, he could hear the distant rumble getting louder and louder until it was nothing but a keening horde that was so loud he couldnt think straight.


    Theyd passed through the main under temple, through the main exist, and had been following an borately tiled corridor with irregrly spaced exists on either side. Up ahead, the mage could see that the corridor expanded out into arge room, but even with the volume of the sound, or perhaps because of it, he couldnt quite figure out which direction the sounds wereing from.


    The answer turned out to be all of them. Even as the Paragon forced his way forward into therger hall where bodies had been stacked like cordwood along the far wall, the tide of evil wasing for them all. To the Temrs credit, nobody turned and ran, though Jordan would have if there had been a direction that was free. There wasnt, though. He had walked into hell itself, and the gates had been mmed shut behind him.


    Jordan feared that at any moment, he would see more zombies, ready to fight him in wave after relentless wave. That wasnt what happened, though. Instead, they were assaulted by dozens of oddities that looked utterly inhuman. The first came a wave of screaming skulls that were on them before he could even decide what spell to cast against them. They were covered in blue-white fire and blew up on impact with the first line of warriors.


    After that came an assortment of anatomical oddities. There was a giant snake made from the limbless torsos of a dozen people with a mouth full of rusted swords for fangs, a jellyfish made of a disembodied brain dragging a small thicket of semi-translucent tendrils behind it, and a ball of arms that was sorge that it moved by pushing off the ceiling and floor simultaneously.


    Each of those seemed almostical on the face of it, and Jordan almost started tough hysterically as a strange sort of coping mechanism. It wasnt so funny when they got close, though. The serpent seemed to have no issue ripping people in half with its powerful jaws. The weird ball of hands lost a few as it approached the men with swords, though it quickly started to strangle everyone around it like a particrly aggressive octopus, and the brain, well, it didnt seem to do anything. It just sort of floated there halfway across the room, and then people started killing each other.


    For the moment, Jordan found himself immune to whatever magics the hideous thing was using to make Temr turn against Temr, but as soon as Brother Faerbar surged forward to deal with the twisted serpent creature, Jordan immediately found himself filled with paranoid delusions. He could feel the hate that the religious men had for him. He knew exactly what they would do to a mage like him. Any moment, they would stab him to death. He could practically feel the des piercing his organs, and the urge to set all of them alight before they could deliver such a gruesome end became almost too much to bear.


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    He did, though. Instead of spraying fire at the knights in all directions, he called upon the thunder and struck the brain entity instead, noting how jellyfish-like it looked as the energy arced back and forth between its gently waving fronds until it burned itself to a crisp and fell slowly to the stone floor as a collection of cinders.


    Those werent the only monstrosities to appear, though. They were just the first wave. To me! the Paragon yelled as soon as his serpentine opponent finallyy still, but very few men answered his call.


    Most of the worst monsters that seemed to be made out of shadows more than flesh gave Brother Faerbar and his aura a wide berth, but they quickly cut swathes through the brave, holy warriors. The Temrs slew their wraithlike enemies by the score, but when you are outnumbered by a perpetual tide of damnation, what did it matter if you killed a dozen or a hundred before they finally ripped your still-screaming soul from your body?


    The room behind them had been reduced from one giant battlefield with two sides to a hundred smaller battles that ranged in size from skirmishes to duels. Jordan doubted that the other men in the hallway leading to this point were doing much better based on the echoing screams that made it this far. A minute or two ago, theyd been a single unified line against the darkness, but it was impossible to fight these things with any martial discipline when each of them was a unique monstrosity that had been created by a clearly deranged mind, and Jordan was quite sure that if they managed to fight their way free of this horror show, he would never have a good nights sleep again.


    Brother Faerbar continued to slice a bloodless path through his enemies, ying as many as any other ten men in the room put together as he pressed toward the nearest doorway where they might be able to establish some kind of coordinated defense. That seemed like a pipedream at this point. No matter how many times he wove the threads to summon a wall of fire to ward off his enemies, he could feel them getting closer with every beat of his heart.


    Part of him wished hed just stayed at Abenend and died with his friends. He would have still died and been raised as a soulless servant of some dark god, but at least he would never have had to endure the sights hed seen tonight.


    Then suddenly, without warning, he was grabbed by the color of his robes. He thought for sure that was the end, and rather than fight it, Jordan went limp and epted his fate. No teeth knawed at his throat, though, and no sword was jammed through his heart. Instead, he realized toote that it was Brother Faerbar. Hed grabbed him, yanking the mage off his feet and pulling him behind him.


    Jordannded in a mound of the actually dead. At least, he hoped they were, as he pulled himself to his feet. They were in a small alcove that had been reduced to the storage of moldering dead. For a moment, he almost broke down in tears. He was never meant to be in such a ce. He didnt give in, though. Being trapped like this made it easier. Now, Jordan knew he had only one choice. He started to chant.


    Up until now, hed only channeled fire and lighting. They were easy enough spells that did great work against the shadows, but he would run out of mana long before this pit ran out of shadows, so he focused on the number of steps theyd take since they left the army behind. It was only 48 steps down and 200 steps eastish to get back to the temple entrance. That was doable, even with other people.


    It was the solid stone between here and there that made that an iffy prospect. Well, that and the fact that there were certain to be more monstrosities waiting for him there.


    The mage tried to ignore the Paragons desperate hymn as he fought back against some deathless monster in the doorway. He tried not to think about the fact that the fanatic was all that stood between him and a death too gruesome to mention as he focused on the facts.


    It wasnt like he could just teleport the two of them free and clear anyway. The edge of the wall of shadows was just over five thousand steps away. That was too far for anyone but an archmage.


    It felt like an impossibility, but he didnt let that stop him. The inescapable fact was that thest time hed cast this spell, hed ended up miles from anywhere hed meant to be and had been lucky to be alive. Every fiber of his being was telling him not to do it again, and yet he was certain that even a messy death where he ended up fusing with a tree or a wall and dying in agony was immensely preferable to whatever would happen to him after he died down here.


    So, with that thought in mind, he aimed for almost a mile away, toward what he recalled as empty fields, while he focused on the words and the gestures necessary to bend the world to his will in such aplex way. His odds were certainly less than one in a hundred with all theplicating factors involved, but Jordan ignored them. Brother Faerbars light was gging, and his strength was failing. It was time to roll the dice, so with hisst syble, he reached out and grabbed the shoulder of the Pargon and took him along for the ride.


    Jordan was sure that the man would have vehemently refused such an act and that he might well kill him when they reached the other side, but it wasnt like they were leaving any of the living behind. Theyd been separated from therger group and forced to face an endless series of monstrosities alone for a while now, and everyone who had stood by Brother Faerbars side was already dead.


    As the world disappeared and vanished into a sh of light, he left with a clean consciousness. Jordans heart might have been pounding out of his chest, but this time he felt sure that he hadnt screwed up the spell.

 Chapter 101: A Shot in the Dark

    Chapter 101: A Shot in the Dark


    In the instant that they passed through the stone, the Paragon was almost wrenched free of Jordans grasp as his hand and mind ckened. Trying to teleport through a solid object was the surest way to make sure they never found a body, though it was possible for a mage that was skilled or powerful enough. His instructor, Magus Gershwile, had joked more than once about that grim fate while he and his ssmates had struggled to send rats from where they sat to the empty cage across the room that had waited for them.


    It had taken a week before any of the rats that had managed to disappear without vanishing in a spray of blood to reappear on the far side of the room, alive and well, and there hadnt been a wall in the way then. That had been years ago, of course, and Jordan had improved since then, but had he improved enough to fling them from the depths of darkness back into the light?


    It was unlikely. Even as they soared through the emptiness between spaces, he could feel the hands of evil wing at them and trying to drag them back to where they had departed.


    Teleportation was an instantaneous thing. Done correctly, one would vanish in one spot and instantaneously appear in another, though it would always seem to the person in transit that seconds or minutes had passed. In fact, it was widely held that the longer it felt like it took, the closer one hade to the edge and that those who never reappeared simply stayed stuck in that timeless moment forever.


    Jordan considered that entirely possible that that was the case here as he swallowed hard and tried to stay focused on their destination. Even being lost in the dark forever would be a kindlier fate than being raised as the servant of a monster, though, so he didnt regret what hed done for a single moment.


    There was no denying that the faster he moved and the harder he strove, the further his destination moved from him. That thought was enough to bring him slowly to a halt as he drifted there, somewhere above the ground but far from the muddy field his magic had aimed for. He could feel the two of them beginning to freeze solid there, and that might have be an actual eternity were it not for the single silver thread that suddenly prated the endless dark.


    The light of the moon would have been unable to breach the veil of unnatural darkness that shrouded this ce had he stood in the real world. Here, though, past the boundaries of the world, the strange magic that caused that strange effect apparently didnt apply, and the goddess of magic still reigned supreme.


    That she had taken pity on him was not entirely a surprise; it happened sometimes in the stories. He only wondered if shed done so to save the mage who was in danger or the servant of another god. Lunaris was as merciful as she was mysterious, and her ways were never entirely understood, even by her devotees. Though most of the world saw her only as the guardian mother who lit up the night for the world, she was the patron god of mages, too. As he gripped the thread and pulled himself forward again, Jordan uttered a prayer of silent thanks for her intercession.


    Suddenly, time started again, and secondster, they found themselves in a heap of tangled limbs in a dark, snow-covered field. It was close to where hed been aiming, probably, but that didnt tell Jordan a lot. Even with Brother Faerbars glowing de radiating outward, he couldnt see the road.


    While Jordan continued to search for some sign of where they should flee, the pdin lifted him up by the scruff of his cor and shook the mage like a rag doll.


    You  traitorous viper! he said coldly, even though his eyes burned with fire, You left all of those men to die!


    Th-they already dead Jordan gasped, barely able to speak. Mustflee


    We were ughtering the devils by the score! the Paragon said, raising his sword threateningly. Theres still time to regroup. Still time! Take us back at once, or Ill have no further use for you.


    Jordan could see that the man was half mad with rage and grief, but what he asked was impossible. Even if he had the strength left to try and the desire to end up back in that pit, they would certainly end up embedded in one of the stone walls for all eternity; the spaces were simply too ustrophobic.


    So, he just hung there in the warriors grip, waiting for the man to run him through or strike his head from his shoulders. The blow nevernded. Instead, the older warrior froze, ears pricked to some distant sound. Then, without exnation, he dropped Jordan and started walking forward.


    Jordan had no idea what had just happened, and he wasnt about to ask what miracle had given him reprieve. Instead, he listened to the dark, trying to hear what it was that the pdin seemed to be listening to. It took a minute of walking before he heard the childs wail over the crunch of ice under their boots. By the Paragon was running.


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    Abruptly, they found the edge of darkness, and it fell away to reveal the thin gray light of dawn. Brother Faerbar stopped there, paralyzed by what he saw, even as Jordan rushed forward toward the sound.


    The wan light was not yet enough to reveal any real details, but the shape of the shadows was more than Jordan ever wanted to see anyway, and the steam that was still rising from some of the corpses revealed that all of this had happened within thest few hours. He rushed to gather up the squalling child of five or six, hoping that the sound would lead him to further survivors. There was none, though. Not even the woman who still held the blood-stained bundle in her arms was breathing.


    Jordan offered a second prayer to Lunara, sure that this was why shed saved him. No one truly understood what it was she wanted, perhaps not even worshipers, but there were more than enough stories about how she would move heaven and earth to save motherless children and war orphans. This probably wasnt even the strangest story on record, he realized, numbly, though he had no idea if theyd survive long enough to tell anyone.


    Even with a knight glowing with divine might, the monsters that woulde for the three of theme nightfall would be all but unbeatable now. Jordan looked past the field of dead bodies and up the road, trying to decide how far they could get before thest sunset, and he didnt like his odds. It was only when he turned back to the Temr to ask him his opinion that Jordan finally saw a wee sight: the sail of a ship.


    . . .


    Markez had been so busy pretending that everything was normal and that there wasnt some monster lurking beneath them while they slowly poled their way through the darkness that he entirely missed the light on the far shore at first.


    It was only when the children cried out that dawn hade again that they thanked the gods of the waters and cried out. Well then, dont stand around gawking at the sun. We got ourselves a sail to raise.


    Polling through the utter ckness that still stood adjusted behind them like a river had been as miserable as it had been unavoidable. With no starlight to show them where the sandbars or the shore were, theyd had to take that whole section nice and slow so as not to sink their fragile wooden world.


    Now, as well as he had these children trained, it might take less than an hour to get their sale up and put that evil ce behind them as quickly as possible. Markez was shocked theyd made it through at all, though that wasnt something he was likely to tell anyone until he could find a pub where he could share drinks with a few salts his own age if such a thing even still existed in this fallen world.


    No sooner did they have the sails up, though, and were once again starting to make real headway than another oddity was sighted. Two men were running towards them, and each of them was stranger than thest. The first one was wearing te mail and glowing brighter than the sun itself, and the second was a skinny young man wearing bloody robes. He would have been inclined to put both of them in his wake, given how desperate and dangerous they looked. He doubted that everyone on this boat together could have possibly beaten him, even without whatever crazy magic he seemed to wield.


    But for the baby, he would have left them both, but if Markez had a weakness, it was that. How could he ever hope to leave a defenseless infant behind?


    So, he guided the boat toward the far shore and ordered his crew to start spilling wind from the sail so he could have a closer look at these two and decide what it was he should do about them. Fortunately, spilling wind from a sail was the only order that the sailors of this ship were any good at.


    Youre a strange couple of parents, Markez called to the two men on shore as they pulled up close. Im not sure I can let such dangerous strangerse aboard my vessel, though!


    I understand that you are nervous, sir, the young man with robes said very politely, I would do no less in these trying times. But we can be of help to you in your darkest hour, as it were.


    Markez didntugh at the joke. Instead, he set his chin and turned to Mr. Light, And whos this then? Whats with the light show? I havent seen a single Siddrimite since your god was plucked from the sky!


    Markez watched the man tense, and for a moment, he thought that the knight would draw his sword, but the man resisted, showing him how close to the mark hed gotten.


    We are in a great war for the soul of the world, the knight said with evident exhaustion, and it shames me to say we are losing.


    So then, why do you want on my boat? Markez asked, confused.


    I dont, the man dered, shocking hispanion. Take these two and get as far from this evil ce as you can, I will


    You cant be serious! the younger man yelled at the older one. They clearly hadnt thought this through at all. They will end you.


    Its where I belong, The Temr said simply. Only I can y this foul beast. That is what this power is for to end


    That was when the thing rose from the dark, boiling waters just ahead of the ship. The children screamed and fled aft, but Markez could only look at the thing in awe. It was the most horrific thing that he was ever likely to see, from the tips of the broken swords that made up its rusted maw to the corpse of the woman that was chained inside of the rib cage where its heart should have been if it was alive.


    Just seeing that was enough to shave years of his life, and all he could do was stand there petrified while the two strangers sprung into action.

 Chapter 102: Leviathan

    Chapter 102: Leviathan


    Find them! Kill Them! Let them not escape!


    The distant words thundered inside her skull like a monsoon that had madendfall. So many times, his orders were insistent but resistable, for it was hard to force water into any shape that it did not choose. For example, the day before when, the voice had demanded that she crush that boat. Hed meant the one with the children, of course, but she had resisted, for she hated the ughter of children and vented his bloodlust of the boat that had followed it instead.


    Given time, the Lich would have ordered her to destroy the second skiff too and drown all those innocent lives, but it had more important matters to focus on and had left her to gather the mangled bodies of the drowned and bring them back to itsir.


    Today, there was nothing to distract it from seeing its will done, and thosemands built up with a tidal force that could not be denied. They were a lightning bolt into Orozas heart. They made her shackles burn with power that made it impossible to resist her own destructive impulse. At least for the moment, though, she could face off against warriors that probably deserved it.


    The knight glowed with a light that no longer existed in the world that made her think of cool spring days after the snow melt had started in earnest, but the reminiscence wasnt enough to give her the strength to resist the Lich. She would save that strength for the moment it forced her to indiscriminately murder the children who were huddled in fear nearby.


    The knight led with a series of strikes as the white fire coruscating across his gilded armor burned even brighter. These werent strong enough to do real damage. He was simply testing her mettle and buying time for his friend.


    At first, she thought the other man sought to escape. She hoped he did. Running him down would buy the children valuable time to flee. Some might yet escape with their lives.


    He didnt do that, though. He did something far stranger. He cast a spell, which was something shed only seen a few times since shed been chained to this corpse. Instantly, blue lightning struck her hard. It cooked the flesh where it went up her arm and then down into one of her left legs. It did very little damage, though, and she roared in annoyance more than pain.


    She charged him then, nning to deal with the mage before he could think of some more effective tactic. He responded with fire.


    The body of the swamp dragon was impossibly strong, and though the fire was enough to make her shy away for a moment due to her aversion, it could do nothing to the tanned skin or thick scales of her artificial, necrotic prison.


    As the mes cleared, though, it was clear that theyd provided just enough distraction for the pdin to charge through him. The main was clearly insane, but his burns healed even as he moved, and when his glowing sword struck, it nced off one of her ribs and pierced the heart of the body that contained her in her chest.


    It was a violent, terrible pain that represented more damage than anyone had done to the monstrosity since Oroza herself had savaged it. It wasnt enough, though, and she batted him harmlessly away into the grass.


    Her blow didnt keep him down any more than his blow had kept her down, though. Neither did her tail. He dodged it entirely, though she did seed in sending the mage sprawling. She doubted that one would rise again, which was just as well because she hated fire.


    He was back like a sh, charging her again. This time, despite the mans armor and his wounds, he danced around her next wed swipe, though that was just a feint. He weaved around it, obviously intending to strike her again. He would probably even seed in that before she managed to bite him in half. The main even used some of his holy magic to blind her, making her skin sizzle and smolder for a moment, but it was a foolish decision.


    After all, hed already jumped before his light had overwhelmed her dead eyes, and he couldnt change his trajectory in midair, so she still snapped at him, catching him in her maw and shaking him like a rag doll as her giant metal teeth ground against his armor. Several actually punctured it and sank satisfyingly into the flesh beneath, letting her feast on his blood.


    It was only while she tasted that warm, coppery draught that she finally felt the wound hed made as shed bitten him. With a powerful swipe, hed severed her right foot just below the calf, and for the first time in a long time, she was no longer fully attached to her bindings. She spat the man free, leaving him a crumpled, bleeding wreck on the ground, as she suddenly explored her current state of being.


    The spell she murmured, Its iplete. And it was true. Each manacle had borne identical runes, ted it gold when theyd been created once upon a time, but now so many had failed that there had only been a full set present if youbined all four manacles together, and one had just been opened in the most grisly way possible.


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    Three circles is enough to hold a lesser goddess like you, the darkness spat. Finish them, and I will have you repairs when this is done.


    No, she said, trying the word on for size and finding that she liked it.


    No?! The Lich roared. Do as you are told, Oroza!


    She didnt, though. The corpse couldnt hold her now, and neither could the words that passed through it. Not with only three worn and pitted manacles. All these decades since the darkness had captured her and turned her into a mockery of her true self, shed waited for the time and the tides to do their work.


    What chance did the Lichs efforts have against the forces that ground rocky promontories and breakwaters into nothing but fine beach sand? It was folly to assume that it could cage nature, no matter how much it poisoned her wellspring.


    She smiled then, for the first time since her capture, and strained at her manacles, ripping first the left out of the socket where the chain held it and then the right. The swamp dragon roared in pain as it reared up, unable to strike the final blow as she ripped the still-beating heart out of it.


    The mage was being dragged back toward the craft by some of the children and an old man, but the knight stilly there, just begging to be finished off. It couldnt strike the final blow, though, because she wouldnt let it. Any other opponent would already be dead, of course, but she watched the light pouring out of the bite marks decrease with every second as the flesh knitted shut again, but she didnt care.


    Even though she hated Siddrims sheep and would have dly killed him for the slights they had heaped upon her followers, she knew how much more the Lich that had held her leash for so long hated and feared them. So, he would live, but only because of spite.


    The swamp dragon roared to the skies, spasming as she leaned forward and ripped open the bars of the prison that had held her for so long, and then, with onest yank at the sole remaining manacle around her right leg, she was free.


    The bars of the ribcage were coated in ugly, rusted iron, but at their core, they were still bone, and when she crushed them, they fell apart like rotten wood in her rubbery finger. As Oroza jumped to the ground, free of her cage for the first time in an eternity, she was sorely tempted to immediately drop the corpse shed been bound to and flee into the water. She didnt, though. Not yet. She still had things to do.


    Standing there on one foot and one stump, she turned her attention to the straining corpse of the swamp dragon that loomed above her.


    You cannot escape me! The Lich screamed in her mind, but she ignored it. Without the chains hed held her with for so long, his orders andpulsions passed through her, leaving only a ripple in their wake.


    I am no longer yours tomand, she whispered as she engaged with it in a battle of wills over what the swamp dragon would do next.


    Now that she was no longer attached to it, shed lost some of her advantages over the darkness that was trying to make the hodgepodge of reptile bones strike her down, along with all the other living creatures currently sheltered in her wake.


    They stood like that long enough for the knight to stagger to his feet and make his way toward the fragile boat that everyone else was already aboard. She ignored that, though. Instead, she forced the dragon to reach up and crush its own skull between its two monster paws while the Lich raged in her soul at what she was doing.


    That didnt stop her from forcing it to grab the structural vicle that held her cage in ce so long and rip it off of the rest of its body before it copsed into pieces on the ground next to her.


    I shall rebuild my dragon and devour you once more, goddess! the Lich bellowed, but she could hear its fear now.


    If you are foolish enough to enter my waters again, you shall be the one to pay the price, she whispered. Already walking to the water.


    The Lich started to respond, but she didnt hear it. By the time it had started to scream again, her toes had touched the water of the river, of her river, and she immediately left the corpse, which copsed into the shallows like a puppet with the strings cut.


    It was an exhrating feeling. She knew she would never truly feel clean again thanks to all of the horrific things that the Lich had done to her, to say nothing of the things it had forced her to do. She still allowed herself a moment to just experience the feeling of being one with the river once more. Her consciousness rippled along the length of her domain, from the still-tainted headwaters to the brackish delta shed spent so much time in thest few years. Everything was where she had left it, more or less, and she could now begin again in the endless cycle of nature.


    First, though, she had to finish dealing with the Lich. With a thought, the current rippled, snatching the corpse that had been her for far too long and dragging it down into the depths for the fish and the eels to devour. She had no idea what the darkness might be able to do with something so powerfully associated with her, but she would rather die than find out the hard way.


    Once that was done, she blended in with the currents, finally unfurling the ghostly, sinuous nature that was a river dragon and using it to drag the boat back out into the channel and upstream against the current before the Lich couldunch some new monster to ughter all the children onboard the fragile vessel.

 Chapter 103: Cut Off

    Chapter 103: Cut Off


    The very earth shook with Tenebroums undiluted rage as the river goddess slipped the leash and seeded in sliding back into her river, where she immediately vanished. In that moment, she aplished something that no one had ever done before - she had escaped the Lich, defeating it in a way that bordered on humiliating, even if it had only lost a single soul in the process.


    Its very first thought, before the clouds of anger had even cleared, was to begin to imagine ways it might get her back. It could inscribe her true name ons of woven metal. It could dig a reservoir deep beneath and trap her forever. It could build a giant cauldron and then boil her until she was nothing but cloudy vapor.


    All of these were dismissed by it as being utterly impractical. Instead, it forced itself to ept what it really needed to do: crush her without mercy. In all the years it had owned her, it had never seeded in breaking her spirit the way that it had with Krulmvenors. The Lich had never determined if it was her elements nature or her fierce spirit that was the source of her resilience, but at this point, it no longer mattered.


    Even in its most paranoid flights of fantasy, it never presumed that the goddess would muster the strength to escape or to help its enemies. It was unimaginable. Up until now, the most shed been able to do was struggle to spare children or followers and, once, to dy her attacks long enough to try to get that pathetic creature Paulus to help her.


    None of those acts had even hinted that shed be capable of something like this, though. As it studied the wreckage of its oldest and best servant, it was in to see what had happened. Salt and time had done their worst to the runes, and shed waited patiently for her waters to do their slow, inevitable work. It was frustrating but easy to see how it had missed it in its single-minded quest to destroy the light. The version of Tenebroum that had emerged from that experience vowed to focus more on those minor details going forward. It would never let this happen again.


    After all, it had been bad enough to lose one of its most powerful servants and watch the lone surviving Temr escape, but it did not realize the full depth of her betrayal until it finished the ughter in the deeps and tried to dispatch a legion across the river to Dutton to finish the bloodbath it had started there. There was evidence that Siddrims church was regrouping, and it hoped tounch a sneak attack on their tenuous supply lines, but it very quickly found out that was a bad idea.


    The first three ranks were getting close to the opposite shore when the river dragon suddenly appeared like the force of nature that she was. One moment, the water was just water, but momentster, it became imprable scales and devastating ws. In an instant, those clean ranks of bone, flesh, and steel that would have been difficult for even strong men to sunder were dashed to pieces by the treacherous currents.


    The Lich immediately reversed course and sounded the retreat, but it was clear that going forward, the long, familiar paths that it used to shield its soldiers from the light were lost to it. This was doubly painful since it had already destroyed all the strong stone bridges upriver in its quest to slow down the Crusaders.


    It tried to mend the crossing near Fallravea with timbers and magic, but no sooner had it made the way crossable than the waters around the central pir began to boil and throb until the whole central support fell away into the dark, churning waters along with several zombies rendering the chasm unbridgeable.


    This outraged the Lich even further. Though its domain over the waters had been slipping constantly since her rebellion, it did not think she had the power to do something so tant, but she did.


    You trifle with me at your peril, woman! Tenebroum roared. If you seek war with me, then you shall have it!


    It continued its reconnaissance of thends beyond, noting the fear had ebbed to some degree as people had started to ept the new state of things. It doubted that wouldst long, though. This was a chilly summer, and the signs of the starvation toe were already starting to show in most fields. Grain would grow increasingly scarce this far south, and not even the increased hours of sunlight was enough tobat just how thin and weak that light had be.


    The darkness might not have won in a single stroke like it hoped, but if this was the peak of summer, then the world was in for a cruel awakeninge winter. The Lich considered holding off on its advances until ice covered the Oroza once more in a few months.


    There was no telling what that frigid bitch would do then, though, it decided. So even trying to cross on a river that waspletely frozen over probably still wouldnt be a good idea because she was very clearly fixated on thwarting it for the foreseeable future. In that, at least, it could not me her. Albrecht had only caged its soul for a few years, and it still burned with hatred for the long-dead mage that became the skeleton of who it had be.


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    It had toe up with some other way to unleash its legions of death on the world. Ultimately, that probably meant killing the goddess and her river, but it wasnt sure how best to go about that. Tenebroum had already poisoned her river once, and though it wasnt sure when Paulus had removed the chrium sieve, it was very clear that it was indeed missing from the spring where it had been installed when it sent a few shades to inspect it one night.


    That was almost ironic. It had noted that the poison levels in the river were falling, but it had never made the connection because it had kept a watch on the area with dead-eyed ravens and four-winged vultures for years, and the man had never appeared. The Lich silently fumed at that as it berated itself for its fixation on preparing the Temple of Dawn, but all it could do now was address the issue and install a new one.


    As soon as it did, something odd happened, though. The spring stopped flowing.


    Its servant ced the tainted metal in the pool just as it had done before, but as the drudge stood there, slowly dissolving from the caustic water, the pool became still, and the small stream that ran downhill slowly began to dry up. It took several minutes for Tenebroum to figure out what had happened. The goddess had literally chosen to cut off part of herself rather than allow it to poison her the same way twice.


    If Siddrim had possessed such steel, there would still be a sun in the sky. the Lich growled with the faintest hint of appreciation as it watched her reject itpletely. I wonder if your discipline will waver when we repeat this experiment at all your other headwaters.


    The goddess gave no response to that. It was not something that it could execute tomorrow, though. Creating so much of the brittle anti-water would take a long time. It did set the necessary works in motion, though, just as it dispatched its leaded earth titan to the Red Hills.


    If she wants to reject my gifts and dry up rather than embrace me, then we shall have to find a new source to flood the Oroza, it mused. Go west and dig a channel that reaches all the way to the sea. Connect Kelvuns canal with the ocean, and lets see if that doesnt twist the knife a little more for her.


    Once that was done, and the poisoning of the river goddess was set in motion from all angles, it was free to focus on what needed to happen next. It needed a new way forward.


    In the end, it was forced to send the iron men that it had been building to cut it a new, deeper path to freedom. The legion of rust it had been building ever since the sacking of Mournden used cast rune tes to force the skulls of the dwarves it had so many of these days to create something that its fire godling had never been: obedient and loyal.


    The dwarves had a strong spirit, it was true. Each and every one of them, except for its mutted and mutated hound, were much more likely to break than bend, but with their true names so helpfully engraved onto the mortal remains, it was easy to lead even the most obstinate ox with the right spell.


    It had been nning on unleashing a legion of a thousand such warriors to cut right through the walls of Abenend, which still had not fallen despite its best efforts. It was thest remaining holdout in the whole region, but it was not a priority right now.


    The church had been crushed, thest gasp of an army had been shattered, and their feeble efforts to build some kind of fortification to keep it contained were worrisome, but only because of their proximity to the river on the one side and the magic school on the other.


    As much as it would love to purge it from the map, that assault would have to be dyed for now until it could strike at all of them from some unexpected angle. Even though it would have much preferred to use the unique anti-magic properties of these soldiers, its need to be cut free of the box it found itself in was far more important.


    Every direction was barred to it, with the Wodenspine in the north, the Oroza to the east, and the Relict Sea to the west and south. Right now, the only conceivable way out of that box was to the northeast, through the narrow gap in the foothills.


    The problem with that was that all of its enemies expected it to do exactly that. They were converging there, and though Tenebroum could still likely win the exchange, it woulde at a great cost, and after the damage thest army had done, it was in no hurry tosh out again unprepared. It would find another way that no one would expect.


    The good news was that the penins well and truly belonged to it now. There was little that still lived on it, but the creatures that did, be they human, goblin, or lizardmen, belonged to it body and soul. The bad news was that its fortress was also a cage.


    It hungered for fresh blood and souls as it always did, and no matter how much power it had siphoned from Siddrims dying soul, that well would eventually run dry if it found nothing new to feast on. And there was so much life to the north. More than even it knew about until it glimpsed the world through the eyes of the Lord of Light. Fallravea wasnt even arge city byparison, and it hungered to read the bloody harvest that those rich farnds could provide, but first, it had to reach it in force, and the only way to dig a tunnel like that in anything approaching an eptable timeline was to bend its army of tireless dwarves to the task.


    Once it did the math and realized that the zombie drudges would take decades to carve the path, it required them with mithril-tipped picks rather than the steel swords and shields it had been forging for so long now. Yes, the path over the mountains was much too rugged, but a tunnel just below them might bepleted in only a year or two. Then, It would vomit forth death on the continent in a manner that would leave no survivors.

 Chapter 104: The Last Ship Home

    Chapter 104: The Last Ship Home


    Even after a few days to reflect on it, Jordan wasnt exactly sure what had happened. Theyd only barely managed to avoid death at the hands of the endless grasping dead, and then while they stood there on the shore, they were attacked by the rotting corpse of a dragon, and somehow Brother Faerbar had struck some vital blow, and it had torn itself to pieces.


    It made no sense. None of it did. In fact, it felt more like a fever dream than reality, but no one really talked about any of it except the children, and that only added to the strangeness of the whole ordeal. How did you talk to children about anything? With small words and hopeful euphemisms.


    It was Siddrims light that smote the dragon. Lunaras mercy had saved the child. They should all be grateful to the swiftly flowing Oroza for saving them.


    All of those things were true, probably, but none of them were answers. They were barely statements of fact, but since that terrible battle, the Temr had been silent and tended only to the child hed rescued. Physically, he was uninjured, but mentally? To Jordan, his mind seemed shattered. The sailor wasnt much better. He might swear and curse that something wasnt being done fast enough or well enough, but other than that, he kept himself to himself, which left no one but children, an upjumpedmoner who pretended to be a noble, and a couple of very frightened mothers to talk to.


    They were all bad choices, and Jordan did as little of any of that as he could manage. Instead, he tried to study and sort the conflicting recollections of his mind. Often, while he toyed with the manacle, hed scooped up when he rescued the Temr.


    Honestly, if not for the dreadful magics that clung to that gilded hunk of rusted steel, he would have been quite certain that hed made the whole thing up. There was no way he could make up dread magics like this, though.


    He spent most nights sitting alone at the bow, watching the stars drift by on thenguid bow wake while he studied the evil auras that wafted off the thing like an evil aura that only he could see. Well - the Temr could see it too. Jordan could tell that much just by the way the man looked at him, but all hed ever said on the matter was, If you start to show any signs of corruption, Ill cut you into pieces and burn the corpse to ashes.


    Jordan believed him. If anything, he had a much harder time believing that the man hadnt killed him yet. Every day, he told himself that he should throw it overboard at least twice, but every day, he held on to it, certain that if he could just get it to a magus more learned than him, it might reveal some important clue about the enemy that they had to fight if anyone had any hope of putting the world back together.


    Winning this terrible war couldeter, though. Right now, all that really mattered was that they went away as fast as their fragile little sailboat could manage. Every day, they drifted more and more to the north, with the help of favorable winds and impossible currents, but it changed nothing. Everywhere they went, they found only devastation and empty fields. It seemed impossible that an evil that no one had even whispered about had spread so far in so little time, but if the women were to be believed, it was like this all the way to the sea. In less than a month, at least three counties had been utterly purged of life, and no one could say how much further the damage continued upriver.


    It was basically the apocalypse; the world as theyd known it had been abandoned, and in its ce, they found only burned-out farmhouses and unburied bodies. They found less boat traffic, too, but that was just as well because the living that they had found had be lean, predatory men.


    When they passed from the Oroza to the Tolden river that flowed into it, just before theyd reached the ruins of Siddramar itself, one small skiff with four hungry men actually tried to pull alongside and take what they had by force.


    Jordan didnt even try to warm them, lest he find out the hard way that they have a crossbow bolt. Hed just muttered a few words and watched the lightning bolt arc down from a clear blue sky to hole their vessel and burn their sails.


    A couple of them almost certainly died the moment that the lightning struck, but at least one of them might survive long enough to make it to shore, though Jordan very much doubted the man would survive the terrible burns that hed received in the st.


    The children gawked and squealed at that, but her was subtle enough that none of them seemed to me him for the magic. The adults knew, of course, but there was as much gratitude as fear in their eyes, and they said nothing at all. Even the suspicious old sailor, who was superstitious enough to make warding gestures at almost anything, didnt outright chastise the mage for what hed done because he knew that any other oue would have been worse.


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    Two dayster, they finally reached Siddrimar and the great stone bridge that crossed the Tolden, but they didnt stop like Jordan thought they would. Bah - keep going, the Temr called out when he heard they were mooring.


    But if not here, then where? Markez asked. I only went this way because I thought your people could protect us, I


    Take them to the capital. Let the King protect them. This ce is cursed, Brother Faerbar said, unable or unwilling to take his eyes off the shore for a long moment before he turned around and walked back below decks with the child he called Leo still in his arms.


    Isnt he supposed to be some bigshot with the temple? Markez asked, obviously spooked.


    I mean, if you took a whole army off to y a nightmare, Im not sure youd want to go back home and report what happened either, Jordan responded without meeting the mans eye.


    Being this close to the church was a risk for a mage, and he had no doubt that any of the priests with the sight could have picked him out of the crowd without issue, but today, he wasnt worried, even though he should have been. Today, he wasnt too worried. There were bigger forces at y than witch hunts. Instead of worrying about who might try to track him down, he tried to imagine what these pristine walls had looked like before whatever terrible thing had urred that had brought the high towers down into ragged stacks of rubble and littered the manicuredndscape with burn marks and blood spots.


    Hed known it was going to be bad, of course, but he was sure the Collegium looked no better than the churchs fortress city. Whether hed wanted toe here or not, Jordan had assumed that this would be their destination. Despite Brother Faerbarsck ofmunication, hed assumed that they were trying to warn the elders and high priests of all the terrible things theyd seen, but that didnt happen, and that created a whole new puzzle.


    Where should we go then? Markez asked as they drifted slowly toward the shore. The Capital? I cant imagine theyre eager for more refugees. Were liable to find the gates shut in our face, and with so many mouths to feed, I doubt very much that we have the food to get there.


    Jordan nodded. He agreed on all counts. No. A ce like that at a time like this? Thats thest ce Id want to be. Well have to go home.


    Home? Markez demanded, mming his hands down on the rail. Are you mad? Wevee all this way, and you think we should just turn around and go back to the sea? I we will never make it through that shadow if we go back and tempt fate, and mark my words


    No, Jordan interrupted softly before the man could get much more worked up. Not your home. My home.


    No offense to you and yours wizard, but I dont think the ruins of a magic school are a fit ce for children and


    Not Abenend, Jordan said louder than he meant to as he mmed his hand down on the railing. Something you might not know Something most people dont know, even though its not really a secret, is that most of the students who end up there are the extra sons of wealthy families. I am no different.


    Markez did a double take, Wait - you mean you and the idiot over there are part of the same club? Hows that work?


    Well, technically, Dian is the second son of a Bar. It is a title he wouldnt inherit even if he was the first son. Hes all posturing and no substance, Jordan said, shing a smile. His father holds the rights to certain lets say fishing grounds. Nothing more.


    Jordan had considered holding those details back, but the way it made Markezugh for the first time on the whole trip made it worthwhile. So yer sayin I can stop taking it easy on him?


    I dont think you take it easy on anyone, old man, except for maybe the kids, Jordan added, getting an approving nod for his trouble.


    Alright then - you tell me where were goin, and Ill get ya there, the sailor said, finally listening to the mage for the first time, whether he was blue-blooded or not.


    Jordan told him as much as he needed to know. He told him that Sedgim manor was an estate of ample size less than a day from the north fork of the river and that it was less than a week away, just after the Greywood gave way to the hilly pasturends that his family had owned for generations.


    He left out the goblin threats, the sullen older brothers who might not be so happy about his sudden appearance, and the fact that the well-manicured grounds were probablyrger than any five little fishing viges like the one that Markez hade from put together. Those wereter problems. For now, he just needed the sailor to keep the ship moving, the pdin to produce loaves and potatoes from thin air every now and again, and he would focus on keeping everyone safe.


    After all, no matter how far they had to go, as long as they stayed on the water, he didnt imagine an army of the undead could reach them, and even though he was just an apprentice, he was confident that he could square off against anything short of that.

 Chapter 105: Unexpected Difficulties

    Chapter 105: Unexpected Difficulties


    Time took on a new meaning for Tenebroum in the wake of its Siddrims defeat, as its spirit continued to evolve. It became insufferably persistent and regr for the darkness for the first time in its long existence.


    Before now, time might linger as it focused on its most important projects, such as when the Temple of Dawn nearedpletion or when its shadow dragon readied itself for another test flight that seemed like it would finally be sessful. Now, though, time was its constantpanion, and order had invaded its soul in a way it would not have been able to imagine previously.


    Now it was aware of the ticking clock as it reminded it of every minute that passed in the same way it was aware of every drip of water leaking into a dank body storage room and every rat that was gnawing away at the raw materials of its future army. It tried to take this new information in stride, but more than anything, it was shocked at just how much waste it had allowed up till now and just how long it was forced to wait for some of its ns toe to fruition.


    Every night its earth titan came to the surface and cleaved right through those damned bloody hills in the west in an effort to reach the sea, but even with its earth magic and the fact that it wasrgely obedient, the project to drown the river goddess was still months away, and it did not expect her to just wither up and die the moment it did so. That was a battle that would take years, but it would not let that stop it.


    Its tunnel project alone might take over a year, too, but even if itcked the infinite patience that ignorance had provided it up until now, it would not let that deter it. It would find ways to speed these things up. Already, the iron men that made up the legion of rust had journeyed north to the Woden Spine Mountains and begun to dig the passage that would be critical to its future attacks, but that was not the only thing it was up to.


    Tenebroums base of operations was constantly expanding, and now that the surface was plunged into eternal night, some tasks could be aplished faster and better simply by moving them to the surface where the cold could aid in those processes. Already, the most gifted healers of the crusader army had been merged and modified with each other to create a new batch of chirurgiens that were currently busy wailing and gnashing their teeth as they were forced to put their dead friends and brothers in arms back together again to replenish Tenebroums much-diminished supply of war zombies.


    Such deficiencies needed to be addressed now that the world was well and truly aware of it for the first time in its long existence. This attack had failed, but there would be others, and it would be ready for them. Already, it was sending caravans with dark tarps and coffins to fetch the corpses that had been left to rot in the nearby viges to ensure that it would not run out of raw materials, and it had dispatched its army to Fallravea to purge it of all survivors since it was thest battlefield open to it.


    There would be no heroics there. Not with a starving poptioncking their holy defenders and a foundation that had long since been filled with tunnels to make any real defense impossible. It fell in a single night,pleting its kingdom of the dead.


    This, at least, was enough to pass the time as time crawled forward at the pace of one of its drudges. The Lich would not get to enjoy ughter like this again until it finally made a new route to the soft cities and viges of the outside world. That meant it needed to savor every drop of orphans blood that dripped into the overflowing gutters and bask in the scream of everyst widow before she, too, was silenced forever.


    It made for a lovely two days of distraction, but after that, the bodies were cooling and slowly making their way back to its realm of eternal night one silent, cadaverous caravan at a time. After that, it was back to the monotony of assembling new minions and waiting for its long-term projects toe to fruition.


    It was true that there were some bright spots. The dwarvish souls in itstest batch positively hated being fused with the bones and teeth of Kobolds so that they would make for even better miners, which was good because Krulmvenor barely reacted when it added the souls of unsullied dwarves in an attempt to rekindle the hound to be something more than the rabid attack dog it had be. This was a reasonable response to all the spirit had been through, but it was not an entertaining one.


    Finally, after several weeks of monotony, when Tenebroum thought it could take no more of the monotony, its legion of rust finally got deep enough into the mountains to hold its interest. Until then, the endeavor had been nothing but logistical headaches. Now, though, it was paying off.


    Not in the form of mineral veins, though their singrly straight tunnel had located both a tin vein and a silver vein that it wouldter exploit. No, in interesting biological specimens. Goblins would asionally be drawn to the activity, though it was easy enough to ughter them if they became too much of a nuisance. There was other, stranger life, too, though. There were giant albino centipedes that bored through the bedrock by spitting acid, and in one cavern, it located a whole ecology of spiders that preyed on other spiders with increasingly powerful poisons and stalking tactics.


    The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.


    One had beenrge enough to try to devour its already dead dwarves, though without much sess. Tenebroum did not ughter them all immediately for their impudence, though. Instead, it was content to study the dumb, dangerous creatures. They were no real threat to it, and there was a great deal to be learned, it decided, both from how they moved and the toxins they generated.


    It was strange, it reflected as it watched the days crawl by and measured the passage of that time in feet of progress made, timbers erected, and cartloads of debris carried slowly back to the surface by hundreds of drudges. A few years ago, its pet fire godling had made a very simr trip and seen very simr sights, but the darkness that held its leash had cared very little about such discoveries at the time.


    It supposed that it was not strange to find itself so altered by its brush with the light. After all, it had taken decades to evolve from where it started as an angry swamp denizen to the master of necromancy that it had be and everything that it had been dwarfed by the essence that it feasted upon in Siddrims dying soul. It would have been far stranger for that situation not to change it at all.


    So, while it waited for the next event or oddity worthy of its attention, it turned its eyes back to its ownir, adding hundreds of small tasks to the list that was its only thing longer than its ever-growing inventory of bodies. There were souls to mend, leaks to seal, bodies to pickle, and grisly mosaics toplete. Even with all the time in the world and more servants every day, it wasnt enough to address the unaddressable.


    It rejected the perfectionist streak that was slowly manifesting inside of it. Tenebroum resented it, but its need for orderliness and precision, especially in itsrger ns, was bing difficult to resist as time crept forward at a snails pace.


    It had just finally gotten around to reviewing the limited data that its new astrbe and the obsidian-lensed telescope that was paired with it when they encountered living dwarves deep beneath the mountain it was tunneling through. The result was a bloodbath for both sides.


    For weeks, Tenebroums legion of rust had been digging forward in a nearly straight line as it built the tunnel wide enough for three ranks to travel abreast. Theyd been making great time at the rate of more than a dozen feet a day through the hard granite roots of the mountain, but when its tunnel impacted a more natural one, it found somethingpletely unexpected: dozens, no - hundreds of dwarves encamped like theyd been waiting for it.


    The sh was immediate but, to some extent, ineffective for both sides. Its iron men could not be in, not truly, and the weapons they wielded were optimized for stone, not opponents, so the already impressive armor of the dwarves worked even better than it usually would. The result was a bloody, grinding stalemate as battleaxe and pickaxe traded blow after bone-jarring blow.


    The Lich didnt like to think that such a meeting could be a coincidence, but it didnt like the alternative even more: they had known that it wasing, and this was an ambush. The fight that followed took almost a day, and for every dozen dwarves it slew, one of its iron men was reduced to scrap. Sadly, this math would not work out in its favor because the waves of dwarves seemed almost endless, and even the shades and shadows it unleashed on the miserable axe-wielding vermin were of limited effectiveness.


    It had only kept a few hundred around for dealing with vermin like Kobolds and Goblin tribes that it did not yet control, but its enemy was prepared for that. Theyd brought priests of the All-Father, and the holy magic they wielded was enough to erase the darkness long enough to banish its most creative servants. That left both sides to face the long grinding ughter of steel against steel.


    For hour after hour, screams and battle cries echoed for miles in all directions, sometimes even drowning out the metallic sounds ofbat. Even those deaths werent enough to give the darkness any pleasure. No suffering or bloodshed could raise its spirits as it brooded on this development.


    I am the one who is supposed to move in secret, far from prying eyes, not the pitiful, plodding dwarves! it raged in its throne room as it watched the fight from so far away.


    The Lich knew that its forces had already lost within the first few hours and had already started to make a fallback n. The drudges were hauling away the fresh corpses of its enemy so Tenebroum could devour them and interrogate them in detail to find out exactly how they had known the best spot to stymy it while its rear guard tried to kill as many as possible.


    When the time finally came that it looked like the dwarves were on the verge of victory, its remaining iron men, who werent actively engaged in the fight, switched their targets to the support timbers instead. For mile after countless mile, these things had beenid to ensure the roof above their heads stayed where it belonged, but now they brought them down one after another with strikes from their pickaxes. Eventually, that was enough to bring the ceiling down for hundreds of yards in both directions as the immense weight of the mountains above bore down on them,


    That was fine with the Lich. If it couldnt have this tunnel, then no one could. It would expand its workshops, build a new force, and start again, and this time it would be ready for its new foe.

 Chapter 106: Last Minute Harvest

    Chapter 106: Last Minute Harvest


    Jordan had been prepared for all sorts of eventualities when he finally saw the tiny vige of Tolems Ferry. Hed expected his family to be happy to see him or even angry that hede, depending on who it was that held the reins of power. After all, the world had all but ended, and there was no telling how much worse things might have gotten during that time. His father might be dead. It was possible that one or both brothers might be too.


    Thest thing hed expected was to find the ce basically abandoned, though. There was no one but a couple of fishermen who were able to offer up exnations for everything that had transpired. The rest of your family has run off, my lord, Rufus told them. As soon as the sun rose again, they took their things and their retainers and took off toward the capital. They said it was to petition the king for men to fight the goblins, but well, you know


    Jordan nodded sadly. He did know. Theyd decided to save themselves. That wasnt surprising. Hed decided to save himself in the end, too, once upon a time, and the only reason he hadnt been because hed flubbed the spell.


    The vige itself wasnt more than 60 buildings, built at a location where the currents were weak, and a safe crossing was all but assured. A little fishing was done here, and a little farming in the bottomnds prone to flooding along the rivers path where rice and potatoes were nted most years. Some wheat was grown higher up on the slopes, but those areas were mostly reserved for grazing sheep.


    This vige should have been home to a couple hundred people, but the brief conversation revealed that there were only a dozen left. Half had run off, and the other half had moved into the manor, slowly turning it into something resembling an armed camp under the orders of the headman Olmers.


    That mightplicate things, Jordan nodded, but regardless, he vowed to set things right and thanked the fisherman for the heads-up. He was a Sedgim, after all, and he couldnt shirk the plight of his people. His family had already done enough of that for all of them.


    He conferred briefly with hispanions and then decided that it would be for the best if they all went together. After all, he didnt think the chances of violence were high, but the presence of almost two dozen children would certainly reduce them.


    At least, he thought so. He was wrong about that, too.


    Jordan could feel the paranoia and the fear radiating off the men he glimpsed from behind makeshift barricades and through the ts of boarded-up windows. Sedgim Manor had been a keep once before it had been made into a manor house after generations of peace, but other than the giant picture windows that had been installed, the home and the giant U-shaped courtyard were still very defensible.


    Paradoxically, when he announced himself, that seemed to put people even more on edge. Youd bar the door against me? Jordan asked, feigning a bit more arrogance than usual as he raised his voice. I grew up in these halls!


    Ive sent someone to fetch the headman, the guard said as he nervously fidgeted with his spear. Olmers said no one allowed in without his say-so, but he didnt make no exceptions for you.


    Jordan considered arguing the point but decided that he didnt want to escte things with so many children about on both sides of the makeshift barricade. Instead, he stood there peevishly while he waited to be let into his own home. Mel was a good guy, and he felt sure the old man would see reason.


    When the headman finally appeared, the first thing he said was, You cant be Jordan. I heard he died.


    Very nearly, more than once, Jordan quipped, but he was unable to keep the warm tone with the drunk he was talking to.


    Hed supposed that the man he was waiting on was the town cooper, Mel Olmers, senior. That man had been a rock of themunity; hed been everything his son wasnt. Ned, on the other hand, was a half-remembered bully who seemed destined to grow up to be a swine herd. From the looks of it, things had changed much in the years youve been gone.


    Well, well see about that, Ned sneered. I might be able to see fir to letting you in, and maybe thedies with you, but the children Im afraid we simply dont have the room for them.


    Youd turn away children at the end of the day, Ned? Jordan mocked him, losing his patience. I shouldnt be surprised, but I am.


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    Neds brow furrowed for a moment as he tried to figure out if hed been insulted. When he decided that he had, he drew his sword and pointed it at Jordan. Open the gate so I can teach this lout some manners. Weve saved plenty of kids, and I wont let any of you be spoken down to by our betters.


    Why dont you put the sword away, man, Jordan said through clenched teeth. That was one of his fathers swords, and thest ce it belonged was in the hands of horse apple like Ned.


    Why dont you make me, Ned shot back as he strode through the door.


    Everyone had moved back now except for the guard that had opened the door and, of course, the Temr. That man wouldnt move out of the way of the devil himself.


    Brother Faerbar didnt even need to unsheathe his sword, though. As soon as Jordan said, Are you sure we cant talk this out, the oaf sneered, The time for your fancy words is past, pal. Theres no daddy that. Can save you now


    Hed never finish his sentence. Jordan unleashed a bolt from the blue and struck his opponent dead without much effort.


    I trust that will be the end of that little mutiny then? Jordan said, walking over to the body and retrieving his fathers sword from the steaming corpse that had just tried and failed to order Jordans death. It wasnt an enchanted de, but it was a finely worked piece of steel, and he had no doubt theyd need all the des they could muster in the dark days toe.


    No one said anything after that, which made him smile. It was one thing to be told that the youngest brother had gone off to learn magic, but it was quite another to see him use it when he returned, and none doubted him now.


    Unfortunately, the more he toured thepound, the more clear it was that all of them would soon be in dire straights. The men had decided that the world was over, or it might as well be, and theyd dinned on the stores in the cer like locusts. What hadnt been taken by his family had been devoured by the people theyd left behind to defend it. The granary was halfway empty, the wine cer was down to two dozen bottles, the beer and ale were all but gone, and even the cheese that should have been aging in the cave before it was brought to market in the spring had vanished.


    Jordan didnt even want to think about the conditions of the herds. Between the talk of increased goblin activity and the things these men had done to their emergency supplies, they were all about to be in fairly dire straights. The only bright side to all this was that by the time he returned to the house toy down judgment, most of the worst offenders and all of Olmerss inner circle had decided to get while the getting was good. The rest of the world might be a bleak, dangerous ce, but it was far less dangerous than a man who could wield lightning and fire.


    The ce was in an uproar, and those that remained seemed pretty convinced that Jordan had tipped the scales to their annihtion, but that was only true until he showed them that theyd only been weeks away from running out of food as it was. After that, their fear turned to the anger it should have been the whole time.


    . . .


    Once the chaos died down, and it was made very clear to everyone that they could demand neither a more legitimate ruler nor a stronger protector than him and his very quiet holy warriorpanion, things got back to normal fairly quickly, but only because they had to. No one doubted that the weather would turn earlier than ever this year. So, giving it their all became a literal life-or-death matter.


    Brother Faerbar wanted to cut the hands of a few people who remained who were obviously guilty of looting and otherwise feathering their own nests to his sight, but Jordan forbade it this time. Instead, he promised the Temr that he could have a free hand to punish the wicked after theyd all been warned, and then he offered everyone the same admonition: Work hard until the first snow, or none of us will live to see spring.


    They were in dire straights. It would be a minor miracle if they made it to spring without having to devour their seed or ughter everyst ewe, but they had no choice. He very much doubted things would be better in the capital, and it was toote in the season to flee north to where climes might be better.


    Everyone worked after that. Even the children. What grains had ripened were cut, and the fields were gleaned of everyst kernel to save them from the birds. Rice was harvested, potatoes were stacked even though they were small and gnarled, and thembs were ughtered.


    For the next month, they did all the work that had been neglected for thest two and more, and slowly, the mood of his subjects improved. When hed arrived, they were desperate men sure there wouldnt be enough food to go around, butradery and teamwork, mostly facilitated and aided by all of the mouths to feed, had turned the tide.


    Even that wouldnt have been enough were it not for the generosity of the river. They all agreed to me Markez for the stunning amount of fish they started to catch on a daily basis in the days leading up to the river freezing over. In a week, they caught more than the dozen fishermen that made the town home usually caught in a season. There were so many that they were going to have trouble smoking and preserving all of them.


    Jordan knew the truth, though, and he suspected that others did, too. This was just one more favor from Oroza to them, and he vowed to repay it by rebuilding a shrine to the river goddess, though that could wait until the snows had set in, and the ground had frozen. For now, he could only offer her his silent prayers.


    They had long, hungry months ahead of them, just like the rest of the world, and even as he pulled his robe around him to fight the rising chill, Jordan walked outside to find an axe. Now that theyd done everything they could for food, they needed to bulk up their stocks of firewood while there was still time.

 Chapter 107: War Without End

    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 copsed. Through those warrens, they pressed forward, copsing section after section and undoing all its hard work until it could bring new units to bear.


    Since most of the Lichs units werent 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 ughter against an ancestral enemy. At best, that was a dying 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 inmon 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 n against the darkness. One that had started even before Siddrims light had been plucked out of the sky. The dwarves were here to avenge the loss of Mournden. Theyd been driven here by divine revtion ande 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 wouldnt be until the sunlit realms above had been hunted until humanity was near extinction, and their godsy 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 wasnt 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 hounds duplicates so it could get the fire godling back in action. That was a lengthy and ongoing process. Of all its servants, Krulmvenors form was the mostplicated. 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.


    Orozas bindings had been as simple as the swamp dragons, and its Titan of earth was only stone trapped in bindings of lead because the Lich still didnt fully understand the creature to do more than that. It couldnt evenmunicate 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.


    Krulmvenors skeleton was moreplicated 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 things powers were impressive, and so it was worth investing in.


    Those bodies had taken months toplete the first time, though, and had beenpletely depleted in the gruesome assault on Siddrimar. Krulmvenor had in hundreds of Temrs all by himselves and turned whole chapels and sanctuaries and chapels into a crematorium, but the cost had been heavy. Hed 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 itsst few lives away, but the darkness would never allow that to happen.


    Tenebroum had already increased Krulmvenors 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 Krulmvenors 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, inrge 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 byplete 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 wed at its very soul. What it did do, though, was good enough.


    Forck 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 rm, 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 Titans 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 ce 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 werent a match for the bearded warriors under normal circumstances, but when they couldnt 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 servants 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 Lichs 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 thats what it was made of.


    In all the Lichs 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 thaty 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 imcable caterpir 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 wasnt 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, couldrgely 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, itunched 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 ughtered.

 Chapter 108: A Hard Winter

    Chapter 108: A Hard Winter


    The only good thing about the snows was that it brought the goblin raids to a halt, Jordan decided. It wasnt untilter that he learned that was only the case because of their Temr. Hed disappeared for three days after the first fall of fresh powder, and it was only after hed been back for a few weeks that he told one of the other warriors the story after theyd been drinking; it was so unbelievable that the way it spread around the camp like wildfire had to be a form of mockery, but Jordan believed it.


    Brother Faerbar had walked out alone into the snow after the raid and used the freshly fallen snow to track the vermin back to theirir before spending days ughtering everyst monster he could find. It was hard not to imagine the old man drenched in the green blood of his enemies, though it was more than a little disturbing.


    When Jordan finally cornered the older man and asked him about it and why he didnt ask for help, the Temr simply shrugged. It was my penance, he answered. Nothing more than that.


    II understand what youre saying, Jordan answered, trying not to blow up at the obstinate old man who was so different from the Paragon that hed met on that dark road a few weeks ago. The light still burned in the mans eyes, of course, but in his heart, it seemed to have gone out. But we need you here, training the next generation of warriors and protecting us should the read rise up once more. If you were to die in some hole


    I was stabbed a hundred times in the foul pit, and now only the faintest scars remain, the Temr answered with nothing but scorn, Unlike the men I led into battle. It seems that I shall not have the privilege of joining the honored dead anytime soon.


    Maybe so, Jordan said, trying tofort him, But then your God works in mysterious ways; perhaps theres a reason that


    Jordans words trailed off as Broth Farbaer turned on his heel and left him standing there. My god is dead, he spat. Theres no n for any of this anymore.


    Encounters like that made it hard to keep hope alive in Sedgim Manor, but Jordan did his best. Hed stopped wearing his mage robes and switched back to wearing the clothing of his brothers to seem more familiar, and hed begun taking daily walks to try to put his remaining subjects at ease, but the results of those efforts could be called mixed, at best.


    A mise gripped the whole area as the weather deteriorated. Some feared starvation and other zombies or goblins, but everyone feared something. That was sensible to Jordan. The world had never been more fearful, and he could not sleep more than a night or two in a row without dreaming of that terrible zombie dragon and the way that it had gone insane and ripped itself to pieces.


    Shortly before the midwinter feast that would be remarkably spartan this year, a group of starving bandits tried to seize the grounds by force. He sent most of the mob fleeing with a few thunderbolts while a few of their friendsy steaming in the snow. He might not be able to do much to fend off an army of Temrs or zombies, but a superstitious mob was another story.


    Bandits were the least of their problems, though. The thieves that truly needed to be worried about were the rats and the hungry mouths of the kitchen workers. Between them, they always seemed to go through the meager stores theyd harvested at twice the rate Jordan expected. At least they didnt have to worry about sickness too, on top of everything else, he thought, trying to look on the bright side.


    The Temr didnt do much anymore besides sulk and sit on the stairs watching the snow fall, but hed still stop whatever he was doing and apply his healing magics when one of the children fell ill, and that was more than anyone could ask for.


    As the winter wore on and the days became more darkness than light, they ughtered their way through the farm animals, preserving as many of their prime breeding stock as they could, even as they winnowed the herds, guaranteeing that next year would be at least as hard as this year had been.


    Even his fathers prized horses and hounds were not spared this terrible fate. As much as the man might have loved them and as beautiful as a war horse could be on the battlefield, they ate grain that could better be given to staving mouths and hay that needed to be saved for the cattle and sheep that life would depend on next season.


    It was around the time that he was serving everyone stew but no longer telling them what was in it that Brother Faerbar finally got out of his funk, at least to the smallest of degrees. When it was pointed out to Jordan that the miracle in question had happened around the same time that the manor had run out of alcohol, he assured the gossipy cooks boy that it was an unrted coincidence.


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    The cause didnt matter in his mind; all that mattered was the effect, and that effect was thatcking other outlets, Brother Faerbar resorted to sparring to get some of the volcanic anger that always building in the mans soul out of his system.


    These training sessions started as impromptu beatdowns to show some of the young men just how much less they knew than they thought they did. This quickly became the sole source of entertainment as well. The children had begun to share strange stories, which, as far as he could tell, were just myths and repurposed scripture from the Book of the Light, but none of these little games proved to be as interesting as watching grown men beat each other with sticks in front of growing crowds.


    In time, most of the men of fighting age started to improve. Some of the fieldhands would even make decent swordsmen, as it turned out. None of them bested the Temr, though. With maces, swords, or even unarmed, he faced allers and left them t on their backs. Most days, after the younger men had finished their chores and practiced their forms, he would face them three-on-one or even five-on-one, asionally. This just ended the matches faster because he felt no need to hold back when he was outnumbered.


    It was those fights that made Jordan reflect on just how dire the straights had been in the undertemple and the catbs beyond it. There, the jaded old warrior had barely been able to hold back the tide of death, but here he was utterly invincible. It was a stark reminder of just how hopeless the situation would be if the evil of ckwater managed to spread this far east.


    Honestly, hed half expected it to by now. Hed even put off butchering the extra horses for as long as possible in case theyd needed to load the wagons or sleighs with children and supplies and flee, but so far, that hadnt happened. But the only hazards without a pulse that other towns ever reported were cold and hunger. Only the usual dangers of goblins and bandits haunted the dark nights, and for the residents of Sedgim Manor, both of those groups were in short supply.


    No, by all ounts, despite their misery, they lived in a winter wondendpared to the rest of the region. So, Jordan would definitely try to hold the fort here as long as possible. As things stood, they were partway between the world goingpletely insane and the world ending, and though he prayed for the best for his family, just now, he wanted no part of the wider world. In the spring, maybe he would work with some of the other local lords to gather some kind of collective defense, but that was as far as he nned to venture until things started to make sense.


    It started with one of Frankos sons. Markez was certain of it. Hed seen the gleam in young Kells eyes early that morning when hed gotten up to go ice fishing. It wasnt very productive, and most days, he didnt catch much, but the little shack hed cobbled together at the very end of the longest pier was a good ce to catch a nap and find some peace and quiet in the madhouse that was the mages manor.


    Even with servants, only twenty or thirty people had probably lived here before this, and now it was bulging at the seams with almost seventy men, women, and children, with a serious emphasis on thetter. His mission of mercy upriver had saved almost two dozen of the little rug rats, and though he didnt regret it one bit, that didnt mean that he liked the energetic little bastards any more than he had when he was on the stony shore.


    The gleam was something new, though. It wasnt quite the glow that the crazed Temr had. That mans eyes always radiated light. It was a subtle enough effect in the daytime, but at night, it was just in creepy, and Markez avoided him whenever he could once it was dark out.


    And now it was spreading. How was that possible? He had no idea, but instead of dashing out young Kells brains with a piece of firewood, he went and got the mage. He didnt like talking to mages either, of course, but better him than the other guy. He might have sold his soul to the dark powers for his magic, but at least he didnt look at you with a gaze of constant judgment.


    The mage had no answers, though. It was all just praise for having noticed, and he promised to keep him informed after hed discussed the matter with Brother Faerbar. None of that had stopped that light from spreading, though. First, it jumped to his brother Mason and then to little Gina.


    It was contagious, is what it was. By the time the first snows began to melt, half of the children had been infected by it, and no one seemed to care! As far as he was concerned, it was a spiritual gue. To the Temr, it had been a wee sign of redemption. A rebirth, hed called it, but that just made Markezugh.


    Its disturbing, is what it is, he said, talking to the river through the little hole in the ice as he counted down the days until it started to crack up. He didnt care how many people called it a miracle. To Markez, those looks just made him regret not nipping it in the bud before it started to spread. I didnt work so hard and save all those little lives just so they could join the cult of some dead god.


    He spent as much time as possible out here now, worried that if he spent too much time around the infected ones, hed wake up one morning to find his eyes glowing too.


    No sir, he told himself. Just as soon as the ice breaks up, me and anyone else that hadnt drunk too deep of the Holy Mans poisonous words - were taking my ship and getting out of here and going just as far away as we can.

 Chapter 109: Turnabout

    Chapter 109: Turnabout


    Spring had not yet started when Tenebroums wraiths found the first city in their long search beneath the Wodinspine Mountains. They had found supply depots and holdouts before that point, and they waited to ambush the soldiers while they slept, draining the life from their bodies until they were still warm corpses.


    They never found arge gathering of more than a few dozen men away from the front lines. The darkness was beginning to think they never would until one day, they heard the distant hammering of the forges echoing through a vent shaft. The inhabitants called the ce Hugeldin, and it was a true city with more than 10,000 inhabitants.


    That made it significantly smaller than Ghental. However, ording to the dwarven souls it had devoured, that was apparently typical for dwarven cities so near the surface, and most of their kind preferred the depths. Technically, Hugeldin was above the surface; one of the tallest peaks in the Wodenspines had been significantly hollowed out, and so it lurked there in the rtive safety of its mountain fortress that only asionally had to deal with the threat of goblins from below.


    When the wraiths found it, though, they did precisely nothing. They did not even swarm around the dustier passages of the city. They merely lurked at the farthest edges to determine all approaches and left as Tenebroum instructed. It wanted to give them no warning after all. No one would know what wasing. No one would know the price to be paid for fighting the darkness until it was done.


    The dwarves should appreciate that, the Lich thought wryly. After all, they were huge fans of holding grudges and settling debts.


    Krulmvenor stirred slowly for the first time in a very long time when the Lich ordered him to rise. The fire will rise once more, hound, the deathless voicemanded. It sounded different now, though Krulmvenor wouldnt have been able to say exactly how if he tried. You are but a guttering spark, but I am a generous master, so I shall give you more chance to feast.


    He knew that the Lichs words must be a trap. They always were, and any feast that was ced before him would surely be poisoned, but part of him still hungered for it. It had been a long time since he had tasted the flesh of the living, and he longed to do so again.


    He felt more himself than he had well, since before Mournden. Since before, the Lich had made him suffer. That was when he figured out the difference. He couldnt hear the other voices. The voices that spoke to him with his own guttural goblin voice. He could still feel those dark spirits deep inside itself, though. They were a churning maelstrom of violence and discontent looking for any excuse to awaken, but he was too weak for that just now.


    Where must I go? he asked.


    North, the Lichmanded. Ever north, deep into the mountains. The ravens will guide you.


    You mean for me to strike the dwarves, then? Krulmvenor asked.


    Will that be a problem? the Lich asked.


    It is not, the fire godling answered, surprised to find that it wasnt.


    He was no longer truly a dwarf, after all, not after everything that had happened. He could hear it in his voice and feel it in his posture. He had be something the All-Father could never ept. So, while parts of his mind genuinely wished for good fortune for his people, the other parts wanted to burn down everything that he could never have.


    He thought about those warring feelings constantly on his walk north. During the brightest parts of the day, he buried himself in a shallow grave, and during the night and the long twilight that made up most of the day, he walked as a faint blue torch, visible to towns that he passed by as nothing but a will-o-wisp.


    At first, he wondered why he didnt get more attention from the viges and farm holds he passed. The first time hed walked across the penins to do his dark masters bidding, hed attracted lots of attention from the superstitious locals. It was onlyter that he learned that everyone in the area had either died or fled.


    That did little to warm his heart. Once, hed been at the heart of a goblin horde that had rampaged through this whole region. Hed gloried in the blood that theyd spilled and the magic theyd wielded. Now, he couldnt even bring himself to make small detours from the path to burn down the small clusters of buildings and glory amongst the ashes.


    It was a strange dichotomy, and he didnt understand it until he realized he sometimes remembered things that hed never experienced. He remembered dying to a giant spider and having a family in far away Gromron. He remembered devoting his whole life to the way of the axe and the way of the anvil. All of these things were impossible because the two paths were entirely ipatible. Hed never even been to Gromron, had he?


    The solitude of his journey gave him all the time in the world to contemte these inconsistencies. However, every examination only deepened the questions until he arrived at his destination.


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    The stone doors of Hugelden stood shut, and the moon was low in the sky as Krulmvenor approached them. There were guards present, and as soon as they saw that his queer blue light was the thing he was rather than something he carried, they sounded the rm and began to shut the doors. It would be thest decision theyd ever make, and when the group of dwarven warriors chose to stay outside rather than retreat within, he saluted their bravery, though they would not survive it.


    Be careful, men! the sergeant shouted in dwarven, Its just another one of the metal mockeries were warring with in the depths!


    Metal mockery sounded just about right to poor, beleaguered Krulmvenor. His mes burned brighter as the dwarves in te began to fan out around him in a defensive formation.


    He wondered how surprised theyd be if his form suddenly exploded forth into dozens of other copies of himself but resisted. He could feel the goblin horde beginning to stir inside him, and he wanted to stay himself as long as possible. So, he would do this himself.


    Hed been too long in the cold, and he desperately wanted to feel warm again.


    As the first dwarf came at him, his fires burned brighter, and heshed out in all directions, making them take a step back as he singed their beards. That was just an appetizer, though. Even as they were taken aback, he was charging forward, and before the Sergent could do more than raise his weapon, Krulmvenor had removed his head in a shower of gore.


    The rest of his men followed though they were not given such mercy. Each of them was burned alive and died screaming. It was only when their whimpers ceased and the fire godling had finished feasting on their pain that he started toe alive. Whatever veneer had been holding together, his shattered mind slowly fell away to reveal the yawning cracks that separated him into his multiplicity of selves.


    Then he began to unfold, again and again, and again, multiplying every few steps. It was a single monstrosity that had killed the guards, but by the time it reached the doors, it had be a small army. Each time, he split. Krulmvenors mind shrank as his viewpoint grew. By the time there were 84 vering versions of himself, hed given himself over entirely to the horde of goblins thaty within him, but he could see everything that each of them did in a constant kaleidoscope of rage and hunger.


    They attacked the door with fire first, but that did little. A handful of guards would not give him the strength to melt granite bs into magma. That wouldeter.


    Instead, they started wing at that stone. Each of them was a mismatched, unholy construct that had been cobbled together by undead artificers. Almost all those ws were tipped with mithril, adamantine, or kobold teeth. Now, all 84 of them started to dig as one at a door that had stood for untold centuries and never once been breached. 171 hands began to dig. 941 ws sank into the stone, and a fraction of an inch at a time, they began to cut through the ancient bulwark.


    The dwarves inside assumed that they were as safe as theyd always been, even with the rm gongs sounding in the distance. They were wrong. These steel banded bs were feet thick, but they wouldntst the hour. Before the moon was high in the sky, the mob that was Krulmvenor breached the defenses in a tide of gibbering, rabid madness.


    The first two steel skeletons to scamper through the opening were demolished by the defenders. He was down to 82 members of his own private tribe now. He responded with an angry firestorm that scattered the well-ordered lines of the opposition long enough for a dozen versions of himself to pour through. Then, they were fighting the remaining guards, and all the rest flooded inside.


    What was a fight for half a minute became a brawl for the next few as battle lines were dissolved by ferocity. Then, it just became a ughter of blood and fire.


    By the time the defenders were entirely broken, and the many versions of Krulmvenor were running throughout the city, hed lost ten more versions of himself, but hed left hundreds of dead and dying dwarven warriors in his wake, and the ground was slick with their blood.


    The fire godling felt each life, his and theirs, as they slipped away. This wasnt just because the darkness used his bodies as focal points to steal the souls of the dead, either. It was because, despite all that had happened, he felt the pangs of his own morality start to chip away at the numbness of his mental armor.


    As disconnected as he felt from the dwarven race now, and as much as he hated them for everything he could no longer be, he couldnt help but be moved by their final moments as the deaths poured in, especially not after the tribe of monsters that he was finished with the brave men and started to descend on the women and children.


    Hed felt like this at Siddrimar, too, he recalls suddenly. To kill the holy warriors had been exhrating, but the rooms with the priestess and the youngest acolytes had tasted only like ashes as hed put them to the torch.


    It was reying again now, and there was nothing he could do about it. The Lich had built him the perfect prison as punishment for his earlier disobedience. Hecked the strength to control even one of his bodies when he was fully unfolded like this. Each skeleton was controlled by the angry spirits of dozens of goblins that had been skillfully woven together. They were simple but powerful constructs, and until they had sated their thirst for blood and death, all he could do was channel the Lichs orders and wait for it to be over.


    Thats when the fires started to rise. The 58 skeletons who remained burned because they enjoyed it, but Krulmvenor ordered them too simply to speed up the suffering and grant the survivors a quicker end.


    Individually, each inferno was terrible, but together, they were a natural disaster. Within minutes, the smells of smoke and burning meat permeated everything. Shortly after that, the sounds of distant screaming were reced by coughing. After that, the only sounds were his gibbering and war cries as the most barbaric parts of him celebrated theirplete victory.


    The temperatures would keep rising as they unleashed more and more destruction, and by morning, there would be only a single skeleton lying among the ashes of the main n hall. The Lich had gotten his revenge, and all it had cost were the lives of thousands of dwarves and another piece of Krulmvenors soul.

 Chapter 110: A Season of Ice

    Chapter 110: A Season of Ice


    Even though the snows were still deep, and the temperatures were still frigid, the river ice on the Oroza began to break up early that year. It was unexpected, but such a strange urrence wasnt because of the weather or even an improvement in the strange behavior of the suns that provided less light and heat than usual. It was because the Lich had sent a new flood to poison her domain, and this time it was salt water.


    The mortals of the region had suffered greatly under this years long, dark winter, but other than the springs she had stilled to thwart the darknesss ns, Orozas winter had been remarkably uneventful. She tried to help the few living people who remained along her banks where she could, especially those who still prayed to her.


    Most of those who were living when the snow first started to fall had died or fled by the time the hints of spring arrived. It was tragic, but she could not save everybody. Certainly not those who had turned their backs on her so recently.


    She didnt let them distract her too much, though, as she waited patiently for the darkness that had imprisoned her and used her for so long to reveal its ns. Shed expected to dash hundreds or even thousands of the Lichs servants as it tried to recapture her or cross her domain to attack the wider world once more.


    None of that had happened, though. The blight had confined itself almostpletely to the strange darkness that always covered thend closest to itsyer now, and though she could not exin it, she stayed clear of the area, fearing another trap.


    Then, one cold spring morning, the ice all along that darkness started to break up as salt water was added to fresh water, and the surging wall of water dashed the ice that had been thickening for months.


    She was outraged. Not because the salt water might kill her; thanks to the time shed been forced to spend at sea when the Lich had decided to dry up her river all those years ago, it didnt even weaken her.


    It annoyed her, though. The idea that it could remake the world in whatever way it desired ate at her day after day, poisoning her heart with anger, the same way that the salt would kill so many of the freshwater nts and animals once the trickle became a flood.


    She wasnt sure if she could stop that from happening, but even knowing that this might well be a trap, she certainly had to try.


    Oroza surged up along the canal that had drained the whole western watershed so long ago, swimming upstream against the poison. As she went, she brought a handful of lesser spirits with her, joining them not as the river dragon she usually favored but as a school of powerful salmon swimming upriver against the salty tide.


    She expected borate traps tuned specifically to her. She expected this to be bait for arger n. That was why shed brought other spirits with her. The Lich only had a few tricks, and since every spirit born of this river was Oroza, it would let her see theming.


    There was nothing there, though, and by the time she reached the smallke that was the source of the canal, she found out why. The whole thing wasnt even close to finished yet. The original canal had been built to very precise specifications through the regions bedrock by human mages.


    The new section, though, was a narrow gouge that cut its way out to the sea in a weaving and irregr path. It was an ugly scar that was almost as ugly as the deathless creature that built it. While she had little in the way of control over the earth, she did what she could do, and created an ice dam with all the broken ice that had been created. She couldnt stop the seawater froming, but she could redirect it, flooding the whole region of the Red Hills rather than let it further pollute her tributary.


    This technique would only work for a few more weeks, of course. When it got too warm, the ice would melt, but by then, Oroza hoped to figure out what she could do next.


    She was so pleased with this n that she was distracted as she watched thekes level rise and begin to runoff over the southern edge. Over the course of hours and days, it began to flood across the countryside, rekindling some small amount of joy in her heart that she had finally crushed another one of her captors ns.


    That was when the Lich struck.


    She felt the shockwave in the water as soon as it happened. It detonated some kind of alchemical explosive on the outgoing canal that shed only recently swum up. She expected poison or magic, but instead, she found a simpler trap. Pure separation and physical distance. Hed built a new prison for her, but this time it was ake, not a body.


    The Lich had simply eliminated a hundred yards of the canal, filling it with earth and rubble, disconnecting her from her river. Oroza began to weaken immediately, but it wouldnt be a real problem any time soon. Instead of panicking, she turned to the ocean-bound channel and started moving. If she could swim to the sea, then she could swim all the way back around to her river once more.


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    It would be exhausting but fairly straightforward. She couldnt, though. As soon as she reached that slender channel, it detonated as well, closing her second exit.


    When shed arrived, there was no magic here that she could detect, but now there was something throbbing beneath her, getting closer every second. The Lich had turned thiske into a cage and would do whatever he had to, for as long as it had to so that it could reim her. Even as she began to panic while she tried to decide what to do, she heard her captors voice whispering at the edge of her mind.


    Youvee back to me, Oroza, it teased. You thought youd escaped forever, but in less than a year, Ill have a new and better body for you to serve me with. One that youll never escape from.


    She ignored those awful words. Shed rather die than let that happen, of course, but if she died, then the next river dragon would be far more likely to be captured by the darkness because she would have so much less experience with all that had happened until now.


    Oroza couldnt let that happen, so,ing up with a desperate n, she divided herself into more and more pieces. This morning, she had been a single river dragon. As she moved up the channel, she had be a school of translucent salmon, but now that the trap was springing around her, those dozens ofrge, powerful fish had be thousands of tiny ones.


    With no real way out, it would take a desperate move and more luck than she wasfortable with to fight free of it. So, she surged for the southern shore where thest of the overflow was still leaving thekes edge to pour across the ins.


    This whole region had never been fertile soil, though she did not know much about it beyond that because it was far from her domain. The hard, frozen ground would not absorb the water, though, and it was too salty to freeze, so she skimmed along it, with one soul spread across nearly five thousand bodies. She followed the tiny flood tide she had created as it went downhill, watching the weakest parts of herself flicker out around the edges, and the torrent focused into a gully and became muddy and polluted.


    It was a miserable experience for her. Shed already lost almost a thousand of the fish that made up her school, and she was painfully aware that at any point, this wild ride could end, and she would be stuck in some canyon or ravine until the spring sun dried her to nothing. Worse, it was entirely possible that some hole could open up and send her down into the depths of the world, where shed be polluted by filth like goblins and the darkness itself.


    There was nothing she could do about though. All she could do was stay at the head of the frothing, dwindling flood as it followed its way toward her eventual fate.


    Fortunately, water tends to find its own level, and after hours of slowly flowing down slopes and through water-carved flood channels and washes, she found a frozen-over creek and slowly burrowed beneath the ice and back to her beloved fresh water. It was just a trickle of life, but even from here, she could feel that somehow, some way, this spot connected with the river that was her.


    Slowly, she transformed from thousands of tiny fish to dozens of mud-dwelling eels and crawled her way single file for mile after ice-bound mile through that trickle of flowing meltwater. It would be the easiest thing in the world for the Lich to eradicate her now if it knew where she was.


    She knew that. The third sun was already setting after all, and when darkness reigned, not only would it be free to do whatever it wanted, but the water would likely freeze solid once more. Then she would be trapped at least until morning, and any number of the Lichs servants could end her without too much effort. That dragon that was in the process of rebuilding could erase a whole section of the world with its breath weapon.


    Those extremes probably wouldnt even be necessary, she realized as she slowly froze in the gathering gloom. A few dozen zombies with shovels could gather her into buckets and bring her down in the darkness once more.


    Oroza wasnt given to fear, not after decades trapped in a decaying body where she was forced to murder the innocent and watch her worshipers die. Dread was another matter, though, and she spent the next eight hours worrying that, at any moment, the Lichs minions would arrive to capture her and that all shed done so far was fall for the things insane, convoluted ns.


    Sunrise arrived before any of the darknesss creatures did, though, and after a few hours of that thin light, she was finally able to move again. Toward the end of the day, her frozen creek became a frozen stream deep enough to stay ice-free throughout the day, and from there, she knew that she was home-free.


    The stream deepened and sped up until it joined another and another. All too soon, it became a lesser tributary that sped right for the heart of her river, and her heart began to sing. She had made her way home and snatched victory from the jaws of defeat through her quick action.


    Slowly, over the space on leagues, she returned to her true form, melding together all the smaller animals she had been into the fearsome predator that she truly was. Even though she was much reduced by all she had sacrificed to break free of the Lichs trap, she was still mighty. It might take several moons to return to her former strength, but in this form and in this ce, no one could possibly defeat her.


    Still, her heart trembled to think about what had just happened. It had been a close thing, and if shed dyed or even paused long enough to listen to doubt, she would still be trapped even now in the Lichs littleke while he did Gods knew what to her. She was grateful that she was more clever than wise, but she would never underestimate the Lichs traps again so long as she lived.

 Chapter 111: Breakthrough

    Chapter 111: Breakthrough


    Tenebroum was loath to trust its servants. Even the ones that could think and act on their own were watched from afar by ckbirds and wraiths when they werent being puppeted by it directly. This had always been the case since long before Oroza broke free of his grasp.


    The anger surged inside the maelstrom that was its soul as it thought about how narrowly that bitch had swum free of a trap that it had spent months preparing, distracting it from what it had been focused on. Worse, she had lived! For a week, it had taken sce in the fact that at least her escape had only managed tomit a particrly showy form of suicide, but then she reappeared in its river and began to harry and destroy its servants once more.


    It was intolerable, especially when the setbacks in the tunnels under the Wodenspine mountains were taken into ount. It had annihted their city, and paradoxically that made the dwarves below fight harder instead of retreat. It had hoped to break the spirits of the stout men when it had unleashed the fire godling to char and devour everyst dwarf in the mountain, but instead, it had caused a new surge of violence and gueri warfare on its nearly finished tunnel.


    The world was filled with nothing but bad newstely. The suns still rose, the dwarves still fought, and the river dragon still lived. So, it would need to further ratchet up the pressure on its enemies.


    It had taken to seeding the river with tiny slivers of chrium each night to further pressure that obstinate goddess since she would no longer allow poisoned springs to flow. It would dly add so much poison to the river that all life would cease if that was what it took to end her.


    A river of poison would not produce nearly as much essence for it to siphon off as a river full of life, but it would make due. Power was not an issue right now, thanks to the year of ughter and suffering it had inflicted on the world, and it would be even less of a problem once its growing army finally prated the mountains and flowed into the sleepy londs that existed to the north.


    All the dwarves were doing was giving it time to rebuild its forces, one limb and sword at a time. Even now, it was experimenting with cavalry units that were somewhere between centaurs and centipedes. Though it annoyed the Lich that the rippling motion that allowed them to move with the most speed required an even number of limbs to move properly, but it had tried configurations with between eight and eighteen legs and still not settled on an optimal choice.


    The longest of them would be usable as siege weapons, though, and on the advice of its library, it built siegedders onto their backs so that other minions could flood over the tops of fortress walls that it thought sure it would soon be forced to topple.


    However, that would only be true if it could manage all of the threats that it faced simultaneously, and right now, that was impossible. It could not effectively use all of its resources because it could not be everywhere at once. Last month, the humans building their fortress at the edge of the river had used an unseasonably warm period to try to make contact with mages that were still under siege in Abendend, and in the two days it had spent making sure that expedition would be a miserable failure, the dwarves have renewed their attack in three different ces along its tunnel.


    So, it had begun to synthesize a general of its very own. Something intelligent enough to make the correct choices in these tedious but important conflicts but not so ambitious enough that it would ever betray it. In fact, as far as Tenebroum was concerned, its general should barely understand the concept of betrayal.


    That was why it had been building a new sort of operating theater on its lowest floor for months now. It was a clean room in every sense of the word. Lined in lead and surrounded in a triple bounding circle that glowed with mes so dark they were only barely visible violet to the naked eye, it was built to reject all outside influences so that it could operate on the souls it had stolen with no concerns about cross-contamination with outside elements. It had many rooms for manipting and constructing the dead, but it only had one for manipting the soul with precision.


    This was not a task it could entrust to anyone either. Not yet. The Lich could not hand this off to even its most skillful surgeons or mages, though that was because of practicality as much as paranoia. They simplycked the skills to see and manipte the soul-stuff well enough to do the work that needed to be done.


    By contrast, the Lich had been manipting the souls of its creations for many years now. Its first efforts were crude, and there were more failures than there were sesses. For every puppeteer or herald, there were dozens of semi-imploded psyches that were barely fit to wield a pick or shovel in the tunnels. Thanks to Krulmvenors constant misbehavior, though, its techniques had grown more advanced, and its mental scalpel had grown sharper.


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    So, when it finally moved to create such an important pawn, started with that pure loyalty as a baseline, siphoning threads of that spirit from its honor guard, which had served it loyally and unblinkingly for decades now. The lizard men were incapable of betrayal, except for very rare exceptions like Tssonvek. It simply wasnt their nature.


    To that, he added to that scraps of the souls of its enemies in measured amounts. They were the ones with the most knowledge of how to defeat themselves, after all. So, it tore the knowledge and tactics from the wriggling souls of the defeated without any regard for the pain it caused them, and then it very carefully cut away all of the excesses.


    The Lich did not want vengeance any more than it wanted justice. It wanted only the need for victory. In the end, after slicing and dicing the minds of dwarf and Temr alike, it had something that was very nearly what it wanted: a crude, focused mind that looked at each engagement as a game to be won. It did not care for the sides or therger goals. Victory was not the means to another end. It was the end because thats all Tenebroum wanted out of such a minion. Any more than that would be dangerous.


    All of that work was only enough to bring the project halfway topletion, though. The most dangerous step was thest one. It had to give the clever abomination a spark of drive and initiative, and for that, Tenebroum chose to borrow a fragment of its own expansive soul.


    It had long considered dividing itself up so that it could be more ces at once. That solution would have solved its current conundrum better than the solution that it was currently pursuing. It resisted the idea time and time again as its library suggested it.


    Do you not see how effective it was for Siddrim? one head asked, before Tenebroum had boiled its brains in its skull. It escaped our trap because it was able to split its grand soul into pieces. Surely we could do the same!


    And Krulmvenor! Is he not more effective now that you have made one many? another head asked on a different asion just before it lit the vat that contained it on fire.


    The Lich would love to create an army of itself, but it simply could not trust that its interests would always align. Another version of it would covet the same treasure and the same blood that it did. Eventually, it would likely even fight over it.


    No, full copies of itself could never happen. The only thing it truly feared was itself now that the light was all but vanquished. It would have to make do with lesser crippled copies instead, and this experiment only proved the wisdom of that mindset.


    The moment that Tenebroum fished a mote of its being out of the maelstrom of its mind, struggled and fought for more resources. It was like a cancer. Though barely an infant, it reached out to the minds of the dead that were closest and sought to wrestle with the true darkness for control.


    That was why it had to be smothered immediately. Even this much of itself was more than it wanted to give to anything. So the Lich sliced the fragment into a sliver, and then let it grow again, before it repeated the process, getting closer and closer to the fragment it wanted to keep.


    It was only when that process was done that it set that well-polished soul shard amidst the patchwork puzzle box of the general it had created. It sat there like a gem amidst theplicated ephemeral pieces that were too carefully crafted and precise to have ever been shaped by mortal hands, even if they were capable of seeing it. It was a tiny thing, no bigger than an acorn, but moreplicated than everyst detail that had gone into creating The Temple of Dawn, which still stood dozens of feet above where it now worked.


    When it was finally done, the Lich studied its creation. Scrutinizing it from every angle and with every scenario that its dark imagination could dream up, the Lich was in no hurry. The chamber it had built had another purpose, too: with a thought, it could trigger the terrible magics it had imbued into the leaden walls and annihte the fragile soul until it was nothing but void.


    Such a choice would mean that months of intense focus would be wasted, but that oue would be infinitely preferable to the alternative. After seven days and nights of inspection, it pronounced the inspection satisfactory, released the little mote of tactical might from its prison, and fastened it into a new body. It was a simple drudge, only slightly more durable than average. Tenebroum would upgrade it only after it had proven itself and its loyalty.


    Are you satisfied, Paragon? it asked the fumbling corpse as it struggled to stand.


    Of all the ironies that were a part of its creation, the Lich enjoyed that one the most. It named its general after the leader of the vanquished crusader who had cowardly fled. Someday, when it collected that soul, it would pit the two of them against each other and show the feeble holy warrior who thought that it was appropriate to wear that title what a true apex predator looked like.


    Without battle, there can be no satisfaction, it said mechanically as it took stock of its new surroundings.


    The Lich took a dark sort of pleasure in those words. That was exactly what it was hoping for. It did notin about its humble vessel. Instead, it asked only to serve, and that was all that Tenebroum could ask from any of its servants.


    In time, when Paragon had proven itself and defeated the dwarves, it would split the thing''s mind and make as many copies as it needed to prosecute theing war against the realms of men.

 Chapter 112: Beneath it All

    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 ws 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 Skoetomikos 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 Lichs forces had endured, and, of course, maps. Due to the nature of thebat, many of the tunnels had changed a dozen times already as old tunnels copsed and new tunnels were dug under or around them. By the time itnded, 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 Lichs forces had vanquished another band of dwarves, and the next, they were crushed to uselessness under the rubble of a wellid trap. It was a theme it picked up repeatedly in the record of battle. Despite the Lichs scouts, the gueri tactics of the dwarves had grown bold and surprisingly effective. The only unit that they didnt 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 ughtered 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 werent 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 n 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 wouldeter, 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 gueri 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 n. Now, they reversed that.


    It was a bloodless, calcting general, and it reversed their strategy entirely, nting 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 nning 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 tunnelpleted 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 ount.


    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 andplete 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 couldnt say if this was because of smell, magic, or some divine insight from their deity. All it could say was that it wasnt 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 their 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 ce to shelter during daylight hours.


    As it turned out, after undermining and avnche, the dwarfs'' rune magic was by far their most powerful weapon. Though it was rarely deployed for reasons it didnt fully understand, it could trigger any number of useful effects when one of its units stumbled upon one of them.


    It wasnt 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 theirrades. 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 be 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 be 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,pleted, and opened. The dwarves had been soundly defeated, and its first test wasplete. 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 asionally found signs that small groups of dwarves had passed. Most of the time, these hinted at gueri 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 ughter in the name of its Master.


    . . .


    Youre certain you werent followed, the acolyte asked them as Bgma and the small group of dwarves hed led here entered through thest of the 8 secret doors that separated their divine work from thebyrinth 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-Fathers 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 wee, 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 theyd 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.


    Well 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 Mournden. It can go as deep as it likes! Weve never faced anything like this before!


    Bgma 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, butbined? It couldnt be done.


    Dwarves would live on, of course. The world was a vast ce, 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 hisst 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 n holds, and the graves of the defiled would have their revenge. Even the dead rising from their graves wouldnt 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 n, 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.

 Chapter 113: One Last Voyage

    Chapter 113: One Last Voyage


    The day after the ice on the river broke fully apart, Markez started making ns to put his boat back in the water. He and several other men who had been spooked by the way the glowing eyes were spreading like the p along a busy warf wanted nothing to do with those light-worshiping weirdos. It was clear to anyone that the light had failed, but if that meant that the world was ending, well, he sure wasnt going to let the day of judgment catch him with his pants down here.


    You sure you won''t stay, Jordan had asked while they were stocking the ship with a small share of the remaining supplies. The fish you catch are a vital source of food for the children and


    Bah, Markez spat. Ive done enough for the children, I think. Given that my own were grown and gone an age ago, thats doubly true. Its time I get to the capital to find out what news I can.


    That was only half true, of course. He didnt care about the current state of the world so much as he cared about being anywhere but here. The mages eyes still hadnt started to glow, but that was probably because the mage had sold his soul for magic, which wasnt aforting thought either.


    You know its probably even worse there than it is here, the mage asked, trying another tactic. Weve still got the plow and enough wheat for nting. It will be a tough spring, but after that, I think


    You think Im scared of tightening my belt,d? Markez said, forcing augh. Trust me. Wherever I go, mys will provide. If the people of the capital are starving, then thats just one more reason for me and the boys to go help out. I wish you the best, of course, but


    He let his words trail off there, not sure how to tell the mage that they were building a cult here, and he wanted no part of it. Fortunately, the other man was the one to fill that gap.


    Well, if you must go, Id appreciate you delivering this to my parents should you find them, Jordan said, Let them know its safe to return home if they would like to.


    Im not sure if you should be inviting anyone to stay in a home that might well starve before harvest, Markez said coldly, But I promise to deliver it if I can.


    They parted on good terms after that and continued their voyage upriver. Markez tried never to burn bridges in case he needed to cross them one day, but he was certain hed never be back this way again. Just the thought was enough to send a chill down his spine.


    The voyage east wasnt easy, of course. It was an unfamiliar river throughnds hed only ever heard about. Even with all that, though, it was still better than when hed been forced to make his way up the Oroza with only women and children for help.


    There were a few snags, and once, some starving men thought hard about trying to board them before they thought better of it. Still, the weather was improving, and by the time they could see their destination on the horizon, it was fair to say hed had worse voyages.


    Rakhin, the capital of the kingdom, was in even shape than he would have thought, and if not for the gripes of the men hed brought with him, he might have sailed right on by and cone up the coast for somece a bit less overwhelmed.


    His little ship wasnt rigged right for the open sea, of course, but with a couple men, he was sure they could hug the coast well enough to make it into Tanada or Bastom. Hed never been, of course, but all hed ever heard about those far-flung ports from other travelers was that they were too warm and too warm sounded just about right with everything else that was going on. Hed take the heat and the worshipers of strange foreign gods over glowing eyes and endless snows any day of the weak.


    Even from a distance, it was in to see the shanties that clung to the walls of the outer city and the burned-out wreckage of certain homes that pointed to troubles in the past. The castle looked fine, of course, and the docks were still safe enough, but then it wasnt an invading army that they were at war with. It was hunger and fear.


    Markez saw that immediately and forced the men hed brought with him to help him gather up a fine catch before they made for port.


    Its the only way well be weed with open arms, he assured them.


    He was right, too. Half a days effort brought them a meager catch of eel, flounder, and other fish he wasnt so familiar with, but there were still people fighting to buy it from them when they finally came to port shortly before nightfall.


    Of course, as soon as he had silvers in his hand, they were quickly disbursed to his makeshift crew, who went off to waste the windfall on wine and women. He, on the other hand, when to do a few things that were nominally useful.


    First and foremost, Markez took a walk through the city, at least the outer part; they wouldnt let him into the inner walls without a pass. Hed hoped to find Jordans family as hed promised so he could deliver the mans letter and be free of that obligation, but he had no luck.


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    Instead, all he found were the churning disced masses begging for scraps. By the end of his walk, he decided he would not travel these streets again when it was dark out. Too many people looked at his clean clothes and healthy weight with envy and hunger. If not for a passing guard patrol at a couple of key moments, he might have been beaten to death in search of wealth he did not have.


    This quickly became the pattern for the days that followed. His decision to stay on board his ship was the only difference in the days that followed. Each morning, he would take the men who were sober enough to go out with him, and they would catch as much as they could. Then, in the afternoon, Markez would journey to some new part of Rahkin to ask about the Sedgim family, and then he would be back on his vessel by evening, mendings for the following day.


    It was a steady rhythm that he could live with, and slowly but surely, his silvers multiplied where he hid them deep in the bilge where no one would find them. The time came that most of his men eventually wanted to leave. Markez could sympathize. Every day, the beer got more watered down, and the streets became more crowded. Apparently, it had been like this all winter, and the guards only expected it to get worse as the snow melted and the roads dried up.


    That was enough to make even the stubborn old sailor change his mind. <em>To hell with that promise,</em> he decided. Hed done his best, and that would have to be good enough. The following day, he told his n to his slowly growing crew.


    One more day, he said, Maybe two at the outside toy in some supplies, and well go north in search of better prospects.


    No one disagreed with that, at least not until he got to the part about how no one was getting paid for todays work because he needed that money to buy flour and salt pork, but even after that, it was kept to the murmurs of discontent that were somon among a reasonably healthy crew.


    Thats how Markez found himself in the small market near the wharf the following day as a food riot broke out. Hede with two good, strong men to scare away thieves and haul their precious cargo ck to the ship, but it didnt happen like that.


    Instead, after hed agreed to pay a King''s ransom for half a keg of pickled pork feet and spend the rest of his ready coin on salt,rd, and coarse flour that would make for excellent ship''s biscuits if fried correctly, the dregs of Rhakin came at him like a wave.


    He was holding a half-eaten loaf of bread that would serve as both breakfast and lunch when the violence reached him. Together, he and his men fought to hold on to the supplies theyd purchased, but that was like trying to hold back the tide. No matter how many heads they bludgeoned, there were more grasping hands looking for something, anything worth stealing.


    Then he felt the knife in the back, jabbing deep between his liver and kidneys. It was so quick he barely had a chance to feel pain. Instead, stunned by the blow, Markez toppled to the ground. He couldnt see the wound in his back, but he could feel the warmth gushing out of it as the rest of his body grew cold, so he knew it was bad, though.


    <em>How can this be happening?</em> He wondered to himself as his knees gave out, and he copsed to the stones, still clutching his food. Hed led a good life. Hed saved nearly two dozen brats and steered a boat up a cursed river past the den of the devil himself. Now he was going to die by the very violence hed just been preparing to leave? That was irony right there if hed ever heard it.


    Of course, as hey there dying on the cobbles, it was a child who pulled the half loaf of bread from his ck grip. It was a small boy with a dirty face and dead eyes, and Markezs dying thought as the world faded to ck was that he hoped the boy managed to navigate the worsening food riot. One more good deed wouldnt hurt him in the world after.


    Of course, he wasnt the only one to die that day. 34 died in the small market before the city guard arrived on the scene to put down the violence, and another 56 died in the process of re-establishing peace.


    It was the third food riot that month, but it was by far the bloodiest. Combined with the steady drip of the melting snow from the rooftops, the gutters were literally overflowing with blood. Most of that made its way through the gutters to the sewers and eventually the sea, but some made its way in a thin trickle to the shrine of Saint Jarloen standing in the center of the square. It stained his pure marble feet red and trickled into the cracks in the pedestal of the centuries-old statue as the blood pooled around it.


    That shouldnt have been a big deal. On any normal day, the acolytes would have cleaned it. There were no acolytes anymore. Faith was the onemodity in the capital that was in shorter supply than hope or food. So, for hour after hour, the blood was allowed to trickle down past the statue of the martyr into the catbs that they sealed below it.


    Rain and snow did the same thing almost every year, but they only fed the ck mold that blossomed on the walls of the catbs below. The blood would instead feed something darker. It flowed down the nearly level tunnel incredibly slowly until it reached a set of stairs and began to descend further.


    It moved like a crimson serpent or a worm that was searching for something as it wound its way through the darkness. Finally, on the fourth, partially copsed level, it found it. There, on the dias, was a stone sarcophagus sealed with lead and bound in rusty bands that had long since failed.


    It had sat untouched with the dust of centuries upon it and should have sat for centuries longer until the weight of the world buried itpletely. Thats not what happened, though.


    The sarcophagus sat two stairs above the rubble-strewn floor on a small dais. That should have been enough to hold the pool of blood at bay in perpetuity, but it wasnt. Instead, the blood started to flow upwards. It didnt matter that it was impossible. All that mattered was the ancient hunger that throbbed inside that box like the slow beating of a dead heart.


    That hunger was enough to force the blood to climb the stairs and then the walls of the coffin itself, where it began to burn and smoke as it crawled across the warded surface toward a gap in the lead.


    Once it reached that hole, it was like a rope had been seized, and with unnatural force, the trickle of blood and melt water became a flood. Minutester, the standing water of the za was empty, and the tunnels were dry, but something in that long-forgotten crypt was beginning to stir, and it hungered for more.

 Chapter 114: Wheat from the Chaff

    Chapter 114: Wheat from the Chaff


    It was Verdenin who thought of it. Tenebroum would have to credit the man with that much, at least. That was why he still had a pulse after all.


    Because the priest loved power, and he had some wonderful ideas about how to get more, hed been allowed to stay alive. That,bined with the fact that he was as loyal as a turncoat could be, almost made it worth the trouble of keeping so many living on the second level in a part of itsbyrinth once made to exclusively house the dead.


    The priest had spent the whole winter exhorting those ideas to the other survivors of ckwater and telling them all about the new world that was being born, as well as their ce in it. The darkness is inevitable, he told them. Death chases every one of us our whole lives, but it will not take you. Not if you are useful to it! Let us serve the night in all the ways it requires, and we shall live forever, unchained by the conventions of morality and the rules of light!


    The Lich still did not know how it felt about living followers, but it hurt nothing to give it a try. After all, all the other Gods and godlings it was aware of cultivated a flock of their own, so there must be a reason for it. Still, most of them had no other ready source of essence beyond their worshipers, where Tenebroum could always fall back on blood and suffering.


    In fact, it doubted that an entire church could provide the same level of power as a single brutal night of fear and death, as one of its armies ughtered a small town, but it had Kelvun make a note to conduct that experiment just as soon as the next phase of its war started. That was why it had constructed the dreamer. Both to delegate the task of surveilling their enemy and to increase their fear of what was going to happen next.


    The Lich was proud of its many creations, and thistest one was no exception; even if it was more simr to the ones that had gone before than it was different, it was still something entirely new. More than anything, the dreamer was a shade, like the dark messenger that had served it so loyally for so long. In its case, though, the horse that it rode on wasposed of pure shadow, just like the rest of its body.


    So, it would need to find a grave or a pool of murky water to hide from the rising sun. If it did not, it would cease to exist as the rays of dawn reduced it to nothing but vapor and an unintelligible chorus of discordant screams as the many souls that made up its dreamer came apart at their very carefully sewn screams.


    That and its inability to murder anything were its primary weaknesses. Its strengths were manifold, though, both literally and figuratively. It had the dark sense of human understanding of its puppeteer, it could spring apart into a hundred different copies like Krulm''venor, and it could speak in the sweet words of its herald so that no man could easily ignore it.


    The Lich didnt care if the dreamer or the missionary, as his priest referred to it, caught a single new worshiper to join its growing flock. What it cared about were the things that the dreamer learned as it prowled the dreams of the unwary, night after night.


    That, and the uncertainty that the shadow monster left in its wake made it a most worthwhile investment of time and resources. The Lich created it by stitching together the souls of fervent Temrs and priests that it had harvested by the score. As it turned out, it was easy enough to lobotomize such a soul, keeping its devotion but vivisecting the cause that it was so fervent about. That is the way it created such a loyal servant by stitching the souls of a hundred lobotomized servants of Siddrim to a single true believer of the darkness.


    With only one thing left for them to believe in, they all believed it eventually, after enough pain and confusion. Some resisted, but the more souls that fell, the quicker the rest of them gave in. Finally, after 66 days and 66 nights, it had a quivering ball of shadows that was practically begging to go out and proselytize to the masses.


    And the Lich was happy to let it. Tenebroum had once spent most nights invading the dreams of those that dwelled with its domain, but there were few survivors left in that area now, and it had better things to do with its time than harvest a tiny trickle of mana from a single nightmare.


    Besides, the dreamer, or the nightmare as Verdenin referred to it, could invade the dreams of a whole vige at once. In fact, within a few days of it being unleashed it was doing exactly that, almost every night, as it galloped from town to town.


    The first few viges were a mixed bag that showed the need to fine-tune the way its dreamer operated because rather than a series of horrific nightmares about what would happen if they dared try to hold back the darkness, it turned out to be something closer to a psychic scream that woke up everyone that it didnt kill or put into aa as visions of a blood-drenched world assaulted the sleeping peasants.


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    So it tried again and again. On its fourth attempt, as the shadowy steed rode into the tiny square of the vige of Muttson, it even managed to borrow inside the heads of everyst resident for a few hours without waking a single soul.


    By the time its dreamer reformed and retreated to the graveyard to escape theing dawn, Tenebroum doubted that the people it had touched would ever feel quite safe again, of course, but that was progress. Night by night, it learned to whisper instead of scream, and slowly but surely, it began to learn things of great interest to Tenebroum.


    It learned to separate the strong from the weak as it sorted the wheat from the chaff onemunity at a time. It learned that fear ruled the day, especially in the south, where people were close enough to hear about the fall of Siddrimar. There, they dreamed of armies of the dead marching on theirnds and taking no prisoners.


    That was where the dream that became known as the prophecy by so many over the next few months first started. It started by ident, but after a while, the Lich decided to honor it and see how it yed out.


    You can be safe from all of this, Tanyana, a fragment of the dreamer, pretending to be a womans dead mother, had reassured her in a dream. Just tell me who the strongest warrior in the vige is


    Thats Braken, Tanyana said, uncertain of what was happening. She knew that her mother had been dead for four years and that if she looked up at the speaker, shed see only a desated corpse of the woman in that terrible logic that dreams had. Still, as long as she looked away and felt her mother stroke her hair, everything would be okay.


    Braken, of course, her mother said soothingly. I always knew that hed grow up to be big and strong. If you want the vige to be safe, then all you have to do is kill him and bury him under the road that leads here. That way, he can defend you from the dead, and you and all my little grandchildren can be safe and sound


    It was meant to be a horrible choice that would nibble at the womans conscience whenever the suns set, and she feared the shadows. The dreamer had told hundreds of people thousands of crazy and terrible things that mostly involved worshiping the Lich, but none of them had actually done it, not until Tanyana.


    She lured the man into her home to seduce him and then poisoned his beer. When her fellow vigers saw what she had done as she tried to bury the body, she defended her decision.


    Dont you understand? she yelled as they readied the noose. I did this for you! For all of us! Its the only way to save us from whatsing!


    Her friends and neighbors still hung her, but they did bury both her and her victim under the road as her dream prophecy suggested. There was such a wonderful thrill to all theyers of that betrayal that the Lich had its dreamer deliver that prophecy to every vige it invaded by night.


    In the south and the east, where the war was the fiercest, the dreams offered a promise of peace, but in the north, where the mountains protected them from violence, at least for the moment, they promised a good harvest instead.


    The sun is weak, the dreams whispered. The growing season will be too short. By the time the snowse, all that will be left to harvest are stalks and rot unless you make a sacrifice to keep it at bay.


    It was a terrible prophecy, but day by day, it spread across an already hungrynd. It was enough to keep every farmer awake at night as he feared for his livelihood and the health of his children. You will die. Your animal and progeny will die. Everything will die.


    That was true enough. Once Tenebroum figured out how to snuff to infernal lights a second time, it nned to starve everyone and build an army with their frozen corpses. All that wouldeter, though. For now, all it could do was watch and see what the good people of the realm would do.


    Not every vige fell, of course. In some regions, whole swaths of them resisted the urge to sacrifice one for the many. Perhaps twenty percent of them did, though, to its surprise, and the Lich was sure that many of the warriors that were the most likely candidates for such sacrifice in other towns and viges that had not yet given in lived in constant fear.


    It turned out that most of the good men and women of the world found a way to justify a little blood on their hands in the same way that the Temrs had when they set out to purge the temples to Oroza. It was an interesting lesson, and Tenebroum took it to heart.


    Even as its armies began to march north through the vast tunnel that was finally quiet and finished, it was these choices that determined where and how it would strike. Over the winter, it had assembled thousands upon thousands of new monstrosities in every form. It had created its centipede calvary and living siege engines. It had repaired its shadow drake and Krulmvenor. More than anything, though, it had created a nearly unending supply of armored zombies and given them a general without equal.


    Now, it was about to unleash them on a corner of the world that thought itself safe, but it would save those who were willing to bend the knee forst. After all, even with its vast and ever-expanding armies, it could not be everywhere at once. If they were willing to kill their own friends and family, then what else would it be able to get them to do before this war was done.


    Tenebroum wasnt sure, but as people began to pray to the darkness to spare them, it found that it finally understood the appeal for why Gods worked so hard to attract their little chorus of worshipers.

 Chapter 115: Better Left Buried

    Chapter 115: Better Left Buried


    Even with the small tide of blood that it had devoured, the thing that had bound away in the dusty stone sarcophaguscked the strength to force off the lid. Such a feast had served only as an appetizer to the hunger that had awoken in it.


    Its recollections of what had happened to bring it to such a nadir or even who it was were tooplex to contemte right now. It had been buried until it had be nothing but dust; it could worry about those thoughtster. All that its tiny mind could focus on tight now was the single crack in its prison. It would have been enough to let in light or even a breeze. Those things didnt exist this far below the city, though.


    Even in its much-reduced state, such a gap was notrge enough for it to escape. So, it began to bite and chew. It gnawed at the very stone, seeking to expand the hole enough for it to escape. Teeth and ws werent as hard as the stone, but they grew back, over and over again, for day after endless day.


    It did not even understand what it was. Not really. All it knew was that its tiny teeth could cut through even stone given enough time and that its hunger was toorge to fit in any prison.


    The blood hadnt just woken it up from its timeless slumber; it had given it the strength to suffer. And suffer it did, widening that tiny gap only a little at a time as the days cycled somewhere above it. Then, at longst, it widened the hole enough that a single part of it could escape, and it did.


    The small creature only realized what it was after it forced its way through the opening. It was a mouse. A tiny desated mouse that had been dead so long that there were only bones underneath its patchy white fur. That was when it knew that the rest of its body was much the same.


    It had not been able to fit any of therger bodies that belonged to it through such a tiny gap. It knew that now. It also knew that all that blood had only been enough for a single minor miracle. So, none of therger, more powerful rats that could expect to put up a good fight against a seasoned tomcat had been resurrected in its ce. It wasnt even a moderately sized rat that some tiny part of it knew that it preferred. In the end, only the smallest field mouse was able to escape the prison and scramble free on the rubble below.


    It was a shriveled speck of a thing, and it twitched from one side to the other as it looked for danger in the darkness. It was practically defenseless, but it found no threats. The tiny twice-dead mouse scampered through the rubble that partially entombed its tomb.


    It had hoped that seeing the ce that it was bound would bring back memories. Maybe it would have given time, but when it spied the first ancient corpse that had beenid to rest in the wall niches further down the hall, all of those thoughts were lost to the hunger that burned inside it once more.


    Danger forgotten, the little mouse scurried across the dusty floor and into the niche, where it began to nibble at the remnants of parchment skin and leather that it found. It wasnt enough, but then it doubted that anything would be enough the way it currently felt. It gnawed through the top of the femur and began to chew on the desated marrow, but still, it wanted more.


    From body to body and room to room, it traveled. The mouse lost all track of time as it searched for scraps. That was where it encountered a real rat for the first time. This one was more than just skin and bones, and it had real beady eyes in its eyesocket instead of a faint glowing red light.


    The rat made the mistake of bouncing on the corpse of the mouse, sure that it was food. It soon regretted it, but there was no escape. The mouse wasnt just snapping at it and trying to devour it. It was melding with it.


    They were two now, and both of them were dead, but the way that their tails twined together and they moved as a single thing, it would have been difficult to tell. They could eat twice as fast as one, and slowly, they moved through the crypt, gnawing here and there as they hunted their own kind and merged with them.


    By the time the mob of rats had grown to 13 and the rat kings tails had knotted togetherpletely, it found its first corpse. Though any evidence of what had happened here had long since been obliterated by the predators beneath the city in the days since the corpse had been dumped in the sewers. Despite that, it could feel the betrayal and the anguishing off of the body like a bad smell. It was interesting but not as interesting as the taste of the mans liver. So, the rat king dined deep on his entrails for days as it feasted, but it appreciated the subtle strains of suffering, too, as it tried to understand why it should care about them.


    Other rats tried and failed to steal a few morsels for themselves. Few of them lived long enough to regret it as they joined one at a time with the swelling, ghoulish rat king that grew well past the size of a cat as it gorged itself on its bloody feast.


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    It was only partway through devouring the mans brain that it realized how much knowledge it was gaining from the act. Names poured into its mind a piece at a time. Hektan. Was that the name of the victim or... No - it was the murderer? And the reason? What was it? Gold? Revenge?


    No, the rat king realized adultery. It was a strange word, and it only recognized it as being distantly rted to a different sort of hunger than the kind that gnawed at it. It pushed those facts aside. All it cared about was feeding the bottomless hole inside of it.


    Even as it brushed them aside, though, it continued to learn. The name of streets. The riots and the cold above. The light.


    It was always afraid of the light, though it did not know why. There was nothing down here that it could not eat, so why should it be any different in the world above. Still, it did not go up there, not even when it heard the sounds of violence or smelled the fresh scent of coppery blood. Something that it could not name held it back.


    There were other bodies, but none of them seemed linked. This was not a n. It was just the very edge of chaos. It felt like the whole city might yet topple over into nothing, but it didnt mind that. More chaos meant more food.


    When it was strong enough, it stopped subsisting on the corpses of the recently deceased and began to attack the sickly and weak who hid away where they would be safe from the predators above.


    Its first victim was a dying old man who had taken refuge in the catbs under a temple. Part of it feared the temple, too, but not enough to resist those weak, watery breaths as the vagrant attempted to fight off gray fever.


    He wouldnt make it more than another night or two anyway, not that the Rat King cared. Life had no value when it was hungry. All that mattered were that its many vering maws and its even more numerous eyes trembled with desire to devour him whole, and he was weak enough that he had no chance against an impossible melding of rats that wasrger than a child.


    That didnt stop him from gasping and screaming until the rat king tore out his throat sopletely that the man drowned in his own blood. More words and concepts bombarded it then, more than even the corpses it had devoured, but it pushed all of them aside in favor of the warm spray of arterial blood.


    This is what it had craved from the moment it had been revived. Not the ancient mummified flesh of the interned or even the cold maggot-ridden corpses of the murdered. No, it hungered for the life force that could onlye from death, and together, its dozens of mouths tried and failed to ke its thirst.


    That was when it started to listen to the rippling thoughts and emotions that it devoured along with the meat of the corpse. Safety was the biggest one. The dead man felt sure that the temple he sheltered beneath should have been a safe ce. The Temple of Saint Anothian... It was in the city of Rahkin. The names meant little to the rat king. It wasnt until it realized that the temple belonged to Siddrim that it finally paused as a tremble of fear and recognition went through it.


    It remembered Siddrim, and once it remembered that awful god, it remembered what happened to it, too. The memories came flooding back like a storm, and all the rat king could do was stand there and yowl in distress as disconcerting facts began to lock into ce. Fire. Death. Pain.


    It was only after all of those puzzle pieces came together that it finally knew who it was, no, who they were. Ghroshian was not a rat or even a rat king. They were more than that. They were more than all rats, even. They were hunger itself!


    To rediscover one''s selves was a curious thing, it realized. One moment, they had been an animal, but now they realized theyd always been so much more than that. The animals were just the tinder to the bonfire that was its mind.


    As that thoughtpleted, it was like a bell being rung in their mind, and it catalyzed everything. Before, it had only been a growing chorus of hunger and discordant thoughts as it picked up the discarded secrets of the dead while it feasted on their flesh. Now, it was a single chorus as Ghroshian took control of hunger rather than letting it take control of them.


    Their giant rat king burst apart into several smaller murderous contracts at the same moment as the sarcophagus that held the rest of its moldering form shattered as it could no longer contain the dark god that it had held for so long.


    Out of that wretched prison poured hundreds and then thousands of rats and mice. It was an unending stream of vermin, and every one of those humble creatures was a part of themself. It was a symphony of whispers more than it was a legion of being, but it was both. In hours, it would spread to every part of this city. It would learn what had happened since it had been defeated and imprisoned by Siddrim.


    Siddrim. Even that name caused a sh of pain as it remembered the light invading every hole and crevice to flush it out when it had finally nibbled enough to draw down the wrath of the Lord of Light. Ghroshian could not remember what happened to Malzekeen - not exactly, but it knew that it was nothing pleasant.


    That was the only thing to temper their growing hunger: the fear of the light. Even as they spread through the catbs under Rakhin and into the sewers and cers where the narrow,byrinthine openings allowed, they shied away from even the smallest sliver of light. Not even candlelight was to be trusted. It was all that kept Ghroshian from rising up and devouring the city whole.


    Indeed, it was tempting to take a peek at the surface, almost overwhelmingly so. It smelled not just people and hunger but turmoil that promised a near-infinite amount of secrets for it to devour, and it desperately wanted them to add to its collection.

 Chapter 116: -The Saddest View

    Chapter 116: -The Saddest View


    Princess Trianna wrung her hands with despair and indecision as she saw yet another cloud of ck smoke rising over the gray city that had seen so many troublestely. Her city, well, her familys anyway. Until this year, it had been a beautiful ce for all of her young life, but now it was a horror show.


    Worse, if the rumors were to be believed, the rest of the kingdom was in dire straits. Spring was all but over, and there were reports from the south that fields were still choked with snow. It wasnt her ce to worry about such things, of course. She was sure her father had everything well in hand, but then shed always thought that, and shed never had to watch the city burn from her own window.


    Its probably just another tenement fire, so I doubt anything of value was lost, Zathenia said, not bothering to look up from her needlepoint. My father says the refugees are cramped in there like sardines, and if anyone forgets to extinguish antern or a cooking fire, the whole ce goes up like matches.


    As if the people in those buildings have anything to eat, Mnia chimed in, smirking, Theyve probably out of dogs and cats at this point, so if theres anything left to be cooked, Id say theyre down to cripples and orphans.


    Mnia! Zethenia gasped, scandalized. How can you say such awful things?


    Im only saying what everybody says, the girl said with a shrug with a shrug and a smile.


    The Princess could only shake her head at that. It used to be that Zethenia had been the more incorrigible of her twodies in waiting. Shed always been so boy crazy, but something about the troubles that were facing the world and the beautiful city of Rakhin had mellowed her out while they made Mnia ever morose by the week.


    It was all too much, but Princess Trianna could hardly ignore the problems. After all, as of a few weeks ago, the hunger had finally reached even the high table in the form of smaller dinners and no lunches at all.


    The criers said it was so that the King could stand with the people in their hour of need, but the truth was far simpler: the granaries were nearly empty. All it had taken was a single winter of hardship and refugees, and now famine was already stalking them.


    She could see the hunger in her face when she looked in the mirror. The King had promised that the mages hed hired would ensure a bountiful harvest; normally, such a promise would have been enough, but then these werent the stately grand maguses of Abenend. These were hedge wizards and worse.


    In any normal year, her father would have burned men like this at the stake to curry favor with the church, but then, there was no church now. At least, there wasn''t a functional one, she corrected herself. The buildings were still there, and many of the priests remained, but they had neither miracles to give nor insights to offer.


    Close the window, Princess, Mnia said finally, rousing her from her fugue state. She had no idea what shed missed of their conversation in the interim. Its getting cold out, and youve only just gotten well again.


    The Princess did as she was instructed and returned to her embroidery, but no peace came from the gentle activity. She would have given anything for theughter and gossip that Zethenia had overflowed withst year to make a return, but sadly, it was not to be. Instead, every topic was glum. If it wasnt about the city, the church, or the starving masses, it was a topic that was somehow adjacent.


    My father says the rats are getting worse, Zethenia said finally. Can you imagine a rat the size of a dog?


    Why would he tell you such awful things, the Princess asked.


    Oh, he didnt, sheughed. I was snooping, you see. He was telling my brother about how one of his guards had been on the lower levels and lost a leg to


    Hush! the Princessmanded. Youll give me nightmares.


    She picked up her pillow and began working on another of the yellow daises she was sewing on it to calm herself, and then she turned to her otherdy in waiting instead. How about you, Mnia? Surely you must have some juicy gossip to share that doesnt involve legs or rats or anything else thats full of awfulness?


    She was quiet for a moment, uncharacteristically quiet. It was only after Princess Trianna looked up at her that she started to speak. I heard an interesting story two days ago, actually. It''s a sort of myth or prophecy, but its much too dark to share with you, mydy. You would certainly have nightmares.


    A prophecy? the Princess asked. But all the priests have lost their sight. How could there be a new prophecy?


    Those poor priests cant even say when the sun will rise, Zethenia smirked. I pity them. Thedies of Lunaris still speak to their Goddess, though, do they not? Perhaps such a thing is her work or one of the lesser cults.


    I think that a prophecy from the moon Goddess would be filled with more hope, Mnia smiled sadly. s, I have none to give. Thats why I think that I shouldnt


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    Oh, dont be like this, Zethenia said. Spill it. The Princess wants to hear it, dont you, mydy?


    I do, she said tentatively. She wasnt sure if that was true, though. She did want to hear anything to get her mind off that terrible rat joke that Zethenia had told, even if it couldnt have possibly been true.


    Mnias eyes twinkled then like she was considering holding out on her friends a while longer, but instead, she sat down her sewing and leaned forward. If I tell you this, you must swear not to tell anyone. Not your priest. Not your father. If the wrong people found out this story, then the poor washerwoman I heard it from would get beaten quite severely, and the poor dear has given me such wonderful charms over the years. I want only the best for her.


    Both of them promised of course, though Zethenia did want to know if she was a worshiper of Oroza as she was a washerwoman, but both of her friendsughed at her for that.


    The Oroza River is hundreds of miles from here, Mnia teased. I do not think she goes that far each day to wash my petticoats. She worships our own river Narridar, as most of the right-thinking servants do, and to the best of my knowledge, theres never been any evil to be found within it.


    The Princess nodded at that and was about to ask about the prophecy, but herdy-in-waiting continued. None of this has to do with what I heard, though. This is not a river prophecy. It''s the kind of warning that would get you burned in the square if Siddrims flock were still with us. It''s a prophecy of darkness and a warning delivered in dreams. Knowing all that, are you sure you still wish to know? It wont be on my if you have nightmares over this.


    They both insisted they were ready, so Mnia plowed ahead. Theres a certain story that travels from servant to servant and from household to household, even if no one tells each other. It is not spread by whispers. Instead, it is spread by the night and the spirits that fear the light. Some say it started far to the west, and others say ites from somewhere to the south, where the dead have risen and


    Those are just stories, the Princess interrupted. If the dead had risen, my father would have raised an army already.


    The fact that he was in the midst of raising an army, or that he sometimes looked incredibly afraid after discussions with his generals, were beside the point here. Her father had told her that there was no evil magic, and that he was merely raising men to defeat the rising tide of banditry, and she believed him.


    As you say, mydy, Mnia nodded. Wherever the storyes from, it is always the same. The shadows warn a vige or a town or a city: Give us your strongest. Give us your bravest. Give us your most revered, or doom shall befall all who live here. Its a terrifying thing, but ording to the rumors spread by merchants and travelers, the worst thing about it is that its true.


    True? Zethenia asked. True that the people in these ces are killing their own, or that doing so averts the promised doom?


    Both, Mnia said with a smile that the Princess felt like a punch to the gut. The ces that ignore the rumor curse the day they did, but many of those that are forced to sacrifice so much to save themselves curse that too. Wives kill husbands. Children kill mothers. People do whatever they have to to get through this awful winter, and if they dont, then one day, disaster befalls the vige, and everyone dies anyway. Theres no happy ending to this story. Sometimes everyone dies, but most of the time, even the survivors are still miserable.


    What a dreadful story, Princess Trianna said, struggling not with the actual words but with the feeling of dread they had given her.


    I agree, Zethenia said. Its absolute rubbish. Theres no way so many good people would kill someone close to them just because of the story.


    Probably not, Mnia agreed, But you wanted a rumor to pass the time, and now you have one. Maybe next time you can think of a better story for us instead.


    They returned to their sewing, but the Princess wasnt able to escape those terrible thoughts. She could tell herself that what herdy-in-waiting had said wasnt true all she wanted, but even if she believed that urge, some part of what it had said resonated. If it wasnt the actual truth, it was certainly close, and that was frightening to think about.


    That night, dinner was a somber affair, as it usually was. Soups had reced sds with almost every meal now because fresh vegetables were in such short supply. At least the thick slices of bread were good, though.


    It used to be that Princess Trianna didnt much care for them, but now she ate as much as she could without appearing greedy. Her tes had never been so clean, but then the portions had never been smaller. She listened to her father drone on and on about tax revenue and requests from the Bishop but mentioned absolutely nothing that might lead her to believe the world was ending.


    Once, she worked up the nerve near the end to ask him about the fire shed seen earlier, but he merely shrugged. I was told that nothing of importance burned down, and no one that mattered was harmed by the deputy guard captain, he said with a shrug. I wouldnt worry about it. Its only a few less mouths to feed. Nothing more. Already, the weather is turning, and things shall straighten right out.


    She wanted to believe him, of course. Her brothers did, and her mother seemed to, too. Still, she worried. Something was very wrong. Shed felt it for weeks now, but Mnias prophecy had rified it. Those dark words had crawled up into her ear and made themselves right at home.


    That night, she dreamed of the hunger spreading through the city. She watched herself waste away in the mirror as it happened. The rats boiled up out of the sewers and the tunnels, and they chewed away at the walls of the buildings, only they began to shrink. Day after day, the city got smaller. The castle was affected too, and eventually, her high tower window was only a few feet above the stinking cesspool that was the rat-filled streets.


    That was when she woke up, just when her sill had gotten low enough that the rats were trying to crawl inside her rooms. She would have kept them out, but she was too weak from starvation by then and practically a skeleton herself.


    That wasnt what she thought about, though, as shey there in her sweat-soaked nightgown, though. She didnt think about the rats or her beautiful body wasting away or anything. All she could think about was how her father had stayed pleasantly plump on his throne right until the end. Even when the city had been reduced to rubble and a seething sea of vermin, he still sat there amiably on the throne, and all she could do was wonder at what that might mean.

 Chapter 117: Breach

    Chapter 117: Breach


    When everything was in position, and thest red sun had set, Tenebroums forces began flooding out of its tunnel into the nearly undefended bottomnds. It was an idylldscape,plete with a perfect, picturesque sunset that quickly faded to darkness. It was that beauty and peace that made the Lich so sure that the whole of the region waspletely unprepared for what was about to happen next. After all, here, the chill of its eternal dark had not reached these distantnds yet, so even its harvest was shaping up to be decent in a few weeks.


    Pumpkins and melons were ripening, and grain stood heavy on the stalk despite the weak and intermittent light. Some of the viges had even started decorating for their harvest festivals already. It was almost a pity that by the time the night was over, there would be so few living souls left to harvest it.


    Much of those crops were trampled under rotting feet anyway as its legions moved forward. Neither the Lich nor its paragon that had nned this assault and all the ones that followed expected any resistance tonight, and all of its most powerful constructs were kept in reserve in case of ambush while it flooded the field with its most disposable assets.


    The ns made no effort to despoil as much of thend as possible. Instead, the paths and actions were a matter of pure efficiency and logistics. Cavalry was deployed to attack the widely scattered farmsteads that were far from the cities and viges it aimed to eradicate with its slower-moving legions. Everything moved with a purpose, and given how much ground there was to cover, little effort was made to increase the suffering of its victims as they cowered in fear or ran for their lives.


    There were no surprises, save for perhaps the looks of horror of those that actually survived. Its general advised that it extinguish all life, and the Lich acknowledged that was the correct move, but something about allowing one house in ten or one vige in twenty to survive because the inhabitants had bent the knee and done what it had taken to survive amused it to no end.


    Tenebroum could hear their prayers now. The pathetic things blossomed every night when the sunset and the people who begged it for mercy grew afraid. They were always the same. They pleaded for the lives of their family and whimpered for the darkness to spare them. It found such things to be intoxicating.


    In all of its existence, only the worship of the Lizardmen hade close, and it made Tenebroum Envy what the other gods must already have all the more. It did not know if it would found a church, no matter how much Verdenin begged it to as the man flogged himself and the other worshipers nightly in the under temple, but as far as it was concerned, such tainted souls should be savored, and it would feast on their blood only once theyd lost their fear, or perhaps their obedience.


    Not all the viges fell without a fight, though. There were still heroes worthy of the name in the mortal world. In ces, they had banded together, and sometimes they even had mages or ensorcelled weapons. Some of these warriors fought well enough for the Lich to let them face their end at the hands of its small number of death knights.


    That was the only consideration the Lichs forces gave to these enemies was to try to keep their corpses as intact as possible for reanimation. Some of them would be joining those rarefied ranks soon enough. Not every corpse needed to be a drudge. That would be a waste of talent and resources.


    Palisade walls fell to deathless strength, and no matter how many pikes and halberds amunity might muster, they meant nothing to a tight formation of three hundred zombies that never tired or faltered.


    The only problem with the night was that it didntst long enough. Teneborum watched, and it fed the whole evening long, retreating only when the sun rose as the first wave of its troops settled into ce. They used caves meant for aging cheese, root cers that normally stored produce, and stone forts of the fallen.


    The bodies would be harvestedter and repurposed, but for now, the most valuable things that the humans could offer it were staging locations for other,rger assaults. The light of the fragile suns was its only real enemy until it reached the castles that served as the bulwark of humanitys defense, but they would not survive an assault.


    As the Lich devoured the souls of the fallen, it learned more about they of thend and the history of the area. It learned about ck Gate and the feudingnds. It saw the twin fortresses of East and West Banath and the pass they defended. None of those were its next target, though. That would be Constantinal, The Undefeated City. It was still more than three nights of conquests from here, but the Lich felt drawn to the giant. Of all the cities in the region, it was thergest and the most well-defended.


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    The spirits of the damned whispered that it had never fallen, but Tenebroum did not care about such things. It would be the first to im it for its wealth in both blood and treasure. For generations, it had served as the gateway to the West, buying and selling grain and wine far and wide, but that rich history would end soon because it had something the Lich sorely craved: a web of catbs and the gold and silver to make a second,rgerboratory for its northern campaign and there was no ce better in the region.


    Those proud walls would fall, but that was still days away. For now, it did not tip its hand. Night by night, its legions of the dead, which now numbered in the tens of thousands, spread in all directions, murdering indiscriminately and leaving only the most craven and fearful survivors behind to thank it for its mercy. The simple farmers had started calling it the reaper, and the Lich thought that was an apt enough name for what it was doing. It was, after all, conducting thergest, bloodiest harvest of souls that the world had ever witnessed.


    Only one of its expanding fronts contained the many works of art that its minions had spent years crafting, and they advanced north toward its primary target. After four nights of blood and fire, there could be no true surprise attack on the waiting city.


    Even as its legions massed just at the edge of arrow range and the Lichs General surveyed the field, it saw no issues. The thirty-foot-high stone walls stood opposite the natural moat formed by the forking river, and the defenses were crowded with soldiers. Even catapults and ballistas had been installed and manned, but even though they started to fire as its forces marched forward, they would do precious little good.


    The beat of its soldier''s feet matching in perfect lockstep shook the earth as they approached, though the inhuman rhythm damaged nothing but the defenders morale. It was obvious to anyone that they all desperately hoped their walls would hold, but the Lich knew that the mighty defenses would only matter a few minutes more. Anything beyond that would take more magic than these pitiful creatures possessed.


    Its constructs didnt stop at the waters edge, either, though the Lich might have summoned its Titan to build them a bridge. This far from Orozas water, it did not expect that it would need to, though. Instead, they just marched right over the bottom toward the walls. Thedders they would use to climb them didnt move forward yet. Not until the Lichs shadow dragon soared down from the night sky and made the foot-thick oaked gates evaporate with a single gout of ebon me.


    The dragon quickly fled after that. One of the primary lessons of Siddrimar had been just how fragile that creature was, so it needed to be used sparingly. After all, even if the light was no longer an enemy that it needed to fear, it could still feel a Gods work somewhere in this battle, and if rivers could have their own deities, then it would not be surprised to find out that cities could have them as well.


    The God of Constantinal did not reveal himself until Tenebroums skeletal centipede Calvary crawled up the outermost wall of the city, and the zombies began to pour over top of them. Then, he appeared in a sh of mana directly over the damaged gatehouse.


    The Lich gave the signal, and a number of ravens filled with alchemical concoctions took to the sky in an attempt to murder or weaken the divine opponent. The shadow dragon even wheeled around to take another pass, but before any of its dark servants could reach their target, the divine spirit vanished again. In its ce, all the heroes that had been carved into the stony rampart sprang to life.


    The Lich had learned of this myth in passing from those it had ughtered, but it had found such an oue unlikely. The Heroes of old springing to life was a tale that was almost as old as the city itself, but it hadnt happened in living memory.


    Even though Tenebroum had not given the myth credence, its general had prepared for it just in case, and members of the Legion of Rust had been dispersed throughout the ranks. While not as brutally effective against flesh as the war zombies, they still bore tools meant for taking stone apart, and that was what they did tonight.


    While the rest of its forces focused on the living defenders and moved past them into the city proper, its broken metallic dwarves made short work of the stony defenders with their kobold teeth-tipped picks. In the stories, those heroes could hold thergest of armies at bay until the end of days, before they needed neither food nor rest. Against the Lich, they barelysted an hour. After that, the back of the mortal defenders was broken.


    There were still pockets of defense here and there, but the Lich was content to let them hold out a while as its death knights advanced on the city''s temples and the pce of the local Duke while the gutters of the city ran red with blood. It would need living sacrifices for the days thaty ahead, and that meant that it could hunt down the remaining forces at its leisure. After all, the people that had cowered behind their thick walls had been too thick to kneel to the darkness. So, here, at least, every life was fair game.


    It looked around the battlefield with a feeling of only faint triumph. Taking the unconquered city had been less difficult than it had thought it would be, and the only thing that would cheer it up after such a let-down was finding the small god of the city and devouring him whole.

 Chapter 118: Night After Night

    Chapter 118: Night After Night


    When the full moon touched her waters, Oroza could feel Lunariss call. It was the first time since her brush with darkness so long ago that the moon sang to her rather than silently judging from its high perch. She could have resisted it, of course, but what would have been the point of that?


    If the moon was calling, then there was a reason, and she should pay heed. So, the river dragon swam toward the reflection and then dove into it. As she dove deeper and deeper than her river actually was. She was in the sky now and making the long, slow track into the sky.


    This deep the ckness of the void was spread out from her in all directions, and the stars were justing into view. The moon was the only constant, and slowly, it began to grow until it filled all of Orozas vision. This wasnt her first trip to the moon, but it was her first trip in decades, and as she transformed back into a woman and stood upon the surface, she noted the oily footprints that were left behind in her wake and sighed at just how much work was left to purify herself.


    It was a maddening thought, of course, but it was a work that would take a lifetime, and that lifetime wouldnt start until she finally dislodged the evil that had settledfortably on her western banks like a cancer.


    As she strolled through the albino gardens along the baster path, it was easy to see that she wasnt alone. Other Gods, great and small, had received the same invitation that she had, and all hade. She saw the fox god of trickery and deceit, padding along another path to her left and Niama, Goddess of the wild ces among the trees, off to her right.


    Those ones, Oroza recognized because she shared an affinity with them, but for every God she recognized, there were two more she did not, and most of these were small gods like her. Gods of a mountain, a river, or a city were far moremon than the Gods that governed all of creation.


    Large and small, they were all going to the same ce, though. Ahead of them loomed the high temple with its great amphitheater. It could seat thousands, which was enough for every God in the world tofortably sit and listen with Siddrim, Lunaris, or any of the other greater Gods who had something important to say. Siddrm was absent, though, and his golden throne on the dias sat empty.


    Normally, Oroza would sit with the other river and nature Goddesses, but when she saw the way that they looked at her, with a mixture of pity and revulsion, she chose to sit far away from anyone on the far side of the giant ce. She did not need to be reminded of what shed be, and certainly not like that.


    Eventually, when new arrivals stopped filing in and all were seated, Lunaris stood to dress the assembled crowd. She was a full-bodied, motherly woman with white-blond hair tied back in a tight braid, and her pale armor was polished to a fine sheen as benefitted the guardian Goddess. Only her shield was missing, and that, of course, was because one of her handmaidens was carrying it across the night even now. The world could not be left in darkness. Not with all that had happened.


    Siddrim is dead, Lunaris pronounced, letting the words settle in for several seconds before she continued. His horses still live, and his chariot is being mended by the All-Father, but the fire that lights the world is no more.


    No one said anything, but the wave of grief and sadness that radiated out from the assembled divinity was palpable. It wasnt enough to stop the lunar Goddess from continuing, though.


    We do note to mourn him, and though in time we may rece his light, but we will never rece his nobility or divinity.


    <em>Or his vanity, </em>Oroza thought to herself. She still fumed silently about the way that his worshipers had decimated her own. Not that she could me him. Siddrim had done little in the mortal realm for more than a century. He was the God that had vanquished evil, so he had grownzy and indolent.


    For thest few decades, hed done little more than ride his chariot, bask in his own reflection, and n everrger temples in his own honor. Even that wasnt enough to justify his death, though.


    Now, the same darkness that slew him is spreading across thend, and we know so very little about it. Who is doing this? Where did ite from? Only two of you have touched this <em>thing</em> and survived the experience. I invite you to tell us now before more fall to the growing evil.


    While she spoke, Lunaris gestured broadly, and faint moonlight illusions appeared around her. Images of dark armies marching and cities on fire. Most of the violence that she showed was the very war that Oroza had tried so hard to prevent, but there were other abominations, too. Wives killed husbands, and children killed fathers, only to bury the bodies in strange locations or wipe the blood of their victims above the doors of their household.


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    The things that the moon Goddess showed them were strange, barbaric acts, but the whole time Lunaris showed them such terrible things, Ozora could feel the womans piercing yellow gaze, even from so far away. Finally, all of it was enough to move Oroza to speak, but as soon as the river goddess opened her mouth, the All-Father spoke up instead.


    The fiend is the ckest magics from the darkest pits at the very core of the world! he yelled, with a voice suffused with barely contained rage. It crawled up from the depths and devoured an entire temple of the dead in a single night, turning my own hallowed dead against me!


    The dwarven lord continued to speak, but Oroza ignored him. Instead, she stood and started walking down to the central dias. Where the greater gods were assembled. The All-Father might be speaking earnestly and passionately, but he did not know what he was talking about.


    Still, he kept right on talking about it for the next ten minutes, regaling everyone in attendance with the war that was being waged beneath the world, under their mountains. The only thing he didnt borate on at length was a secret counter-attack that had already been set in motion.


    It was only when he finally finished that she said softly, You do not know of what it is you speak.


    Why I the All-Father said, his face purpling as he moved to stand. He was not a man to be gainsaid. She knew that. She just didnt care.


    He stopped speaking when Lunaris raised a hand. Let my daughter speak. She has been through much and means no disrespect.


    <em>Didnt I?</em> Oroza thought as she smiled grimly. That isn''t what she said, though. Instead, she turned and faced the assembled mass of the several hundred Gods and Godlings that had shown up.


    That monster is not made of shadows. It devours them. Its been growing in the swamps near my river for decades, but I didnt know, Not until it devoured me. She flushed with shame as she remembered that terrible dual and just how badly shed been out-maneuvered. I know exactly what it is because Ive been forced to serve that darkness for decades.


    As Oroza spoke, she lifted one of her hands to show the raw scars where the manacles had chafed at her for so long. Then, Without any warning, she reverted into water. Instead of bing the sallow, emaciated river dragon that she was now, though, she became a watery representation of the Lich itself to give everyone a good look at what it was they were up against.


    Slowly, she grew in height, and her features melted away until she was nothing but a three-legged, four-armed skeleton in the ugly beetle carapace that her former master wore into battle. There were gasps of shock and horror as she donned such an ugly face. She couldnt me them. It was a visage that would likely haunt her for the rest of her days.


    The evil that held me in chains has beenboring long for this war, and all of us are off guard as a result, she said, spreading her four arms wide. I thought that with the help of the few that remained loyal to Siddrim, I could hold back the tide of darkness myself, but I was wrong. It will spread in all directions now, and each time you confront it, it will learn from you.


    No corpse will outsmart me, Ronndin, the fox God, bragged. I will seek out his weakness so that we might dispose of him the way that we have all the other dark gods that have littered history.


    This is not the same as those that came before, Oroza implored him. The fox god was known for being clever but not for being humble, and that was exactly the wrongbination of traits for this situation. The Lich it has the mind of hundreds of humans screaming and chattering inside its awful skull. Whatever idea you had, however smart you think you are, a madman has thought of it first, and the Lich has already tried it out in its terrible workshops; it makes


    It makes nothing! the All-Father roared. The monstrosities that this Lich has are not creation! They are abomination!


    I dont care what you call it, she urged, but you should be careful not


    The world has been careful for too long, Istiniss cried out, silencing her, even as Oroza began to dete into her smaller human form once more. The God of sea and storms was louder than she was ever going to be. We must rise as one now and crush this thing. Why shouldnt we? We know its game and where its strange littleir hides. Nothing can save it from our wrath.


    Oroza exchanged a nce with Lunaris for a brief moment, and then she started to walk towards the exit. The gods could rarely agree on anything, but in this, the river goddess was sure they would all find ordance. Those who had churches and armies sworn to their name would rally against the Lich, and those who didnt would help in smaller ways.


    Despite the fact that the whole might of heaven had been united against her tormentor, she was notforted. Even as she left the amphitheater and walked back along the path to the edge of the moon, she couldnt help but feel like her efforts had made things worse, not better.


    At the end of the path, Oroza found Lunaris waiting for her. We will need your help, sister, only you know what it is we face.


    You dont know what you are asking, Oroza said, tears welling in her eyes.


    The moon goddess did something Oroza didnt expect then and embraced her. She stroked Orozasnk ck hair and soothed her, which only caused the river goddess to cry harder.


    One day, I will tell you the story of why the moon turns dark every month, Lunaris whispered. We all have our own pain to bear. It is unforgivable, but there is no changing it. All you can do is keep others from finding out how deep the darkness is for themselves.

 Chapter 119: Cat And Mouse

    Chapter 119: Cat And Mouse


    After Ghroshian ate the rats, they started on the cats. That was followed quickly by the dogs, the old, the sick, the very young, and anyone else who happened to stay the night somewhere beneath the city in the domain that very quickly was turning into their sole hunting ground.


    None of these sated their hunger, though. Eating never did. That was what drove them. That was why they wouldnt be able to stay hidden forever. Theyd never mastered that trick. They were tens of thousands of hungry mouths now, lurking and listening beneath floorboards and at the edge of candlelight conversations, and after only a few months, they touched almost every part of the city.


    The corpses of the men they devoured gave up their secrets, too, but they were small things about how they died, and the swarm wanted something more tangible and satisfying. Knowing that this person was betrayed for love and that one for money was only interesting for as long as it took to finish feasting on their entrails. After that, they were already hungry again.


    Food was in short supply in the capital right now and carefully guarded by those who had it. Secrets and stories, though, those flowed more freely thanks to the fear that freely haunted the streets, and the growing god of hunger and famine fed on those too.


    They heard about wars and rumors of wars and that the dead either did or had recently walked the earth. They heard that the fields were heavy with grain and that the rot was spreading. Most of the rumors were contradictory, but most agreed on one thing, which, at least at first, the rat god ignored: Siddrim was dead.


    Such a thing was unconscionable, but it was widely regarded as true. Priests still prayed, and believers still left offerings at the shrines to the saints, but if rumors were true, that great glowing bastard was no longer in the heavens where he belonged.


    If that was the case, though, then why were there still days? Why were there still nights? Why was the order of the heavens maintained? They asked themselves these questions a dozen times a day but found no answers.


    In the end, the only way to know for sure would be to test the light. If they sent out a tendril into the world above, and that part of them was smote, then it would know that Siddrims death was a ruse and that its doom was only a season or two away.


    So, for a long time, it clung to the shadows. It was only when it noticed the poor state of even the grand temple, that they crept closer for a better look. They knew from past experience that hallowed ground was every bit as deadly as daylight. Just thinking about it triggered memories of the past when they had crossed paths with the Lord of Light and other simr deities.


    Tonight, though, there was no sting. There was no burning or holy fire. The single small mouse it had sent to sacrifice quickly scurried past the barrier and under a pew, where it proceeded to look for forgotten scraps. For several long minutes, the rest of the swarm held back worried that this was some sort of trap. It was only when its sacrificial scout found a stale crust of bread and began to gnaw at it greedily that the rest of themself charged forward, the danger forgotten.


    Still, even in the three hours it took to ravage the ce of anything remotely edible, right down to the scrolls and leather bindings, no divine punishment came. Morning light caused them to retreat, but even that might not have been dangerous. They were not inclined to test the boundaries of their newfound freedom that far, though.


    Still, the next night, the swarm devoured every offering at every shrine in the whole city within an hour of sunset. It that was fair game now, then they would make sure it would not go to waste.


    From there, they wondered what it should do next. Ghroshian seemed to be in no serious danger. Normally, they would spread themselves out further and begin to hide in the cargo holds of ships as well as wagons that were leaving the city, but there seemed to be few enough of either group right now. Traffic only came to the city of Rahkin now. The only thing that seemed to leave was the army.


    ording to the rumors, more men went to fight every day. There was a war somewhere to the west. Some said it was over food and farming, and others said it was because of something darker or even apocalyptic. No one agreed on anything except that the strong young men of the city were leaving in formations every few weeks, and not one of them had been seen since.


    They wondered what they should make of that, butcked the means to follow and explore the issue more fully. If any of their brothers were loose on the world, it would know. It was not easy to hide the presence of any of the Malzekeen, and Ghroshian was by far the most subtle of the three. Hunger was a quiet force that no one wanted to talk about, but rot and ruin? As soon as the first traces of a real gue set in, the people of the city would be on fire in panic, and to date, that had not happened.


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    Certainly, they had never expected to be free again. Siddrim had burned cities and boiledkes to kill everyst member of their tiny swarm and then buried them with lead and stone, but now, as it gazed out at the wild ces and the fields beyond the furthest viges, they saw a whole world waiting to be eaten, but it knew that the world out there was just waiting to eat it as well. The natural world was far more aware of its existence than the world of man.


    In time, Ghroshian could no longer resist the fields and the bountiful forests. They had eaten everything in this wretched capital city that would not be missed and were already beginning to gnaw their way past the bricks of the remaining granaries when they decided to have a taste of the wider world. None of the mice that had been dispatched on ships had grown intorge enough swarms for them to be aware of each other yet, but in this case, it was impatient.


    Rather than sending out a few rats and hoping they would grow in time, the swarm dispatched an entire pack of knotted-tail ratkings to go and take what they could by force. The hunger pangs would not allow them to do any less.


    The first three days they were in the fields and vineyards, they feasted, ruining whole stretches of farnd that might have been enough to feed Rahkin for several days. They should have returned after that, but they couldnt. That victory only made them crave more sesses.


    So they slipped into the forest. That was where they found her. Ghroshian didnt remember what her name was, but he remembered that she was bad news the moment he saw the tawny hunting cat condense from the pale rays of starlight that prated the forest canopy.


    Until that moment, the pack of vermin was devouring the doe and her fawns that theyd brought down a few minutes before, but as soon as they saw the magical, glowing beast, they left their prey and fled as fast as they could. Each rat king went in a different direction to force the goddess in an animal skin to make a choice, but it didnt go as nned. Instead, she burst apart into a murder of white albino crows and gave chase to each of them simultaneously.


    The swarm didnt know why it feared her so much. A rat king was a match for a handful of crows in any normal circumstances, but tonight, it knew that its only choices were death or escape and that being forced to face her would certainly lead to thetter.


    Even as they rushed as a frantically squeaking mob, the first rat king was ripped to pieces in less than a minute. The second and third didntst long after that, either. Soon, the fourth one was all alone while its bones of the rest of the packs were consumed, and the birds harried them no matter which direction they ran, but the glowing wildlife that chased them would not give up.


    The Rat King couldnt shake the feeling that they were being toyed with. If they hid in a hollow log, the birds would be a badger, and if they forced their way inside a rabbit burrow, then they would be a snake. Shaking their pursuers became almost as impossible as making their way back to the safety of the city.


    All hope was finally lost when they decided to bolt through the starlit de toward the swampy area thaty on the other side. There, moonlight became a prison, holding the growling mob of rats entwined togetherpletely, still like an insect trapped in amber.


    They could only stand there helplessly as, one by one, all of the glowing forest creatures came together until they unified into the shape of a giant white owl that was almost asrge as a man.


    The rats trembled in fear as she spoke. I remember you, little pestilence. You are an old taste and not at all wee in these woods.


    Then let us free, and we shall not return, the rats squeaked in a quarrelsome and discordant harmony that only barely resembled words. We swear it!


    I know the rest of your swarm hears everything I tell you, so theres no need for you to survive. You are a gue on man and doubly so on nature! she crushed as she pped her wings and began a woman that was either beautiful or old, depending on the light. You think you can feast on whatever you like because Siddrim is no more, is that it?


    Yes! Ghroshian squealed. They would have said anything to live, even though they knew they would survive whatever it was she meant to do to them.


    Well, all that is only temporary. A god as powerful and prideful as him will be back one day, and when he does, hell roast you in mes like he did before, she spat, pressing harder. But even without him, youre no match for the glories of nature, so feast on my children again at your peril.


    Ghroshian wanted to apologize. They wanted to grovel and beg for forgiveness, but before they could draw another breath, the life from its sole remaining rat king was snuffed out, and its awareness of the forest dimmed to nothing.


    It was only once the rest of the swarm was safe that a righteous anger rose up inside themselves, and all of them chittered together in a chorus of fury. They did not know how, but they swore they would have their revenge. That would have to wait until they discovered who that woman was, though. She obviously knew them, even if they could not yet recall her. They would, though, and soon. Tomorrow, they would devour every book in the library if need be, to learn her name and find out what weapons could be brought to bear against her.

 Chapter 120: Last Rites

    Chapter 120: Last Rites


    Tenebroum had built the grotesqueries as shock troops and cannon fodder originally. They were a mixed group of hairy, misshapen things that resembled nothing too much as a herd of spiders made from the cast-off parts of farm animals, with just enough pieces of human left in the mix to easily bind a true soul to them.


    They were hideous things that were the exact opposite of beauty, but the Lich found its own sort of appreciation in those dull-eyed nightmare visages. Some of them contained legitimate experiments in new joint designs that might someday be used in some of its main warrior types, and others had alchemical bombs sewn into their guts so they could be violently detonated at the right moment. Most of them had but one purpose, though. To charge the enemy lines and terrify the superstitious humans before its marching waves of death washed over them.


    Thats not what they were doing today, though. Today, they were scent hounds, stampeding through the tunnels beneath Constantinal, searching for the now-defeated citysst defender, and they were howling as they went, desecrating every shrine and holy sight as they went.


    The Lich gazed on in contentment from the confines of one of its new bodies in the ruins of the grand chapel that it had just leveled in an attempt to force the slippery spirit of the city to face it, but so far, it had refused to fight with the Lich directly. That was smarter than the darkness would have expected from such a prideful godling, but it could no longer stop the Lich. These games could only slow it down for a few days or a week.


    Already, the bulk of its army was marching to points further north and east where new cities awaited their chance to be turned into graveyards, and already, all of its elite troops were gone. It did not need strength to find the hiding ce where the city''s guardian. It only needed numbers.


    Even as the drudges of the recently dead began their nightlybors of moving the citys forging equipment and the remaining corpses from the walls deep into the catbs so that this ce could be reborn as a new fortifiedboratory, the grotesqueries roamed ever wider looking for some new hiding ce to defile.


    It was only hourster when one of them was struck down in a single clean blow that gave no hints to who might have vanquished it, that Tenebroum started walking toward that point deep beneath the pce. It was possible that a mortal yet lived, but it was far more likely that the citys guardian spirit had finally been forced to act, and that was exactly what it had been waiting for.


    It walked through dank, lightless tunnels, hopeful that it would finally face a challenge. Though Tenebroum did not enjoy being bound to a single body, this one wasfortable enough. It was a gilded afraid with only two arms and two legs, but all of the joints had been improved to allow an inhuman range of motion, and each arm split at the elbow, giving it an additional set of hands to wield its shadow des or cast spells.


    That wasnt the only oddity on the overwise conventional form, though. The whole thing was made up of increasingly interesting sets of design choices that it had been working on for years. The crown that it wore contained a whole ring of eyes, removing all possible blind spots, and there had been an additional mouth stitched into the esophagus, just above the reinforced vicle that the breastte was riveted to so that it could cast those spells even as it spoke, or cast two at once if it needed it.


    It sincerely hoped that it would get to try out some of these new capabilities tonight as its metallic footsteps echoed through the halls of the ossuaries. Eventually, it discovered the vivisected remains of its servant outside of an only barely detectable secret door.


    Not sure what traps might await it, Tenebroum had but to think it, and the piles of bones that had been neatly stored behind it sprang to life. They joined together effortlessly like links of a macabre chain to create a skeleton that was too inhumanlyrge for any mortal creature, but that didnt matter to it.


    Together, its temporary giant reached around where the Lichs golden body stood on an ind of stability and cing one man-sized hand on each side of the door, it ripped the thing off the wallpletely, revealing an ornate, mosaic-encrusted chapel that was done in blue tile and silver ornaments.


    The Lich let the bones fall to the floor in a chaotic pile, and it walked forward into the hidden temple. It was likely a trap, but the Lich would be happy to fight the godling in its ce of power, so long as it could finally snap its neck and consume its soul.


    The ce was empty, though. Statues that would no doubte to life and try to kill it ringed the outer walls, but Tenebroum was unconcerned. Only a single candle on the altar lit the room, and as the Lich approached it, it flickered.


    I will drag your city down brick by brick if you do not reveal yourself, The Lich shouted. Or maybe you want to stay behind and see what it is I do to your reanimated corpse?


    The Lich vomited out a stream of pure shadows from its second mouth in an attempt to extinguish the me, but though it danced and guttered, it did not go out.


    You think that power can ovee every challenge before you, a disembodied voice rang out from somewhere in the dark. This is the folly of youth and why it will never ovee technique and mastery.


    So old age is whats made you fearful, then? The Lich called out as it looked for its opponent, who still remained frustratingly elusive.


    The other mes on the candbra began to light. It was almost as if the Lich had struck a nerve, and it pressed the point. Thirty thousand lives lost, and the unconquered city is in ruin, all because you refuse to face me.


    The candles all red to life in unison as the voice called out once again, I know what you are, just as surely as I know what battlefields are hopeless. You are the one that chose to face me here. Remember that!


    Even as the godling spoke, the statues all began to stir as Tenebroum expected, and it sighed as its four shadowed sabers materialized in its hands.


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    When it was three-on-one, the Lich easily beheaded all three opponents, though that didnt stop them from continuing to fight blindingly. When that number increased to six and then eight on one it fought with a bit more finesse and defensiveness. With four des, it could be almost everywhere at once, and though its enemies notched and pitted des held against its arcing dark magics, their stone limbs were still vulnerable, and they lost those without much difficulty.


    It was a dizzying assault that was nearly overwhelming, even for it and the spirits of great sword masters that it had enved in each of its limbs. That wasnt a problem either, though. With a few chanted words, the piles of bone just outside the room assembled themselves and charged into the room to aid their master.


    The result was chaos, but it was a well-orchestrated chaos. Individually, the skeletons stood no chance against the stone constructs, but that wasnt their role. They were there to distract the things just enough for them to y them, which was exactly what happened next.


    Tenebroum lost itself in the dance of the des. It moved from opponent to opponent for the next several minutes and shattered the heart of each of the warriors, rendering them into nothing more than gravel that copsed to the floor. Each death came with the loss of several skeletal warriors, but then, that was what pawns were for.


    So much for your vaunted skill, the Lich taunted. Nothing can match an unending supply of bodies, and as soon as you are dead, you will join my side as just another piece.


    I would rather cease to exist, the voice rang out again. This time, as it did so, the patterns on all of the colorful tiles flickered briefly and began to dance.


    Tenebroum had some hint of what was about to happen next and turned its gaze to the door, but it was already gone. The tiles were moving now, each of them, in aplex puzzle that made shapes appear and disappear almost at random. It was an architectural kaleidoscope, and for the first time in months, it felt a twinge of worry rising up inside it.


    Some of the symbols that appeared and disappeared on the flickering tiles were just random noise, but others were more meaningful. Religious and arcane symbols appeared and disappeared with concerning frequency.


    You are not the first terror that has swept across thisnd, and once you are sealed away, my city and the people of thend will rebuild, the sourceless voice dered. This time, as it spoke, it appeared in a shifting gap between the titles. For a moment, the Lich was almost certain it was just a painting or fresco, but then it moved,shing out quickly with a spear and ying three of its dwindling skeletons with a single blow.


    Tenebroum moved to follow up, but the opening was already gone. It had been reced by endless ripping geometric designs and bright blue tiles. It barely had time to get its guard up in all four directions before another blow struck out, followed by another and another.


    The thing it was fighting was the city, and as a consequence, it was the tiled chapel. It was everywhere at once. So even as the Lich parried with two of its hands, it started to attack the walls with its other weapons, trying to find a weak spot.


    The thinyer of zed ceramic shattered easily enough, but each mark was erased in moments as new tiles slid into view to rece the old ones. You are foolish, even for a hellspawn, the godling chastised as it continued to rain down blows on the Lich from all directions. You have already lost, and you do not even understand how.


    The Lich ignored the words and dispelled the des in two of its hands so it could pound through the wall to the tunnel it knewy beyond. I would leave and regroup to try again now that it better understood what it was up against.


    There was no hallway beyond the stones, though. Instead, there was an infinite yawning void that extended forever into the star-filled distance. Its mind swam with questions, but it said nothing. It would not show weakness in the face of an adversary.


    Theres no way out, its adversary said to hammer home the point more than another blow ever could. You have stepped into my inner sanctum, and as long as the city above still stands, you will never leave it.


    Tenebroum thought the im was ridiculous. It was the darkness, so the dark could never bind it. It reached out, looking to pierce the illusion and find the way out, but that darkness stretched forever, or at least, nearly so. There was simply nothing out there to find.


    It wasnt until it reached out to one of the stars in desperation that it could see the truth. Each star was another version of the tiny ind it stood on in this void, replicated forever in all directions. For a moment, a twinge of hopelessness went through the Lich as it realized it faced a magic it truly did not understand.


    That was when its opponent struck. Even as Tenebroums guard lowered slightly, ancing blow came out of nowhere. Piercing all the way through both sides of its cuirass in a single powerful strike meant to pierce its heart.


    It did not have one of those, of course. There were a few ces on the Lichs gleaming golden body that could truly harm it, but the heart was not one of them. In fact, the heart was a trap it had built long ago, though it had never nned to use it.


    As the godlings shining saber pierced Tenebroums golden breastte and shattered the ss, the ooze that had been trapped inside it lurched along the de in its bid to escape. Against a normal opponent, the purpose would be to let the evil little creation devour the de and disarm a troublesome opponent.


    In this case, though, the de was not a physical object. It was an extension of the spirits own essence. That was why it moved so quickly and surely. So, the thing that was getting devoured was not its opponent''s weapon but its opponent.


    The godling screamed in pain, and its spear vanished, but it was toote. The darkness had a taste for it now. Even as it stepped back into the maze of its tiles and vanished, the Lich could see its spirit flowing back along the ever-shifting pathways.


    If you hadnt gone for a killing blow, you might have been able to keep me here for decades or centuries, it taunted, But now you can never escape me.


    Then the Lich struck, striking right through the heart of a symbol and into the spirit lurking there, just beyond. With the first blow, the patterns slowed noticeably, but with the third, they came entirely to a stop.


    It was a clever little puzzle box you built, Teneborum chastised it, But for all your talk of wisdom and patience couldnt save you from pressing the advantage, could it?


    There was no one left to respond to its taunts, though. Its opponent was gone, and one by one, all the candles in this Byzantine cathedral winked out until it was once more in the dark where it belonged.


    Now that the city''s god was dead the title faded to dull azure nothingness and began to fall off the walls and vaulted ceilings in pieces. It would have loved to study what it was that had happened here, but it was gone now, and all that remained in its ce was a dpidated grave of another dead god.


    I will devour this one slowly, the Lich told itself as it left the room. There were many secrets to be picked from the tattered remnants of the screaming, shredded thing that it still held trapped at the center of the whirling maelstrom in its heart.

 Chapter 121: A Battle of Will

    Chapter 121: A Battle of Will


    Tenebroum was still in Constantinal, supervising the stitching together of a monstrosity in the proud, cked-out cathedral that would eventually serve as the city-factorys silent supervisor in its absence when the signal arrived in the form of a tortured scream for its ears only. For the first time, one of its probing armies had finallye under attack in a very real way.


    The timing was a shame because it had been looking forward to the final touches of this particr project ever since it had devoured the soul of the small god that had sought to thwart the darkness. It had decided that rather than having dozens of different flesh crafters working at cross purposes, it would make more sense to have a single giant corpse-surgeon using dozens of minds and hundreds of limbs in a dance of pure, efficient madness to pass the constructs from one work station to the next.


    In its dark mind, it was a work of pure beauty. Here, the ribs of the central core formed a shape that was reminiscent of a flying buttress as it arced toward the vaulted ceiling of the defiled ce, and there, at its peak, was a crown of a hundred sightless eyes syed out in every direction to observe the process. They even scattered out across the flesh that was being grafted to the ceiling to ensure that itstest creation would have a view of its work from every angle.


    Unfortunately, the Lich was forced to tear its mind away from all of that as the rm sounded in its mind as a scream of alert, as its general shattered one of the orbs that Tenebroum had given to it for this very purpose. It could not be everywhere at once, but it could make sure that its servants would be punished badly if they failed to alert it of an emergency.


    It left the ustrophobic bounds of its body and soared through the night sky as a vast sheet of shadows. Once, it had traveled as an invisible spirit, but its power was too vast now. Now, it plotted out the stars when it moved, and animals sickened and died in its wake.


    There had been attempts at knightly charges against some of the smaller tendrils of its army before, only to find that three ranks of armored zombies were only slightly softer than a stone wall. One intrepid lord had even done some real damage by soaking a field in pitch and then lighting it on fire. He had not been killed by zombies like so many of his neighbors. Instead, he was killed by ming skeletons.


    There had been no real setbacks, though. The only people who survived his armies were those who had done unspeakable things to the ones who loved and trusted them. That chorus ofmentations was growing nightly and was starting to be a noticeable source of essence in the stagnant pool that was otherwise full of the blood of its enemies.


    But someone had apparently rallied arger force. Large enough for the Paragon to decide it was an emergency worthy of its master''s attention at least.


    Tenebroum arrived half an hourter, but the battle was still underway. There, in a meadow in the midst of a forest, thousands of its zombies had been rooted in ce by nt life and were working to free themselves even as giant, ferocious wildlife battered and mauled the outermost ranks.


    It was not at all what the Lich expected. It had thought that a human kingdom might have finally gotten its act together or that some clever mages might have finally sprung some long-prepared trap. This seemed to be nature itself rising up against it, though, which meant that the gods were interfering with it once more.


    At first, Tenebroum just lingered around the edge, fearing a trap. Its warriors were in no great danger, after all, so there was no harm. Some of its centipede Calvary had been smashed to uselessness, but most of the heavy foot soldiers were made out of materials too strong for any wildlife to shatter, no matter how big.


    Indeed, the Lich looked at the packs of dire wolves that were nearly six feet tall at the shoulder with hunger more than fear. They would make more fantastic additions to its army once they had been properly ughtered, and the Lich issued orders to the whole group to do minimal damage to such precious specimens before it made any attempt to free them.


    Only then did it descend to the battlefield like a fog. The roots and vines began to shrivel as soon as its presence brushed against them, but it didnt just brush; it grabbed hold and began to travel through them, seeking to find whoever it was on the other side of the connection. The forest was wide and deep, though, and the darkness quickly lost its way amidst thebyrinth.


    Even if it couldnt find the culprit, it could punish the battlefield, and it began to leach the vitality from every shrub and branch that those circuitous paths were routed through. This took more energy than it gave in the form of decay, but it was still worth it.


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    Within minutes, the bonds that had anchored the zombies in ce and the fighting began in earnest. It was no longer a one-sided conflict with a frozen army, and the hot blood of the savage beasts quickly watered the dead nts that covered the ground.


    At some unspoken signal, a volley of arrows wasunched from the woods on either side of the conflict. The zombies that they hit came apart in a ze of light like theyd been struck by holy light or something simr, but most of the arrows missed, harmlessly striking the ground throughout the bloody meadow.


    Tenebroum surged in both directions at once, seeking to find out and y these new enemies so that it could feast on their spirits and learn all that it needed to know about the threat they posed. It almost caught them, too. It glimpsed the lithe forms and the pointed ears of the forest folk as they fled with their bows, but as it gave chase, the darkness was surprised to find itself suddenly restrained.


    For a moment, it wondered how that was possible. It had already stretched nearly a mile on either side of the ongoing battle, but it found that its vaporous form could stretch no farther. Then, it felt the tug of the arrows. They hadnt missed it. Theyd held it in ce for whatever it was that its opponent had nned next.


    The darkness grew wary. It had stumbled into a trap, but it hadnt been intended for its army. It had been intended for their master. They were only bait.


    No new opponents appeared, though, confusing it. The darkness that was Tenebroum was pinned to the ground here and now, but once its undead soldiers finished ughtering the animals that beset it, they would quickly free it, rendering the whole thing moot. Shouldnt time be of the essence, then, it wondered?


    It scanned the battlefield and all approaches through the forest repeatedly, certain that it had missed something, but it was only when the moon began to brighten that it looked up.


    The moon was a shield for the world and a weak recement for the light of Siddrims extinguished sun. It was out almost every night now, if only because the world needed it more than ever. It had never bothered Tenebroum before now. It existed, as far as the darkness understood, to protect the world from the threats that waited in the dark void that surrounded the world in the same way that Siddrim protected the world from the evils contained within. At least, thats what its library hade to believe, based upon the addition of a number of religious schrs to the choir of unwilling advisors.


    Now, though, it was turning its pale rays upon its stricken form, and as the celestial body began to glow brighter and brighter, it began to smolder and smoke in its most exposed areas. The searing pain was far less of an annoyance than the feeling that it had been baited and outsmarted by some new god it hadnt been prepared for.


    Even if it let her burn away against it for the rest of its night, that wouldnt have done much to injure it. After all, even a brightly glowing moon was shaded out by the forest, and most of its form took refuge in it. It was a pointless exercise that was more humiliating than it was dangerous.


    Still, Tenebroum redirected many of its zombies to begin pulling up the arrows that rooted its shade in ce seconds before the stars started to fall. It was not about to underestimate whatever it was that it faced any further, and it was fortunate that it did.


    Even though every arrow cost it a minion, as the spells attached to them caused the crude zombies to ignite, it was worth it. As each pinprick was removed, the darkness found that it could move a little more freely. Only a handful of the hateful arrows remained by the time the firstet fell, setting the dying forest on fire, and it was able to move well clear of both the white-blue st that was strong enough to fell ancient fir trees as well as the hot yellow mes that followed.


    Then, it was free, and Tenebroum retreated from the area to observe the strange situation. Those forces that were free to do so moved forward, dispersing as they went in an attempt to limit further damage. In the end, it was only lowly zombies that were caught in the st as fireball after fireball erupted, temporarily turning the night into day.


    Some of Tenebroums minds had built a tiny observatory, and they had noticed wandering stars, but it had never urred to it that those might be turned as weapons against it, and it vowed to better understand what might be lurking up there, out of reach in the heavens.


    The moon had already begun to fade as she turned away from the world once more after that, but even before she did so, Tenebroum knew that it had won. It had made whatever nature goddess that worked with the Lunaris suffer mightily, and in time, it would figure out how to strike at the heart of both of those enemies.


    Now, just like the elves it had only managed to glimpse, whatever divine beings were arrayed against the darkness had retreated before it. Even the fires caused by the falling stars had begun to gutter as the clouds that covered the fading moon let forth a little burst of rain. It was like the elements themselves were colluding against it, but Tenebroum was not surprised.


    It was frustrating, but waiting until it knew more was certainly the wisest course of action. Once the danger was passed, and they were moving to assault the next town in the area, it would bring up the issue with its general to see if the tactical mind had any insights into what they should do to counter future attempts.


    In the short term, the answer was clear enough. It would bring Krulmvenor to this ce and burn the entire wood to ash until nothing remained. The moon might be out of reach for the moment, but this route would be important to its attempts to move armies further east, and it would be impossible to stage another ambush if all that was left was the ashes of what used to be verdant paradise.

 Chapter 122: Fog of War

    Chapter 122: Fog of War


    After the ambush in the woods, Tenebroumid low. It was not out of fear of the moon, though, but caution. It had built arge bronze telescope with fine lens that had been made from the clearest ss in the cities that it had sacked, but other than studying the pock-marked surface of Lunariss shield as she carried it through the sky every night or the heavily filtered wandering stars that the sun had be, it learned nothing new. So, it sought to steer well clear of her and her machinations.


    Instead, it consulted its servants and studied the field, more aware than ever that it was a target. It had a world full of enemies now, and just because the sun had been shattered and the Lord of Light was no more did not mean that there werent other enemies that could y it, nor that their mortal servants and avatars could do terrible things.


    Each target was scouted extensively in a variety of ways by different sorts of agents. ckbirds looked for any signs of physical resistance from the popce, and at the same time, shades stalked the night, looking for more evidence of interference from the divine. It even listened to the pleading prayers of its growing flock for any clues about where resistance to its efforts might be starting to form.


    Sometimes, these efforts located saboteurs or even mages that were eliminated before they could create too much mischief. Devouring their souls was enough to answer many of the questions about the traps theyd nned, but those who had given the order remained a step or two removed and remained inscrutable, much to its growing annoyance.


    It was a simple thing to rip the souls from the still-warm bodies of rogues that were seeking to smash the keystone of a bridge, and it was nearly as easy to make a mage that had secreted themselves on the slopes of the Den Pass beg for death before forcing him to spill his guts about how hed hoped to bury hundreds of zombies underneath andslide, but that information did little good when they could provide no answers as to who gave the order or paid the bill.


    Only once did the saboteurs manage to strike a serious blow against it, and that was when they made a brazen attack at noon and burned down the barns that it had been sheltering 800 soldiers in away from the harsh light of the sun. The loss was greater than any single battle it had faced, and before the coals of that victory had grown cool to the touch, Tenebroum responded by snuffing out every life within fifty miles to make sure that word of the tactic would not spread and undermine its disparate forces.


    Even those subjects that had otherwise proven themselves loyal to the darkness over thest few months were in. It simply wasnt worth the risk that even one person might survive long enough to share such a dangerous idea. After that, though, it tried to limit its reliance on wooden buildings, and whenever possible, it stationed its troops in caverns, fortresses, and mines.


    All these incidentsbined to give Tenebroum pause, and after extensive reflection on the subject, it decided that it had be too predictable. For too long, it had operated with the advantage of surprise, but now even a blind man could see what it was up to. All of its movement had been in a single direction and all. Of its strongest forces were part of a single army, and whoever was watching it from a distance had noticed that, too.


    Was that the influence of the light, it wondered? Was there too much order in its soul now? While the delegation to lesser servants for logistical and tactical purposes had been a great boon, Teneborum was forced to concede that it was entirely possible that it had be too straightforward over thest year. So, it decided to muddy the waters. It dispatched lightning raids to the north and west and had Krulmvenor burn an entirely unrted woods to the ground in case it was sending his fiery servant into a trap.


    For the next month, the darkness upset all of its ns. Not because they werent correct, but because correct was predictable. That was the true lesson here. It had optimized its general to such an extent that a clever opponent could guess what it would do next. Excessive perfection was not a defect it had previously considered, and Tenebroum considered retiring its Paragon for a time until it could better understand the problem but decided against it.


    It was too valuable a tool, and with so many warriors streaming under the mountain toward the front every day, the ability to delegate the fighting to someone else was vital to the Lich. Instead, it opted to do something that none of its enemies might expect: it sent envoys of peace to every kingdom that was still standing with the same message: swear fealty to the rising shadow, and you may yet live.


    Sometimes, these messengers took the form of a living person and other times, the messenger was a construct custom-built for that purpose. Living messengers were usually either one of the fanatic priests who listened to Verdenins increasingly unhinged sermons throwing off the chains of the flesh in rapt joy or a person from one of the viges that its dead armies had spared within the same domain.


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    While there was never a shortage of thetter, it sometimes amused the Lich topel one of them to make the offer. It knew precisely what would happen to the trembling man or woman that dutifully went to their Lords court to make the terrible offer on its behalf, almost as much as it amused the darkness to burn their vige down and leave them alive long enough to watch if they refused.


    These poor souls were almost universally executed on the spot for consorting with evil, proving that the dead were a better option. At first, Tenebroum sent ghosts like his favorite bard with these d tidings, but they were, unfortunately, able to extract very little in the way of retribution because of their nonphysical nature.


    Eventually, Tenebroum started sending skulls to every town and keep days or weeks ahead of its armies. They were simple, custom constructs with a single purpose: they delivered the Lichs terms, and if those terms were rejected, then they would shriek in outrage, burst into mes, and explode with enough violence that everyone in the room would be shredded by bone shrapnel before they could escape.


    The Lich enjoyed that part so much that it ordered siege engines built just for firing the things at fortified structures. There were many ways to scare mortals half to death and make their essence more ptable for its consumption, but few of them were quite so enjoyable as ming skulls soaring through the air moments before their death.


    Eventually, the Counts and Barons in the path of its armies came to fear those death''s heads, and they called them almost as much as the armies themselves because once they were delivered, the fate of the recipient was sealed.


    In the past, one might be able to refuse it and live for a week or two while its soldiers moved into position. An enterprising Lord might even flee east and try to stay ahead of the armies of death. Now, though, refusing the Lichs terms came with a very personal cost.


    Not that they were particrly onerous. All that it demanded was 10% of the living, the Lords weight in gold and silver, and an oath of eternal allegiance to reject the gods of light and serve the dark. Surprisingly, few were willing to make that deal, though. Even the slenderest of lords seemed willing to risk everyone''s lives for the sake of a few coins.


    It didnt matter to the Lich that its entreaties were rejected. All that mattered was the division and fear it sowed. How could someone hope to second guess where it was or what it would do next toy another trap when it seemed that its forces might make peace or strike out in fresh conflict in any direction at once.


    Besides, Tenebroum didnt want the fealty of anyone who didnt have those dark, murderous impulses. Disloyal servants would make for better zombies or drudges than they would living, breathing humans that could cause mischief.


    This game upied it for a time, and as victory after victory stacked up, a few noblemen like Count Wardrick and Duke Elbin sued for peace. The darkness only epted their offers because it knew just how many skeletons were already in their closets, of course, but it was sufficiently shocking news to echo across the continent and put its opponents on their back foot.


    When the Lichs forces entirely skipped their kingdoms though and followed through on its pledge of peace, the floodgates opened. Suddenly, every Lord wanted to swear their allegiance to the dark. Tenebroum saw through this too, or at least its puppeteer did. It understood human nature better than any true human, and it could see which groups were ying for time and which sought to position their armies for a stronger counter-attack in the read of the undead army.


    They were foolish thoughts since armies of the deadcked supply lines in the traditional sense, but even at the end of the world, the powers that be sought thefort of the familiar rules of war, and they died to a man. Not a single one of those vipers was allowed to know peace or even given an audience. In fact, the deathheads disappeared altogether after that. Now that its opponents expected it to seek peace, it sought only war once more.


    Why shouldnt it? Peace had been an interesting diversion, but the darkness had tens of thousands of subjects in itsnds now, but corpses outnumbered the living at least five to one, and that ratio only grew by the day.


    It was an interesting calculus. Dead could not betray it, but they were fueled by essence. Every day, it burned wholekes of the stuff and replenished them through cruelty and murder. Living subjects, on the other hand, provided essence, but at the cost that they were not direct pawns for the Lich to control. There was an argument to be made that it should leave as many alive as it could and make peace with anyone who earnestly wanted it, but that seemed unwise.


    No, the darkness whispered to its far-flung council. We have only one offer of peace left, and we must save that for the King after all hope was lost.


    That wouldnt be too much longer, of course. There were still a fewrge armies, and the mages seemed to be up to something from their growing fortress on the banks of the Oroza, but in terms of defenses, there was simply nothing to stand in its way for hundreds of miles.


    So, while its general and its copies yed at war, growing ever more skilled at striking hard targets with small groups of death knights and maneuvering therger blocks of troops in the field to optimal positions for the battles that would follow, the Lich began work on yet another new project. This time, it would make a messenger worthy of a King and see what sort of reception it received at court.


    Tenebroum had made many things as deadly as possible, and it had made even more creatures that were optimized for efficiency. It had never attempted to make a construct that was as beautiful as possible, and that, it decided, would be a more interesting project than whatever oue came of its newest toy.

 Chapter 123: Payback

    Chapter 123: Payback


    As he walked through the woods, Krulmvenor didnt dare think about how close the Lich hade to being murdered on this very spot. That wasnt because the thought made him ufortable, though. It was because it made his heart sing like nothing had in years.


    Now that he had a skull full of goblins, keep secrets bordered on impossible, so it was better simply not to think at all. In that sense, he had finally be the perfect automaton that the Lich had wanted him to be for all these years. He didnt think about who he killed or why he did it. He didnt think about all those dwarves he had burned alive. He certainly didnt think about Oroza and how she had finally managed to slip the chains of the Lichsmands.


    All he thought about was the next goal, and todays goal was a simple one: to burn this forest and everything in it to ashes. He didnt start that immediately, though. Though that would have been satisfying. Instead, he wandered through the moonlit des, hoping to attract some sort of attention from the locals.


    Each time some small beast like a fox or an owl flickered across his path, the voices in his head would open up in a hungry chorus of baying and obscenities. For a moment, his only desire in life was to run the thing down and rip it to bloody shreds, but he resisted. He was here for bigger game.


    Kills it! a small chorus of goblins screeched.


    Feed us! another shouted over a gibbering, unintelligible din of madness.


    Krulmvenor struggled for a moment to retain control. While he moved through the forest, he kept the blue mes that were his tortured soul at the very minimum. The only visible fires were those that burned in his eyes. Everything else stayed bottled up inside his bones, where he was filled with ever-burning coals and rage instead of marrow.


    He could feel strange magics here. The shadows were full of them, though they were not the dark sorceries of his master nor anything to do with mes or other elements that he had a passing knowledge of. They were thinner than that; they were insubstantial, like cobwebs or the oil sheen upon still waters.


    It could very well be a trap, Krulmvenor realized. Behind these illusions, or whatever they were, there might be whole armies waiting in ambush just beyond what he could see. He didnt care, though. He weed death, and that was even true when he was still rtively whole. Each time the Lich sent Krulmvenor against a new opponent, he hoped that the darkness would finally overreach and that such an enemy would be hisst.


    Once he broke apart into dozens of lesser versions of himself, he didnt care what happened to himself at all. This didnt make him brave. There was no bravery left in his hollow metal bones. He was filled only with fire and madness now. He would have felt sorry for himself about it if he still had the privacy for self-pity.


    When the first arrow finally came at him, it was much too quick for him to dodge. It streaked through the night, leaving a trail of white fire in its wake, but just before it hit his skull and they saw whether its enchantments or the Lichs forges were stronger, he ruptured, splitting into two. Each version of him was now a little to either side of the arrow, and it passed harmlessly between them before embedding in a nearby tree, where it exploded in a shower of sparks.


    Maybe this will finally be the end, both versions of himself thought hopefully as they charged into the woods after their unseen target. Neither of them ran directly where they thought it would be. Instead, one version of the fire godling ran wide to the left, and the other ran wide to the right. More arrows came. Enough to know for certain that there was more than one of his opponents. Some even found their mark, and the copy that they stuck was either mangled or eliminated.


    Most of the arrows missed their ever-multiplying targets, even though each division made Krulmvenors fires glow brighter each time, and soon the woods were full of flickering blue lights that might have looked like will-o-wisps to anyone watching the scene y out. The trees didnt begin to burn, though, not until Krulmvenor had fully surrounded his quarry.


    Thinking was harder now, but the n was not aplex one. Surround the enemy so they couldnt escape, then burn them alive. This was where the godling gave in to the dark voices that overwhelmed it somewhere around twenty different minds and bodies. This was when they began to cackle out loud in his voice instead of simply shouting obscenities in his head.


    No escape left for you! one shouted.


    We can smell your fear! another one yelled from somewhere not so far away.


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    Then, at an unseen signal, as soon as eighty-something copies of himpleted the nearly quarter-mile loop, they all red to life and began to burn with the unearthly heat theyd wanted to do for so long. By then, the godlings mind was lost. Each version of it held only a single sliver of sanity that was overshadowed by the gibbering madness that boiled up inside it.


    These goblins had never tasted elves if thats indeed what they were hunting, but they were hungry to sample them, and each lurching steel form ran at full speed, eager to beat out all the other versions of itself to be the first to taste the warm flesh of their enemies. While they moved, the forest lit up behind them in a curtain of me.


    There would be no escape in that direction. Not for anything of flesh and blood, at least.


    The first instance of Krulmvenor arrived just in time to see thest of the elves disappear through the shimmering, mercury veil of some strange new portal magi. It immediately felt a pressure in its mind as the Lich moved forward to investigate it, but before either of them could do much more than glimpse it, the magic faded, leaving only the hoary old oak behind and an empty tree hollow that no seemed bereft of magic.


    There were more fire godlings in that burning d now, and all of them advanced on that giant tree, driven to find the path that their meal had used to escape. For the original version of Krulmvenor, so much fire would have been enough, but the thing that he had be craved ughter even more than the ashes that he left in his wake.


    Theyd never get the chance to find out more. Even as the first half dozen copies reached the tree and watched the spindly cobweb enchantments burn away to reveal the woods were alive with any number of other dangers, they knew this would not y out as they were sure that it would only moments before.


    The hunters had be the hunted. The trap theyd sought to spring on their enemies had be a trap of its own. There were too many Krulmvenors left to care about that, though. Each giant beast and thorned dryad sprung from their hiding ce, and the field of battle became ever more crowded.


    Suddenly, wooden talons and powerful jaws were tested against the steel that bound the many molten fragments of Krulmvenors soul, but in almost all cases, they were found wanting. Even bears and dire wolvescked the strength to do much more than dent skulls or bend bones, and every one of them was immensely and enjoyably mmable.


    Soon, the whole, smokey section of the forest spells of burning meat, but that was only the warm-up act for the giant oak. It began to move as soon as a few versions of Krulmvenor approached it, but before they could reach it, the thing came to life as a sort of tree giant and smashed three of him to pieces with its two-foot-thick limbs.


    <em>Treant,</em> the word came to mind. It was supplied by the Lich because he had never heard it before. Perhaps shes even a godling, the Lich whispered. Capture it if you can; kill it if you must. Then it was gone again, leaving its pack of hunting dogs alone to fight the thirty-foot-tall giant.


    You tread on hallowed ground, monster! the tree boomed in a voice that sounded like wind roaring through branches. This will be the grave of all who are foolish enough to invade my domain!


    Krulmvenor wouldnt have bothered to answer its foe intelligently, even if it had been capable of such a thing. Instead, it hurled insults as much as fire, as the dozens of small battles and depravities were forgotten in favor of the new challenge. The goblins that were in the driver''s seat now werent much more loyal to the Lich that had woven and bound their wretched souls than Krulmvenor was, but they didnt need to be. They craved violence, and a giant that could crush their rigid steel bodies like they were nothing but dried leaves was nothing if not violent.


    I have beaten you once, and I shall do so again! she screeched.


    The longer the tree fought against them, and the more it manifested, the more it shaped itself to resemble a giant woman with thick, rough bark instead of skin and leaves and vines for hair. She might have eleven been beautiful if she wasnt on fire.


    The old wood was not yet burning, but the leaves had already flown apart into ashes, and the bark was smoldering. Even awash in curtains of blue me, the oaken monster still raged. Every blow and swipe caused at least one version of Krulmvenor to wink out of existence, and as the total number of its copies drifted down somewhere below 100, the diffuse consciousness that was the core of its mind found itself rooting for its failure almost as much as its victory.


    Slowly, her cries of defiance morphed into cries of pain. The fire godling understood that all too well. Some small distant point of hope that she managed to die properly at least and that no trace of her was left behind for the Lich to study and corrupt because, to his eyes, it was looking less and less likely that she was going to win.


    As strong as the behemoth was and as many steel goblins as it shattered, it could not bear the heat of the Lichs unfire for more than a couple of minutes. Soon, wood was splitting as sap boiled into steam, and the wooden goddess was screaming in pain as much as rage as his strikes got slower and slower. After two minutes, she scarcely had the speed to connect her terrible blows with her agile tormentors, and after five, as she could do was make weak warding gestures as the goblins used metal talons to dig deeper and deeper into the veins of charred wood that prated almost all the way to her core.


    It wasnt until she stopped movingpletely, and the entire grove had been reduced to a charred ruin, that the sixty-eight copies of Krulmvenor spread out into the night. Freed of their chains, they spread out into the dark of the woods, looking to kill and burn.


    They had no idea if they would find the elves or even other opponents worth fighting. They didnt care. They only wanted to maim and destroy, and Krulmvenor had no choice but to let them. Hed long ago lost control of the mob, and now he was just along for the ride as waves of blue fire beard throughout the forest in all directions, recing what should have been theing dawn in a few hours with an endless inferno.

 Chapter 124: The Greater Good

    Chapter 124: The Greater Good


    When the ebony carriage rolled through the gates while thest sun was still high in the sky, no one thought to stop it or inquire as to the business of the vehicles sole upant. Why should they? The undead forces that assailed thend were utterly inhuman, and they only ever struck in the dark of night. They didnt ride into town in an borate carriage pulled by four pale horses.


    Tenebroum had worked hard to make the masses of humanity believe that any light at all was enough to keep them safe, but the thin blue light of the first sun''s dawn and the pale white of the fourth sun was only enough to keep the shadows, and other fragile, slender abominations at bay, and this creature had been custom-built to endure the light and all the scrutiny that came with it.


    The carriage had beencquered until its deep ck surfaces were practically a mirror, and its gilded ornaments were almost enough to make it look like a cheerful affair. The aura of wealth that it gave off was second only to the aura of fear that radiated from it. Though it was not obviously evil in any way, everyone gave the coach and the team that pulled it wide berth, and neither man nor beast could bear to bar its path for long.


    The animals that might have given the citizens of the city early warning were in short supply, though. The dogs had long been eaten or released into the wild to forage for themselves, and other horses and oxen were already in short supply. Because of the grinding war of attrition that was being waged to the northwest, theyd already been seized by the military.


    Only those with the sight might have been able to glimpse what the thing truly was and see the plume of ashen darkness that it left in its wake. The only old woman who did glimpse that shocking sight died of a heart attack before she could warn anyone. No matter how polished and pretty evil was made, it was still evil, and nothing could hide that fact.


    When it pulled up in front of the pce steps, most people were stillrgely unaware of the danger that they faced. They didnt know that the horses had rusted skeletons beneath the immactely bleached hides or that inside their mouths were the charred teeth of dire wolves and that the souls that upied them longed to be let off the chain more than anything. They also didnt know that both the nd-faced footman and the sole upant had breathed theirst breaths months before.


    All anyone might say, beyond the feeling of disquiet that everyone felt, was that the whole thing had a strange odor, which was equal part alchemical preservatives and pleasantly scented substances designed to mask the decay.


    The coachman descended stiffly from his perch atop the carriage. That wasnt its fault. It was because the subdermal armor ting and the extra pair of arms folded under the rib cage to make it seem like nothing but a bear-human under its loose, rubbery skin made movement difficult.


    If it was forced to shed that illusion of normalcy to defend its charge, it would take only moments for its extra limbs to unfold and for its retracted ws to extend. Only then would it be the nightmarish reaper it had been created to be. That wouldnt happen until the Lichs very kind offer was rejected, though, and itstest emissary had been spurned.


    The Voice of Reason was by far the most beautiful construct the Lichs minions had ever built, and as she exited the door, hiked her ck skirts, and began to walk toward the front door, the only hints that she might be anything besides a beautiful woman was the strange perfume she left in her wake, and her weight.


    The Voice weighed twice as much as a strong man due to the alloys that strengthened her construction and therge amount of porcin that made up her body. That porcin was harvested from the thick yyer of what had once been the swamp, so she would belong to it more than perhaps any other servant it had ever crafted.


    The mors that made that perfect porcin skin of her hands and face look like anything other than a beautiful woman flickered slightly in direct sunlight before stabilizing. Even if they had failed, though, she would still have been an inhuman beauty.


    Tenebroum did not understand desire or attraction, but it had servants who did, and each of them swore she was as perfect as a wind-up doll could get. With a perfectly symmetrical figure, carefully polished sapphire eyes, and hair of literal spun gold, she was a storybook creature, and she was here with a simple message: surrender and swear fealty to the darkness encroaching on yournds or die screaming.


    . . .


    She wouldnt put it in quite so many words, of course. She would never do anything so impolitic. She smiled slightly, blushed when appropriate, and curtsied whenever necessary as she spoke first with the doorman, then the chambein, and finally the guards. Conversation by conversation, she slowly worked her way into court, where the runes on the throne shed a warning before she even got close to the ornaments that had been installed into the gilded wood so long ago that people almost forgotten their meaning when they red to violent red life.


    With the smallest gesture, King Borum''s honor guard stepped between her and the throne and leveled their halberds at the slight woman, and his court wizard tried not to cower too much behind the imposing chair while he whispered into his Kings ear.


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    The Voice stopped just shy of the polearms and smiled. Thank you for agreeing to meet with me, your Majesty, she said, curtsying so deeply that the spike on the closest weapon was only inches from her eye.


    She was not made forbat, but depending on how powerful the wizard was, she could probably have killed the King. That would have been unspeakably rude, though. Instead, she stood there full of poise in the face of steel and looked around the room. The grand hall of the Kings Court was an impressive thing, with standing room for hundreds.


    On the walls above the heads of both the King and onlookers were venerable war trophies from all the Kingdom of Hallens victories of ages past. Torn banners and broken shieldspeted for ces of honor with shatterednces, and even the preserved heads of monsters made their appearance here and there.


    Those details only added to the atmosphere of the whispering nobles and the tense warriors just ahead of her.


    Theres no need for violence, the Voice said, I havee here merely to give you an offer from my Lord.


    And who is your Lord? King Borum asked with a voice that was almostpletely free of any quavering.


    Why, you already know that, your Majesty, she smiled, I serve the darkness, and so can you, if you like.


    A hush fell over the room with those simple words, and several noblewomen lining the gallery fainted.


    All of you can, she pledged in a cheery voice. Let us end this constant bloodshed together and find a solution that all of us will benefit from.


    And if I prefer to take your life instead? The King demanded, raising his voice. Weve heard the cost thates with your peace. What makes you think you want any part of it?


    Because the vast army you raise is full of husbands and fathers? she answered his question with a question. Do all of them really need to die? Do all of you really need to die for nothing when there are so many other lives that


    Is that a threat? King Borum tried to sound wrathful there. It might have worked if he hadnt squeaked at the beginning.


    My Lord does not make threats, she said sweetly. He offers deals that benefit both parties. You know well that some of your neighbors have spared themselves bloody battles already.


    As she spoke, she produced a scroll seemingly from nowhere, almost getting stabbed for the effort as one of the guards almost attacked her because he thought she was drawing a weapon. Thisys out the specifics of the proposal, the Voice of Reason said in a strained tone as she struggled to avoid the near act of war that had just happened. Any of the Lichs other servants would have ripped the mans head off by now, and part of her wanted to, but she resisted. But the short answer is this: you have too many people and not enough food to survive this winter, so make a trade with us and spare yourself the cost of a bloody war on top of all the rest. We will take the beggars than clog your streets and the thieves that fill your prisons, and all we ask in return is that


    You ask us to sacrifice our subject for a coward''s peace, the King shouted. This time, there was real fire in his voice. But, for the sake of amenity and as governed by the rules of hospitality, I will read your proposal and discuss it with my privy council before we make any official ruling on such a thing.


    She smiled ruefully at that while the courtier came forward to collect the parchment, and the guards in front of her lowered their weapons a touch. As long as there was talking, things were not likely to escte, which was to the good as far as she was concerned.


    Hedging his bets was as close as shed expected him toe to saying yes anyway. To give into the demands at the very first contact would seem like cowardice, and it would not sit well with the nobles to seem afraid of what wasing, especially when you were terrified.


    As you say, your Majesty. My Lord has bid me to give you a fortnight to speak of such things. I shall return then for your answer. She said, giving the throne another deep curtsy. Thank you for granting me such a speedy audience. I look forward to a fruitful rtionship in our future.


    Then she whirled and began to retreat from the room, and the only sound of her departure was the clicking of her heels against tiles as she left the room. No one standing there failed to notice that she didnt get permission to leave, and no one tried to stop her either.


    She already had one, though. If they epted the darknesss offer, then thestrge human Kingdom in the region would be defanged, leaving its forces free to pursue other targets. If they rejected them, then they would spend the next winter squabbling amongst themselves while they slowly starved to death.


    In time, all would belong to the darkness whether they wanted to or not, but for now, it would be helpful to continue to make inroads among the living. As far as she was concerned, that had many advantages.


    They did not hurt you? the coachman asked, slurring his words.


    No, she said, noting the disappointment on its otherwise emotionless face.


    That was the biggest shame of this trip, she decided. The Lich paired two servants together with mutually exclusive goals. Her protector could only ever be what he was meant to be if she failed in her mission, in the same way, that the toxic, infectious bomb that sat under the seat of her carriage would only ever detonate and unleash a new gue on this city when they were attacked.


    As they began to ride toward the front gate in the growing darkness, she wondered if the nobles who watched her speak realized how close theyde to meeting their own messy ends.


    <em>Would more of them drown in their own blood or their own phlegm? </em>She wondered for a moment before deciding it didnt matter. The loyal would live, and the disloyal would die and be put to better use.

 Chapter 125: For the Best Reasons

    Chapter 125: For the Best Reasons


    Hed done them the kindness of meeting with them before his meeting with the Dukes and Earlster that evening. Princess Trianna should have been grateful for that, but she knew that hed already made up his mind and that the decision was the wrong one.


    There was nothing that said he had to meet with his wife and daughters to exin the grave news to them. Oh, he tried to put a brave face on it. This will avoid the war weve been building toward for some time, he assured them as he gestured to the scroll hed just exined to them. She wouldnt have the chance to read it, of course, but she didnt want to. She might not have the sight, but she could feel the evil radiating from that hateful treaty. Tens of thousands of lives will be saved, and


    And thousands of souls will be damned! her mother blurted out, unable to suppress the outrage anymore. Honestly, Henry, if you try to round up the beggars, theyll burn the whole city down beneath us! Are you sure youve thought this through?


    Her father, King Borum, was used to these sorts of interruptions and only sighed. Though her mother never said anything to embarrass the King in public, in private, they argued frequently about a whole range of issues. Sometimes, she would even seed in changing his mind, but the Princess could see by the twitching muscles of his clenched jaw that today would not be one of those days.


    Theres an army of death marching toward us, Glorena, he sighed. At first, I didnt believe it, either. Not when my best spies reported it. Not even after the sun shattered, but its true. The dead are marching, the Gods have turned their backs on us, and there are precious few fortresses between here and the enemy. What would you have me do?


    Well, at least youre being honest about it now, her mother growled. She hated being lied to, and the King had lied to all of them for months. The first rumors had begun to circte more than half a year ago, but in each instance, her father had downyed them.


    No, theres not a waring.


    Yes, theres a war in the west, but theres no need to raise an army.


    Yes, Im raising an army, but it''s only a small one, and we shouldnt need to field it.


    War is unavoidable, but its against flesh and blood. Well be fighting the men of Harrow and Kellor, not fiends from the pit.


    At every step, hed lied to them and to the people, admitting as little as he could reasonably expect to get away with while he and his generals had whispered and nned: the dead had risen and were marching across the world, scourging whole kingdoms in their path.


    There were some disputes about where this started. Some said theye from a backwater county in the South and that Siddrimar had been the first casualty. Others insisted they came from the West in the low kingdoms. Both options were equally nonsensical, of course; nothing ever happened in the South, and the West was full of fractious feuding lords that warred with each other.


    If we do as they say, and we send them those men, father, Princess Trianna said finally in a lul in the conversation. Whats to stop them from asking for more and more after that?


    The steel of our des and the strength of our walls, he said firmly. She knew that was a lie, though. Everyone did. Constantinal had fallen. The Undefeated City had been defeated.


    <em>If they fell, then what chance do we have? </em>She wondered to herself. Princess Trianna said nothing, though. She was rarely given the sametitude that her mother was. A wife might criticize a husband if done correctly, but it was a daughters role to be dutiful and supportive.


    While her father exined why this was the only way to her mother for the third time to try to get a blessing that simply wasnt going toe, she sat there, growing cold as she realized the truth: a few hundred beggars and criminals might buy peace for a season, or a year, but such a price would have to be paid whenever it was demanded of them. They would starve just as the beggars were now, and when they were too weak to defend themselves, the rest of them that sheltered behind the walls of Rahkin would join the rest of their fellows who had long since been given away in an attempt to secure peace.


    She didnt imagine that anything good would happen to anyone who ended up in the hands of their enemy, be they beggars or kings, and slowly, her heart hardened.


    <em>Its just like my dreams, </em>she told herself as the thought slowly dawned on her.


    The Princess might be sitting there smiling ndly and nodding at appropriate moments like her brothers, but in her head, she was a thousand miles away. She could see her father sitting there on his throne, plump andfortable, as he traded every citizen and every brick for one more day of life andfort.


    It chilled her to the bone and froze her smile in ce even more than the evil scroll that sat in her fathersp. Would he trade them away, too? Would he feed his own wife and daughters to the darkness, hoping that it would sate the darkness?


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    This was a terrifying question that ate at her all afternoon, long after their little family meeting had ended. In the end, it was that, even more than her concern for her subjects, that made her act. Her father said that she got her impetuousness from her mother, but today, Princess Trianna had noints about that. She got her sense of right and wrong from her, too, it would seem.


    Weve gone from theres no waring to it''s only the beggars and the criminals in less than a year, she sighed as she clutched the beat-up old doll on herp. She would have preferred to have her cat to stroke, but Poppet had gone missing months ago, and though she would love to me her father for her disappearance as well, it was just as likely that shed met the wrong man while shed been out hunting rats. Where will we be by next year and the year after? Its only the Garden District? Its only your sisters?


    Looking around the threadbare thing that her life had be, it was hard to believe that her choice would be more of this. Her clothes were patched, her windows were perpetually shuttered, and there were almost never fresh flowers to brighten the ce up. Somehow, in spite of that, though, she would rather live the rest of her life like this than see a return to prosperity if the price was measured in lives.


    Paradoxically, that meant that her father was going to have to die by her hand. Her brothers, too.


    <em>Does that make me just the same as him? </em>She wondered. She had no answers. She prayed to Lunaris about it but received neither wisdom nor peace as she contemted murder. So, reluctantly, she pulled the small bottle of liquor shed hidden under her bed and stared at it.


    By all appearances, it was just an amber bottle of plum brandy, but she knew exactly how adulterated and toxic it was. She should. Shed made it herself when things had started to get bad this past summer. Given the growing rat problem in the city, poison was one of the few substances that was still easy toe by. It was certainly easier to gather a few poison fruits from the corners of the dining hall than it was to get deserts or enough cloth to make a new dress.


    Shed intended for it to be a peaceful way for her to escape the worst if the rumors of the living dead proved to be true. Now, it was a strychnineced death sentence for any who would drink it, and she was sure that in the nned meeting, drinks would flow freely as those men struggled with the terrible things they were about to do.


    Just as she struggled with her own terrible deeds, she considered wryly. More than anything, Trianna wanted to put this off for another day or another year, but she couldnt. Realistically, she only had an hour or two left to act. After that, the die would be cast, and they would find themselves in alliance with the devils of the pit.


    This is what the Gods would want, she whispered herself. Siddrim taught us this. All who seek to ally with evil or cate them are evil themselves.


    It was with those words that she finally forced herself to move. The Princess made no attempt to sneak or skulk; that would have only attracted more attention. Instead, she secreted the bottle in a handbag and then began to wander around the castle, saying hello to every guard and servant she came across and asking them about their day.


    During all that time, no one noticed her little side trip into her fathers study, and no one was there to see it when she ced that bottle in the top drawer of his desk. She would pray that her brothers were spared the terrible fate shed just created, but if they were not, she knew they would be casualties in a righteous cause.


    The light is worth dying for, she whispered to herself that night like a mantra as shey sleeplessly in bed until the screams started just before dinner.


    Any rumors that my husband nned to ally with these fiends is nothing but pure nder, her mother said at the funeral. Her face was tear-streaked, but her voice was stronger than it had any right to be. The evil that we fight knew that he would never bend, and they wormed some agent of darkness into the very heart of our Kingdom, but we shall root it out!


    There was a cheer at that, forcing Queen Borum to stop speaking for a moment as she addressed the masses from the balcony.


    My husband didnt deserve this end, she said finally when the crowd died down before she went on to name a long list of honors and achievements that he did.


    Her mother went on to lionize her father at length, calling him A hero who would never bend the knee to the dark, even though they both knew he wasnt and that the army would bring them all the vengeance they craved soon.


    Princess Trianna stood there at her right hand but said nothing. Her mother would never find the culprit because she wasnt even looking at her daughter. They were questioning the maids and torturing likely suspects, but not one person had so much as asked Trianna if shed done this terrible thing.


    If they had, she might have confessed on the spot. Despite the fact that she was certain it was the right thing to do, the whole ordeal ate at her. Fourteen people were dead, and though the healers had been called swiftly, there was little theyd been able to do. The King, his Lord General, both of her brothers and ten different Dukes and Earls. It had been a horrific discovery, and the entire Kingdom was in mourning.


    It was only once all that was done that she announced that she would be assuming the throne and was already searching amongst the nobility for the right man to be the new Lord General. There had been Queens who ruled before, but they knew that would not be a popr move. In time, she would be forced by the gentry to remarry, but for now, during the mourning period, everyone would give her a free hand where vengeance and defense were concerned.


    Tears cascaded silently down Princess Triannas cheeks as she looked at the blue-skinned bodies that had beenid in state beneath them, just inside the gates of the castle so that the people could see what had be of their King. It was terrible, and she couldnt stop the tears froming, even as she reminded herself that it was better than the alternative. Fourteen souls would be interred in peace instead of hundreds that would have been devoured and made to serve the dark.


    She would just have to find some way to deal with it because as awful as all this was, it was still better than the deal theyd been offered.

 Chapter 126: Wall of Stone

    Chapter 126: Wall of Stone


    Tenebroums armies had only just reached the twin fortresses of Banath and were pausing to gauge King Borums response to its generous terms when its carriage was detonated in front of the city gates of Rahkin without warning. One moment, The Voice of Reason had been riding sedately toward the open gate, and the guards seemed to have no interest in baring her way, and then next, fire arced out from a pair of mages on the castle wall, turning its beautiful carriage into an inferno.


    The Lich was outraged by this turn of events but not so wroth that it turned away from whatever was going to happen next. The fire was destructive, but the tank of noxious gases that held its new gue in the bowls of that glossy vehicle was even more so. Though the mes likely destroyed all the infectious magic they possessed, it still took some joy in the fireball that expanded outward in a second,rger explosion that engulfed a dozen guards as the explosion became an eruption of liquid me.


    The fire melted away the flesh of the forms the horses and the carriage driver, crisping them in the preservative oils that had been used to keep them looking natural. So, the things that strode out of the fire looking for vengeance looked even more inhuman than they otherwise might have. Each of them strode out of the smoldering wreckage to make sure that those who had done this did not live to regret it.


    First came the four horses, or the things that had been disguised as horses. Those skins had only hidden the predators thaty beneath, and now the long-legged dire wolves revealed themselves. Their legs stayed long, but tier spines lengthened, and their ws extended as they charged the main gate. The results were as bloody as they were terrifying.


    The men that had been spared the fire were caughtpletely off guard by the vering beasts of bone and steel as they darted forward and grabbed those closest to the violence in the giant mouths. They shook their prey like rag dolls, crushing bones, and snapping spines before releasing the corpse and moving on to the next target.


    Amidst all the screams, no one noticed what happened to the other two upants. The ripper dyed a moment in attacking as its extra arms finally unfolded, and it could, atst, do what it had been made to do. It ignored the guards and ran straight for the wall, where it started to climb like a giant, six-legged insect.


    Its task was just as simple and straightforward as that of the wolves. It existed to kill, but its capabilities were greater, and its targets were of a higher priority. The mages didnt even notice it until it was already halfway up the forty-foot walls. All the lightning and fire that they rained down on it in an effort to kill it did more damage to the stone than it did to the Lichs revenge.


    It would not be dissuaded in its task, and by the time it reached the first mage, it still had 3 arms and a heart full of rage as it ripped the young woman to pieces. Only the intervention of three guards with pikes dyed it long enough to allow the second mage, a graybeard, to flee down the rampart in panic. Those extra few minutes of life he might yet have cost everyone else their lives, though.


    Pikes and spears were terrible weapons with which to face the undead. Without the cross guard of a partisan or coresque, there was nothing to stop it from searching up the shaft and ripping the head off the wielder. Even a boar-hunting spear would have been a better choice and told Tenebroum exactly how far those pitiful fools were from being ready. If they wanted a war, it would give them one, and instead of taking their dregs as payment, it would im everyst life in Rahkin.


    As everyone else fought for their lives, The Voice of Reason finally made her way from the carriage and walked away from the city with all the dignity that her broken form could muster. She was missing her left arm at the elbow, and most of her hair of, spun gold, had melted together into a single lopsided lump that clung to her scalp.


    Her entourage was so effective that no one watched her cracked, soot-covered form walk away from the city as fast as she was able. All she had to do was hide until nightfall, and someone woulde for her. Until then, she was a broken toy that would have to think about how she might do better in the future. The Lich might allow her to try to mediate simr conflicts again in the future, but repeated failures would be rewarded only with being scrapped and turned into a drudge or worse.


    . . .


    Tenebroum turned its attention from its servant''s failures and toward the battle that was already starting here. Behind it, to the west,y a series of blood-soaked kingdoms they had already marched through. There, the only towns and viges that were left standing were those that it had chosen to spare. A number of ruined castles dotted its path, and though there were still a few holdouts in the kingdoms to the north, the forces of darkness had ripped through the whole area already like a scythe.


    Now, there was only one pass separating it from the Kingdom of Hallen and the areas that had been denied it for so long by the intervention of the mages of Abended, the Siddrimites, and the Goddess Oroza. It had been forced to dig a tunnel all the way through a mountain range, war with the dwarves in the deeps, and fight through half a dozen smaller kingdoms barely worth the name to reach here, but it had done so. It was only perhaps a hundred miles north of Abenend now but on the wrong side of the Woden Spine.


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    All it needed to do was cross this pass, and to do that, only two fortresses stood in its way. For better or worse, though, they were some of the toughest defensive structures on the whole continent. Its General, Paragon, had argued that they should simply be bypassed via increased tunnel digging and dealt with at ater date or simply starve out, but Tenebroum would not hear of it.


    It is not enough to win. We must crush the living, and they should know it, itmanded. There will be survivors. They will spread the truth: the darkness can breach even the highest, toughest walls. It cannot be beaten. That is the message that will spread from one man to the next until the whole world reeks of fear.


    Did we not aplish this by defeating the undefeated city? the General asked.


    The Lich was forced to concede that that was exactly what theyd done. But it wasnt enough. A city, no matter what its reputation, is nothingpared to a fortress. All of their strongholds must be turned into tombs, or they will think that resistance is possible.


    After that, the General did not argue. It merely nned and prepared to carry out the darknesss will. In this case, the problem was that the two fortresses stood on either side of the pass. One could attack neither the western nor the eastern fortress without being in the line of fire of the other. They were built that way to prevent sieges, and their weapons were quite formidable. However, though catapults and ballistas could do almost as much damage as war mages, arrows did little to zombies and even less to skeletons.


    So, as the fourth sunset, the bulk of its armies advanced on both structures without fear, and their dread footsteps echoed off the walls of the mountains as the war zombies marched in perfect lockstep. Even if they were capable of such a worthless emotion, they would have nothing to be afraid of. The humans had so little that could hurt it, whereas its Generals hardest problem was often deciding which weapon of the darkness should be brought to bear for which challenge.


    In this case, given the simultaneous nature of the strike, it chose two: Its earth titan and shadow drake. Each of the imposing structures had been carved from the same granite stones as the rest of the mountain by means of magic; and their fifty-foot vertical walls were meant to hold out against an army. They were considered all but impregnable ording to the souls it had interrogated.


    Neither Tenebroum nor its general thought that either would be considered a problem, though. So, as its blocks of thousands of troops each reached the high, crention-topped walls of the imposing gray stone structures, the shadow drake swooped down from the night sky and released a gout of me that caused the stone of the eastern fortress to burn just as readily as the stout oaken door which was immediately engulfed in the monsters all consuming ebon me.


    At the same time, the Lichs titan appeared out of the stony ground as if it were nothing but a swimming pool and strode toward the towering walls as it began to rip them apart piece by piece. Despite the thingspliance, the Lich still considered this toy its greatest failure. Even as it watched its lead gauntleted hands rip out a stonerge enough to copse a whole section, it became annoyed that it had learned so little about the thing.


    Both fortresses were breached in the opening salvos of the encounter, and its dark elementals retreated immediately. Though there would be losses even after such a maneuver, victory was all but certain at that point. It was all over but the dying, so the Lich focused on other things, like itsckluster titan.


    It obeyed, always, in all things, but its mind was so alien that Tenebroum still had very little idea of how to make it suffer. The Lich took some sce in the fact that it looked perpetually sad, but it was still far from unraveling the element of stone in the way it had water and fire, and it had been shocked to find out that the dwarves had learned scarcely more than it had already known as drained the priests of their knowledge.


    <em>Why didnt the dwarves work together more with the humans, </em>it reflected, as it stood there in a shell on a rocky outcrop next to its General.


    There were definite synergies. Mentally, the darkness began to make notes for its fleshcrafters to try a few iterativebinations of humans and dwarf parts to determine an optimum mix for toughness and reach, but before it couldpletely document the new project, disaster erupted.


    It had been a couple of hours since the first shots had been fired and twenty minutes since the walls had been breached. The killing was going steadily, and the Lich had no cause to be concerned, and then suddenly, just as its forces werergely engaged in the assault, both of the shield fortresses copsed.


    No, copse wasnt a strong enough word for what happened. They imploded, copsing inward on themselves, and as they did so, the cliff faces that they were carved into gave way, copsing together like a giant hammer and anvil and sealing the passpletely.


    A path could be reopened, of course, but there would be no point. The point was that at a stroke, it had lost six or eight thousand soldiers, including all of its heavy infantry. It was a catastrophe that shocked both it and Paragon to their cores.


    What happened! The Lich bellowed as rage overwhelmed it.


    With the air full of dust and debris, no one could say obviously, but the General proceeded toy out several theories about the nature of the rock and how the attacks of the titan and the shadow drake had weakened the superstructure, but given the symmetrical nature of the copse, this seemed unlikely.


    Someone had done this to it intentionally, and though it didnt know if it was due to dwarves or magic, it would find out and make sure that whoever was responsible for it died screaming.

 Chapter 127: Starve Them Out

    Chapter 127: Starve Them Out


    By day, the reaver hid away in the attacks or the basements it could find that were furthest from the scenes of its bloody ughters. It had killed over a hundred souls in the first week of its endless mission of suffering, and even though it was now down to only two arms and one eye, it hoped to murder at least that many again before it finally ceased to function.


    The most interesting thing it found was not the blood of its victims or a weakness in the walls, though. It still had not found a way to creep into the castle and ughter the royal family who had spat in its masters face. What it had found, though, was a rat.


    Not just any rat. The thing that it currently pinned to the ground with a w and studied with fascination was a rat that was already long dead, and still, it moved. That had been enough to get its attention, and because the reavers initial assessment was that this had been some sort of proxy for the still-living mages it had not yet managed to hunt down, its first instinct had been to dash it to pieces.


    Instead, it decided that this was something alien and unique enough to await the judgment of its master. So, instead of going out that night to prowl the shadows and ughter more families, it lingered there in that disused ossuary and prayed to the Darkness for guidance for hours until it finally manifested itself.


    Finally, its focus was rewarded, and the deathless Lich slipped smoothly inside its cracked skull as it began to examine all the specifics of the situation. A city in mes, a panicking popce, and a tiny zombie rat were the things it looked at the most, and the reaver could feel that its master was pleased with it.


    Who do you belong to? the Lich growled through the reavers mangled voice box.


    The rat gave no reply to the question, and so the Lich crushed it. However, as it did so, it wove a dark enchantment, using that rat as both focus and sacrifice, and the tiny, still corpse began to glow with a dim yellow haze.


    Know this, the Lich continued. You can answer me now, when I have killed a single one of your tiny servants, or when my reaver has killed a thousand more, but I will have the truth. I will find the source of this magic!


    By the time the reaver was done crushing the half-mummified rodent, it was nothing but powder, and as that glowing dust drifted on the foul air currents of the sepulcher it was hiding in, it began to illuminate all sorts of things. Suddenly, there were tiny little tracks crisscrossing the tunnels between various crevices and corpses.


    Even as the Lichs spirit left its deathless servant behind, it left a new order in its ce: hunt the rodents until you find their source. ughter all you find until they are amenable to conversation and use their remains to extend the spell.


    While the newmandcked the blood and suffering that the vengeful reaver enjoyed most in life, it could hardly resist. Instead, it pursued its new task with even greater gusto than before, for it was no longer limited to the dark hours of the day. It could masquerade through the ck warren of tunnels beneath the capital almost constantly, and everywhere it went, it found more of this strange infestation.


    Mice, rats, and even hound-sized constructs woven of dozens of dead rats filled the ce, but none of them stood a chance against the reavers fists or its des. Their only chance was to find somewhere narrow enough that it could not reach them, but often enough, it found a way to extract the dully glowing rodent from their hole by ripping out part of a wall.


    It gave each construct it located a moment to speak as the Lich desired before it reduced it to nothing but dust and bone fragments, and with each death, the web of yellow and brown lines that connected these creatures thickened and multiplied. Who was it that was responsible for animating so many tiny creatures? What was their purpose? It didnt know. Most of the time, it barely cared about the answers to those questions.


    It had been built to hunt in the same way that the Lich had been built to think, and so thats what it did. It hunted through mile after mile, moving from bone-filled catbs to sewage-filled sewers and back again. In all that time, its onlyint was that the humans were often so close that it could almost reach out and drag them screaming into the depths, but sadly it was not allowed to. So they stood in the safety of their ignorance, just out of reach.


    After weeks of hunting rodents, all it wanted to do was creep to the surface and bathe in the blood of the innocent. After so long without killings, they would think that the coast was clear and that everything would be safe. They were wrong, though. As soon as it fulfilled the Lichsmand and found the source of this strange infestation, it would be allowed to return to its killing spree.


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    The simple predator clung to that hope long after its joy in stalking and murdering such unsatisfying prey faded. In the end, it took almost a month and hundreds of murders to find the tomb. Though it practically glowed with a sickly yellow aura, the master of the rats had obviously gone to great lengths to hide it. Only a single strand of faint footprints finally led it here, but even it could see that this was the beating heart of its enemy.


    As it advanced, a tremulous cry finally rose up from a chorus of rats. It was a discordant thing, but the words were understandable enough. Cease your hunt! they cried! We surrender!


    It stood there in the doorway, baring their escape, and this time, when the Lich came, it was much faster than before. It took minutes instead of hours for it to reach out and make the connection.


    I ept your surrender, it said at once. Tell me, who do you serve?


    No one! came the chorus of denunciations. We are our own master. We feast where we like on what we can!


    You did once, the Lich agreed, but you will serve a new master now.


    Yes! the tiny voices screeched in unison. Be merciful! Let us serve you!


    The vermin crumpled immediately, as expected. It was their nature. Better to eat the crumbs from the high table than be exterminated by your betters.


    The light the Lich invoked as it willed aplex binding spell into existence made the floor throb with violet lines of power, and even the dead, cracked limbs of the reaver began to tingle as a massive amount of necromantic energy flowed through it, and a ghostly version of the Lichs Scoetomikos appeared in one hand.


    No one, not even a single copy of you, leaves this room, the Lich promised. Not until I understand everything about you.


    The hundreds of rats lined up there on the niches, and the shattered sarcophagus resembled a small sea of candles in the way they glowed faintly yellow, but each time the Lich reached out to dig deeper into their collective soul with its dark powers, they flickered in they flickered dangerously like they were moments from being extinguished.


    The reaver understood that much, though. The Darkness that flowed through it right now was so powerful that it could have very easily been extinguished by its master. It wouldnt even have to do it on purpose. A mere ident would be enough to steal the spark that animated it and send it tumbling back into the maelstrom of souls that made up the Lichs true self.


    It did not fear such a fate, but only because it was made with hunger instead of fear. It had that inmon with the rats, too. It, no, they were all named Ghroshian, and they were pure hunger. It seemed to the Lich, or at least it seemed to the reaver as it watched the Lich study the fragile souls of the creatures, that they had been part of somethingrger and stronger. Neither of the thing that studied nor the thing that was being studied knew exactly what that was, though.


    This terrible conversation had started off with words and questions, but as the two things melded together in a whirling maelstrom of magic thatmunication became nonverbal, and eventually, it contained very few words at all. It had been imprisoned for so long that whole parts of its soul had shriveled to dust and were poorly understood. Some words like Malzekeen flickered by between the images, but it was unsure if that was a ce or a person.


    It was a cacophony of thoughts and images, and the revenant could only stand in mute awe as much of the details passed right through it. These rats were part of a hive mind, and they were old and already buried long before the Darkness had been born. It had been beaten by Siddrim and the other gods, as it had fought beside the worm and the wolf centuries earlier, but it had lost those names to the searing light theyd tried to purge the rodents with, and the Darkness their remains were imprisoned in afterward.


    Why couldnt they y you? the Lich asked through its mouth when words finally returned to the conversation.


    Can hunger ever truly be extinguished? the rats asked in a ragged chorus. Can war and conflict ever reduce hunger with their presence? Famines can be eliminated, and pestilences can be defeated, but some child, somewhere, will always go to bed somewhere, and we will be reborn there and start the cycle anew. The Lord of Light thought better of it. He trapped us so that we would always exist, and a new hunger could not be reborn without us.


    The answer made no sense to the reaver, but its master seemed satisfied with it.


    The meager swarm swore their allegiance to the Lich there beneath Rahkin without an ounce of deception in their heart. Only then did the yellow magic of seeking and the purple wards of binding begin to fade to ck, leaving the reaver standing there in a new darkness that was lit only by hundreds of tiny red eyes and no specific orders about what it was supposed to do next.


    Unfortunately, when all was said and done, it was not given back its previous mission of mindless ughter. Instead, it was forced to assist these rats in their new order: starvation. Though it would get to do some killing yet, that would be incidental to therger goal.


    The fall harvest wasing in now, and thanks to magic, it was better than it had any right to be. The humans were experiencing hope for the first time in a year because of that, and it would have to be not just stopped but reversed for the siege thaty ahead.


    Make them rue the day that they dared refuse my generous offer, the Lich dered to both of them. Make them weep and gnash their teeth until they have nothing left to eat but dust as the corpses of the fallen!

 Chapter 128: Battle Lines

    Chapter 128: Battle Lines


    Despite the setbacks at Banath, the Lich¡¯s forces moved on. A small portion of its men and some imported chirurgeons were left behind to tunnel and triage, digging out what soldiers could be saved and building new constructs to fight from pieces of the old ones along with the corpses of those defenders that they found.


    It was grisly work, and the effort wasrgely wasted as most of everyone had been crushed to powder. Fortunately, its servants could work quite well with unmatched parts like its drudges were finding, but there were other silver linings, too.


    With the pass closed, armies to the east entirely lost ess to the entire region, granting it an exclusive domain that measured perhaps a fifth of the continent and further isting the remaining pockets of resistance its forces had not yet ground to dust on the northern coasts. Its more specialized units hadrgely been spared destruction as well, so the Lich¡¯s general adapted its tactics to current resource levels and moved on without missing a beat. If its enemies thought that this desperate gambit would save them, they would be sadly mistaken.


    The Lich let it make the important decisions there. After all, despite the stunningly terrible victory they¡¯d aplished, it did not me the entity that led its forces. It would have been a fool to do that. Not one soul in its entire collection had the awful piece of knowledge that the fortresses might copse in a single moment. It was truly unforeseen.


    Besides, the Lich was busy with other, more interesting toys at the moment. Not only did it have the Ghroshian rats to y with and study, but it also had thest tree of Eldameer wood, which Krulm¡¯venor had brought back to its growingboratory in Constantinal. In the former case, it continued to research the origins of strange amalgamation without much sess, but thetter case, it found to be especially diverting.


    In many ways, a forest spirit was literally its equal opposite, and the Lich found that to be an irresistible riddle. For the first time in its entire existence, its fire godling had not found some way to disappoint it. Though the elves or fae that he¡¯d spotted had managed to elude both capture and death, that had not stopped Tenebroum¡¯s rabid little army of metal goblins from burning down the entire forest or from repeating the scorched earth on the night that followed on the splendid saplings that had sprung up overnight.


    In the end, they did that repeatedly until only one tree remained. Then, the little gibbering horde dug it up and brought it back to its thriving dead city. Despite the fact that no one had lived there in months, Constantinal was thriving. Every day, it produced dozens of new constructs for the Lich¡¯s armies, and there was something about the industrial ballet in what used to be the city¡¯s grand temple.


    When there were no other matters that required its immediate support, it would often linger there and watch the slow ballet of hundreds of hands and arms as they moved each unfinished corpse from station to station in a process that was as efficient as it was pleasing. Right now, it had many more important things to do, the most important of which was to nt the seeds that the sapling produced and nt them in soil from the swamp that had been imported just for this purpose.


    Its true home had been burned to nothing, but the Lich could see the mana flows in that tree, and though the life element was diametrically opposed to its unlife element, it was going to enjoy studying it and perverting it. It was a long-term experiment thatcked the urgency of other matters, like those it entrusted to its Paragon, but the Lich couldn¡¯t help but study the growth of each new leaf as it wondered when the thing would flower from an interesting botany specimen to a full-fledged nature spirit that it could learn from. While the Lich focused on this, its war ns continued on without skipping a beat. In the short term, the Paragon did not try to conquer fortresses or hold territories. Instead, it merely sewed chaos. It sent small forces of fast-moving centipede cavalry in all directions, ughtering resupply caravans and other, harder-hitting strike forces to destroy supply depots andmunities that supported nearby garrisons.


    For the moment, out of an abundance of caution, it actively avoided any significant forces that were pitted against it. If an advancing force needed to be met, it would be struck with magic or dark fire from a distance. There was simply no need to engage the enemy forces while they had a numerical advantage.


    Beside the crude, ugly fort that the remains of Siddrim¡¯s sheep had built near the Oroza, the Kingdom of Hallen was thestrge army in the region. It had more than ten thousand men, and though many of these defended the city itself, almost half of the rest were in the field.


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    For the first time in months, the Lich¡¯s forces were outnumbered, and it did not think that the fact that such a tragedy would befall it so close to Abenend was a coincidence. Magic had definitely been at work here, though whether that magic was human or dwarven had been the subject of much debate in its library.


    There, the opinion was evenly divided. Some of its heads thought that this was exactly the sort of maneuver that Abenend would do to buy time by sacrificing the lives of others. Another contingent argued that since no obvious mana spikes or other signs ofrge-scale casting had urred, the magic had to be old and deep and that the fortresses had likely always had such a self-destruct sequence built into them, but they¡¯d never needed to use it before.


    Either way, the souls of the dead that Tenebroum had devoured shed no light on the subject, though it had not yet found the corpse of either fort¡¯s captain to question directly.


    For now, it didn¡¯t matter. What mattered was keeping the enemy force off bnce. If they sent a cavalry force in its direction. It ughtered enough viges down in the rear of the army to make them change course and investigate the new threat. If forests began to act in any way suspicious, then they were burned to the ground as a precautionary measure.


    As the noose on Rahkin tightened, the only real problem for the Lich¡¯s forces turned out to be adequate ces to keep its advancing troops during daylight periods. In a normal siege, the enemy force would ring the opposing city and wait them out. Indeed, the undead were better suited to that than their human counterparts because they required neither sleep nor food. All they needed was the tremendous mana that Tenebroum provided as a dark, unending river and somewhere to shelter from the light each dawn.


    This, of course, meant that its treacherous opponents had six to eight hours each day to do whatever they wanted. This forced its general to alter its ns, expanding them to create a very wide cordon on all sides of the city.


    Attacking directly would be easier, but with so many of its forces eliminated so recently and direct reinforcements in the form of mages and Siddrimites only a few days to the south, that was a risky proposition. It wasn¡¯t just the possibility that it could lose thousands of more constructs that stayed its hand. It was the idea defeat itself.


    If such things became possible, then hope would rise further, and already it could feel what food had done to the morale of that nation. The mana had flowed so much more freely when they were frozen and starving. The Lich could easily foresee an oue where the mages engineered its defeat, and the popce, driven by rising spirits, pushed it back and back again. It should easily be able to hold this line here, but if that fell, then it would have to fall all the way back to the tunnel it had bored through the Wyrmspires.


    That would bepletely uneptable. Every square inch ofnd that the Lich had imed would belong to it forever, and even as it surveyed theplicated battlefield, that resolve only strengthened. The snows woulde soon. Then, not only would the men move slower, but the darkness wouldst longer.


    Before the ground froze, though. There were preparations to be made. Tenebroum¡¯s forces always imed mines and caves near the zones of conflict where they could, but this time, given the sheer amount of ground they would have to cover, this was not going to be possible. It was going to build dozens of smallirs all throughout the region. Each would have to be close enough to each other to allow movement and close enough to the main trade roads to interdict traffic.


    This would be impossible to do in a short period of time without magic, and even with magic, it was certain that everything it did was being watched. Neither Tenebroum nor its Paragon had any doubts that both the mages and the Gods themselves were spying on them. It was the only way to exin all the subtle counters that had urred at every stage of this operation. From the dwarves locating its tunnel so quickly and the ambush in the woods to the copse of the shields of Banath, something was helping the mortals, and that wouldn¡¯t change until it was victorious or it had found to snuff out the gods.


    Since, in most cases, the only way to aplish thetter seemed to be toplete the former. In a battle of attrition, it seemed unlikely that a fragile foe like the humans could ever triumph over its deathless might, but with its most recent setback, Tenebroum was already beginning to face a shortage of some of its most valuable parts like skulls and martial souls. Steal or animal parts couldpensate for one, and goblin souls could be used in ce of the other, but even so, both choices would weaken the quality of the end product.


    Its soldiers mightst forever, but between its recent losses and the countermeasures that the humans were taking to secure the corpses of their dead where they could, the Lich could see a day years from now where it might have no way to create new servants. Such a fate was intolerable, of course. It had already dispatched drudges to the graveyards around the cities under its control, like Fallravea. There, centuries of dead waited for it, which made those ces vast if finite resources.


    Something would have to be done, but for the moment, the Lich was out of ideas. Trying to keep track of its arcane projects, its various servants, and the tactics and disposition of the various dungeons it would need to build to house its units during daylight hours was an overwhelming task. It was an infinite and ever-growing list, and the Lich would have been tempted to build a servant just to handle that for it if it had not already done so in the form of the Skoetomikos.

 Chapter 129: Seeds of Darkness

    Chapter 129: Seeds of Darkness


    The siege around Rahkin started well before the first snows, though it would be weeks before the humans understood that. Despite the fact that they were offering to pay well over the market price to fill their diminished granaries and had frequent patrols wandering the countryside to keep the roads safe. The roads were not safe, though, not at night, and a few mercenaries weren¡¯t enough to keep its ghostly riders and centipedal cavalry at bay. So, the only supplies that arrived eventually came from the north, and most of those were forced to travel by sea.


    Thanks to Oroza¡¯s betrayal, Tenebroum had no hold on those routes. Despite its best efforts, it had yet to find a recement that was even a hundredth her strength. It would in time, though. Even though Tagel-by-the-sea was abandoned, a fishing fleet still sailed out into those waters some nights. The boats that were caulked in pitch had been infused with cholorium, though. This was enough to keep Oroza and her ilk at bay, even if it poisoned the whole harbor and made the nearby beaches a graveyard for rotting fish.


    It might not be able to catch a river dragon, but with tainted harpoons, it could drag the bloated carcasses of sea monsters back to port. There, they would be stuffed with a thousand tiny elemental spirits if that¡¯s what it took to animate them after they¡¯d been dissected and alchemically preserved. Though the lives of both animals and men were rare in the South now, and even finding goblins in the Red Hills could be a challenge, the seas and the mountains still had many raw materials just waiting to be plundered.


    For now, at least, the creation of interesting new servants was not the Lich¡¯s focus, though. At the moment, it was focused on territory and on stranglingmerce. To the South of the capital, this was easily aplished with night riders and fire. There were no longer any major cities in that direction to offer resistance, and the roads were already nearly abandoned, so it was easy to burn the harvest to ashes while hungry men tried to harvest it.


    The north and the west were moreplicated, though. There, defenses still stood, andrge divisions of men still patrolled. This was where Tenebroum would enact its invisible siege. If it wanted to hoard thousands of troops overnight to prepare for the inevitable assault as it grew closer and closer to the capital. However, it had learned its lessons with buildings of timber and would not repeat that mistake. They could be burned to the ground. So, from now on, it required that its minions build dozens of dungeons across the disputed region to house both its undead and its goblinoid minions.


    As much as it would have liked to simply build a tunnel across the continent, suchrge-scale earthworks were infeasible, even with the Devourer. It had taken over a year to dig its tunnel through the Wodenspine Mountains, and that had only been thirty miles. Even at that blistering pace, it would take over a decade to build tunnels all the way to its current target, and that waspletely untenable.


    Between that construct and its sad, silent titan, though, making a number of smaller fortifications was easy enough, and several newirs for it to hoard its troops during daylight hours sprang up each week. Most of these were simple affairs to start. They were little more thanrge rooms connected to winding stairs that were dug into the earth in out-of-the-way ces.


    It was only when some of them were discovered, and the humans began to attack them that they became more interesting than that. Tenebroum knew in some sense that humans were drawn to such things. It had seen that behavior before, in its earliest days, but it was still a surprise when it happened once more.


    The first group to stumble onto one of its scatteredirs was a group of boys armed only with their father¡¯s weapons. Most of those who were foolish enough to descend into the darkness died very quickly, but because it had been unprepared for such an activity, a few of them were allowed to escape and spread the word. This caused arger force to appear on the following night to take their revenge. This time, all of them perished, and their vige did notst much longer than that. The Lich immediately ordered traps be installed to force those that had stumbled inside to stand and fight, even after they found out what a terrible idea that was. The deathless voices of its advisors contributed other ideas to that, though.


    ¡°Let the dreamer tell them,¡± the library whispered. ¡°Let them believe they have found a way to defeat you and that the tool to your undoing is hidden in that darkness.¡±


    ¡°If you are going to bait such a fine trap, you might well spread the word as well,¡± the Ghost of Solovino suggested. ¡°Let them whisper of your bane, let them pray for your downfall, quest for it, and then die screaming.¡±


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    Tenebroum was not a fan of giving its enemies hope, but a poisoned hope sounded very interesting indeed. It could imagine such a thing. It had long spread songs to make the world believe what it wanted them to believe. This would be no different, save that the only light waiting for the heroes at the end of this tunnel would be the forge fires that would turn their bodies into something more interesting.


    Slowly, day by day, the dungeons nearest to therge towns and close to the most well-traveled roads began to grow and change. They were no longer ces where a few hundred war zombies sheltered until dusk.


    They became testing grounds, and not just for traps, either. The Lich filled these ces with escting terrors designed to draw in the opposition and make them feel like they had a chance right up until the moment they watched their friends die.


    For the price of a few broken-down drudges holding rusted weapons, it could lull warriors with spirit and prowess who were fierce enough to pose it actual problems into acency from which they would never escape. A warrior might be able to strike down a worn-out skeleton that had spent thest decade digging holes, but against a handful of war zombies, or worse, he would quickly be reduced to a quivering blob of flesh begging for mercy with his dying breath.


    The Lich was also able to use some of its more creative monsters in these pits as well. With the distinctck of mages anywhere in the world outside of Abendend or the other major cities they sheltered in to hide from its wrath, there were few that could protect the fools from turning on one another when they faced the floating brain that was one of its neuroids. Some might have swords with a touch of magic, but most couldn¡¯t even strike a single blow against a shadow hydra before they were bitten in half, even if they had a silvered de.


    asionally, these pits lured other interesting specimens like a priestess of Lunaris or a druid that worshiped Niama, and it learned a great deal about those Goddesses and even some of the other gods in their cursed pantheon by saving those heads to be mounted into its ever-growing library.


    It was unlikely that such diversions would pay for themselves in terms of mana or effort. However, as the snows began to fall, one thing was certain: it amused Tenebroum. Watching fools blunder to their deaths as they searched for a supposed sacred sword or forgotten scroll that would finally reveal the true name of the evil that was sweeping thend wasn¡¯t quite as enjoyable as basking in the prayers of the tens of thousands of scared vigers it had left in its shadow in the march east, it was still exquisite.


    Increasingly, the Lich found that it treasured more than gold and rubies. Those things were still shipped to one of its mainirs, of course, along with the intact heads of anyone worth studying on a deep level. It was bing ustomed to bing a god.


    The original dungeon beneath ckwater had be quite beautiful despite its humble beginnings. Its library was in the process of bing the poison tree that it had seen in its vision, and its bras limbs and gold foliage blended right in twitch the rest of the arcane infrastructure that was its ever-growing core.


    Most of the rooms near the core were a gilded hive as soul webbing stretched across every ceiling in a way that mimicked the ornamentation that humans used in their most important buildings, and in many ces, mosaics increasingly dominated the floors and the walls as well. Each of them showed a different victory in a timeless fashion via the clever arrangement of precious and semi-precious stones.


    Almost no one would ever see these, though. Even the devoted worshipers who created them by the light of dim oilmps never really saw the whole work when it waspleted. They could only ever enjoy the tiny contribution they were making. This was fitting, as far as Tenebroum was concerned.


    Though High Priest Verdenin and his growing cult were the ones that created these works to glorify the dark, the dark spirit they served, it was the only one that would ever really appreciate their undertaking. As in all things, only Tenebroum could see how all of its ns and all of the moving parts involved in them fit together, even though it was increasingly delegating minor roles within those grand schemes to other, lesser spirits.


    As it gazed upon the world now, it saw it in many ways as a mosaic where it had once seen only a map or a chessboard. It was still a game to be yed, but now there were thousands of spaces and tens of thousands of moves, and as it moved outward, conquering more and more territory.


    The main difference between the version of the game that it was ying and the one that the nobles it battled against yed in their homes while the snow thickened outside was that the Lich yed for keeps. Each time it took a piece from an opponent, it became another pawn on its side, and each time it took a square, that became one more piece of the glittering mosaic that was the monument to its glory.


    Someday, every piece would belong to it. It would not have to pace the under temple or haunt the halls of itsir to view them; it would be able to hold the world in its hand instead and admire every glittering facet itself.

 Chapter 130: The End of Winter

    Chapter 130: The End of Winter


    Last winter, all that Jordan had worried about was that he and his slowly increasing band of refugees might run out of food. That was a horror that had never quitee to pass, though it had been a near thing in those first few days of spring. This winter, the ghost of famine no longer haunted them. In fact, though not pleasant, he might have been tempted to call this one cozy.


    Against the odds, they¡¯d had a prosperous year, which had started when Markez left. He¡¯d done them the idental favor of taking many of the malcontents with him. Though word of what had be of them never made it as far back as Sedgim Manor, he was sure that strong men like that hadnded on their feet. With any luck, they¡¯d sailed so far to the north that they would never need to fear the dark or the cold again.


    Their departure had been only the first in a year of minor miracles. Neither the bandits nor the goblins returned in any great numbers, and despite theirck of grown farm hands, the children had done a better job than expected, and grain flourished while weeds shriveled.


    He could only hope that the same would be true in the wake of Brother Faerbar¡¯s departure. <em>Oh, the Temr hasn¡¯t left yet, </em>he thought to himself as he watched him out sparring with the other young men on the frozen grass of the practice yard. He soon would, though. He¡¯d already said as much to his little disciples.


    That he hadn¡¯t bothered to tell Jordan as much, rankled him only slightly. Despite the fact that he was thewful heir of thesends and a mage, he¡¯d never made to establish any sort of dominance over the holy warrior. He knew better.


    Even if he had, though, that would have stopped once the children¡¯s eyes started glowing. Siddrim might be dead, but the light was not, and if anything, his little followers were more devout than Brother Faearbar was.


    If Besmr or one of his other friends had sat down across from him at the Dragon¡¯s gon and asked him, ¡°When do you reckon that us and the Siddrimites will sit down together and share a pint,¡± Jordan would have answered, ¡°When the sun and the moon finally meet in the sky, and only for as long as that momentsts.¡±


    They all would haveughed at that, as eclipses were not unheard of, though they were extremely fleeting. The end of the world would have only been his second choice. Here they were, though, living under the same roof and asionally working together for themon good.


    They just didn¡¯t do it with much inmon. Just like now, Brother Faerbar stuck to the martial end of things, leaving Jordan to handle everything else. That was fine, of course. It just would have been better if he¡¯d been the second or the first son and raised for such activities rather than pawned off on mage school so he could learn to brew tinctures and the asional spell. It wasn¡¯t for another week until the Temr told him directly that he was leaving. Jordan was hard at work trying to make heads or tails of his ount books when the glowing man sat down across from him.


    ¡°I¡¯m needed elsewhere,¡± Brother Faerbar said simply, leaving Jordan at a loss for words.


    ¡°For what, exactly,¡± he asked finally, not sure what else to say.


    ¡°The war against the dark never truly ended, you know that almost as well as I do,¡± he started, ¡°But until I¡¯d made peace with all that I¡¯d lost¡­ for as long as I had that darkness in my heart, I couldn¡¯t fight that fight, so I stayed.¡±


    ¡°Thank the Gods you did,¡± Jordan agreed. ¡°Honestly, I know you, and I don¡¯t really see eye to eye on these things, but you¡¯re wee to stay here for as long as you¡ª¡±


    ¡°I¡¯d been hoping that the snows would melt and give us an early spring, but that seems not to be the case,¡± the older man sighed, ruffling his hair with one hand and looking at the ceiling before once again fixing Jordan with the unnerving glow of his gaze. ¡°In a week, I¡¯ll be gone. No longer than that. I¡¯d like to take certain supplies with me, but if you think things are too tight, then I can¡ª¡±


    ¡°No, please,¡± Jordan insisted. ¡°Help yourself. I would never try to stop you, Brother; I just want to understand the urgency so I can help how I can. If you and the children are going north¡ª¡±


    ¡°Not the children. They aren¡¯t in the dreams,¡± the Temr corrected him. ¡°Just me. They will stay here with you where it¡¯s safe. Even though you are a mage, I can trust you to do that much, at least, can¡¯t I?¡±


    ¡°You can,¡± Jordan agreed, not pressing the point further. Instead, he pulled out a bottle of brandy he¡¯d foundst month while he was going through his father¡¯s effects and poured them each a generous jot in two mismatched crystal sses.


    They sat there for a while in thatfortable silence, drinking before Brother Faerbar finally said, ¡°I can feel the darkness growing. It''s hard to exin, but I feel like every day it¡¯s getting closer and closer while it waits for its chance to gobble everyone and everything up.¡±


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    ¡°Well, that is what it does, doesn¡¯t it?¡± Jordan asked. ¡°It devours all our misery and uses it to raise the corpses of the dead to kill any who oppose it, creating yet more misery.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s the way it should work,¡± Brother Faerbar agreed. ¡°That¡¯s the way all the small gods and the demons that have walked the mortal realms worked in the past, but there''s a hunger to that. There''s a certain straightforwardness that is both strength and weakness. Whatever we fight now is different. It¡¯s always mutating and changing. It¡¯s not natural.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s not,¡± Jordan agreed. ¡°I¡¯ve tried to contact the collegium. I¡¯ve sent several ravens, but none of them ever returned an answer, so either I don¡¯t merit a response, or they¡¯ve long since fallen.¡±


    ¡°I cannot say,¡± Brother Faerbar answered with his hands spread wide. ¡°Your kind are just a different sort of darkness, and ck against ck is invisible to my gaze. All I can say is that there are small sparks of life somewhere to the west, in Siddrimar or past it, but many more to the north, and that is where I will go to kindle the next great bonfire that will push the darkness back for at least another age.¡±


    ¡°Do you think that will be enough to unbreak the sun?¡± Jordan asked hopefully. Though he¡¯d grown used to the strange way that the lights wandered across the sky, leaving their ugly multicolored shadows, he still did not care for it and would wee a proper daylight once more.


    ¡°That is beyond the power of any mortal. I could no sooner ride one of those horses than I could bring them together again, even with what little light I have to give,¡± the Temrughed as he finished his drink. ¡°Erresten, Klydonium, Balzaar, and Pheadron are headstrong beasts. It is up to the gods to corral and yoke them once more. All I can do is try to keep hope alive.¡±


    Their conversation ended a few minutester, and the two of them didn¡¯t speak again before the Temr¡¯s departure, at least not beyond the asional pleasantry. The warm weather the man had hoped for never appeared, and with a heavy heart, Jordan watched the man leave with a heavy heart through the deepening snow.


    Winter would end, but much like theirrger predicament, it would not really change anything. He hoped that the Temr would be able to manage some real change because otherwise, the darkness would overwhelm them all one day.


    Less than a weekter, the darkness found them, though not in any form he¡¯d expected. For a long time, Jordan had worried that random goblin raids on their flocks might turn into something more cohesive or that the living dead might one day be spotted by the watch they kept on the forest and the main road one night.


    Instead, it came in the form of a blind woman wearing the tattered robes of Siddrimar. Reben, who was on watch that day, didn¡¯t believe that she was more than a crazed beggar from the way she mumbled to herself, but when he caught a glimpse of the strange book she was carrying, he invited her to one of the small outbuildings to the north of the manor and saw her fed while Jordan was summoned.


    ¡°She said she¡¯s here about the falling star and the¡ª¡± Reben whispered to him as Jordan entered, but the woman piped up immediately.


    ¡°I¡¯m blind, not deaf, son, and I¡¯ll happily tell your Lord my business my own self if you don¡¯t mind,¡± she said cheerily between bites.


    ¡°Quite,¡± Jordan agreed. ¡°What can I do for you, miss¡­¡±


    ¡°Annise,¡± she answered as he sat down across from her. ¡°Sister Annise. Though the Lord of Light has fallen, and his order has buried beside him in his grave, a few of us yet live on in service to the light in other ways, as we are able.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯ll forgive me if I say that you don¡¯t look like any Siddrimite I¡¯ve ever seen,¡± Jordan said, trying to be polite. In truth, she looked crazed. Her hair was a mess, and her outfit was torn and dirty. Even without the book, he would have been tempted to turn her away as a witch or worse, but the dark leather of the tome she carried with her had a malevolent aura about it. Honestly, he wasn¡¯t sure if he should read it before disposing of it or if he would just burn it outright if given a chance.


    ¡°These are hard times for us all. Harder still if youck the eyes to see, but I manage, somehow. I have to the world depends on me,¡± she said, finishing half of her loaf before she pocketed the other half. Then she turned to regard Jordan with her milky, sightless eyes. ¡°Tell me, are you ready to y your part in history?¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t think history will be kind to the minor yers in the current story,¡± Jordan shrugged, ¡°But it will be even crueler to the heroes. I think I will stay here and mind the people and thend under my stewardship. You¡¯re wee to stay for the night, of course, but beyond that¡ª¡±


    ¡°You are already destined to be a hero, ording to the book,¡± she assured him as she reached for the book, opened it, and began flipping through the pages. ¡°The fallen star has left the cradle to light the bonfire, and now the shepherd must grasp the lightning!¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not sure who the falling star is, but I can assure you that lightning isn¡¯t a problem. Be that as it may, I¡­¡± Jordan¡¯s words trailed off as she stopped on a page and pushed it in front of him.


    The drawing in the book was crude and uneven. Part of the edging was illuminated and gilded in iconography that was unmistakably Siddrim¡¯s, and the figure it depicted, talentless though it was, was definitely Brother Faerbar standing at the top of a ruined wall with eyes full of light. He had no idea what it meant, though.


    ¡°Is this supposed to be the Temr?¡± he asked finally. ¡°You¡¯re out of luck, I¡¯m afraid. He¡¯s already left to¡ª¡±


    ¡°To light the bonfire,¡± she agreed. ¡°All is ording to n. There is no doubt that the falling star will do his part. The only question is, will you do so as well?¡±

 Chapter 131: Old Friends

    Chapter 131: Old Friends


    Brother Faerbar walked through the snow without issue for the first several days of his trip. It was a long road to the north, though, and he doubted very much that he would make it to the heart of the maelstrom that only he could see without being noticed.


    Such a thing would be impossible. Even now, in the height of the shattered daylight that the world was forced to endure, he could sense the darkness building and flowing. He was miles to the northeast of the ruins of Siddrimar, in the very hearnd of the kingdom. It was a ce that had known peace for centuries.


    Despite that, the taint here was worse than it had been on the banks of the Oroza even before theyd purged the foul under temple.


    Brother Faerbar sighed at that memory and at his foolishness. Hed know that the waters of the mighty river had turned to poison, spiritually speaking, but hed never stopped to wonder who had been the one to poison it, and now everyone who had fought beside him in that dank ce was dead.


    He didnt me himself for any of that, though. Such a thing would dishonor their memories. Instead, he would honor their memories by fighting until he joined them in death.


    The Temr had no idea whether the hallowed halls of the world after still remained or if he could even find his way to them, given that his God was nothing but dust now. Still, he contemted those thoughts until he fell asleep next to the embers of his small fires.


    That peace didntst forever. When he was near the halfway point of his trip, Brother Faerbar could feel the shadows beginning to stir as something finally noticed him.


    He was not afraid, though. The Temr had spent a lifetime warring against the dark, and though some small part of him whispered that the candle of his life was beginning to gutter and that he would soon reach the end.


    He ignored that, just like he ignored the flickering shadows that hid amongst the trees and the dead-eyed ravens that watched him from a distance as his armored feet crunched through the ice and snow. Two days after the darkness started to watch him, there were only a handful of ravens and crows that circled him at a safe distance, but by the third day, there were hundreds as he slowly marched north. Brother Faerbar ignored them all since hecked a bow, and they were well out of reach of his sword.


    <em>Let them watch,</em> he thought bitterly. <em>Let it see its dooming. </em>


    The darkness would either face him now in some hurried ambush, or it would face him on the battlefield with an army at his back. Brother Faerbar hoped for both.


    Two nightster, the first ambush came, deceitfully, while he was slumbering next to the dying embers of his cookfire. Unbeknownst to him, six vicious wraiths had spent thest few days pursuing him, and even while he slumbered, they waited amongst the roots and branches of distant trees for midnight.


    When the world was at its darkest, the wraiths swarmed him as one from every direction. Despite the speed with which they flew through the night and the vicious-looking weapons they wielded, they made no noise. Each of them found their target, and together, they tried to skewer him in half a dozen ces at once while he slumbered through the assault.


    If theyd wielded steel instead of pure solidified darkness, then the des that didnt nce off his armor might have wounded him. Instead, the weapons made of pure glossy ck umbra managed to scratch his skin. Then, before they could plunge deeper into something vital, they evaporated from the brief burst of light that issued from his wounds, cauterizing them instantly shut.


    It wasnt even the pain from such an attack that woke him up. It was the hideous death cries as those faint bursts of holy light dissolved his attackers into little bursts of foul ck smoke. Brother Faerbar was on his feet in an instant after that, though he did not draw his sword yet. Not until he understood where the next attack woulde from.


    Farbear cursed his age as he looked into the dark with his burning eyes. The younger versions of himself would have heard the ambush well before theyd approached him. His hearing wasnt the best either, though, and he only heard the rush of wind from the shadow dragon at thest possible moment as the thing above him dived toward him.


    The Temrs sword was out and just starting to glow as the shadow dragon roared its inhuman fury and vomited forth a torrent of shadows. The deep purple mes cast no light on any of the surrounding trees. Instead, they barrel toward the man as a sizzling wall of death.


    Demon! Brother Faerbar roared, meeting the death sentence with a burst of light.


    It never had a chance. Despite the chill as the darkfire almost reaches him, it vanishes in an instant. The dragon that was behind it isnt so lucky.


    Even as it opened its rotting maw wide to rip the Temrs head off, he pivoted to the side, and before the monstrosity could pull up, Brother Faebars sword was there running along its rusted, scaly nk. For the first dozen fee, it found no purchase and made only a storm of sparks, but then it slipped into a gap between the scales and cut a huge rent that separated skin from bone and made the near wing p limply as some vital tendons became unmoored.


    The Temr had no idea if the thing had nned toe around for another pass before, but that was impossible. Instead, it crashed into a nearby tree, and then, even as he ran toward it, the monstrosity limped off into the sky.


    Face me, you coward! Brother Faerbar shouted, shaking a fist at the sky.


    It didnt, though, and it was only as it disappeared into the night that he noted just how much damage those dark mes had done to the surrounding area. The surrounding snow had meltedpletely despite theck of heat, but beneath that, the vegetation had been scourged to nothing. The trees werent spared either. All the nearby trunks were gone or eroded so badly that theyd toppled over in the direction of the st.


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    Brother Faerbar didnt sleep the rest of that night or on any of the other nights as he made his way north. After that, he only napped briefly for the period when three of the four suns were in the sky. Hed expected that the skeletons and zombies his enemy would send after him would be something that he could hear and seeing, but hed been wrong.


    Still, the crows never left him now. They haunted each night like a red-eyed constetion, and on some evenings, they outshined even the stars themselves.


    Two nightster, he encountered his next serious ambush. Though the road had been entirely empty of farmers or merchants, which hadnte as a terrible surprise to the Temr given the weather and the state of the world, he eventually found someone waiting to bar his path.


    Ahead of him were a handful of death knights on skeletal monstrosities that might have been distantly rted to horses, backed by some two dozen zombies. Brother Faerbar smiled grimly at that and drew his de once more.


    Hed expected the death knights to charge immediately, but instead, they sent their zombies ahead to bog him down and waited until he was locked intobat before they charged him. That suited him fine. He wanted them all together before he showed his true power.


    The Temr had not merely whiled away his time in the manor teaching children to fight and telling them the stories of Siddrims love. Hed spent a great deal of time pondering and understanding the gift hed been given.


    Inside of him, he had a piece of his Gods very soul, and It was more than a healing light or a me that could be used to kindle that light in other people. If used correctly, it was also a raging bonfire, and that was the way he used it now.


    There is nothing to fear here, he grunted as the death knights charged toward him.


    Even as they rode down their own men in an effort to strike the killing blow that their zombies hadnt been able to aplish so far, the golden light from his eyes and his sword intensified. Momentster, the zombies nearest to him were already engulfed in a fire that was burning them from the inside out.


    Though they didnt panic per se, since they were mindless things, they did spasm and il in agony, further slowing down the knights and giving the Temr the distraction he needed to unhorse the first one. The second and third both wounded him, but his wounds were closed, and their bodies were on fire even before they finished riding past him.


    Only a few minutester, Brother Faerbar stood alone with his chest heaving amidst the ashes and the still smoldering limbs of the corpses that had once been his enemies. Now, they were little more than a stain on the road. If they had faced him with ten times that number, they might have taken him, but only because age took almost as terrible a toll as the light that burned away within him.


    Still, he would not be defeated until he reached his destination, and he resolved to make better time as he walked the empty road from deserted vige to burned-down town before the enemy could assemble such a host.


    That hammer never fell, though, for on thest night of his trip, when Brother Faerbar could see some signs of life as well as the first breaths of spring, he found only one man left to bar his way. I should have known theyd send you, the Temr said to the silhouette as soon as he figured out who it was.


    Between the winter weather and his nighttime schedule, the world had been made monochromatic for most of his trip. Now, though, standing in front of Brother Faerbar on the muddy brown road was a thing wearing the cold blue skin of his dead squire.


    It is only right I pay my respects to you before the end, the zombie croaked in a voice that was a little too rough to be human but still somehow familiar. I want to be there for you in a way that you werent for me, at the end.


    It wasnt Todd anymore. He was certain of that. No matter how well the creature was able to mimic the skin of thed he once knew, hed never believe it.


    Brother Faerbar set his jaw and drew his sword but could not quite bring him to set it aze. My squire did his utmost until the very end, he dered. He stood with Siddrim then, even as I do now. Your lies have no hold on me.


    No? the unclean spirit asked, approaching Brother Faerbar without a weapon drawn. You dont regret that you werent the one there that day? That you werent there to save either your God or your charge? There was sadness in the constructs voice, but to the Temr, it sounded more like mockery than regret.


    He was a grown man, The Temr answered. He did all anyone could ask of him.


    How would you know? the squire asked, drawing his sword as he saw his evil words failed to find their mark in his opponent. Would you like to know his final words? Would you like to know that he died like a coward?


    Brother Faerbars grip on his sword tightened. He could feel his anger rising, but he would have felt the same even if the shard of Siddrim that resided in him hadnt already revealed of the truth of those moments.


    If you wish to try to kill me, then let''s get to it, the older man grunted. I have more important things to do than to reflect on the ghosts of the past.


    Why rush to your grave? the corpseughed. The boy you knew has been reformed and enhanced. He


    The taunting spirit stopped talking as Brother Faerbar brought his sword down like a thunderbolt. It was parried by the silvered de of his opponent, but the blow sent sparks out in all directions into the darkness. It took three attempts tond the first blow, though even the holy light of his sword seemed to do little when it pierced the monstrosity that hed once counted as a friend.


    It will take more than that, old man, the zombie masquerading as his squireughed. Death is only easy the first time. Youll find that out soon enough, yourself.


    Each hateful word and each killing blow made the fire inside the Temr burn that much brighter. This zombie was more skilled than the real Todd had ever been, and it seeded in cutting deep into him twice.


    Those blows healed almost as soon as they were struck, though. It was a battle between one who could not die and another who was already dead. In a true battle of attrition, it would be the dead who would win, for they would never tire.


    Even as Brother Faerbar began to breathe hard and the weight of his sword grew more noticeable, he knew it wouldnte to that. The face of his dear friend was already beginning to crisp, and golden-white fire was leaking from most of the wounds that Brother Faerbar had delivered. The construct was well-built, which made it slow in dying. It could not survive the light any more than the darknesss other constructs, though.


    More than twenty minutes after their terrible dual started, the zombie staggered and fell to one knee. The Temrs first instinct was to surge forward and strike the killing blow, but he remembered too well the terrible explosion that another one of these terrible toys had once unleashed, so instead, he moved back and pulled the light tighter around him like a veil. The result was more than enough to shield him from the worst of the effects when the corpse of his squire detonated, littering the area with poisonous green gas and bone shrapnel.


    Brother Faerbar walked on after that. He didnt even pause for a moment to pay his respects. Why should he? Todd had died long ago; it was only his corpse that had now beenid to rest.

 Chapter 132: Bread Crumbs

    Chapter 132: Bread Crumbs


    Ghroshian was not aware of the Temr when he first entered Rahkin, but when the Lich informed them the following night, they were not surprised. They had felt the menace from the moment the man had walked through the gate and scurried to find new, deeper hiding ces for many of the rats that made up its greater whole.


    It was an old scent. The scent of a predator. However, because everyone had said that Siddrim was dead and gone, it had been hard for them to reconcile that baleful aura with the Lord of Light.


    It was him, though, and as soon as the Lich spoke those words, the rat god trembled. The fear only grew stronger when it was given the terrible order that they feared most in the moments after that.


    ¡°You are to follow him,¡± the darkness whispered to him from the mouth of its incapacitated reaver. ¡°You are to watch all that the man with glowing eyes says and does as in this cursed city! We spent the winter denying them food and hope, and now, in a single day, the citizens are renewed. This is an outrage!¡±


    They agreed, of course, but Ghrosian would have said anything to the Lich to avoid bing the target of that rage. Its wraiths had already abducted more than a few rats that made up the pieces of their soul, and even without a physical manifestation here to enforce its will, the hungry God dared not oppose the thing that had be its master.


    Of course, they dare not get too close to the specter of Siddrim¡¯s light, either. They remembered too well how it burned, even around corners and through doors. Those terrifying memories were some of the oldest, most vivid parts of themself, and they had a feeling that they had not been quite so fearful in the days before that God taught them humility.


    Still, the twin fears forced them to agree, at least to a very small degree, and that night, they sent dry, desated mice into the walls of the pce to observe what they could and report back. They would not get too close, but they would do enough so that they would not earn a punishment either. They had few enough bodies after the reaver had practically hunted them to extinction, and they would need time to grow from hundreds to tens of thousands all over again.


    Getting into the pce was easy enough these days. Everywhere except the kitchens, of course. Thanks to all their hard work, the ces in the city that might contain food were the most tightly guarded.


    Everything else, though? The movement of dead armies beyond the walls attacked all the human attention, and since the reaver¡¯s nightly attacks had been brought to an end weeks ago, the guards and the mages focused their attention on the darkness outside the walls.


    The pce was an empty ce these days, though, after the King and his sons had died. There were no longer banquets or parties, and even if there had been food to spare, it would have been unlikely to change things.


    Why should it? ording to every corpse they had feasted on, from the high-born to the gutter scum, the queen was in perpetual mourning after the death of nearly her whole family. The fact that they¡¯d never really found out who did it and simply hung a few criminals as servants of the dark only twisted the knife.


    Ghroshian didn¡¯t mind, though. They enjoyed twisting the knife. Torment and grief were both fine spices for rotting meat, and any corpse that came from the pce these days had at least a hint of both.


    So they would have enjoyed this little expedition as their mice fanned out through the grand hall and the private chambers of the royal family in search of their quarry and other tasty secrets, were it not for those terrible eyes.


    When the mouse first saw them in the private dining room of the royal family, it retreated almost immediately, and it took all of the hungry God¡¯s willpower to force that small tendril of itself to return to the tiny crack in the corner of the room where it could see the Temr talking with the queen and her generals about the cities defenses.


    This was exactly the sort of conversation that Ghroshian should have been listening to, but it couldn¡¯t. It couldn¡¯t focus on anything but those twine golden eyes, which were brighter than any of the othernterns in the room.


    The man sat there with salt and paper stubble and te gray hair. He even looked somewhat frail without his armor on, but all that they could see were those two terrible eyes sending out beams of light like twin lighthouses.


    Once, when the man briefly turned in Ghroshian¡¯s direction, the mouse that had been upying simply died on the spot. The man hadn¡¯t even been the one to do it. It simply cut off the limb rather than risk that the Temr¡¯s gaze might fall on even the tiniest part of them.


    Cursing itself for what the Lich would do to it if it found out, the rat God quickly rushed two more pieces of itself to the room, sending one to the same crack that already held one mouse corpse and sending the other to a cab on the far wall that it had long ago picked clean of anything edible.


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    Once there, it forced itself to sit there with their eyes closed and listen to the wordsing from the humans. Even with the vengeful glow so close that it might be able to be seen, it forced itself to listen and remember as they discussed the parts of the wall most likely to be attacked and how what they needed to do most was reinforce the harbor because the dead did not need to breathe.


    It was only after the Temr asked to be allowed to visit the Grand Temple, which had since been sealed, and the queen opted to send her daughter to apany the man, that the rat god allowed the fear to overflow it.


    It was alone in the room now. Nothing had harmed it, and there was no reason to fear, but it could sense the danger, and it waited for a very long time before btedly sending more of themself to the Grand Temple to await the Temr¡¯s arrival.


    That spot, at least, was safe enough. The light had long since left it, and it had since eaten the rugs, the books and scrolls, and every tapestry except those that were hung by chains too high up for it to reach.


    The ce had long since ceased to be holy, and that had been a greatfort to the rat god since its return to unlife. If Siddrim could be snuffed like an ordinary candle, then there was nothing that would stop it from feasting on the world until there was nothing left.


    Well, nothing but the Lich, of course. It was not inclined to cross anyone that could defeat the Lord of Light, though, and even if there was something strangely familiar about the darkness, it¡ª


    Their thoughts stilled immediately as the guards forced open the door for the first time in months, and two people entered the darkened chapel. The glowing eyes of the man made their indities unmistakable, and all eight parts of themself froze in fear as the two humans made their way through the colonnade and toward the altar.


    ¡°And to think, even in this sorry state, it is still probably the grandest temple to Siddrim left in the whole kingdom,¡± the Temr said, gesturing widely at the splintered wood of broken stained ss in so many of the decorative elements.


    Ghroshian had never once tried to evaluate this room as beautiful or not, but it could see how a human might. It was a wide open space, and the thick pirs held up the massive vaulted ceiling that made even this muted conversation easy to hear. In the light of day, it was probably quite bright, too, thanks to the multicolored windows that were stered all along the southern walls.


    It had no interest in such things, though, and didn¡¯t let the stray thought distract it for even a moment as it focused on the people as well as the words they were speaking. They were talking about the nature of darkness, and the Princess seemed to have some terrible secret she wanted to confess, but they were more interested in how much its hunger had taken a toll on her previously lovely body.


    She had been beautiful once, but between theck of food and whatever it was she felt guilty about, she was little more than skin and bone. As sixteen sets of eyes observed her from different corners of the room, Ghroshian couldn¡¯t help but wonder how soon it would be able to feast on the marrow of her bones.


    ¡°I¡­ I had to, you understand. It was terrible, but he was going to¡ª¡± the Princess said.


    ¡°Enough,¡± the Temr interrupted. ¡°I am not your confessor; do you understand that? These terrible eyes allow me to see everything you have done, but I cannot punish you for it, do you understand? All of that will be between you and whatever God judges each of us in Siddrim¡¯s absence when we pass over to the other side.¡±


    ¡°But¡ª¡± she persisted.


    ¡°But nothing,¡± the Temr said, shaking his head. ¡°Let me ask you this. Did you do the things that you did for your own benefit or for the light?¡±


    ¡°I had to fight the darkness,¡± she pleaded. ¡°All who seek to ally with evil or cate them are evil themselves.¡±


    ¡°Correct,¡± he agreed. ¡°Then you have nothing to fear.¡±


    Ghroshian wasn¡¯t quite sure what it was they were talking about, but they were intrigued. Nothing tasted better than a secret. At least nothing that wasn¡¯t still warm and bleeding.


    This had the taste of something older, and it desperately wanted to know more, but the holy man kept cutting her off. That was just as well, unfortunately, because their frustration was doing an excellent job of counteracting their collective fear as they watched the scene.


    ¡°That isn¡¯t enough,¡± she whined. ¡°I did something terrible. I demand to be punished for it, and you¡¯re the only one left in the kingdom that can grant me that!¡±


    The older man sighed. ¡°Do you think I haven¡¯t had to do terrible things? Sometimes, the light requires that and more. Do you think that these men haven¡¯t also had to do terrible things to preserve the bnce? Perhaps if we¡¯d all done more, there would still be one sun in the sky instead of four.¡±


    As he spoke and gestured at the men in the windows who were presumably saints or at least other holy men, a strange thing began to happen. They started to illuminate. One at a time, the panes began to glow. Worse than that, some small part of the consecration was returning to the ancient tile floor.


    Ghroshian could feel their tiny feet beginning to burn at the unwee sensation, and most of their bodies fled. Even so, though, one remained to try to see how this would y out.


    The Temr was merely lecturing her on the nature of morality and the terrible deeds that each of these men had done for the greater good. As he spoke, though, candleless candbras were relighting, rays of a non-existent sun were streaming through windows that no longer seemed to be missing ss, and even the thick coat of dust that shrouded the entire room had disappeared.


    ¡°That¡¯s nothing though,¡± she dered. ¡°I did so much worse than that. I¡ª¡±


    Ghroshian strained to listen, but even as she moved to finally spill her secret, their final mouse body burst into holy white mes, and it was unable to make out whatever terrible burden it was that this woman was holding. It would tell all this to the Lich, of course. Hopefully, it would be able to make heads or tales of both the Princess''s disposition and the way that the temple could return to life like that, even for a moment of grandeur.

 Chapter 133: Total Eclipse

    Chapter 133: Total Eclipse


    When the stars once again aligned on the equinox, and Lunaris made the call to everyone, Oroza knew she could not ignore it, much as she would like to. She had too much to share about the evil that was currently drowning the world from one sea to the other.


    It had even started to assault her river again with bizarre poison monsters that had been dredged from the deep and altered. So, even with the scars of her recent battle with a cholorium-infused squid serpent she¡¯d torn to pieces still fresh on her serpentine body, she made the long swim into the darkness of the night sky and joined the gods at their conve.


    She felt much better than she had time, even if some part of her was still ashamed to be seen by her fellows. Despite the fact that her constant fighting and the salt water that the darkness had flooded her river with had done her no favors, she was grateful that she at least felt clean now. The scales of her river dragon form were still patchy and lusterless, but every scar she earned in her endless war with her former captor was a badge of honor that she would wear with pride.


    As she approached the moon, she briefly wondered how the Lunaris could be both the person that carried the moon across the sky as well as a ce where she could also visit, but she didn¡¯t think too much of it. Those deep thoughts were for someone else to decide. Whether the moon was a shield, antern, or a ce, it did not matter to her. All that mattered was that here was the only ce where the people who could actually do something about the ongoing tragedy dwelled.


    When she arrived in the divine amphitheater, it was more crowded than it had been thest time, but even so, she could see many seats were empty, and the pattern of those absences disturbed her. Nature spirits like her seemed the most likely to be missing, followed by the other small gods of ces like cities.


    None of that surprised her. The world was on fire with war.


    Despite the absences, Oroza could see the scars on so many of her fellows easily enough. Hers were obvious as well, no matter her form. As a river dragon, they took the form of dark scales and long scars, but even as she turned back into a woman in a dress of grey spray and white foam, the sudden streaks of grey in her hair were easy enough to see.


    For centuries, she hadn¡¯t aged a day thanks to the river¡¯s constant power, but now that she was being poisoned in a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle ways, she was withering. She doubted she¡¯d be much good at fighting anything in a decade at the way things were currently unfolding, but she couldn¡¯t let that bother her now. There was too much to do and too much to say.


    Only the greatest of the gods seemed untouched by the war. Siddrim¡¯s seat still sat empty at the high table, but Niama, Lunaris, the All-Father, the veiled goddess of death, fox-faced Ronndin, along with the other animalistic gods, and even the twin gods of sea and storms were in attendance.As their strange meeting started, much of the discussion was on how far the damage had spread. The Lich had stained much of the continent with its long shadow. Worse, it had stopped simply killing all who opposed it and was developing a terrible sort of flock in its own right.


    So, even while its destruction weakened the gods that supported the natural order, it grew and strengthened, and all the while, the world grew emptier and emptier. Niama was happy enough to see the wild ces starting to reim so many fallow fields, but even she acknowledged the need for humanity.


    ¡°The children of the forest can never hope to grow to the numbers needed to fight this monster,¡± she confessed.


    Still, others had better news. Lunaris promised them that even now, there was a swarm of stars working hard to reunite and herd his horses so that they could once again be yoked to a new chariot the All-Father was building, which was already nearingpletion.


    The god of dwarves and craftsmen seemed to be working on a great many ns, but each time one of them was talked about, the stone man stopped the conversation. ¡°By the ancestors, woman, these are not secrets to be shared yet. Not until all is in fruition!¡±


    It was frustrating. Most of the gods in attendance felt that way. Each of them was working on their own small n or their own secret vengeance, but because they were so used to it, few seemed inclined to share them. There were mentions of a secret weapon here and a clue about the history of the monster they faced there, but each mention would be trampled on by disagreement or impulses of secrecy.


    All of them argued for a time about where the need for help was greatest and which part of the world was going to fall next. The All-Father confessed that even his blow by unleashing the Hammer of Banath had done little good despite how many of the Lich¡¯s dread servants it had crushed.


    There just didn¡¯t seem to be anything stopping the darkness¡¯s advance. Even their greatest victories only slowed the thing down. All they could agree on was that the next city to fall was likely Rhakin. Despite the heroes they¡¯d sent to try to help with that growing siege, the storm clouds that gathered around that doomed city grew ever darker.


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    When it was atst Oroza¡¯s turn to speak, she shared all she knew. She had nothing half so brutal as Niama¡¯s forest ambush against the darkness to share, but she described how it had almost trapped her again and was willing to bend whole geographies and ruin entire regions just to get its way.


    A forest being burned to ashes and a river being poisoned were both terrible tragedies, so the great marble amphitheater was nearly silent when the terribleughter began to ring out from the stands. As one, the Gods turned to see what mockery this was and saw only the slender form of the dryad Breeandwyn.


    She was a frail, sickly little thingpared to the woman she¡¯d been before the Lich had burned down her wood for daring to ally with Lunaris and Niama, and for a moment, Oroza¡¯s heart went out to her as she realized the poor woman must be sobbing under the weight of despair. Oroza knew that pain well.


    She wasn¡¯t, though. The dryad stood, and as she did, Oroza could see that she was definitelyughing. She thought the other goddess¡¯s mind must have finally given way, but as soon as herughter subsided and she started to speak, Oroza began to transform back into her true form.


    ¡°All of my enemies here in one ce, and yet you can agree on nothing!¡± the Lich gloated through someone else¡¯s mouth. ¡°This is why you have lost so much and why you will lose the rest. Do you understand that?¡±


    Some of the warrior gods were already standing and unsheathing their weapons, as they understood the danger, but Oroza was faster. She was already halfway there to where the thing that had once been, Breeandwyn stood, mocking them. She was still toote, though.


    ¡°That fiend must be destroyed!¡± Lunaris shouted, but by the time she stood and denounced it, the thorns were already growing.


    The dryad started toe apart. What was a woman one moment became a flowering nt, and each blossom unfolded into a yawning void of infinite darkness. That horrible sight unraveled further into a thicket made of shadows and nts so dark they drank even everyst ounce of light.


    They grew fantastically, and even as Oroza approached the dark oasis and began to tear into it, they¡¯d already involved several of the small gods that had been sitting near her. Phlioiel, the goddess of spinners and other crafts, had been sitting next to Ferden, the young god of shepherds and herds, along with a few other nature goddesses from the same region as Breeandwyn.


    All of them disappeared into the darkness, leaving only the Lich¡¯s echoingughter and taunting words behind. She bit and tore and the impossible flora even as it cut into the gaps between her hardened scales. Such pain meant nothing to Oroza, though. She¡¯d had much worse.


    It was only when the shadowy abominations of things that might have once been animals began to pour their way out of the tiny thicket that the fight was truly joined. Oroza had in many undead at this point. Few, except for Siddrim, could probably have exceeded her in that regard, but that¡¯s not what these were.


    These were terrible shadow monsters that she could barely harm while the chill of their every attack went right through her scales. Even that she might have been able to deal with were the forms not so abominable. These were not wolves and bears; they were elk with snakes for horns and foxes with mouths asrge as the rest of their body. There were birds with two heads and five wings, along with bulls with horns bigger than their own emaciated bodies. The whole thing was a singrity of pure madness.


    The ming swords or glowing ws of her peers had more luck. Despite that, though, Oroza could feel the brambles engulfing her long, sinuous body like ded ropes. Despite how hard she fought, she was ensnared, like several other gods and goddesses, and she was slowly being drawn into the maw of whatever abomination it was that the Lich had unleashed.


    She could feel it, grazing her mind and taunting her even as she struggled and switched from trying to kill it to simply trying to flee from it. <em>Wee home, my pet,</em> it whispered in her mind, making her skin crawl as she bucked and raged against it.


    That was when Lunaris finally joined the fray. She never moved from the dias at the center of the amphitheater. Instead, she watched and drew on her power for almost a minute before releasing it as a singlence of light that wasn¡¯t muchrger than Oroza¡¯s scaled form.


    Despite its intensity, it didn¡¯t hurt her. Instead, it felt warm andforting as the light passed through Oroza and the other warrior gods, dissolving the chains that bound them, along with a good portion of the terrible thicket that had appeared so violently.


    It would have been better if the light had banished the shadows. That wouldn¡¯t have given her nightmares. Instead, as the shadows withered under the moon''s intense gaze, they exposed the physical form of these monsters, which were stitched together from an uncountable number of people and animal parts for a moment before those, too, burst into greasy violet mes amidst the moon¡¯s onught. It was vile and made Oroza shback to her time in the heart of the swamp dragon, freezing her in ce for a moment even as her allies continued to fight.


    The moon goddess did not strike at it again. Instead, she stood by while the rest of the gods pounded, cleaved, and chopped it into ruin. The fight took several minutes more, but by the time it was done, there was no trace of the darkness, the dryad, or another half a dozen Gods and Goddesses that had been there moments before.


    ¡°How could this have happened!¡± a demigoddess of song cried.


    No one had any answers for her. Indeed, most of them were thinking the same thing. Oroza was sure of it. The moon and the goddess that carried across the sky each night existed to literally ward away evil. If it could somehow make its way even to here, then what were they supposed to do about that?

 Chapter 134: Violation

    Chapter 134: Vition


    As Tenebroum watched thetest skirmish preparing to unfold outside the walls of the capital, it had trouble focusing on the details. It wasn¡¯t because it was upset that the Temr, with the light in his eyes, had made it unharmed into the city or even that they had as of yet been unable to find where the man had sheltered for so long. Even the growing light behind Rahkin¡¯s walls wasn¡¯t enough to make the Lich too angry.


    That the man had failed to fall into the trap that the Lich had prepared for him so long ago was disappointing but not unexpected. He did not seem to be half so weak as his squire had been. Still, even thistest twist was unlikely to deny it the city. The man had not been able to rally his thousands-strong Temr army against it at its nadir, and it was much stronger now than it had been before.


    It was just how well the events had yed out on the moon the other day. That was enough to make all of this seem trivial.


    <em>The gods themselves are afraid of me,</em> it pondered to itself in equal parts contentment and gloating.


    After that, as delicious as the feasts of the battlefield were, any victory tonight simply wouldn¡¯tpare. After all,st night, it had dined on the flesh of the divine for the first time in a long time. Nothingpared to that.


    Not even victory, it had struck by sending real fear into the hearts of the gods that were arrayed against it. The Lich had spent months growing that corrupted dryad in Constantinal, and for most of that time, she was a scrawny, withered thing that hung on the edge of life and death. It was only shortly before the nature Goddess had called her to the conve that the dryad looked like she might survive, and the Lich had seized on the opportunity and stitched a truly nasty surprise inside of her.


    It had intended to leave the relic it had embedded inside of its wooden servant as a measure ofst resort when some God or another detected its presence. Only none of them had. His construct had simply been pitied by Niama for the terrible fate that Krulm¡¯venor had inflicted on her, and she had been escorted to a seat so that she could speak her words of warning toward the end of their little meeting.


    Sitting behind her eyes, the Lich had soaked up all it could from that meeting. After all, while killing or even kidnapping a god would be an incredible victory, spying on the whole affair and leaving while its enemies were none the wiser would have been even better. At least, that¡¯s what it had thought until it saw her there.


    It knew that Oroza yet lived, and though even the sight of her was enough to make its anger boil over, it resisted the urge immediately. The Lich was content to note her weakness and gloat over her eventual demise. When she revealed secret after secret that belonged to it, though, that was when it grew truly enraged and changed its mind.  The Lich could not yet tell if its efforts to poison the All-Father¡¯s soul were bearing fruit or that God was naturally a curmudgeonly sort; with a dwarf, it could well be either. Either way, it approved of the stone man¡¯s need for secrecy, as well as the way it hamstrung all the other gods as they tried desperately to get help for their own concerns while desperately trying to frame it as working together.


    They were like a gaggle of panicked chickens trying desperately to avoid ughter, which was exactly the opposite of the way that it worked with its slowly developing pantheon. In the grand scheme of things, Tenebroum was not yet a full-fledged deity, but even now, some of its servants rivaled the weakest of the true demigods, and every single one of them was permanently andpletely loyal to it. Even those like Groshian, the long imprisoned God of hunger and rats, was loyal to the darkness, if only because they feared the Lich¡¯s strength, and for now, that was enough.


    Once this war was done,yer more enchantments to make that loyalty unbreakable, but all of that would have to wait for more urgent things, like the Lich¡¯s sudden, overpowering need to taunt these fools and show them just how powerless they really were. Later, it might regret it. It knew that even as it whispered the final words to unseal theplicated puzzle box that connected to a room in its inner sanctum, six full floors beneath the earth, in the bottommost realm of itsir.


    It was there that the portal opened, and it spewed vitriol and hate at the assembled gods and goddesses. Even as the item unfolded from a dull metal cube into a delicate origami flower, it channeled a massive burst of dark essence into its bearer whether she wanted it or not.


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    None of the deities that were about to face the consequences of that would have any idea how hard the Lich¡¯s servants hadbored to create that delicate link where two far-away spaces were, for a moment, a single ce. It was the realization of insights that it gained when studying the nature of this world and the way it fit into therge cosmos, but even so, it was a fragile thing with tidal forces and distortion ripples that would have been enough to kill any mortal transmitted in such a fashion.


    Tenebroum did not have to worry much about the consequences of life and death, though. In this case, the result of the violent essence surge was explosive, instantly killing its fragile dryad, though it would be several minutes before she knew that. Instead of dying outright, her body mutated into a spiraling cancerous mass of impossible vegetation that was powered by pure darkness rather than any natural impulse.


    To the Lich, it was a violent work of art, and it savored the moment even as the battle was joined. Why shouldn¡¯t it? Despite the thicket only being ten or fifteen feet on a side, the interior was close to infinite, and the perfect spiraling shapes would never ur in nature.


    Any creature that found its way inside of it, divine or otherwise, would be lost forever. Well, it would be lost until Tenebroum copsed the strange singrity, dumping whoever it captured into the same room where its shadowy cast-offs and rejects hade from. The object itself was only a gate. It was those creatures it relied on to do the real damage to those in attendance.


    One moment, the Gods that sat around its cursed dryad Breeandwyn were whispering amongst themselves about what could be done, and the next, they were swallowed up by its dark,cerating vines. It was a sight to behold, and the Lich would forever remember the sight of those beautiful women screaming even as they were dragged into itsrge and growing maw by ded vines. They would never be seen again, at least not in any form that anyone was likely to recognize.


    Part of the Lich wished it had tried to capture Lunaris itself with such a trap, but it knew that the odds of this working on a Goddess with real power, let alone powers over light and magic, were slim to none.


    Capturing half a dozen different minor deities forter vivisection could not be called a failure by any stretch of the imagination, though, and watching all those around its dark beachhead struggle with the monsters that poured out of that well of darkness was more than satisfying as well. Tenebroum¡¯s one regret when the whole thing was done was that it had not been able to pull Oroza over the threshold.


    That would have made the whole thing perfect, it decided fondly, as the Lich looked out the eyes of a swarm of ravens at the Walls of Rahkin while it viewed the skirmishes that its dark Paragon was engaged in on a nearly nightly basis. They were an ongoing process that typically consisted of one or two fronts of low-quality drudges and worn-down war zombies to attract the defender¡¯s attention while some new abomination or another damaged a wall or wreaked havoc from an unexpected quarter. Today, it was a frontal assault to test out the limits of their mage¡¯s range while specters assaulted the smallest gate on the northern side of the city.


    If that went well, they would let in a unit of death knights who would do real damage as they fought their way toward the city¡¯srgest granary, but Tenebroum was not confident it would be sessful. The only way it was likely to take this city was in arge-scale battle where itmitted everything in the area to overwhelm the defenders, and it was unwilling to do that as long as it and its general suspected they still had trucks up their sleeve.


    So instead, they opted to inflict a death by a thousand cuts until the defenders¡¯ edge were suitably dulled. Often, very little was aplished, but sometimes, it found a vulnerability and wreaked true havoc. That had been the casest week when it had sent a brigade of zombies across the ocean floor and into the city¡¯s harbor at night.


    Its Paragon had given it a two-thirds chance of losing the whole expedition to an ocean god or another spirit like Oroza, but no one had noticed, and instead, the sodden zombies hade ashore without issue. That, in turn, led to the damage and destruction of dozens of vessels and hundreds of deaths before the city watch had finally vanquished thest of them.


    Repeat performances hadn¡¯t worked any better than this frontal assault was working now. Even as it watched through the eyes of its flock, it could see that the dregs that were assaulting the gate tonight were already being mowed down with a mixture of arcane magic and holy might.


    Every attack was a small victory, though. Tonight, it would allow the Lich and its minions to better understand the range and capabilities of the dwindling defenders, and in the case of its recent battle for the harbor, it had forced the humans to station guards all around the harbor, now only further stretched their already dwindling defenses.


    As it watched a watchman with light in his eyes hold back the specters long enough for reinforcements to arrive, denying the death knights entry and forcing them to retreat, the Lich sighed. In time, the city would break, and the Lich was confident of that. No matter what magic Brother Faerbar brought to wield against it, it would not be enough to stop what wasing

 Chapter 135: Breakwater

    Chapter 135: Breakwater


    As the third sunset, Brother Faerbar began his mass to the men that would join him on the walls tonight. He did it as much to put steel in their spines as to feel a fraction of the light he missed so much, though.


    The way that the broken stained ss would glow and the darkness would be forced out of the stone structure as he recited the old words was a balm to his spirit. After seeing how few men here had taken up the light, he needed it.


    As battered and looted as it was, the Grand Temple of Rahkin was still probably in better shape than the spiritualndscape of the city¡¯s inhabitants. Despite how many hours he¡¯d spend scrubbing its floors between meeting with the Queen and her generals to discuss the city¡¯s defense, it looked no better than it had when he arrived, except for in moments like this when the divine gave all of them a taste of what all of them had missed for so long.


    For a moment, all of them together here in fellowship didn¡¯t have to see the timeworn stone or the threadbare walls. They didn¡¯t even have to see the dull red light of Balzaar as he galloped alone across the heavens. Instead, they could see the world as it had been, with white light, veined marble, and blue skies.


    It was the way things should have always been. Those were high standards, though. In truth, even the holiest men he¡¯d known were far from perfect. Less than half the men in Siddrimar had been devout enough to catch Brother Faerbar¡¯s fervor, and outside those hallowed walls, he had not expected to find even half that much devotion.


    Still, in the sea of eyes that looked at him as he lectured on the fight toe, less than one man in ten looked at him with the zing gaze that he¡¯de to expect as the true blessing of the light. All of them looked at him with rapt devotion, and some even with fear, but those things were not enough.


    He couldn¡¯t say what was required beyond righteousness, but he didn¡¯t need to. There was no time left for specting now. That <em>thing</em> was on the move. Whether your ce was at the altar or the gutter no longer mattered. At this point, Brother Faerbar no longer cared if you were rich or poor or even a man or a woman. Stained souls could defend the lives of their fellow man almost as well as those with pure ones, as far as he was concerned.


    All that mattered was that you could hold a sword and stand in the face of the devil because it wasing for all of them. The scouts had been reporting it for days. Further dungeons were emptying, and nearer dungeons were filling as the dead shuffled their forces and prepared for somethingrger than usual.


    <em>Would they actually try to breach the walls for good this time? </em>He wondered. Rahkin was the capital. It had walls between walls and districts that could be individually defended, so all might not be lost even if the main gate was breached, but once the dead could roam the catbs at will, it would probably be over.


    Brother Faerbar had learned that lesson more than once. Above ground, it would be a bloody battle, but it would still be a battle. Below it, though. That, it would be a ughter.


    Those terrible memories of those he¡¯d lost in the Lich¡¯sir were almost enough to shake him free of his blessing, and the Temr paused for a moment to steady himself mid-sentence.


    ¡°The light will not prevent your death,¡± he started again, ¡°But know that your death, should ite to that, will save the lives of countless others. More importantly than any of our lives, though, are our immortal souls.¡±


    He drew his sword, willing it to re with light to better drive this point home to the hundreds of kneeling men who were listening to his words before the battle toe. ¡°For as long as we hold this city, you and the souls of everyone you love are safe, but if it falls, then all of us are damned, and you shall spend an eternity ving away for the monster we fight, bing one more foot soldier in its terrible army. Is that what you want?¡±


    ¡°NO!¡± some of the men yelled in unison.


    It was less forceful than Brother Faerbar would have liked, so he continued. ¡°And what of those you love, not just those that are living now, but your children and your parents who are already buried. Do you want this darkness to unearth them as well? Because it will, it¡ª¡±


    ¡°NO!¡± they cried out louder.


    This time, almost all of them joined the call, and it brought a grim smile to his face. He understood too well. The idea of your own death was a terrible, frightening thing, but it was his brothers'' deaths that haunted him at night.


    Not now, though. Right now, the light was too bright for any darkness in his heart, and it had grown all the more powerful since he¡¯de here for one simple reason: those souls that he vouchsafed fueled his own powers in the same way that they would if they ended up in the hands of the darkness instead.


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    This was something he hadn¡¯t fully realized in the liar of evil while he was trying to beat back the mishappen hordes of the damned, but his time in Jordan¡¯s manor house. That was one of the main reasons he¡¯d had toe here. It wasn¡¯t just that he didn¡¯t want to feel the souls of the children he¡¯d raised in the light slip through his fingers either. It was bigger than that. If Siddrim had given him such a gist, then he needed to use it where there were the most people possible.


    That was the only way to give all of this meaning and the dead purpose. He didn¡¯t share any of this with the warriors before him, though. Instead, Brother Faerbar blessed them and sent them on their way.


    Unit after unit, mostly led by the remaining noblemen with their fine armor and their magical des, came up to him one at a time to receive the Temr¡¯s blessing, but he would not be joining them. Not tonight, anyway. He would let the mages that the Collegium handle the monsters that mere men couldn¡¯t instead. He was needed elsewhere.


    For too long, the dark forces had been probing every weakness that Rahkin had to offer. For week after week, they¡¯d sent various monstrosities against every wall and gate, and if the monster they were facing was making such a big deal of the frontal attack, then Brother Faerbar was fairly certain that the true battle would be elsewhere.


    It was only then he took a much smaller group with him to the sheltered harbor that was the weak link in Rhakin¡¯s chain of defenses. In every other direction, walls and towers held back enemies, but in this one, there was only water, and that seemed less effective.


    At this point, he was unsure if Oroza worked for the darkness they fought or opposed it. He¡¯d seen evidence for both. He hoped that the other Gods and Goddesses were on the side of man, though, otherwise, they were screwed.


    The attack on the walls started as soon as the fourth sun, Pheadron, ran below the far horizon. Brother Faerbar could hear it distantly, but he wasn¡¯t concerned, at least at first. Instead, he and the thirty men he¡¯d selected waited in an abandoned tavern just close enough to see the waterfront.


    They didn¡¯t have to wait too long. An hour after the fight started, but several hours before midnight, the first sodden zombies began to wade onshore. They were pitiful, waterlogged things with rusted armor. The Temr didn¡¯t even need to dispatch them himself. While he fought, he kept the visor of his battered helmet down and hid the light that might frightenrger prey while he waited to see what would follow them.


    The things that came next were a real horror show. First, there were corpses that had been stitched together out of several people until they were two times the size of a normal man, and the ones that followed them had been crafted from so many limbs that they looked more like crabs than people.


    Brother Faerbar joined the fight as soon as these abominations broke the surface, but only because the dregs he¡¯d chosen to fight alongside him would have broken and fled if he hadn¡¯t. They were horrifying and strong, but they were not difficult to kill.


    He was just beginning to doubt his certainty that the true battle would take ce far from the walls of the city when it finally broke the surface and began to glide toward them. When it reached them, its tentacles wrapped around the docks. It didn¡¯t climb them, though. Instead, it smashed them to flinders.


    The Temr wasn¡¯t sure exactly what it was in the dark, but even as he ignited his sword to try to understand, he realized that he''d probably made a mistake. He could see the monstrosity towering above him like the brow of a ship now, but so could the men fighting beside him, and several of them broke immediately.


    Some part of him didn¡¯t even me them as he called to everyone else, ¡°Rally to me! Do not let them establish a beachhead and take the docks!¡±


    Thest time that Brother Faerbar had fought something like this, it was Oroza¡¯s leviathan, deep beneath Fallravea. This one was worse, though. That thing had been a mockery made from cast-off human limbs, but for this, someone had found the half-eaten corpse of a true kraken and reanimated the thing. The fact that they¡¯d used other random bodies and carcasses to make it whole made it that much more disgusting.


    Here, a person had been used instead of the foot-like fin that belonged there, and there snakes and giant eels reced tentacle sections that had been bitten away or rotted off. In addition to that, everywhere there was a holerge enough to be a structural concern, it was riveted over with metal tes or thick, scaly hides from who knew what.


    None of that mattered right now, though. What mattered were the writhing tentacles that could just as easily crush a man as sink a ship or bring down a building. For the first few minutes, it was stuck at the water''s edge, and for every trunk-like tentacle he removed with his glowing de, it slew a few of his men.


    Once it managed to drag itself ashore, though, the destruction only got worse. That was for two reasons. The first was that now, every time it failed to strike down Brother Faerbar, it would crush a wagon or knock down some part of a building. The other reason was the zombies it began to vomit up, though.


    These slime-covered monstrosities were heaved up past its three rows of sword-like teeth. They weren¡¯t the sort that tried to fight you, though. They were the sort that exploded. Brother Faerbar found that out the moment he cleaved one and two and, the alchemical contraption ignited.


    One moment, he was the brightest light on the waterfront, and the next, he was bathed in green fire as the corpse he had just cleaved in two exploded, riddling him with poisoned shrapnel for the second time in his life and knocking him back into the ruins of what had once been someone¡¯s home.


    It was a painful blow but not so terrible that he couldn¡¯t rise to his feet once more. Brother Farbar yanked out thergest pieces of metal that had prated his armor with his free hand, and then he leveled his sword back at his enemy and mentally steeled himself to return to the fight.

 Chapter 136: Breakwater (2)

    Chapter 136: Breakwater (2)


    ¡°You will never strike me down,¡± the Temr grunted, even though, truthfully, he wasn¡¯t sure how many more of those he could take.


    That blow would kill any normal man, and it had been nearly enough to do him in as well. He cursed himself for not expecting such an obvious trap that he¡¯d seen once before. The oddly distended bodies of the things had all but given away the trap, but he¡¯d been too focused on chopping them to pieces to notice.


    So many people had died around him in thest half hour that he was practically overflowing with power. This included almost all the men that he¡¯d brought with him, many of the nearby residents, and even some of the reinforcements that had been sent once word of the giant beast had made its way to their small reserve force stationed in the main square.


    Every one of those deaths would be turned into another soldier in this awful war if he didn¡¯t beat this thing back, here and now, though. Brother Faerbar was sure of that much. That was what made him grip the sword and increase the light that was flowing to it despite the pain from his wounds, which still hadn¡¯t finished knitting shut.


    ¡°Vile creatures!¡± he yelled as another one exploded not so far away, triggering a chorus of screams. ¡°You have no ce here among the living!¡±


    This time, he didn¡¯t run toward them again. He merely stood there and closed his eyes as he channeled as much of the light as he could bear into his sword, and it continued to swell with brightness. At first, it was so bright that he could see the veins in his eyelids, but moment by moment, they became almost translucent as he burned brighter and brighter.


    The Temr poured all of the energy he¡¯d scavenged from the souls he¡¯d saved as well as the thin trickle of prayers that the people of Rahkin were offering up to him, and for a moment, he felt like a true avatar of his dead god even though it all but overwhelmed him. Despite everything that had happened, there were still some who believed in the light, and he would reward that belief.


    At first, he was a bonfire, then he was a beacon, and finally, even though he was almostpletely blinded in this moment, he was sure that he was brighter than even the eternal me that had once graced the tallest tower in all of Siddrimar that had been lit centuries before, at the city¡¯s founding, to drive the darkest shadows back each night.


    Even though he couldn¡¯t see what he was doing to the enemy, though, he could hear it and smell it. Cries of agony and anger erupted from the throats of the dead, including the subsonic bellowing of the lumbering kraken zombie. Worse, though, was the smell.All of this purified flesh had smelled awful from the moment the battle had started. Not even the briny scent of the sea could cover it up. Brother Faerbar didn¡¯t think that anything could make it worse, but he¡¯d been wrong.


    The zing light that he was channeling was enough to boil them alive in their skins, turning them from rotting corpses into charred ones. Despite being blinded by his light, he could smell purification and smoldering smokiness blending together in a way that was almost sickly sweet.


    It disgusted him, but he couldn¡¯t wretch now. Not while he was channeling so much power. It was just one more distraction, like the roars of the wounded kraken or the burning sensationing from his hands.


    Finally, after almost a minute of burning like the sun itself, he finally got the reaction he was looking for, and one by one, the explosive zombies ignited, detonating where theyy, shriveled up on the ground. Inbat, they would kill their opponents, butying there in torment, they would kill only themselves.


    When the detonations stopped, and he felt very nearly drained by the power he unleashed, he finally released it, letting his sword drop to the ground as its light suddenly died. It was still a length of red hot metal, but it was warped and useless now. He would need another one before continuing to press the fight. Before that, though, he would need to let his eyes adjust to the now overwhelming darkness and give his hands a moment to heal.


    Brother Faerbar winced in pain as he looked at them. They were a charred ruin, and he could see his finger bones in ces, but already fresh flesh was growing over those terrible injuries. Even the gifts of the light were not without a cost.


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    When the spots finally cleared from his vision, he looked out at the carnage that his light had wrought. The whole waterfront was a warzone, from one end to the other, now. Amongst the carnage, the most obvious thing was the giant zombie kraken.


    The flesh of its face had been cooked, and even though it didn¡¯t seem to have a proper skull, its giant, dull eyes had exploded, and the bones of its jaw were exposed beneath sheets of cooked, sloughed-off flesh.


    The soldiers that had arrived held a wide cordon, but everywhere between here and there, there were scorched bodies, shattered buildings, and streets pock-mocked with craters. He couldn¡¯t join them yet, though. He could barely flex his hands. The flesh was still too raw and new.


    Instead, he studied his surroundings, looking for the next threat. Nothing new was boiling up from the water¡¯s edge, and no zombies besides the blind giant still moved on the battlefield. He was fairly sure that as soon as they found a way to bring it down, they would be done here. That¡¯s when he noticed the shadow.


    Brother Faerbar glimpsed it out of the corner of his eye and whirled as he raised his fists to fight the shadowy figure, but it didn¡¯t move. It took him a few seconds to realize not that it was just a shadow but that it was his shadow.


    Somehow, it had been burned into the whitewashed wall behind him by the strength of the light he¡¯d been holding in front of him. He wondered how that had urred exactly, but unsure, he turned away after a moment¡¯s study.


    <em>If I want the answer, I will probably have to ask a mage, </em>he thought glumly.


    While Jordan hadn¡¯t been a bad sort as far as mages went, the Temr could see his damaged soul, even after only a few years of time spent using magic. He had no desire to look into the withered souls of their untrustworthy allies any more often than he had to. This would be just one mystery, he supposed, as he checked his hands and turned back to face his enemy.


    He still didn¡¯t have much sensation, but by now, his hands were rtively whole again, and they moved properly as he wiggled his fingers and checked his grip while the zombified Kraken bellowed andshed out blindly. Brother Faerbar looked around the nearest corpses for a sword he could use. While he typically favored giant, heavy des that could shatter and cut these foul contracts with equal ease, this time, he was looking for something smaller. He ended up finding a dagger and a short sword that worked equally well.


    So, taking one in each hand, he slowly approached the blind, iling beast. Once he had its erratic pattern down, he sprinted toward its mouth, even as all the other warriors that were still standing stood as far back as they could.


    He didn¡¯t pay attention to them, though. Instead, he waited until the beat¡¯s jaws were opened as wide as possible, and then he jumped inside them. If the light hadn¡¯t done much more than burn out its eyes and scorch its skull, then the only ce that he could possibly strike down such a monster was deep inside.


    It was possible that the dark mind that had created this had nned for such an eventuality, of course. It might well have defenses for just such an orthodox attack. He might fight his way inside the belly of the beast to find traps, des, or even another explosion that would tear him limb from limb.


    Brother Faerbar didn¡¯t think that likely, though. Not only did the constructions that the darkness make reek of pride in addition to all their other smells, but this one had been carrying especially vtile cargo. It seemed unlikely to him both that the darkness would destroy something that it worked so hard to build, and identally detonating those explosive zombies he¡¯d fought earlier would have amounted to much the same thing.


    He didn¡¯t have time to think about much more than that, though. Once he was sliding down its gullet, he was too busy focusing on doing as much damage as possible on the way down, as well as trying not to suffocate.


    The choking chemical smells of preservatives and decay were not something that had risen to the level of threat in his mind, but now that he was past the point of no return, they proved to be thergest hazard of all. Still, he persisted, slicing through chemically hardened flesh that only parted that much easier once both of his newfound des began to glow lightly.


    Brother Faerbar fought his way to the pit of the thing¡¯s stomach one attack at a time but found no new dangers. When he reached that awful ce, the thing attempted to vomit him back up so that it could chem him to pieces, but no matter how hard it tried to expel him, his des anchored him to the walls of its esophagus.


    Then, finally, he was through the wall of that organ and loosed inside the abdominal cavity, where he could do even more damage. It was here he found the real problem with his n. Despite the fact that the Temr was rtively unrestricted, there really wasn¡¯t any one terrible weak spot he could strike and end the thing. Though it iled and pulsed, he was rtively safe from those motions thanks to the metal reinforcing skeleton that had been installed in ce.


    He struck at the heart and even managed to sever a few things that looked like spinal cords, but they weren''t. Brother Faerbar attacked anything that looked even a little important or vulnerable, but these attacks enraged the creature more than they slowed it down.


    He destroyed in minutes what had probably taken months or years to create, but he didn¡¯t care. He might never feel clean again after this because of all the blood and slime, but he was going to stop this monster before he could kill anything else if it was thest thing he did.

 Chapter 137: A Long Night

    Chapter 137: A Long Night


    Though the soldiers manning the defenses of Rahkin might have thought that all of its forces had taken the field, thanks to the seemingly endless waves of dead that assaulted them, that had not been the case. Even as waves of zombies attacked the high stone walls from every direction, and Tenebroum¡¯s cavalry and other stranger units scaled the walls in an attempt to breach them, its general had been holding back the main body of its forces for the right moment.


    The ns of the dark Paragon had been wearing away at the city¡¯s reserves and their defenders'' nerve for weeks now, but tonight might be the night that the city of Rahkin would finally buckle beneath the strain. Then, it would finally feast on the tens of thousands of souls that sheltered inside in a single night.


    It needed no survivors from this wretched ce that had refused its offer and damaged its envoy. She was still being stitched back together but would never be as beautiful as she once was.


    ¡°Unexpected,¡± the quiet spirit that was its dark Paragon said as it watched the battle from a hill well outside the range of battle.


    The Lich was focused on its own thoughts, so it took a moment to understand its general¡¯s uncertainty. Unlike the Paragon, Tenebroum did not attend tonight in person because it did not expect the city to fall from the first blow.


    Instead, it watched from a hundred different angles as a swarm of red-eyed ckbirds took the whole scene in, feasting on the death and the chaos that rose from the field of battle like a fine red mist. Though it would dly give up any ten of these birds to try to pluck out the eye of a troublesome mage if the opportunity rose, it was mostly content to soar above the battlefield and take everything in.


    It had been too distracted by the screams of its enemies as men were yanked off the rampart to their doom to notice that the Kraken had finallye ashore. That should have been good news, but it would seem that it had been expected. The Lich refocused all of its resources on the main gate and the surrounding walls as soon as he saw that the Light¡¯s Paragon was personally blunting its backdoor assault on the harbor.


    <em>One day, I will rip his soul screaming from his body myself, </em>Tenebroum thought in annoyance at all the time that man had managed to survive.


    Neither it nor its general had any idea how the man had known the kraken woulde or that it was the main thrust of their assault, but it no longer mattered. It seized the opportunity even before it saw that terrible, overwhelming light that lit up half the city, mming against the city walls with all of its forces in defiance of it. One man could not hold back the tide of death that wasing.  Until that point, it had been attacking sporadically, luring the defenders into clustering together at various points on the wall before attacking them with wraiths and death¡¯s heads. Thanks to the mages on the walls, these weapons were only partially effective, but the Lich was not concerned.


    The light had been a wild card, and now that it was ounted for, it would drown the living in the bodies of the dead. And Krulm''venor was always the ideal choice when it came to having more bodies.


    The Lich finally let him off his chain and sent him baying forward on all fours as he split and split again, bing dozens of himself before he reached the wall. That proved to be the second problem of the night.


    Even as they climbed one of the walls and moved toward a mage to rend him into tiny pieces, the man brandished some strange talisman. As he did so, the lights in the first few copies of his fiery godling went out as he fell from the wall, seemingly banished or in without ever being struck.


    ¡°What is this?¡± the darkness raged, moving closer for a better look, even if it cost it a bird.


    It turned out to be a piece of another copy of Krulmvenor. Specifically, it was a piece of the creature¡¯s skull, where his name and the binding rituals that chained the fire spirit in ce were. Such a fragment was almost certainly one of the many copies that died at Siddrimar. There was simply nowhere else it coulde from.


    For a moment, Teneborum was outraged. ¡°How dare a mortal use my own creations against me!¡± it raged.


    Still, instead of showing more anger, it forced its ming goblin army to pull back instead. They were not happy and snarled collectively as they yanked against its mental leash. It had already lost 8 copies that may or may not be retrievable, though, and it was unwilling to risk more until it understood the threat.


    After all, the odds that any single mage would have such a thing were very low, so since he did, it was entirely possible they all had them. It had lost many shattered copies of its fire godling since this war had started, so the Lich was forced to admit that it was a possibility.


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    ¡°They might have countermeasures prepared for your shadow drake and titan, too,¡± its general chimed in. ¡°We should not use tools they have seen before against a wary and cornered enemy.¡±


    Tenebroum was inclined to agree and sent the two of them away. It already had its own misgivings about using its titan because of some of the strange energies it had felt from beneath the city, but after this, the Lich was certain that the dangers for at least those servants outweighed the benefits and sent them away.


    Instead, it would rely on its conventional troops and other surprises. Thousands of dead marching as one was a form of magic all its own, anyway. Once all the defenders could do nothing but safeguard their wretched little lives, its most important weapon for this battle was unleashed: the siege ogre.


    Tenebroum had crafted severalrge monstrosities from ogres in the past. One had been lost at Siddrimar, one had been buried beneath the rubble at Banath, and two more had been detonated.


    This one was built from the remains of those and metal casts of some of the bones, where spares had not been avable: the result was a lumbering monstrosity almost three times the height of a man and nearly twice as tall as a normal ogre. While it wasn¡¯t quite tall enough to reach up and tear down the walls down, it was more than strong enough to rip the oaken gate that guarded the main entrance.


    The siege ogre moved slowly, shaking the ground with every step. None of the chirurgiens who had built it would be surprised by that fact, as it weighed several tons. A great deal of reinforcement was needed to unleash the strengths in all six of its man-sized arms, and three legs were needed to hold it up as it moved forward.


    It was imcable, though, and loomed out of the night like a hill more than a man. Eventually, the defenders noticed no matter how many arrows ricochet off the chainmail and armored ting that had been riveted to its tanned hide, the defenders could do no damage to it.


    Even lightning and hellfire called down by one of the mages before the man¡¯s soul was ripped to shred by a swarm of wraiths he hadn¡¯t been paying attention to was barely enough to stagger the thing instead. All the man seeded in doing was making the monstrosity more visible as he wreathed the siege ogre in mes.


    The flicker green fire was just the preservative chemicals being ignited, though, and it hurt nothing more than the morale of the men who watched in horror as the mes lit up the monstrosity with that ghoulish lighting, making it even more terrible to look upon. Fire would never hurt such a well-built thing. It was more powerful than any force of nature that could be brought to bear against it because it was beyond nature.


    The Lich could feel the terror radiating off of the starving men on the walls, but after a few minutes, it was finally forced to smother the mes. That wasn¡¯t because they were doing any real harm, though; it was because it was making it easier for the catapults to strike their target. They were doing some damage, at least, but only because their heavy stones were actuallyrge enough to break bones.


    Even a broken arm and damaged rib cage still couldn¡¯t stop it from reaching the gate, and once it was there, there wasn¡¯t a force in this world that could stop it. The ogre began ripping the timbers off the gate, one at a time, and tossing the foot-thick boards aside like they were no more than firewood.


    <em>Soon, that was all they would be, though,</em> the Lich thought with an eagerness that bordered on glee.


    At one point, a man trying to be a hero leaped down from the guardhouse and tried to inflict some mortal would with a ymore that was being used more like a spear. The zombie ogre snatched him out of the air with its upper right arm and crushed him to paste without effort. It barely even broke the ceaseless, noisy rhythm of destruction it was engaged in as it ripped down the main gate.


    Minutester, the timbersy in ruin all around the siege ogre, and it advanced to the portcullis. There, the men of the guardhouse sought to light it on fire with boiling oil and ming arrows. This did more damage than the magic had, but only because the pitch burned hotter for longer.


    Neither the burning oil nor the pike-wielding defenders that jammed their weapons over and over in a vain attempt to hit something vital were enough to stop it as it gripped the giant metal grating with three hands and began to pull. The metal popped and whined in its hands as the gate began to stretch and warp in its hands. Then, with a pained shriek, they finally gave way and were rent in two.


    The battle that followed was a desperate one, but even so, the humans never had a chance, and for every step forward, the siege ogre skilled a dozen men. Whether they wielded a great sword or a halberd and had dark eyes or light, few could even scratch Tenebroum¡¯s armor creation, and none could y it.


    In the end, the defenders couldn¡¯t even slow it down, and some mage weakened the stone in the guardhouse enough to drop a whole tower on the monster. Even that wasn¡¯t enough to kill it, though. Buried up to its waist in the ruble. This was enough to stop it in its tracks, but even so, it continued to fight, and it killed anyone foolish enough to approach it.


    The Lich was not surprised. Its general had already predicted such an oue, but it was only a dying move. It reeked of desperation. They had bought themselves another night, perhaps, but tomorrow, on the night of the new moon, there would be nothing to stop the fresh hell that it would unleash.


    The Lich would have continued its assault all night, but when it felt the Kraken finally cease moving and copse into a rapidly purifying puddle on the docks, it ordered the Paragon to begin to withdraw.


    ¡°As you will, my master,¡± it acknowledged as the flow of battle began to morph.


    Tenebroum knew full well that it would want to fight until nearly dawn, but at this point, the Lich felt that they had done all they could. If it wanted to end this, it was probably going to need to join the battle itself for only the third time in its entire existence. Despite its distaste, part of it relished the idea.

 Chapter 138: One More Sunrise

    Chapter 138: One More Sunrise


    Princess Trianna gazed out over her city that morning and despaired. They had survived another night, but it was hard to believe they would survive another as she looked outbuildings and surveyed the damage.


    Like everyone else, she¡¯d heard the terrible battlest most of the night, but she hadn¡¯t been able to bring herself to watch. She justy in bed praying for Siddrim to return to them and save them from this evil. But other than a brief sh of light after midnight, he had not returned to them.


    <em>This is still better than the alternative</em>, she told herself, but she had trouble believing it anymore.


    For a time, after the Temr hade to them, she had seen it as a sign. How could she not? Brother Faerbar was literally filled with light. For the first few weeks, the people of Rahkin had been quite sure that he would save them, and she¡¯d agreed, but that was harder now that there were so many dead that she could see them from her window, along with the huge pyres that had been heaped up just outside the city walls.


    Things only got worse after her two remaining servants helped her dress, and she listened to the battle reports with her mother over a meager breakfast of tea and toast. The bread was stale, but even so, the princess tried to be grateful; they might well be thest people in the whole city who still ate toast.


    He started with the number of dead and wounded. By his count, almost five hundred men had been killed in the defensest night, and a simr amount had been wounded or maimed. He believed that the number of dead among the residents closest to the harbor was almost as high, but it was too soon to say because they were still digging bodies out of the rubble.


    He didn¡¯t say exactly what had wreaked such havoc. He just kept going on about the Temr¡¯s holy light and alchemical constructs and the casualties they caused while avoiding therger issue.


    Truthfully, she didn¡¯t follow all of what the man said. She was not well versed in alchemy beyond its purported abilities to turn lead into gold. She understood what disastrous meant well enough, and when he started to discuss the <em>thing</em> that had attacked the harbor, that was the word that he used.


    She could see why the Field Marshall had tried so hard to skirt the topic. A rotting sea beast sounded positively hideous. She lost her appetite after that.  ¡°Is he alive then?¡± her mother asked about the Temr.


    The Field Marshall had very clearly said that he was, but the way he¡¯d talked about the man afterward, she admitted that she wasn¡¯tpletely sure either.


    ¡°The Temr is still breathing, Your Highness,¡± he nodded, ¡°He is recuperating in the high temple and may yet make a full recovery, but¡­ well, he was swallowed alive by that thing. You have to understand that the man is not himself.¡±


    Princess Trianna wondered what that meant but put it out of her mind for now as she continued to listen quietly while body counts and the extent of the damage were discussed. Apparently, both the main gate and the majority of the piersy in ruins now, though the man assured his queen that ¡°we have more than enough resources left to evacuate you and your daughter along with other vital members of court should you wish it. You have but to give the order.¡±


    He mentioned that several times. Really, whenever the opportunity arose. It was clear to everyone that he wanted nothing more than a valorous excuse to leave the city. Her mother refused him that, though.


    ¡°I will die where my husband did if ites to it,¡± the queen finally snapped. ¡°So why not do what you can and see if we can¡¯t push that off at least a few more weeks, won¡¯t you?¡±


    ¡°Yes, your Majesty!¡± the man said, taking the hint and snapping a salute before retreating.


    They would all live or die together. That was the message. That was always the message, even if someone didn¡¯t want to hear it. Her mother had exined that thought process to Princess Trianna on more than one asion, though she was thest person in the world who needed to hear that.


    ¡°Evil, like all things, is finite,¡± she¡¯d say, ¡°And we must exhaust that evil against our strong walls rather than let it continue to rampage across the defenseless countryside. With the help of the Collegium, we might even seed.¡±


    The princess was bing less sure of that every day. She didn¡¯t say that, though. Instead, she smiled and kissed her mother on the cheek.


    The only one who might be able to reassure her was the Temr, but she would wait untilter to see him. First, she wanted to climb to the top of the tallest tower to see the truth of the Field Marshall¡¯s words.


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    She was disappointed to find out that it was just as bad as he¡¯d described. From her window that morning, she¡¯d been able to see the terrible battle and the damage that had been done to the main gate. They were plugging the gap with rubble and lumber as best they could, but it was clear to her that it would not hold if they were attacked again soon, which she had every reason to believe they would be.


    Even the watchmen that were up here in the cold dawn light seemed to think that they¡¯d all be dead by the end of the week, and they ignored her while she shivered in her cloak. She tried to steel herself against such pessimism, but once she turned to view the harbor, her heart sank.


    She was far enough away that she couldn¡¯t smell whatever the rotting monstrosity was over the onshore breeze, but she gagged anyway. The whole area around it waspletely destroyed. Not just the building either. Half of the ships in the harbor were sunk.


    She shook her head. That would just make the whole thing worse. The bounty of the sea had been the one thing holding body and soul together, and now she wasn¡¯t even sure if the few fishing vessels that remained could move between all the half-sunk wrecks to reach the harbor mouth. It was an unmitigated disaster.


    Those terrible images didn¡¯t leave her head for the rest of the day. They stayed there, along with the secret guilt that she was the one that had caused this. She tried to tell herself that despite all the death and destruction, she¡¯d still done what was right.


    Seeing the heavily scarred face of the Temr that afternoon didn¡¯t help that, though. Princess Trianna braved the streets with only a handful of guards as she walked to the Grand Temple. All the horses had long since been ughtered, and though she¡¯d thought that more than a single guard would be overkill, even in times like this, the hungry looks of starving people quickly dismayed her.


    When she reached the building, she left them outside, but the soft glow that the ce usually had in his presence was absent. Instead, with the door left open, she could see rats skirting the periphery, looking for scraps to eat. They scurried away as she strode through the door, but to her, they looked so thin they were half starved to death.


    <em>It was a bad sign when even the rats couldn¡¯t find enough to eat,</em> she thought to herself.


    ¡°You¡¯ll need it when theye back tonight,¡± the older mage said, pushing something into the Temr¡¯s hands even as he tried to refuse it. ¡°You alone have the power to use this frozen¡ª¡±


    The conversation abruptly stopped when they heard the sound of her footsteps. All three of them pivoted to look at her as she walked out of the shadows and into the light, but they rxed just as quickly once they saw that it was just the slender princess and not some hideous abomination bent on assassinating them.


    ¡°I need none of your mage tricks,¡± the Temr stated, pushing the strange-looking crystal away. ¡°I¡¯ll not imperil my mortal soul, even on myst day.¡±


    ¡°It will be thest day for all of us soon if we do nothing. Without Karsagan I cannot use this relic as we¡¯d nned, but you wouldn¡¯t even need to craft a binding ring,¡± the old man said. ¡°Just channel the same power you didst night and¡­¡±


    The three of them kept talking, but Princess Trianna couldn¡¯t hear them. Not over the terrible need to look at the mutted holy warrior. Eventually, she just stood there looking quietly at her feet to avoid staring.


    She¡¯d seen him only a few days ago, and the man had borne a few fresh scars, as he always seemed to, but today, he barely looked human. His graying hair had disappeared overnight, and he¡¯d gone bald. In the grand scheme of things, that wasn¡¯t so bad. What was, was that his hands and face, and really all of his exposed skin, was covered with blotchy scaring.


    It was like he was molting. Even in the time she stood there, sneaking peeks, she could see a few more pink patches of fresh skin peek through the crusty scaring to rece the older, damaged skin. To her, it bordered on the demonic. The princess didn¡¯t know what to say, though, so she said nothing at all.


    The three of them never foundmon ground, at least that she could hear, but it wasn¡¯t until the mages left, saying they would return after dinner, that the Temr finally turned to her. ¡°What can I do for you, my child,¡± he asked as politely as ever.


    ¡°Oh, me? Nothing,¡± she murmured. ¡°I was worried about you. After the fightingst night, they said you¡¯d been terribly hurt and might not recover, and I just wanted toe and see.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s not as bad as it looks, princess,¡± he said with a shrug as he walked over to the stairs that led to the altar and sat down, patting the stairs next to him.


    She appreciated the kindness. In that spot, she wouldn¡¯t have to look at the grotesque he¡¯d be, and she was sure he knew that, too.


    ¡°It¡¯s not?¡± she asked. ¡°Were you burned badly?¡±


    ¡°Only on my hands,¡± he said, showing her a balm that had been burned and healed into the shape of a sword¡¯s hilt.


    ¡°Well, then what happened to the rest of¡­ you know.¡± she inquired, suddenly flustered.


    ¡°Oh, this?" he chuckled to himself as if he''d forgotten how badly burned the rest of his body was. "I had to dive into the belly of a proverbial whale. One pumped full of foul magics and alchemy. I¡¯m not at all surprised that it burned me as badly as it did, but even if I didn¡¯t think it likely I could heal these¡­ disfigurements, I would have done it just the same.¡±


    ¡°Why?¡± she asked, surprised to find tears running down her cheeks as she turned and looked at him abruptly. ¡°Why do you do so much? Can¡¯t you see it¡¯s killing you?¡±


    ¡°You¡¯ve already proven you¡¯d do anything for the light,¡± he smiled softly, making his face that much more hideous. ¡°Just know that I¡¯d do the same.¡±


    ¡°You think we can beat them, then?¡± she asked, willing herself to stare into his eyes and only his eyes. None of the damage could damage the holy light that lingered there.


    ¡°We have to,¡± he said solemnly, ¡°No matter what sacrifices it takes.¡± She knelt there and prayed with him after that to a god that both of them knew no longer existed, but somehow, she tookfort from that.

 Chapter 139: A Convoluted Convocation

    Chapter 139: A Convoluted Convocation


    Jordan rubbed his eyes as the words swam in front of him. Right now, that was merely a figure of speech, given his fatigue, but sometimes, he was certain it was literally true. This was not the first time he studied Sister Annise¡¯s strange book, and each time he did, he had trouble finding a passage or an illustration that he¡¯d studied intently previously.


    It was a ridiculous notion, of course. The first time it had happened, he¡¯d told himself he¡¯d simply gotten the pages confused or that it had gotten lost in the clutter. It was an easy thing to believe, given just how odd the whole thing was, but he no longer believed it.


    The book itself was a four-inch tome that had obviously been pieced together from two or more other books. Sister Annise imed to have made it by hand and done many of the gildings and illuminations herself before the book had taken her sight, but Jordan could see at least two other hands at work besides the spindly script of the woman.


    The whole thing was a study of contrasts, inside and out. The binding of the Book of Ways was a rich chestnut leather that was practically marred by its scribbled title and its ugly, dull, leaden corner protectors. Those shing aesthetic choices looked almost well-designed inparison to the pages of the book, though.


    It was obvious to Jordan that this had started out as a Book of Days, which was one of the many holy books that the Siddrimites venerated. It was sort of their religious history book, and though the Collegium disputed many of the points it made about thest few hundred years since Siddrim had supposedly lifted the world out of the dark ages, they agreed on the main points: darkness had once ruled, and many wicked creatures had terrorized civilization before mankind had brought them to heel one at a time.


    It was a far cry from that now. Though most of the most prominent embellishments and illustrations were still in ce, much of the wording had been pasted over by fragments of madness, and what little remained of the original text had been scribbled over in a different hand, and new notes had been added in, in the margins.


    Lines like, ¡®Siddrimmanded the dark waters, and verily they nk into the depths or fled the world entirely to escape his wroth¡¯ were reced with notes that read, ¡®Siddrim didn¡¯t do that! That was Posiphina. Liar! LIAR!¡¯


    The pasted-in fragments didn¡¯t seem to concern themselves with either version of the original text. Instead, they were long, rambling observations done in a sloppy hand on seemingly mundane things that were usually apanied by clumsy illustrations of their own. The way that people walked through a market square and were obviously in cahoots even if they never spoke to each other, the way that turbulent currents flowed through a stream, and numerology significant days that some count chose to spend with his mistresses were all topics that were discussed at some length on this page.


    It didn¡¯t seem to be about any of those patterns in particr, of course, it was more like the nature of the patterns as a whole. Sometimes, if he read for too long, Jordan almost got what the man was after. Those moments of rity happened just often enough for him to think that the person who wrote this tome might have been a mad genius instead of simply a madman, but on the whole, he was still undecided.  He honestly had no idea what it was she imed was offering her guidance in this book. Hell, she could no longer even read it, and if it was truly changing, as he suspected, then there was no way she could memorize it either.


    That didn¡¯t stop her from iming that he was the shepherd and that he had to escape with his flock while ¡®the fires were still burning.¡¯


    ¡°Escape?¡± he¡¯dughed. ¡°To where? Death lies in every direction! To the north is a city under siege, to the west lies the ruins of Abenend, the south has been abandoned, and to the east lies the sea!¡±


    ¡°Abenend has not fallen,¡± she answered, shaking her head, ¡°But it will. Our destiny¡­ your flock¡¯s destiny doesn¡¯t lie in that direction, though.¡±


    They¡¯d argued about that for some time. If the Magica Collegium still stood, then it was about the only ce he would consider fleeing to, but there was no need to flee anywhere.


    This spring, they¡¯d already started to build a palisade to reinforce the manor, and the herds were finally starting to grow again. Though the men and women under his stewardship did not yet have an easy life, they had enough food every night, which was more than most could say in these trying times. Thanks to Brother Faerbar¡¯s hard work the previous year, the goblins and the bandits hadrgely been dealt with, but every little bit would help.


    Despite all of those very reasonable positions, though, she insisted, they flee while there is still time. ¡°The fire will not burn forever!¡± she dered. ¡°You and everything you would preserve must be gone from here when the darkness returns!¡±


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    She could never answer his real question, though. Why would he flee from thefort and safety they¡¯d carved out so diligently over thest year and a half to seek out this hermit if the woman didn¡¯t even know who he was?


    It had given him much to think about, but in the end, he could hardly put much stock into what it was she said. The Sister had insisted that he read this book like it might convince him where her ravings hadn¡¯t, but if anything, it just made her less credible.


    At least, that was until he found the children among the tome¡¯s pages. That was a frightening moment. It was something that he would have sworn she¡¯d scrawled when he wasn''t looking if he hadn¡¯t had the book since before she¡¯d been allowed a room in the manse to recuperate from the ordeals of travel.


    She¡¯d never had the chance to make such an addition, though, nor could she have known about the children before she¡¯d gotten here, especially not the glowing eyes. <em>Markez had found the phenomena deeply unnerving, but he¡¯d been spreading that fact around since his departure; surely more than a lone crazy woman would havee to investigate, wouldn¡¯t they?</em> He wondered as he stared at the illustration.


    Its strikes were clumsy, but the details were still clear. It showed 18 children smiling in the garden next to the sparing yard. Some of them were so clear he could have named them. Jenna was there,plete with her recent growth spurt, towering over some of the other boys like Toman and Reggie. Even little Leo was there at the front with the serious look he so often wore on his face.


    It was undeniable that his charges were in this strange book, but it had no detectable magic that could exin it. Not that he had many tools to go on there. Neither scrying nor identification was something he¡¯d had much of a chance to learn at the Collegium. That was one of the reasons he¡¯d locked the River Dragon¡¯s manacle away for so long. That piece of work was dripping in foul magic, but once he¡¯d finished making a rubbing of it for further study, he¡¯d buried it in the once hallowed ground of the town cemetery so as not to be tainted by it, or worse, to draw more evil to them.


    He¡¯d spent thest year hoping a more knowledgeable mage might have turned up so he could hand such a burden off to them, but that had never materialized. Now, he had no idea what to do with it.


    That¡¯s the problem with all of this, though, Jordan thought with a sigh, closing the book after carefully noting the page number so that he could talk to Sister Annise about itter. For the time being, he wanted nothing to do with any more insanity, though, so he spent the afternoon doing what he did so often: watching the children spar.


    In the mornings, they were forced to do their lessons so that they could learn their letters and their numbers, but in the afternoons, when learning and chores were bothplete, they would engage in tiny mock battles that were the main source of entertainment these days at Sedgim Manor now that Brother Faerbar was no longer around to beat the other men.


    Sometimes, Jordan wouldunch little pyrotechnic fireworks for the holidays, but that was not amon thing. Even after all this time, his magic unnerved some more than all the glowing eyesbined.


    He wasn¡¯t the only one who wasn¡¯t doing much with his natural gifts, though. Given how peaceful things had been, most of thebat drills had fallen by the wayside since their pdin had left in favor of other, more enjoyable activities.


    Only the children still practiced every day, and they treated it like a war because that was what their master had drilled into them from the earliest ages. They went at each other like professional knights and worked together in tiny formations of three and four as they warred for control of the tiny hill that had been worn down to almost nothing by all the scuffles.


    Each day, the teams changed. They were decided randomly, and they drew lots of ck or white stones from a little bag. Mostly, it came down to which side Braedon and, more recently, Jenna were on, though Jordan didn¡¯t expect that gap wouldst too much longer. Once all of the other children started to hit their growth spurts, things would even out, and skill would matter more than size.


    In the evening, after the white team had pronounced their victory and dinner had been eaten, Jordan returned to the Sister¡¯s room with the Book of Ways under one arm. He found her already waiting for him. Before he could even ask her about the children, she said, ¡°So, you¡¯ve seen them then? You believe me now?¡±


    ¡°I¡­ wait¡­ How could you possibly know such a thing?¡± Jordan asked in confusion. ¡°What sort of trick is this?¡±


    ¡°Even as you read the book, it reads you, Shepherd,¡± she smiled cryptically. ¡°That is the way of these things.¡±


    ¡°It¡­ read me?¡± he asked, certain he¡¯d misheard her.


    ¡°Indeed,¡± she smiled. ¡°You are apparently quite the page-turner.¡±


    ¡°That¡­ makes only slightly less sense than the idea that the book is changing each time I read it,¡± he sighed. ¡°I need answers, Sister Annise, not more questions.¡±


    ¡°Of course, it changes,¡± she smiled wider like he¡¯d finally gotten some important point, even though he hadn¡¯t. ¡°No river stays the same from day to day, and the river itself is always changing.¡±


    ¡°But¡­ if that¡¯s so, then how can you know whates next?¡± Jordan asked.


    ¡°The river changes but rarely leaves the bounds that were decreed by the Gods,¡± she nodded. ¡°So things are as they have always been. The bonfire has been lit, but when the mes fail to burn away the night, then the shepherd must leave his flock to the hermit. It is the only way forward.¡±


    Jordan was d that she was blind because, for a moment, he could only stare at her in disbelief. The way she spoke to him with such certainty was almost as confusing as the tome that guided her. He took a deep breath and vowed to start the conversation again, but this time, he would keep a tighter grip on its reins.

 Chapter 140: All Night’s Falling

    Chapter 140: All Night¡¯s Falling


    When the sun set on Rahkin that day, Tenebroum vowed it would be thest time that anyone there would live to see it. Even as it reviewed the situation on both sides with its dark Paragon and discussed the intelligence that the rats had offered about the mages and their schemes, it could see that a frontal assault was probably not the optimal move, but it no longer cared.


    Just as it had refused to let the first vige it had ever devoured slip away into the light, it would not let this city do so either. Not even if it was thest and thergest stronghold in the area. The Lords of the realm had refused to bend, and now they would be broken.


    Though the walls still stood, they were brittle things, and the men that stood upon them no longer wore armor with the matching heraldry of its enemy. Instead of professional soldiers, half of the defenders now were simply whoever was strong enough to fight, wearing whatever would fit.


    Even with those signs of desperation, though, the light inside was growing, not ebbing. Even as its general assured it that victory was imminent, the Lich did not feelforted by its endless simtions and counter stratagems.


    ¡°With a few more waves of attacks to redirect the defenders to the north, we could free up the gates and the southern approaches,¡± the dark man assured him. The Lich did not doubt that was so, but even after listening to all of that, it still pronounced its judgment coldly in the thing''s mind. ¡°No. This will end tonight. Rally your forces ordingly.¡±


    For the longest time, the Lich had kept its dark Paragon in the bodies of random, broken-down drudges. This was both because it did not need more than that and also because Tenebroum wanted to be sure that its servant could never hope to challenge it. However, with the unpredictable state of the battlefield, it had finally built an appropriate body for the spirit, adding it to the tiny pantheon that was growing in its shadows, one creation at a time.


    Now, instead of a decaying skeleton, the Paragon animated a set of carefully inscribed mismatched te mail made up of pieces taken from the generals and heroes it had already outwitted. There was no head or even helmet, though. The Lich would not grant it the ability to hide its expression any more than its thoughts. So, its artificial, patchwork spirit stood there, encased and exposed simultaneously as it flickered in violet and cyan mes in the mockery of a real man.


    Though Tenebroum had certainly built its general to be capable of fighting if necessary by using all that, it had learned from Krlum¡¯venor and its shadow drake, that was not the intent. The intent was just to make it capable of defending itself from the strange attacks the humans sometimes surprised them both with.


    The body that Tenebroum wore today was an entirely different story. For months, it had been transported from battlefield to battlefield, but it had not actually been used since it had yed Siddrim the year before. It had been repaired and upgraded in the interim, of course, but the Lich had felt no need to join the battle directly, especially not since the Moon Goddess¡¯s ambush. That changed now. In fact, the Lich hoped that she would try to intervene, for it had brought several sorceress servants to the battlefield for just such an eventuality. Tonight, it would happily act as bait to win a battle like this that would all but bring about the end of its war.


    Though the Lich much preferred to let its spirit drift among the ravens or haunt the battlefield as a dark mist, it would face the Temr directly this time. It had even brought a few trinkets to try to capture the divine spark that the man wielded so effectively. If the darkness could not capture one more piece of the Lord of Light, snuffing it out would be almost as important a victory, though.


    When the darkness moved into its construct, it felt its world diminish and shrink as it began to flex and test each joint and limb. Remembering what it was like to be a singr thing rather than a divine entity of awesome power took longer than it had before. It was more stifling, too, but Tenebroum ignored it as it nestled deeper among the hollow bones of the holy men that had made up hisbat form.


    Over thest few months Tenebroum had designed many specialized forms, including one body was nothing more than a tarnished silver skeleton covered in a skin made up of the mouths and faces of the dead. That body was almost solely upied with arge series of multichambered lungs that could constantly inhale even as it channeled the air to the vocal cords of almost twenty different mouths.


    There were still some bugs to be worked out, but when it wasplete, it would allow it to cast impossiblyplex spells that even a full choir of decapitated mage heads could not do presently. Such things were not required of mortal enemies, of course, but the Gods it was pitted against would need more power, and given enough time, Tenebroum was more than capable of making a weapon appropriate to any foe or battle.


    The Temr was not a God, though. He was a pretender, and even though he¡¯d defeated a number of Tenebroum¡¯s lesser constructs, he could not hope to stand against the full force of a divine being or the deadly body that it wielded. After all, what could a spark do to it after it had already withstood the bonfire?


    The Lich listened to its Paragon drone on a little longer while it manifested its four shadowy des and then, without a word it began to stride toward the front lines. All around it, troops stirred to life as they realized its intent, and they began to stir. Blocks of war zombies began to march, cavalry charged forward, and other stranger things moved ording to their general¡¯s n.


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    Tenebroum reserved one of the war zombie bands for itself, pulling the formation to it and using them both as shield and disguise as they marched toward the rubble that had been the shattered gatehouse. This part, at least, the Lich enjoyed. There was a different vor to the screams and the swirling violence when one was a part of the churning maelstrom of war as opposed to soaring far above it.


    To the enemy, it was just another wave of undead warriors. Their archers and mages never once noticed that every bolt and st seemed to miss Tenebroum. Instead, its minions were stuck, one at a time, removing almost half of them from the field before the formation reached its goal.


    It didn¡¯t even have to get close to the shattered gate to know that <em>he </em>was waiting for them. The Lich had known that he would be. It had seen him as a beacon across the battlefield, and given the shadows that billowed around it, even in the heavy armor of this body, it was sure that the man with zing eyes could see it just as easily.


    There were no words exchanged when the Lich trudged up the slope with its remaining vanguard. Normally, it would have used the bloodthirsty mob that was Krulm¡¯venor to clear the path, but given talismans that the mages had, it was inadvisable. Instead, its war zombies charged into the grinder and were cut down, one after the other, buying time and distance with their heavily reinforced bodies as they endured blow after terrible blow.


    The Lich¡¯s army was everywhere, and its numbers seemed limitless. Despite that, they were spread across the entire length of the wall. So, at this spot, there were enough warriors to outnumber it. At least, that was true at first. There were perhaps fifty ragtag humans left standing by the time it was reduced to only a bare handful of leathery, riveted war zombies that had not been beheaded or crushed yet.


    It became a tangled storm of swords as the scrum was reduced to a chaotic melee. There, the Lich had an advantage that no one could match: with so few minions in such close proximity, it could control each of them very specifically. So, despite the chaos, its final few minions became extensions of its limited body, acting as one and taking out many times their own number. The livingsted no longer than its zombies did, though, because each time the Temr red to life with holy fire in an attempt to smite it, the Lich used those dark shadows tosh out far beyond its normal reach.


    Its des that were exposed to that light directly dimmed and shortened for a moment with each st as they were reduced to nothing but their rusting cores. Their shadows sprang to life for that instant, bing more like whips than des as they sought out the closest living thing and murdered it.


    After all, there were shadows in every suit or armor and unwatched vulnerabilities under the enemy¡¯s guard. So, every time the Temr shed to life to heal himself or to attempt to strike down the Lich, two or three of the men closest to it died painful deaths as their shadows became infested by its own for an instant before they were ripped to pieces and diced like soft cheese.


    When the battle had begun there were nearly a hundred warriors, both living and dead, but after twenty minutes of fighting only two remained. Horns were blowing in the distance, calling for more reinforcements, but they would never arrive in time.


    Instead, this was a battle that would be decided only by two warriors, and one of them was already bleeding. The Lich didn¡¯t think much of this pretender, even up close. It had already studied him through the unguarded eyes of the man¡¯s squire, but it saw nothing that the man had admired so much.


    He was a brute and nothing more. Every attack was an exercise in power, butpared to a dark god, power was the one thing he didn¡¯t have. The Temr bore a heavy glowing de and hammered it home over and over, but the feeble light he used was nothingpared to what Siddrim had burned it with or even what he¡¯d used on the warf the day before.


    ¡°Whats the matter,¡± the Lich rasped in a voice that was rusty and discordant. ¡°Why won¡¯t you show me how brightly you can burn.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯d be ready for something so straightforward, wouldn¡¯t you?¡± the Temr growled through gritted teeth.


    His light burned bright enough to keep the darkness circling him like a hungry swarm at bay, but only just. The Lich proceeded to batter the man with a swarm of attacks. It even taunted him with the knowledge that it had killed his god and his squire, but still, the man did not react.


    ¡°I know what you¡¯ve done!¡± the Temr spat, offering no further insight into what he was thinking.


    ¡°Then you should know that you¡¯re next!¡± The Lich shrieked, redoubling its efforts, bing a storm of des.


    It delivered a dozen minor wounds before it seeded in knocking the Temr from the ce they fought atop the rubble and sending him tumbling down the slope to the ground below. Despite that, the shadows found no purchase on the man¡¯s soul. There were no stains to infect or guilt to blossom.


    ¡°What do you think you can do with your tricks that your god could not do with your healing and your light?¡± The Lich gloated, pointing all four of its des down at the fallen warrior. ¡°You have fallen, and soon your city will too!¡±


    ¡°I guess I¡¯ll need a new trick then,¡± The Temr said with an inscrutable smile as he dropped his weapons and pulled something from behind his breastte.


    The Lich had a moment to study the swirling prismatic shard that the man was holding. That¡¯s how long it took it to realize that was the same shard the rat had told him the man had refusedst night. He¡¯d expected the mages toy their trap, but now, suddenly, it was in the hands of this brute.


    It surged forward, twining its four shadowy weapons together andunching them at the strange object like a pike of pure darkness. They never reached him.


    ¡°Burn!¡± The Temr yelled. After that, everything was erased in a curtain of fire.

 Chapter 141: Burned in Effigy

    Chapter 141: Burned in Effigy


    Some distant part of Tenebroum¡¯s mind recalled what it was the infernal rats had told it when they had whispered about this encounter. Crystallized dragon fire, they had called it. The breath of a wyrm frozen in time. The mages imed that theycked the power to release it with their weakened numbers and that only the Temr¡¯s light might seed where they had failed.


    The Rat¡¯s smelled subterfuge in that statement. They¡¯d even thought to mention that to the Lich, but at no time had they mentioned that the Temr might have had the scent of deceit about his as well. That no longer mattered, though.


    Now, everything was burning. The fire had shattered its prison, andunched toward it like a Tsunami with ferocity that might have melted even Krulm¡¯venor¡¯s specialized form. The wall of fire burned in yellow and white, sting back the rubble that was the remains of the gatehouse from the force of the shockwave, and bathing world in incandescent mes for twenty yards on either side of the breach in the walls, and extending backward a hundred yards behind Tenebroum.


    There was nowhere for it to run now, not even if it wanted to. All it could do was trust in the skill of its unwilling dwarven artificers as it moved one step at a time toward the man that was holding the torrent of fire in his bare hands. The Lich was a creature that was made up of pure will, but that didn¡¯t make enduring what it was experiencing any less agonizing.


    The shadows on its des had winked out immediately, but it only dropped their rusted cores as the phnges of its hands began to reduce to g and ash. In those first few terrible seconds it losts two hands and an arm. Finally, the head of this construct itself was sted to ash in the high pressure torrent of inhuman me.


    Tenebroum had not designed this body to endure fire like this. Nothing was. Its mind raced as it tried to imagine what it would need to do that, but even if it could craft the brittle ceramic bones, the dragon scales were something it simply didn''t have


    This form had been created to fight the light, which wasn¡¯t quite the same as what it was facing now. Light it could have handled for hours. Wearing this form, the Lich could have walked for several minutes under the noon day suns if it had been required. But against the heat of a dragon¡¯s breath? The gilded coating of the Lich¡¯s bones very nearly evaporated under that terrible assault.


    Bronze and brass didn¡¯tst much longer, and after a few seconds, even the Lich¡¯s steel bones began to redden and soften. In the end, it was only its mithril armor that saved it.


    As its arms fell and its legs gave way only a few steps away from its goal, the darkness was forced to hide in an ever smaller portion of its carefully crafted vessel. Even among the grave goods the Lich had looted, mithril was a rare substance, and this was the only construct it had built with half so much of the stuff. Fire, as it turned out, could not prate the silvery metal, and even as the mes began to subside and it was forced to cower there like some sort of metallic beached tortoise, it endured. Less than half a minute after the torrent of fire started, it was over. The nearby stone walls had been melted by the mes, and anything not made of stone or metal had been erased from existence.


    For a moment, the Lich stood ready to flee and lick its wounds, but then it saw the mangled corpse of its opponent and changed its mind. The front of the Temr had been burned away down to the bones. Even as it watched, it could see the man trying to heal himself from the impossible damage, but the Lich didn¡¯t see how that would be possible. It could see the man¡¯s tortured lungs rising and falling in his charred rib cage, and though he still had his arms and hands, they were practically skeletonized from the elbow down.


    The Lich rose up from its own charred corpse as a vaporous mist and moved with haste to the closest war zombie it could find. It felt terribly vulnerable in this form but not so vulnerable that it would not see this man dead. Just because it should have been impossible to recover from such a grievous injury did not mean it would not happen.


    So, with the uneven gate that came from no longer being used to walking with only two legs, the Lich trudged back over to the man, raised the rusting great sword clutched in its skeletal hands, and then brought the weapon down hard, shoving a foot and a half of steel through his heart and into the scorched earth beyond. Pinning the Temr to the ground and finally forcing his cursed heart to stop its endless beating.


    The light left his body then and drifted toward the night sky. The Lich wanted to stop it. It had meant to capture and study it, but all the devices and spirits that it thought might have aplished that had been annihted. Instead, it let the thing go. It was too depleted to do more than that.


    It could still im the second most important soul present on the battlefield, though. The darkness poured out of the construct. It was animating like smoke and traveled down the de into the still-warm body of its foe.


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    This was one soul it would treasure. Tenebroum wasn¡¯t yet sure what it would do with it, but these bones would be taken back to itir for something truly diabolical. It found the soul just where it expected, and swarmed it, epassing itpletely, so escape would be impossible.


    To its surprise, the man didn¡¯t even struggle when it forced its way inside everyst pore, seeking to suffuse himpletely. He just said, ¡°So you survived that, did you monster? The mages told me there was no way anything could stand up to the dragon¡¯s fury. Not even me. I suppose they were right about thest part at least.¡±


    ¡°Silence!¡± Tenebroum countered. ¡°You will have all the time in the world to apologize to me and beg forgiveness, but now¡ª¡±


    ¡°Apologize?¡± the Temr Laughed. ¡°I¡¯m just sorry that I didn¡¯t eradicate you with the same weapon that killed me. I knew I couldn¡¯t trust those damn mages. Jordan was an okay sort, but the rest of them? Liars and thieves, the lot of them.¡±


    Tenebroum was so apoplectic as it tried to understand what was going on that it merely floated there as a slowly solidifying haze while the annoying warrior spoke. Even now, without the light, he still had a small aura about him. The darkness reached forward to try to grip him and force him toply, but its dark tendrils slid right off the ghost.


    ¡°All of this, and you still think you have a hold over me?¡± the Temr asked, looking at him in amusement.


    ¡°I control the forces of death itself! All spirits are within my power!¡± Tenebroum roared, but that only made the frustrating warrior¡¯s smile broader.


    ¡°You don¡¯t get it, do you?¡± he asked with a shake of his head,


    You only snared Siddrim with Todd¡¯s stained soul, you¡ª¡±


    ¡°Of course I know that!¡± Tenebroum hissed, swirling around the man like a storm as he looked for an opening.


    It couldn¡¯t find one, though, and more frustratingly, even as it watched, the spirit was already fading away. That was intolerable. There should be nowhere for it to flee to, and yet it was happening!


    ¡°Then you already know that you have no hold on a soul without any darkness in it,¡± The Temr said with a shrug. ¡°You cannot stop me from going to the Elysian Fields that were promised to me and my brothers and sisters.¡± He looked like he was going to sleep now.


    ¡°No soul is clean!¡± Tenebroum raged. ¡°No life is without taint!¡±


    ¡°True, mostly,¡± the Temr agreed. ¡°There was a little darkness in even my soul once upon a time. I used to hate myself for all the mistakes I¡¯d made, but a few years with the light burning away inside you is enough to bleach even those transgressions to nothing. I die with only a single regret, but will ept that I maimed you at the very least¡­¡±


    Tenebroum¡¯s scream of incoherent rage as the mans spirit slowly faded to view and crumbled to nothingness was enough to stop its constructs in mid stride for a hundred yards in any direction. A dozen of its ckbirds fell from the sky.


    It had experience anger and frustration before, but it had never felt the strains of volcanic rage like this, and for a while, its ghostly form flickered and jittered like an agitated swarm of wasps. It had achieved its goal, and yet somehow it had gotten nothing it wanted from the event.


    It had faced down terrible magics, beaten what might have been its only real adversary left on the continent besides the mages, and the gods themselves, and somehow it had walked away with nothing. Not the divine spark, nor even the soul of its enemy to torture for the rest of eternity.


    Despite that, much of its power had been bled away in the assault. <em>I maimed you, at the very least. </em>Those words echoed in its mind even as it took in its ragged form that was closer to a shredded burial shroud than a cloak of pure midnight.


    <em>The fool did nothing that cannot be repaired with a day or two of rest!</em> Tenebroum griped, but the words were coldfort.


    Finally, when it was so angry that it would have gnashed its teeth with rage if it still had a body, the Lich retreated, floating above and away from the burning city. The defenses were failing on several fronts now, and it no longer saw mages casting their bolts from the walls.


    ¡°Crush the defenders and sink the ships, but leave the rest to cower in their homes,¡± Tenebroummanded as it drifted higher and further to take in all the violence.


    It was wounded, frustrated, and in absolutely no mood to enjoy the mindless ughter that would unfold next. So, that would wait for tomorrow. There was no hurry any longer. The shepherd was dead, and the sheep would mill around, panicky and bleating, until they were ready for the ughter.


    The Lich was determined to enjoy that moment, and if it could not do so tonight, then they would just be allowed to keep breathing for another day or two until it had collected itself.


    <em>Yes, </em>it thought as it drifted up into the night to look for the nearest dungeon that would be dark enough to allow it to rest. <em>Rahkin¡¯s defenders are no more. The table is set now, and the feast can begin at my leisure.</em>


    There were still thousands of living souls in those broken city walls, and soon, everyst one of them would die screaming for its pleasure.

 Chapter 142: The Feast Nearby

    Chapter 142: The Feast Nearby


    Tenebroum retreated to the nearest dungeon, four miles away from the city walls, but restless, it moved twice more before daylight made further travel on the surface impossible. It left the dark Paragon to handle the withdrawal of its forces, though its general did not wish to leave.


    ¡°Sire, if we push only a little further, we can kill thousands and then bury our remaining legions in the city catbs proper,¡± it insisted.


    The Lich ignored that advice, though. It was almost peaceful once the darkness¡¯s forces withdrew and the screaming stopped, but that didn¡¯t fool the Lich. More surprises awaited them all in Rahkin, and even if they did not, it wanted to feast on those remaining defenseless lives itself.


    Though its forces left behind the battered husk of a city and a shell-shocked poption, it was certain that there was one more trick awaiting it. There always seemed to be. The moon had seen how much those infernal mes had weakened it, and she would rally some new hero to strike the final blow. So itid low and flitted between locations while it recovered.


    Nothing came, though. Later in the day, some of the humans began to stream away from the still-burning city in long refugee caravans to the north and the south. There were no heroics, though. No new champions of the light raced across the ins eager to strike it down, and no Gods descended from on high to do so either.


    Instead, Tenebroum was allowed to slowly coalesce from the ragged fog it had be back into the true pool of night that was its nature. <em>Surely they will take advantage of this moment</em>, the voice gibbered in its head in half a dozen tongues. <em>Surely, they will strike me down when I am out of my strongest constructs. </em>


    No one did, though. Instead, it huddled there in the dank, dark pit with the dozens of abominations that were being stored here to protect it. The day above them was calm and hideously bright, even twenty feet under the surface as the wandering stars made their way across the sky.


    No doom was leveled at it, which gave Tenebroum the time it needed to lick its wounds and recover. It cursed itself for underestimating the Temr, but even that castigation was not enough to entirely quell its joy that it had finally won.


    Well, won this region at least. There was still the bastion of magic to the south, and there were still likely humans to be purged or imed along Dalton¡¯s eastern shore. Even when it dealt with both of those groups, there would still be other enemies far to the north across the trackless sands to contend with, but the Lich was not concerned about any of them immediately. There was not a single army left in a hundred miles besides its own, and once it crushed the mages and the vestiges of the Sidramites that sheltered with them, it would have all the time it needed for even the mostplex of ns.In a perfect world, it would already be preparing a newbat form for tomorrow¡¯s ughter. The charred remains of its mithril armor would not be easily fixed in a minor dungeon outpost without any proper tools. What it needed was a handful of flesh crafters, a forge, and some exotic raw materials. It had none of that, though. Instead, it had 47 drudges, 13 many legged horsemen, a handful of wraiths, and a neuroid.


    None of those would help it to create what it needed, so, instead, it turned inward into the shadows. The flesh was strong enough to tear people limb from limb, but for what came next, there were no armies or priests to contend with. Instead, there were just families barricaded inside their homes and people hiding wherever they could while they prayed for a miracle that wasn¡¯ting. For most of its campaign, it had tasted the blood that had been spilled in its name through a chain of intermediaries, and now, on the eve of its ultimate triumph, it would not be denied a more direct experience.


    Shadowscked the strength of flesh, but what they did have was versatility. It could be anything in the shadows. A dragon, a mass of writhing tentacles, or even a bizarrebination of the two was entirely possible. It was not limited by the real world when it made its form solely from the souls of its victims and the darkness that was at the core of its being. That would make it intensely vulnerable to mages and all the rest, of course, but ording to the whispering of the rats and the assurances of its general, there were none of those left.


    For hour after hour, Tenebroum healed, and it also sculpted a new form it would wear for the ughter toe. It started with something resembling its own discarded form of mithril and steel. However, as it realized that it did not need something slow and heavily armored, that began to change.


    The first thing to go was its constrained size. It had grown so used to the human parts that it was most frequently forced to work with that it had practically forgotten what it was like to unfurl its true self, except for when it was watching the battlefield from high above as a cloud or a flock of dark birds.


    Tenebroum did not need to be diffuse any more than it needed to be small. It was a vortex of death and power that could tower over almost any spirit it had ever encountered. It was with that in mind that it slowly uncoiled from the shade of a man into that of an ogre. It grew sorge that the cramped dungeon could barely contain its majesty.


    Ironically, in this form, the Temr could have defeated it easily with his terrible light. Now that he was gone, though, the darkness could practically devour the city whole.


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    It only needed something with ws that could cut through the souls of its prey and speed to evade any traps that might yet wait for it in the battered city by the sea. So, modification by modification, that primal, amorphous form became more animalistic. Its back grew more hunched, its armor disappeared, and that bulk was, in turn, reced with a sinuous body and additional limbs.


    Even as a centipedal abomination covered in hands so that it might move through even the smallest of crawlspaces with ease, the darkness decided it wasn¡¯t yet fast enough. So, it added wings, and then tweaked them, recing ws with ded feathers and removing each element one at a time until it was nothing but an incarnation of hunger than even its pet rat godling might approve of.


    Tenebroum paid attention to even the most minor of details, adding unnecessary symmetries to things like the nine rows of teeth present in its maw to ensure that it would fly that much faster and making sure that everyst shadowy pinion on its nine pairs of outstretched wings was a perfect reproduction of the real thing, only sharper.


    Each feature mutated and improved, and each of those improvements were polished and rehoned as Tenebroum became lost in the activity of making itself the perfect spiritual predator. Normally, it used the corpses of others because it was safer to y puppet master, but so much of it had burned away the night before, and so few enemies now remained that its normally cautious nature took the back seat to hunger.


    It became so engrossed in the activity that the final sunset of the day passed without its notice. It was halfway to midnight by the time it crawled from its burrow as a dark phoenix and flew like a bolt toward the now quiet city. As it left, it only issued a single order to its general.


    ¡°Capture or kill the stragglers, and let none escape,¡± itmanded. ¡°The city itself is mine!¡±


    None saw it as Tenebroum approached the city like a monster of legend. Now that it had cast off the human form that it had grown toofortable with, it had be a force of nature. Its wings stretched nearly a quarter mile against the nighttime gloom, blotting out stars in its wake. Even if the residents had been able to see the dark shapeing for them, ready to engulf the city, they wouldn¡¯t have been able to pick out the thousand terrible details that would drive most men to madness.


    When Tenebroum flew over the walls it expected another strike against it, but none materialized. Instead it saw only a few ragged guardsmen holding their posts with pike and crossbow against an attack that would nevere. They feared zombies, but tonight they would face something much worse than anything it have ever build of steel or bone.


    When itnded in the battered merchant quarter, itnded as a wall of darkness that prated every building that it brushed against. There, its attention to detail paid off, and even before it had folded its wingspletely to dissolve into the next stage of hideous abomination that it had created for the once-capital city, its de feathers had already spiritually maimed and flensed dozens of helpless people.


    They didn¡¯t even know they were under attack when suddenly a line of darkness pierced them, and they fell in two as surely as if they¡¯d been struck by the de of a guillotine. Their flesh was intact, but they were mortally wounded just the same.


    The lucky ones died of shock and heart attacks as the impossibility of what had happened to them simply shattered their soul. The unlucky ones fell to the ground screaming or were unable to remember their name as they were only maimed instead of mortally injured.


    Tenebroum stood there for a long moment, testing the air as it searched through the fainted whirls of essence for any sign that something might be amiss, and when it found nothing, it began to unravel. It had not spent hours of its day simply perfecting an eighteen-winged behemoth to look pretty, it had built a terrible purpose into every appendage. Now, each of those appendages dissolved into a hungry multiheaded hydra in its own right, connected to the rest of the body by only the thinnest strands of malice.


    With every moment that passed, the dread god began to resemble a giant spider web more and more as its body became half a hundred grasping mouths that spread through every nearby building in the search for life to devour.


    Most of its victims barely saw more than a ripple in the air before it attacked them. If a small mouth found someone, then ittched on to the very core of their being, and if arger one found them, it simply swallowed them whole.


    Those few victims with some measure of the sight, or those who watched a loved one fall to the ground next to them, often tried to run, but they didn¡¯t get far. In every room and in every building, the darkness was feasting. Those few that remained with a flicker of light in their eyes were sometimes enough to hold it back a moment until another limb could attack them from behind, but that was as much opposition as it faced.


    Amidst the spiritual carnage that it inflicted, a rush of energy and joy-filled Tenebroum. What it was doing was monstrous, and it gloried in it.


    Here, it began to achieve an apotheosis it had not reached even when it had devoured a god. Each of the lives it was consuming at that moment was a minor thing, but the way they were all connected became thettice that it crawled over as much as the cobblestones and tunnels. How could you escape from the darkness when it already had its ws in your neighbors and your siblings?


    Each victim hunted to the ground and died screaming as the Lich¡¯s wildly mutating form burrowed ever deeper into their souls and forced them to relive their deepest traumas over and over before they finally passed. But in their passing, they opened up a small window into those lives they¡¯d touched most.


    Tenebroum didn¡¯t even need to hunt them anymore. It just needed to want them, and that wasn¡¯t hard. It wanted everyone and everything. Though it had gotten ate start, it continued to spread quickly. Though their bodies would remain as it hollowed out their souls and took everything that made them who they were, the slowly cooling corpses of the citizens that had once been the true heart of the city were quickly bing an endangered species.


    By sunrise, there wouldn¡¯t be a single living pulse remaining anywhere in the city. All that would remain would be a feast for rats and raw materials for future constructs. Right now, the Lich didn¡¯t care about any of that, though. It was lost in its predatory bloodlust as it drank in the lives of the innocent and rendered them screaming into the void.

 Chapter 143: Vengeance not Victory

    Chapter 143: Vengeance not Victory


    While her dark god feasted and thrashed about the city, the Voice of Reason entered the hole that had once been the main gate astride a skeletal horse that walked slowly into town. Her master would devour everyst soul in the ce. All save one or two in the castle. Those, it had left them to her, so that she could properly carry out her vengeance.


    Despite the obvious joy her lord was taking as he sucked the life out of Rahkin¡¯s inhabitants, part of her was saddened to see it. Her terrifying master had built each of its constructs for a single purpose. The Dreamer existed to spread the darkness into the minds of those who might be susceptible, the Dark Paragon existed to crush the forces of light and life on the field of battle, and she existed to make the reluctant see reason and bring them into the fold.


    After all, even a lord of the dead would rule better if it had a few living allies to carry out tasks during the daylight hours, and the darkness¡¯s priesthood was a bloody ce always eager for fresh recruits. Each of them had their purpose, and only she had failed in hers.


    Had the King seen things her way, then even now, this might be a bustling city of thirty thousand souls working hard to bring in the harvest. Instead, walls were ckened, buildings were copsed, and deady scattered in the streets.


    As she rode slowly toward the heart of Rahkin, she watched men and women continuing to die as the hungry mouths and limbs of the darkness ripped soul from body, making their corpses fall to the ground like a marite with severed strings as the dark jungle made of etheric limbs multiplied in number again and again.


    It could do the same thing to her just as easily. She knew that. It might at any time, too, if she failed it again.


    For now, though, the person-sized tentacles that were its grasping mouths steered around her. One day, she might not be worth repairing, but for now, she was hardly considered food.


    Her soul, like the rest of the darkness¡¯s constructs, was a fragile, artificial thing and hardly the font of life force that it was currently seeking for. So she continued on, unmolested, as she rode toward the castle.


    Several times along the way, she found guards. In most cases, they simply ran from the sight of a broken woman on a skeletal steed, but in one instance, they had enough steel left in their spine to stand their ground. Then she took a deep breath into her hollow chest and shrieked a single inhuman note that lingered in the air for almost half a minute. The terrible note cracked nearby ss and was enough to rupture the eardrums of the men who opposed her. Most of them fled at that, but the one that didn¡¯t, copsed with blood pouring from his ears and nose.


    He wasn¡¯t dead, but he would be when her lord found his insensible form and consumed him. The Voice of Reason rode past the body without so much as a sideways nce as the body as she approached her target at the main gate.


    Before her carriage exploded, she would have hesitated to use the sole weapon she¡¯d been given for fear that she would have cracked her perfect porcin face. Those days were over now. Though the cracks had been fixed with molten gold, and whererger caps were visible, pieces of moonstone and finely crafted howlite had been cut to fit.


    The end result was still beautiful, in its way, though itcked the perfect symmetry she¡¯d had at her creation. As a result, she could not bear to look at herself in the mirror and routinely shattered them when she came across them.


    The rest of her broken body had been repaired in a simrly piecemeal way. The golden wires of her hair had been melted down and reced, though they were not as lovely as before, and her limbs were repaired in the same wed style as her face, though they could not be seen under her ck dress.


    The construct rode into the castle without opposition. The gate was still sealed, but one of the side doors had been left open by someone who¡¯d decided that fleeing would be safer than cowering behind the walls. They were wrong. Nowhere was safe now. The Lich owned the world for leagues in every direction.


    The halls were even more vacant than the rest of the city, but the Voice of reason ignored all of that as she made her way to the Grand Hall and the throne itself. She was here for one reason and one alone: to murder the traitors and redeem herself.


    The only guards she found were outside the door to the throne room itself, but these weren''t pce regrs. One old man with a boar spear stood shoulder to shoulder with a boy too young to grow a beard wielding a kitchen knife. It was aughable scene, and when the two of them found themselves face to face with a construct as hideous as her, they bolted in opposite directions, leaving her free to enter the seat of Rahkin¡¯s power.


    Inside, she found thest stand she¡¯d expected. Half a dozen gray-beared knights stood or knelt in prayer in the center of the room, halfway between her and the throne.


    None of them was able to endure The Voice of Reason¡¯s keening scream long enough to make it even halfway to her before they fell on the polished stone floors. The only difference between this encounter and thest one was the way that the stained ss fell from the intact windows near the ceiling and rained down on all of them.


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    She walked over that ss, letting it crunch beneath her high-heeled boots as she strode toward the throne where the Queen waited for her.


    ¡°Queen of the dead,¡± the Voice of Reason said cordially. ¡°Pity you had not taken my lord¡¯s generous offer. Then your people and your sons might yet live.¡±


    ¡°So you admit it!¡± The Queen yelled a touch too loudly, for she was still partially deafened by the earlier screech. ¡°I knew it was your vengeance for their refusal.¡±


    ¡°Vengeance?¡± the construct asked in confusion. ¡°My vengeance only arrives today. I havee to wring your sorry throat as well as that of every member of your family who dares to live!¡±


    ¡°You have already in them with your foul poison!¡± the Queen yelled with tears in her eyes.


    This confused the Voice of Reason considerably. She¡¯d killed no one. Certainly not the people she¡¯d been trying to negotiate with. ¡°I believe you are mistaken,¡± she said simply. ¡°My only weapon has ever been words, and now I havee to take yours away forever for interfering in my Lord¡¯s critical diplomacy.¡±


    As the Voice of Reason strode toward the throne itself to carry out her task, a voice yelled from the shadows. ¡°She did nothing! If you want someone to me for standing against you, then face me, you monster!¡±


    The woman who spoke so bravely stepped out of the darkness, clutching a dagger in her hand, and the Voice of Reason turned to the new speaker and then dropped the frail old woman back onto the throne to face this challenger. She might not have been created for fighting, but even a doll like her could take off the starving woman before her. She¡¯d probably been beautiful once, but like everything else in this city, war and starvation had taken their toll, and the princess was a shadow of the woman she¡¯d once been.


    ¡°No. That¡¯s impossible. You?¡± the Queen mouthed, unbelieving. ¡°You couldn¡¯t have¡­ your father¡­ your brothers. You couldn¡¯t have¡ª¡±


    ¡°I did.¡± the princess said curtly. ¡°I had to. They sought to ally with evil, and that made them evil as well.¡±


    The Voice of Reason merely stood there, letting all this y out while she listened. Not only was this level of betrayal and emotional turmoil certain to draw the hungry gaze of her master, but it meant one thing above all others.


    <em>I didn¡¯t fail, </em>she thought to herself. <em>I convinced the man and his generals to see the error of their ways. </em>


    She felt the relief wash over her, and as she stood their stiffly, only the slightest of smiles at the corner of her ceramic lips betrayed that sudden lightness. For months now she¡¯d carried around the weight that was the certainty she¡¯d failed to aplish her mission. Now she knew that was incorrect. She¡¯d seeded in winning over the heart of the kingdom, only to have that tentative truce betrayed by the man¡¯s own daughter.


    That was simply too delicious for words. It was almost enough to make all these wasted lives worthwhile.


    ¡°Your father, the King, he would never¡ª¡± the Queen answered.


    ¡°He did, Mother!¡± the princess screeched, almost matching the volume of the Voice¡¯s earlier destructive note. ¡°He was going to trade human lives and souls to this¡­ this¡­ thing and I could never have allowed it. It would have damned all of us to the pits!¡±


    The Queen opened her mouth to protest again, but no sound came out. Instead, she broke into sobs andy heavily across one arm of the jeweled throne, letting the crown on her head trouble to the ground. It was a pitiful sight, but the Voice basked in it for a moment before she began walking toward the princess.


    ¡°What is it you think you prevented?¡± The porcin doll asked. ¡°All you did was seal the fate of everyone in your city. Why would you do that when piece would have saved so many lives.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m more concerned with their souls than their lives,¡± the princess spat back.


    ¡°Their souls will never escape the grip of my master either,¡± the Voice of Reason said, gesturing toward the window. There, they had a clear view of the ck veins burrowing into half the buildings of the city. The shadows no longer looked like a monstrous creature. They grew too thickly and too numerously for that now.


    The scene looked like the roots of an impossiblyrge tree or the tangled veins of a cancer now. Either way, the metaphor was apt, and it feasted on the city while tiny things like them could only watch in disbelief as it devoured the world.


    ¡°You¡¯re lying,¡± the princess whispered. ¡°My father and brothers are safe in Elysium, where you can never touch them, and I¡¯ll join them there soon enough.¡±


    ¡°Is that so?¡± the Voice of Reason asked, taking two steps toward the woman before she raised her weapon again. This time, she dropped it and staggered back a few steps.


    ¡°I will not run from my city, but I will not let you have me either.¡± the princess said. Those were her final words before she dropped to the floor. The Voice had thought that the woman was merely starving, but it would seem that she turned the same poison she had on her brothers on herself in a bid to die before the darkness could take her.


    That was never an option, though. The Lich would devour everyst soul in the city before the night was through.


    It wouldn¡¯t devour the bodies, though, and this one was too lovely and too fitting not rece her current one. She moved to the wall to lower a tapestry so she could hang it by its heels and drain it of blood before it began to rot. Perhaps in light of her good work, the Lich would grant her a boon and give her the wless face of the woman that had upset all of their ns.


    Only then would the voice of reason be able to look at herself in the mirror again.

 Chapter 144: A Wider View

    Chapter 144: A Wider View


    ¡°Is it really over then?¡± Oroza asked, looking at the images the moon yed upon her waters. ¡°Is the age of man over? How long will the darkness rule this time?¡±


    Lunaris shook her head. ¡°The Kingdom of Hallen might epass your whole world, Oroza, but it is but a small part of everything. The Underkingdoms are stillrgely intact, so I¡¯m told, and even if the mages did not still stand, or the children of the forest, there would still be other champions. The Northern Kingdoms, the Westends across the sea, and even the Isles yet remain untouched, and they are just as full of heroes as anywhere else. This evil may fester and grow here, but like any fire, it will run out of fuel and exhaust itself soon enough.¡±


    The two goddesses sat there on the small delta ind looking at the moon Goddess¡¯s scrying magic as the city burned, and crazed shadows multiplied to devour the whole ce like a growing tumor. Both of them looked worse for wear after thest several years of ever-increasing violence.


    Oroza¡¯s skin and begun to wrinkle, and her hair was more than half gray now. She¡¯d never been particrly vain, and wouldn¡¯t have cared about that if she wasn¡¯t so weak. The Lich¡¯s poisoning of her watershed with saltwater via the canal was taking it toll. She¡¯d copsed the thing again and again, but each time, it was rebuilt, and more nts and animals that made up her little world died as a result.


    The moon Goddess, by contrast, was looking as young as ever, but she was paler than usual, and she seemed thin and worn out. That was the way of things since thatst terrible ambush on the moon. A full conve of the divine had not happened since that awful night, but that didn¡¯t bother Oroza. Someone would tell her if important things were happening, and the rest of the time, she would focus on thwarting the darkness wherever she could.


    As Lunaris spoke, she waved her hand, and the nightmare that was Rahkin was reced by a wider view of the word from high above. Oroza could only barely make out the penins that her river traversed as ity there in the shadow of the Wodenspines. At this scale, it was impossible to see cities, but she knew where ces like Abenend and Siddrimar must be.


    She¡¯d spent some time exiled to the oceans, where she¡¯d prowled restlessly and devoured what ships she could find when her river had been so forcefully dried out. So, she¡¯d known that the world was muchrger than she could see from the snow-capped mountains where her headwaters originated. Still, it was one thing to know and another thing to see.


    Even as vast a domain as the Lich now controlled, it wasn¡¯t even close to the majority, and from this height, she could scarcely even see the slender tower of darkness that marked its domain.


    ¡°Does it really stretch so far up into the sky?¡± Oroza asked, noting the ck thread that rose far above even the tallest mountains before disappearing in the night sky above the two gently glowing women.  ¡°Indeed,¡± Lunaris nodded. ¡°It goes past the domain of the wandering stars and even the fixed stars beyond them. ording to the All-Father, it descends deep into the core of the earth as well. We know not what that monster ns to do with such a thing, but there are many possibilities.¡±


    ¡°It doesn¡¯t seem to move or even do anything at all,¡® the river Goddess said as she dragged her fingers across the waters and dispelled the ugly illusion lest it somehow draw the dread eye of the Lich itself.


    ¡°It doesn¡¯t have to move,¡± Luaris breathed, suddenly speaking quieter. ¡°There is very little darkness in the sunlit world, but past the domain of the dwarves, and forever churning in the night sky the number of shadows is truly endless. If the fiend ever figures out how to make contact with the reservoirs, who know which deity he might attempt to ughter next.¡±


    ¡°It has been trying and failing to kill me for years now, and it has yet to seed,¡± Oroza said with a thin smile, trying to put a brave face on their predicament. ¡°Surely, when ites to Niama or to you¡ª¡±


    ¡°Niama is still grieving the loss of her daughters,¡± Lunaris said with a shake of her head. ¡°And most of my battles will never reach your shores. Pray that they don¡¯t, or we would all be lost.¡±


    Oroza¡¯s eyes drifted up to the sky, where the flickering constetions held the endless void at bay. From the moon, one could see the arcane arrangements that the stars held, like giant wards, but from here, all she could make out were the general shapes, like the Hunter and the Leviathan. The river goddess had no idea what it was such things must fight, and honestly, she didn¡¯t want to. She had her own nightmare to face and was better off not knowing what the constetions and the moon warred against each night.


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    The two Goddess talked a while longer after that, but since Lunaris had already given Oroza her message and begged her to abandon her one-woman war against any undead that should find themselves within arms reach of her river, she finally left in a ray of light to attend to other matters.


    That left the river goddess alone to ruminate on what it was she should be doing. The kingdoms of men hadrgely fallen everwhere that she could see, and other than a few small settlements like the Siddrimites that held the gap between the mountains and her banks, and the farm where the children of light lived in their tiny bubble of peace so far from the fighting, the rest of the world seemed to be dead or dying.


    That was true of ces well beyond her salt-poisoned borders. The All-Father had sworn that he would repair Siddrim¡¯s chariot so that his fiery steed could be gathered once more, but until the dwarf did that, the world withered, snows gathered, and mold blossomed. Oroza couldn¡¯t remember thest time it had been warm; even the hottest days were merely pleasant now, and there were far too few of them. She could hear it in the whispers of grasshoppers and the creaking of the growing ciers.


    ording to the stories, that was the way of things in thest age before Siddrim¡¯s rise, too, but Oroza did not know the old stories well. Until all of this, she¡¯d been wrapped up in the rhythm of the seasons before all of this had happened to pay such ancient history much attention. She dearly wished she could go back to the days when she was only concerned about today, without care for the things that might or might not have happened hundreds of years before.


    Oroza glided back into the water at that thought, looking for some sort offort, but she found little. Though this river would always be her body and her home, it was dying. The resurgent darkness that the Lich called Cholorium sickened her, and the ever-growing amounts of salt stung her eyes.


    Still, neither one could stop her as she swam up river with ever increasing speed. The Oroza river spanned hundreds of miles from one end to the other, and she could navigate the entire length in less than an hour. This was not something she¡¯d done much in the past, though.


    Why should she ever be in a hurry when she could linger in the mangrove roots or explore shipwrecks that had been unearthed once more after thetest storm? That had been her way for the longest time, and she missed it terribly, but it wasn¡¯t enough to stop her from soaring now as her long, sinuous river dragon form swam with mighty strokes of its tail.


    There were only a few spots she did not navigate the world like that at this point. The upriver shallows prevented it, of course, but not half so much as the wall of darkness that bisected her river almost directly in half. It was there, where the perpetual crust of ice marked a line in her domain, that she always paused.


    She could swim through. She told herself that. Even if the Lich had created some awful new trap, she could probably fight her way free.


    She didn¡¯t try to, though. Some fears could not be escaped from so easily, and though she no longer had a real body, she could still feel those terrible shackles around her wrists and ankles.


    Instead of risking it, she rose from the water as a mist and dispersed along the band of grasses that ringed the edge of the shadows that were still part of her domain. When she¡¯d first escaped and had a chance to study this thing, she feared it would continue to expand until her domain was cut in half.


    That never happened. Instead, it had merely sat there unmoving, issuing foul monsters nearly every night. So, while she could traverse her whole domain in less than an hour, this one spot took nearly half that time, and she was always on guard that some new terrible thing might exist to ambush her if she traveled during the night.


    Tonight at least she was lucky, and nothing stirred, letting her travel ever more north. Eventually, she left her river and her dragon form behind as she swam up the streams, fanning out into her headwaters. Her at least she could feel clean again.


    Oroza looked for the hand of man throughout the whole of her trip as she always did, but they were rarer now than they had ever been before. They were practically an endangered species.


    It was only when she reached the ciers frozen solidly into mountain passes that she finally paused to think clearly. Here, she could do little to save the world or help anyone, but she doubted very much that anyone could hurt her either. She could probably crawl up into this giant block of ice and slumber away an age, hoping that when she woke, someone else would have solved this problem.


    She didn¡¯t do that, though. She couldn¡¯t.


    Her life, precious to her as it was mattered little in all of this. What did, was that she found something to do to turn the tide in all of this. Oroza no longer knew whether she would live a year or a decade. Until now, she¡¯d been functionally immortal, but death didn¡¯t scare her. Only the idea that she might waste that time without striking a blow against the darkness was enough to give her real fear.

 Chapter 145: Ever On - End Book 3

    Chapter 145: Ever On - End Book 3


    In the end, it was the children that convinced Jordan. Sister Annise¡¯s book had certainly proved that there was something amiss, of course. It wasn¡¯t hard to do that, the way the pages changed from day to today. It was clearly some kind of powerful artifact, but despite all his efforts to study and understand it, the only thing he¡¯d even found within its pages were riddles.


    The idea that she¡¯d made it herself was preposterous, of course. A blind woman, holy woman, could not do anything that a mage, or even an appearance like him, couldn¡¯t, and yet he wouldn¡¯t know where to start with something like this. He¡¯d drawn up simple scrolls before and copied longer spells from ancient spellbooks, and in both cases, he could feel the magic intrinsic in the act.


    In this case, though, there was nothing. Flipping through the book, he could not point to a single sign or seal that radiated arcane might. Instead, the deeper he went into the tome, the less things made sense as the handwriting became more crazed and the messages it contained more nonsensical.


    Of course, the fact that the messages drifted away to be reced by other contradicting ones didn¡¯t make them seem any saner. Why should he care about who the wolf would hunt when freed from its bonds or what the rat would be when the missing piece was finally revealed.


    All he cared about was keeping the people in his care safe and finding a weakness to fight the evil that gued thend. Though the former had gone very well thest couple of years, thetter, well, to say he¡¯d made no progress would have been charitable. All this time, he¡¯d had a dread relic forged by their enemy in the form of that terrible golden manacle, but hecked the knowledge to understand its workings, let alone figure out how to turn its secrets against its owner.


    Still, until the night when he was woken up by a dozen children with tears in their eyes, he was content to pursue both mysteries in tandem. Why should they need to flee a warm, safe house that finally had enough food when there were no threats.


    The threat wasing though, the children promised him that much once the crying stopped and precocious little Leo exined, ¡°Brother Faerbar has fallen, and the city with him.¡±


    ¡°How can you possibly know that?¡± Jordan asked. It wasn¡¯t that he didn¡¯t believe the child, but the fact that they could know something so preposterous only frustrated him more.


    As if to answer, most of the children suddenly pointed to the same spot in the sky. Jordan looked around but didn¡¯t see anything beyond a scattering of stars. One was brighter than the rest, but it was nothing special, at least not until the children exined it. ¡°His light has left his body, and returned to the sky where it was borrowed from,¡±Cynara exined.


    ¡°His light?¡± Jordan asked. ¡°You mean his soul?¡±


    ¡°No,¡± Toman answered. ¡°High light - the light of Siddrim which was gifted to him. It has returned to protect the heavens, and he has gone with it.¡±


    Most everyone else was unnerved by the glowing eyes of the children, but for Jordan he¡¯d always been more concerned about the way they acted years older than they were. Sister Annise was bothered by neither and stood quietly in the doorway, watching this whole exchange with the patience of a grandmother.


    ¡°We must go now,¡± Reggie said next. ¡°All of us. The keep is broken, and the way is clear; nothing will stop the darkness now. All we can do is outrun it.¡±


    ¡°Outrun it?¡± Jordan asked. ¡°Better to defend what we have then¡ª¡±


    ¡°We can¡¯t!¡± Cynara pleaded as she gripped him by his robes. ¡°Don¡¯t you understand? What ising is¡­ it''s like the tide. It cannot be stopped. They wille¡­ not for us, but for everything that smells of light or life¡­¡±


    Cynara was only eleven, or thereabouts, but the way that she gripped him by his robes while she tried desperately to talk some sense into him was remarkably grown up. It would have been adorable if the moment wasn¡¯t so strange. However, when he met her desperate gaze, flickers of the terrible scenes she referred to drifted through his imagination.


    Moment by moment, the other children mobbed him, too, each pleading and grabbing, but as they did so, the most peculiar thing happened: the threads of their delusion epassed him. Each one of them seemed to be trying to force their own little spark of awareness to make him understand.


    Separately, that was only enough to make scenes of distant battle or a darkened city flit across his mind, but when they all spoke to him with such urgency and stared at him with those glowing eyes, he was unexpectedly overwhelmed, and their vision became his vision.


    Suddenly, he was standing there at the shattered gates of Rahkin, gazing upon theplete ruination of the city. In front of him was Brother Faerbar¡¯s charred body; Jordan knew it was him even though the corpse had been burned beyond recognition.


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    The street was filled with corpses. Most of themy where they had fallen, but some of them walked the streets looking for the living or piling the corpses of the recently dead into wagons for some foul purpose. None of that was able to tear his attention away from what was happening in the sky above the city.


    While columns of smoke still rose here and there, they were all but blotted out by the shadows of something darker and all together more terrible. Jordan¡¯s mind could¡¯t quite resolve it, but to his eyes it seemed like a mass of tentacles reaching from the heavens to devour the whole city.


    He¡¯d seen engravings like that in some of the old books that described the time before time, but to see it in person, or whatever this was, his mind simply rejected the idea. It was too terrible to contemte, and he stood there staring up in horror at the throbbing, undting shapes until the vision finally faded.


    When he looked around the finally quiet room at the fearful gazes of the children, his resolve stiffened, but only for the sake of appearances. ¡°Do you see now?¡± Sister Annise said. ¡°The pyre burned, but its brightness was unable to burn away the smoke, even with so much kindling. Now, we must be away before the darkness stretches so far to the south.¡±


    ¡°Yes,¡± Jordan agreed with a shaky voice. ¡°We must be away from that¡­ <em>thing</em> at once.¡±


    The only problem was there was nowhere to go. The Tolden River barred travel to the south, and the nearest ford was a day to the east, but there wasn¡¯t much between here and the sea. South of the Tolden were the Trollmoors. Past that, there was only a narrow band of pine forest along the hignds before it reached the sea.


    There were a few viges that way, or at least there had been before the world ended. Jordan had no idea if they were still there now, but that was because it was no fit ce for man or beast. Without their crusader with them to purge things like goblins, he didn¡¯t really think that their herds would do very well.


    When he shared his concerns with the blind woman, she merely shrugged. ¡°What need have you for herds or retainers when we reach the heands? The Hermit would never wee them.¡±


    ¡°Hermit? Heands?¡± Jordan asked. He had no idea who the Hermit was, but he knew exactly where the heands were, he just had no idea why they would ever want to visit them. They were an ugly storm beset series of mountains that took the worst of the weather that came in from the sea to the east. ¡°I¡¯m not sure what it is you''re ying at, but I expect we will all get more than a little acquainted with starvation if we don¡¯t provision ourselves properly for a trip to such a bleak ce.¡±


    ¡°A few sheep for the road might suffice,¡± she shrugged, ignoring almost all of his questions, ¡°But we must move quickly lest the dark rider or his flying rats catch us unawares.¡±


    ¡°I agree,¡± Jordan said, content with the knowledge that things he didn¡¯t understand were in motion now. ¡°By tomorrow, or at most, the day after, we should be gone from¡ª¡±


    ¡°Tonight,¡± she hissed, grabbing him by his robe¡¯s sleeve with her free hand. ¡°Have you learned nothing from the book of ways? We must leave tonight at thetest, or all will be lost.¡±


    ¡°Tonight?¡± Jordan asked, looking at her like she was crazy. ¡°But there is so much to do. Possessions to pack, people to organize, and, of course, we must¡ª¡±


    ¡°Tell them toe if you like,¡± she said with a shake of her head, ¡°But not where we are going. Say you travel Siddrimar, or past that to Abenend, but not to our true destination.¡±


    ¡°Why would you ask me to lie to everyone,¡± he asked, noting the children were already packing. ¡°Surely they¡ª¡±


    ¡°When they stay, and their souls are pulled from their cooling bodies, the dark one will know all that they do,¡± Sister Annise said as her blind eyes teared up. ¡°It will know about the children and about us, but not where we will go. And that makes all the difference in the world.¡±


    Jordan listened to her in this, but only because he knew enough about necromancy to be able to say that what she believed was entirely possible. So, reluctantly, he began to rouse everyone, and when most of the people who dwelled within his walls had assembled in the courtyard, he told them about his vision.


    That was a lie, too, of course, but it was the easiest way. He told them that he¡¯d scryed past the horizon and see that evil was stirring this way because even that made a lot more sense than ¡®the children see unimaginable horrors and a crazydy and her even crazier book insist we run while we can.¡¯


    That spurred a massive debate, but almost to a man, everyone agreed that it was better to fortify and defend this ce than it was to flee across unknown territory in search of safety. He could understand that. Jordan had felt exactly the same way less than an hour ago.


    That wasn¡¯t enough to stop him from imploring them to listen to him, though. By the end, the mage¡¯s words bordered on the apocalyptic, but only a few were willing to take him seriously, and almost all of those had a trace of light in their eyes.


    He thought about ordering them toe with him, but there seemed to be little point to it. So, eventually he wished them the best, and those who were going to flee alongside him. They took a small share of the wheat, some goat cheese, two of the cured hams, and wagon for bedding and other supplies along with a single draft horse and half a dozen sheep.


    It wasn¡¯t enough to damage the prospects of those they left behind, and it would be more than enough to keep the bellies of the 17 souls that joined him as they made their way east after first looping around to the west.


    By the time they were heading toward their destination, Jordan could see a thin line of blue on the horizon. The idea that it would soon be light should haveforted him. That would be enough to protect them from any lingering evils after all.


    Still, it only made him feel more exposed. They were wandering toward a destination he could not yet see and did not understand with only the slenderest threads of hope, and that seemed to be enough for the children. For him, at least, it left a lot to be desired.

 Chapter 146: A Lifeless Husk

    Chapter 146: A Lifeless Husk


    Tenebroum feasted for three nights running before it finally decided that the city was now a lifeless husk. That first night, it gorged itself on the great masses of the living, leaving only the souls of the pce for the Voice of Reason to harvest and the remaining generals for its Dark Paragon to feast on.


    For the darkness, this wasn¡¯t about harvesting great minds for future ns; this was about victory and a truly bottomless hunger. There were times in the swamp when a single bloated corpse had been an unimaginable luxury. Now, an entire city wasn¡¯t enough to feed its bottomless hunger, and it had ripped the souls from the bodies of entire families at once.


    It had spent the following day slowly digesting its banquet of tens of thousands of souls in the catbs beneath the city while the many rat vessels of Ghroshian cowered in the corners, avoiding direct contact. They were an interesting abomination, and Tenebroum looked forward to exploring their tiny connected minds once it was done with Rahkin.


    That wouldn¡¯t be for several more days, though. On the second night, it boiled to the surface like a hungry shark, searching for those few crumbs that had fallen from its table the night before. The strong, the clever, and the small made up its meal that night, and though there were only a few hundred of those resourceful men and women at sunset, it savored everyst one even more for their rarity.


    By sunrise, none of them were left, and it retreated from the surface once again. This time, the rats were nearly as stuffed as Tenebroum, thanks to all the corpses their dark master had left in their wake. As a result, they were less skittish, and the two of them talked about many things while they sheltered away from the light.


    In this strange multi-tiered conversation, the two of them covered many topics, though theyrgely focused on the things that the rats could remember from ages past as well as the things that they had forgotten. They were able to answer, at least in part, one of Tenebroum¡¯s long-simmering questions: where were all the other evil spirits? Why were their Gods in the heavens but no evil Golds?


    This was something that Tenebroum had wondered about for over a decade, but not even the most learned mages it had devoured had a satisfactory answer for it. Ghroshian did, though.


    ¡°Long ago, before the age of the age of dawn that we lived in until recently, there were other spirits. There was a Goddess of death and any number of lesser cults,¡± the rats whispered, ¡°But as Siddrim rose in power, discing the other lights in the heavens, he finally gained the strength to devour and obliterate them. Well, some of them. He was forced to bury my ashes after we rose from our own grave for the third time.¡±


    ¡°Why?¡± Tenebroum asked. ¡°What makes you special?¡±¡°We do not know,¡± the rats confessed, ¡°But it has something to do with the primal nature of some spirits. A river goddess may not be killed while her river flows; she will only be born anew in a new form. The god of a city will not perish as long as people still live and trade in his domain. ¡±


    ¡°So you could not be destroyed because hunger still exists?¡± Tenebroum asked. ¡°An interesting theory.¡±


    In all their conversation, the darkness senses only meek obsequiousness and confusion from the rats. These tiny, fragile creatures might know its hunger, but they would never be a threat to the darkness.


    On the third night, there were no living creatures left alive in the city. There were no humans hiding in houses, cats scurrying on rooftops, or fish swimming in the harbor. Everything that had once moved and breathed was now a room-temperature corpse.


    That was when it began to devour the graveyards themselves. Groshin or other spirits had long ago devoured scraps of ethereal energy and memory that clung to the bones stacked in the mausoleums and crypts beneath the city, but in the graves of the churchyards, and the private sepulchers beneath the manses of noble houses, there was well-preserved dead that went back for centuries, and Tenebroum devoured each of their souls in turn, draining the city dry of everyst spiritual remnant as it sought to purge it for its disobedience.


    The ancient dead had long since given up their souls to whatever afterlife awaited them, but there were traces of the person they¡¯d once been, and Tenebroum devoured those echos in a bid to fill the bottomless pit at the center of its own swirling maelstrom. This was unsessful, of course. It could devour the entire world and still feel the craving to know and possess more than it already did.


    It did learn scraps about the history of the city as well as those that had lived in it, though few of those memories held any real value. It did find many graves where the long dead were buried in finary of silver and gold, though, and it added each of those locations to its drudges¡¯ to do list.


    Even now, they were ransacking the city in an orderly fashion, gathering and sorting everything of value, including bodies, parts of bodies, weapons, and wealth, and setting it aside to be turned into new bits of artifice and new soldiers for its growing army. It was only when all that was done that it called for a meeting for the other spirits that served it in the Grand Temple of Rahkin.


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    The grand stone building was a ce that had once been so holy that neither it nor any of its servants could have dreamed of standing there beneath the moonlit oculus of the vast ce. Now, though, there was no one to stop them, and the assembled wraiths and skeletons stood there like something out of a mortal¡¯s deepest nightmare.


    Tenebroum came wearing only the skin of the nearest drudge, as its only body in the city that was worth wearing was still melted to g. Repairing that might take half a year, given how far away its dwarven spirit-powered forges were.


    Its lieutenants, on the other hand, made up for its drabness with their distinctiveness. To its right stood the Dark Paragon, flickering with dark fire from the neck of its imposing armor. To its left stood the Voice of Reason. She held the spender crown of the Kingdom of Hallen and looked much different than when he¡¯dst seen her. Over thest three days, she had put the flesh surgeons to work and now wore the skin of the princess over her battered form, reiming most of the beauty she had lost in the explosion.


    Across from Tenebroum stood its silent titan next to a smoldering Krulm¡¯venor. The fire godling had be less talkative ofte. That made it more obedient, but less fun to torture. The Dreamer floated between the two of them as little more than an iridescent outline. Past all of them, the Puppeteer flitted about the rest of them as a mass of tentacles wearing three heads attached to different limbs, and Ghroshian¡¯s countless red eyes glimmered like stars in the background of the conve.


    Innumerable lesser spirits like its shadow dragon and the various flesh crafters that toiled endlessly for the Lich were missing, of course. Despite that, this was perhaps the greatest focusing of its strength in a single location that had ever experienced before, and the Lich took a moment to appreciate that.


    Here, the shadows swirled so thickly that the world lost its color, and the very fabric of reality distorted slightly. It, along with its spirits, was a truly irresistible force, and it had not even finished its corruption of the captured nature spirits or finished some of its other specialized projects.


    ¡°My victory isplete,¡± it said finally, ¡°This Kingdom is no more, and the only residents that yet live are those who venerate me!¡±


    There was only silence there for a moment before the Voice of truth stepped forward and said, ¡°Sire, this is yours,¡± before lifting the crown toward his head. Tenebroum leaned forward slightly so she could ce it upon the brow of the skeleton it was wearing. It was odd, given that the thing otherwise wore only rags, but it epted the token regardless.


    ¡°What are the next steps?¡± Tenebroum asked, turning to the Dark Paragon. ¡°Where do my armies march now?¡±


    ¡°North, sire, across the sun-scorched deserts to Bastom and all thends thaty beyond it. There are several northern empires, and each is ripe for¡ª¡±


    ¡°A long march through the sunlitnds sounds less than optimal,¡± Tenebroum said cagily. ¡°What about a nautical approach?¡±


    ¡°Ships could be built and made fast against the sun with wreckage from the harbor,¡± the Dark Paragon agreed, ¡°But legions of soldiers should be safe enough in our approach as long as we stick to the dunes. We could¡ª¡±


    ¡°Do it then. Both ns. We will take a few months to gather our strength and incorporate all of these new soldiers into the army, and then we will head north for fresh blood at the turning of the year,¡± Tenebroum ordered. ¡°Be ready for it. I may have to divide you into pieces to create a new crop of generals, so I am not needed so far from my ces of power.¡±


    ¡°As youmand, my liege,¡± the general said with a slight bow, offering zero resistance to the idea of being lobotomized and used as spare parts to create a new series of spirits.


    In a sense, the Dark Paragon would die to create sons that would rece him. Even if the creature had protested, it would have changed nothing, but the fact that it had no sense of self-preservation heartened Tenebroum. The perfect servant was as talented as it was disposable, and by that measure the Dark Paragon was the best that it had ever created.


    It went around the room after that, asking for status updates and opinions on what it should do next. The Dark Paragon and the Voice of Reason both agreed that the Magica Collegium in Abenend should be their next priority, though both of them differed greatly on the right way to defeat such an enemy.


    The Voice of Reason argued that diplomacy could pay dividends in such a circumstance, while the Dark Paragon argued that only a massive attack would work on such a cagey opponent. Tenebroum agreed with their instincts but already had a n in ce for how they would deal with the damn mages, so it said nothing and moved along around the circle.


    The Dreamer delivered its answer in the form of a surrealist series of images where infants were nted in the dark earth and grew into crops of bloodthirsty men, the Puppeteer argued passionately in two different voices that it should winnow its growing priesthood and remove the most conniving, but only Ghroshian had something unexpected to tell them.


    ¡°Abenend¡­¡± a chorus of rats whispered. ¡°We know that name. Yes, we have heard it.¡±


    ¡°What of it,¡± Tenebroum snapped loud enough to make a third of the undead rodents scurry for cover.


    ¡°The wolf,¡± the chorus said as one. ¡°It¡¯s where they keep the wolf!¡±


    ¡°The wolf, eh?¡± Tenebroum said to itself. The Rats had spoken to it before of a wolf and a worm before. It remembered that much. If the wolf proved to be as deathless as the rats had been, then that was all the more reason for the darkness to end those wretched mages for good and all. It could always use another interesting spirit to experiment upon.

 Chapter 147: Laying the Groundwork

    Chapter 147: Laying the Groundwork


    Even as it debated the decisions with its tiny pantheon of underlings and slowly began to make preparations forrger tasks, its minions spread in all directions. Some of those were fast moving cavalry units that galloped throughout the night on discordant hooves before they sheltered by night in bogs and ponds. The infantry units moved slower, both because of their short, human legs and the fact that they had to dig their own graves wherever they went.


    There were only three areas of concern now, though. The first priority was to surround Abenend.


    After that, some small measure of its forces was sent to the north to keep an eye out for any northern armies that might which to disrupt things. A few scouting parties were also spared for thends it had not yet ravaged to the south-east of Rahkin. Unfortunately, the north part of Dutton county. There were already nearly abandoned.


    At least, that was what the Lich believed, it was only after almost a week of scouring out every trace of life at each isted farmstead that its scouts reported a small vige on the banks of the Tolden river that was still prospering.


    Normally that would have been enough for the Lich to descend on it and feast on the still living morsels itself, even if it was currently busy with arrangements for Abenend were it not for one smallplication. After many days of discussions with its Dark Paragon, it had decided that further frontal assaults would be fruitless. This left them with two options: tunneling under the mages¡¯ school-fortress orying siege to it.


    Of course, in a broad sense they hadid siege to the area for years now. It had done little good, though. The Wiley wizards somehow used their magic to sustain themselves even as the world copsed around them.


    Tenebroum was just beginning to discuss a different sort of siege involving standing stones more than soldiers, but that was halted when the men and women with light in their eyes were found. That was enough to stop everything.


    Its troops retreated undetected, and instead a swarm of ck birds wasunched to go find out what new torment had been unleashed. It took days for more than a few of them to gather, but they revealed no dire news.


    Indeed, other than the fact that two dozen of the two hundred people in the tiny armed camp had glowing eyes, everything was as it should be. They were just humans preparing for theing harvest. Other that a palisade and a sturdy gate they were as defenseless as anyone else. Still, the Lich doubted. There had to be more than meets the eye for such a strange urrence to unfold. He suspected the work of the dead Temr, or if not him than evidence of another fallen star. Thetter prospect was terrifying


    If the gods were continuing to intervene in small ways at the edges of its domain, then who knew where they might strike at it next? The moon goddess might attack him again from anywhere in the sky, and the All-Father theoretically had everything beneath the ground within his domain. Then there were the gods of the sea and of nature to consider.


    Tenebroum didn¡¯t feel fear, but suddenly it¡¯s paranoia raged out of control and it sent spies in every direction and dark messengers to check on its distant strongholds while it focused on this one. Something wasn¡¯t right.


    As each of its minions reported back, though, all they had to say was that everything was as it should be. No reports contained anomalies, and no devastating attacks had beenunched in unexpected ces. Even the kidnapped nature goddesses were still trapped in their cells so that Tenebroum could experiment on them as time allowed.


    With trepidation, after several days it sent the dreamer forward to explore the minds of the vigers next, to try to get more information from their sleeping minds. The results were unexpected.


    The evidence of the light¡¯s touch had made the lich fear the worst, but all it had found were the embers of hope. ¡°This is where the Temrid his head while he recovered from yourst battle, sire,¡± the ephemeral Dreamer whispered. ¡°There was a mage too, and some children, but they are gone now.¡±


    ¡°Where did they go?¡± Tenebroum demanded.


    ¡°West,¡± the Dreamer said, ying a piece of a vision that showed the small band leaving. ¡°To take shelter with the mages at Abenend.¡±


    Even before the spirit had finished speaking, Tenebroum ordered a segment of his cavalry along with a small portion of the gathered raven flock to set out in search of the group. If they¡¯d been forewarned about itsing, then they must be pawns of some importance.


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    The trail was weeks old at this point, so magic would be of little aid. Still, it controlled all of thend between here and there, so there was nowhere they could hope to hide from its deathless eyes.


    ¡°Shall I dig deeper and discover who might yet serve you with their whole heart?¡± the Dreamer asked.


    ¡°Not this time,¡± Tenebroum answered, shutting down the topic immediately. ¡°They have been touched by the light, and I want only to consume them.¡±


    Once the Lich had determined that the danger was minimal, it sent a single neuroid to the tiny vige, projected by half a legion of war zombies. They didn¡¯t attack though, they just got close enough to an unwatched portion of the palisade to fall under the spell of its minion''s psychic screams.


    By the end of the first night, half of the vige had torn the other half into bloody shreds over paranoid delusions and imagined grievances. Even after its units retreated before the light of day, the killing continued. Later that night, its constructs returned to find only a bare handful left that hadn¡¯t been driven out of their mind by the maddening magics.


    That all of them had light in their eyes seemed to indicate that the Temr¡¯s blessing granted some kind of resistance, but it wasn¡¯t enough. Tenebroum took things slowly after that, sending back its minions each night just closely enough to ratchet the pressure up on the survivors as other minions studied which ones would crack first.


    It was only when the there was a single survivor left that they finally moved in and hauled her away for further study. Her mind waspletely broken at that point, and she was covered in the blood of her family, but she generated such a rich vor of suffering that the Lich could not bear to put her down until it had delved more deeply into her mind.


    That would have to wait though. It had wasted more than a week of its precious time focused on this anomaly, and even as it devoured the light tainted souls, it turned its attention back to the true threat: the mages of the Magica Collegium.


    There, at least, the n was simpler. Indeed, it was already ongoing. While it had focused on understanding the light¡¯s resistance to malign magics, its library had done the calctions, and all that remained was for its somber earth titan to do its job and create obelisks and standing stones at the required points, so that skeletal dwarven artisans coulde along and carve the necessary runes toplete the spell.


    The theory was a simple one, it was only the scale that was grand. The mages had built their school in a very defensible and highly auspicious ce. Perhaps at one point an army of Temrs and Siddrimites might have been able to march into that valley and pit the love of their God against thebined might of centuries of learning and study, but no mortal army hard dared attempted it, almost since the founding of the institution.


    The forces of darkness had already annihted the surrounding town, but in the three waves since the initial attack they had done very little damage to the walls themselves. The mages imply possessed too much firepower and too many tricks. So it would take those away, and then it would ughter them to thest and feast on their secrets so that it would be its future enemies that might know that pain rather than its own forces.


    Such arge n required many parts, though. Itsst few attacks hade from forces that had gotten as close as possible via the caves that ran throughout the mountains. Those entrances had long since been copsed, but without much in the way of dwarven interference, it would not be hard to rebuild tunnels that went right into the basement of their fortress.


    All it would take, was time. That too was fine, since the fourteen monuments that would have to be raised, and the Strangulite that would have to be fabricated to to power them would also be extremely time-consuming.


    What Tenebroum would have preferred to do was create a magical deadzone that nketed the whole area, but the equations and forecasts had dubbed that infeasible. Were it to stop all mana from flowing in along the usual routes, more would juste in from elsewhere. Even if the Lich managed to seed, then it would nott be able to follow up wit the coup de gras, because its own constructs would have difficulty operating in such an environment.


    Instead, it would have to settle for twisting the current of magic that flowed along the Wodenspine range, and make them unpredictable and alien to the mages. Anti elements in the peaks would poison the currents that flowed through them as surely as it had crippled Oroza when it poisoned her waters.


    That wouldn¡¯t stop them from casting their spells, though, but poisoning the nature and flow of mana would make the results very unpredictable. Albrecht had experienced only the smallest taste of that once the darkness wormed its way inside the man¡¯s soul all those years ago. Soon, his peers would get a taste of the very same thing, and in the chaos, the Lich would storm their fortress and murder all of them.


    <em>Oroza. </em>For a moment that word sent a thrill of rage through it, and Tenebroum only pushed it down by force of will. <em>She is not a priority, it repeated to itself for the hundredth time as it forced itself to calm down. Her river has been poisoned in every way, and she will die along with it while I focus on more important matters. </em>


    The Lich had many more important tasks to do, of course. It had to split the soul of its paragon into perfect copies to prepare for all the wars toe, it had to finalize the spirits in its dark garden, or at least end them and give them up as failures, and of course, it had to use the very air itself to create itself in a dread sort of alchemy. Compared to those tasks, Oroza¡¯s ultimate fate was less than meaningless. Whether she died tomorrow or a decade from now, she could barely even challenge it in the waters of her own river anymore.

 Chapter 148: The Dark Garden

    Chapter 148: The Dark Garden


    Even as it nned the assault and set its forge ghasts and its hammer weights to crafting magic resistant weapons and armor from the bones and armor of long dead dwarves, it turned its mind back toward more important tasks. When night next fell, it soared halfway across its domain from Rahkin to the hub of activity that was Constantium.


    The city was still devoid of life. Even the nts had withered and died because of the overwhelming amounts of unlife as well as the caustic embalming fluids and tanning liquids that spilled so frequently on the ground. Despite that, it was still a hub of activity.


    During the day, those activities were limited to the growing catbs that hummed beneath the ce as well as the Grand Temple. However, by night, the streets woulde alive in a parody of the life that would normally be present in such arge city.


    There was no food, or merriment, though. There was no buying and selling, there were only drudges carrying bones from the beetle pits and fresh armor from the forges so that all theponent parts could be assembled smoothly by the silent supervisor of its city factory.


    Even that dread giant had grown in both size andplexity to ount for new techniques and workflows, and each of the pirs that held up the giant dome were lined with appendages, handing off constructs in different stages ofpletion. Truly, it was a work of beauty well beyond the mortal mind. If anyone with a pulse had ever seen the thing in action, they might have died on the spot from the dread gaze of its 300 eyes that lined the dome and monitored all the work as it was being performed.


    That was not why Tenebroum had returned here, though. There were no problems here, and if there were, they would not be the fault of its industrial strength fleshcrafters. They had no will. They existed only to bring to life the horrors of its mind, not to improvise or even object.


    That was not why the Lich had returned to this ce, though. With everything else going on, Tenebroum would have liked to delegate the tasks that would be necessary to experiment with its captured goddesses, in the end such important work ultimately could be done by it alone. They were simply too valuable as specimens. Even if it was unable to turn them into something grander, then it might yet learn a great deal simply by dissecting them.


    Whatever it decided, though, it would need to be done soon. Cut off from light and life in its lead and stone dungeons, they were wilting a little more every day. Gods of nature were not meant for stygian captivity, and though it might have simply consumed their souls and gained more power. As a result, another servant with a new domain would be much more valuable to it.


    Oroza had taught it a tough lesson, though, and it would not let them escape. The first in doing that, of course, was to learn their true names. For some Gods and Goddesses that might have been impossible, Even the names that they were worshiped by sometimes had little inmon with their true names. Siddrim had several secret names it had learned, but it wasn¡¯t until Tenebroum had consumed the other god that it had learned there were several more names that it hadn¡¯t known.


    For nature goddesses, at least, though, that was easy enough. It simply spread its ckbirds far and wide and looked for forests and natural areas that seemed to be dying for no discernible reason. Once it had identified those three ces, it was simply a matter of torturing the three bark-skinned women until it found out which name belonged to which forest goddess.


    It was a straightforward process. Soon, Tenebroum figured out that the three small gods it had stolen were Tarieneian Vale, Verdant de, and Thornwood. Each of the women was slightly different, in both demeanor and appearance, in ways that suited the territories they called home.


    Only one of them, Tarieneian Vale appeared almost human. She had skin of bark of course, but otherwise she looked very much like a woman. The other two, though, were much less so. Verdant de was more like the outline of a person made from foliage, and rarely spoke. Thornwood was the most alien. She was constantly shifting set of brambles that appeared as an animal much more often than a person.


    Unfortunately, its every attempt to chain any of the three, failed repeatedly. No matter how it attempted to chain them with manacles of servitude, they would grow in such a way that the bonds would slip free within only a few days. Only the wards of the cell itself held them reliably, which was far form ideal.


    It was maddening. In the end, the Lich was force to improvise, and made the dark garden itself it¡¯s means of control. This undertaking was grander, but lessplicated. It simply chose an unused za in Constantinal and after the runes were carved by night in the stone of the ce, its servants began to fill the whole thing with grave earth.


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    The hardest part of the project, as it turned out, was choosing which za would least impact everything else that was happening since Constantinal had be so busy. It knew that if it gave them a single opening, they would escape the way that Oroza did. So, even before it installed them in that lifeless courtyard, it installed leaden rings inscribed with each of their names to keep them from spreading their roots too widely.


    Once that was done, it salted the earth in the rest of the ce so that not even a de of grass would grow. It was only then, when all was in readiness that it rented them and observed what came next.


    To start with, all of the women became trees that grew quite quickly at first. They¡¯d thought that with enough strength, they might pierce the stone beneath them or bridge some kind of connection to the rest of the vegetation outside the city and vanish, but that was not possible. All they had done in the process was take in a tremendous amount of taint from the grave earth instead.


    Tenebroum let them limatize to this, and grow new leaves and buds before it started to add Cholorium to their water, feeding the three slender trees a steady diet of poison and unquiet dreams.


    After that, its drudges began to carven profane symbols into the bark of all of them on a regr basis. The former was to continue to increase its grip on their foreign element of wood, while theter was merely to provoke a response from those that might be watching.


    Those markings would vanish in a few days, and the spirits within the wood barely even cried out in pain, but then, they weren¡¯t the intended audience. Now that the Lich had shown its hand, it knew that somewhere out there, the Moon and the rest of her friends were watching and waiting for their chance to rescue.


    Tenebroum had prepared for that, too, and had several creative countermeasures prepared for just such an eventuality. There were watchers and guardians every night. During the day, the whole operation was far more vulnerable, but its artisans were working on thepletion of a mechanical trap that would slide a rusted awning across the whole area and lock anyone foolish enough to attempt to free its prisoners inside with them.


    There were a few false rms, but the conflict it had hoped to bait never happened. So, when it became apparent that its enemies would be patient, it decided to test that patience with a bit of brutal theater.


    First, its drudges installed a second,rger binding ring to amodate all three of them, and then, seeds from each were nted and allowed to grow before the three trees were chopped down and burned to ash.


    It was done on the night of a full moon to ensure that the show reached its intended audience. Despite how terrible of a scene it was, Lunaris never attempted to intervene, though. Instead, Tenebroum feasted on the agony of its prisoners alone and then proceeded to twine the trunks of the new bodies together while they were still flexible saplings.


    The trees resisted this, and it was forced to use steel chains that had been profaned with terrible engravings to force them into an unnatural shape long enough that it started to be permanent. It was only when their forms began to blend that it started to work on their spirits.


    Tenebroum was a cruel God, but in many ways, this was the cruelest thing it had done since it had given Kelvun his richly deserved reward. It had to be, though, both because of the assumed audience of this project, and because of the level of brutality that would be needed two destroy three individual spirits, and turn them into one new monstrosity.


    At first, they endured this monstrosity silently. Even when its servants began to feed its prisoners more poison and prune their branches to force terribly unnatural symmetries on it, they did nothing. It was only when it began to prune their very souls that they began to beg once more.


    The Lich hoped that their silent screams would carry for many miles for those with the ears to hear them. It was only when those wounds were fresh that it began to stitch them together that it could see a glimmer of what they would be when all this was done.


    The Lich was very familiar with the idea of sharing its soul with others. It had done so since almost its earliest days. Initially, the shade and the murderer had warred and feuded in its heart, but by the time the mage and pieces of its first dozen victims swirled there, too, it had be normal.


    It would never be normal for these three godlings, though, and with a midnight thread spun from pieces of its own tattered soul, it began to turn three women into one. For now, it started with minor enough operations. After all, they hardly needed three heads and thirty fingers between them. These rounds of psychic surgery were incredibly taxing for them, of course. They had to be. All of his subjects wanted to die.


    So, Tenebroum would have to give them frequent breaks and asionally stop poisoning them for weeks at a time. Despite that, progress was made. Slowly, wounds healed closed, thoughts began to mix, and day by day, what had been three fae and beautiful women became a terrible chimera.


    Even tied together so tightly they would never escape, they still weren¡¯t one by any stretch of the imagination, of course. They warred within their strange braided tree as they fought to preserve themselves at the expense of the other two Goddesses that now shared their soul.


    It was a losing battle, though, and in the end whatever this produced was unlikely to look like any of them.

 Chapter 149: Something New

    Chapter 149: Something New


    When it shattered its Dark Paragon, Tenebroum expected each of the four identical fragments to grow into a separate clone of the original. Not only would that allow it to better manage its sprawling armies that were scattered almost haphazardly across thend by this point, but it would allow them to focus on multiple tasks at once while it, it devoted itself to more important projects.


    This would only be more necessary as the scope of its wars increased. Soon, there would be more armies, more enemies, more fronts, and more factory cities for all of the above. Even as powerful as it was, it could not do all of those things while plotting to bring down the remaining gods. So, delegation to effective minions was no longer optional, if it had ever really been before.


    The Lich had nned to devote one to advancing to the north, one to building its drowned fleet, another devoted solely to monitoring the mages, and the fourth to cleaning up any loose ends in its current domain.


    Unfortunately, one of the four souls began to mutate almost immediately. It was easy to see the change, even after only a few days.


    The other three were slender shards of ephemeral green ss that slowly rebuilt themselves, the way a mosaic might if you nted a single tile in fertile soil and gave it room to grow. The fourth one, though, was a spidery thing that continued to grow like a cancerous weed.


    The Lich tried to trim it back to its crystalline core twice. Both times, it cut off so much that the thing almost dissolvedpletely into ether. That didn¡¯t change anything, though.


    If anything, the thing grew back more snarled than before, with sharp edges and little barbs as it sought to defend itself against the unknown attacker. Itshed out at the Lich, which was almost enough for it to shatter the thing on principle. Still, it was harmless, and the barbs it attempted to infect the maelstrom that was Tenebroum¡¯s soul were quickly snuffed out.


    The deformed soul was a strange, aggressive thing, but it wasn¡¯t strong enough to do any real harm. Still, as an experiment, it was interesting enough to preserve, but it was dangerous enough that the Lich couldn¡¯t just let in grow unmonitored. So, it moved it back into the soul forge and locked it up tight until the appropriate binding circle could be built to contain it.


    There was a wonderful aggressiveness about it, Tenebroum decided, and even if it would never be a general on the field of battle, it might yet be some new type of weapon. Even in failure, it could find purposes for most of its creations.  After briefly checking in on its twisted nt Goddesses and pruning them again while they learned to speak in a single voice, the Lich moved on to Rahkin to observe its naval preparations. There it found the Voice of Reason lording over a dead kingdom, and she quickly provided all the updates he requested, showing him not just the ships that were already refloated and repaired but the ones that stilly at the bottom of the harbor where the dead could work on them night and day without regard to the sunlight.


    It was a clever arrangement, and the Lich approved. ¡°Your efforts do you credit,¡± Tenebroum praised her. ¡°See that they continue.¡±


    Of course, they would for the foreseeable future. Its zombie leviathan had destroyed almost every ship in the harbor during its attack, and so there were still innumerable wrecks to choose from. Even when those started to run low, though, there were plenty of wooden structures in the city that could be torn apart for additional timber.


    The fleet was undoubtedly ugly in the eyes of men, but that hardly mattered to the eyes of men. What mattered were the enchantments that were even now beingid on those blood-soaked keels. They would enable the ck fleet to use unnatural storms and fog to both block out the hateful sun and to catch unwary ships at sea as they probed further north for weakness.


    Tenebroum was under no illusions that it would catch them by surprise, of course. Even now, the meddling gods were already doing what they could to thwart it. It was certain that the people to the north would be better prepared than the Kingdom of Hallen. However, that mattered little since it was equally sure that it would crush them. These ships would make effective scouts, but they would make even more effective gue ships, and they would sow panic and blight wherever theynded when the time was right.


    Of course, some of them would exist just to be bait for the Goddess of Sea and Storms, should she decide to intervene. Istiniss had, so far,rgely stayed away from its ns. That was almost certainly because the Goddess of the seas had seen how easy it had chained her sister, the river Goddess, and opted to steer clear.


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    The darkness knew that couldn¡¯tst forever, though. Eventually, she woulde for him, and he would have ships filled to burst with poison ready for her, just waiting to be ruptured. For a few days, it mulled over the idea of crafting the defective soul shard it had created into a harpoon of sorts and using it to snare the Goddess before deciding against it. If it was going to create projectiles sharp enough to pierce the soul of a God, then there were better targets to choose from.


    . . .


    Once those were all on track, Tenebroum returned to the most important task: watching the isted citadel of magES craft as its invisible noose slowly tightened. Over thest few weeks, while its paragon shards grew to fruition, it had begun to fabricate Strangulite. The machinery to craft it had been finished years before, shortly after it had seeded in making its shadow drake fly, but since Tenebroum had no pressing need for the stuff in all this time, it had never begun production.


    Now that the time had arrived, though. It finally ordered its servants to kick things into motion, and the giant cylinder that guarded the served as the door to its inner sanctum began to rise and fall rhythmically hour after hour. It was both a door and an elevator, but it was something else, too: it was a pressure chamber. Though most of the shaft beneath it was devoted to the plumbing for the pressurized water that allowed it to rise and fall, the central core held a single harm-sized conduit of air.


    When the runes activated, and the air in the tall, narrow chamber waspressed, along with a very fine dust made of corpse ash and souls of those who had died of suffocation, the air crystallized, forming a lens that could be carved a lens norger than a dinner te, which could be carved into any number of shapes depending on the requirements of the spell.


    In the same way that Cholerium would turn normal water to a poisonous acid and Stygium would not burn from normal fire, even as it burned the undead to ashes, Strangulite, in its raw form, did nothing but make the air that passed through it quite unbreathable.


    That was of no concern to its servants, of course, but if properly cut and polished to form a lens with the right convexity, it poisoned the essence that passed through it in a simr way. These effects had been predicted by the heads in its library, but even so, when it came time for experimentation, those were done far from the seat of its power, by lesser mage souls that it would not be bothered to lose.


    For this work, they were disposable, because it had no wish to track whatever the secondary effects of those foul magics into any of its seats of power. The experiments started off simple enough. It took a mage with an ample supply of tainted essence and had it cast some very basic spells. It summoned fire and lightning. It attempted to raise the dead or use basic wards to protect it from the magic of its opponents.


    None of those effects worked as expected. The mes appeared, but they sputtered and died before long; they were only ever more smoke than fire. Lightning likewise came into existence, but it arced and split more than it should, scarring the ground around its target without actually hitting it.


    It was the wards that were the most interesting, though. Wards and binding rings wereplex things, and each symbol and connection needed to work properly for them to function. Changing only a single symbol at random could make the whole thing behave differently than it should.


    This is exactly what happened when the strangulite-tainted essence charged symbols that had been drawn into the wet earth. The whole thing went haywire. First, power began to arc between symbols that had no connection, and then a few of them exploded under strain they should never have been subjected to before the whole thing imploded.


    Unfortunately, the skull that the spirit that was performing these experiments was bound to was swallowed up in that vague spacial distortion and vanished without a trace. Even after extensive study, Tenebroum was unable to determine what happened to it and was forced to dy furether testing for two days while another bound mage was delivered to the testing location.


    All in all, the results were impressive, and the Lich¡¯s only concerns were that releasing this weapon so near itsir might have unforeseen consequences for it in a way that the first two elements never did. Fortunately, the perverse wild magic effects seemed to fade almost immediately, falling by 90% within three days and 99% within two weeks.


    While that still wasn¡¯t enough that it would ever conduct experiments of this type near the giant rune encrusted catbs that anchored it to the earth, it was enough that it no longer had qualms with the idea of embedding these gray cobweb filled lenses in the standing stones that were even now being constructed.


    However, these interactions, though, would require some changes to the design. The Lich had not been aware of the effects that these perverse currents would have on the runes when construction had started. Now, with this new data, the stones seemed as likely to detonate themselves as they did to poison the Collegium¡¯s magic.


    So, it started again, where it had to, on better designs that would summon the storm winds and aim them in a particr direction for an extended period of time. As it did so, Tenebroum wondered idly how long it would take the mages to notice exactly what it was doing.


    <em>Would they try to attack its monoliths? Would they even be able to find them? </em>Teneborum wondered. It wasn¡¯t sure. Truthfully, it wasn¡¯t even sure how it would go about looking for such a source and set a quartet of minds to the task immediately. How could you locate something when it warped the very divination that you sought it with?


    It was only when it was fine-tuning those structures and raising the height of the lens so that the runic ring that anchored and powered each monolith was well clear of the poison it generated that it finally urred to the Lich that they¡¯d never found the mage it had sought in the immediate aftermath of Rahkin¡¯s fall.

 Chapter 150: Sanctuary

    Chapter 150: Sanctuary


    The first day that Jordan had helped his charges travel east after first traveling to the west, he felt like a moron. Even knowing that something greater was at work, he felt like he¡¯d immediately regret his decision to leave his childhood home. That didn¡¯t change as the house that had always protected him or in any of the chilly days that followed.


    They traveled east for a day, then forded the river before continuing east-south-east toward the coast. Each day was bleaker than thest, and with so many mouths to feed, it wasn¡¯t so long before their food supplies were running low. On the fifth day he brought a deer down with a lightening bolt, just to keep anyone from going hungry.


    He worried that whatever was looking for them might be able to find him from that little spell, but Sister Annise assured him that the darkness couldn¡¯t find them now, no matter what they did. ¡°Besides,¡± she volunteered. ¡°The evil that haunts thisnd is too busy tearing apart your manor, even as we sit around this fire.¡±


    ¡°What?¡± Jordan gasped. ¡°How can you possibly know that?¡±


    ¡°See for yourself,¡± she said with a shrug, handing him the Book of Ways as she opened it to a page, seemingly at random. ¡°These things are decided well in advance, and neither you nor I can stop them. We are all of us ves to fate.¡±


    Jordan ignored her often repeated line and instead studied the page, noting with annoyance that it was dominated by arge illustration of the manor house they¡¯d just abandoned.


    It was drawn in red and ck, and though it wasn¡¯t impossible that Sister Annise could have done it herself, if she¡¯d been able to see, in this picture, though, it was on fire. That wasn¡¯t the detail that caught his eye, though.


    As he peered closer, he saw a tiny smuggled illustration of a thing near the house. It would have been impossible for the average person to say what it was that the thing was supposed to be. More than anything it looked like an overgrown scarecrow.


    Jordan recognized it immediately, though. How could he not? That hideous tentacled brain had haunted his dreams for years. Of all the sights he¡¯d seen in that pit. That one was the most terrible, and if he hadn¡¯t burnt it to a crisp with coruscating electrical fire, it would have driven all of them insane and made them rip each other to pieces. Just thinking about it again after all this time made him remember that terrible paranoia and he turned to the spidery text, trying to gain some insight into what was going on here. What he found was only further horror.


    <em>¡®By the second night, less than a half of the inhabitants of Sedgim Manor still breathed. A few had run to the Greywood, but due to the inaucpicious nature of the stars, they turned on each other too in a series of terrible misunderstanding. </em>


    <em>Since they were not directly under attack, none of the survivors understood the danger of baracading themslves into unused rooms to escape the madness. That was folly, for when the metal abomination returned after the fourth sun was set, most of those that were already weakened by its previous assaults sumbed to a number of creative suicides. </em>


    <em>Though most of those with light in their eyes managed to hold on to much of their wits, Britha chose to¡ª¡¯</em>


    Jordan tore his eyes and mmed the book closed. <em>What in all the hells did I just read, </em>he wondered. He turned to Sister Annise to ask her, but when he realized her answer would be a repeat of so many others, he thought better of it and opened the book again, searching for the page to examine it further.


    Just like before, though it had vanished. He searched by firelight, and eventually, he found the page he thought it had been, but now the manor had been burned to ruins, and the words no longer described the same thing. Instead, it talked about how quiet the town was now that the survivors had been rounded up and dragged off by the minions of death.


    He shuddered and would have shouted obscenities if he didn¡¯t have the children to consider. ¡°Is this what will happen, or what has happened?¡± he asked finally.


    Sister Annise shrugged. ¡°What you read is the history of now. Whether they happened yesterday or tomorrow is a meaningless question. No matter what say they happen on, they cannot be changed.¡±


    ¡°So I couldn¡¯t save them?¡± Jordan asked, feeling like he had their blood on his hands. ¡°Not even if I summoned the storm winds? I could be there tonight. I could¡ª¡±


    ¡°If you found a way to raise Siddrim from the dead and channel his full fury on the monsters in the region, you would only dy this,¡± she sighed. ¡°Our destinies cannot be changed. They have already happened.¡±¡¯


    Jordan flipped to the next page and saw a picture of them sitting around the fire. He read about the conversation he¡¯d just had.


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    ¡°The blind prophetess assured the skeptical mage that what has already happened cannot be changed, then, before he could ask her about the god of secrets or the trials toe, she took the book and¡ª¡±


    He didn¡¯t get to finish reading, because no sooner had he read it, then she snatched the book back from him and shut it tight before putting it in her bag. ¡°Hey!¡± Jordan protested. ¡°I was reading that!¡±


    ¡°You were,¡± she agreed. ¡°But you should read no further than you have to. Reading too far into the future is bad for the eyes.¡±


    ¡°Trust me, I know,¡± she chuckled darkly. ¡°Sufficed to say, I have seen enough to know the way, and you shall know it soon as well.¡±


    ¡°What is the tower?¡± Jordan asked. ¡°And the God of Secrets? You¡ª¡±


    ¡°The tower is where we will find the hermit,¡± she said ndly. ¡°And all the other questions can wait until we get there.¡±


    Jordan was less than thrilled by the answer. However, what had started as a quiet conversation had be heated enough to attract the interest of the children, and that was enough reason for him to drop it. If he continued, there would be questions, and as brave as these light-eyed kids could be, he had no wish to force the responsibility of how dire their situation had gotten on those who were so young.


    . . .


    They traveled for two more days and nights before they found the barrier. Well, barrier wasn¡¯t exactly the right word. It was a line in the sand that he sensed as soon as they crossed it, though.


    One second, they had crossed through the thin pine forest and were making their way down a dreary penins toward the sea, and the next, they were on the other side of the line, and they could see a small vige and, at the far end of the spit ofnd that jutted off into the sea. Just beyond it, there was a lighthouse, too.


    <em>No, not a lighthouse, </em>he corrected himself: a tower. It was white and elegantly tapered to a conical blue roof that blended with the sky, but it had too few windows for a lighthouse, and the shimmering that emanated from it was not any source of mundane lighting.


    Before he could give much thought to it though, he focused on the fact that it had just appeared out of nowhere. That was far stranger.


    ¡°Did you feel that?¡± Jordan asked, turning to sister Annise.


    ¡°Why would I?¡± she asked. ¡°I am no mage. The veil barely exists to me.¡±


    ¡°Why would it matter that I¡¯m a mage?¡± Jordan asked.


    ¡°Because the veil doesn¡¯t exist if a mage isn¡¯t here to power it,¡± she said with a patient smile as if she was telling someone something they had known but forgotten. ¡°This is why you are the Shepard. Because your flock could never find sanctuary without you.¡±


    Jordan studied her expression, but said nothing as he marveled at her non answer. Until she¡¯d spoken he¡¯d thought that what they¡¯d just passed through was something like an illusion, but her answer implied it was more like a pocket world. Such things possible, theoretically, but Jordan doubted that any ten masters at the Collegium Arcanum could construct a thing like this without divine inspiration from Lunaris or another of the gods.


    For now, all he could do was study thendscape. No one but him seemed to be perturbed by the sudden change. Indeed, the children were more than happy to ept the change and quickly shed their cloaks to enjoy the suddenly sunny weather.


    It would have been picturesque, of course, if the whole scene hadn¡¯t just suddenly changed. If there had always been a vige and a lighthouse clinging to the edge of thend while a sea roared in the background, then he would have been sure they¡¯d finally found a refuge. As it was, though, his doubts were thick enough to blot out even the menacing red sun that was only now climbing toward its zenith to chase the grey one that had already moved past it.


    The vige, they quickly discovered, was called Landsend, which was evocative, if not particrly creative. They were greeted by the locals more warmly that expected. It only urred to Jordan after a few minutes of conversation that these people had no idea what was happening in the world outside their little bubble, or whatever this was.


    ¡°You don¡¯t get out much, do you?¡± he joked at one point.


    ¡°Out?¡± one of the farmers who¡¯d been handling much of the talking said, ¡°Why would we want out? To leave the veil would be to share its doom.¡±


    ¡°Doom?¡± Jordan asked, trying to draw out more details.


    He was disappointed, though. Instead, the man shook his head and said, ¡°These are not topics for a farmer. I confess to knowing little and understanding even less. You must speak to Tazuranth; he¡¯ll want to speak to you in the evening after supper, I¡¯m sure of it.¡±


    <em>Tazuranth? </em>Jordan wondered, sure he¡¯d heard that name before. He seemed to recall that someone from the dawn age had such a name, but he had not been particrly interested in the histories and legends of long dead mages, so he could not say precisely what the man was known for, or why someone would want to name themselves after such a figure, but he was sure he there was a reason.


    That question didn¡¯tst long. Soon enough, logistics became more important. There were no spare cottages, but there was a barn that wasn¡¯t used much anymore, and they quickly set to work cleaning and organizing that to create a refuge. They¡¯d eaten almost all their animals, but that did not seem like it was going to be a problem. After all, the vige of Landsend was prosperous enough. They had fish, sheep, goats, and cattle, along with several steep step-terraced fields that were full of crops of all types.


    A few years ago, any vige in the county might have looked like this. Some would be better, and some might be worse. Now, it was a paradise that they dared not dream of, and for better or worse, it was home for the foreseeable future.

 Chapter 151: Pieces of the Puzzle

    Chapter 151: Pieces of the Puzzle


    Tenebroum regarded the golden cage full of squirming rats impatiently as it scryed into their flimsy souls. It did not find deceit there, nor even signs that it would normally think of as intelligence. It never did. Instead, it found only fear and hunger-fighting their eternal war against one another.


    ¡°Tell me about Malzekeen,¡± itmanded again. ¡°In detail this time. Everything thates to mind.¡±


    ¡°W-we don¡¯t recall details; it¡¯s been much too long for them. They have tried up and blown away.¡± the rats cried out as one in a keening, squirming chorus. None of them could make whole words, but each of them could make parts of words in a way that sounded like nails on a chalkboard. ¡°All we remember are the wrath and ruin¡­ That endless terrible light¡­ Then all of it, everything, and everyone was gone.¡±


    The Lich was uncertain if they were referring to the fate that had befallen the city, or if they were instead referring to the wolf and the worm that it sometimes spoke about instead. The two concepts were almost as entwined in the rat¡¯s mind as it was in various texts that the Lich¡¯s servants had pored through.


    ¡°Nothing?¡± the Lich grumbled in annoyance. ¡°Remind me, which one is wrath and which is ruin?¡±


    ¡°Wrath has the sharpest teeth,¡± the rats called out, ¡°Ruin¡¯s bite is much slower but even deeper.¡±


    The Lich sighed mentally. I hated dealing with this broken thing.


    It had already found some answers in the mind of its library and more in ancient books in ces like Sidddrimar, Constantinal, and Rahkin. It had specialty constructs in those and other ces that did nothing but read and remember. Those undead were uncharacteristically thoughtful, and so it had made them uncharacteristically weak to prevent any problems as they sifted through centuries of knowledge, looking for an uncertain number of needles in a variety of different haystacks.


    Its readers were little more than drudges, save that they¡¯d been given the minds of learned men, and their skulls had been sliced open cleanly and hinged on top. This was so that when those minds were full, they could be reced, and fresh minds could be installed so they might continue their research. It had found a number of surprising details so far, but many of them were contradictory. Malzekeen seemed to be both a ce and a group of dread gods that may or may not have been from that ce. The details were unclear.


    All that everyone agreed on, was that the ce was either lost in the northern deserts which were apparently created when Siddrim smote them for their foul ways, or it was off the east coast of the continent, sunk beneath the waves because the Lord of Light had decided that it was so foul to his sight and so irredeemable that it had moved the very world from its ce in the heavens to drown them.


    Though the Lich thought that either story was possible, and its presence in both locations was unlikely, it had dispatched servants throughout the area to search for the ancient ruins. Despite those efforts, and the fact that it apparently had one of the survivors in its hands, it still could not find any clues to narrow the search area down further.


    As ast resort, the Lich had brought a caged sample of therger swarm back to itsir so that it could investigate them more thoroughly in its soul forge, but even that had limited utility. Individually, the rats were simply too insubstantial.


    They required some critical mass to take on the spark of true intelligence. While that was an interesting detail, it was happy to study, no matter how many of the rat souls it had to shred for answers, it did not help Tenebroum find the answer that it was looking for.


    ¡°What of the wolf and the worm then?¡± the Lich asked again, with growing impatience.


    ¡°What of them?¡± the rats answered. ¡°They are our brothers, lost to us for all this time.¡±


    ¡°Do you think they yet live?¡± the Lich asked.


    ¡°Always dying, but never dead,¡± the rats agreed. ¡°Unless new deities of wrath and ruin have risen to take their ce.¡±


    The Lich paused to consider whether or not it qualified as wrath or ruin, but decided again it. It wasn¡¯t sure if it know of course, but it liked to think it would. If things were so broad as that, then surely its eternal avariceness and greed would have long ago stolen Groshin¡¯s power too, wouldn¡¯t it?


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    If it had to characterize itself, it would give itself thebels of darkness and death more than anything symbolic. <em>Is wrath the same as death in the end, though? </em>It wondered.


    It couldn¡¯t say. Instead, it passed along the philosophical question to its library and returned to the topic at hand. ¡°Were you always separate creatures, or were you more than that?¡±


    ¡°My brothers were never far from us,¡± the rats squeaked. ¡°Not until the Lord of Light burned us to ash and dust.¡±


    ¡°Yes, but as a single entity, or a pantheon, or something else?¡± The Lich demanded. It was trying to stay calm. When its power raged too out of control, the rat swarm was disrupted and lost almost all ability to speak for a time. It was annoying but only slightly more frustrating than the current quality of answers.


    ¡°We have never been a single entity¡­¡± the rats answer with hesitation. ¡°Hunger never applies to only one.¡±


    Somehow it knew that was the wrong answer, but still they said it anyway. That was enough to make Tenebroum worry that the things were trying to be deceitful toward it, but thy seemed tock the intelligence for suchplex lies, especially in small numbers.


    It had figured out one thing though. It was fairly sure that Siddrim had intentionally not destroyed thempletely in order to try to imprison those natural evils. This fact tended to argue against Malzekeen being a drowned ind somewhere. After all, if the ind sank how would they find all the little rat corpses and seal them away in a sarcophagus.


    No, whoever had done this had made sure to have pieces of the dark gods left to imprison so something new wouldn¡¯t rise in their ce. That much it could determine without having to ask anyone at all. Tenebroum wished it could get more answers from Sidrrim¡¯s soul on all these things, but it was so long ago that the only answers it had were a smug satisfaction that it had triumphed, which was less than useless.


    It left them there and had a drudge seal the room as it soared off into the night sky beyond its absolute barrier so that it could look at the stars and consider what it already knew.


    It knew that the Malzekeen probably came from the city of Malzekeen, or at least they met their end there at the hands of an angry sun god. Where that was exactly didn¡¯t truly matter in the grand scheme of things.


    What mattered was which of the many versions of history were right. To date, the most interesting books it had found were actually in the ck libraries buried beneath Siddrimar. Those hidden histories contrasted more than a little with the public ones that its heads had read elsewhere, but because it had eaten their God, Tenebroum knew better than anyone how corrupt and untrustworthy Siddrim¡¯s church had be in thest century.


    There had been several attempts to fix that and at least two reformations, but as the Lord of Light took less and less interest in the world he ruled over, corruption set in. Still, broadly speaking, Sdirrim¡¯s adherents seemed to believe in a cyclical view of history. There were ages of light and ages of dark, and the world kept spinning.


    Different saints throughout the church''s history took that to be literal, while others thought that it was a metaphor for corruption and vignce. It was impossible to say which was true with any certainty.


    Given how much damage Tenebroum¡¯s forces had done to the world so quickly, it understood how fragile that bnce was, too. But it saw no way that light could win now that darkness was all but paramount. It was only the thought that the light had once believed the very same thing only a few years ago that gave it pause.


    <em>I will take nothing for granted,</em> Tenebroum told itself as it gazed across the night sky and red at the waxing crescent moon with suspicion. <em>I will find every advantage, take every precaution, and kill or corrupt every enemy until the whole world belongs to me and me alone!</em>


    This was practically its mantra, and it had only strengthened as it learned how big the world was. For a short period of time it had assumed that it had already conquered almost all their was to see, but as it consulted maps and learned from the souls of merchants and mariners, it began to understood just how many othernds there were to be conquered.


    Though the darkness doubted they would stand any more of a chance against it than these pathetic kingdoms had, it would not grow overconfident. It promised itself that. Especially not as long as the moon still hung in the sky. That woman was not to be trusted, and even now, it was certain that she was marshaling her forces for some new trick.


    It had tricks of its own. It already possessed spirits of almost every element, and its work on its new nature goddess was going well. She still thought that she was free, but in time, his six-armed Queen of Thorns would do terrible things to the gueri forces that had beset it on more than one asion. The Lich had spent months carving those three spirits into one, and it wouldn¡¯t be long before they had its brand on their soul, and it could finally be unleashed on an unsuspecting world.


    She was just the first of its new weapons, too. Once it struck down Abendend who knew what strange magics it would be able to unlock, and if the wolf was still buried beneath that ancient ce as Groshin had promised it, well, Tenebroum was sure that soon it would be the one trapping the moon, not the other way around. It had already dragged the sun from the sky, so why not Lunaris as well?


    Tenebroum watched her as she traced her slow track across the sky, just as she did every night as he considered all theseplex ideas. Now, it just had to find the worm, and the table would be set.

 Chapter 152: A Long Time Coming

    Chapter 152: A Long Time Coming


    At dusk Jordan received an invitation to dine with the man that the vigers called the Wise One, or moremonly, Tazuranth, the Great and Powerful. This struck Jordan as a little ostentatious, but then there were many Mage Lords at the Magica Collegium that insisted on such pomp as well.


    <em>They rarely named themselves after mages of legend, though, </em>he thought ironically.


    Despite not being invited, Sister Annise insisted oning, and when Jordan told her, ¡°You should probably stay behind until I learn more about our host, and wee to some sort of arrangement,¡± but she ignored him.


    ¡°The Book of Ways says that I am there at dinner tonight,¡± she insisted as if that meant anything. ¡°So, I am afraid I must attend.¡±


    Jordan sighed inwardly but didn¡¯t pursue the issue further. <em>Surely even the most callous host wouldn¡¯t deny a blind woman food, would he?</em>


    Jordan¡¯s concerns were needless, as it turned out, and the servants invited her in, almost as if they¡¯d expected her, further deepening the mystery. It was only when they sat down at a table heavy with food that their host finally joined them.


    He wasn¡¯t at all what Jordan had expected. He¡¯d expected a gray master in borate robes and extensive titles. He¡¯d expected the typical obsession with protocol and pecking order that he¡¯de to associate with mages powerful enough to have their own demesne, let alone mages with enough power to raise some kind of illusion around it to protect it from the outside world.


    What he found instead was a man that was little older than him, in stained shirt sleeves, who began eating almost as soon as he sat down.


    ¡°What?¡± he asked with a mouth full of roll as Jordan looked at him in confusion. ¡°Dig in. The food will get cold. We can talk about your journey after we¡¯re done. I have an important astronomical alignment to observe in 44 minutes. We must be quick about these things!¡±Though Sister Annise continued to look at the man as if he were a snake, the absurdity of the situation was enough to put Jordan almost immediately at ease. This wasn¡¯t an archmage; instead, he was just like any number of other senior students from the Collegium, and that memory was enough to make him smile wide for the first time since Brother Faerbar had left the manor, never to return.


    The three of them devoured the best meal that Jordan had eaten sincest year''s harvest in record time. Honestly, they ate like kings; everything was good, from the mashed potatoes and the boiled carrots to the buttered rolls and the piping hot prime rib.


    There was some conversation throughout dinner, but it was limitedrgely to pleasantries, and whenever Jordan or Sister Annise tried to ask about something more substantive or exin something he would deflect right back to the food, or ignore the statement entirely as he focused on his feast, or checked the hourss that he¡¯d brought with him from somewhere upstairs.


    Through all that, Jordan managed to learn a couple of things. Foremost was that their host seemed to insist on calling him Taz, and he seemed almost allergic to formality. He did listen, though, when his manservant said, ¡°Please, sir, do try to keep your elbows off the table when we havepany over.¡±


    Those were all normal enough, but in ces, like when Taz said, ¡°Well, sometimes stars do surprising things, even after you¡¯ve been staring at them for a century or two. It¡¯s always best to keep an eye on them lest they start to wander too far.¡±


    The idea that anyone could watch anything for a century or two was impossible, of course, unless they¡¯d stumbled into their of a small god, of course. The man almost certainly meant that he was continuing someone else¡¯s vigil that was documented in an old book, or perhaps he was part of an order that devoted themselves to such things.


    Jordan didn¡¯t know. What he did know was that he needed to get to the bottom of this. The man was obviously a mage, though. Even though he seemed too young and too rxed to have any real power, the way he would casually use minor spells to summon food from across the table after he¡¯d cleared his te or animate a napkin to dab at his mouth instead of simply wipe at his mouth showed that he had real power.


    He enjoyed every mouthful, and it was only when the servants were asking about desert that he suddenly stood and said, ¡°Sorry, out of time. Perhaps next time, Bernard.¡±


    He jumped up with his hourss and ran to the stairs. It was only when he reached them and said, ¡°Well, are youing? You¡¯ll want to see this, trust me. Its not often that a constetion reorganizes!¡±


    Those words, strung together in that way, meant nothing to Jordan, but he still wanted to see what his host was talking about. So, he stood and followed the other man up the stairs. By the fourth floor of the steep spiraling staircase, he was beginning to regret that decision, but even so, Sister Annise kept up with him while he huffed and puffed without anyint.


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    In fact, if anything, she looked grim, and he made a note to ask her about that when they returned to the barn that had be their temporary home. Right now, there was no time for that, though. Instead, there was just enough time to appreciate the quality of the mage¡¯s observatory and the view it afforded him of the dark sea before the real show started.


    Taz had one of the nicest telescopes that Jordan had ever seen. It was the size of arge wine barrel with a mirror near the back, which was certainly an unconventional arrangement. He was just trying to figure out how much light that monstrosity might be able to gather and what the level of magnification could be when their host muttered a few words, and therge circr window in front of it suddenly became¡­ something else.


    A moment ago, it had been arge, circr window frame that would have been more than big enough for Jordan to crawl out to the ledge beyond if he¡¯d wanted to. After the runes on the frame began to glow with a soft blue light, though, the air inside of it began to condense and thicken, adjusting its optical characteristics. One second, it had been an open window, and the next, it was a giant magnifying lens almost four feet across.


    Taz leaned down to the telescope¡¯s eyepiece, and as he did so, he said, ¡°It¡¯s just a little trick I learned to observe the stars with better resolution. That¡¯s all.¡±


    He spoke as if he¡¯d read Jordan¡¯s mind, but he¡¯d probably just observed his look of shock. Over the next few minutes, he lectured about the phenomena he was looking for. ¡°Stars don¡¯tst forever, you see,¡± the strange wizard exined. ¡°Just like Siddrim, they all burn out eventually, and its always interesting to see what the given constetion reces them with.¡±


    The mageughed at his joke about Siddrim, but no one else did. When Jordan looked at Sister Annise, he was unsurprised to see that her expression had soured.


    Before he could say anything about that, though, Taz wave him over, and said, ¡°go on, take a look. Be quick about it. Its hard tonight, because Lunaris is spending more of her power on the affairs of mortals than she should, but that happens sometimes.¡±


    The stars didn¡¯t look any dimmer to Jordan than any other night, but that didn¡¯t stop him from looking through the telescope. It was then that he saw something he never expected to see.


    Jordan had seen the heavens through smaller telescopes before at the Collegium, but never one with this level of magnification before. In the past they¡¯d always appeared as glimmering dots, but here, now, as he stared out into the void what he saw was a glowing figure, locked in mortalbat with an inhuman monstrosity that he might have bestpared to a hydra, or perhaps a jellyfish.


    ¡°What in the name of Lunaris¡­¡± Jordan swore softly as he looked on in wonder. ¡°What is it I¡¯m seeing here?¡±


    Taz took the scope back, chuckling softly. ¡°Surely they still teach you the nature of the heavens in school, do they not? That each star is a god onto itself in the service of Mother Lunaris?¡±


    ¡°Of course,¡± Jordan answered, wondering how the man knew what he¡¯d learned in school. ¡°But it¡¯s a metaphor, not a literal¡­¡±


    Jordan¡¯s words trailed off as the other mage started tough. ¡°A metaphor, he says. If they were only metaphorically defending the world, I assure you that the darkness would have consumed us long ago. No, they are very real, and though not all of them have ming swords, they all work together to hold back the night.¡±


    Jordan tried to digest what it was he was hearing, and as he did so, he watched the stars through the lens. From that device, hecked the magnification to make out the details of any of the stars, but he could see the constetion of the Orchid and another wandering star moving toward the one he¡¯d just observed.


    ¡°What¡¯s going to happen next?¡± Jordan asked, watching with rapt attention, even as the stars got closer and closer.


    ¡°All stars get old, and they need to be reced,¡± Taz told him, ¡°That is the natural order of things.¡± As he spoke, he made frenzied notes into a journal while he watched through the eyepiece, Jordan saw two stars meet, and then, after a bright sh, there was only one, fixed in the heavens. The constetion adjusted, but only a little.


    ¡°Does that still look like an orchid to you?¡± Taz asked. ¡°No, I think it does. We can leave it unchanged. I was worried it might be the rose or the tulip, and I¡¯d have to change all of my charts.¡±


    ¡°What happened to the other star?¡± Jordan asked.


    ¡°It was devoured,¡± the mage smiled. ¡°Nothing goes to waste, not on that scale. All the gods are cannibals. Did they not teach you that either?¡±


    ¡°Well, not in so many words, but I understand your meaning,¡± Jordan agreed.


    ¡°Do you, though?¡± Taz said, finally looking up from his cosmic light show now that whatever he¡¯d been waiting for had happened. ¡°It¡¯s not a metaphor either. Gods die, and new gods rise up to rece them. I know. I¡¯ve seen it plenty of times myself.¡±


    ¡°You have?¡± Jordan asked, making no effort to hide his confusion.


    ¡°He has,¡± Sister Annise agreed. ¡°Tazuranth the Remarkable is well over four centuries old. He has seen almost as much as Lord Siddrim.¡±


    ¡°He¡­ he what?¡± Jordan asked.


    ¡°More, actually,¡± the young man said with a slight bow. ¡°After all, I¡¯ve seen all the terrible things that have happened since he slipped up and died, haven¡¯t I?¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s also killed every mage that his stumbled upon his own private world in all the time between then and now,¡± she said, making Taz¡¯s smile go even wider.


    ¡°How does someone¡­ what?!¡± Jordan blurted out. He¡¯d nned to ask about how even magical immortality couldst so long, but Sister Annise¡¯stest revtion disrupted that entirely. ¡°If he kills mages, then why did you bring me here?¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry,¡± Taz said, dispelling the lens and sitting down in a chair. ¡°There¡¯s no need to end you at this point. Not only are you an apprentice instead of a fully vested mage, but you¡¯re trapped here. With that monstrosity out there, there¡¯s literally nowhere else for you to go, is there?¡±

 Chapter 153: A Long Time Coming (2)

    Chapter 153: A Long Time Coming (2)


    ¡°Besides,¡± the mage continued. ¡°In this case I am afraid it is the priestess that must die.¡±


    Jordan¡¯s mind was reeling as each new revtion assaulted his mind more than thest one had as he looked back and forth between the two other people in the room. Taz was leaning forward on his chair, looking far too amused for what he¡¯d just said, while she gazed sightlessly back like a person resigned to her fate.


    ¡°Can one of you just calm down and exin what in the hell is going on to me?¡± Jordan asked, worried that this could turn violent at any moment. He stepped in between Annise and Taz, but if this mage was as powerful as he imed, there was very little protection he could offer her.


    ¡°Well, you seem to know so much,¡± Taz said, gesturing very widely. ¡°Why don¡¯t you tell him.¡±


    ¡°I only know the what but not the why,¡± she said simply. ¡°Siddrim has not shared that with me.¡±


    ¡°Siddrim is it?¡± the mageughed. ¡°You really do believe that, don¡¯t you? Very well, we shall leave it at Siddrim for now.¡±


    ¡°We are here, all of us, because I won a game of chess a very long time ago. It was a game I should never have yed, of course, but since I won, well¡­ it all worked out.¡±


    ¡°And who was it you were ying?¡± Jordan asked, even though he was almost afraid to.


    ¡°Well, I¡¯ll give you a hint,¡± Taz smiled. ¡°Unlike Siddrim, she¡¯s still hanging around.¡± ¡°You yed a game of chess with the moon goddess herself?¡± Jordan asked, fairly sure he was right. He seemed to remember a legend along those lines, but he didn¡¯t associate the vague memory with Tazuranth, but he couldn¡¯t be sure. ¡°And what were the stakes?¡±


    ¡°Oh, I wanted to be her sessor when she finally became tired of her nightly march across the sky,¡± and if I won, she agreed that I might have what it took to hold her nightly vigil. If I lost, well - I would have had my soul ripped out for my insolence, but it was a small price to pay for the opportunity. It took over a year, but in the end, I managed to beat her at her own game.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s some chess game,¡± Jordan nodded, trying to decided if he was serious. He didn¡¯t doubt the Goddess¡¯s existence. He¡¯d felt her touch, after all.


    ¡°It was,¡± Taz agreed, looking into space as he reminisced. ¡°It was a giant thing with thousands of squares and hundreds of pieces. I¡¯ve been tempted to build a copy of it off and on for all these centuries, but trying to find an opponent worth ying would be a pointless endeavor.¡±


    ¡°But how is it you managed to stay alive since then?¡± Jordan asked.


    ¡°Time doesn¡¯t function here,¡± Sister Annise volunteered. ¡°Not the way you think of it, at least.¡±


    ¡°She¡¯s right,¡± Taz agreed, staring at her a little closer. ¡°I don¡¯t know who it is that¡¯s been talking to your friend out of turn, but our patron Goddess long ago struck a deal for me with the god of time so that I would have a ce to wait until our margin was concluded, and that is this ce.¡±


    ¡°So, in all these centuries, you¡¯ve never left?¡± Jordan asked, boggling at the idea.


    ¡°Why would I?¡± Taz said flippantly. ¡°If I leave the light of my tower and travel beyond the vale, four centuries of aging would catch up with me in an instant. It¡¯s rather hard to be the God of magic and the true defender of the world if you suddenly turn to dust.¡±


    ¡°Siddrim is the true defender of the world,¡± Sister Annise insisted.


    ¡°Siddrim¡¯s job was to keep the darkness that mankind generates at bay, and he failed at it,¡± Taz said,ughing again. ¡°Lunaris has a muchrger and much more thankless task, she must hold off all the darkness beyond the world, and that, I assure you, is nearly infinite. Siddrim might have ruled the day, but he would have buckled under the weight of a single night.¡±


    Sister Annise looked unconvinced but said nothing. Instead, she sat there impassively, clutching her book to her chest like it was some sort of shield.


    ¡°Besides, you don¡¯t even serve Siddrim anymore,¡± Taz continued, pointing an using finger at her. ¡°There¡¯s only one God of death, and he¡¯s missing in action too. No, someone else is pulling your puppet strings.¡±


    ¡°So you¡¯re going to kill her because she¡¯s serving another god?¡± Jordan asked, more than a little horrified. ¡°Does that mean you¡¯lle for the children next? This ce was supposed to be a refugee.¡±


    ¡°A refuge ording to who?¡± the mage asked. ¡°You shouldn¡¯t have even been able to find me here.¡±


    Jordan didn¡¯t answer. Instead, all he did was look at Sister Annise¡¯s book, but that was enough. With a gesture, Taz pulled it from her grasp and glided slowly across the room to his. Once he had it in hand, he opened it, leafed through a few pages, and then set it on top of a messy stack of books to his right.


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    Jordan could see the pages he looked through, but didn¡¯t recognize them. Rather than the scrawled, crazed messages he was used to seeing in there, it had somehow returned to a perfectly normal devotional tome. If it was ced on the shelf next to any other Book of Days, he wouldn¡¯t have been able to tell the difference.


    ¡°I led the Shepard here for the sake of his flock,¡± Sister Annise repeated. ¡°Siddrim showed me the way. My sight has left me, but his remains.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s an interesting delusion, I¡¯ll grant you that,¡± Taz said, ¡°but think about it. If it''s Siddrim¡¯s ghost that talks to you, then how do you know that¡ª¡±


    ¡°The light cannot die!¡± she insisted. ¡°This is my destiny. I havee as bidden and¡ª¡±


    She probably never even felt the bolt that struck her. With aplicated gesture, a single shard of obsidian buried itself in her chest, and her body began to crumble like it was made of sand. The frightening shockwave traveled through her body, and her final act was to look Jordan in his eyes before she crumbled into a pile of dust on her chair.


    He was certain that she¡¯d been trying tomunicate with him, but he was unsure of what it was she was trying tomunicate. Was it that she¡¯d expected this? Was this all going ording to her deranged n?


    Jordan spread his arms and was about to cry out, but the other mage said, ¡°You should stay calm and have a seat. I don¡¯t want to hurt you. Those children will need someone, and Lunaris knows it won¡¯t be me. I¡¯m much too busy.¡±


    He ignored the fact that Taz had pointed to the chair where the dust of hispanion remained and instead slumped down into the one beside it. ¡°I can¡¯t believe you murdered her¡ª¡±


    ¡°Murder is a strong word,¡± he said with a shrug. ¡°Technically, I annihted her, but really, what I did was prevent her patron from manipting my domain.¡±


    ¡°How does that justify anything,¡± Jordan said, trying and failing to stay calm. ¡°you don¡¯t even know who it was that was behind her gift of prophecy.¡±


    ¡°I know it wasn¡¯t Lunaris, and that¡¯s all that matters to me,¡± Taz said, growing suddenly serious as he studied Jordan. ¡°You are in my house and will respect my rules. That is the price for safety against the malignant spirit currently devouring the world, and I cheap one at that, I should think.¡±


    Jordan wasn¡¯t about to argue whether Sister Annise¡¯s life was worth a temporary refuge, so instead, he pivoted, asking, ¡°What of the children? Will you annihte them as well because they have been touched by Siddrim?¡±


    ¡°Why would I?¡± Taz asked, genuinely confused. ¡°That God is no more. He cannot meddle in my affairs at all. As such, the children are worthy of study, not butchery.¡±


    ¡°And me?¡± Jordan said finally,


    ¡°What about you?¡± Taz asked. ¡°You can be my apprentice if you like once you get tired of babysitting. Perhaps we might even teach you something about¡ª¡±


    ¡°No,¡± Jordan said. ¡°Not that. Why are you letting me live? Why not simply murder me, like Sister Annise said you did to all the other mages.¡±


    ¡°I didn¡¯t murder them either,¡± he said, with a shake of his head. ¡°All the ones before you came here on purpose. They each challenged me to a dual, and I epted. Each of them lost and died for it. That is the nature of magical duels, is it not?¡±


    Jordan nodded slowly. That point he was at least forced to concede to. Magical duels were as deadly as they were rare, and it was far more likely that both mages died than that both of them survived when they unleashed such powerful forces to kill their opponent.


    Jordan spent the next few minutes being lectured on the nature of Taz¡¯s position, and when it was over, he stood and said, ¡°Thank you for rifying things.¡± That wasn¡¯t what he wanted to say at all. He wanted to call the man an unhinged monster, but he didn¡¯t dare do that. There was nothing that Jordan could do to stop a four-century-old mage from doing whatever he wanted, so for the sake of the children in his care, he did his best to y the grateful supplicant.


    ¡°Of course,¡± Taz agreed. ¡°I just have one more question. How do you think that woman knew so much, both about this ce and about me.¡±


    The question was asked casually, but the gaze behind it was an intense one, and Jordan wouldn¡¯t have been the least bit surprised if the man was using some sort of truth-sensing magic at this very moment, so he didn¡¯t dare try to lie.


    Instead, he told the truth. ¡°I honestly have no idea. She said different things at various times, but I believe she got visions. Part of me had doubts that they came from Siddrim, as you¡¯ve made very clear, but¡­ Well, I don¡¯t think you understand how dark it is out there now, Tazuranth. The world is ending. I was happy for any sort of divine intervention, I think, no matter the source.¡±


    The other mage nodded and said. ¡°I understand, and someday, if you are here long enough, you will understand that this has happened before and will happen again. It is the way of things.¡±


    ¡°May I have her book back at least?¡± Jordan asked, trying to sound nonchnt. ¡°For the children, you understand. They will miss her, but Siddrim¡¯s words will be a balm for that.¡±


    Taz looked at Jordan for a long moment, then studied the book briefly. He cast the basic version of detect magic then, and Jordan saw half the things in the room begin to glow with their own colorful aura that hinted at what they did. The book stayed strangely dull.


    Jordan didn¡¯t understand that result, but he wasn¡¯t surprised by it either. He¡¯d found the same thing when he studied it all those months ago.


    ¡°Very well,¡± Taz said, handing him the book. ¡°You may leave. I am busy most evenings, but if you would like toe by for a friendly game of chess or just to discuss topics your masters might have neglected up until now, you are wee toe by for lunch.¡±


    Jordan nodded and thanked the man. Then he departed.


    He left with the book in hand, unsure what he should do next. Was it really safe to stay here with such an unhinged lunatic? Was it really safe to leave? He didn¡¯t know what the right decision was. Right now, it wasn¡¯t like he had a choice.


    He sighed as he walked back to the barn. What was he going to tell the kids about where Sister Annise had gone? He thought about that for several minutes, but ultimately he looked down at the book. It would probably have the answer to that, too. Should he look, or should he go with his gut and see if he got it right after everyone else went to sleep?


    It didn¡¯t matter. They¡¯de here to escape the madness, but now it had only intensified.

 Chapter 154: Unrecognizable

    Chapter 154: Unrecognizable


    Niama. That was the only word that they clung to as they were trapped in the Lich¡¯s dark garden. <em>Niama will save us, </em>each of them whispered to each other, like the frightened sisters they were.


    No one wasing to save them, though. Only Lunaris tried to visit them the once in that desperate ce, but before she could even whisper whatever message it was she¡¯d darede to deliver, a whirlwind of inky ck barbwire sprung up out of the hateful thing that was the circle that bound them together, and she was forced to take flight lest she be caught alongside the rest of them.


    It had been the only moment of hope that the three of them had experienced since they¡¯d been stolen from the moon, and now it had turned only into a bitter stone in all their hearts.


    After that, the only visits they ever received were from that terrible shade. Sometimes, it came in the body of one of its servants, but more often, it came as a dark thunderhead billowing with wicked powers.


    Sometimes their captor tormented them words, but it always tormented them with pain as it cut away at who they were and pruned them into its desired shape. They had no idea of what that was, of course. All they could see were the bleak walls that surrounded the dead courtyard, and the leaden sky above them as the goddesses slowly forgot everything they¡¯d ever known.


    They had all had names once. Tarieneian Vale. Verdant de. Thornwood. Now they often had trouble remembering who was who, and when they spoke they were no longer sure if they were talking to themselves or each other.


    It gained other things, though, while it lost so much. Sometimes, that would be a strange new power manifesting, but mostly it was hate. The monstrosity that had been three Goddesses slowly became consumed by hate more with every passing day as everything they¡¯d loved about themselves faded away. It hated what the darkness had done to it, but it could not stop or protect itself. It could not even fight back.


    One day one of her voices just stopped, and a few weekster a second one followed. The corrupted nature spirit didn¡¯t know if those two parts of itself had died or finally merged. Since it couldn¡¯t remember which of the three it had been and which two were the ones that had vanished, it seemed to be theter. That realization wasn¡¯t enough to keep it from feeling alone.


    That was when the Lich finally branded them with their new identity. By the time that dread creature showed up that fateful night wielding a darkly glowing wand with a smoldering tip, they had long since forgotten who they were or even what they were. The monstrosity that had once been more was bound to its tree like an anchor, but that did not stop it from pacing around the ring that was the boundary of its existence as it slowly mutated from something more nt than animal to something more animal than nt in a desperate and almost unconscious attempt to be free. ¡°There¡¯s no escape for you,¡± the skeleton rasped when it finally stopped before it, just outside the line.


    ¡°No?¡± she asked,shing out at the monster that had taken so much from her even as she knew that the thorny vines could¡¯t cross the boundary any more than the rest of her. ¡°Thene in here with me and I will settle for revenge.¡±


    As the natural monstrosity spoke, she grew terrible ws from her six arms, but the Lich showed no reaction. Instead, with a few muttered words, she felt something gripping her heart even as it tried to beat in her chest.


    ¡°The only revenge you shall ever have is mine,¡± it intoned as she fell to her knees. ¡°You will tear apart the Gods and Goddesses you once called friends¡ª¡±


    ¡°Never!¡± she spat, but the Lich ignored her.


    ¡°You shall be their undoing,¡± it continued. ¡°And when their souls are mine, I shall give you a gift.¡±


    ¡°We¡­ I want nothing from you!¡± the thing that had once been a woman, no, several women, spat.


    ¡°And yet you shall have it just the same,¡± the skeleton whispered. ¡°I shall give you dominion over all of the natural world that you consume so that no one else can rise up to take the ce of those you y.¡±


    That was when she finally understood that she was being offered the chance to serve this terrible thing. Sheughed at that, disturbingly, in all three voices.


    Thatughter came to an abrupt halt as the fist in her chest squeezed tighter. She copsed to the ground, and then, as shey there, a dozen skeletal hands came up from the cursed earth and held her tight.


    She reached for the tree to try to return to the safety of its wood, but it was inches too far away, so when the Lich began to carve terrible words into her very soul with its evil-looking wand, all she could do was scream.


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    She had no idea how long the process took or even if it was finished, but by the time dawn began to color the edge of the sky, it was gone. She was alone again, with nothing but the pain of the darkness¡¯stest atrocity to keep herpany. She could onlyy there as the vines and branches that made up her body writhed inint.


    When she finally made it back to the tree, she didn¡¯te out again, not for more than a season. There was no point. There was only pain out there, and though the Lich could still hurt her in here, it was slightly more protected.


    That torpor might have gone on forever, except for one spring day, she realized that her strength was returning. For many months, she¡¯d confused the weakness that winter imposed on all their kind with the weakness caused by all of these surgeries and experiments.


    As the sap began to flow, though, and she felt herself grow revitalized, she realized that she might be able to finally dig through the stone far beneath her. It was a slow, methodical n, but day after day and week after week, she made progress. Once she finally felt the stone that had barred her way for so long crack, and she prated to the deep earth and pure water beyond it, she tried to drink deep of it but was almost immediately sickened.


    <em>Too much of a good thing after starving for so long can be almost as bad as the starvation itself,</em> she reminded herself as she began to tunnel blindly toward the edge of the city.


    It took weeks more to find some hearty climbing vines to link to, and once that was done, things moved quite quickly. So far, no one had discovered that she¡¯d slipped from her cage, and despite how deep her roots had dug, she was determined not to give that away. If she could just reach the foliage beyond the city walls, she could flee to the nearest forest, and Niama would take her into her loving arms and fix her.


    She was sure of it. There was nothing the goddess of nature could not do.


    Two dayster, while the red and the white suns were high in the sky and the Lich¡¯s forces were all hiding from their gaze, she finally made contact with the weedy, overgrown irrigation ditches nearest the walls, and fled. In her ethereal form she raced along from one set of roots to the next. The fields had long since gone fallow and were being reimed by nature. That only helped her move faster.


    Less than an hour after she escaped the city, she made it to the nearby woods only a dozen miles away. She would move farther tomorrow, and in time, she would reach even Niama¡¯s court itself, but for now, she desperately needed to rest.


    She tried to feast on nature''s bounty here, but found the essence almost tainted. <em>Could the darkness¡¯s reach really extend so far? </em>She wondered as she began to search for allies so she could exin what happened.


    Shortly after noon she looked into a pond at her reflection and she immediately regretted it. What she saw was a horror. The left and right side of her face clearly belonged to two different people, and even if she had recognized whose body it had been originally, the fact that she had six arms made her look anything but natural. She was a monster, a nameless monster.


    She concentrated, and after a few seconds she was able to be something close to what she thought that she might have one looked like. Even the indistinct features and curled vines that were only vaguely man shaped were better than the alternative, though.


    It was almost twilight when she found a small encampment of the children of the forest. She concentrated, and with some effort, she forced her strange, new body to return to a form that they might find more pleasing.


    ¡°Greetings wanders, Ie in¡ª¡± As she spoke, the elves drew their weapons, obviously sensing something was wrong about her.


    ¡°Who are you?¡± one of the ageless young men demanded in the musicalnguage of his race, pointing his ck ss dagger at her. ¡°You stink of evil. How did you find your war through our mours.¡±


    She wanted to tell him that the mours, and the way they glowed in the deeping gloom were the reason she¡¯d found them at all in the first ce, but even as she opened her mouth to exin how she¡¯d been captured and tortured by the evil gripping thend she felt the Lich smoothly slide into her mind.


    ¡°Such a good huntress,¡± it whispered in mock praise. ¡°You¡¯ve only just been released into the wild, and already you¡¯ve found some of my most elusive quarry. Make sure not to let them get away.¡±


    ¡°I would never!¡± she hissed, trying to resist themand, but even as she did so, she felt her disguiseing undone and her other arms slipping free as their ws extended.


    ¡°By the goddess,¡± the closest forest child whispered, backing away as the ones farther from her started to scatter and run for their lives.


    ¡°You cannot escape me,¡± the Lich continued, ignoring the growing chaos. ¡°Even if you could, you would soon starve to death because the light is forever lost to you. So, my Queen of Thorns, it is time to im your destiny. Feast on the flesh of your allies by the time the sun rises, or I shall call you a failed experiment and feast on your soul instead.¡±


    After that, the Lich was gone, but it didn¡¯t matter. As he said that terrible name, Queen of Thorns, the profane symbols he¡¯d carved into her very soul sprang to life and began to burn inside her like a forest fire. She now knew who she was again, for the first time in months, but she did not like it.


    It became harder to think after that, and as her body began to shift with every move, and the bloody thorns erupted through her bark colored skin, she didn¡¯t even try. She felt the hunger now, and she scented her prey, and that was enough.


    A few minutes ago, she¡¯d been a mutted goddess looking for allies to save her, and now she was a thorned, eight-legged hunting cat bounding down the fading trail to rip those same allies to pieces. Part of her screamed in horror at this turn of events. She never even suspected that the Lich would let her escape, but now it was toote. She was gaining on her quarry rapidly, and any second, she¡¯d be able to rip out his ageless little throat and drink the sweet taste of elder blood before she started looking for another corpse.

 Chapter 155: A Long Shot

    Chapter 155: A Long Shot


    When the first of the ships were ready to head north, the Voice of Reason was on thergest of them. It had taken almost as long to make her tiny fleet seaworthy as it had to make her new skin fight right. It did now, though, and it was worth the effort.


    As she stood in her deep red dress on the aft castle of her refloated Caravel, she admired the way her skin fit like a literal glove on her hands as she flexed and moved. It was only after that, that she looked back at the tiny, ck sailed fleet, she wondered if she would return or if she would die on her fools errand far away from her master and his power.


    Some of those ships contained soldiers and powerful constructs, it was true. She was hardly defenseless. Beneath her, somewhere were even a few aquatic monstrosities that lurked somewhere beneath her should the gods of sea and storms give them trouble.


    She was well protected and had all the resources that she would need for her mission, but most of the ships that followed her contained only the skeletal remains of a few sailors, along with a hold full of poisoned and diseased rats powered by a god that was not her own.


    The Lich had nned to send a scouting mission along the coast to weaken the enemy. It was she who proposed that any such mission should have a diplomaticponent to it. It had, after a few considerations and some questions, agreed. She¡¯d argued that such dialogs could sew discord and panic and discord among nominal allies, but the Lich had been far more interested in the prayers of the living.


    That was why her master¡¯s high priest, Verdenin, had sent along a few of his ck-robed monks. They were the only living souls in the entire armada, but if her efforts were sessful, then they would be the most important. Apparently, its war machine was a hungry thing, and in lieu of blood and souls, prayers to the dark could ameliorate a great many of its concerns. She would have done it for any reason if only to be useful. In this thing, she was the carrot, and the ships behind her were the stick.


    The thought sent a shiver down her spine as she flicked her eyes back to them. The Lich could do no wrong as far as she was concerned, and any new abomination from its flesh forges was beautiful in her eyes. Even the dread leviathan that had been so critical to its attack on Rahkin had been a work of art, but a hundred thousand squirming squealing rats packed into the holds of her fleet just waiting for her negotiations to go wrong so that they could be unleashed and despoil everything they could find?


    She found something about all of that deeply unsettling. Not only were they ugly, unsettling things, but they were somehow independent of the one true master of the world in a way that she would never be. She shook her head and walked slowly back to the prow of the ship.


    She hoped that she would never need to unleash them. She shouldn¡¯t have to. Not when she had such powerful allies of her own. The Dreamer and the Puppeteer had both joined her on this voyage, and though neither of them would be much better in a fight than her own fragile form, they would both be very helpful in determining who might want what, and where the political fault lines of a given kingdom might be. At this point, they were little more than dots on a map to her. She¡¯d read a few dusty tomes on the subject of the Kingdoms of Zum Jubar, but it still made little sense to her, and beyond the most important trade cities, little was known about them in the south. She¡¯d summoned and consulted the spirits of a few sailors and merchants that had been there, but apparently those that were more knowledgeable had fled long before the Lich¡¯s forces hadpleted their conquest.


    ¡°Those will be our most fearsome opponents,¡± she said to herself in a voice no louder than the breeze. ¡°The ones that fear what they do not understand and have just enough knowledge for others to believe them. Something will have to be done.¡±


    Two monks stood not so far from her, but they neither looked at her nor spoke to her. They couldn¡¯t. Their eyes had been sewn shut long ago so that they could only see darkness, and their vows of silence prevented them from making any noise except for singing the discordant psalms of the Lich.


    Part of her resented that the living had any ce on this mission, but it was not her ce to question her master, so she ignored the urge to strangle them or push them off her ship and drown them. Instead, she focused once more on the view. And the destinations thaty far ahead.


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    Somewhere in the distance, passed endless dunes and baster cliffs,y Tanda. It was an ancient, walled city ruled by a sultan that tended to focus on trade rather than on warfare. It was often thought of by southern merchants as the gateway to the north, and though she was journeying there for something other than the dates and ivory that were the mainstays of their trade, she was confident she¡¯d find what she was looking for.


    They needed allies, and leaders that cared more for the fate of their subjects than the vanity of the gods that lorded over them all. If she didn¡¯t find those things in Tanda, then she¡¯d keep going, and in Bastom, or somewhere even further north she was sure she would find what both she and her master were looking for.


    The voyage from Rahkin to Tanda would take a good crew and a fast ship about three weeks. They, unfortunately, had neither, thanks to the limitations that daylight imposed on their vessels. Each morning, they lowered the sails and drifted more at less and random. After a month at sea, though, they still had not arrived.


    It was only the magic imbued into the ships that kept them even somewhat together, especially after the storms that she was sure that the Gods were tormenting them with. Still, they met no opposition from mortals, until they were passed all the dunes, and reached the White Gates.


    There, they found a small armada of well-trimmed warships waiting for them. Fortunately, thanks to the wraiths that were released each night to scour the ever-shifting seascape for hazards, they saw the enemy long before their sails crossed the horizon.


    As far as the Voice of Reason was concerned, the best course of action would have been raise the gs thatmunicated the need for a pay, and work things out with the opposing captain. She was sure that she could reach an amicable solution. Unfortunately, with dawn a few hours away, that was impossible, and in the light of day those sleek white sailed ships would easily sink her helpless ck sailed vessals.


    Such an oue was intolerable. So, instead, she continued to sail forward directly at them, and when she was close enough, she unleashed a swarm of death¡¯s heads. They had hundreds of those cursed skulls in the hold of her ship, and they were not strong enough to sink arge ship on their own; the fires they caused would do that in an hour or two.


    As much as she might have liked to keep survivors and merely send a warning shot, that oue was equally intolerable. Knowledge of how easily the Lich¡¯s forces might sink the local navies could be valuable in establishing a reputation in a new area. Unfortunately, that was not the reputation she wanted, which meant that there had to be no survivors.


    Thanks to the Lich¡¯s magic, that¡¯s exactly what happened. Fire rained from the sky, and every vessel, no matter how small, received its share. They went up like so many candles, and though the Voice¡¯s heart felt heavy that she had not found a way to bring about a peaceful solution to this impasse, she looked at her lovely hands and decided that she would much rather have them stained with blood than be ruined by weapons and wooden shrapnel.


    That dawn, as everyone fled below decks to escape the distant blue rays of the first sun, the ck fleet floated there at rest, surrounded by the ming wrecks of their burning enemies. In the morning, they would harvest what corpses they could for spare parts, and the Puppeteer would do what it did and sniff out secrets that might aid them in their quest.


    That sinuous monstrosity learned a great deal in the night that followed. They sadly could not find the corpse of the fleet¡¯s admiral, but they found a captain and several quartermasters, and it was able to confirm her worst fears.


    ¡°We came to stop yer foul kind before you could stain the holynds with your evil!¡± the Puppeteer growled in an unfamiliar voice through the mouth of a dead man, ¡°And even if you make your way past us, you¡¯ll find neither quarter nor sor inside the walls of our beloved home!¡±


    Those sentiments were echoed by the other drowned souls, which they harvested for their dark god. Those sentiments worried her but not so much as to deter her from her n. All they hade away with from this encounter was maps and warnings, but they had lost nothing of value in return, and that would have to be enough.


    Less than a weekter, they reached the verdant coast where Tanda stood like a glittering gem. It was gifted by nature and clung to both sides of a fertile river that provided so much of its wealth. The Voice became instantly suspicious of what small gods of city and nature might lurk in such an old ce, but ultimately, she still unleashed her wraiths and the Dreamer to learn what they could from the sleeping popce while her ck fleet rested at anchor far offshore.


    It would be hours before any of those shadowy servants returned with useful information, of course, but even so, the Voice could not tear her eyes away from the glittering white spires that dotted the city and the starlight blue domes that sparkled in the moonlight.


    It was the most beautiful ce she¡¯d ever been, and she dearly hoped that she could find a peaceful solution that would bring these people into the fold. She would hate to ruin such a lovely ce just to make a point that the other local lords would better understand, though she would if she had to.

 Chapter 156: Widening Gyre

    Chapter 156: Widening Gyre


    Once the Tenebroum¡¯s forces had been pushed out of the valley that sheltered the dead city of Abenend on its third assault, it had never managed to get an agent close enough to investigate again. This wasn¡¯t due to any ineptitude on the part of its servants, though. It was because of the talent of the mages.


    In many ways, the Lich feared them more than the gods arrayed against it. Humans were fragile things, but they were clever too, and the mages came up with all sorts of arcane countermeasures to keep its minions at bay. In fact, some of them were so convoluted and unexpected that it took some time to unravel their secrets.


    First, there was the of air they¡¯d managed to weave over the entire Collegium. Many ck birds had crashed to the earth ruined before the Lich had figured out that the fragile things had been failing at higher rates than usual and had them perch on trees further from the grounds instead to watch for signs of weakness among the mages.


    That worked well until the mages started to pick them off, one at a time. At first Tenebroum thought that was being done with spells that detected evil in some way, but when it it had the fly further afield, circling well out of arrow range, it still found that they were being sniped from the mage¡¯sst hold out.


    The answer turned out to be rune carved arrows that were drawn to undeath. It was a clever bit of magic, and Tenebroum filled away those tricks vowing to find some way to use them against the gods themselves in due time.


    After that, it started to use shades and wraiths exclusively, even though they couldn¡¯t prate thepound directly because of ancient wards inscribed into the bedrock itself. It was deeply frustrating to know that its enemy was behind fragile stone walls working on new sinister ns like their crystallized dragon fire that had wounded it so recently, but it couldn¡¯t stop them or even spy on them.


    After that, the lights started to go up. Visually, they didn¡¯t seem to be anything special at first. They were just papernterns hung outside the walls of the castle with a tiny shard of sunlight instead of a candle or an oilmp. They were a nuisance at first, though Tenebroum would extinguish the ones furthest out when it could.


    Soon, there were hundreds, and then thousands, though. Every day, they seemed to amplify in the light of one of the suns, and every night, they would dim back to theirntern strength. At first, the Lich thought the whole thing was a novelty, but soon after, the entire valley was lost to their collective glow, and it was forced to build creative spies from the eyes of keen-sighted men and women and the bodies of sure-footed goats to spy on their continued activity from the closest mountain peaks.


    In time, these clever constructs were dashed as well by the mages and their protective spells, but not before they saw what was happening. The mages weren¡¯t just baring the darkness from their long river valley. They were barring winter from it as well. Even as the icy fist closed around the world with more force than usual, ice and snow never settled for long on the glowing valley. That let them import thousands of refugees and put them to work. Before Tenebroum¡¯s rise to power, Abenend had been a sleepy backwater, and after it¡¯s victory over Siddrim it had been reduced to ash. Now, even with Constantinal fallen, it was stronger than it had been before. In fact, in all the world that Tenebroum could see it was the only ce that was growing and flourishing.


    Some of the towns and duchies that the darkness had imed for its own on its long march east were still doing fine. People still got married, had children, and harvested their crops between prayers for the darkness to keep them safe. There was no growth there, though. There was no vitality. All there was were people in fear going through the motions.


    Not so in Abenend. There, even as the Lichid siege to Rahkin and prepared to fight the mages when that was done, it saw that they were getting stronger. When thest vestiges of the Siddrimites received news that their fortification alongside the Oroza had been nked, they abandoned it and quickly retreated up into the mountains to makemon cause with the mages, turning the whole ce into an armed camp.


    The priests might no longer have any magic of their own, but they had strong backs and experience with war. Soon, all passes except the main one were barred by controlled avnches or manned palisades, and the main pass beside the river quickly became a new fortress in its own right.


    Aside from the northern kingdoms, and the far away inds across the sea, that tiny valley swaddled in light was now the biggest threat to the Lich¡¯s ns, and it was still gallingly near its own seat of power as it was less than two hundred miles from the spire of darkness rising from the ice shrouded ruins that had once been ckwater.


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    Even lightning strikes to try to sabotage these defenses, or at least sew fear and chaos, met with little sess. Calvary was picked off by the mages'' arc lightning and me strike spells before they ever did real damage, and even something subtle as a neuroid couldn¡¯t get close enough to do real damage before it was detected and eliminated.


    When the sky andnd failed it, the Lich sent its legion of rust to dig beneath and find some way through, but an earthquake of almost certainly unnatural origin copsed the tunnel as soon as it got near enough to the surface to be detected.


    At one point, the Lich sent a few of its rodents in to try to bridge the gap that way, but based on the way that Groshian¡¯s other nearby parts screamed for a day and a night, it was safe to say that the mages found them immediately and did something horrible to them.


    It was only when the lights of Rahkin were snuffed out, and every mage that had been sent there to bolster their defenses died, that Tenebroum was finally able to turn its attention to the troublesome valley. That was when it had started to poison the very mana itself with its Strangulite powered monoliths. The results were subtle enough not to be noticed at first, but that could notst forever.


    In time, the Lich¡¯s vignt goats noticed small groups attempting to reach the summit of the mountains it was using to poison them. While these efforts were sometimes sessful, it was very easy for the Lich to tear them apart by night before they reached the peak, so these expeditions were invariably costly and only rarely sessful.


    It was from the souls of those that it murdered there on those high ciers that it learned the most.


    ¡°Dozens of my brothers died trying to use teleportation to reach these cursed high ces,¡± the soul of Artem moaned as the Lich tormented it in the search for answers. ¡°Magic no longer works as it should there, and even the Archmages do not know why.¡±


    ¡°Of course they don¡¯t,¡± Tenebroum gloated. ¡°And they will only figure it out when I im their souls for all of eternity!¡±


    It was heartening to discover with every new expedition, it imed that they still had no idea what it was doing or why it would damn them, though.


    Week by week and month by month, the web of tainted artifacts slowly became a noose, and eventually, that noose began to choke the nascent revival of the mages and their allies. At first, this was only visible in the number of lights that failed after a storm went through, leaving gaps in the otherwise perfect field of lights that were hung all throughout the valley now.


    These were reced, but it was done slowly enough to show the limits of its enemy¡¯s resources. In time, the Lich dispatched more ckbirds to spy on the ce since, unlike the wraiths, they could endure at least a little light. To the Lich¡¯s surprise, almost none of them were detected immediately, as so long as they were circumspect and stayed moving, the mages could no longer shoot them out of the sky as they¡¯d done with such impunity for so long.


    That was when the Lich knew that their destruction woulde sooner rather thanter. In less than a year, it was certain that it would purge every scrap of light from that ce and devour everything that lived there.


    Still, despite its eagerness, the Lich did not rush things. It knew that these mages were the favorites of Lunaris, and that when the time came to crush them, she would do everything that was within her power to aid them.


    That was so predictable that it was nning a trap for her too, should such an opportunity arise, of course, but for now, it focused on other, smaller details, like forcing Groshian to attempt to infiltrate the ce a second time.


    ¡°No, please!¡± the rats wailed piteously as the Lichmanded hundreds of them into dozens of cages that were to be dropped at random along the length of the valley byrge six-winged buzzards that the darkness did not expect to survive the trip. ¡°It¡­ the mages did things to us! We can¡¯t! Never again! The pain!¡±


    The Lich silenced them with a singlemand before it continued. ¡°You will go, and you will die, in time, like all my other constructs. This is the way of things, but until then you will feast on their fields that are heavy with wheat. If you can, you shall devour their books and learn their secrets.¡±


    ¡°Wheat? Secrets?¡± the rats echoed, their hunger growing.


    ¡°Indeed,¡± the Lich said. ¡°There are many things worth feasting on, and the winds of magic are changing; you will find ways to do more damage and undermine their foundations further. In return, I will continue to spread you far and wide so that you can grow strong and be a stronger servant to me.¡±


    To say that the small, hungry god agreed to those terms would be inurate, but it did obey, and that was enough. The Lich had dissected many versions of the rats, but it had found nothing remarkable, and it doubted the mages had either. It didn¡¯t matter to it if the rat god had ten thousand bodies or ten thousand and one. All that mattered was that itbored to advance Tenebroum¡¯s ns, and it could think of no better way to exacerbate the decaying situation of the mages than by unleashing famine and disease to apany their growing troubles with magic itself.

 Chapter 157: Sands of Time

    Chapter 157: Sands of Time


    While Tenebroum engaged in its slow war of attrition with the Mages, it did not sit idle and count the days until victory. That was only one n among many.


    Unless they broke the cordon that slowly tightened around them by doing somethingpletely unexpected, there was no need to watch them day by day. Instead, the darkness monitored the progress that its servants were making to the north, the speed with which new armies were assembled in the east and the rate at which its new generals grew deep in the heart of darkness.


    Everything was going ording to n. Then its scouts finally found what might have been the ruins they¡¯d searched for, for so long. The centipede cavalry unit that found the wastnd of stone and ss deep in the Mulkara desert had long been modified for both traveling in such an inhospitable ce by day and burrowing deep into the desert sands by night to escape the caress of the sun.


    That was why, even when a dark rider reached it with the news of what had been found, it was still several weeks before the Lich could look with its own eyes. It was simply too far for any of its ckbirds to fly and survive the long day, and the darkness was unable to fly there alone as a mist in case the moon should notice it and turn her gaze once more upon it where it had no way to hide.


    So it waited until a fine, four-armed, eight-legged centaur-spider was crafted for it,plete with armor polished to a mirror sheen to drive away as much of the light as possible should the worst happen. It was only when that strange new body was in ce that it made the long journey across the desert to where its forces waited to show it what they had found.


    The journey took three nights running as fast as its spindly limbs would allow, and three long days buried beneath he dunes waiting for the suns to pass by overhead. The experience was strange to Tenebroum, who was not used to being trapped in a singr body for such a long period of time.


    It had expected this, though, and the giant nightmare crab that it upied had been built spaciously enough that it was no trouble to bring along a small chorus of dead mages and schrs with it. That way, it had something to pass the time while it dwelled nearly alone in that ustrophobic darkness.


    By night, it strode along sinuous dune ridges as it got ever closer to its goal. Sometimes, it saw animals and, even more rarely, elementals. Near dawn and dusk, fire elementals dancing like heat mirages could be seen dancing across the cold sands, and sometimes it saw the swells of earth elementals swimming somewhere beneath it in ways that made the sand ripple. None of these creatures strayed close enough to the Lich to devour them, but it did make a note about new elemental traps that it hoped to catch them in for further study another time.


    By day, it curled up into an armored ball deep under the sand, and it discussed Malzekeen with the minds that knew the stories best. There were a dozen different versions of the story. The Siddrimites wrote that it was a terrible, fallen ce that was old when the sun was still young. To them, it was replete with human sacrifice, and it was the city''s destruction that marked the first true year of the light. Others said that the destruction came muchter and that the ce was only a holdout where evil had gathered after the forces of righteousness burned them out of their more traditional strongholds elsewhere in the wide world. The ounts didn¡¯t even agree on whether or not the desert had been in here in those days. It was either ¡®a verdant area that had been reduced to nothing but dust in the face of Siddrim¡¯s might,¡¯ or ¡®a trackless ce on the edge of the wastes, that was not enough to hide them from the light.¡¯


    When Tenebroum finally arrived, there was not enough to say with real certainty. The sand around the edges of the city had indeed been burned so badly that it had melted into a fracturedyer of thin, dun colored ss for hundreds of feet. It crunched underfoot with each step that the Lich took in its strange body.


    Whatever had done that had reduced most of the city to ash. Now, only foundations and low brick walls sprinkled between the dunes hinted at the vast numbers of people who had once lived here.


    It would not havee all this way for that alone, though. Even the central temple, with its copsed dome and its markings that had been worn away by the sand and the wind, were interesting, but not particrly telling. It was only as it moved inside that fallen ce and saw the entrance to the catbs below that it glimpsed what had made the journey through such inhospitable territory worthwhile.


    Navigating the stairs into the depths in a wide-footed body meant for galloping across the sweltering sands was challenging but not impossible; the flesh crafters had known about this part of the trip when they had constructed this body, after all. Once Tenebroum descended into the depths, it released a handful of modified death¡¯s heads to begin a proper search.


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    These differed from the typical ones in many ways. Not only were they smaller because they¡¯d been made from children¡¯s skulls, they weren¡¯t even made to explode. They were simply vessels to house the myriad of souls it had brought with it so that they could look around for what critical clues might yet be found.


    It crowded those souls into the tiny vessels two and three at a time, at random. Then, it released each one down a different corridor so they could begin their search, and it stood there waiting for the answers toe in. Despite the ungainly way those skulls floated here and there while the souls crammed inside fought for control of their tiny little world, Tenebroum didn¡¯t have to wait long.


    The first facts that were gathered were basic enough, but after that things grew steadily more interesting. Based on the inscriptions and faded murals, the ce was an ossuary devoted to the former god of death, Anhnkhanin.


    The historians of Siddrimar insisted that their god had in him as well, though other histories merely said that he had fled beyond the edges of the world to escape. The idea that a god of death could be killed was ludicrous to Tenebroum, and it would have doubted that official narrative even if it had not known all that Ghrosian had exined to it about certain fundamental parts of life and the way they powered certain deities.


    Even If the ce was filled with bones dedicated to one god, though, that did nothing to change the fact that it was also crammed full of the corpses of others too. The dead that belonged to Anhnkhanin were stacked neatly in the alcoves that had been dug out of the soft sandstone beneath Malzekeen.


    The bodies which were scattered across the floor in every corridor, though none of those had been interred here originally. A few of them near the stairs were grave robbers who had been sickened by the miasma here, but most of the rest were those poor souls who sought to survive the day that the city above them had died.


    They had been unsessful, but in their attempt they had identally preserved a wealth of knowledge. Some of the bodies that were far enough away from the door that natural predators had never had the chance to pick their bones clean had even been mummified, preserving even their tattoos in addition to the possessions they carried and the jewelry they wore. Eachyer of those artifacts represented a wealth of clues.


    Slowly, the story came together for the Lich. This was not some grand battle. This was a ughter, and though the three dark gods that it was trying to understand had not died here, after enough research, it was fairly certain that they had been born here at least.


    In every scroll and inscription that Tenebroum uncovered, there were only ever three gods who were mentioned. However, none of them were Ghrossian, and none of them were wolves or rats. Instead, all the Lich¡¯s floating servants found were references to Siddrim, Anhnkanin, and Malkezeen.


    That was telling, of course, but it was only when they found a mummified corpse with the tattoo of a truly unique chimera did Tenebroum finally understand: once the rat, the wolf and the worm had been a single deity as it had already suspected.


    They were separate now, of course. Still, it was sure that their survival from this terrible event was what had broken them apart into the separate shards of divinity that they were now.


    Even with that knowledge, the image was arresting. The god, at least ording to this one idental record by one of its worshipers, was a giant two-headed chimera with the head of a wolf and a rat, surrounded by a tentacled mane of leaches and worms that made it look more like a deformed lion in its way. It was a wonderfully revolting sight, but even as the Lich considered how feasible it might be to build one of these from spare parts, its mere existence raised more questions than answers.


    If Ghroshian was simply part of arger whole, should it even unearth the wolf once it had conquered the Magica Collegium? Should it look for the worm at all?


    The answer was, of course, that it must do those things, but only so it could learn from them and steal their power for itself. It would not abandon such riches merely because it was fearful or because it had doubts. It would just have to keep them apart until that was done to prevent any mishaps. If it brought them together, it would be at a time and a ce of its choosing, when they were bound and leashed. Maybe Tenebroum would simply devour Ghroshian before the other two were unearthed to prevent anyplications altogether.


    It would brood on itter. For now, it studied this ce, and in doing so, it felt a strange sort of kinship with the creatures that were born here. Tenebroum had been born of a single tortured soul in a swamp, and in doing so, there had been enough life to feed and nurture it for a long time. If the city above had been rebuilt, it had no doubt that the same thing would have happened here.


    Instead, the god that had died left behind fragments forced to seek out new sustenance elsewhere, and in doing so, they had be separate. If it were ever to fracture in such a way, where would it find the fault lines in its soul? Darkness? Death? Disease?


    Tenebroum couldn¡¯t say, and honestly, it hoped never to find out. It was a thought-provoking question, though, and it pondered it while it waited for more information in that cursed ce. If Siddrim had sundered Malkezeen into hisponent parts, then might Tenebroum have done the same thing to Siddrim? Was that what those tiny stars represented? It was impossible to say, but now that it had articted the question, it dearly wanted the answer.

 Chapter 158: The Undiscovered Land

    Chapter 158: The Undiscovered Land


    When she traveled downstream for thest time, it was anguid affair, but Oroza no longer had the strength to swim. At this point, she barely had the strength to hold herself together as the emaciated shell of the river dragon she was. Even time spent among the ice at the peak of the mountains was enough to rejuvenate her; she did not truly understand why.


    Was it not as clear as it had always been? Were the heights not untouched and perfect in that timeless way that she¡¯d always been until so recently?


    She didn¡¯t know, but then, she didn¡¯t know that it mattered, either. She had lived a long enough life that it was measured in centuries, and for most of that time she had been content to drift along as if it would never end. Now all that mattered now was that the Lich did not get its hands on her soul and continue her torment in perpetuity.


    It would be bad enough that it would shape and eventually seize whatever sprang up from the polluted banks of the Oroza next, but she could do nothing about that now. She¡¯d already fought too long and too hard and lost everything in the process.


    While she drifted through the southern reaches of her realm toward the silty delta, she bitterly reflected on how little her efforts had aplished. She had prevented the darkness from marching east immediately, but that had only given those people a two-year reprieve. Beyond that, what had she done? Saved some children? Torn apart as many of the Lich¡¯s constructs as she could?


    Oroza smiled at that as she glided along. It wasn¡¯t much, but it would have to be enough. Before that, she¡¯d granted the wishes of countless mothers for healthy babies and even more farmers for bountiful yields, but somehow, all those minor miracles paled inparison to the dark years that had done such damage to her.


    All she could hope for was that in time, after the Gods finally stood together and defeated this enemy, or the darkness had consumed all the life in the area and burned itself out, that nature would finally begin to heal. One day there would be an Oroza again. She believed that. She just knew that it wouldn¡¯t be her.


    The behavior of the other Gods was the point that galled her the most. Their domains were so disparate, and their concerns were so focused that it was hard to get them to work together on anything, especially since the nature goddesses and the children of the forest had begun to vanish.


    It was the nature of man to be selfish, but the Gods were supposed to rise above such petty challenges and work together to defeat their enemies. Sadly, they could not even aplish that much. The All-Father was almost finished building a new chariot, but Lunaris would not loan him any of her stars to wrangle the horses for it. She said the firmament was too weak to support any more losses.


    Even if she had, though, who would they get to drive such a thing? For a time, she had hoped that the Temr with the glowing eyes might be the one to do so, but ording to what she¡¯d heard, he was dead, and the ce where she¡¯d left those light-eyed children so long ago was gone too.


    Siddrim had once been a man, it was said, before he was invested with the light. Perhaps another like that would be born somewhere across the seas.


    None of that mattered to her any longer as she traveled out to sea herself. She used to hate the itch of the saltwater in the Relict Sea, butpared to her own waters now, they felt clean and pure, and she quick sank beneath the waves, letting the currents take her ever deeper. That was all she wanted, to find a ce somewhere where her tormentor could never find her, and there was no ce vaster than the ocean depths.


    That was why she was surprised when Istinis found her there, curled up beneath a rock in thousands of feet of water, a hundred miles from anywhere in a in of endless mud and stone. Her pale aqua skin and the flickering lightning in her eyes made a mistaken identity impossible. She was Istiniss.


    Normally, such an unexpected visit might have frightened Oroza. After all, it wasn¡¯t so long ago that the Lichpelled her to invade the more powerful Goddess¡¯s domain and ravage her behemoths with the Lich¡¯s crazed sea dragon. Now, death would be a blessing, and if the Ocean Goddess wanted to strike her down, well, so much the better.


    Instead, the two of them regarded each other for a long time before Istiniss finally spoke. ¡°I would make you one of my own if I could,¡± the Goddess said atst. ¡°I would give your domain of the east wind and let you pour out your poison on the creature that did this to you, but that is beyond me.¡±


    ¡°I appreciate that,¡± Oroza said, too tired to offer up any proper formality.


    ¡°Sadly, you cannot die here,¡± the storm goddess said as she crouched down next to Oroza¡¯s coiled form.


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    ¡°I can¡¯t?¡± Oroza asked. ¡°Do you think is too close to¡ª¡±


    ¡°No, I promise you that the monster that ravages yournd would never find your spirit,¡± Istiniss said, stroking the silvery scales of Oroza¡¯s nk. ¡°I would bind you to a pearl and hide you away at the very bottom of the sea. In a ce, it would never think to look for you.¡±


    ¡°I appreciate that,¡± Oroza answered with a smile wide enough to show how many teeth she¡¯d lost already.


    ¡°I know, but the prophecy, and therefore Lunaris herself, forbids that you should die in this ce alone,¡± the sea goddess said atst.


    ¡°Does she have another one?¡± Oroza asked. ¡°I heard her recite the thing once, and I¡¯m nowhere in it, I can promise you that. Rivers do not change the course of history.¡±


    The only answer that Istiniss gave was to smile before she started to recite one of the long rhyming passages that made up the cryptic poem that the Moon Goddess seemed to believe held some sort of key to defeating the evils that they faced.


    ¡°The savior of light shall brave endless night


    Though if she could, she¡¯d only weep.


    Until she returns to the light, she¡¯ll continue to fight,


    Then she can finally sleep.¡±


    ¡°I am no savior of light,¡± Orozaughed softly. ¡°I couldn¡¯t even save myself.¡±


    ¡°No,¡± Istiniss agreed. ¡°I didn¡¯t think so either, but our Moon Goddess is quite sure. She says that you told her about how you saved an entire boat full of light not so long ago, though, and perhaps that is enough.¡±


    ¡°Maybe,¡± Oroza sighed, ¡°But wouldn¡¯t it make more sense for one of the children on that boat to be the savior of the light?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not sure,¡± Istiniss said with a shrug. ¡°I read the whole thing but confess it made no sense to me. Regardless, Lunaris told me that I must not allow you to die, and I aim to do that at least.¡±


    ¡°How? Will you purge my river of the poisons?¡± Oroza asked. ¡°Will you drain it of the salt that is killing the nts that dwell there?¡±


    ¡°I would if I could,¡± the Goddess of Sea and Storms nodded. ¡°I would empty every thunderhead in the world on that evil patch ofnd if I thought that it could cleanse its taint, but that would only poison the sea faster.¡±


    ¡°Then all you can do is put me out of my misery,¡± Oroza smiled sadly, certain that a st of lightning would be enough to stop the slow wheezing in her chest each time she breathed in and out through her gills.


    ¡°Sorry,¡± Istiniss said. ¡°I already told you you aren¡¯t dying in my ocean. Lunaris is already cross enough with me. I¡¯m going to help you get somewhere where you can recover your strength, at least for a while. It''s very far away, but once that¡¯s done, well, as long as you fulfill your destiny, I suppose you can do whatever you want.¡±


    Oroza opened herrge mouth to speak. She was going to exin that shecked the strength to swim for another mile, let alone leagues and leagues, but the words were lost in the sudden surge of currents that surrounded her. They pulled her out of her own grave and flung her off at great speed through the darkness to somece only Istiniss knew.


    There was a time when Oroza would have fought her way free on principle. Shecked the strength to do that now, though. Instead, she was dragged through the depths back toward the surface. That was not her destination, though. Instead, she was propelled for a night and a day like that toward warmer waters and sunnier climes.


    Three times, she saw an ind speeding toward her from the horizon, and each time, she thought that was her destination. She passed all of them by, though.


    Oroza glided across the water until she no longer recognized the color of the water or the sky. Even her cleanest mountainkes were not so teal, and the strange pink rocks she glimpsed beneath her were contrasted by brightly colored fish that were every color of the rainbow. She would have thought for certain that she¡¯d left the world entirely for some new ce were it not for the constetions in the sky.


    Then, the next morning, shortly after sunrise she spied a fourth ind, and the currents carried her all the way to the breakwaters of it before they finally released her. It was a strange ce, with oddly shaped trees that had broad leaves only at the very top of tall crooked trunks.


    All of that was beautiful, but as she got close to the shore and let her dragon form fade away to reveal only an old woman in a silver dress, it was the man standing on shore that caught her attention. He was alone there, in ankle-deep water, wearing fine ck clothing that did not fit at all with everything else. She had no idea what to make of that, but she didn¡¯t feel at all threatened by the dark-skinned woman as she slowly waded ashore.


    ¡°I was sent here,¡± Oroza said, rising from the surf and walking toward the shore on shaky legs.


    ¡°You were,¡± she agreed, ¡°but you don¡¯t have toe here. Not if you don¡¯t want to.¡±


    ¡°Why wouldn¡¯t I want to?¡± Oroza asked, suddenly unsure.


    ¡°Where you stand now, you have the traces of not just life and death, but undeath upon you as well.¡± The dark woman said. ¡°If you leave the surf ande fully onto the shore, you will leave behind two of those worlds forever.¡±


    Oroza paused. Trying to decipher the cryptic words as she stood there, struggling against the tide as itpped against the shore. She was exhausted, and truly, there was nowhere else for her to go. Still, she asked the obvious question, ¡°Who are you?¡±


    The dark woman smiled with frighteningly white teeth and said a word. It might have been a name, even, but it was lost in the crashing of the tide that churned around them.


    ¡°That won¡¯t mean too much to you, though,¡± she continued, extending his hand, ¡°Not until you make your decision.¡±


    Oroza only had to think for a moment. Then, with determination, she gripped the stranger¡¯s hand and strode ashore.

 Chapter 159: Uneasy Silence

    Chapter 159: Uneasy Silence


    At first, the denizens of the port sought simply to ignore the dark fleet that had anchored in such a way as to choke off most of the harbor¡¯s approach. A few brave merchant ships rowed by during the day, but by night, they lost their nerve and hid in the port, hoping for one more night of safety.


    The Voice of Reason would have let them go, of course. Killing merchants and sinking their fine ships in sight of the city would have been exactly the wrong thing to do, to prepare for all that wasing next.


    Twice, a small formation of ships rigged for war formed up in the harbor, preparing to sail on the Voice¡¯s fleet. Whether that was because they nned to fight or because their pride demanded that they show they were, she couldn¡¯t say. The spirits of the sailors they¡¯d fished from the wreckage of theirst battlergely agreed that the ships were waiting for the return of the fleet she¡¯d already burned and that they would strike once they sighted those white sales on the horizon.


    It would have been a ssic pincer maneuver. It would probably have been quite effective, even. Sadly, they were out of allies and the fearful men would have to treat with her directly, or continue to cower behind the beautiful walls of their fragile city until she finally lost patience with them.


    Given enough nights to study the ce, she didn¡¯t need her master¡¯s Dark Paragon to tell her that it would have been much easier to conquer this ce than Constantinal or Rahkin. She might have enough death knights and other constructs to march right up through the harbor and sack the pce in a night or two.


    <em>That would have defeated the point, though, </em>she thought crossly to herself while she admired the distant lights that flickered off the glittering waves. <em>The Lich had endless numbers of servants that could conquer, but only one that could do it without swords, and she needed to show her worth in that regard.</em>


    It took almost two weeks for the powers of Tanda to cease their bickering and send forth an envoy. His dhow was an ornate pleasure craft, which made it quite showy, but it was a t-decked vessel that left nowhere to hide unwee surprises.


    She approved. It was a sensible choice intended not to provoke her further while still offering a glimpse of the wealth and status of this ce.


    Thanks to the wraiths that circled the waters like so many gulls, she knew what she would see long before the fragile boat reached her gship. Onboard the <em>Mysterious Ways</em> was a single, plump eunuch who only just barely managed not to tremble as he stood there between his eight rowers, reeking of fear. The voice stood there as the boat pulled slowly alongside of hers, and then as he began to shout his entries as to pay, she walked toward the bow of her ship, tracing the rails lightly as she studied the little man and his strange ent.


    He tried three differentnguages before the figurehead on the bow of her vessel began to unfurl and extend. The Voice wasn¡¯t concerned. She knew everynguage her Master did, and she was sure that any that she did not already know woulde to her quickly.


    The figurehead had been a beautiful maiden made of ivory holding a harp, but as soon as the Voice approached her, she extended into her true form, bing a bony maia that slithered almostpletely free of her bonds, bing a delicate stairway that curved around toward the aft of the dhow.


    Though she could be unleashedpletely and made into a killing machine, that was not the main purpose of the figurehead. It was to provide an easy way for the Voice to board and disembark the vessel. After all, she was far too heavy to float, and if she were to fall into the water, there would be nothing to catch her until she reached the abyssal sands hundreds of feet below.


    Though she could presumably walk until she reached the shore again, she didn¡¯t like to think of what such a fate would do to her fine dress or carefully tanned skin. The odds of staying unmolested by the things that dwelled down there long enough to reachnd weren¡¯t good, and she had not been built to fight them. Evidently, the Lich had simr fears, for it had given her this guardian to prevent exactly that fate, and graceful mia did an excellent job.


    Even though both ships bobbed up and down in the surf out of sync with each other, the Voice never felt it. Instead, each bony stair beneath her moved ever so slightly to cancel out all the motion, making her the only part of the entire tableau that was even capable of stillness as she walked down the path with her stiff, prideful gate.


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    The screams started before she reached the dhow, but she knew that they weren¡¯t because of her. None of the rowers who were trying their very best to fling themselves into the sea were attempting to escape the beautiful woman in ck who was strolling down her own private staircase made of serpentine vertebra; instead, they were doing all they they could to escape her loyal ma.


    They couldn¡¯t, though. They were chained to their rowing benches, and in the end, all they could do was find something to defend themselves.


    When the voice stepped onto the deck, she curtsied slightly in her long ck dress. She only walked three steps forward before the first fearful ve attempted to strike out at her. Fortunately, his master was faster with his whip, and before the terrified rower could strike a second time, the chubby little eunuch was already waddling toward her.


    ¡°Mistress, please!¡± he said, struggling to maintain hisposure as he moved himself between her and the rest of his crew. ¡°One thousand pardons for this. I will have him yed to within an inch of his life once we return to port. I am Harun Rok, a lowly functionary who serves the Sultan, and I havee here to ascertain who the great power behind such a fleet might be and what it is that they would want from the ivory port of Tanda.¡±


    ¡°This would be an eptable apology,¡± she nodded, letting a moment of silence linger before she continued just to make the man sweat. ¡°I am the Voice of Reason, and Ie from the darkenednds to the south at the behest of my Master.¡±


    ¡°Your Master?¡± he asked hopefully, seeking to wheedle out more information, but the Voice ignored him.


    ¡°We thank you for your bravery, Harun Rok,¡± the Voice said with a cold smile, ¡°But this is a conversation for your lord. You are here to work out the details for such things and nothing more.¡±


    The man was so concerned with the snake woman that lingered just beneath her that he barely noticed the slight. Instead, he nodded nkly and agreed, ¡°Yes, the arrangements, of course. When will you¡­¡±


    ¡°Midnight,¡± she said in a tone that was as much answer as it wasmand. ¡°I shall journey to the pce tomorrow at midnight so that we may have an amicable discussion about all of this. Please go and deliver this message to your lord so that he may expect my arrival.¡±


    The man had obviously expected a longer audience or even negotiations, but as soon as the exchange wasplete, the Voice was turning away and returning to her ship. There was nothing to be gained by further discussions with someone who had no power, not when the cost was mystery and intrigue. She would let poor master Rok return alone with nothing but a name and a time, and that would be enough to practically watch the whole of Tanda¡¯s dense harbor, and white walls burst into mes of intrigue from here.


    She watched the tiny dhow slink back the way it hade with its tail between its legs, and In the day that followed, she did little except choose a few appropriate gifts as tokens of her Master¡¯s generosity. After some consideration, she chose a fist-sized pearl carved in the shape of an eye and a wind-up raven made of brass and bone that would p its wings quite convincingly when the key was turned.


    Thetter had no magic, of course, which was just as well because the former was overflowing in enchantments. With the right level of focus from the Lich, it would be able to spy on half the city even if they tucked this thing away in the deepest treasury, which is what any sensible ruler would do. Still, it was a work of singr beauty, and the iridescent iris was arresting in its detail, so she was fairly certain that a ruler with this level of wealth and vanity would put it on disy regardless of what his advisors had to say.


    She wouldn¡¯t have to wait long to find out, though. Less than 24 hourster, her ship, along with two more nking it, moved slowly toward the vacant pier at the heart of Tanda¡¯s harbor where her smallpany of only a few dozen disembarked. The voice no longer had her carriage, but even if she did, she wouldn¡¯t have had any way of moving it from sea tond. Neither did she have any way of matching the ostentatious pomp of this foreign ce, so she didn¡¯t try.


    Instead, she met the overwhelming wealth of their mosaics and silken banners with dread austerity as she mounted her pnquin and was carried into the city by four towering death knights. They were escorted by another three dozen that marched in perfect unison; it was an impressive showing of steel and precision, but that was not the reason that she¡¯d chosen them for this asion.


    It wasn¡¯t even because they were as merciless as they were deadly; It was because out of all the soldiers and monstrosities concealed below decks in the ck fleet, these were the only ones that appeared to be human in a convincing way, and while she was in no way ashamed of her undeath or that of her minions, she had a better understanding of fear and panic after the events of Rahkin, and she would not let the reaction of the streets and those who dwelled among the gutters force the Sultan¡¯s hand.


    So, despite the growing crowds, she and her fearsome entourage marched in perfect silence from the harbor to the pce. There had been a weing party to greet them, headed by the same eunuch and a few other dignitaries, but her dismissive gaze had made her stance clear without a wasted word:<em> I am not here for you.</em>


    That dismissive silence clung to the group as it made its way to the pce, and though the size and the volume of the onlookers increased as they went, even their exmations were not enough to breach the metallic drum beat of dead footsteps that silenced everything as they went.

 Chapter 160: Foreign Gods

    Chapter 160: Foreign Gods


    The voice had known that Tanda was going to be wealthy before she¡¯d ever set sail on this voyage. The northern trade routes were well known for luxuries that were very nearly unheard of in the South. Even her time spent off the coast, watching the city night after night, had not prepared her for the dizzying variety of that wealth, though.


    The undertemple within the Lich¡¯sir was a gilded nightmare that grew more extravagant with each passing year, but even that terrible heart of luxury was the only part of her Master¡¯s kingdom topare to the thousand delights she saw on her way to the pce. It was a humbling experience, in its way, though none of that consternation made its way to her carefully neutral face.


    Instead, she studied the sights from her ornate pnquin as she glided through the darkened streets and studied the city that passed around her. The city was made up of stone and sto buildings, and each dwelling that was too poor for a mosaic or statues to mark its existence was decorated with colorful frescoes or lined with ornate friezes.


    Together, the result was that it was impossible to tell which buildings might be the tenements of paupers and which might be the homes of merchant lords. In the end, the whole thing became a sort of temple in its own right, and between the silken banners and fine clothes of the natives that had braved thete hour to see what themotion was, the only symbol of status that she could ultimately discern were the small gardens and oasis that hid behind wrought iron fences along her route. In a city where everything was fancy, only a few could afford the space for simplicity.


    That lesson was driven home when they finally reached the pce of Tanda¡¯s Sultun. It was arge, towering building, built in a spiral like a narwhal¡¯s horn in such a way that it lorded over the rest of the walled city. It was neither its size nor its opalescent tiles that made it stand out, but the broad and verdant gardens that separated it from the rest of the city like a green manicured moat.


    Guards with wicked halberds had lined the whole route to the pce. They kept themoners away from her death knights as much as anything, but here she faced what might as well have been an opposing army. Not only were there hundreds of broad-shouldered men wearing well-polished conical caps standing at attention, but there were mages too, draped in silk and watching her from high above as they circled her on tiny flying carpets.


    The scene struck her as a show of force that was almost as ostentatious as the rest of the city, but then the Voice of Reason was sure that was the point, and to her, it stank of weakness, not strength. Mortal soldiers needed to eat and sleep. Most importantly, they needed to be paid, and with as much money as the people of Tanda spent on their decorations, she doubted very much that they had arge standing army.


    So, instead of doing anything that might provoke conflict, she dismounted her pnquin and strode past the assembled defenders with only a single skeletal knight in tow to hold her baggage as she walked toward the pce gates. No one opposed her. Indeed, the sense of relief radiating off these perfumed warriors that this would not devolve into bloodshed as she walked through the garden-lined path was palpable, and the towering bronze gates opened before her quickly enough that she didn¡¯t even need to slow her steps.


    Once inside, she finally stood on familiar ground. There, she encountered the true warriors of the merchant realm, the servants and the courtiers, and she was bombarded with all the polite and hospitable weapons that they had to offer. The Voice of Reason would not allow these to slow her down, either. She knew that she had perhaps five hours until the blue-gray light of dawn colored the horizon once more. As much as she might wish for all the time in the world to conclude such important negotiations, time was ever against the servants of the Lich. So, buffeted by fawning curiosity, she moved ever forward, giving the well-dressed men and women that swirled around her just enough information to announce her properly as she moved toward the heart of the court. There, she found a ce not at all like the audience halls of the South that she was used to. Instead, she found the Sultan half reclined on a pile of plush cushions at the heart of the building, ensconced in the warm light of oilmps and the glowing wards of mages.


    The Voice of Reason made no effort to approach these. Instead, as the room was stilled and her presence was announced in half a dozen foreign tongues, she studied the men and women that ringed the outside of the room to watch. It was clear to her immediately that not all of them were human. Some of those in attendance were shown with an inner light that marked them as spirits or even small gods.


    <em>Are such things moremon here? </em>She wondered. <em>Did that make peace a more or less likely prospect? </em>


    The Voice wasn¡¯t sure. Such things might change the oue, but they wouldn¡¯t change her efforts. It was not at all unlikely that a city as old and grand as Tanda would have a godling of its own, but who were the others, then? Might the desert have a spirit? What about the river or the bay?


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    All of that would require further study, which would be the prerogative of any number of other spirits. Her job was not to puzzle this strangeness out but to make peace with it, which she did with her gifts, a chilly smile, and as many kind words as she could muster.


    The Sultan¡¯s servants took her precious objects from her as she presented each of them, and once that was done the Sultan looked down on her magnanimously and offered her exotic incenses and aged wines from a dozen different ports along with golden jewelry. It was only thest that the Lich would have an interest in, but she thanked him for all of them just the same.


    ¡°Surely you havee all this way for more than gifts and pleasantries,¡± the Sultan said finally. ¡°Tell me¡­ tell all of us what your dark fleet is doing here.¡±


    ¡°We havee to make war¡ª¡± she started to answer, but the Sultan quickly interrupted her as he finally pulled his bulk up to his full height instead of slouching.


    ¡°Is this a threat? In the heart of our power, you think to¡ª¡± he started to say, his indignity rising with each word.


    ¡°But we havee to make friends too,¡± she said, continuing in a loud, clear voice that silenced the few remaining whispers. ¡°The darkness has risen and imed the South, but it will not stop there. In time, the whole world will belong to my master.¡±


    ¡°Tanda has stood for hundreds of years and resisted dozens of armies,¡± the Sultan said, leaning forward. He was obviously enjoying this as he licked his fat lips. ¡°What makes you think yours would do any more than add to the bones in the wastnds around the city?¡±


    ¡°Besides the fact that those bones would be converted into fresh soldiers for the fight?¡± the Voice smiled. ¡°Tanda has been strong for a long time. It would be strong even now, at first, at least, but we have already imed Constantinal and Rahkin and every kingdom in between the two, and only those few that surrendered to the darkness still live and breathe. All the rest are broken ces, grown over with weeds and shadows.¡±


    ¡°So you ask us to bend the knee?¡± The Sultan asked, appearing even more annoyed. He looked like he was about to tell her off, but a look at one of the women who lounged around the base of the Sultan¡¯s dais seemed to make him think better of it. ¡°We will not surrender to you or anyone else, but we would¡­ consider an alliance, perhaps, with the proper terms.¡±


    ¡°An interesting proposal,¡± the voice said automatically, but it had barely registered. ¡°What would that look like in your mind?¡±


    Instead of dealing with the puppet figurehead, she turned her gaze to the woman whom she¡¯d thought to be nothing more than a courtesan until that moment. She was dressed in pale silks and golden ornaments that showed more of her body than they hid, but as soon as their eyes met, the Voice could see an ageless depth in the eyes of the other woman.


    While it was possible she was a mage, it was far more likely that this was the goddess of Tanda here, hiding in in sight. It was that insight that guided the rest of the Voice¡¯s conversation with the Sultan. He might have been the one saying the words, but it was the nameless woman¡¯s bodynguage she was listening to as the two of them began the borate dance of diplomacy.


    For the next two hours, the three of them made proposals and counterproposals as everything slowly fell into ce. Given the Sultan¡¯s hostility, it was hard to understand why this meeting was even taking ce at first, but it eventually became clear why: Constantial. Every time the name of that city came up, the Voice saw the shadow of fear cross the eyes of her true opponent. The goddess of Tanda did not wish to share the same fate as her sister city and was forcing the mortals that ostensibly ruled her to find another way.


    That was reasonable. That was a motivation that the Voice of Reason could understand, and she used that to frame the discussion. Guaranteeing both the city-state of Tanda as well as any of their partners that wished to sign on as well safety and security both from the Lich and any of their neighbors that might feel differently for a moderate tithe, to be delivered monthly to Rahkin, or possibly other nearby cities after they had been conquered.


    ¡°O-o-one percent of the city¡¯s poption every year¡­¡± the Sultan stammered when she first proposed the terms. ¡°Even spread out monthly, that would still be dozens of ships! The cost is too high!¡±


    ¡°You would lose more people in your first night of standing against use than you would in a year of fealty,¡± the Voice insisted. ¡°I¡¯d invite you to ask the good people of Rahkin, but they refused our generous offer and are no more.¡±


    That caused a round of collective gasps, but the Sultan ignored them. ¡°If you¡¯re so confident, then why not ask for two percent or even ten percent?¡± he asked.


    ¡°We seek a rtionship that will span decades,¡± the Voice answered smoothly. ¡°No city could flourish under such an onerous yoke.¡±


    That metaphor was as close as she dared step to the truth. The people of this city, and all cities that might yet be brought to heel, were nothing but herds of cattle, and so they would be harvested slowly. For now, they could pay in beggars and criminals, but she was certain that in time when the Lich held dominion over the world, they would pay with their prayers and their dreams, too. After all, just as her dark lord used every part of the body to build its creations, it would use every part of creation to build what was going toe next.


    Though the negotiationssted almost until morning, she returned to her ship before the first sun rose with a deal signed in blood. One more city entered the fold, and she hadn¡¯t lost so much as a single death¡¯s head to achieve her goal.

 Chapter 161: An End for Abenend

    Chapter 161: An End for Abenend


    Though it took almost a year for the winds of magic to sour enough to spell the doom of the Magica Collegium, the effects were felt widely within months. For a time, the mages struggled against the invisible noose of the Lich without any real understanding of exactly what it was it had done, but it was no use.


    First, the delicate divination and teleportation magics they relied on to detect and counter any incursions into the valley failed them, and in time, everything else did as well. By the time Groshin¡¯s rats had wormed their way into the granaries of the viges and the basement of the school itself, the wards that had protected it for so long were spontaneouslybusting nearly every day and bing almost as hazardous to those they protected as to those they defended against.


    In that way, magic was increasingly bing more of a liability than anything. One minute, a set of wards that had been carved into the doorway of a building to protect it from evil were doing the job they''d done for generations, and the next, they were bursting into me and catching the thatched roof on fire.


    It was a subtle evil that apparently not even their Goddess had discovered the cause of. For it was only at the end of things when mages were already fleeing their sinking ship, that they even thought to begin striking out those ancient wards with hammer and chisel. Those short-sighted actions would not save them, though; they just made Tenebroum more eager for what was toe next.


    The mages of Abenend had lived by magic for so long, and now they would die from it as well. The Lich hungered for that moment. It remembered well when they tried to drown it and smother it in its cradle. They had failed, but it would still return the favor. Tenebroum just wished that it had been able to use water rather than air to affect its revenge; it would have been more poetic that way.


    Indeed, the day the hordes of undead finally began to pour the tunnels that had been dug in opportune ces where underground caverns nearly reached the surface, it was probably already over, and most of the runes that might have warned the mages of what wasing had long since been defaced. The result was a massacre.


    Until now, every assault after the first one had been met with overwhelming firepower as soon as the Lich¡¯s forces were within range. This time, the mages that remained to secure the walls of the Collegium were blindsided, and the battle that followed was bloody and brief.


    It was hard to fight, of course, when every fifth spell might blow up in the face of the caster. Even before the Lich¡¯s abominations had topped the ramparts, there were already mages on fire and others who had turned themselves to stone in the face of twisted essence. For the first time in their long history, indeed, for the first time in the history of the world, the winds of magic had turned against them, and they had no idea how to cope with that.


    Tenebroum had decided not to send anything fancy orplicated on the assault, for that reason, of course. Krulm¡¯venor and the shadow drake were both left home, far from this battlefield, because the delicate spells that bound their tremendous power might unravel in a stray gust of un-wind. Instead, the Lich sent simple, bloodthirsty creatures that were less likely to be affected by suchplexities.The wights and the war zombies that boiled up from the ground and charged across the night were fast and brutal but not nearly as fast as the centipede cavalry that followed in their wake.


    The multi-legged horses and their skeletal riders sometimes started toe apart where theck of magic treated them unfavorably, but this didn¡¯t stop them from forming siegedders on nearly every stone wall that protected the school. Its cavalry was gruesome but fairly simple. Even the rtively simple magics that tied together the bones of dozens of different people and animals were tooplex for the terrible smog that now covered the valley.


    Indeed, the stranguliteden winds proved more dangerous than the mages themselves, and once they had unfolded in ce, only a few of them were dislodged by lightning and other magics. The casters themselves weren¡¯t so lucky. They became lightning rods that glowed even brighter than their targets while they were boiled alive by their own magics.


    It was a thing of beauty, or at least it would have been had Tenebroum dared to observe it up close. The whole valley of Abenend, with its few remaining twinkling lights, was too contaminated for it to even risk a view from a flock of red-eyed ck birds thousands of feet above. Instead, it merely tasted the impressions from its bloodthirsty minions as they charged heedlessly into danger. The resulting picture of a hundred maddened viewpoints was fairlyplete but hopelessly wed, like viewing the world through thick, frosted ss. Even if the details werecking, the pain still came through very clearly.


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    It didn¡¯t need to see every blow to know that it was winning. It could tell that merely from the taste of blood and the sight of distant fire as the fortress finally began to burn.


    In the end, even the Lich had expected the defenders to put up more of a fight than this, but famine and the loss of magic had taken their toll; apparently, the twobined had broken the spirit of the mages far faster than it had hoped. Even so, it had expected that it would have to repeat this assault, once, or even twice more, to finally purge the annoying mages.


    When it saw the moon moving through the sky to defend herst bastion of mortal defenders, Tenebroum knew it had already won, though. She would never do such a bold thing unless her cherished mages were on the brink of defeat. As far as evil and darkness went, she was a terrible weapon in her own right, and as she brightened, night faded into pale twilight.


    As her light flooded the valley fully, it was enough to cause all of its undead minions who were not already deep inside the castle to turn to dust. Dozens of its minions died, but every one of them was easily receable, and Tenebroum cared very little for the loss. It would have lost a thousand minions to put her in such a vulnerable ce without batting an eye because it was then that the Lichunched the weapon it had been working on for so long, just in case an opportunity like this should ever arise.


    Tenebroum could never be sure that the witch Lunaris would strike at it again at this moment, of course, but it had been certain that she would do so again one day. That was why it had taken the cancerous shard that would never be a copy of its dutiful Dark Paragon and turned the thing into a single cursed weapon that was closer to arcane cancer than any true construct it had built.


    The thing still had a tiny piece of its maker at its core, of course, but it had mutated beyond all recognition. It was a violent, primitive thing now, made from dark ether, and the Lich was certain that even if it tried to give the thing a body, it would have been quite mad and very nearly uncontroble. So it didn¡¯t bother.


    In thest two years, the constantly morphing dark crystal shards had been pruned and sharpened, and they had been fitted with wings and enough minor air essence to ensure that it could fly as quickly as even the dark rider. The Lich had never bothered to name the dread creation, though, as a drudge that had been stationed on a nearby mountaintop for just this purpose released it, and the thing soared across the sky Tenebroum decided that it looked like a harpoon or a vampire bat more than anything.


    The Goddess paid no attention to it as it soared over the top of the Wodenspine mountains, aiming ever higher. She was so intent on burning the evil that was burrowing its way ever deeper into the heart of the Magica Collegium that she only noticed the jet-ck projectile gliding against the ck backdrop of the night sky in the moments before it struck her.


    By that point, it had flown so high that it had left even the tallest peaks in the distance behind it. Lunaris tried to retreat then, but she was too slow. She tried to st it with the full force of her light, but it was impossible to focus on a point that was so close to her, and in the end, all she seeded in doing was burning the wings off of the dread creation before it pierced the thin skin of lunar soil, and began to worm its way deeper inside of her like a ded tapeworm.


    The soul shard had been rejected by Tenebroum because it was too aggressive and too out of control for any conventional servant it would care to make. To unmake one, though, or even a God, it was perfect, and it quickly began to spread out its tendrils of avarice and hate as it sought to devour its host.


    The moon screamed, then, as she turned away from the worldpletely to focus on the tiny shard of shrapnel that was growing inside her as it looked for something vital to sever and devour. As she retreated into the void, Tenebroum¡¯s awareness of its construct slowly faded. It doubted that a single pinprick would be enough to end such a powerful goddess, but it would certainly remind her that even she was not beyond its reach. That wound would take up her focus for a long time, and it would have been enough to put a grim smile on its face if it had been more than imcable gilded bones.


    Instead, the Lich turned its gaze back to the fall of Abendend and felt the desperate battle y out as a distant series of urges. Rage, bloodlust, and fear dominated the scene and gave it just enough details to understand that though it only had a few hundred wights and reavers left in that cursed ce, the mages were far fewer in number. There were perhaps only a few dozen of them left, and they were quickly bing an endangered species in their own bloody halls.


    In the basements, at the heart of their power, their magic worked far better, but even their strength could notst forever. It also cut them off from their greatest ally of all: the light. The suns eventually started to rise, but that light could not harm the teeming horde of the dead that still fought in the depths.


    For hour after hour, the two wildly uneven forces fought. Mages sted apart whole corridors full of bloodthirsty monsters with their wands and staves, only to be ripped apart in turn by the pieces of the survivors that were still strong enough to rip them to bloody shreds. The fighting was as intense as any his forces had endured since the fall of Constantinal, and part of the Lich longed to get closer to the violence, but it knew the whole area was poisoned still, so it resisted.


    After the obelisks had been shut down and the whole area had been allowed to detoxify for several weeks, it would collect all the souls and trophies worth collecting. It would still have what it needed, even if the bodies had long since grown cold.

 Chapter 162: Awakening the Wolf

    Chapter 162: Awakening the Wolf


    The battlested all day, and it wasn¡¯t even clear until almost evening that Tenebroum¡¯s forces would win. At this point, the oue of the war was not in doubt, even if this desperate battle still hung in the bnce. In the broadest sense, it wouldn¡¯t matter if it took one battle or five of them to secure their doom. However, if it gave the mages breathing room, it would almost certainly affect the quality of knowledge that it would be able to pige from the ce.


    That was what drove the Lich on more than anything at this point. A victory for the mages, while meaningless in itself, would give them hours or days to address the corpses that littered the interior of the Magica Collegium. Every head they managed to burn on a funeral pyre would be one less mage that it could add to its library. While both men and undead abominations were receable, the arcane knowledge contained in the minds of some of these men was not.


    That was what drove it to scrape together whatever reinforcements it could, including drudges fit only for digging tunnels. It would send another wave the following evening, even if only to keep the mages pinned. Fortunately, that proved unnecessary. A few minutes before the blood-red sunset, the final mage was torn to pieces where he was hiding in an alcove on the third basement floor. Out of the hundreds of deathless warriors the Lich had sent tounch this surprise attack, only seventeen of them still moved, and none of them were whole, but it was enough.


    Thanks to what it had done to the flows of magic, it had been able to aplish with a small force what it probably wouldn¡¯t have been able to do with the entirety of its army if magic had worked properly. It had even wounded the Goddess Lunaris herself, which was, in its mind, worth nearly as much as the sacking of Abenend. Both were victories worth celebrating, and it immediately ordered Verdenin to have his acolytes and sightless monks do just that. What was the point of having a congregation or worshipers if not for moments like this?


    Sadly, the Lich could not begin to investigate its spoils immediately. Instead, its minions had to disable all of the dark obelisks and dread monoliths that it had spent so long installing. Then, once that was done, it had to wait weeks for several storm systems to dilute and dissipate the poison that had taken so long to build.


    Tenebroum spent that time listening to the songs and the chants of its growing priesthood as it lurked among the undertemple. Most of these rites involved human sacrifice, at the moment of crescendo, but these werergely war captives taken from isted viges, or tribute that hade to it from the Voice of Reason by way of Tanda. None of those lives mattered, of course, at the best use of them was for moments like this.


    Tenebroum acknowledged that such moments were indulgent, but they passed the time, and it had no other pressing tasks to aplish. Most of its ever erging empire proceeded on autopilot at this point, leaving it free for new experiments. The Lich did not have to travel east to Constantinal to ensure that the production of its armies were proceeding on schedule, any more than it had to travel north to where its armies were marching across the desert, one night at a time.


    Indeed, the only thing it paused to do besides bask in the adoration and the fear of its worshipers was to study the stain on the face of the moon. Because of the way her phases changed, and she moved to hide the darkness, it was hard to see, but even so, Tenebroum could very clearly see the shadow''s long tendrils crawling across her surface. Its weapon had found its mark, and though it spread slowly, it was still spreading, which meant that the Lunar Goddess of magic and protection still hadn¡¯t found a way to fullybat his vile sorcery.


    That was wee news, highlighting that she was every bit as unprepared for him as Siddrim had been. So, while the Lich listened to dirges that celebrated his final victory over thest holdout of the area, it mused and deliberated over various ns that might be used to end her once and for all before passing them off to its library so they could be refined and implemented. It was only three weekster when the taint in Abened had fallen by more than ny percent, that the Lich approached the school in a body that had been prepared for this environment. Though not exactly built forbat, the abomination it walked the world once more with had been fortified and reinforced with a leaden skin that had been embedded with hundreds of cast iron runes that were meant to warn and protect against the worst of the miasma¡¯s effects.


    This form carried no weapons with it beyond its metal fists and its powerful runes of protection. Indeed, it was armed only with a golden cor that it had made for its quarry, should it really be here.


    Tenebroum wished to see their of its enemy with its own eyes, but it would not do so in a foolhardy way that would see it crippled for weeks or worse. Its encounter with the Temr and his dragon fire had left an indelible lesson in that regard.


    Still, if those mages had so many powerful weapons that they could use them so casually, then it was that much more important that it carefully dissected their holdings itself. That was why it did not delegate this task to a lesser mind and journeyed from the cavernous beachhead its minions had dug several miles from the school to the charred gates themselves.


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    The way was not far and led through the partially rebuilt ruins of Abenend, but the faint glows that spread across the Lich¡¯s leaden skin revealed nothing it needed to be concerned about. The school itself, though, was another matter. There, in certain hallways and in ces where the fighting had been thickest, the miasma still clung to the corpses of the fallen, and it was forced to backtrack and take new paths to its goals.


    In its wake, it left drudges with any number of orders: clean this up, gather those books, harvest and preserve these heads. There was always a flurry of activity in the Lich¡¯s wake, but whenever it was examining something important, it was always alone so that it might deliberate in stillness.


    The Collegium was a mess but an impressive one. From the outside, the Lich had viewed it as a castle and a bastion of war for so long that it was easy to forget that it was a school with lodging for hundreds of students and dozens of teachers. It took quite a lot of space to support all of those people, as well as the servants who cooked and cleaned for them. On top of all that facilities to support that mass of humanity, there were also innumerable warehouses, store rooms, study halls, libraries, workshops, and ssrooms.


    After almost a day of wandering the premises, the Lich was fairly sure that the ce wasrger on the inside than it was on the outside. That realization was enough to make it recall the ufortable battle that urred with the city god of Constantinal so long ago. For a brief moment, fear of that inexplicable infinity shot through it. If the space inside the Magica Collegium was distorted in simr ways, might there be simrly inescapable traps?


    The thought put the Lich on guard for the next several days, but it was not afraid. The mere idea that something might exist was not enough to merit retreat. After all, despite all the battles that had taken ce here, it had never seen evidence of a small god associated with the Collegium. It was certainly old enough to have one, of course, but it was also entirely possible that the mages had done something to prevent one from taking root.


    Tenebroum might find the answer to those questions when it began to ransack the memories of the mages that lived here, but for now it put it out of its mind and focused on the present as it descended ever deeper into the dead hallways of the school.


    Along the way, the Lich found dozens of objects of interest, from magical relics that it did not fully understand to books that had been bound shut for unknown purposes. Every one of these was collected, but it was only on the bottom floor of the deepest basement that the Lich finally found what it was looking for.


    There, past remains that had been interred in Sepelchurs that disyed the honor or dishonor that led the mortal remains of some ancient sorcerer to be interred in such a spot; the Lich finally saw the stone sarcophagus it had been searching for, sealed in lead and lying undisturbed for who knew how long.


    The runes of its magic-resistant body glowed a dull, angry red down here. That wasn¡¯t because the whole floor was guarded against evil withyered enchantments. They might be enough to make a lesser drudge cease to function or crumble to dust, but against the Lich, all they could do was express their displeasure as it moved past them.


    When the Lich reached the Sarcophegus, it ripped the stone lid off without much effort at all. For a moment, the enchantments that warded the lid screamed against its touch, but even as its current body¡¯s fingertips began to melt, it hurled the thing aside, letting it shatter against the far wall.


    There, in the container, was arge, desated hound that might have been nearly the size of a pony bound by rusted chains. The Lich had half expected it toe to life on the spot, but when it sat there like little more than the mummified pet of a long-dead king, it ced the cor around the neck of the ancient hound¡¯s corpse, then picked up the animal and began to carry it toward the exit. Obviously, the magics and wards were still too stone down here, and it would need to be revived elsewhere.


    The wards that Tenebroum had bypassed easily enough did not like this turn of events and glowed all the fiercer as it tried to leave, forcing the Lich to deface several on his way out the door. <em>The mages here had truly nned for everything; well, everything except for it,</em> Tenebroum thought darkly.


    The Lich brought its burden to a dining hall on the first floor. It was empty and save for a single feature, utterly unimportant. It just happened to be just below the room on the second floor where Tenebroum had ordered its drudges to gather all the unimportant bodies.


    So, it set the hound down in the center of the floor, and then, with a thought, the Lich ordered one of the reavers in the room above to punch a hole in the floor above, allowing all the blood that had started to pool up there to rain down on the ancient creature.


    At first, nothing happened. It was only after almost a minute that Tenebroum noticed that the desated corpse was drinking in that awful vitality and slowly returning to life. Moment by moment, its muscles bulged, and its tissues became more supple until it was finally strong enough to shatter the chains that bound it.


    Slowly, like a newborn fawn it found the strength to stand, and stood there on shivering legs. Then, when it turned and saw the Lich standing there, it growled a deep, bone chilling growl that resonated throughout the room. It took a moment, and then it slowly advanced on the leaden construct with its teeth bared.


    Before it got halfway to Tenebroum, though, the Lich spat amand. ¡°Sit!¡± The word echoed through the room briefly, and then a momentter, though the giant hound clearly didn¡¯t want to, it did exactly that.

 Chapter 163: Digging for Answers

    Chapter 163: Digging for Answers


    Tenebroum had hoped that the hound would have been able to provide it the answers it craved, unlike the incoherent swarm of rats, Ghrosian. In that way, at least, it was disappointed. The thing had a powerful soul, even in its weakened state, but there was no intelligence there. Instead, there was only an overflowing font of rage that swirled in its core.


    That wasn¡¯tpletely different from the rats, of course, save that they swirled in fear. It could see how the two of them werepatible in that sense and that they might fit together. Not that it would ever bring them together, of course. The Lich had the nameless hound tied to a stake in a cave and allowed to continue to decontaminate for a month before it was brought back to Tenebroum¡¯sir for further experiments.


    The hound spent most of its time sealed in a room on the third level, far from the caged rats that the Lich had brought here for study previously. The two might have verypatible souls that could fit together, but that did not mean that the Lich had any desire to bring them together. That was one experiment that was simply too dangerous until it knew more.


    At first, those were a matter of simple bloodsport. It would pit the thing against various beasts before having it fight men and even undead abominations. Though the hound was huge, it was also barely skin and bones when these matches started. Yet despite that, it never lost. There was a terrible ferocity in it that the Lich could not fully understand but was eager to see in action. In its first match against a grizzly bear, the hound tore it to shreds despite being entirely outssed in both size and weight. It was a bloody spectacle that simply had to be seen to be believed.


    It scarcely killed any quicker when it faced off against a man in full te mail. Somehow, despite any specific magics that Tenebroum could identify, the thing simply shredded its opponents, always bing stronger than them, and after each bloody bout, it grew visibly. At first, it had been the size of arge hunting dog, but now it was something closer to a small horse, and even with its cor on, it paced back and forth pensively whenever the Lich locked it away.


    Sometimes, when Tenebroum brought itstest pet out of its cage, it would not be for its own private bloodsport. Instead, it would experiment on the thing while it bayed and howled. Sometimes, these experiments would be simple dissection and vivisection, as it wondered what made this thing tick and ounted for its strange immortality. Other times, it would be bound within one or more magic circles of the Lich¡¯s devising while it sought to study the thing with divination magics. It found nothing useful, which was as rare as it was frustrating.


    <em>How could such a simple creature evade my understanding of it! </em>Tenebroum thought in annoyance. <em>It is more animal than spirit!</em>


    Eventually, forck of anything better to do, it released it into the Red Hills just to see what it would do to the poor, woefully unprepared goblin tribes that still existed there. The Lich still kept an outpost of undead at the gold mine where drudges ved away endlessly, and it asionally sought out unwilling goblins for experiments, but by andrge, that ce had lost most of its importance to the Lich, who was now focused on other fronts.


    The hound tore through the ce like a force of nature, devouring a newir nearly every night. It didn¡¯t matter if they used poison or magic, and if they fought with weapons or ws, nothing could stand against the monster. In fact, its performance was so frightening that Lich immediately began to work both on a better binding cor and a method of eliminating the wolf, should it ever find a way to turn on its owner. It clearly did not like being forced to obey, and the Lich had little doubt that if it ever broke free in the same way that the troublesome river spirit had, it would not end well.


    So, it set to work on several ooze-based solutions that would be entirely immune to the teeth and ws of the hound so that it would have options should the need arise. One of its fleshcrafters suggested that the Lich could install a failsafe alchemical charge in the thing, but given how poorly the Lich¡¯s attempts to graft better weapons to its ws had gone, such an experiment seemed unlikely to end well.


    <em>It is not a creature, dead or alive,</em> the Tenebroum reminded itself. <em>It is a </em>godling<em>, the same as my twisted dryads or that cursed moon. </em>


    It was easy to forget that, given that all it did was fight and kill and devour. The hound had a certain predatory intelligence, but nothing more than that. Were it not for the golden cor that it wore around its neck, it would be nothing but a berserk, vering beast.


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    After months of study, the Lich eventually lost interest in its newest pet and left it to rampage in the Red Hills while it turned its attention to older projects; in time, when Tenebroum was sure the thing had stopped growing, it would send it to the front to fight with the rest of its minions, but it wanted no surprises.


    As it searched through its catalog of unfinished abominations, it found none, either. Its carefully pruned nature goddess no longer spent all of her time screaming and begging to die. Instead, she¡¯d decorated the small garden it had allowed her in that barren Constantenal courtyard with deadly nightshade and any number of other toxic herbs and flowers, humming away while the thorns that pierced her skin bled as they always did.


    She still cowered in its presence, but the Lich was certain that when she was set free, she¡¯d be happy to do as bidden and hunt down her former peers. However, for now, the Lich was content to watch her grow and change, studying her as the scars continued to fade, looking for any clues as to what she might be when she wasplete and finally blossomed.


    It spent some time examining the new juggernauts that were being created in Constantinal and some of the new vessels that incorporated parts whales and sharks in lieu of wood in Rahkin, but eventually, the Lich found itself once again focused on its plot to undermine the All-Father again.


    Its poison was still spreading through the moon, and she was rarely seen in the sky as anything but a waxing or a waning crescent anymore. There had been some signstely that she might manage to fight off the cancerous soul that had been injected into her, but each time she made progress and seemed to get brighter, a few weekster, there would be a rpse, and she would lose all the progress she¡¯d made.


    The Lich didn¡¯t understand exactly what was happening, but it didn¡¯t care either. As long as she was weak and suffering, it could focus on trying to hunt down and break other gods, and for some time now, it had chosen the dwarf to deal with next.


    This wasn¡¯t because the All-Father was the most powerful or the most dangerous. It wasn¡¯t even because it had dared toy a finger on the Lich in their single real encounter. It was simply because he was essible.


    Once Tenebroum had decided that Krulm¡¯venor would not be useful in the war against the mages now that they¡¯d developed some way of nullifying the magics that animated the godling, Tenebroum had sent him into the depths to purge other dwarven cities with fire. This was for the death and the pain it provided Tenebroum as much as anything, but each conquest allowed it to steal away a few more dwarven relics, and that, it had decided, was the key to breaking the All-Father¡¯s soul.


    As a god, it was better known to the Lich thanks to the wealth of stolen source materials it had taken from the charred cities and tombs it had ransacked over thest several years. It was also simpler than the others it had tried to learn about. The secret that Krulm¡¯venor had tried to hide for so long when it had been in every book and mural: the All-Father was literally an amalgam of all the honored dwarven dead that had gone before.


    Though it did not yet fully understand why dwarves ossified as they aged, it was now very clear that when a dwarf finally could live no longer, its flesh would turn gray and shrivel into something like soft sandstone before falling to dust, leaving only the partially crystallized skeleton behind. It was the skulls that the dwarves were interested in when they buried the body, which meant that it was the skulls the Lich was interested in as well.


    It had constructed many abominations from the bones of dwarves at this point, which meant that its flesh crafters had dissected thousands of corpses, and these changes only seemed to start sometime around three hundred years old. The very oldest dwarves might reach three hundred and fifty years of age, but the exact age didn¡¯t seem to matter, only that they lived a life of honor andsted until it was their time.


    For a while, the Lich had merely crushed the skulls to extract a lifetime¡¯s worth of essence, but recently, it had be more interested in a simple question: if the All-Father was a giant structure built brick by brick from the souls of the honored dead, then how many of those souls would the Lich have to corrupt or drive insane before the whole thing copsed.


    On the face of things, the All-Father was an indomitable warrior who spent almost all of his time deep in his earthen fortress where no one could touch him. That wasn¡¯t true, though. The God¡¯s seat of power might be there, but in reality, he was spread across a hundred cities, and a thousand graveyards, and the Lich was determined to destroy as many of them as it had to before the God finally came apart at the seams.


    Of course, it was much too busy to do such things itself, but with a little effort, it had driven a handful of dwarven priests insane, and now theybored day and night in the Lich¡¯s warehouse of crystal skulls with forbidden runes that conflicted and warred with each other, carving them into the crystalline skulls one at a time. This was not an effort that would pay dividends tomorrow. It was like the erosion of water on stone. Each drip was imperceptible, but taken together, they could wear away a whole mountain range.


    When used to attack a god that had been around as long as the All-Father, that was certainly an apt metaphor. Tenebroum¡¯s slow but insidious efforts would break him, and then it would devour whatever pieces were left.

 Chapter 164: Soon

    Chapter 164: Soon


    ¡°This is what I wanted to show you,¡± Jordan said finally, unwrapping the dirty cloth that covered the manacle that he¡¯d kept hidden for so long and showing it to Taz for the first time.


    The archmage didn¡¯t look at the cursed thing, though. Instead, he simply stared deeper into Jordan¡¯s eyes, searching for something. The silence lingered for almost a minute before the ageless man said, ¡°Why didn¡¯t you bring this to me earlier?¡±


    ¡°Because I wasn¡¯t sure I could trust you,¡± Jordan said, mostly truthfully. ¡°Not after¡­ well, you know¡­¡±


    The truth was that it wasn¡¯t the way that this man had ended Sister Anisse without a second thought. It was the way that he continued to sniff around and ask probing questions. Taz knew that Jordan was hiding something from him; he just didn¡¯t know it was the book. So, Jordan was offering him this as a gambit to try to muddy the waters. While he doubted the archmage would be happy to discover that an artifact of the Lich had been smuggled into his domain, he was certain that he would be much more upset if he found out that Jordan had been hiding a book that told the future all this time.


    Of course, it was also hard to trust Tazuranth, given the things the book had been hinting attely. Jordan pushed those thoughts from his mind, though, as he met the other man¡¯s gaze, lest he somehow sniff out Jordan¡¯s stray thoughts.


    ¡°After all this time you still think I mean to hurt you?¡± Taz asked with a cold smile, pretending to be hurt. ¡°You¡¯re my apprentice, of a sort. I could never do that. Besides, now that the Collegium has fallen, you might be thest mage left on the continent beside me. When I ascend and beat back the darkness, I¡¯ll need you to refound the school for me.¡±


    ¡°I¡­ what?¡± Jordan gasped, his mind reeling. ¡°The Collegium fell? But how? I thought that it was holding up better than expected?¡±


    This was hardly the first time they¡¯d talked about the ce. For a time, it had been flourishing, at least ording to Taz. His divination spells had shown him a valley of lights, which had be a bastion against the darkness that had swept across the rest of thend, and now all that seemed to have reversed, and somehow, the ageless man didn¡¯t seem particrly upset by the news.


    ¡°It was,¡± Taz nodded, ¡°But the Lich unleashed some new weapon that undid the very rules of magic itself. Things fell apart rather quickly after that.¡±¡°But that shouldn¡¯t be possible,¡± Jordan answered, uncertain if that was true but even more uncertain as to whether or not Taz cared very much about what he was saying. Jordan had certainly never been taught such a thing, but then, his education was far fromplete. ¡°Is that what injured the moon, then?¡±


    Taz had reached down to pick up the corroded manacle. He was busy studying it, but as soon as Jordan spoke, his gaze lifted back up to meet Jordan¡¯s eyes. ¡°How do you know about that?¡±


    ¡°You can s-see that something has happened, even without your fancy telescope,¡± Jordan stammered, realizing he¡¯d tipped his hand a little too much. ¡°There hasn¡¯t been a full moon in over a month now, and there¡¯s a growing stain in the lower quarter.¡±


    In truth, it was barely more than a dark smudge through the naked eye, but he¡¯d seen much more detailed drawings in the book. Though all it would say is that ¡®the Lich struck a blow that could not be healed,¡¯ as it showed off the worm-like cancerous growths that were spreading on the moon, which was either the body of the goddess or the ce where she lived, depending on which page of the book he read.


    ¡°It might be rted,¡± Taz said finally. ¡°It¡¯s hard to say. She hasn¡¯t spoken to me since the incident. She may yet recover from it, or this might be the first sign that I¡¯m about to rece her. We should know soon in either case.¡±


    Soon was, of course, an impossible measurement when dealing with Tazuranth. He might mean a few months or a few decades from now, so Jordan simply ignored the statement.


    ¡°So what will you do then?¡± Jordan asked.


    ¡°I will be patient, as always. I will study this bauble you¡¯ve brought and see if we can find some way to turn it to our advantage, and I will learn what I can so we can be ready when the moment arises.¡±


    Some version of this was Taz¡¯s answer to almost everything, and Jordan fought to avoid rolling his eyes. It said exactly nothing, which was probably exactly what the ageless wizard meant to say.


    ¡°Do you think this will be useful to you?¡± Jordan said finally, gesturing toward the manacle, ¡°Or do you think we should destroy it before the Lich uses it to track us down?¡±


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    ¡°Through the barrier?¡± Tazughed. ¡°If it can manage a spell that leads it past the edge of the world, I would be very impressed. No, it should be safe enough. It¡¯s a crude thing, but it certainly gives me some insight into the magic it prefers to use. This is a hentarctic formtion. Very basic stuff. It tells me that we might be misreading this situation altogether. Perhaps what we face is no mastery of sorcery but some other kind of aberration.¡±


    Tazuranth started an impromptu lecture and length then. Sometimes, when you wanted an answer the man would dodge and weave avoiding anything that might appear conclusive, but if your discussion happened to tread into magical theory, he might spend an hour, or even two discussion the minutia of ancient history, and the merit of different theoretical approaches.


    Jordan paid attention as best he could. At times, he would try to return the topic back to the fate of the Magica Collegium, but the most detailed answer that Jordan could get from Taz was that ¡°Scrying spells became unreliable several months ago and only recently started to work again.¡±


    Even that wasn¡¯t enough to hold Jordan¡¯s attention, though, and his attention began to wander, he stood up and wandered around the room instead. He still answered Taz¡¯s questions as best he could, and even tried to ask some semi intelligent follow-up questions where they were appropriate, as Jordan struggled to remember his ancient runguages.


    Still, as he worked his way around the room, he noticed that the ancient mage¡¯s telescope was pointed down toward the beach and not up at the sky where it usually was. He didn¡¯t approach it directly, and he definitely didn¡¯t look through the eyepiece. That would have shown that he noticed. Instead, Jordan continued his slow loop around the room, looking at different odds and ends while he discussed the nature of binding rituals on unquiet spirits with the other mage.


    Still, when he was in the right spot, across from the wide picture window, he looked down and noted the part of the beach the telescope was pointed at. Jordan immediately recognized it as the ce where the children held their practices and tourneys when the tide was low. Right now, the tide was high, so the sandy strip was almostpletely underwater, but still, the fact that the man had been watching¡­ It was the first confirmation of some of the things the book had been hinting at for a while now.


    Jordan tried to push the thought from his mind, at least until he got back to the little farm he called home, but it distracted him until Taz had finally had enough of the conversation. Then the ageless wizard assigned him some light reading from three massive tomes about the nature of rune construction and then sent him on his way as thest sun was heading toward the horizon.


    Though the meeting hadrgely been boring, it had given Jordan much to think about. Really, he should have been obsessed with the school. If he¡¯d returned there as he¡¯d nned to do so often, he¡¯d be dead right now.


    <em>Or maybe I would have managed to turn the tide somehow,</em> he thought to himself. <em>As if one more apprentice could have done anything useful. </em>


    In the end, it wasn¡¯t the Collegium¡¯s fall, or even the moon¡¯s wound, that he thought about, though. It was the children. He spent the whole walk back worrying that what he¡¯d read was going toe to pass. It almost had to at this point. There was no way around it if Tazuranth was studying them discreetly from a distance. He really was going to use them in some sort of twisted experiment. Maybe not soon, but someday. The book had been very clear about that.


    <em>In a ce where time has little meaning, someday is forever, but someday, just the same, the mage that covets their light will try to find a way to take it for himself. Given that he is entirely undefeatable, such eventualities are unavoidable. </em>


    However, the thoughts never left him, even when he came home to find the older children already cooking a fish stew. Still, he tried to keep the worried expression off his face for their sake. Instead, he listened to them as they told him about their day. They were arge and unruly tribe at this point, and he was likely to be the only parent they ever had.


    One by one, between different fights and bouts of bickering, each one of the twelve light-eyed children told him about their day, and he nodded, asking questions as he pretended to be interested and engaged. They¡¯d all spent the earliest part of the morning looking for a lostmb once their drills had been done at dawn, of course. That was a devotion that never wavered, even if Brother Faerbar hadn¡¯t been around in more than a year now.


    After that, though, they¡¯d gone in half a dozen different directions to help the good people of Sanctuary and earn their keep. Toman and his brother had mendeds, Cynara and some of the other girls had helped the vige¡¯s wise woman gather herbs that were justing into bloom for the season, and Reggie and some of the other boys had helped to weed the fields. All in all, it was a productive day, and it might have sounded like a hundred others they¡¯d had since they¡¯de to this strange ce.


    Indeed, the weather was better than average here, and most days were cool and clear, so they really did start to blend together. In the end, as they all ate, everyone got the chance to tell their story. The only one who didn¡¯t say a word was young Leo. That was to be expected. He¡¯d talk if Jordan asked what he¡¯d done today, but there was no need to do so. The young man had almost certainly spent the day praying and training just like he always had.


    He was frighteningly intense for a boy of eleven. Technically, he was almost two years older than that now, but the boy didn¡¯t age beneath the barrier the same as everyone else, which made his focus and maturity all the stranger. Jordan had never nned on being a parent, and certainly not to twelve children, so he had no idea what to do about that sort of behavior; in the end, he resolved simply to ignore it in the face ofrger issues, though he knew that wasn¡¯t healthy either.

 Chapter 165: Sight Beyond Sight

    Chapter 165: Sight Beyond Sight


    Leo roared as he beat back Jamin¡¯s wooden de, trying and failing to move in for the kill. He couldn¡¯t, though. His opponent¡¯s shield was toorge, and even though he was only a year older than Leo, his reach was too long. After a few tense moments filled with lightning-fast exchanges, Leo found himself on his back. Hey there in the soft, wet sand of the beach, breathing heavily, as a proper corpse should.


    Many of the other children got up when they¡¯d been defeated and left the battlefield to watch the rest of it y out, but not him. He wasn¡¯t going to move to the sidelines and use the light to heal his wounds in the same way that almost all of the other kids had learned to do by now.


    This was his shame, and he would suffer for it. Suffering would make him stronger.


    Other than the asional lucky blow, he knew he was never going to win in this ce, so he had to get used to it. He was the youngest and the smallest of their group, and here they had all been frozen in time, which meant that he would never have the growth spurt he needed to change that.


    It was incredibly frustrating, but he would not let that knowledge defeat him. <em>Nothing will defeat me,</em> he swore to himself. Yet, no matter how often he promised himself that, it changed nothing. He was still the runt of the litter, and even though he was the only one who spent all day pushing himself, he was the only one who lost every single morning.


    It might have been enough to make him cry, but he¡¯d run out of tears a long time ago, the day before Brother Faerbar had left them all. That was the day that the Temr had exined to Leo his dark origins.


    ¡°You are the son of a monster,¡± the old man had said simply after he¡¯d separated Leo from the other boys before he went off forever to die in his fight against the darkness. ¡°I¡¯d kill you myself if I was sure it was the right thing to do, but there¡¯s light in your heart, so as far as I¡¯m concerned, that¡¯s enough to give you a second chance, but never forget where you came from or how easy it is to fall. You might say you¡¯re predisposed to it.¡±


    Leo had asked a few questions about his father and received less than specific answers, though it seemed to him less like Brother Faerbar was trying to shield him from some terrible truth than that he¡¯d just forgotten many of the details over time. His father was a ¡°licentious wastrel of a Count¡± in the Temr¡¯s words. Leo wasn¡¯t quite sure what that meant, but he wasn¡¯t about to ask Jordan or anyone else for those definitions. It sounded bad, and that was what mattered. He took some sce in the fact that he was named after his grandfather, who was apparently a good but weak man.


    That was all the information that Leo needed, even if he didn¡¯t really understand what it all meant. He knew what he had to do, even at that young age. He had to be better than his father and stronger than his grandfather. That was what he devoted his life to now. So, when the fighting was done, and Cynara had won as she almost always did, he pulled himself to his feet. However, even as everyone else got ready to go help the vigers of Sanctuary with their chores, he retrieved his wooden sword. Then, beneath the judging eyes of everyone else, he got to work practicing his swing, his footwork, or whatever else it was he thought he needed to improve to finally start to beat some of the other younger kids on the field of battle.


    Though he was sometimes tempted to tell his friends that he was actually Count Leo, the fifth ruler of Greshen County, he opted not to do so for obvious reasons. Not only would that secret be told to everyone within a day, but it would just give the other children something else to make fun of him for, and they had quite enough to do that already. He was the smallest, thest picked, and the first to die.


    Some of the others were nice and never said anything mean to him. That was easy for people like Cynara because she was the biggest and the fastest now, and as long as time stayed stopped, she always would be. None of the boys would ever grow stronger than her here.


    Other people, like Toman, never failed to remind him that he was the youngest and the smallest. Some days, they called Leo the craziest, too, if they found him praying all day. It was regarded as universally foolish, and even sister Annise had tried to dissuade him before she disappeared. He¡¯d given up trying to defend the decision. Even if he had the words to exin himself, he didn¡¯t really know how.


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    It didn''t matter to him that the others didn¡¯t understand. Sometimes, Jenna or Sam would pray with him, but they were just trying to make him feel less alone. Their heart wasn¡¯t really in it.


    They couldn¡¯t feel the light inside them burning brighter when they said the words that the Temr had taught them. They couldn¡¯t hear the sound of some distant voice, with words just out of reach.


    Leo didn¡¯t tell anyone about that, not even Jordan. He already looked at Leo with more sadness than anyone else, and Leo didn¡¯t want to make the man think that he was going crazy. That was why he didn¡¯t tell anyone when he started to see things either because they were sure to think he¡¯d gone insane after that.


    About nine months after they arrived in Sanctuary, Leo¡¯s whole world started to bend. Even before Brother Faerbar left them, most of them could see good and evil, but this was different. First, he saw the shimmering outline of the barrier that surrounded the whole penins and the colored lightsing off of the tower most hours of the day.


    After that, he started to see other darker things. These weren¡¯t the typical shadows of evil. They were more like dark ghosts, and they were usually around Jordan or the things that the man owned, like the strange book he read every night. There was a sort of mist of shadows that surrounded that thing, and sometimes, if Leo looked at it for too long, he felt like it was looking back at him.


    It was an unsettling feeling, but Leo wasn¡¯t sure what he was supposed to do about it. So, he did his best never to be alone with the Book of Ways, and he threw himself that much harder into training because, after a while, it was the only thing that made him feel sane.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t you ever help us put food on the table,¡± Reggieined one day as he pulled turnips while Leo swung his sword until he thought his arms were going toe off. ¡°Every night, you eat, but you never put the work in. It''s like you¡¯re too good for it.¡±


    In that moment, Leo almost told him that he was a noble and that he needn¡¯t work in the soil like the rest of them. That would have been a terrible mistake, though. So, instead, he simply said, ¡°We all need to do our part, but I have a higher calling. That¡¯s all.¡±


    That was a mistake, too. That was the day everyone started to make fun of him for his higher calling. It was upsetting, of course, because they couldn¡¯t understand the way he could, even if he exined it. They didn¡¯t see the light, and they didn¡¯t have a connection to the divine like he did, not anymore. They were blessed by Siddrim, but he could feel himself going beyond that, one day at a time now.


    Part of Leo felt sure he could walk right out of the barrier if he wanted to at this point, but he didn¡¯t try. Not only were they under strict orders from their guardian, Jordan, never to approach the boundary, but he feared what was on the other side of the line. There, the shadows ruled and drifted on the wind. If the barrier was what he needed to avoid such evil, then he would dly shelter behind it like a kite shield.


    The day they started mocking him for being touched or being ¡®blinded by the light¡¯ was the day it all started to change. That was the day that his sight revealed to him something new: what his opponent was going to do next. At first, he thought they were just after images caused by the rage that was building up inside him. It was only after a particrly intense and violent flurry of blows left him standing above Jamin, who was bleeding on the sand beneath him, that he finally calmed.


    The battle was stopped then, and the other young boy was healed, but people looked at Leo differently after that. They teased him less and shunned him more.


    ¡°You¡¯ve got to be more careful,¡± Jenna chided him. ¡°Save your anger for the enemy. Someday, it will be here, just as Brother Faerbar said, and on that day, we must be ready.¡±


    He thought her words were unfair but said nothing because he wasn¡¯t sure what to say. They always gave it their all. People got hurt. It happened nearly every week and was usually seen as the fault of the person who had been injured, but for some reason, when he finally won a bout, suddenly it was his fault.


    That didn¡¯t stop him from suddenly winning more, though. He couldn¡¯t beat everyone, not even with his new trick, but suddenly, he could beat anyone who had less than a foot of advantage on him. Jamin, Sam, Rin, and anyone else who tried him suddenly found an imcable enemy that they had troublending a blow on.


    Several of them had developed new abilities beyond merely the ability to see evil or to heal with a touch. Cynara was able to make her weapons glow with holy light, Toman could detect lies, and Sam could bless an object and make it almost indestructible. As far as Leo knew, though, he was the only one who could glimpse the future and see what move his opponent was about to make.


    It felt like cheating, and he felt bad about that, but what was he to do? Simply pass on the advantage? He had no idea how it worked or how to turn it off. He thought about exining it to Jordan at least but decided against it. The man had been an excellent guardian to all of them, but whatever he was reading in that book was making the darkness gather in his soul, and after several months without Sister Annise there, he found himself pulling away from the older man.


    It wasn¡¯t that he didn¡¯t trust him exactly; it was that he didn¡¯t understand, and honestly, he wasn¡¯t sure he wanted to. He wasn¡¯t going to see it, of course. He could see that many of the other children saw something as well, and slowly, the children of Sanctuary began to pull away from the adults.

 Chapter 166: The Long Way Down

    Chapter 166: The Long Way Down


    It took some time for Oroza to figure out that she was dead. Not just dead, but in the afterlife, at least in a sense. It should have been obvious from the beginning, of course, as she stepped free from the shredded remains of dull scales and emaciated flesh on the shore and strode into paradise.


    From the sea, the ind seemed like a tiny thing surrounded by strange, colorful nts made of stone just beneath the waves, but as she walked with the dark man into the interior, she found more. More of everything, really. More trees, more buildings, and many more people. Eventually, there were more people in this one spot than she¡¯d ever seen in her life, but it was only when she started to meet some of the women that she recognized as her followers from decades and decades ago that she finally understood.


    This was the eternal reward. It was the end of everything.


    ¡°Well, not everything,¡± the dark man corrected her. ¡°Souls stay here for a time, and when they are ready, they move on to the next stage to be reborn again.¡±


    He showed her a cave that people asionally entered, leading down into the dark. No one forced them to leave paradise and walk into the darkness, and yet, sometimes, they did for reasons that Oroza could not exin.


    ¡°You will need to walk into the darkness soon,¡± he told her, ¡°Though not that way. There¡¯s no way back from this particr point.¡±


    ¡°Then why do people go?¡± she asked.


    ¡°For the same reason people die,¡± he answered with a shrug, ¡°It¡¯s their time.¡±


    That conversation led many ces, but the ce it returned to again and again was Death. ¡°If you¡¯re the god of death, then why are you here on an ind and not out there, stopping all this?¡± she demanded. ¡°Evil has been unleashed, and you could do more than the goddess of a river or the god of a city could ever do!¡±¡°I would have,¡± he nodded sadly. ¡°s, I have been dead for a long time, and I no longer leave this ce than any of the other spirits that have been confined here.¡±


    ¡°But that doesn¡¯t make sense,¡± she insisted. ¡°How can the God of Death die?¡±


    ¡°All things die, eventually,¡± he said, looking at her with eyes so deep and dark that eventually she was forced to turn away. ¡°As to how I would tell you to ask Siddrim, but sadly, he is not here. Sufficed to say, Death was one more evil he sought to eliminate from his perfect world, but he was only partially sessful.¡±


    ¡°The world decided that death was something it would handle on its own, and for the most part, it does.¡± he continued with a shrug. ¡°If I sit here long enough, then all the dead of the world wille to me on the tide just as you did. It¡¯s only a matter of time.¡±


    Oroza didn¡¯t know what to say, so she sat down on a nearby boulder and stared off into the distance. This wasn¡¯t what she¡¯d expected at all. Here, there were so many people chatting and swimming or simply eating fruit that grew back almost instantly. It truly was paradise, but it wasn¡¯t what she¡¯d been looking for.


    She¡¯d been looking forward to when her grip on life rxed, and she slipped down her river and into the sea to die. It was supposed to be oblivion that awaited her, but instead, Istiniss had forbidden such an oue. However, if the god of Death was to be believed, then she would have washed up here one day, regardless of what she wanted. She¡¯d only found a more direct course.


    ¡°Well, if people can¡¯t leave, then why did you say I¡¯ll need to descend into the dark,¡± she asked finally, unwilling toin about this oue.


    ¡°Dead Gods and Goddesses are far moreplicated than the average soul,¡± he said slowly like he was trying to decide how much to say. ¡°These things take time. Days. Months. Years. It depends on how long you lived, how much power you possessed, and how many worshipers still whisper your name. It took me decades before people forgot about me.¡±


    Orozoa tried and failed to remember his name, but she found she couldn¡¯t. She wondered how long it might be until she forgot her own name too.


    ¡°Regardless, at least as far as the prophecy Lunaris shared with me,¡± he continued, ¡°You still have time enough for three things.¡±


    ¡°Lunaris¡¯s prophecy?¡± Oroza asked. This wasn¡¯t the first time she¡¯d heard of it. ¡°What is it I¡¯m supposed to do exactly.¡±


    ¡°Not her prophecy,¡± Death corrected her. ¡°Just one that was shared with her. Magic and destiny are not the same things. Regardless, the words of fate say you will yet do three things: you will visit the forge, you will imbue the sword with light, and you will give it to the chosen one. After that, you may finally rest.¡±


    ¡°What if I just stay here?¡± she said, feeling suddenly obstinate. ¡°What if I just¡­ just stop and wait here for it to all be over?¡±


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    She knew she wouldn¡¯t do that, of course. If she had something she could do to strike back against the darkness that had taken so much for her, she would. Still, part of her wanted to. She was tired, and more than anything, part of her just wanted toy down and sleep, even as rejuvenated as she was.


    ¡°You can try,¡± Death agreed, ¡°But the words of true prophecy are difficult to resist. I should know. I¡¯ve tried, but here we are.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t even know what the forge is,¡± she sighed.


    ¡°Oh, that much is easy,¡± Death smiled, his dazzling smile. ¡°There is only one forge worthy of prophecy, and it sits at the very center of the earth where the All-Father pounds away night and day on his creations.¡±


    ¡°That sounds like a long way,¡± Oroza answered doubtfully.


    ¡°It is, though it takes less time than you¡¯d think, especially since it¡¯s so hard to get lost,¡± Death exined. ¡°Just listen for the pounding of his anvil, and you will not go away,¡±


    They talked a while after that, but it became increasingly clear to Oroza that she wasn¡¯t going to resist. Instead, she listened to the man as he exined to her where she must go. The cave at the center of the ind wouldn¡¯t take her to where she needed. That ce only leads to oblivion and rebirth.


    Instead, she had to don the skin and scales of her serpent form once more and wade back out into the sea. It was a jarring experience. Even though it felt like she¡¯d only just left the water earlier that day, it already felt like an alien environment. The water chilled her, and the salt choked her, and even as she began to swim toward the bottom of the sea, all she wanted to do was go back and lie down on that sunny beach.


    The crevice she¡¯d been directed to find in the ocean floor wasn¡¯t hard to find or navigate. All she had to do was swim ever deeper. It was only when she reached the bottom and had to search for the tunnel that things slowed down. It took her far too long to find the path forward, but once she did, she made good time again, descending ever deeper into the earth.


    Things only slowed down when the water ran out, and she was forced to walk rather than swim. Then, at least, she could hear the hammer blows. They led her the right way at every juncture, though she marked her way as she went because she suspected that she would have toe back this way when she was done. As much as she longed for oblivion to take her, being buried miles beneath the ground was hardly her idea of a perfect end.


    Oroza put one foot in front of the other until time lost all meaning. Had it been days or weeks? She simply couldn¡¯t say. She was surrounded by darkness and stone, and in all that time, the only sign of life she saw, other than the continuous sound of hammering, was a tiny creature made of stone that fled from her as soon as it saw her.


    The underworld was a strange ce; it was a dark and endless desert that was only asionally brightened by glowing crystals or luminescent fungus. Other than the Lich¡¯sir, she had never seen a less hospitable ce. She¡¯d actually never even imagined that such a ce might exist, and it certainly went a long way to exining the dour demeanor of the All-Father on the few asions she¡¯d seen him.


    Still, she didn¡¯t understand himpletely until she saw walked past the flowing magma rivers, and over the ancient granite bridges into his stone sanctuary at the center of the world. It was a sweltering, oppressive ce that made her long for the cold dark tunnels, but she¡¯de so far that there was no way she was going back empty handed.


    Oroza continued, moving forward, though, through ancient halls that were built for someone at least twice her height. There, she found the ghosts of dwarves, or perhaps the memories of them, running to and fro on nameless errands. They ignored her, though, just as she ignored the deafening sound of steel on steel until she finally found the All-Father.


    Though he was the god of the dwarves, he was a giant of a man at more than twice her height. He stood there at an anvil that must have weighed thousands of pounds, lit only by the orange glow of the incandescent metal. She had to approach within a dozen feet of the god before he finally stopped his endless hammering and said, ¡°So you are here atst.¡±


    ¡°Atst?¡± she wondered aloud before realizing that Lunaris must have told the dwarf everything she¡¯d told Death.


    ¡°Yes,¡± she agreed. ¡°I¡¯vee here as I was told to.¡±


    ¡°Well, then give me the metal, and I¡¯ll get to work on the cursed de that the Moon Maiden wants so badly,¡± the All-Father said grumpily.


    ¡°Metal?¡± she asked, confused. ¡°I wasn¡¯t told I needed to¡ª¡±


    ¡°How in the zes am I supposed to make a sword of singr sharpness without any metal?¡± the dwarven god yelled loud enough to make her tremble.


    ¡°I¡­¡± Oroza didn¡¯t know what to say.


    Was she supposed to apologize? Was she supposed to walk all the way back to the surface and ask Death for help getting the thing she needed? While she wondered about this, one of the scales that made up her fraying form fell to the ground, making a metallic clink as it hit the ground.


    She picked it up and studied the tarnished silver scale between two wed fingers. <em>Was this why I was the one to be included in this stupid prophecy? She</em> wondered. <em>Is this what he needs?</em>


    ¡°Will this do?¡± she asked finally, reaching up to hand the small thing to the dwarven god.


    He studied it for a long moment before he said, ¡°Aye, this and another hundred or more just like it mixed with mithril might indeed do the trick.¡±


    The idea of plucking her few remaining scales off of her already threadbare form made her despair, but that sadness wasn¡¯t enough to stop her from doing just that. If this is what it would take to stop the Lich, then she would do all of this and more.


    Carefully, one at a time, she began to pull scales from her flesh. She started with the closest, but when those were all gone, it was like pulling teeth. Still, she bore the pain, and she she¡¯d finally reached a hundred she handed them all to the All-Father¡¯s ghostly helpers who immediately took them over to the forge to be melted down until the darkness and impurities were burned away and those pieces of her had been reduced to nothing but liquid silver.


    ¡°There we are,¡± the All-Father nodded, watching the metal that had once been part of who she was getting poured into a crucible to be alloyed with the Mithril that the forge god had spoken of earlier. ¡°With this, I can make you a de that could strike down any god, living or dead. Mark my words. Now you just need to find a hero to wield it.¡±

 Chapter 167: Ever Further

    Chapter 167: Ever Further


    As the months ground on, The Voice of Reason and her forces moved ever further north. They kept a good pace, but even so, they were never able to outrun the news of their approach and gain true surprise. Though there was a time when such an oue would have been ideal, even if such things were impossible when one served a master as illustrious and powerful as she did, she would no longer have weed it now.


    Not only did thatck of surprise do nothing to aid their enemies, it undermined them. Every week, she continued to glide inexorably further up the coast, visiting every Sultan and Pasha that would receive her and crushing the few that would not. In every port she visited, the rumors of the ck sailed ships ran before her like messengers announcing her arrival. They foretold the danger that any city or kingdom would face as soon as they sighted her on the horizon.


    The threat was very real now. However, it did note from her tiny fleet. Instead, it emanated from the Dark Paragons that scoured the deserts in her wake, marching north with their growing armies. The message was an incredibly clear one: make a deal with her or deal with them. It wasn¡¯t hard for most people to decide the right answer to that question.


    The Lich¡¯s forces were an unstoppable wave of darkness now that was slowed only by the treacherous terrain they were forced to navigate. She had gotten only the briefest glimpse of their armies when theyid siege to Abbas, but what she was deadly enough.


    Other than the truly wealthy city-states like Tanda, these desert cities had only small walls of sandstone or adobe. They were just strong enough to look imposing and no more. They didn¡¯t need any more than that. Not when they relied on the desert as their primary form of defense. After all, how could a force of any sizey siege to your walls when there was nothing to drink and nowhere to hide from the sun? How would someone move siege equipment through endless soft sand?


    Wars this far north had apparently been decided with subterfuge and piracy more thanrge armies or even the lightning-fast cavalry that the lords of the region loved to use in their endless border skirmishes. Whenunched against the forces of the Lich, though, those proud princes and their expensive horses had a way of disappearing into the desert, never to return. The cities themselves did not fare much better.


    Though Tanda had all but surrendered without a shot at the apparent behest of a small god that had no wish to give the Lich an excuse to devour it, other cities had proven more truculent until the brutal fall of Abbas had given them a reason to take her unspoken threats more seriously.


    Of all the cities in the area, it was one of the most powerful. It had a small standing army, a few mages, and a proud Emir that would pay tribute to any man. On her brief, chilly visit, the Emir had made it known that ¡°Even if you think your lord to be a God, that changes nothing, for he is not our god.¡±


    She hadn¡¯t done much to attempt to change the man¡¯s mind. While some rulers could be reasoned with, and others could be convinced by discussing what other rulers had chosen to do, she knew immediately that even spending this much time with the Emir of Abbas had been a waste of time. He could not be brought to their side; he could only be killed and removed as an obstacle.Abbas¡¯s resistancested for a month, but only because it took that long for two of the three armies making their way north to get into position for a truly decisive strike. They would snipe at traffic on the trade routes and make whole mounted patrols vanish into dust, but they did nothing to attack the city itself until all was in readiness and they had moved up their lines to within a few hundred feet of the enemy¡¯s torches.


    It was only when everything was in readiness that they boiled up from the sand as one and attacked. Such a precise attack would have been impossible for living troops, but the Lich¡¯s deathless soldiers had no such limitations.


    As the Voice of Reason watched from just offshore, she¡¯d expected to see the green and orange fire of the Lich¡¯s alchemical explosions light up the night. Instead, all remained dark. Instead of wasting such powerful tools on such a pitiful target, huge grapnels were thrown by thergest of the abominations, and then whole sections of the fragile walls were pulled down by inhuman strength.


    Once they were breached, it was all but done. The defenders ran out into the dark to try to plug those gaps, but they had no idea what it was they faced. From everything that the Voice had heard, it was widely assumed that the very nature of the Lich¡¯s forces was assumed to be exaggerated. A ce as sunny as the endless desert rarely dealt with the undead, so the idea that someone really might raise thousands of corpses and use them to crush you was seen as more than a little far-fetched. That night, they learned the truth, and not even the mages could save them.


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    Indeed, though their lightning did some good, most mages seemed to try a sort of sandstorm spell first, which was entirely ineffective against the dead. It was so powerful that it could turn the desert sands into a weapon that scourged flesh from bone and even made the sails of her ships flutter over a mile away, but in this case, the loss of flesh did nothing to stop a zombie from ripping you to pieces.


    Though the city was annihted that night, something else happened that hadn¡¯t urred in a very long time; the Paragons¡¯ forces left survivors. That wasn¡¯t an ident. No brave forces had managed to fight their way free of the noose. With less than five thousand zombies and abominations, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to crush everyst spark of life in the city, but that¡¯s not what happened.


    For months, the Dreamer had done to seed how dangerous the Lich¡¯s forces were in the mind of these desert dwellers, seeing was believing, and the fear of the few men that would escape this night would spread like the gue, leaving tens of thousands in their wake begging to be saved from such a fate.


    The Voice of Reason¡¯s lips curled in a smile as she remembered watching how that spread from city to city and how much easier her job became after that. Though the Paragons had not wanted to spare even a single life thanks to their natural blood thirstiness, they had acknowledged that hers was the correct approach.


    As a result, most of the city-states and kingdoms she found as she worked her way up the coast were practically moring for her arrival. ording to the Puppeteer, people were saying, ¡°The only way to avoid death is to make an agreement with the Dark Lady.¡±


    She smiled at that. Not only did she like the name, but she liked that hers was the only path to salvation for these fearful leaders. That let her impose ever more onerous terms of these ces as they traveled north. Fearful rulers rarely did more than agree when they understood how precarious their positions truly were.


    At this point, all it took was one look at her death knight vanguard, and she could see the rumors y across their faces. Sometimes, she was fairly certain that if she¡¯d demanded their firstborn, they would have agreed. She didn¡¯t, though. She wasn¡¯t here to choose what would hurt these people the least but to reach agreements that would benefit her master the most.


    From the smaller, poorermunities, she still chose a tithe of flesh, paid for with both the dead and the living. Therger cities would pay this way too, though often at double or even triple the rate that Tanda had gotten away with so long ago, but now they paid in gold, too. In most cases, such as the cities Idrhim, Malwar, and the ind of Golway, a talent a year was the agreed upon sum, over and above all tolls that were paid with blood and flesh.


    ¡°You serve me well,¡± the Lich told her, sending a fragment of its soul as a message delivered by one of its dark riders in an unarmed death¡¯s head. ¡°Even now, ships full of the damned travel down the poisoned Oroza to be delivered into my inner sanctum peace does us many favors but do not forget that if these petty allies betray us, the bulk of my forces will be cut off far from here. So, learn well the price of subservience, and ensure that we shatter all those who might one day be a danger.¡±


    Even if the message was a backhandedpliment and harsher than the praise she¡¯d hoped for, The Voice of Reason understood the Lich¡¯s concerns. She gave a full report about her reasons and the results they¡¯d achieved, hoping that the news of several shipments of gold would please her dark lord more than the earlier victories had.


    She also informed the Lich that the desert was supposed to taper off soon and that, in the event they were betrayed, they would simply poison every oasis that wasn¡¯t behind city walls. Once that had happened, they could build a route through the deep desert that simply could no longer be reached by living bearings and their mounts due to the distances involved.


    ¡°Based on everything we¡¯ve learned from the dead and the living, the Kingdom of Varenell lies less than a hundred miles to the north. By all ounts, it is nothing like these little desert kingdoms, and it had much more inmon with Hallen¡¯s cohesion. So, I thought it best to save military resources where possible to focus on the conquest toe.¡± Even after she finished her full report, she waited until the dark rider left before she rxed visibly.


    It was only when she was alone once more and entirely surrounded by the mindless automatons that had been loaned to her that she let worry cross her face. Had she done the right thing? She wondered, looking up at the blighted moon. Would her desire for domination via peaceful conqueste back to haunt her?


    Even if it did, it didn¡¯t matter on some level. She¡¯d been created to want these things. She could no more be bloodthirsty than the Dark Paragons could be wise pacifists. The Voice¡¯s gaze flicked down to her hands as she briefly recalled a moment that she¡¯d been more than a little bloodthirsty, but she put it out of her mind. That conniving princess had deserved everything she¡¯d gotten and more.

 Chapter 168: Nothing Ever Happens

    Chapter 168: Nothing Ever Happens


    Leo regarded the cake as he would an enemy while everyone else sang him happy birthday, but he tried not to let it show on his face. After all, despite their differences, the other children had gone to such efforts to make this, and even though they didn¡¯t see eye to eye most of the time, it was still a nice gesture.


    It was just too bad that the cake itself was pretty awful. It wasn¡¯t their fault, of course. There was no sugar here and little in the way of sweetness to be found in Sanctuary. He only had the dimmest memories of what sugar tasted like from when he was very young, but he knew that it wasn¡¯t carrot or cream. This cake was a mockery of sweetness, but he was determined to enjoy it all the same, if only because it meant that another year had passed.


    Still, when they finished, he blew out the candle and smiled, thanking them all for remembering. The truth was that he didn¡¯t even know if this was his birthday. It almost certainly wasn¡¯t. Half of them had been too young to remember that sort of thing when they¡¯d been rescued by Brother Farbaer and Jordan so long ago.


    Leo didn¡¯t even remember the boat they¡¯d been rescued on, but some of the older kids did. They¡¯d told him that one minute, they¡¯d been sailing north with a man called Markez. One second, they¡¯d been looking for a ce that still had light somewhere upriver, and the next, the Temr had appeared carrying a child to battle a rotting dragon. It had apparently been a terrifying sight.


    The description had been thrilling, but Leo would never know why Brother Farbaer was carrying him that day in the same way that he¡¯d never know his birthday. One dayst spring, someone had simply decided that everyone who didn¡¯t know their birthday should get one, so they set about picking one out for everyone and then marking them on a calendar they¡¯d carved into a nearby liveoak so they remembered to celebrate them when the time came.


    Not having a birthday had never been a concern of Leo''s. At least, not until they came to this ageless ce. Now that he never got any older he was pleased to have one, so he could at least keep track of all the growing up he was losing out on.


    This candle theoretically made him what? Fourteen? How different was fourteen than eleven for the third time?


    He wasn¡¯t sure, but he imagined that given the choice, he would prefer to be aging. Maybe old men like Jordan were d to stay the same age forever. As far as Leo was concerned, being thirty was already like living with one foot in the grave. He wanted to live, though, and when every day was the same, that bordered on the impossible.


    That was why they needed something to mark time. The harvests helped, but really, that was it. Each day was distinct, but given that the weather was never too hot now, and the magic protected them from ever being too cold, it was hard to say what time of year it was on any given day. So, they made their own holidays now, tracking the passage of time with birthdays and holy days to keep things moving in something that resembled a life. Slowly but surely, the shreds and pieces they knew about Siddrim¡¯s worship blended together and became a new sort of religion to them, and though they didn¡¯t share it with the adults, they enjoyed it.


    As he contemted this, small slices of cake topped with whipped frosting were cut and handed out to everyone. Even Jordan woke up from his nap long enough to join them, though that put a damper on the mood as a whole. The conversations that followed weren¡¯t anything that they hadn¡¯t had a dozen times before, giving Leo all the time in the world to study the man.


    On the surface, he was still just as warm and helpful as he¡¯d always been, but the darkness that had spread through him like a cancer had practically taken his eyes now, and not even his polite questions or wide smile could convince most of the children to talk to him any longer than they had to.


    The part lingered longer than it might have because no one could say the things they really wanted to say until Jordan finally left to visit Tax in his tower, but that was normal, too. They were caught in an eternal loop sopletely that even birthdays and made-up holidays were quickly taking on a strange inertia of their own.


    ¡°I Just feel like we''re living the same day over and over,¡± Sam sighed when Jordan was finally gone. He¡¯d said the same thing not so long ago, but he¡¯d been every bit as right then as he was now. Almost everyone agreed with that at this point.


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    Even Cynara confessed that she was tired of winning all the time. ¡°I¡¯d trade a hundred victories for an actual challenge,¡± she said dismissively. Rin and Tara weren¡¯t too happy to hear that since they were the ones she always beat, but even they were forced to agree on this. It was hard to get better when you could only fight the same people, and your body insisted on never growing up.


    The only one that didn¡¯t agree with that, of course, was Toman. Out of all of them, he was the only one whose world had changed. Well, him and Leo. They¡¯d swapped ces. Now, instead of being strongpared to at least Leo, he was the weakest of all because he lost every bout the two of them had now.


    Everyone said it was because Leo worked hard and was getting better, but that was only because they didn¡¯t know he was cheating. They had no idea what he could see, and he was determined to keep it that way. Hell, he was determined to rise to the top, though he didn¡¯t really know if that was even possible. He was working through Will and Rin¡¯s fighting style now, and he even beat them sometimes, but even with his ability to see blows and parriesing, it only offset so much of the deficit he had in strength and reach. Everything else would have to be made up for by understanding his opponent and their weaknesses.


    Nothing different than normal happened for the rest of the day, and indeed, he expected nothing too different to happen in any of the days that followed. He didn¡¯t expect that would change next week or next month. Then, he was woken up in the middle of the night.


    It wasn¡¯t the first time it had happened, but thest time hadn¡¯t been since Jordan had told them of Sister Annise¡¯s departure, and the children had met to discuss the fact that they¡¯d been lied to. This time, as he woke to Jenna¡¯s face and a finger pressed against his lips, he wasn¡¯t sure what to expect. Instead, he got dressed as quietly as he could and then went outside to join everyone else at the tree where the group had these rare midnight talks.


    It was chilly but no worse than normal, and Leo wrapped himself tightly in his cloak before he sat down on the grass and waited for everyone else. He didn¡¯t have to wait long before Cynara was up and standing in front of them, with her pretty blonde hair visible even in the thin moonlight.


    ¡°I know you¡¯re all wondering what we¡¯re doing here,¡± she said finally. ¡°I¡¯lle right out with it. I think we need to leave sooner rather thanter, honestly?¡±


    ¡°What?¡± one boy cried out.


    ¡°What happened?¡± another boy said.


    ¡°It¡¯s nothing new, of course,¡± she continued. ¡°There was no ident or emergency; it¡¯s just that every time I¡­ and many of you look at Jordan or the other mage he is with, I see a growing darkness. Brother Farbaer didn¡¯t trust mages, and frankly, I don¡¯t either. I think the sooner we are rid of them, the better.¡±


    What followed was a quiet but spirited debate. Most of them could see a growing darkness in the mage¡¯s soul, but even though some didn¡¯t, all of them argued about what exactly it was that it meant. Was it this ce? Was it that book?


    ¡°What if he means to do us harm?¡± Toman cried out, clearly on the side of Cynara.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think he means to hurt us,¡± she said, ¡°But tainting us with his shadows would be almost as bad. If what sister Annise said was true, then we are thest bearers of the Temr¡¯s light. We need to preserve that.¡±


    ¡°But how?¡± Reggie asked. ¡°There is only darkness beyond the veil that protects us. To leave is to die.¡±


    ¡°So they say,¡± Rin said, but it was without conviction. No one seriously doubted that the darkness had been defeated in the time they¡¯d been here. They¡¯d all felt Brother Farbaer¡¯s passing, and no one seriously thought that the darkness that was devouring the world could be defeated without him.


    After all, how could darkness ever be pushed back without light? Though he prayed that a new light had risen up in some far-offnd, Leo, like everyone else he¡¯d talked to, had the sick certainty that they were in. They were twelve tiny mes that stood against the end of the world, and trapped as they were in a ce where they could never grow up, they¡¯d probably never be strong enough to do so.


    In the end, they held a vote, but less than half of the children thought they should try to leave. Leo said almost nothing the entire time, and it was only when he was prodded to give an opinion after the vote that he said, ¡°It doesn¡¯t matter if we try to escape or not because it¡¯s impossible. You need to be able to work with spells and magecraft, and all that we have is the light.¡±


    Neither the vote nor the words of her peers were enough to stop Cynara and those who agreed with her. They announced that they were going to try anyway, but by morning, Leo woke to find them once again in their own beds.


    He never doubted that oue. While he secretly believed that he could escape this strange prison, he was also sure that no one else could. The light had started to brighten in a few of his friends; at least, he was pretty sure it had. It was normal to wax and wane, but the darkness of the world outside had only grown worse, and baring a sign from the gods or a visit from the ghost of the Temr, he knew that their ce was not out there. They were sparks that might one day rekindle a fire or flickering candle mes at best, but they were not a bonfire, and they could not hold back the night.

 Chapter 169: All Just a Game

    Chapter 169: All Just a Game


    Taz moved the ivory bishop carved into the shape of a high priest of Siddrim across the board with thoughtless ease and took a pawn with it. The move had been expected by Jordan, but it was still a painful one and moved him solidly back to the defensive.


    The bishop had a distinct enough face that Jordan had long suspected that it, along with every other piece on the board, was meant to be someone specific, though hecked the history to even begin to guess, and if he asked Taz, then he would only be assigned more reading in an endless search to find answers that weren¡¯t there.


    Jordan had no interested in being given any extra reading, with his eyes being in the state they were in. Instead, he removed the spectacles that Taz had found for him among his seemingly endless trove of objects and peculiarities that were tucked away in his tower and cleaned them while he considered the board and the situation they were in.


    It wasn¡¯t just the bishops, of course. Every piece on the board, white and ck, was carved in such a detailed way that they were almost certainly modeled on someone. While the white pieces were hard to figure out, the ck pieces were less so. White was carved in such a way that they were mortals, but ck - they were obviously carved in the shape of the gods. The ck king was Siddrim, and the ck queen was Lunaris; that much was very clear. One of the rooks was probably the dwarven All-father and one of the knights was Niama, mistress of the wild ces. The others were more difficult.


    He was fairly certain that one of the bishops that Taz had already taken was Istiniss, mistress of sea and storms, and that the pawns were various small gods, but even if Jordan had the eyes to study those fine details, he simply didn¡¯t study the gods closely enough to make educated guesses for each piece. He didn¡¯t need to, though. It was clear to him merely from the theme of the board that Taz considered him to be at war with the heavens on some level. That every friendly game of chess they yed was another exercise in subjugating the divine was no surprise to Jordan after all this time.


    ¡°Ready to concede already?¡± Taz asked with a crooked smile.


    ¡°What? No,¡± Jordan answered quickly, as he reached forward and moved the All-Father out of danger while using it to put pressure on Taz¡¯s undefended knight. ¡°I was just considering my options.¡±


    It was a fine move, but it was a dying tactic at best. Jordan was fairly sure that, just like most of the other games they yed, he¡¯d already lost this one; he just didn¡¯t see how yet. That was ironic because even though he felt like he was always a step behind in these games, thanks to the book of Ways, he felt like he was a step ahead in every other way.


    He knew that the children were looking for a way out of sanctuary but that they wouldn¡¯t find one for a long time toe. He knew that Taz was looking to harvest their light, even if the man hadn¡¯te right out and said it yet. Jordan even knew how it was he would stop him when that horrible day finally came. Not that he ever would have thought of it, of course. Not on his own.Such things were enough to make him wonder if the book was so much predicting the future as it was dictating those events into existence. After all, Jordan would never have dreamed that the Archmage¡¯s weakness was his strongest point, the spell that kept them all safe, but after reading through what he would do on the appointed day more than once, he could find no fault with the logic.


    Now, the hardest part was keeping the look of distaste off his face whenever he had to spend too much time with the man. It wasn¡¯t easy, but then, there was nothing else to do while they were all trapped here together besides learn and y games.


    ¡°Are you quite sure that the youngest one of your little group hasn¡¯t changed recently?¡± Taz asked as a series of exchanges were made, and the game inched toward checkmate. ¡°He hasn¡¯t done anything out of the ordinary recently?¡±


    ¡°Leo?¡± Jordan asked, pretending to think. ¡°No. He¡¯s still the same serious little boy he¡¯s always been. I think he¡¯s getting frustrated with being perpetually the smallest since none of us are getting older, but¡ª¡±


    ¡°And the light?¡± Taz interrupted. ¡°Have you not noticed the light intensifying? What do you suppose the cause of that is?¡±


    ¡°Intensifying?¡± Jordan feigned ignorance. The book had the same thing, but it wasn¡¯t anything that was visible to the naked eye, and since he knew Taz watched all of them, thest thing he wanted to do was cast a spell that might rify things. ¡°His eyes are no brighter than any of the other children. In fact, I think that in terms of brightness, Toman and Rin might¡ª¡±


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    ¡°Check,¡± Taz interrupted before standing up and walking to his telescope. ¡°Come here. There¡¯s something I want you to see.¡±


    Jordan couldn¡¯t help but notice that the lens was already tilted down toward the beach, even if the Children would have finished their little tourney hours ago. Slowly, the Archmage pointed the long brass tube toward the vige of Sanctuary and then moved aside. After he adjusted a couple of lenses, he said, ¡°Tell me, what do you see?¡±


    Jordan bent to the eyepiece and took a long look at the small town. He was still impressed how Taz could make objects hundreds of yards away seem like they were only a few feet away, but every book on optics that the man had shared with him had gone over his head. Jordan might have some talent with magic, but this was entirely beyond him.


    Still, he wasn¡¯t sure what he was supposed to see, though, and he just started listing what he saw. Old man, Marley was bringing in some produce from the fields with Cynara¡¯s help, the cksmith was pounding away on something small, and a few people were sitting in the shade on the east side of the market talking.


    ¡°Nothing seems out of ce, does it?¡± Jordan asked finally.


    ¡°Not with the lens,¡± Taz agreed before he pulled out the clear lens that had been at the focal point and reced it with a smoked one that looked like the mage had mixed ss with obsidian or something. ¡°But now that you¡¯ve seen what you¡¯re looking at, try again with this.¡±


    Jordan looked down at the vige square again. This time, everything was hazy but unchanged. It was like a pall had been cast over the town, which made sense considering how muddled the new lens was. He was about to say as much when he noticed Cynara walking back into view. That was when he saw the light around her. She wasrgely a featureless silhouette like everyone else, but the light that was normally confined to her eyes coruscated around her like an aura now.


    ¡°She¡¯s glowing,¡± he breathed.


    ¡°She is,¡± Taz agreed. ¡°They all are. Now, see if you can find little Leo.¡±


    ¡°But how will I be able to tell anyone apart with this lens. They¡ª¡± Jordan started to protest.


    Taz cut him off, though. ¡°You¡¯ll see. Trust me on this one.¡±


    As Jordan looked, Taz started lecturing him on the optical properties of alchemically treated ss, but Jordan wasn¡¯t really listening. Instead, he was panning around the vige, looking through the fields and the beaches in search of all the children.


    They were not hard to find. Though he would have a hard time guessing who was who, each of them stood out like little stars against the darker world. Some of them shone brighter than others, and while some children glowed with a golden light, others were closer to silver or even white.


    Jordan almost gave up on his search and pulled away from the scope. It was only then that he found what he was looking for. This time, he didn¡¯t have to feign surprise. Leo had juste up the path from the beach, and as soon as he walked into view, he appeared like a pir of me.


    ¡°What in the¡­¡± he gasped. He didn¡¯t need to fake his surprise this time. The book had told him that thed was growing stronger, but not like this, and Jordan was entirely taken aback by it.


    Some of the other children¡¯s glows had flickering mes at their edges, but they were nothing like this. Even if Jordan still had the perfect eyes he¡¯d been gifted until recently, he would have trouble seeing the outline of the boy amid the glow. As it was, he was a smear of darkness surrounded by a bonfire, and Jordan could only look for a moment before the light hurt his eyes, and he had to nce away. Still, that moment was enough to send his mind racing.


    ¡°See, I told you,¡± Taz said smugly as Jordan stood and backed away. ¡°The boy is changing. Trust me. I¡¯ve kept detailed logs of him and all the others. A year ago, he wasn¡¯t like that, and two years ago, he wasn¡¯t anything special. Now though¡­¡±


    ¡°Please don¡¯t tell me you intend to harm them,¡± Jordan protested. ¡°For heaven¡¯s sake, Tazuranth, they¡¯re kids.¡±


    ¡°No one is hurting anyone,¡± the mage assured Jordan, even though Jordan knew what the other man was nning and that he was lying through his teeth. ¡°This is merely a mystery I wish to explore. In the face of the darkness, the heavens have great need of such light, and if we could find a way to harvest it¡­¡±


    Jordan tuned out the lecture as he looked out the window with his naked eyes for the boy. After a minute of searching, he finally found the distant boy who appeared no different than ever, at least from here.


    Taz often ranted about the nature of stars and how they protected the world from outer darkness. ording to him, the greatest threat to the world atrge was not the darkness sweeping across it. It wasn¡¯t even the broken sun or the dimming moon: it was the state of the stars.


    ording to him, they were fewer and number and dimmer than they¡¯d been in centuries. Jordan had no idea if that was true, but the idea of trying to harvest the children¡¯s light to use it to fix that problem seemed to be a fool''s errand, and the Book of Ways had already given Jordan some insight into how that experiment would end if it was allowed to proceed.


    For now, he pushed that out of his mind, though, and instead focused on staying calm as the Archmage talked about big ideas concerning light and constetions. While Jordan might agree that the devils of the void needed to be kept back, as far from the world as possible, he was not prepared to do so at the cost of his wards¡¯ lives.

 Chapter 170: The Death of a Dream

    Chapter 170: The Death of a Dream


    For more than two years, The Voice of Reason had pushed forward, practically unchallenged, since the earliest naval battles. She had seen a whole region fall to the Lich¡¯smand, with only a few battles to put the desert peoples in her ce.


    Part of her had thought that this would be the new model going forward and that the dread armies, which only grewrger month after month thanks to the tithes that she¡¯d secured and the bloodstained flesh factories that had been built amidst the wastes and the endless dunes.


    For a time, she even let herself second-guess the Lich¡¯s original campaign. She knew deep down that if it had only built her earlier and used the dreamer for more than just mind games andmunal torture, that they could have secured huge regions of devoted worshipers instead of the empty kingdoms that it ruled over now in the south.


    Those dreams were all ended by the Kingdom of Varenell, though. For months, she lingered at sea, not far from their border. At first, she sent scouts and spies. Later envoys followed, but all of these were rebuffed. After that came scouting parties and headhunters that brought back enough body parts for the Puppeteer to rummage through their memories and determine what they might try next. His words were anything but reassuring.


    ¡°They¡¯ve been warned about us,¡± he told her in the voice of one of the dead men he was currently ying with. ¡°Extensively, it would seem. To call them on their guard would be an understatement.¡±


    Indeed, the longer they lingered, the more they learned and the more bad news they had to deliver to their master so far away. This new kingdom had strength, both magically and physically. For generations, they had built a wall that would hold back not just the desert but the raiders that regrly came from it, and now those fortifications were paying dividends in stopping the march of the Dark Paragons and their fifty thousand undead abominations.


    There would be no peaceful conquest here, she decided, which saddened her, but that did not mean that she could give up entirely. To im the desert was a victory, but to leave when she could have done more was unforgivable. She offered to use her forces to sink whatever fleets came from the north, but after a meeting with the generals, they decided to confiscate most of her martial resources and all of her death¡¯s heads instead, sending her back to the south with little more than a skeleton crew.


    ¡°The fleet existed to bypass the desert and explore the inds beyond them,¡± the Triumvirate told her in a message that had been spoken practically in a single ce, ¡°That has been done now, and at least until we have gained a foothold, there is no longer room for peace.¡±


    This was disappointing to the Voice of Reason, but she did not dispute it. That wasn¡¯t because they were right, though. She wasn¡¯t sure that they were; it was because their decision absolved her of responsibility for whatever it was that was going toe after.The Lich¡¯s servants might not fight to the same degree as the courtiers and nobles of other mortal courts, but she at least could see the struggles ofpetition as different servants jockeyed for their dark master¡¯s favor. As far as the warriors were concerned, the Lich¡¯s ambassador had been given much too much time in the spotlight, and now they aimed to take their turn.


    While she thought that was premature, at least she could wash her hands of it. Even as they set up dungeons and looked for weak points in the fortifications, she sailed south. She had given the Lich the north, and whatever these generals did next would be on her. That was of somefort as she made her long journey home.


    She didn¡¯t go back, though, not right away. Despite the Voice¡¯s confidence that she¡¯d done her best, the shadow of the Lich¡¯s judgment still frightened her. So, she took her time and stopped by every city-state and principality that had bent the knee to the darkness and reinforced her position there.


    Ostensibly, those visits were about intimidation, and she made a point to mention just how well the war was going and just how far north her armies had pressed. She enjoyed watching the way those strong men paled as she discussed the dead cities or the endless ranks of armored zombies that she¡¯d observed so recently, but it took several visits to realize that she enjoyed one thing even more than that.


    It was only when she returned to the ind of Golway, and she was sipping a ss of blood amidst the Amir¡¯s inner circle when she realized she would miss the pomp and ritual of these asions almost as much as she would miss everything else. She might even miss it more, she realized as she gazed out past the papernterns of the party and the glittering seaside city spread out half a dozen stories below the tower where they held a feast in her honor.


    She had no purpose in ckwater or even in Rahkin. She knew that. They were dead cities. There, she would find no agreements to forge or terms to hammer out. She might visit some of the smaller kingdoms that had surrendered in the early stages of the war, but it would be nothing like this.


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    It was vanity, and it was selfish. She knew that. She even regretted it and wondered what her master would do to her when he saw it inside of her. It was thatst thought that slowed her trip down even more.


    Up until now, she¡¯d been lingering to enjoy the strange journey for as long as she could, but now that she worried she could be tormented the way the Lich toyed with Krulm¡¯vanor or even broken down and stripped for parts if she was truly useless, she grew afraid, and her voyage slowed even further.


    She found a chain of inds that had been missed on the way up and spent two months touring from one end to the other and using the dreamer to put the fear into them. Before her arrival, they worshiped a volcano that was just powerful enough for her to be sure a small god dwelled within it because of the way that it smoked fitfully whenever she approached it.


    After she left, though, the inhabitants¡¯ ancestor shrines had been tainted, their dreams had been haunted, and she was sure that at least a few of them would continue to worship the golden skull even after she departed.


    <em>Perhaps this will make up for some of my other misdeeds, </em>she tried to tell herself as the smoldering ind slowly disappeared in the wake of her ck fleet. She wasn¡¯t hopeful, though. The Lich wasn¡¯t the type to forgive even the smallest of slights. It used the Skoetomikos for many things, but its most important function was to document each and every slight that had been made against it, as well as an appropriate punishment so that the Lich would be prepared to torment each and every one of its enemies as soon as their lives or their souls fell into its bony hands.


    It was a fate that, at this point, she could dy, but she doubted she could avoid it. So she sailed on, reliving her original journey in reverse, until eventually she arrived in Tanda, where it had all started so long ago. Back then, it had been a voyage of discovery, and she¡¯d sunk the first fleet to cross her path. No, no one opposed her because they knew with certainty what would happen to them.


    Instead, the wee she received was very nearly a moonlight parade. Despite the unexpected timing of her appearance, they still managed for dozens of performers and hundreds of gleaming soldiers to escort her to the Sultan¡¯s pce, where she was feasted, her master was honored, and the vows of peace were renewed.


    Part of her wished that she still had the death knights and the other weapons of war to conquer this city and make it her own. She couldn¡¯t, of course, and she wouldn¡¯t have even if she had an overwhelming army. Still, the temptation was there. There was just something about being at the heart of power, surrounded by people who decided the fate of thousands, that felt right to her.


    It was only toward the end of the night when she was touring several beautiful mosaic-encrusted shrines on her way back to the harbor and to her vessel and admiring the tan and supple skin of the acolytes, that she finally met the small goddess of the city.


    ¡°This is Tanda Nihara,¡± the Voice of Reason¡¯s Guide said after a small bow. ¡°And she is¡ª¡±


    ¡°She is here to talk to the dead woman,¡± the goddess barked. ¡°Everyone, leave us.¡±


    She was a slight woman in ivory veils with skin that was every bit as lovely as those that served her, and judging by the reaction of her guide, her appearance was entirely unexpected and not part of the n.


    After the men and women filed out of the room, and they were left only with the altar and the burning oilmps, the goddess waved a hand, and the doors vanished. They did not simply blink out of existence. Instead, the mosaics shifted, sliding sideways until the blue and white tiles devoured them, leaving the four walls of the inner sanctum bare of any way to escape.


    ¡°Do you mean to obstruct a servant of the Lich?¡± the Voice asked with all the dignity she could muster.


    ¡°Why would I harm a puppet just to anger her master,¡± Tanda Nihara said crossly, with a heavy ent. ¡°You will be on your way in a few minutes. I wish only to offer you a warning. That is all.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m listening,¡± the Voice answered with a nod. Her suspicion had not abated, but then she doubted very much that she could harm the other goddess if she tried. She¡¯d heard about the Lich¡¯s encounter in Constantinal, and she was fairly certain that on their own turf, small gods of ces like this were close to invible.


    ¡°Most of the city-states that you visited in your time amidst the kingdoms of Zum Jubar¡­ they seek to betray you and your lord as soon as the situation allows for it,¡± the goddess exined, obviously conflicted.


    ¡°I should think that is obvious,¡± the Voice said, ¡°The question is, why you are telling me this now?¡±


    ¡°Because if the Lich¡¯s wrath is roused and he scourges thesends like a haboob, I do not wish to be caught up in its wrath. Send a gue if you must to eliminate the city, but leave it intact. I want no part of this. I know what it is capable of.¡± The goddess spoke like she hated both the Voice and the Lich, but that did not stop her from helping them.


    ¡°Why would the Lich spare you, even after you betray its servants and break its deals?¡± the Voice asked, skeptically.


    ¡°Because I already stopped this little revolt once,¡± she spat. ¡°The other cities wait for Tanda to give the word, and I have prevented the Pasha from doing anything so stupid for now,¡± Tanda Nihara answered wearily, ¡°But the day wille when he gets his way. Probably after your first real defeat against the northern kingdoms if I had to guess, and then, the pits of all the hells will vomit up their chaos onto the world.¡±

 Chapter 171: Almost Done

    Chapter 171: Almost Done


    Oroza had no idea how long she waited there in that Stygian ce. To her, that ind had not seemed like the afterlife, but this was close to her version of hell. The heat radiated from the forges, making the dark air ripple, and the sound of hammering never ended. She didn¡¯t think it could take too long to make a sword, and indeed, it didn¡¯t.


    The All-Father¡¯s first attempt took perhaps a day or two from the time he poured the silvery metal into the mold until he had finished hammering, honing, and quenching the de. However, each time hepleted these steps, he found some small w that made him melt the thing back down to try again. Each time, it was something different: an asymmetry, a crack, or even a bnce problem would be enough to scrap the project and start again, no matter what stage of work had beenpleted.


    That was part of the hell, too. Watching the futility of it all. Ghostly dwarven servants rushed around doing this and that and bringing the All-Father whatever he required, but inevitably, the giant man would mutter, ¡°No, no, no - this will never do,¡± and toss it back in the crucible to start all over again.


    More than anything, Oroza wanted to leave. <em>He can keep my scales, </em>she thought to herself. She couldn¡¯t, though. She didn¡¯t know why this was important, but it clearly was. So, no matter how miserable she was, she could hardly quit part-way through. Instead, she suffered in silence, d that lingering at death''s door as she was, at least, that she felt neither hunger nor thirst.


    Still, as the weeks and perhaps even months dragged by, she watched the progress. Eventually, the de forging process was refined, and the temperatures were adjusted until they were always perfect. The edge came faster; it was a gleaming rivulet of silver so sharp that it looked like it was practically made of liquid itself, which pleased her. The project looked to be on the verge ofpletion as a pommel and handle were attached. It was only when the time came to carve the runes into the t of the de.


    These at least did not need to be done multiple times, but they were done with all the care of a jeweler setting tiny stones into a delicate ring. So, the process seemed to take forever. In the end, their efforts were beautiful butpletely illegible to her. The structure was a series of entangled rectilinear knots that had no meaning to her beyond the fact that they were identical on both sides of the de.


    When that was done, Oroza worried they¡¯d spend another eternity iying jewels in the pommel or some other unnecessary step. <em>The battle could be finished before he¡¯s forged a single de,</em> she thought bitterly. <em>No wonder the Gods were defeated by that monster. They can¡¯t manage to work together on anything, but the Lich is of one mind on anything. </em>


    Oroza said nothing to vent her frustrations, but only because it would have slowed down the process even more. Fortunately, aside from the runes, which seemed to be functional rather than merely decorative, the de was a in thing and the scabbard they gave her to hold it even more so. The dwarven god had spent forever on the unique, silvery metal of the de, but the wire wound pommel and the scabbard had been done in only a few hours each. The result was that she was surprised when a ghost suddenly brought her the weapon wrapped in an oilcloth parcel and sealed in wax.


    ¡°The de is finished,¡± the All-Father pronounced with finality. ¡°You may tell thedy Lunaris that I have done my part, as promised.¡±¡°I will,¡± Oroza said, trying to remember which direction she¡¯d entered this strange room from after so long.


    ¡°But do not open it,¡± the god said, pointing his giant hammer at her. ¡°Not until you are on the moon. The metal is still too brittle, and it should not be exposed to the air until she infuses it with light.¡±


    Oroza didn¡¯t know what that meant or why it should matter. So, she didn¡¯t ask him about that. Instead, she thanked the All-Father for his hard work and then turned and started back the way she came.


    The walk back was another short eternity, and if she hadn¡¯t marked her way by scratching the walls at critical junctures, it was possible she might have gotten lost forever. Instead, once she reached the underwater tunnels, she transformed back into her threadbare river dragon form, and then, taking the small parcel gently in her mouth, she swam the rest of the way to the surface.


    From there, the way to the moon was long and well-known. She would have preferred to swim to it from the reflection of her own river, but the ocean would do. Unfortunately, since it was so dim, she had to circle anxiously just beneath the surface while she waited for the waning sliver to peek out from behind the clouds.


    Honestly, she couldn¡¯t remember thest time it had been bright now that she was thinking about it. Still, it wasn¡¯t until she swam deep enough into the sky that the clouds had passed her by and the moon was in full view that she even started to understand the problem.


    On every other trip into the sky, she¡¯d traveled toward a bright full moon that, except for a few craters and scars of ancient celestial battles, was a pure ivory orb hanging there in the sky. That was no longer the case.


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    Where once the moon had been covered by endless ins, now its shadowy surface seemed to be dominated by mountains. It was only when Oroza got close enough that she could just make out Lunaris¡¯ pce that she understood those were not mountains at all. Instead, they were some kind of ugly venous growth that reminded her of cancer more than anything. It was a new feature, and a particrly evil-looking one that couldn¡¯t be ignored as the tattered river dragon swam ever closer to the moon¡¯s surface.


    <em>When did this happen? What could have done it? </em>Oroza wondered. She wouldn¡¯t have to wonder for too long, though. If the Moon goddess was still alive, then Oroza could ask her again and soon.


    It turned out that Lunaris was, in fact, where she often sat in the albino gardens of her miniature pce. The terrible monstrosity that was devouring the moon had undermined and copsed the coliseum that Oroza had visited several times before, but it had not reached this ce or disturbed its peace.


    ¡°So you¡¯vee atst then,¡± the pale woman said with a wan smile as Oroza entered her field of view. She had seen better days. She looked as thin and frail as Oroza had been before she swam out to see to die.


    ¡°Mydy¡­ what happened to you?¡± Oroza asked. The only response she received, though, was for Oroza to pat a spot on the white grass beside her.


    ¡°Mortalityes for us all,¡± the Mood Goddess said cryptically. ¡°It is only the immortals that it surprises. You should know. You¡¯ve died rather recently yourself.¡±


    ¡°It was my time,¡± Oroza said, surprised to find she felt at peace with it. ¡°But you¡­ without Siddrim, the world needs you more than ever. How could this have happened?¡±


    ¡°A ncing blow that digs deeper every day,¡± Lunaris sighed. ¡°The darkness poisons everything it touches. That is all you need to know. Do not worry for me, child. I have already picked a sessor, and when the timees and the moon finally crumbles to dust, something new will rise in its ce.¡±


    ¡°But¡ª¡± Oroza protested.


    ¡°It is just not my time yet,¡± the Moon Goddess said dismissively. ¡°I have things I must do yet, like guard against the outer darkness and give your de thest of my light.¡±


    ¡°Lunaris, please,¡± the River Goddess said, casting the oilcloth bundle aside. ¡°You must save your strength.¡±


    The older woman smiled, gesturing broadly at the dark sky. ¡°I cannot save what I do not have. My strength has been spent long ago. Now, all I can do is hold on a little longer.¡±


    Oroza looked up. This wasn¡¯t the first time she¡¯d beheld the stars from such a distance. Here, she could see the web of warding lines that stretched between each star in a given constetion. From the ground far below, the stars appeared to twinkle, but here she could see that they were writhing or perhaps fighting. The lights were vaguely inhuman shapes, but with the moon so dim, for the first time, it was possible to see what it was they were fighting against.


    The River Goddess¡¯s mind balked for a moment as she tried to take it all in. Past the invisible lines of magic that held the stars in their ces, defending the world, there was a writhing and undifferentiated mass of shadowy forms. It was somewhere between an army at the gates and an aquatic organism attempting to devour the stars.


    It was something Lunaris had known for a long time, though she¡¯d never really given it much thought until the rise of the Lich. The Lord of Light existed to purge the evil that developed in the world, but Lunaris¡¯s ce had never been to protect them from the night, at least not against mundane threats. It had been to protect the world from the <em>night. </em>From the endless mass of darkness that existed everywhere, the mes of Siddrim¡¯s horses did not touch. There was no way she could do Siddrim¡¯s job as well as her own.


    Oroza¡¯s thoughts were interrupted when Lunaris put her hand on the River Goddess¡¯s shoulder. ¡°Do you know why there are fewer stars than there used to be?¡± the Moon Goddess asked.


    ¡°I¡­ didn''t realize there were,¡± Oroza said truthfully, making Lunaris nod sadly.


    ¡°It¡¯s because of Siddrim¡¯s jealousy and vanity,¡± the Moon Goddess said with a shake of her head. ¡°He would brook no rivals. Not for thest century, at least, since he purged thest of the dark gods. Before that time, though. Heroes¡­ rare heroes at least would have souls that burned with light, and when they died¡­ well, instead of descending into the underworld to be reborn, I¡¯d ce them where they would do the most good so they could fight on.¡±


    ¡°And Siddrim didn¡¯t like that?¡± Oroza asked, confused. She had no idea why the Lord of Light wouldn¡¯t want more lights in the sky.


    ¡°He would not release those souls. Instead, he devoured them to burn ever brighter,¡± Lunaris exined. ¡°But now that he is gone, those sparks are mine again, at least, to do what I will with them.¡±


    As the Moon Goddess spoke, a ball of light materialized in her hand. ¡°This one was called Farbaer, and he was a very brave young man. Given a bit of time, he might have be the next Lord of Light himself, but no mortal can stand against the Lich.¡±


    ¡°Lunaris, please,¡± Oroza said, not caring about whom the light was or his history. The name meant nothing to her. ¡°You need that. Use it to purge your own darkness, or¡ª¡±


    She ignored Oroza and instead reached for the de, leaving the light to flicker in midair like a stranded will-o-wisp. When she opened the seal, unwrapped the de, and drew it from the scabbard, the thing gleamed like a mirror, but that was only for a moment. Once that was done, the light darted to it, and the whole thing glowed with a brilliant white light that faded after a moment, leaving only the runes behind to glow dully.


    ¡°Do you know what this is?¡± the Moon Goddess asked finally.


    ¡°A weapon to use against the darkness?¡± Oroza guessed.


    ¡°No,¡± Lunaris answered with a shake of her head. ¡°It is destiny, sharpened to a fine point. Whatever evil is pierced by this shall be struck down and shall never rise again.¡±

 Chapter 172: The Ashes of Civilization

    Chapter 172: The Ashes of Civilization


    Krulm¡¯venor could no longer remember how many fortresses, mining settlements, and cities he¡¯d sacked. However, the fact that he now traveled as a small band of himself most of the time instead of as a singr entity was enough to make him at least as much goblin as dwarf. That made thinking harder, but even if it hadn¡¯t, he¡¯d been down here so long that all of those conquests made everything blur together after a while.


    Not thinking was preferable to the alternative, though. Krulm¡¯venor had not been able to drink a good dark ale or a bright golden wheat beer in ages. The closest he¡¯de was the smell of them burning as he and his many copies had burned down countless taverns and breweries. Still, the faint fuzziness as his mind started to slip away from being divided so many times was the mostparable sensation he¡¯d yet discovered.


    The fire godling had figured out many months ago that if he simply existed as five or six of himself all the time, his cares and suffering would be just far enough away that they wouldn¡¯t bother him too much. The Lich had not yet figured that out, but it no doubt would one day. Until then, even if he had to deal with the random mutterings and outbursts of his copies, it was worth it. After all, drinking was nothing if not the excuse to feel like this while you were surrounded by idiots anyway.


    So, he and the shards of himself walked ever on, almost at random, in the depths, looking for new things to destroy. The Lich had released any number of wraiths down here to map the tunnels and find everything worth snuffing out or burning alive, so Krulm would receive frequent messages in the form of whispered words from the dark, but he had no talent for the arcane or the necromantic, so it wasn¡¯t always possible to determine what it was the things were trying to tell him.


    Still, as long as he kept moving, the cursed bones that bound him slumbered, and the Lichrgely left him, and all his other copies, alone to suffer in the dark. It had bigger issues to worry about, not that it had conquered half the world.


    If Krulm¡¯venor was braver, then he would have asked the Lich why it even needed to keep fighting this war so far from anywhere. Dwarves were never a numerous people, even before the fighting had started. These days, he purged more goblin caves and koboldirs than dwarven outposts.


    The fire godling said nothing, though. He knew the answer already. Inside every dwarven settlement were things the Lich craved, even beyond the blood of the living and bodies capable of being reanimated. The monster that owned it body and soul was forever in need of more gold, silver, and steel to create new abominations. Even more, it forced Krulm¡¯venor to sack every tomb and shrine in search of more mithril and adamantine.


    Even the bones of the honored dead were not safe. He did not know what the Lich nned to do with them, but he was sure it was nothing good. Krulm¡¯venor regretted giving those up to his master wherever they were found, even more than murdering a city full of dwarves trying to live their lives. New families could be created, but a hero of old was a work of singr life well lived, and once the Lich stole it away through its dark portals, it was gone forever.


    Today, it wasn¡¯t a shrine they were moving toward, at least. Today, they were too shallow for that. By his reckoning, they were only a couple hundred feet below the surface. He and his noisy copies had spent thest few days burning out goblin warren after goblin warren. Yesterday, they''d found a luminescent mushroom forest that might have been a dwarvish ntation before it had gone wild. They¡¯d left all of those caves as nothing but ashes, of course, but the trend was toward civilization. When they found the vent shafts for the coal mine, he was only surprised that dwarves were still working on them.


    ¡°Feed us!¡± the spirits mored in his soul, but Krulm¡¯venor suppressed them.


    In fact, he pulled all of his duplicates back together. That wasn¡¯t for the rity, though. It was because if he was careful, he could destroy the ce without killing many besides perhaps himself.


    Krulm¡¯venor was always on the lookout for two things: ways to keep his master happy and ways to end his miserable existence in a way that didn¡¯t trigger the agonies that the Lich hadyered throughout his body to ensure his obedience.


    Last year, most of his copies had gotten caught in an undergroundndslide, but enough had survived for him to be reconstituted, and more vessels for his guttering soul had been built. Several monthster, he¡¯d been swallowed whole by a giant purple boring worm. Krulm had hoped that the thing¡¯s acids would have been enough to melt down its body for scrap and release his suffering soul. Instead, its mes had eventually killed the creature, and he¡¯d ripped his way out of its belly to find his metal skeleton polished to a fine silvered sheen.


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    Nothing, it would seem, was enough to defeat the Lich¡¯s craftsmanship, which had only grown better now that it harvest the souls of dwarves to work its forges instead of random drudges. If anything was going to do it, though, a mine shaft that led to a warren of mines following a coal seam might be enough to do the trick. He hoped it would, at least, because short of finding the All-Father or one of his sacred champions and being smote from existence by a blessed forge hammer, he was unlikely to ever find an end to this awful existence.


    That didn¡¯t stop Krulm¡¯venor from leaping into the hole and bursting into mes as he fell toward the unsuspecting miners thirty feet below him. They barely had time to look up before he and the wall of fire trailing behind him reached them. They¡¯d done everything right. They¡¯d watered the walls to avoid explosions, and they were using bronze picks and shovels to prevent sparks. No amount of safety precautions could do much to stop a burning skeleton, though.


    Despite his sudden appearance, the fire godling was surprised that some of the dwarves managed to escape the death trap it created. It wouldn¡¯t chase them, though.l Even if they were shouting in rm, trying to warn their fellows now, their lungs would be cooking from the hor air soon enough.


    Instead, Krulm¡¯venor watched the orange mes that had started this show gutter and fade as the blue mes reced them. These weren¡¯t the blue mes of its unfire, but they did look very simr. They were the oxygen-starved methane mes leaking off the coal as all the air was sucked out of the room.


    That wouldn¡¯tst long, of course. Even how it could feel the increasing wind as the chimney effect took hold. Soon this whole mine would be a st furnace, desperately sucking in air, only to convert that air into more fire, repeating the vicious cycle.


    He walked slowly, ignoring both the growing heat as well as the gibbering voices in his mind begging to release. Instead, he focused on the destruction all around him as he walked as slowly as possible toward the entrance.


    Along the way, the fire godling found a few charred bodies and other dwarves who had given in to smoke inhtion but had not yet burst into mes. He ignored all of those and continued on. The mes had long since outrun him, and though more than anything, he wanted to stay standing where he was, the smoldering timbers were just enough for the angry spirits that were always watching him to demand he keep moving.


    He did, but as he did so, he felt something he hadn¡¯t felt in a long time, at least as a single entity. During the razing of every city, he felt the terrible, primitive joy of a goblin tribe running roughshod over their enemies, but it wasn¡¯t the same as this.


    It took him some time to figure out just what it was, but it wasn¡¯t enough until he could see the exit and the small stone town thaty in the cavern beyond that he finally understood. It was the fire.


    It had been a long time since Krulm¡¯venor had experienced enough heat to make him feel true exaltation, and even at the height of his powers, he¡¯d never experienced a fire like this. The mine had be exactly the st furnace that he hoped it would be. The air roared into the mouth of the cave, sending waves of orange fires along the walls and ceiling. They almost reached him, too, before turning the blue color that saturated the rest of the mine.


    It was so much heat that it was reaching through the cold steel barrier that the Lich had bound him in. For the first time in years and years, that heat actually reached him and warmed his soul. It wasn¡¯t hard to see why. His entire skeletal body had taken on a dull red glow. He was so warm that his body¡¯s temper was damaged; if any dwarf could withstand such terrible conditions, they might even be able to strike him down in this weakened state.


    The tribe of nearly a hundred copies of himself squired and writhed inside of him, demanding to be free, but he ignored them. Instead, he basked in the warm glow of a sensation that had been gone so long he¡¯d forgotten what it felt like.


    As he stood there like this, it was almost enough that he could believe he was still back there in Fallravea, feasting on the goblin ughter, or even before that, feeling the power of the forges as the dwarves hammer steel beneath his¡­


    The sound of the copse somewhere behind him wasn¡¯t enough to shake the godling free of his reverie. Neither was the tumbling stone. However, the stone blocked the smooth flow of the air, instantly killing the st furnace he was enjoying so much and reducing the entire thing to an ordinary inferno.


    It was disappointing, but no good thing couldst forever, certainly not in his torturous existence. Even though the fire godling was still hundreds of degrees, it could already feel itself glowing colder as the ephemeral heat left it as what had been for so long: a dead soul trapped in antern of unme shaped like a skull.


    This sad thought was enough to finally make him feel real self-pity, and as he walked out of the coal mine and passed therge stacks of coal that had no doubt been meant for export to some nearby city, he began to unleash the horde inside him.


    As Krulm¡¯venor reflected on how none of this would ever reach its destination, he started to fission, bing two, then four, then eight twisted metal skeletons instead of the one that was there only a moment before. He wasn¡¯t looking to let all the demons out. He didn¡¯t want to cease to exist, as his doppelg?ngers began to rush toward the frightened townspeople who were clustered under glow stones under the far end of the street, trying to understand what had happened. He just wanted to take the edge off, and for that, a little ughter was exactly what the doctor ordered.

 Chapter 173: Waiting Forever

    Chapter 173: Waiting Forever


    The city they found after the coal mine was called Nel-Bartov, and though Krulm¡¯venor had never been there in life, he had heard of it, even from so far away. It had been famed for the river of crystal that cut the city in half like a cracked geode on a truly massive scale.


    It had been described as a work of art or a sort of natural cathedral, and dwarves hadbored for lifetimes to cut and polish those giant crystals so that every ray of light that touched them rebounded through a dozen rainbows before fading away.


    As a whole, the sight was said to be quite lovely and one of the true wonders of the dwarven world. Now, it was just a ughterhouse, and that crystal channel was nothing but a colossal gutter for the blood of so many dead dwarves in the aftermath of his brutal assault.


    That city wasn¡¯t the only one either, of course, it was just the one that happened to be next. Cities were gettingrger and closer together in this area. Krulm¡¯venor knew why, of course, though he never said so out loud. It was because he was getting close to the capital of the entire underrealm: Forgeholm.


    The fire godling wasn¡¯t quite sure whether he was attempting to shield the ce by hoping they didn¡¯t find it or hoping that he would stumble across it before the Lich had a chance to prepare an appropriate stratagem and be crushed into so much smoldering scrap by the Iron City and their formidable armies.


    It was the armies he discovered first, quite by ident. They first found a squad of red helmed defenders in the byway of Grigen-dol. It was nowhere special. It was just three dozen buildings carved along the wide part of a tunnel where two important paths of the underway met.


    Krulm¡¯venor had confused them for being the town watch, but he quickly learned his mistake. They fought much too fiercely and in a well-coordinated fashion for that. Even when he became forty and then eighty to outnumber them, they did not break or even show real fear. Instead, the thirty dwarves fought to thest with their shields held high and their banners raised, even as he set them alight.


    That battle, fierce as it was, wasn¡¯t enough to attract the Lich¡¯s baleful eye. It took more and more to do that these days. Instead, it did not press itself into Krulm¡¯venor¡¯s mind until he found a unit of more than fifty dwarves out on patrol. Though that might happen anywhere in the under ways, he knew that it was really only likely near a city asrge as Forgeholm.


    The group marched in formation, five dwarves wide and at least ten ranks deep. It would be a formidable foe to face, even with fire and ferocity on his side. He could see the design of their tower shields and the way they were built to lock together. That wasn¡¯t enough to deter Krulm¡¯venor¡¯s attack, though. At least not until he felt the Lich¡¯s chill spread through him. ¡°What is it you¡¯ve stumbled upon now?¡± the Lich asked in the cold, dry voice that the godling had learned to hate and dread.


    ¡°A small army out on patrol,¡± the dwarf answered honestly. ¡°It is likely from arger city.¡±


    ¡°The Iron City?¡± the Lich asked, prating directly to the core of the matter. For a moment, Krulm¡¯venor wasn¡¯t sure how it had done that, but then it realized that with all the dwarven souls it had devoured at this point, there was very little that the monster probably didn¡¯t know.


    ¡°It¡¯s very likely,¡± Krulm¡¯venor admitted, ¡°Though I have heard no word nor seen a sign, it is supposed toy somewhere in this direction.¡±


    ¡°Then find it, but do not engage,¡± the Lichmanded. ¡°Such a ce will be impossible for a lowly worm like you to crack alone.¡±


    ¡°You are sending me reinforcements then?¡± the fire godling asked, disgusted at what new horror it might have to put up with.


    It had seen the Devourer and other inhuman monstrosities that the Lich had created in recent years, and being close to something like that would be even worse than dealing with the hundreds of goblins that had already burrowed their way into his soul. As foul as they were, at least they were creatures that dwelled in the natural world.


    ¡°No, not immediately, at any rate,¡± the Lich said, studying the distant dwarves marching through the far cavern through his dead, flickering eyes. ¡°ns are already in motion, and until they are ready, they are nothing you need to concern yourself with. Simply learn what you can and stay out of sight until all is readiness. Only then can you strike the deathblow against the empire below.¡±


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    Krulm¡¯venor didn¡¯t like the sound of that, but he also had no desire to ask any further questions. Instead, he simply nodded, and then, the Lich faded from his mind, leaving him with the sound of distant tromping boots and rattling te mail echoing through the caverns ahead.


    The Lich might have intended to be harsh, but it dawned on Krulm¡¯venor as he stood there that he felt something he hadn¡¯t felt in almost as long as he hadn¡¯t felt real warmth. He no longer felt the need to march and kill in an endless spiral to stay one step ahead of the vengeful spirits that dwelled where his bone marrow should have been.


    It wasn¡¯t quiet peace, thanks to the tribe of green skins in his soul, but it was something, and he stood there long after the patrol had left, glorying in his ability to do nothing at all. It was only when the darkness and silence were once more absolute that he continued on.


    This time, the skeletal fire godling moved forward, looking to avoid trouble instead of causing it. It was a strange sensation. Until now, for years, since long before the siege of Rahkin, or even before that when he¡¯d sacked Hugelden or Siddrimar, he¡¯d constantly acted with a spear against his back. ¡®Move forward or face the consequences.¡¯


    It wasn¡¯t even an unsaid threat. His very bones were itching to torture him.


    Now, suddenly, he could do what he wanted as long as he could ignore the gibbering voices of the creatures that lived in his head. Now, he could walk slower and appreciate the subtle signs of dwarven society, from the well-trod stone paths to the subtle graffiti he spied along the mostmon thoroughfares as he got closer to the city.


    Of course, the closer he got, the harder it was to stay hidden. There were smaller outlyingmunities and, along some routes, significant traffic. There were more guards than usual, too, but that was his fault. He¡¯d spent years down here ravaging the world in every direction, and since there were never any witnesses left behind, it was impossible to say what the dwarves believed was happening.


    Krulm¡¯venor found it unlikely the All-Father didn¡¯t know, but then, he¡¯d never been a religious schr. Perhaps that was why the Lich no longer wanted him to kill where it could be avoided. Perhaps that was how the god might catch his scent if he wasn''t careful.


    In the end, it didn¡¯t matter. If he moved slowly and carefully, there was almost always a way to avoid killing the dwarves that crossed his path. Even when they caught a glimpse of the blue fire burning in his eyes, he could simply move deeper into the darkness and wait for the dwarves to move on.


    There was only one case in the weeks that followed where he was forced to kill anyone at all. He¡¯de around the corner at the same time as an older dwarf leading a long mule train. Thinking quickly, before the man could scream, Krulm¡¯venor snapped his neck, letting him fall dead on the ground. He could have simply left the graybeard there.


    It would have been a strange death, but nothing that pointed to him directly. In the end, he decided to let the howling mob within him out to rip both the corpse and his pack animals to shreds, though. This was both because it would be viewed less suspiciously as a random goblin attack, which the metal jaws of his minions would perfectly replicate, and because they¡¯d been caged in his mind for so long that they were howling out of control at that one death, and he no longer felt like fighting them.


    He couldn¡¯t. This was who he was now.


    He didn¡¯t join them, though. Even as half a dozen metal goblin skeletons killed and screamed in delight like any tribe of goblins would, he picked through the wreckage that had once been this peddler''s life, examining artifacts that reminded Krulm¡¯venor of a home so far away that he no longer remembered it.


    He examined the man¡¯s short sword, which was oiled heavily enough that he was sure it hadn¡¯t been used in quite some time but sharpened down enough that it had obviously seen hard use over the course of its life. All the man¡¯s possessions told a simr tale. The cloak had been expensive once but was now threadbare, the boots had been resoled more than once, and the buttons, well¡­


    Krulm¡¯venor had spent what felt like half a lifetime shredding and burning dwarven cities as punishment for all of his failures as a god and man, but during those activities, he was a force of nature, and when he was done, there was nothing left behind but ashes. Here, though, right now, as he sat there amidst the blood at the gore that his doppelg?ngers were causing, all he could do was study that small brass button, admiring the details and its perfect symmetry.


    It wasn¡¯t particrly fancy, and though it was stamped with the crest of a dwarven n, he didn¡¯t recognize it. That didn¡¯t matter, though. What mattered was that it had done its job. It might have done it for decades or even centuries. There was really no way to know. It was polished, though, and clean save for a single drop of blood. It was what he should have been before he walked down the long, dark road that led him here.


    Krulm¡¯venor mourned what could have been and held that button tightly even as he disbanded his tribe and started walking away again. He still had to figure out exactly where the Iron City was and where its gates and defenses were located specifically. After that, he could lie low and do what he wanted with his own time for once.


    He could spend his time nning the best way to attack or trying to figure out what it was that his dark master was up to. He could even sit there and listen to the voices in his head babble until he wentpletely insane. What he couldn¡¯t do, though, was let go of that damn button or stop thinking about all that it symbolized in his savage, miserable life.

 Chapter 174: Return to Nature

    Chapter 174: Return to Nature


    She spread like a noxious weed once the Lich released her from the dark garden in that dead city. She hadn¡¯t wanted to. Not initially, but now the Queen of Thorns gloried in what she was doing as she spread her blight in an everrger radius.


    Part of her might hate herself for it, but that small, sad voice could only be heard when she was at peace. That was almost never anymore, though, since she lived two lives now.


    By day, she was a blight. And she spread across the world an acre at a time. One day, she would wipe out a farmer¡¯s field with molds and rusts that made wheat stalks droop so low that their heavy grain dragged on the ground. The next, an ill wind might sweep through a forest, and parasitic vines that had never been seen there before would climb old-growth trunks and begin to suck out vitality.


    Her goal was not to despoil the entire world, at least not immediately. Instead, she was probing for the presence of small gods and nature spirits. She was looking for the children of the forest and their sweet blood by forcing those prideful beings to defend their turf. Once they did so, well, all she had to do was wait for the sun to set.


    Because of all the changes the Lich had inflicted on her, she could really only emerge into the world once it was fully dark. It was then the hunt would begin. Sometimes, she was a six-armed woman with weapons of wood and magic and other times, she was an eight-legged hunting cat made of twining vines. In either form, she was forever bleeding dark red sap from the thorns that pierced her skin.


    Once she found her prey, it would not escape her. If it was a spirit, she would devour it whole and add its domain to her ever-growing dominion over the world. Ironically, though, if it was something closer to mortal, then she had to be more careful. She had been punished before for ruining valuable corpses of the rare specimens that she hunted down.


    The Lich could not harvest their souls or build something new and abominable from their parts if she tore them to shreds. So, instead, shepped up the fresh blood of mythological creatures and the elder blood of the forest children while it was still warm, then nted herself near the piles of bodies she gathered and feasted on the spilled blood that stained the earth until her master sent drudges to collect the necromantic treasure trove.


    It often asked her questions like, ¡°Who are the Children of the Forest? Where do theye from? Where do they flee to?¡±


    The Queen of Thrones couldn¡¯t answer those questions, though. If she¡¯d ever known, then those answers had been lost in the course of being remade. That wouldn¡¯t surprise her. She¡¯d lost so much to get what she had now, but she didn¡¯t regret it. ¡°Ask the souls yourselves!¡± she growled, but apparently, they didn¡¯t have the answers that it sought either. They were too fine a structure and fell apart at the smallest amount of coercion or torment, like a sculpture of spun ss.


    The most she could do was describe the moonlit portals that small fae beings opened and repeat the words they told each other before they sensed her presence. They were not her focus, though; the elder beings were just a delicious treat that she sometimes found. Her real priority was the spirits that were so like the women she¡¯d once been, and every time she ate one of them, she got stronger.


    At this point, it was hard to imagine being the Goddess of one pine forest or a single valley. She was not yet strong enough topete with Niama, the Goddess of the natural world, but she would be. She knew that with a certainty. She would face off against her old mistress someday soon, no matter how many of her sisters she had to feast on between here and there.


    Of course, even devouring an acre a day made this a very slow process. The world was a huge ce, and there were a thousand tiny ces for the light to hide among the darkening world, and so little of it was held bymunities loyal enough to the Lich that she was forced to leave them in peace. Those she had to take time out of her hunt to bless, and ensure that their crops thrived against the darkness and the rot. Those duties always chafed at her.


    Even in this new, mutted form, she had no love for humanity and the idea that she must make the fields of the loyal blossom even while other fields had to wither annoyed her. So, the Queen of Thorns was very pleased when she found a tinymunity that had been missed by all the other armies and abominations that had rampaged through the area.


    It wasn¡¯t the first human she¡¯d found to feast on, of course. Even after all the Lich¡¯s efforts, the world was not yet the dead ce it desired for it to be. There were still mountain men tucked away, checking their traps and keeping their heads down, and hunters who stayed alive by always being on the move. asionally, one of them got it into their heads to do something heroic, like try to sack one of the Lich¡¯s many dungeons or scavenge through the ruins of some city or temple in search of treasure that no longer had meaning.


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    The first time she¡¯de across one of these increasingly endangered loners, she¡¯d asked the Lich what she should do since she had such clear orders regarding beasts she¡¯d probably never find and spirits with very difficult-to-decipher descriptions. The answer she received was an intense jolt of pain that echoed through her limbs and the words, ¡°Do not waste my time with such trivialities. Expunge those mortals and then focus on your true purpose!¡±


    The Lich was only kind to her when she brought down some new creature it had never seen before, so when it came to everything else, she no longer even mentioned it to the Lich. Instead, she toyed with it, like a cat hunting a mouse.


    She sent those rare hunters in circles for days, never able to escape from a fog-shrouded forest as they slowly ran out of hope and supplies. It was an enjoyable game that she never tired of. She would let them go slowly mad and fully give into despair before she would personally hunt them down and rip them to bloody shreds.


    An entire hamlet, though, would have to be handled differently. The queen of Thorns gave it a lot of thought as she lurked into weedy groves nearby before she decided that the right way to go was to make the children go missing first. They often yed near the edges of the forest when they weren¡¯t needed for chores, and after seeing just how thin and scrawny they were, the dark Goddess decided it was the easiest thing in the world to lure them in with glimpses of sweet red berries that started at the edge of the tree line, with more easily visible further on.


    The kids flocked to bushes to gorge themselves on the fruits, and it was only when they¡¯d eaten their fill of the rare treat that they started to gather them. The Queen of Thorns could have poisoned them, of course, but that wouldn¡¯t have been nearly cruel enough. Instead, she gave them all they wanted and more. Soon, the band of almost a dozen boys and girls was arguing about what to do next.


    ¡°Well, of course, we have to get the rest of them!¡± one boy announced boldly. ¡°What we don¡¯t pick will just be taken by the birds anyway.¡±


    ¡°But Mama says we ain¡¯t supposed to go in there,¡± one of the girls said staunchly, even as some of the braver kids started to move toward bushes deeper in. ¡°There are wild animals and monsters and¡ª¡±


    ¡°There ain¡¯t no monsters,¡± the first boyughed. ¡°If you¡¯re scared, then you don¡¯t have toe. We¡¯ll be right back.¡±


    ¡°But the rules,¡± she pouted, stomping her foot. ¡°We have to¡­¡±


    Other childrenughed at that, which tipped the bnce. No one wanted to be called scared, after all. Where once most of the kids had been content to stand at the edge of the forest and follow the rules, now most of them crossed that imaginary line that separated safety from danger.


    It was a lie, though. That had been erased as soon as the Queen of Thorns had found this sheltered enve, eking out its quiet existence. Still, the meadow that the few remaining children would be enough to save them for now. Slowly, though, a few minutes at a time, each child decided to throw caution to the wind and give in to the peer pressure. In the end, there was only one ten-year-old girl left, pouting and fuming as she held her dolly, waiting for everyone toe back.


    They¡¯d never be back, though. The lone little girl waited, calling the names of her friends, but they ventured deeper and deeper down the primrose path that The Queen of Thorns had created to tempt them. By the time she went back home shortly before sunset to tell her parents what had happened, she¡¯d long since lost sight of thempletely, and had been left alone for hours.


    Of course, a search party was formed, but they¡¯d only ever find pieces of those that had wandered off, and the red stains on the trail they followed hadn¡¯t been caused by crushed berries alone. Few of the men that ventured into the woods that night made it back, and the ones that did were dark-eyed and broken.


    She devoured all of the strong warriors herself and left only the weaker sort who could spread fear to their neighbors free. They had seen what such a goddess could do to defenseless young children, and though most would not speak of it, they didn¡¯t have to. The horror of such things had poisoned their souls, and all too soon, that poison would sink into the soil of the fields that sustained them.


    Calves sickened, and insects flourished that spring, but there was nothing for it. These people had avoided the troubles of the wider world in a tiny farmingmunity that the forest had hidden away, but the forest was hers now, and even if there was somece to flee to, there was no way that any of them would find a safe path through her darkening domain.


    All they could do was try to pretend that everything was normal as the trees encroached and unfamiliar blight worsened. It wouldn¡¯tst. Day by day, things got worse, and good people died or went mad from the strain of trying to pretend their own tiny corner of the world wasn¡¯t about to end.


    Though the dark nature Goddess couldn¡¯t linger here for too long, lest she draw the wrath of her master for other reasons, she would still make the time for this. In a few weeks, it would be like the ce never existed. Trees would sprout in cultivated fields, weeds would overwhelm homes, and those that weren¡¯t hunted down by her terrible cat form that hunted the woods each night would die of starvation and leave their bones to bleach in the sun.


    The Queen of Thorns realized that the Lich would probably want to be told of this ce if only to harvest the bodies, but she didn¡¯t n to do anything of the sort. It had made its position very clear, and she had no wish to taint the memory of the fun she¡¯d had unwinding the threads of family andmunity with a rebuke.


    <em>If it had wanted to be informed of ces like this, then it should have been more clear,</em> she thought to herself as she drifted on in search of other prey.

 Chapter 175: Prepared for Anything

    Chapter 175: Prepared for Anything


    Tenebroum spent more and more time in the well of darkness that had been ckwater. Now that Abenend had fallen, there was little point in being anywhere else. At night, it would still leave briefly or take to the eyes of its watchers, which were nothing more than zombified owls that had been given extra eyes so they could see even more clearly in the darkness. This was so that it could gaze upon the moon and bask in the certainty that one day, the entirety of her fine white surface would grow dark.


    What would happen after that? It wasn¡¯t sure.


    Would the thing vanish or die? Would it have to strangle whatever foul creature was born from her corpse in its crib lest it be a rival? The Lich could not say, but even if the method of assassination birthed new challenges, Tenebroum would still be happy to see her go.


    The Moon Goddess was even more slippery and elusive than Oroza, and it had learned more about her from the souls of the mages it had devoured than everywhere elsebined. A minority of those very souls seemed to think that magic might cease to exist when she did, but most of them thought that it would simply grow more dangerous for mortals to use without her purifying light.


    The Lich was very skeptical that anything could snuff magic out in a single day. It was a natural force that permeated everything, but even so, it had begun to stock extra essence in its dread ring just in case things should go awry.


    Still, these tiny excursions were no different than the way a farmer might sit on his porch and watch the sunset or a noble would stand at his window and watch his serfs toiling away. They were a reward for a hard day¡¯s work, and the Lich was toiling now night and day.


    Well, at least its servants were. The dead city of Constantinal, on the far side of the Wyrmspire mountains to the north, might be ving away to build an endless tide of war zombies for all the battles toe. The desert kingdoms had fallen without much fighting, but initial reports suggested that would not be the case even further to the north.


    All that had done, however, was free up the fleshcrafters and the forgeweights of ckwater to do other things. Those other things, at least since the fall of Rahkin, had been to make sure that it never faced humiliation on the battlefield again.


    The Lich loathed being forced to take the field at all. It was demeaning that it should ever have to do so, but the only way to prevent that in the future would be to make more powerful servants. As much as it loathed the idea of being forced to take weapons into its own hands and fight its enemies, it hated the idea of giving any of its minions enough power to rival a god even more, for obvious reasons.So, day after day and week after week, its most clever creators hammered rare metals and stitched together alchemically treated leathers to create new forms that were optimized for all future scenarios that it could imagine. This was something it had worked on long before now, even before its first god-yer form had been finalized. Still, most of these had not made the cut.


    Even a few years ago, it had only a few different corpses it could wear on the field of battle should the need arise. In addition to its preferred form, there were a fewrger versions of simr designs. One had been built like a six-legged centaur to favor speed as much as anything else; it had been given four arms so it could fire poison arrows from two different long bows simultaneously, but the Lich had never gotten used to the gait. There were a few flying forms, but all of them were too fragile for its liking, and it doubted it would ever find the need to wear them.


    Of all its early forms, only the chorus had stood out as truly unique. It, too, was terribly fragile, but the ability to sing in the voices of a dozen dead casters wearing a body clothed in the faces of the dead was a terribly powerful thing. Sorcery, as the humans preferred to use it in the heat of battle, involved one man chanting ancient words, but the Lich found that too stifling.


    It generally preferred to show up on the battlefield with every arcane contrivance it expected to need already enchanted into objects and weapons, ready to be used. Though this option was less flexible, the results were generally much more powerful. Indeed, these triumphs of darkness had be somonce now that frost des were regrly handed out to its most powerful death knights to make them even more fearsome.


    This did have the disadvantage of leaving it unprepared for certain situations, though. A chorus of bound mages could summon a twister or two or even rain fire or disease down on its enemies before their vocal cords frayed or their minds gave out.


    That was why, thanks to Brother Verdenin¡¯s inspiration, it was having a staff that functioned on the principles of a pipe organ crafted. The priest hadmissioned arge version of that strange instrument to be built in the inner sanctum, and over thest year after much effort it had finally been constructed. It was evenrger than the one that had existed and Siddrimar, though all of the notes were tuned two octaves lower, and most of the hymns were yed in minor scales with t keys instead of the sharper ones that the Lord of Light¡¯s worshipers had preferred.


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    It still wasn¡¯t as beautiful as it should have been, but the sound of its terrible low notes could be heard and felt almost anywhere in their at this point, which the Lich found to be quite pleasing, especially when a choir filled with men and women who had each had their vocal cords surgically altered so that they could sing only a single note, sang in apaniment to it.


    Brother Verdinan had vowed to rip out his eyes once the undertemple wasplete, and the giant brass pipes were fully decorated and engraved with all the words of the scriptures of darkness, ¡°because after that, he never needed to gaze on anything less perfect again.¡±


    This pleased the Lich, too. It had already decided that when the man died, it would bind the high priest¡¯s soul to the organ so that it could sing the Lich¡¯s praises for the rest of time. That was the only fitting reward for a man who had spread his fervor to so many.


    Even more important than the man¡¯s devotion or the stream of missionaries he was sending north to preach the truth of the darkness to the benighted desert kingdoms and beyond, though, were the mechanics of how that musical instrument worked. It was one thing to have it ying soothing melodies at a volume that might deafen anyone who wandered too close to the main chapel on certain days, but it would be something else to use it as a weapon of war.


    The end result was a sort of music box hidden inside the golden skulls that topped the staff. There were five of them, each from a dead woman or child. They had all been gilded and fixed in such a way so that when the elemental fire and water that were hidden in the staff itself were mixed, the ensuing steam would boil up and force one or more of them to screech the words of a spell at a volume sufficient for the mages that were bound in the little devices to unleash havoc on demand.


    It still wasn¡¯t a perfect solution, but it was a flexible one, and it doubted that any enemy could anticipate such an odd new weapon that might be wielded by any of its bodies. However, other than checking on the Lunaris¡¯s failing health and making progress in the slow work of undermining the All-Father, all that Tenebroum did most days was swirl through the darkness of its own hive, inspecting the craftsmanship of the various vessels that were in production for imaginary fights, and nameless future enemies.


    It would be ready, no matter what it faced. Tenebroum had promised itself that.


    All of these abominations contained a golden core to hold as much of its grand, swirling soul as possible, but that was where the simrities ended. Past that, each one was unique. The most recent corpse to have beenpleted for it was built so that it could not be ambushed, and topping its seven-armed form of imperfect radial symmetry was a crown of eyes that looked in all directions at once.


    It was nothing special, though. Not whenpared to the spidery body that couldunch alchemical webbing that was as sticky as it was poisonous, or the aquatic body that it some day hoped to hunt down Oroza with. It was the evidence that he had not forgotten about her and that when the time was right, it would devour her whole so she could never escape again. Truthfully, her disobedience deserved much greater punishment than that, but it would be self-indulgent to enve her to some menial task in perpetuity, just to risk her escape a second time so that it might make her suffering worse.


    All of these forms were just the tip of the iceberg, though. It had built a gilded skeleton that could be used just like Krulm¡¯venor¡¯s multiplying goblin form, though because it feared what a copy of itself might do if allowed to get free, it had never tested it before. Still, should the need arise, it could be a hundred-fold army all on its own, so it would never need to fear that another army might try to ambush it.


    Most of its forms were more practical than that, though. One had been made to be entirely fireproof for obvious reasons, while several were built to withstand ever-increasing amounts of light, corrosion, or force. By contrast, some were built to radiate heat, cold, or even disease. More than one was only a container and an anchor for the army of shadows that it could unleash to devastating effect.


    Each one was beautiful in its own terrible way. It even had some forms built solely for aesthetic reasons in case it ever wished to grace some mortal kingdom in person for diplomatic reasons. Those had been created long ago, though, and it thought that trying to cater to such lesser beings now would be embarrassing. Instead, it decided it might split the Voice of Reason¡¯s soul the same way it had done with the Dark Paragon upon her return and turn those bodies of gold and ivory to other purposes.


    That was why all but thergest bodies now decorated the undertemple and the area around it. In alcoves between mosaics and on plinths above, the parishioners below they stood there like humanity often did with saints. Each vessel was just another aspect of Tenebroum, though, which was entirely fitting given the character of the worship it demanded. It was a jealous god, and it would never ept another as ally or enemy.


    Only thergest bodies were stored elsewhere. To date, thergest one was a draconic form made in homage to the swamp dragon that had served it so faithfully and for so long. Its ckbirds had found the partial skeleton of another long-dead drake, and its workers hadbored tirelessly to create a body using those magnificent parts. It still didn¡¯t fly, of course. Of all the magics out there, flight was the trickiest, and you had to give up so much to obtain it. Even so, each scale had been runed and warded, and in time, when it decided which terrible breath weapon to install, it would be a force to be reckoned with.


    Taken as a whole, the Lich was content. If it was ever forced to fight again, it would certainly have the right weapon for the job.

 Chapter 176: Forever’s End

    Chapter 176: Forever¡¯s End


    Leo was fighting imaginary enemies on the cliffs that overlooked the beach when the mage approached him. He had seen the man looking down on them from his tower many times, but he¡¯d only ever seen him outside the tower before with Jordan. That would have been enough to mark the circumstance as odd, even if he wasn¡¯t strolling toward Leo like he didn¡¯t have a care in the world.


    He wasn¡¯t sure whether he would have felt the goosebumps of fear rising on his arms and neck if he couldn¡¯t see the ck aura that the man possessed, but then he could scarcely turn his sight off now. So, he would never know.


    All mages had a touch of darkness in them, ording to Brother Faerbar. Leo wasn¡¯t sure why that was true, but it certainly seemed to be the case in the only two that he¡¯d seen. It wasn¡¯t the same darkness that he¡¯d seen in the bad men who lived at Sedgim Manor, but it certainly wasn¡¯t light.


    Still, it was something that seemed to advance with age or perhaps with the casting of spells. He wasn¡¯t sure which. Jordan¡¯s soul had gotten much darker since they¡¯de here.


    Compared to their host, though, Jordan¡¯s soul was almost as pure as his own. The tower mage, which was all the children called the man, was so dark that he bordered on being a ck silhouette, and Leo had trouble seeing the details of the man even as he approached him.


    ¡°What do you train so hard for?¡± the Tower Mage asked when he finally got close enough to speak without raising his voice too much. ¡°The barrier protects us all. Your time would be better spent helping with the fields or¡ª¡±


    ¡°Not all evil can be kept away with trickery and magic,¡± the boy said, paraphrasing a psalm that actually read ¡®with nning¡¯ instead of magic. ¡°Sometimes a sword is required.¡±


    Leo didn¡¯t look at the mage, not after the initial nce. He found the swirling form that was more absence than man to be a little unnerving. Instead, he kept his eyes locked straight ahead as he swung his wooden sword in strikes that were as precise as they were repetitive.


    ¡°You think my magic will fail then?¡± the mage said in an amused tone.¡°What I think doesn¡¯t matter,¡± Leo said, not sure what to say. He might not be the eleven-year-old he was stuck as anymore, but he had no idea how to handle a situation like this. He wasn¡¯t good at much else besides fighting. ¡°No matter what you do with your spells, the darkness is already in here with us.¡±


    That made the mageugh out loud, and Leo had no idea if that was a good or a bad thing. ¡°All mages are full of darkness, is it? I should have known you¡¯d sound like a Sidrimite with that much light inside you.¡±


    ¡°No, all mages are full of darkness,¡± Leo corrected. ¡°Jordan only has a little, but you¡­¡±


    ¡°Aren¡¯t you precocious,¡± the Tower Mage sighed. ¡°Well, how about I let you in on a little secret to ease your worries. This darkness¡­ it¡¯s not evil. Not like the undead that roam around, it¡¯s¡­ or has my apprentice told you this already.¡±


    ¡°Jordan?¡± Leo asked, finally stopping his strikes and resting his sword on the ground as he turned to face the strange man. ¡°He hasn¡¯t ever brought the darkness up. Not like this.¡±


    ¡°Well, that''s typical,¡± the tower mage nodded. ¡°No matter what Siddrim says, mages are not evil. It¡¯s just that the longer they serve Lunaris, the more light she takes to make new stars.¡±


    Leo nodded along like that made any sense, but truthfully, it sounded pretty dumb to him. If an evil soul let in darkness, and a good soul was one that was flooded with light, then giving away that light for magic would make you just as evil as any other reason, wouldn¡¯t it? He wasn¡¯t sure, but really it didn¡¯t matter.


    More than anything, the intensity of the man-made Leo felt like he needed to get the hell out of there. For once, he sorely regretted the way he spurred everyone else and their chores to focus on practicing alone.


    ¡°I¡­ uhmm, that¡¯s interesting,¡± he stammered, ¡°But actually, I¡ª¡±


    ¡°Oh, you¡¯re not going anywhere, I¡¯m afraid,¡± the mage said with a poisonced voice. ¡°I¡¯ve been watching you, and I¡¯ve decided you¡¯re the perfect person to help me with my new experiment.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t know much about magic, I¡¯m afraid,¡± he answered as he started to back away slowly. ¡°But I promise that when I find Jordan, I¡¯ll let him know.¡±


    ¡°Oh, my apprentice can¡¯t help me with this one, I¡¯m afraid,¡± the mage said dismissively as Leo turned. He nned to bolt, but no sooner had he taken a step toward town than a pair of ghostly soldiers appeared in front of him with swords drawn. ¡°This is an experiment that only someone overflowing with light like you can help me with, my dear boy.¡±


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    A shiver went down Leo¡¯s spine as he took in those words. As jarring as they were, though, they weren¡¯t enough to stop him from studying his opponents.


    <em>No, they aren¡¯t ghosts,</em> he decided. Ghosts would have had ck streamers and taint that tried to leach the color from the surrounding air. Whatever they were, these things weren¡¯t dead. Instead, they were magical constructs that glimmered with iridescent cyan light.


    <em>Maybe they¡¯re illusions,</em> he thought more, hopefully.


    That was possible, and for a moment, Leo almost tried to walk right through them, but the way they held their swords as he moved closer was enough to convince him an attack was imminent, so he lifted his own sword into a guard, not certain what wood would do against magic, but unwilling to go quietly.


    ¡°Nothing you do will make me help you,¡± Leo spat. ¡°And if you hurt me, then Jordan will¡ª¡±


    ¡°There is nothing that my apprentice can do to me that I cannot stop with a wave of my hand,¡± the shadowy mage said in a tone of utter assurance. ¡°Even if I were to train him for a century or more, he¡¯d never be more than a middling hedge mage. Nowe along quietly, and I won¡¯t have to hurt you¡­ much.¡±


    Leo charged the closest enemy and roared a battle cry as loud as he could while heshed out with his sword. If this maniac didn¡¯t want to hurt him, then that was his only advantage. Maybe he would hesitate, and Leo could fight free. Then he could¡­


    His n of action fell apart as he brought his wooden de down hard on the first guard, making him shatter into a million glittering pieces like he¡¯d been a stained-ss window and not a soldier at all. The other one brought his translucent sword down on Leo, even as he brought his wooden one up in a smooth overhand block. The result was just as spectacr, and the second illusion shattered as well.


    For a moment, he felt excellent. Intellectually, he knew he couldn¡¯t beat a mage, but part of him wondered if maybe the man was a fraud. That moment of confidence faded as soon as he realized that the pieces weren''t going to vanish. Instead, they swirled around him like a constetion of broken ss.


    ¡°Just remember, I did offer to do this the easy way,¡± the dark mage said in a sardonic tone.


    Leo had only an instant to process those words before the twinkling bits of magic closed in around him on all sides like a swarm of bees. He didn¡¯t panic or try to fight them, though. He knew that would be hopeless. Instead, he lunged at the mage¡¯s inky form. If he could just hit him, then perhaps he might distract him enough to ruin the spell.


    Leo never made it that far. Instead, the magic overwhelmed him in a storm of stinging. He tried to fight them off, but everywhere they struck him, they stuck to him like tar. Bit by bit, he slowed, but he was practically paralyzed after a few seconds as what had been fragile as gossamer before hardened to be harder than wood.


    Once that was done, it started to expand again. He was in a cage of sorts now, but it was a cage in the shape of a body, like one of the guards he¡¯d just shattered. This time, though, it didn¡¯t break; it started moving, walking back to the tower, one plodding step at a time.


    ¡°Let me out of here!¡± Leo raged, but it was useless. His hands and feet were stuck inside this weird thing, and even if he had enough air to breathe inside the thing¡¯s hollow body, it practically muted him. He knew that no matter how loud he shouted, no one would hear him.


    ¡°Syraliam¡¯s Shapable Servants is an awkward spell, but for moments like this¡­ well, think of it as a way that I can bring you to my tower that doesn¡¯t involve maiming or any other permanent damage. For someone else I might just bend their mind, but the light doesn¡¯t take kindly to such tricks,¡± the mage exined as he started walking alongside his prisoner as if he cared about any of this.


    All Leo wanted while the man talked was to break free and rip out his throat. However, like everything else in life, he simply wasn¡¯t strong enough.


    Still, as the minutes passed while they walked to the tower, that rage started to wane, slowly souring into despair. He wasn¡¯t ready to give up or anything, but if things continued that way, then he might have. Then, as they approached the door to the tower, he saw his friends running toward him.


    Some of them had wooden tools, others had farm equipment. It was clear that someone had heard his battle cry earlier, and the world had passed through sanctuary. Even a few of the vigers wereing to see what all themotion was.


    Jordan was not among them, he realized. Instead, he was standing in front of the door to the tower, barring the way like he''d known this was going to happen all along.


    ¡°Thank you all foring to investigate the source of the trouble,¡± the mage said, addressing the growing crowd, ¡°But I assure you I have it all well in hand.¡± The mage¡¯s voice was calm, which, more than anything, told Leo just how little of a threat the small mob was to a man like him. ¡°I just¡ª¡±


    ¡°Get your hands off Leo!¡± Reggie yelled. His words were the leading edge of a chorus, and Leo quickly realized that almost everyone had shown up.


    In the initial moments, he hadn¡¯t noticed, but now that they¡¯d stopped as the mage attempted to reason with the crowd, he could count almost a dozen pairs of glowing eyes looking back at him from the mob. Everyone was there. Well, everyone except for Cynara.


    <em>Where was she,</em> he wondered, even as he hoped she was sneaking up behind them.


    The mage ignored all of them, though, and instead turned to face Jordan, who stood there holding that book he carried everywhere now. ¡°Don¡¯t look at me,¡± Jordan said with a shrug, ¡°I didn¡¯t tell them. This is always the way it was going to happen once you decided you could use other people like pawns.¡±


    ¡°And who¡¯s going to stop me?¡± the dark mage scoffed. ¡°You?

 Chapter 177: Forever’s End (2)

    Chapter 177: Forever¡¯s End (2)


    ¡°We both know I can do nothing to stop you,¡± Jordan said with a shake of his head. Leo¡¯s heart sank at those words before the man continued. ¡°But your weakness doesn¡¯t involve you, does it, Tazuranth.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ve had centuries to n for every eventuality,¡± the mage boasted. ¡°I was an Archmage before your grandparents were born, and the spells that power sanctuary are wless. You can do nothing to stop me from harvesting this light, but even if you could, you wouldn¡¯t because you know how badly the night sky needs more stars.¡±


    ¡°You might find some twisted words that exin to me why we need to sacrifice one child to save the world,¡± Jordan agreed, ¡°but certainly not 12 of them, and certainly not Leo. I personally picked him off of a cursed battlefield. He didn¡¯t survive that ordeal just so you could¡ª¡±


    ¡°Enough,¡± Tazuranth spat. ¡°Lunaris is on her deathbed, and I must prepare for whates next. Move aside, and I won¡¯t strike you down.¡±


    Jordan only smiled at that because that was what caused the rest of the children to charge the Archmage. Of course, that probably wouldn¡¯t do any more than Jordan¡¯s words, but it still warmed his heart to see the boys and girls he¡¯d fought and yed with for so long besides trying to save him from certain doom.


    Then, with a wave of his hand and a few words, the Archmage produced a faint, hazy cloud that wafted over the crowd, instantly dropping most of them to the patchy crabgrass where they¡¯d been running.


    Toman held his breath and ran the farthest, which made Leo smile a bit. Despite everything else that was happening, he was getting stronger, and Leo could respect that. Still, momentster, when everyone was asleep or dead on the grass, all Leo could do was struggle at his bonds and re at the mage. ¡°If you¡¯ve hurt them, I¡¯ll¡ª¡±


    ¡°You¡¯ll what,¡± the mageughed, ¡°I might have to deal with my misguided apprentice before he damages something. But the rest of you¡­ After I¡¯m done siphoning the light from you, I¡¯ll repeat the same with your friends, and if you survive the experience, well, maybe we can do it over again and¡­¡±


    The mage¡¯s words trailed off as an arrow suddenly arced through the air over the heads of all of them. ¡°No!¡± the mage yelled as he suddenly understood Jordan¡¯s threat, even if Leo still didn¡¯t. He had no idea what would happen next, but at least now he knew where Cynaria had been.


    She¡¯d been at the archery butt more than she¡¯d been at the beachtely, getting better and better with her short bow. She¡¯d said it was to give other people a chance at winning, but that rang hollow to him. He didn¡¯t know what it was she was aiming at, but whatever it was, the first arrow must have missed because she fired a second.


    This time, he and the Archmage both saw her. ¡°Little brat,¡± he growled as he pulled out a wand from his robes and aimed it at the sky, causing the wispy afternoon clouds that dotted the blue sky above them to begin to darken and rumble.


    Leo knew with certainty that he was going to strike her down. He was going to call fire or lightning down from the heavens and annihte her in a single blow, and there was nothing he could do to stop the man, no matter how hard he struggled against his illusionary bonds.


    Then, there was the sound of breaking ss somewhere in the distance. Leo didn¡¯t have a chance to wonder what it was, though, because his full attention was taken up by the ripples that traveled across the sky. The shield¡­ the dome that had hidden them from the world for so long¡­ it was fading. No, worse, it was copsing.


    Leo had seen that magic for a long time now. It was a familiar sight that was always in the background of everything they did, and now it was vanishing. That could only mean one thing. He reluctantly tore his eyes from the ripples and looked to the Archmage.


    Now that the barrier he¡¯d built so long ago was gone, time was flowing in, and the mage was drowning in it. It was hard to see the details exactly because he was so covered in shadows, but Leo could see him drop the wand even as he clutched his chest and fell over.


    The transformation was clearer in the other residents of Sanctuary. Each of them aged decades in seconds, and by the time they fell to the ground, they were already shriveled corpses. Those graying, shrinking corpses didn¡¯t stop aging when they died. Instead, they continued to rapidly decay until they were only skeletons wearing the clothes of the living.


    It was an impossible thing, and he doubted that everyone else would believe it when they woke up, but he¡¯d seen it, and he could not doubt what his eyes showed him. Really, they should be grateful that they hadn¡¯t had to watch, he thought as he watched thest of the dust that had once been the Archmage blow away, leaving behind none of the darkness that had poisoned the man¡¯s soul.


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    Even as he saw Cynaria running toward him from across the field, part of him expected the tower to copse, but whatever strange magics the Archmage Tazuranth had women seemed only to affect the living, and they were all gone now. Well, all of those that had been sheltered by time for more than a few years, anyway.


    ¡°By the gods, Leo, you¡¯re safe. He didn¡¯t get you!¡± she said as she hugged him so tightly he thought she might crush his ribs.


    It was only when Cynara reached him and hugged him tightly that he realized he was not unaffected either. He was taller than her now. Only by a few inches, but still, that was all the height in the world for someone who had been waiting for years not to be the shortest of his group.


    At that moment, Leo felt ashamed for the selfish joy that he felt, but he couldn¡¯t stop himself from feeling it just the same. He¡¯d finally gotten something he¡¯d wanted, but at what cost?


    ¡°How did you know?¡± he asked finally. ¡°To shoot, I mean? Did Jordan tell you?¡±


    ¡°Not exactly,¡± she said, stepping back self-consciously. It was easy to see that she¡¯d grown up, too, but it was even easier to look away and pretend she hadn¡¯t. ¡°One dayst year, I asked him about this spell, and he¡­ well, he pointed to that little crystal right on top of the spiral and said that it powered the whole thing and that if anything ever went wrong, all someone would have to do was break it, and the tower mage would lose all his power over us.¡±


    She looked around at all the skeletons, and until that moment, he wasn¡¯t sure that she understood that she¡¯d done that, but when she began to cry, it was obvious that she knew. ¡°But I didn¡¯t know¡­ I didn¡¯t think¡­¡± she sobbed, embracing him a second time as she cried into his shoulder.


    Leo had no idea what to do with a crying girl, especially not one that had suddenly be so pretty. So, he just held her as he took in the scene, not sure what else to do.


    With the mage gone and his magic failing, everyone started to stir once more. However, the mood was one of confusion, not celebration, and it wasn¡¯t until Jordan woke up and started to exin things that they made any sense.


    ¡°He¡¯d been nning to use all of you for some time,¡± Jordan said, ¡°I wish I could have taken you far away from here to prevent this, but it was much too dangerous before now outside of the protection of his spell.¡±


    ¡°But aren¡¯t we all outside the protection of that horrible man¡¯s magic now?¡± Jenna asked. ¡°It¡¯s gone, isn¡¯t it?¡±


    ¡°It is,¡± Jordan agreed. ¡°And the world is a lot more dangerous than what it was thest time we were out there. That¡¯s true, too. But we¡¯ll do whatever we have to do next, it will be okay.¡±


    ¡°Okay?¡± Cynara practically shouted as they all gathered together among the corpses. ¡°Okay?! How can you say that? I killed everyone. The townsfolk didn¡¯t deserve this. How¡­ why would you want me to do this?¡±


    She was in control of her tears now, but only because of her anger. They were all getting used to these strange changes. No one looked the same as they had before, and everyone¡¯s clothes had gotten too small and tight as they¡¯d each aged almost 4 years in a few seconds.


    ¡°You didn¡¯t kill anyone,¡± Jordan said calmly. ¡°You saved Leo. Everything that happened to make that happen is Archmage Tazuranth¡¯s fault. If you hadn¡¯t stopped him, then once he was done with Leo, he would havee for the rest of you, one at a time, until you were the corpses that decorated the ground.¡±


    ¡°But¡ª¡± she started.


    ¡°No buts,¡± he chided her. ¡°This is how it had to happen. There was simply no other way forward from here. Everything will move much quicker from now on, and you must be ready for it.¡±


    ¡°But the harvest,¡± Sam protested. ¡°Surely we must¡­¡±


    ¡°We will pick what we can, and then we will move before the Lich can find us,¡± Jordan answered. ¡°It is overwhelmingly powerful, but it is not omniscient, and a moving target is much harder to surround and prepare for.¡±


    The conversation continued on for a long while after that. It was like the mage thought this would be thest time they talked or something. Jordan was often very patient with them, but today he was especially so, and he talked until the sun set before they decided it was time for dinner, even though the conversation mostly went in circles as different children asked him the same questions in different ways.


    How could they not, though? People were dead, and everyone was changed. Leo had been the shortest for years and years, and now, in a single afternoon, everyone was changed, and the ying field that they¡¯d all known for so long was equalized and distorted.


    At that moment, more than anything, Leo wanted to battle so they could all test themselves and learn what their older bodies were capable of. Instead, as everyone went back to the barn that had be their home all this time, he walked to the cliffs and looked out at the nighttime sky and tried to make sense of it all.


    With the spell of Sanctuary shattered, the weather had gotten worse almost immediately, and it was chillier now than it should have been for this time of the year. The miasma of the outside world had also started to leak in, but he couldn¡¯t do anything about that. All he could do was look out over the ocean with its barely visible white caps and listen to the sound of the waves. Then, just as he went to go back and join everyone else, he saw something.


    Even from the cliff, he could see something glimmering down there in the nighttime seas, not so far from shore. If the moon had been out, he would have thought it was nothing more than a reflection. As it was, though. The night was pitch ck, and it was only his glowing eyes that let him see as he started to pick his path down to the shore to investigate.


    Leo had no idea what it was they were supposed to do next. He did know one thing, though. He knew that he was never going to leave an unanswered question behind again.

 Chapter 178: New Moon

    Chapter 178: New Moon


    The moon was ck now, but thanks to Taz¡¯s endless conversations about celestial objects, and tables of sr and lunar motion, Jordan still knew that it was time for it to rise. It was nothing but a shadow in the sky now as it rose, but even if his eyes worked as well as they used to, he doubted very much that he¡¯d be able to find it, even with Taz¡¯s telescope.


    More than that, though, even beyond the knowledge of where it would be in the sky, and when, he could feel it calling to him. All through his long talk with the children, and even during dinner, he could feel it like a pressure on the back of his mind. Even if he knew it was rted to the moon, though, he did not know why. Was she angry with him for murdering her chosen champion?


    Eventually, that pressure became impossible to ignore, so he stepped out into the cold night air. He wasn¡¯t sure if he would make the long walk to the tower and try to find it with the telescope, or what, be he felt the need to be outside that throbbed in time with his heart. It turned out that it wasn¡¯t the fresh air, he required, though. It was the solitude.


    As soon as he got far enough from the light eyed children that he could no longer hear their talking and chatter, though, he could hear something closer to a whisper or a buzz, from somewhere far away. This confused Jordan, but even if he wanted to resist it, he couldn¡¯t have. It was practically apulsion. So, he followed it, ever deeper into the unharvested fields of Sanctuary, where the darkness and the distant sounds of the oceanbined to create something deeper than silence. It was there he heard the words clearly for the first time.


    ¡°Come to me, Jordan. There¡¯s not much time left,¡± the voice whispered.


    ¡°Come to you?¡± he asked, confused. ¡°Where? How?¡±


    ¡°Jump,¡± the whispery voice breathed, so close that it tickled his ear and made him turn around to find no one there. ¡°Take a leap of faith, as you did so long ago¡­¡±


    Jordan¡¯s blood ran cold as he suddenly understood who it was that was speaking to him, and what it was she was asking him to do. His first urge was to ask where he was supposed to go, but he suppressed that too, because he already knew the answer, and it was simply too absurd to hear aloud.


    <em>The moon. She wants me to teleport to the thrice-damned moon! </em>He thought, as he stood there, gazing half blind into the night sky. Jordan sighed at the impossibility of the request. No one had ever teleported half so far and lived to tell the tale, but somehow, she wanted him to cast a spell that he hadn¡¯t used in years, and reach a ce so far away that no mortal had ever trod upon in all of recorded history?


    <em>Perhaps it¡¯s not Lunaris, </em>he thought in a moment of self-doubt. <em>Perhaps it''s merely some wraith trying to trick me into destroying myself.</em>


    That was practically a joke of course. If something was watching him there were easier ways to strike down an out of practice apprentice like him than using self-doubt. Still, he clung to that delusion for a moment in an attempt to ignore the memory of hisst and only brush with the Goddess so long ago.


    Of course, it was impossible to forget moments like that. He still had nightmares about the moment he felt the world freezing into ce, locking him beyond time in space so he could bitterly regret his miscalction until his mind disintegrated from madness.


    In his nightmares, though, there was no Goddess to pull him free. Of course. He was just trapped there in the dark with nothing but Brother Faerbar¡¯s eyes glowing in usation forever.


    Jordan took a few deep breaths to calm down, as he started to run the incantations through his mind that would let him step between worlds. He probably still trusted himself to jump across the several hundred yards that stood between him and the tower. In the daytime, at least. Jordan knew every inch of Sanctuary, and of that tower, still, further that that seemed like a death sentence, and the moon was a lot further away than the top of Taz¡¯s now empty tower.


    Jordan searched the horizon, looking for the ce without a single blurry star, and when he finally found it, he wondered if such a thing is even possible. ¡°Are you really going to do whatever a voice in your head tells you to?¡± Jordan asked himself, as he tried to talk himself out of this. He already knew the answer, though.


    Suicide or not, he had been called, and he was going. His only regret was that he hadn¡¯t told one of the children. They would wonder where it was he¡¯d gone. They would feel like he¡¯d abandoned them, but he¡¯d taken care of them for as long as he could, and he could not resist the way the Moon Goddess¡¯s plea tugged at his soul.


    Then, without even so much as a backward nce at the house, he took a deep breath and started to chant. Despite its risks, teleportation was a rtively straightforward spell, when used as intended. This, though, was longer and moreplicated. It took time to gather this much power. One could not hope to cross vast distances without proper preparation.


    So, even though he knew that it was impossible, he let the essence build inside of him for several minutes. He continued until his body started to hum with barely suppressed power, and the air around him started to twinkle with motes of essence. Only then, when he could handle no more did he release the spell.


    The world jerked hard immediately. The sensation of motion was so violent that the battered old copy of the Book of Ways that he¡¯d been holding fell into the field as a spasm of shock wracked his body. He couldn¡¯t worry about that, though. Instead, he could only focus on the destination.


    When a mage teleported, technically he didn¡¯t move. It was the world that moved around him. Still, that knowledge wasn¡¯t enough to stop him from feeling like he was soaring into the night sky. He was flying skyward in a journey that could not end well, but that did not stop him from moving forward like an arrow from Cynara¡¯s bow.


    Eventually, though, just like an arrow, he slowly lost speed, and hovered there, lost in the darkness between heaven and earth. Unlike the proverbial arrow, though, he would never return to earth and dash himself to pieces against the ground far below. Instead, he would simply be lost between ces. At least, he would be, if not for a lifeline from the Goddess.


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    Whenst they¡¯d met in the inbetween he was in the darkness beneath the ground, and though her hand glowed so brightly it was hard to appreciate her beauty, it was smooth to the touch. This time though, it was the hand of a mother, or a grandmother, care worn with age, and the pull he felt as she grabbed his hand and pulled him forward was weaker than it had been before.


    Weaker was a rtive word, though. After a few seconds he was soaring almost as fast as he¡¯d been at the start, and the distant, blurring stars were soaring by him like a swarm of myopic fireflies. Still, he kept going further and further away.


    Honestly, he never dreamed the moon was this far away. He¡¯d expected that his leap into the void would have gotten him most of the way there, but it did not. Instead, for minute after minutes he was dragged skyward, until the dark of the moon blotted out everything, and he was in the void once more.


    Then, just as quickly as his journey started, it stopped, and he was standing there amongst the ruins of some giant work of cyclopian architecture, with only Lunaris¡¯s fading light to hold back whatever it was lurking in the squirming shadows. And he was holding her hand. He was holding the Goddess¡¯s hand while she regarded him with faint amusement.


    He pulled his hand away like he¡¯d been scalded, and bowed as low as he could. ¡°Mydy,¡± he said, not sure how one addressed a divinity. ¡°I¡­ your, uhmm¡ª¡±


    She dismissed him. ¡°Please,¡± she said. ¡°There¡¯s no time for that. There are more important things right now than stuffy formalities.¡±


    ¡°Tell me what you need then,¡± Jordan said, rising.


    ¡°I need you to kill me,¡± she said, producing a silvery knife from seemingly nowhere. ¡°Before <em>it</em> wins.¡±


    As she spoke the word ¡®it¡¯, she nodded to the dark, to where the squirming shadowsy. For just a moment, her light red bright enough that even his failing vision gave him a pretty good idea of the throbbing, serpentine nightmares thaty beyond her dim ring of light.


    ¡°Kill you?¡± he repeatedly, dumbly, as he took the knife and looked at it. ¡°Why?¡±


    ¡°Because sometimes, that is the way that my divinity is passed, from person to person, in a chain that goes back to the very beginning of these terrible cycles,¡± she answered with a wan smile. ¡°and if the Lich¡¯s cancerous servant is the one to strike me down¡­ well, there is no telling what darkness it will unleash. It will snuff out the stars and open the floodgates, which will almost certainly wash the world away.¡±


    As she spoke, he gazed up into the night sky and saw an orb that was much like the moon used to be, only it was colored in greens and blues. <em>Is that the world?</em> He wondered. <em>Is that where I was? </em>It looked so tiny and distant.


    He didn¡¯t ask about that, though. Instead, noticing that the ring on light that the two of them stood in had gotten slightly smaller he asked, ¡°Why me? I¡¯m¡­ I¡¯m not even a full mage. It should have been Taz. I¡ª¡±


    ¡°That man was a monster as you well know,¡± she chided him. ¡°I only held out as long as I did because I knew that the oath I swore so long ago to keep him from making more mischief would be absolved by his death. No, Jordan Sedgim, you are not much as a mage, it¡¯s true. I wasn¡¯t either, though, when I was chosen. You are a good man, though, and you saved those children even though no one forced you to. That is all that matters to me. You¡¯ll figure everything else, in time.¡±


    Her words made sense, but they did nothing to address the real concern. That concern was overridden by the darkness that was crawling every closer. He couldn¡¯t make out the details, but he could see the surface of the moon bubbling beneath their feet as something grew there, or perhaps attempted to burrow to the surface.


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry,¡± she said, trying her best to smile. ¡°The boy already has his de, and the shadows grow overconfident. You will see everything when the moon is whole once more. It is all falling into ce¡±


    In the end, Jordancked the steel to plunge the knife into the dying woman¡¯s heart. He simply couldn¡¯t do it. All he could manage to do was hold the de steady while she stepped forward and did it herself, spilling red blood all over her fine white dress.


    Jordan suppressed the urge to apologize. Whether he was apologizing for what he was doing or wasn¡¯t doing, though, he wasn¡¯t sure. In that tense silence, though, he could see the shapes in the dark start to wither and die, and he could feel a terrible power flowing from the de that held the knife into him.


    It started slowly, but as Lunaris¡¯s eyes closed, and she began to fade away like a ghost, that trickle became a flood. Soon it was a dozen times more overwhelming than the essence he¡¯d gathered for his most recent teleportation spell. It wasn¡¯t overflowing, though. It was consuming him. He was on fire, and as he started screaming in agony, he knew that it was his humanity that was burning away.


    Knowing didn¡¯t stop him from zing white brightly enough that it drove back the things that lurked in the darkness. <em>No, it¡¯s not driving them back,</em> he realized. It¡¯s erasing them.


    Unmaking them was probably a better word, but it only urred to him after he watched the toppled stones of the coliseum fade away, to be reced by a structure that was probably what it looked like before the copse. Once he looked beyond himself, though, he found it hard to return to his burning body. Instead, his view spiraled further and further out.


    The moon itself was being reborn, and though the stars themselves were not brightening, their patterns were bing clearer to him by the minute. So were the horrible things that they were holding back, in the darkness beyond that vast andplicated. Jordan turned away from all of that, and looked instead back to the world he¡¯d left behind. He didn¡¯t understand any of what was happening. Taz might have been a monster, but he was a monster that had trained for lifetimes to be ready for this. Jordan was just the third son of a minor house that knew enough to cast a few spells.


    <em>I was a man,</em> he corrected himself.


    He definitely didn¡¯t suffer from that limitation anymore. That was the reason he could look down on the world beneath him with such rity that he could see the children out withnterns now looking for him, and why he could see Leo standing in the surf talking with a ghostly dragon while he held a gleaming sword in his hand.


    It was all too much to take in, and as soon as he tried to study the blurry vision in more detail a wave of dizziness took him and he pulled back showing him the wider view, and the way that the entire region was polluted by darkness so badly, that not even his bright, clear moonlight could do much to prate the fog.


    <em>That¡¯s because the moon is not the sun, </em>he reminded himself with something he¡¯d never heard before, as if it was something he¡¯d known forever. <em>The Sun¡¯s job is to burn away the dark, and mine is to hold back the night. </em>


    With some reluctance, he turned away from the world and back toward the of constetions that kept the monsters of the beyond at bay. He needed to figure all of this out, and that was the first ce he needed to start.


    In the end, the only evidence that anyone would find when they looked for him outsideter that night was the book of ways lying in the dirt where he¡¯d dropped it. That, and a bright full moon hanging in the sky where the dark and battered one had been earlier that evening. Lunaris was dead, and for now at least, Jordan would reign in her ce.


    <em>I¡¯m going to need toe up with a better name before I get any priests or whatever, </em>he thought in embarrassment.<em> Who ever heard of a God named Jordan?</em>

 Chapter 179: Catching the Scent

    Chapter 179: Catching the Scent


    The Queen of Thorns loved nothing more than to hunt and prowl in the woods. She did it almost every night without attempts to ck or shirk, and she regrly brought her lord fresh corpses and carcasses to keep its favor. Somehow, though, despite that, the dread Lich still saw fit to ruin her joy by saddling her with a new responsibility.


    ¡°But I don¡¯t need help,¡± she protested. ¡°Have I not bested every small God and Goddess that I have caught the scent of?¡±


    ¡°You have,¡± the Lich agreed. ¡°This is not a punishment, though it can be if you wish it. It is exactly as you said. I need to catch the scent of something, but know not where it is.¡±


    ¡°But I can¡ª¡± she started to protest.


    ¡°Silence!¡± the Lich roared through her mind, making the Queen of Thorns tremble as the power of thatmand froze every part of her being. She felt it briefly sift through her soul, looking for signs of disloyalty before it continued to speak.¡°This is an old grave from centuries past. I must find it, and so I will add it to your endless hunt.¡±


    The dark Goddess knew better than to question the darkness roiling in her mind a second time. Instead, she merely nodded and answered, ¡°Whatever it is you require, I shall do.¡±


    The Lich went on at length after that, exining the worm to her in broad strokes and how it expected it to be some ancient god of decay or death that it wished to harvest and dissect. That was also when it exined the nature of the hound to her and how he¡¯d vivisected to better understand it before releasing it into her service.


    ¡°It will obey you in all things,¡± the Lich promised her, ¡°But never remove its cor. It is a powerful, single-minded thing, and it will rip you to shreds should you give it the chance.¡±


    The Queen of Thrones doubted that as she eyed the gaunt and mangy, pony-sized wolf, but it had only taken a couple of weeks in the nighttime forests with it to see that there might be some truth to it. The thing was a monster that could rip the throat out of anything they encountered and had a nose sharp enough to hunt down anything she cared to name. Neither of those frightened her. It was the way it looked at her, with a glimmer of malicious intelligence, that made her worry about what it might be scheming or nning. The Lich had told her it was no smarter than an animal, but she¡¯d fought and devoured almost every animal that the forests had to offer her at this point, and none of them looked at her like this, no matter what form she took.


    None of this was enough to stop her from doing what she had been created for; she just enjoyed it less now. Bloodshed was always fun for her. She enjoyed ripping her pretty to pieces when she was allowed to do so, but even more than that, she enjoyed stalking and hunting her prey for nights at a time before she attacked it to truly understand it.


    That was impossible with this giant wolf in tow. It was a giant ball of rage and violence that never failed to charge loudly through the underbrush, baying for blood. Its prey wouldn''t get away very often, but it was exhausting work that could be handled much more elegantly.


    Despite that, they were stillrgely sessful. Together, over the next few months, they brought down small groups andrge game, but there was no joy in it. It had be work instead of pleasure, and her trusty hound made short work of even notoriously difficult-to-kill beasts like hydras with their nearly infinite capacity for regeneration.


    Of course, there were some monsters that tested the hound¡¯s limits as well. The Lich had told her that the thing could not be killed, but on a day when they were ambushed by a hunting party made up of a vengeful goddess and a band of angry forest children armed with those terrible blows, the Queen of Thorns was fairly certain that the thing was dead, at least for a day or two.


    That was bound to happen eventually, since it had sense of stealth or timing. The beast rampaged everywhere that it went like a force of nature, but the Queen of Thorns didn¡¯t mind. She just melted into the foliage and hunted them one at a time until the only living things left in that piney wilderness were small birds chirping pleasantly away while she tried to decide what to do with the beast.


    The answer, of course, turned out to be vast quantities of blood. It healed or perhaps revived nicely after that. She wasn¡¯t sure which.


    After that, she stayed away from the forest for a while, instead leading the things through swamps and anywhere else she could think of that a worm might like to be. She was desperate to get rid of this burden and return to the life she¡¯d had until she¡¯d been saddled with it.


    However, they found no trace of whatever it was the Lich was looking for. Not until one day when they were crossing a particrly rugged section of foothills on the north side of the Wyrmspires. The two of them were there in search of fresh hunting grounds where the denizens wouldn¡¯t be expecting them enough to set an ambush, when suddenly the hound stood stock still, sniffing the air.


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    The Goddess paused, unsure of what had happened. <em>Did it sense another trap?</em> She wondered.


    However, before she could even attempt to draw that information out of the beast in its limited way, it bounded off into the night. The Queen of Thorns let her legs grow longer so that she could stride ever further in an attempt to keep up with the thing¡¯s desperate sprint as it charged through the hills, but eventually, she was forced to transform into a cat just to keep up.


    When it reached the Barrows, the only reason it stopped was because she yelled out, ¡°Freezzze¡­¡± in a strangled voice that was more of a cat screech than human words.


    Still, it chaffed at hermand, and for the first time since the Lich had assigned her this monster, it tried to disobey her. It struggled at its cor and tried to push forward thest few feet to what it had found. It even growled at her, but in the end, there was nothing it could do. Their Master¡¯s magic was much too strong.


    She didn¡¯t know what it was the thing had found, but there was no way she was going to let it go even one step further before she found out. That would have to wait until she recovered from the unexpected exertion, though. She took a few minutes to catch her breath and watch her hound¡¯s lungs heave like it expected to start breathing fire at any moment. They¡¯d eaten up miles in only a few minutes, and both of them were spent.


    When the Goddess recovered, she asked, ¡°What is it? What¡¯s down there? Is it the worm our Master seeks?¡±


    The hound didn¡¯t answer. It couldn¡¯t, but it barked as it pawed the ground restlessly in a way that she read as restless. Honestly, despite its strange bestial intelligence, that was as close as she¡¯d seen ite to warning her so far.


    Once she walked past it and started to descend into the gaping doorway, it began to bark and growl more loudly. <em>Was it concerned about her? Was it dangerous down here? </em>


    She didn¡¯t know, but it didn¡¯t matter to her. There were few things in this world more dangerous than her, and to prove the point, the ws on all six of her hands grew as she descended the stairs, and she traced the stone with them, just loudly enough to let whatever was down here know that she wasing.


    Sadly, the effort at intimidation was wasted. The tomb, or whatever it had been once, was empty. Worse, it was ransacked. Something had been here once, but the sarcophagus was broken on the floor, and the bodies in the alcoves had been desecrated and smashed. Whatever it was the Lich had been looking for was probably long gone.


    The Goddess of Thorns sighed. Now, she would never be rid of that beast.


    She stood there for several moments, studying the scene. If the hound outside wasn¡¯t still baying and desperately howling like it had chased the fox back to itsir, she wouldn¡¯t have given this ce a second look. It had obviously been sacked and looted by men long ago. Still, the beast seemed certain, so she would look harder.


    The Queen of Thorns reached out to the nts that had taken root in the cracks between the stones that made up the floor, the molds and fungus that blossomed in the corners, and the slime in the areas nearest the door where water pooled. Then, when she had collected her audience, she began to hum a melody.


    It was a sad song, and she¡¯d long since forgotten the words. She wasn¡¯t even sure which part of her had known it at first. Still, even so, the leaves and the mushrooms began to sway slowly in time to it.


    Then, slowly, they grew and blossomed, sending little roots and tendrils wherever they could, searching for something that didn¡¯t make sense. This was a slow process, for the dance of a nt was a very sedate thing. Even so, almost an hour after she started, a climbing vine on a wall near the far end of the tomb found something.


    The Queen of Thrones walked to it specifically, and when she reached it, she ced three of her hands on it and began to hum louder. The effect was immediate. nts might be slow to dance, but they were fast to grow, and as she filled it with life energy, it spidered across the wall, sending tendrils deep enough to make the outline of the hidden door unmistakable. Once she had that, she started to rip it apart with her bare hands, which didn¡¯t take long, considering how old the stones were and how rotten the mortar had be.


    The door revealed a set of stairs descending into the darkness. She strode down them fearlessly, though she had no idea what to expect. What she found, though, was nothing special. It was simply proof that whoever had built this tomb had been smart enough to create a decoy. That the chambers above had contained a false tomb and treasures was a little strange.


    <em>Surely the treasures should have been down here,</em> she thought briefly before discarding the thought. Humans didn¡¯t have to make sense. That was what separated them from the animals.


    The room here was ancient and dusty, but it was still possible to read the carvings, and the squiggly lines that were probably wormsbined with the carvings of skulls and starving me made it very clear that something terrible had been buried here. More importantly, though, there was every indication that this might, in fact, be what the Lich had sought for so long.


    When she reached the casket and saw it was still sealed with a bead of lustrous lead and runes that were well beyond herprehension, she stopped. This part of the tomb was still undisturbed, unlike everything else she¡¯d seen so far, and she was almost certain that her master would y her until she was nothing but shredded leaves and scraps of flesh if she screwed this up. This was what it wanted, and this is what it would get.


    The dark Goddess carefully walked back the way she came, careful not to step anywhere she hadn¡¯t already stepped, and then when she reached the area that had already been ransacked, she turned and exited the ancient mound to where the hound still paced outside in agitation.


    She ignored how badly it wanted to slip the leash and go inside. Instead, it would find the closest ckbird and let the Lich know. Then perhaps it might reward her by freeing her from this vering beast so she could go back to the joy of prowling the wild ces on her own once more.

 Chapter 180: Setting the Table

    Chapter 180: Setting the Table


    Without checking the Skoetomikos, Tenebroum was uncertain exactly how many years it hadbored to erode the bulwark that was the All-Father. The God was a craggy edifice of pure tradition and willpower, so any normal effort to do what the Lich was doing might well take a millennium. It was certain its ns woulde to fruition much faster.


    Gods weren¡¯t immortal, though. Tenebroum had proved that already, and this had already been going on for more than a decade, so it was sure that it would bear fruit soon. Of course, it had believed the same thing about that cursed Lunaris until recently, it thought with rising bitterness.


    Then, just like that, his whole n had been apparently undone, and she was whole once more. The moon had apparently recovered seemingly overnight from the terrible poison it had injected her with. Its Queen of Thorns could devour a thousand lesser nature goddesses, and it wouldn¡¯t be worth half what it might have been to bring the moon down. So, now, the Lich was redoubling its efforts. It would not allow another of these troublesome gods to slip through its fingers.


    So, now, instead of basking in the prayers of its worshipers and priests as it had done while it watched her slowly fade to nothing, it stormed around the catbs at the heart of itsir like a dark storm, causing terror and exaltation in its worshipers by turns. Now, it was focused. Now, it was monitoring the progress of every major effort. The Lich sent messengers to every corner of its dark empire with demands for updates and new, more ambitious orders. The Lich did not know what happened, but it would find a way to have its revenge.


    The only n that had born fruit, in recent memory, were the efforts of its huntress and hound. They had located what was very probably the third part of this dark godling it had sought for so long. That was tantalizing, and Tenebroum was sure that it would learn much before it devoured them.


    The find was being transported night by night under guard. So, it would yet be weeks before the seal sarcophagus arrived, but that was eptable.


    The Lich would use that time to prepare a secure area for study. It was imperative that it understand those three strange divinities and the way that their broken souls fit together. That said, it was equally imperative that they not join together until or unless it decided that was the correct move. Layers of binding runes and wards would be prepared. Each cell would be ringed with all the names it knew for these little monsters so that it could experiment on them as long as it wanted.


    Until that good news was received, though, things had been quiet. The Voice of Reason was still on her way back south and had imed a new ind of primitive worshipers for its growing religion, and its armies to the north were making only limited headway against the humans they faced off against there. It would seem that they learned from the ughter of their cousins to the south. There had not yet been any reports of light-eyed Temrs, but the men of the north had their own magics that were proving to be quite formidable. Tenebroum was looking forward to learning those as well.


    None of that was as important as the news that the All-Father was on the verge of cracking, though. That report had caused it to drop everything and rush to the giant storehouse where it kept the trove of dwarven artifacts that it had sacked and stolen during the endless gueri wars that Krulm¡¯venor was engaged in. In almost all cases, weapons, armor, and jewelry were melted down and put to work in other, more important projects. That was both because they had no apparent effect on the God and because it could get such rare metals nowhere else. Mithril was scarce, even to a dwarf, but their tombs were full of the stuff, and the Lich would put it all to use.


    The crystalline skulls of the honored dead, though, those had a higher purpose, and of the hundreds of thousands of such things it had stolen so far, nearly a hundred thousand had been tainted and then ced in the ever-growing cathedral that Verdein had been constructing for some time now.


    It wasn¡¯tplete. In fact, it might never beplete, but that didn¡¯t stop it from being ready for its purpose. Already almost fifty thousand skulls had been added to the niches carved into ce. That number would only grow over time, but the summoning circle that was its primary focus had long since beenpleted. It had to be; the Lich had long been ready to face the All-Father, but soon the All-Father would be ready as well.


    Still, even iplete, the thing was a sight to behold. It was a giant cylinder a dozen stories tall, built to mock Mourn-den, and other smaller ossuaries that the dwarves had built over the centuries. Hundreds of thousand eyeless skulls would stare down at a broken anvil in the center. That would be the only monument to the dwarves left when its servant had finished scourging them from the underworld.


    Monument or not, though, each soul that the Lich tainted was a drop of poison in the blood of the All-Father, and though dwarves could resist poison better than anyone, they were not immune.


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    In some way, it had yet to fully understand the souls of the dead dwarves still existed in both their remains and their God. It was a duality that should have made the God even more powerful. Tenebroum had used such techniques for the ring that bound its power to the world like a scar. Should it even be defeated on the battlefield, the magics that swirled thickly in those bloody passages would birth it once more.


    Well, some version of it at least. The Lich did not like to contemte the possibility. It felt too much like a pretender rising up to take its throne. It would prefer that a Tenebroum be the one to conquer the world, of course, but in reality, it would ept no one else.


    That duality did not strengthen the dwarven God as it strengthened Tenebroum, though, because it left pieces of itself scattered across the world in a way that anyone might take them. This gave the dwarven deity a terrible weakness. Anywhere those remains were scattered around haphazardly, they created a terrible vulnerability.


    Now, after tirelessly exploiting that vulnerability with the souls of goblins and profane symbols, things were finally bearing fruit. Now, some of the skulls they had not yet defiled were already found dim and damaged in the piles. The damage that its servants had been causing for so long was adding up, and every day, the divinity was getting closer and closer to copse. Tenebroum could feel it.


    That was why it was unwilling to slow or cken. Instead, it sent more wraiths to probe the Iron City for weaknesses and ways in even as it devoted more servants to the cause of inflicting a death by a hundred thousand cuts on its enemy.


    The dwarves would have certainly called it dishonorable. In fact, they did, often. The spirits that were bound to the horrible tasks wailed and chaffed against their task, the same way that Krulm¡¯venor had early on. They cursed the Lich for making them do this, and they swore that it would be defeated. It made no effort to silence theseints. It enjoyed them. The only thing sweeter than the prayers of the devout were the curses of the suffering, and it soaked them all in.


    None of that stopped their busy hands from doing an excellent job of defaming and tormenting their elders who still dwelled within their God. Now, though, the work was spreading. The curses were appearing on skulls that had not yet been intentionally tainted, which meant that the cracks it had long sought to create in the armored edifice of dwarven faith were spreading on their own. Things like this tended not to move all for a long time before moving suddenly and sharply, like an avnche.


    Tenebroum no longer restlessly passed through itsir looking for answers regarding the moon or status updates for other projects. Instead, it haunted those dark and spacious rooms, watching for more signs of stress that indicated that its long-nned schism was imminent.


    The avatars of the All-Father had taken the field on more than one asion. They were mighty if temporary things. Soon, though, that cosmic craftsman wouldn¡¯t have enough power to enchant a sword or an axe, let alone channel a spell like that to his priests.


    For weeks, the only thing that it did beyond lurk and watch was to order Krulm¡¯venor to prepare to assault the Iron City itself. Such an attack would be suicide, even for its fire godling. The same might be true if it sent a dozen armies, though. The giant city buried hundreds of feet below the ground was a fortress that was utterly immune to any conventional attack it could think of. That was why it was going to kill their God to distract them.


    It was distracted by these thoughts when it happened, but only for a moment. The first indication that something monumental was about to happen was the way the skulls began to dim in unison. Whole sections of the piles began to flicker and fade out as one. Then the screaming started.


    Tenebroum had never wondered what half a million crystalline voices screaming out in pain would sound like, but now it knew. The Lich instantly ordered its terrible tome to document that in musical notation as best it could. Suddenly, High Priest Verdenin¡¯s cathedral would have another use now, once its primary use waspleted. They would put on an opera voiced solely by the dead: The Death of the All-Father.


    For generations, dwarven society had been unified by a single idea. There was only one way to live a good life. There was only one way to contribute and be remembered, and anything less fell short of that idea and, therefore, of contributing to divinity. What the Lich had done was shatter that. Now, their God was splintering under the weight of darkness and insanity it was directing into the dwarven afterlife, and it doubted very much that their culture would survive any more than their God would.


    . . .


    Krulm¡¯venor had crouched in the cramped airshaft a dozen feet above the market street for weeks now, basically unmoving. He didn¡¯t mind that. He had found a way into the city without drawing the Lich¡¯s attention, and he had waited for further orders.


    It was as pleasant amand as he¡¯d had in years. For the first time in a very long time, the normal noises of a dwarven city were enough to block out all the terrible whispers and deranged howls that echoed through his soul.


    The sound of merchants hawking their wares and housewives haggling for everyst copper was a balm to his soul. He knew he would have to move when the ratcatchers came through this area or when the Lich gave itsmand, but for now, he justy there, staring out of the iron-barred grate at the street far below him, idly fidgeting with that damn button as he tried to remember what it had meant to be a dwarf.


    He might have done that forever, but when the Lich whispered to him to be ready to begin his assault, he knew that perfect moment was all but over. What he did not expect, though, was for the world to go insane.

 Chapter 181: Just an Appetizer

    Chapter 181: Just an Appetizer


    When the greyhaired woman with a hairstyle more borate than most men¡¯s beards stabbed the merchant in the eye over a disagreement about the ripeness of the mossfruits she was buying, Krulm¡¯venor didn¡¯t notice until the man started to scream. She¡¯d done it so normally and with such calm that his eyes had simply slid over the act as another market transaction in this ce. He had been lulled intocency by the normal rhythms of dwarven society as he studied this small part of Hammerheim and waited for his time to strike.


    From the moment the Lich had whispered, ¡°The time ising, be ready,¡± Krulm¡¯venor had been ready. He had to be. If he drifted off too far, his bones would start to heat as a warning of the retribution that would follow.


    Still, a coiled spring could stay coiled only so long, and after three days of watching, ready to rip open the grate and pounce on the unsuspecting dwarves below, everything started to blur together until suddenly, it didn¡¯t. After that stabbing, the guards were called, and the matron was taken away, but soon after that, there was the sounds of a scuffle somewhere out of sight and,ter, the smell of something burning.


    <em>Something is wrong, </em>the fire spirit thought to himself. The voices in his head threw out a dozen different things that it might be, but their conclusion was just the opposite. Something was very right, and soon, they would get to feast.


    Some faint strain of madness had gripped the city of Hammerheim, and Krulm¡¯venor wasn¡¯t sure quite what to do. This wasn¡¯t enough to justify an attack yet, but it also wasn¡¯t something he should just watch, was it? For a while, things almost got back to normal. Then, he heard the bells begin to toll in the distance. First, it was from a single watch post, and then another and another picked up the brassy, methodical rhythm.


    It was a continuous toll. That was the signal to take shelter and that the city was under attack. That couldn¡¯t be the case, though. <em>Did the Lich send another army to assist me? </em>Krulm¡¯venor wondered. That didn¡¯t make sense, but given the things that its master could do with the shadowy portals this far beneath the ground, it wasn¡¯t impossible.


    The fire spirit watched for a few more minutes before he decided there was no attack. Not yet. <em>Did they discover my position? Were they warned? </em>Krulm¡¯venor worried.


    He¡¯d done nothing to give himself away, nor would he now, but still, at this point, it was undeniable that something was off. Dwarves would not ring the rm for no reason.


    Even so, he hesitated, more confused than concerned. It would take more than whatever this something was to give him a chance in hell of taking down the dwarvish capital. Here, there were not only armies of the most well-equipped dwarves in the world, but there were other more dangerous enemies, too. There were almost certainly a few high priests of the All-Father, as well as a full-blown forge father. Such things were roughly equivalent to what the humans called small gods. That is what Krulm¡¯venor had been so long ago before his city had fallen to the shadows and he¡¯d cowardly fled. He knew that now, but only intellectually. The only memories he had of the experience were blurry moments of pride and shame.


    No matter what he remembered or didn¡¯t, he knew that no amount of fire would do much against a god who was made of fire, though, even a small one. It had tried to exin this to the Lich, but it had ignored Krulm¡¯venor¡¯s council. It always did.


    <em>Why would a master listen to their hound,</em> he thought sullenly before he berated himself for that moment of weakness. <em>Let that monster ignore good council. Maybe then the All-Father will crush him and me both. </em>


    The godling¡¯s thoughts warred in his head, which seeded in keeping the chatter and the screams of the goblins down to a dull roar, at least, until he next heard the sounds of conflict. This wasn¡¯t something like a riot, though. This time, he could very clearly hear the sh of steel, and it was getting closer.


    The next group he saw, judging by their colors, were two different ns fighting with each other. They were obviously trying to settle some sort of grudge, but when members of the city guard tried to intervene, both groups turned and beat them back before they continued.


    For a moment, he considered that this might be a coup of a sort. Someone might be trying to overthrow the King. That could exin this much chaos. The only thing that made him doubt that was the viciousness of the insults that were being tossed back and forth. This was clearly personal.


    Krulm¡¯venor still knew that blood feuds and grudges were part of dwarven culture on some level, but massbat and blood in the streets struck him as umon. There was nothing honorable about shedding dwarven blood in the streets. It was only by watching these various scuffles and beefs that often left at least one body in the streets that he understood why this seemed familiar, though.


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    ¡°Goblins,¡± he breathed. ¡°They¡¯re acting like thrice damned goblins.¡±


    Just those words were enough to rile up the pests inside him, and Krulm¡¯venor had to focus to mute the sound of them baying for blood. He had no idea how one could take the highest tier of dwarven culture and turn it into this, but the Lich, certainly.


    Why else would it have told him to be ready? It had poisoned the Oroza and every other thing that it hadid its cold dead hand on, so why not the soul of the whole dwarven race?


    <em>Does that mean the bastard tainted the All-Father? </em>Krulm¡¯venor wondered, in shock. He was the very wellspring of the dwarven soul, but somehow, that didn¡¯t seem possible.


    Krulm¡¯venor didn¡¯t understand it. In fact, he didn¡¯t try. Instead, he just got angry. He¡¯d been poisoned by the Lich¡¯s magic for decades now, but somehow the awful creature had managed to do the same thing to the rest of his people? It was monstrous and utterly unforgivable.


    He wasn¡¯t sure if this was the right time to strike, but he no longer cared. For once, he didn¡¯t want to die or throw his life away against an impossible opponent. Instead, he wanted to burn it all down. He would rather that there be no dwarves at all than dwarves that behaved like this.


    As these awful thoughts chased each other in circles, Krulm¡¯venor¡¯s grip on the bars of the grate he was crouched behind only grew tighter and hotter. As he watched the madness escte below, the bars grew red-hot until they were easy to bend and pull up out of the way. Someone paying attention might have noticed such a thing. They might have noticed his suddenly bright blue eyes that were full of roaring mes.


    They didn¡¯t, though. There was no one left in the Iron City to notice anything that was out of the ordinary because there was nothing ordinary topare it to. The world had gone mad.


    As Krulm¡¯venor fell twenty feet from his hiding ce to the crowded streets, he looked out over the city for thest time with dwarvish eyes. He saw the central pir, which was both the tremendous structure that held up the giant cavern that housed the Iron City, as well as the imperial pce, which had been hollowed out over the course of centuries. It might have dwarfed the other stgmite and stctite towers that had also been turned into buildings on both the ceiling and the floor, but it did nothing to diminish the beauty of the scene. He was struck by it and would have cried tears of joy if he¡¯d been capable of such a thing anymore.


    He might have fallen from that vent as a dwarf, but when hended in the crowded, bloody street below, it was as something else. He wasn¡¯t even a single dwarf anymore. He was two. He was two skeletons, burning with blue fire, and by the time he started tearing his way through the crowd, he¡¯d increased to four. Even as he started tearing into dwarves, his bloodlust did not sate his anger. He was still capable of thinking, and everything he thought was awful. So, he became eight and then sixteen in his bid to be a mob rather than a man, or whatever it was he was now.


    Every few seconds, the number of burning skeletons doubled, but strangely, this still wasn¡¯t enough to stop the ns from fighting each other. Copies of him spread up and down the street and forced their way into the homes of dwarves, whether they¡¯d been smart enough to bar them or not. Wood could not keep him out, and metal onlysted a little longer.


    In less than a minute, there were over a hundred of him, and it was only then that Krulm¡¯venor was spread so thin that he no longer cared. The chorus of screeching in his collective skulls had finally grown loud enough to cover up both his sense of self-loathing at what he was doing and his anger that he had to.


    At that point, he was a kaleidoscope of violence. He was spread so thin that it was bing hard to identify with anybody for more than a few seconds. Those that were feasting on fresh kills and bathing in warm, coppery blood drew its attention the most often, but each new scream drew its mind somewhere else.


    This wasn¡¯t enough, though. The rm was still ringing, but since it had lost none of its terrible doppelg?ngers, there was no reason to think it was because of him. So, he continued to fan out, and the mob continued to expand, devouring whole neighborhoods like locusts in minutes and leaving a trail of burning buildings in their wake.


    Somewhere past two hundred copies of itself, it was starting to lose any sense of self at all. It was no longer a crowd. It was just a hungry bonfire, and it saw the progress it was making only in a series of images that shed through its mind before they went up in smoke. The only thing that would bring it to the level of consciousness was when one of its bodies was struck down by the guards. That pain was enough to make Krulm¡¯venor focus, but only for a moment before it drifted off again.


    They were everywhere now, working in tight formations and only asionally copsing into berserk rages that caused their lines to fall apart in curtains of fire. The dwarves were losing. There was no excuse for it, but they were losing, and in the rare moments they weren¡¯t, and some group of dwarfs stood up to the mob as heroically as all of them ought to, the army of ming skeletons either surrounded them or fled and pivoted somewhere else, depending on their size.


    Hammerheim was burning. There were fires in the upper city and the lower city now, but it was burning worst where Krulm¡¯venor was raging. It was a grand view, especially when viewed from all angles through more than four hundred eyes, but Krulm¡¯venor no longer had the mind to appreciate it. To him, it was all just fuel for his fire now, and beautiful temples were burned just as thoroughly as ugly warehouses.


    Aesthetics didn¡¯t matter to an army of deathless, bloodthirsty goblins. All that mattered was death and destruction, and today, they experienced exactly that beyond their wildest dreams.

 Chapter 182: Main Course

    Chapter 182: Main Course


    When the city was burning, and chaos was at its peak, Tenebroum left the warehouse where skulls flickered and screamed and moved to a body that it had specifically built to fight the dwarven God. Then it walked to the cathedral, which would hopefully be their battleground, and began to summon the All-Father.


    It enjoyed the pain and death that Krulm¡¯venor was harvesting, of course, especially with the overtones of fear and madness that pervaded the normally muted dwarven psyche. For so long, the dwarves of Hammerheim had been entirely immune to the rise and fall of the world around them. Even the troubles of other cities barely reached their stout iron walls. The Lich could have basked in that shock and fear all day, but if it did, it would have missed this window of opportunity to strike at their God while he was weak enough to kill but strong enough to answer a challenge.


    The body that Tenebroum had built for the asion was a giantpared to the forms it normally wore and only barely fit down the hallway that led to the cathedral. The form that Lich had chosen was as close to the true form of the All-Father as it could find, based on the iconography of the dwarven religion. Unfortunately, this arrangement limited it to just four real limbs, but it would make due. It was worth it to mock the proud God with his own face.


    The real only difference, beyond small spikes and other stylistic elements along with theyers of intensive enchantments, was the small third arm built into the chest that could move the oundishly sized te mail beard from side to side as a sort of auxiliary shield. If the Lich was going to waste so much Mithril and steel, having such an affectation constructed, it might as well put it to use.


    Though it was constructed solely of materials that had been gathered from dwarven heroes, that would have been impossible for most to notice, as every piece had been melted down and recast into something new in case the All-Father had some unknown hold on the original. It would have been terribly ironic if Tenebroum lost this fight because of that kind of overconfidence, in the same way, that the All-Father¡¯s avatar had lost their first fight because he thought to use the ghosts of the dead to face the Lich.


    Tenebroum was not so foolish as to do that. Even so, despite using dwarven forgewights to do the work, it was somewhat inferior to the original. There was just something about dwarven craftsmanship that could not be replicated by the hands of the unwilling dead, but hopefully, Tenebroum could pry those secrets loose today.


    Fortunately, the Lich had ess to magic that the dwarves never would. They might have their runes, but that was only the smallest part of the greater magical whole, and when it came to this armored form, not a single inch was wasted on the inside or outside. Those protective spells, along with the liquid metal bubbling away in the center of this construct¡¯s hollow core, would allow it to heal or at least cope with a significant amount of abuse.


    When it reached the iron-floored cathedral, the drudges were just finishing setting up the embalmed dwarven heads that were going to sing this spell into existence and exiting in a silent single file line. Dwarves had no talent for magic and certainly did not enjoy it but could be convinced to coax a spell into existence when they were forced to by a monster like him. Sadly, it expected most of them to spontaneouslybust within minutes as a result of the unnatural act, but the Lich didn¡¯t care.


    Either it would get the attention of the dying God and put him out of his misery, or the All-Father would resist Tenebroum¡¯s call and bleed out in the dark. With the way the dwarves of capital were unraveling, it doubted very much that the deity had much longer to live in either case. Tenebroum could be sustained by devouring the souls of the dead, but none of its peers could say the same.Strictly speaking, the Lich did not know if this would work. It didn¡¯t have to work. The only hold that it had over the All-Father were the dead hostages. Still, Tenebroum thought that would be enough. On the broken anvil altar were arrayed an assortment of skulls from high priests that had been gathered and set aside for the purpose. It was powerful bait but not necessarily irresistible.


    The God could simply ignore it and watch as Tenebroum devoured these hallowed souls one at a time. That was why it had made the entire performance as sphemous as possible.


    Some of the corrupted skulls that looked down on the whole thing were already crying or babbling, but that only added to the atmosphere as eighty-eight deep base voices began to sing with notes so low that the iron floor beneath the Lich¡¯s steel feet vibrated. The spell that it had written for the asion wasposed in dwarvish so that the All-Father might hear the litany of curses and insults in the summoning.


    Dwarven honor and rage were a potent mixture, and the Lich was relying on the All-Father¡¯s injured pride as much as his desire to save the souls of his priests as the Lich as much as it lifted the first crystalline skull from the altar and dropped it into the giant steel mouth of this body. In a single gesture, it crushed the thing to dust, feeling the spirit briefly effervesce from the jagged bits of crystal as the dark portal opened in its designated spot, beckoning for the All-Father to join it.


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    The first dead dwarf, Thuall¡¯kenden, died at the ripe old age of 341. He yed the harp and was survived by seven sons. He only had a chance to experience a few flickering moments from his deadly dull life before The Lich devoured his soul and stripped a lifetime of centuries down to a bit of essence. Jarden-bar didn¡¯t fair much better. He lived for 332 years and died thest member of his n before he wasid to rest; his soul vanished into the ether in an instant as well.


    Several heads in its choir had already burned into cinders, and the wailing of the crystal skulls in the background had increased markedly because of all the light and activity, but still, the portal from the depths of the world to this cursed ce stood unused. The Lich was just picking up a third skull to repeat the process, and the throbbing song was just reaching a crescendo when the All-Father finally stepped through the dark portal which was nothing less than an intentional rent in the invibility of the area contained by the vast circle that surrounded ckwater, and showed himself.


    ¡°You called, and so I havee to end you,¡± the All-Father growled. ¡°Your insults and your depravity will not be allowed to stand!¡±


    As he spoke, a hammer with a red-hot head appeared in his hand, somewhere between a forgehammer and a warhammer. Tenebroum had expected that sort of weapon and was not surprised. What it was surprised by was that the All-Father was shorter than it expected. It had built this body to be the exact same height, based on religious texts, but instead of being a nine-foot-tall dwarf, he was closer to seven and a half. This unintentionally made the irony sweeter to the Lich, though, and it said nothing about it.


    Instead, the Lich said, ¡°Stand? You¡¯ve spent this whole time hiding on your knees, little God. Perhaps if you¡¯d joined the fight earlier on, the realms of men might have yet stood a chance.¡±


    Even if the God was shorter than the Lich had expected, he was still imposing. He glowed with a soft orange light and, worse, perfectly crafted armor. He might be as tall as a man, but he was as wide as any three of them and could easily have wrestled the Lich¡¯s juggernaut into submission.


    ¡°The realms of men can rise and fall without me and mine,¡± the dwarf grumbled as it regarded the Lich with burning eyes. ¡°They have fallen to dark before, and they will again. It is you who are transitory in all this, not I. Earth and steel will endure even your deprivations. Tradition is forever.¡±


    The Lich drew the battleaxe it had created for this asion as it considered the God¡¯s words. ¡°When all is darkness, nothing will be allowed to rise again,¡± he said finally, annoyed that despite everything, the dwarf was still maintaining a solid sense of who he was. He flickered some moments, indicating there was some strain, but that was the only sign of problems. Given that the Lich had destroyed his entire world, he expected to see more damage, mentally and physically.


    ¡°You think you¡¯re the first one that ever tried that?¡± the All-Fatherughed. ¡°You think you¡¯re the first viin to shatter some arrogant light god¡¯s chariot? I¡¯ve already fixed that and made the damn sword. My part in all this is done, or it would be if you would learn to leave well enough alone.¡±


    <em>Chariot? Sword? </em>The Lich¡¯s mind wondered about both of these things, but before it could consider that, or the implication that this had all happened before, the All-Father charged the Lich with all the force of an avnche.


    The Cathedral of Skulls was built to be bait and insult, but it was also built to be an arena. That was the reason so much stone had been carved away and witchfire braziers burned in the background. It was also the reason why the floor had been ted in iron; because the blows that these two heavyweights could inflict on each other would shatter stone.


    There was no art to thisbat. There was no dance of des with borate dodges and parrying like it had once done with Siddrim andter with that cursed Temr. This was more brutal than that. This was a force of nature. It was an earthquake, given human form, and the Lich worried a little at the damage these terrible blows might do to the rest of itsir.


    That didn¡¯t stop him from taking the full force of the hammer on his left shoulder even as it brought its dark axe down on the dwarf god¡¯s head. The force of the axe was only enough to dent the helmet, but the shadowy edge that manifested along the edge of the de a moment before impact was enough to split it, too, sending the piece of armor tumbling away, even though the head beneath it healed almost instantly. At the same time as it struck, though, Tenebroum''s body was thrown entirely off bnce by the hammer blow, and despite the reinforced skeleton that had been created to hold the weight of this giant suit of armor, the vicle still fractured. The Lich staggered back from the blow as the liquid metal flowed like mercury to repair the damage.


    What distracted Tenebroum wasn¡¯t the force or the pain, though; it was the strange magical interactions that had urred at the moment of impact. Its construct had tried to harvest the heat of the hammer to power a few of its spells, but the hammer had likewise tried to do something with the metal, and as the traitorous substance responded to the call of the deity, several lines of inscriptions that powered those spells were erased, resulting in a spray of sparks rather than the magical aura of protection that should have been created.


    <em>So even after all this time, he has some surprises too</em>, the Lich mused. This was about to get very interesting.

 Chapter 183: Devoured Whole

    Chapter 183: Devoured Whole


    Blows hammered like metallic thunder as each of the two titans battled it out. The axe and hammer each inflicted grievous wounds that might have felled an army or crushed the walls of a mighty fortress. It wasn¡¯t enough to stop either the All-Father or Teneborum, though. Indeed, it wasn¡¯t even enough to knock them to the ground.


    The Lich¡¯s body was built to withstand anything, but without the protective magics it had been relying on. Eventually, the cracks grew too numerous to patch, and it was forced to abandon its shadow-edged battleaxe for a three-hundred-pound short sword and a shield that was more than two inches thick.


    It rang like a bell each time it was struck, which made the All-Fatherugh. ¡°You thought that you could forge something capable of defeating me?¡±


    The Lich ignored the taunt and continued to hack and sh away at his opponent. The de he¡¯d switched to was smallpared to the body it currently wore, but it was still four feet long and tipped with sharpened kobold teeth. So, it had no problem slicing through the All-Father¡¯s formerly immacte mithril chainmail, leaving it rent and tattered. The problem was that it didn¡¯t wound the God. He simply did not bleed.


    It was a different problem than the Lich was used to. Fortunately, the deity was slowly getting smaller. He¡¯d lost several inches of height since the fight had started, and though that wasn¡¯t so much, it meant that everything from his weight to his hammer had shrugged proportionally as well. That meant that the blows were noticeably lighter than they¡¯d been before.


    Still, the Lich was hardly in better shape. It had expected this to be easier. It had thought that the All-Father would be weaker and that its magics would make its armor much stronger. As it was, it was relying almost solely on the skill of the forgewights and the thickness of the metal in the armor they¡¯d crafted.


    Tenebroum could flee at any time, of course, as humiliating as that might be. It could abandon this body and fly from the room to grab another and another if that was what it took, but it was in no danger just now. The All-Father, on the other hand, did not have such an option.


    The portal he hade through to end the Lich had long since faded when more than half of the heads that had chanted it into existence had turned into particrly foul-smelling candles. A few still sang on as a sad sort of background music, but it was barely audible over the sound of shing weapons and brutal blows.


    The dwarf lost another 6 inches before the Lich seeded in striking a decisive blow, cutting off the dwarf¡¯s weapon hand at the wrist and sending the hammer tumbling through the room, end over end. It tumbled across the rusty floor, leaving a series of dents and scrapes, but when it hit the far wall, it embedded in it for a moment. They destroyed dozens of tainted skulls at the moment, but as it shook the cavern, hundreds more fell from shelves. When that happened, and they shattered on the rusted floor in a rain of ss that sounded almost musical to the Lich, it noticed the All-Father flinch in pain. Until that moment, the God had not uttered a word ofint. No matter how deep the wound or how brutal the strike, the dwarf had simply healed andshed out again. From time to time, he''d cursed Lich¡¯s name, but that was it.


    <em>So he does have a weak spot, </em>the Lich thought, stepping aside as the All-Father raised his newly regrown hand to catch the hammer that flew through the air to return to him.


    All this time, the Lich had been poisoning the souls that made the God up to try to weaken or even shatter him, but it was only after seeing that it realized it might have misunderstood the correct strategy. Should it have simply been shattering or draining the things all along?


    As the All-Father prepared to swing again, the Lich quickly took in the room. The skulls in their natural state glowed a very dim cyan, but the tainted ones that its minions had sessfully poisoned might glow purple, deep blue, or even a dull olive green, depending on how tainted the soul inside that skull was after it was defiled.


    Only the souls that were snuffed outpletely weren¡¯t glowing at all, and as Tenebroum looked around at the ce, it decided there were definitely more dark alcoves than there had been before. The Lich let the braziers that had lit the room up until now gutter, so the well of souls it was in resembled a patchy night sky as the skulls which glowed brightest made constetions of different colors and sizes, save for therge dark spot where the All-Father¡¯s hammer had done such damage.


    ¡°You think that the darkness can save you from my hammer?¡± the All-Father yelled. He was the brightest light in the room now, and his zing hammer burned like a torch as he struck the Lich¡¯s shield so hard that half of it bent inward, rendering it useless.


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    The Lich tossed it aside and retreated to pick up the axe it had discarded earlier. It knew that dim light wouldn¡¯t hide it from the eyes of a dwarf. That would have been a ridiculous strategy. It just wanted to make what happened next more dramatic, to twist the knife that much harder.


    ¡°We are both familiar with the darkness,¡± the Lich agreed,shing out with his axe, ¡°But that is not all we share.¡±


    ¡°I share nothing with you!¡± the All-Father proimed,unching a blow that the Lich actually managed to sidestep for the first time.


    As the God was getting smaller, he was getting slower. It doubted that he had expected a fight to be this prolonged. Honestly, the Lich was fairly certain he didn¡¯t fight often at all. He was made up of the souls of dwarves smart and tough enough to survive to old age; that meant each one of them knew how to fight, but it also meant that each one of them had stayed away from the battlefield long enough to live long lives.


    That went a long way to exining why a wrecking ball with this sort of power was loathe to leave his forges and enter the fray. It also exined why he was about to lose.


    ¡°We are both gods. We are both made from souls,¡± the Lich teased, shrugging off a blow to the chest before heshed out with one of his giant feet and sent the All-Father sprawling t on his back. The God reached out to grab his hammer again, but as he did so, the Lich brought his battleaxe down so hard that it cut right through the tattered armor and the magical flesh and bit deep into the rusted iron floor beneath the All-Father, pining him to the floor, at least for the moment.


    ¡°In a moment, we will have one more thing inmon as well,¡± the Lich proimed, spreading his battered arms widely. ¡°We will both be dead, like all of your subjects.


    As the All-Father roared and struggled, Tenebroum reached out and began to pull at the swirling souls in the crystal skulls that surrounded them on all sides, drawing them to itself in a slow maelstrom of light and sparks, and they flowed to it like a luminescent whirlpool.


    ¡°All this time, I was overthinking it,¡± Tenebroum gloated. ¡°All this time, I thought I had to corrupt and weaken you a piece at a time when really I just had to devour you whole.¡±


    ¡°You monster!¡± the dwarven God screamed, trying and failing to rise. ¡°You think you can beat me? I¡¯m thrown away g that¡¯s stronger than you. I¡¯ve killed goblins that were¡ª¡±


    The Lich didn¡¯t answer; it just pulled the axe free and started hacking at the shrinking dwarf again and again while the dwindling God struggled to rise. Each blow was more brutal than thest, and though the dwarf managed to parry a couple of them with his hammer, it was clear that the way the Lich was draining the souls it had collected in this room was taking a toll on the All-Father. None of that was a reason to show the God any mercy, though, as the Lich continued to maim him over and over again.


    In truth, its body was creaking under the strain of it all and would likely be scrapped instead of repaired. The construct it had built to mock the dwarven God had been built with the finest materials and the mostplex spells that the Lich¡¯s craftsmen knew how to make, and still, it had all but copsed through the course of the fight. The limbs were cracked and bent, the breastte was partially caved in, and the jaw no longer closedpletely.


    However, despite all that, it had done its job. If it hadn¡¯t contained so many valuable materials, it might have left it in this room as a monument for what was about to happen today.


    Tenebroum butchered his opponent until he was all but a corpse. It was only at the end, when the All-Father was only a little smaller than a real dwarf, that it finally paused.


    ¡°What? Do you expect me to beg for mercy?¡± the dwarvish God asked peevishly.


    ¡°Begging isn¡¯t your strong suit, but perhaps in time it could be,¡± the Lich said as it dropped its axe and picked up the dwarf as it rose to its feet. ¡°But I don¡¯t want to have you work my forges until you tell me your secrets. I want them now.¡±


    The All-Father screamed in outrage, but those were Tenebroum¡¯sst words before he swallowed the remnant of the God whole. One second, the All-Father was roaring in defiance, and the next, it was nothing but ashes as sparks as the Lich ground him into nothing.


    It stood there, trying to enjoy the moment, but that was impossible because of all the new information that was rushing into its mind. When the Lich devoured a new soul, it learned things, but most of the time, these things were too trivial to rise to the level that it noticed, especially since it had devoured Siddrim. At this point, almost no soul had something new to tell it, and instead, it joined the swirling mass of undifferentiated souls, which was Tenebroum.


    That was not the case with the All-Father. Even in its weakened state, the God was the second most powerful spirit that Tenebroum had ever tasted, and the power and knowledge that flowed out of it were overwhelming. Most of the details were in no way applicable to anything it was working on. It didn¡¯t need to know the proper way to build a bridge or the appropriate way to pay homage to one''s ancestors. Those annoying facts were only so much drivel, though, crowding around the nature of runic magic, the distition of forgotten materials, the artifacts that the dwarf had mentioned earlier, and most importantly, the history.


    Tenebroum¡¯s mind struggled to take in thest bit, even as it drifted out of its body and floated there like a dark constetion in the now almost silent room. The world, ording to Siddrim, had been a ce that was only a handful of centuries old, but ording to the All-Father, things went back millennia in a cycle of light and dark that the deity had long ago opted out of to focus on the world below. It was a treasure trove, and the Lich¡¯s mind boggled at the implications.


    It was a lot to take in. In fact, it was so much that much of the knowledge slipped through its fingers while it desperately tried to soak it all in. It couldn¡¯t, though. Just likest time, it was slowly sliding into a state of torpor, like a snake devouring a meal that was much toorge for it.

 Chapter 184: Lost in Thought

    Chapter 184: Lost in Thought


    Tenebroum lost itself for days this time rather than weeks, but the strange visions were much the same as they had been before. It swam through the swirling memories of the All-Father, exploring the junctures where they met and, indeed, often differed with individual dwarves. Still, big or small, they pounded against the Liches mind like the blows of a forge hammer.


    In those swirling, rigid facts, there was enough information to make it feel some measure of shame for the way it built itsir. The core had been redone as a temple to amodate its growing cult of followers, but the warrens of tunnels that had been built for defense and the storage of zombies, well, the influence of the All-Father made it clear that those would have to be redone, but only after it improved its forges.


    Tenebroum had always thought that quality issues in itsponents were due to the unwilling nature of the forgewights, but now that the knowledge of the All-Father swirled through it, it could see dozens of problems in need of correction. Venttion, contamination, temperature. None of those were quite where they should be, even for simple steel. It would take steps to improve all those things when it woke if it remembered.


    For now, though, it remembered working with Lunaris to rebuild Siddrim¡¯s chariot. It remembered chastising her in the All-Father¡¯s gruff voice when it found out they had no one yet to recapture and harness the horses or even drive the thing.


    ¡°It¡¯s a waste of my time if the thing won¡¯t be put to use!¡± the dwarven God had roared.


    Despite her assurance that it would be, the memory faded before the dwarf¡¯s ire did, and instead, Tenebroum watched the All-Father force a sword made from silver dragon scales. This seemed important, but as soon as it saw that Oroza was with the All-Father and that it was her scale the divine smith was using, Its rage blotted out the whole memory.


    <em>She lives! </em>Howled in outrage. The Lich had not seen his escaped handmaiden in so long that it had assumed its poisoning of her domain had been sessful. To think that she was still out there and still working against its interests, even as rough as she looked, was more than irksome.


    Eventually, even that drifted off, too. The Lich couldn¡¯t hold on to anything for long, no matter how much it might care about it in the moment.


    Remembering anything was hard. Sometimes, the intensity of the maelstrom at Tennebroum¡¯s core reached such a fever pitch that it felt like it was either going to copse or explode. It was especially intense when feeding on a god, though, and the dwarf was alien in so many ways. There was such attention to detail and uniformity, but beyond that, even, there was a certain alienness. It was a second sort of cosmology.


    Above the world, past the stars and their strange constetions, there was nothing except the endless primordial darkness, but the same was true, ording to the All-Father at the very center of the world, too. He kept the void from expanding the same way that the Moon Goddess and her glowing shield kept back the night.


    Tenebroum had no idea if that was true, of course, or what would happen if those forge fires one day went out, but it was hard to focus on anything, let alone worry about it in the constantly drifting and morphing images. The forges of creation held back the nothing in the same way that the light kept the monsters at bay, and truly, the Lich wanted nothing more than to devour them all. It wanted to extinguish every light and life until there was nothing left but a cold, gilded monument ruling over a world of the dead.


    Then, just as soon as it was focusing on those writhing shadows so far away and trying to figure out how it could devour them, it woke once more. What it had been waiting for had arrived.


    That news was important enough that to finally get Tenebroum to stir from its slumber. Still, ity there for the better part of a day while its drudges transported both the coffin and the hound that apanied it to their proper ce in theboratory that it had built for this specific purpose.


    As urgently it wanted to dive into those experiments, there were too many valuable insights left over from the churning remains of the All-Father, so instead of rushing anything, it spent time rying as many of those memories as it could recall to the Skoetomikos. It was only then, after all of that tedium was done that it swirled out of the hopelessly damaged cathedral.


    It wasn¡¯t sure what precisely it would do with it now, but on a whim, it ordered its drudges to rece dull skulls with the few glowing ones that remained in the story room. Tenebroum wasn¡¯t sure if there was more magic left to be done in that ce, but even if there wasn¡¯t, it would serve as a fitting tomb to the dwarven race. After all, that was where their God had died, and when it was done, the only dwarven souls that remained might be left in that room.


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    Dwarves were no longer its concern, though. It was done with that enemy and moving on to the next one. Would that be the human kingdoms to the north? Somehow, the idea of hunting down mortal prey after devouring a god seemed less than enticing. Perhaps it would make its Queen of Thrones some allies to continue her hunt while it baited a trap capable of catching Niama, the nature goddess. Since it could not have the moon, then perhaps she would be its next meal.


    When Tenebroum reached the room set aside for studying the worm, the rat, and the wolf, it found his dark nature Goddess waiting. She¡¯d grown stronger since it hadst seen her, and it was obvious that her hunts were going well. She was not nearly as strong as the true Goddess, of course, but she was already the equal of Oroza; she might even be stronger. It was hard to say.


    ¡°Finally, a servant that does not disappoint me,¡± the Lich said, suffusing the room as a mist while it studied the stone sarcophagus that sat in the far binding ring. ¡°Tell me everything about this discovery. Leave nothing out.¡±


    Tenebroum listened to her as she ryed everything in a tone that was prideful enough that it would have sifted through her soul to search for treasonous thoughts if it was not already consumed by this new discovery. It would let her have her pride for now since she had done such good work.


    She spent the next few minutes telling the Lich what it already knew, with only minor additions. It wasn¡¯t until she talked about the strange behavior of the wolf that it stopped her and studied the beast.


    ¡°What do you suppose it wants in there?¡± Tenebroum asked her.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know, my lord,¡± she answered, bowling her head. ¡°I only know that it wants it badly.¡±


    ¡°What about you, Ghrosin?¡± the Lich stormed, making the cage full of rats that sat in the far circle scurry and swarm in fear and agitation.


    ¡°I-it wants the worm,¡± the chorus squeaked. ¡°It needs it!¡±


    ¡°And what about you?¡± the Lich asked again. This set off a chorus of excited squeaks.


    ¡°Please,¡± they begged. ¡°Please let us devour and knaw!¡±


    The Lich had no intention of doing any such thing, of course, but it was all the confirmation that it needed that what it sought was here now. It had taken longer than it would have liked, but it had collected three dark gods that were, at the very least, centuries old. ording to the All-Father, they might even be older than that.


    ¡°You may leave us,¡± it said finally to its dark forest Goddess. ¡°Continue your hunt, and when this project is done, I will build you more suitablepanions than this hound so you can take downrger prey.¡±


    ¡°Yes, my master,¡± she said with a sinuous curtsy that would have been impossible for anyone with a limited number of human joints. Then, she was gone, and Tenebroum was alone with its menagerie of monsters.


    That solitude didn¡¯tst long. Secondster, a number of zombies entered the room to be the hands that the Lich no longer had to do the work that needed to be done. Three zombies came in with chisels, hammers, and prybars to begin opening the lead-sealed sarcophagus, and one more 7 eyed fleshcrafter came in for the darkness to coalesce inside to better study the problem.


    Suffusing the room with itself had advantages, but with all the unknowns here, the Lich wanted a bit of distance. It wanted to be as separated from its subjects as they were from each other.


    Breaking open the thing wasn¡¯t hard. The thing was almost identical to the container in which the other two animals were found. This one wasn¡¯t filled with the mangey, emaciated corpse of a wolf or hundreds of dead mice and rats. It was filled with grave earth. Though that was the end product of decay, of course, it still struck the Lich as odd.


    <em>Did the other two survive all these ages while this one did not? </em>It wondered. It wasn¡¯t sure why that would be the case or what that would mean, but it did strike the Lich as odd, and the unexpected always made it nervous.


    Still, after only a moment''s hesitation, it decided to continue the experiment and hadrge bowls of blood brought to it to feed the thing. That was how Tenebroum had woken up the wolf, and that was how it would wake up this monster, too, probably.


    <em>Blood feeds rage, though, </em>Tenebroum deliberated as it watched its unthinking servant fill the thing with blood that was quickly absorbed by the desated soil. <em>What might a worm require? If it''s the incarnation of pestilence, then does it require flesh? A victim to infect?</em>


    The Lich was just trying to decide whether it should fetch an acolyte for this thing to consume when the grave earth began to stir, or rather, something stirred beneath it. It was barely noticeable, but it would have been difficult for anything to hide from a construct with so many eyes.


    ¡°Are you there, spirit?¡± The Lich asked in an ancient, cracked voice rather than speaking out into the ether.


    Groshian could speak in their way through the rats, but the wolf had only ever managed to howl in pain as the Lich took it apart and then put it back together to better understand its undying nature. So, there was no way to know if the worm could speak. So it was with mild surprise it heard the words ¡°Yesss¡­ I have risssen¡­ Oce more¡­¡±


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 Chapter 185: The Turning

    Chapter 185: The Turning


    ¡°Yesss¡­ I have risssen¡­ Oce more¡­¡± The words of the Worm weren¡¯t physically spoken things. Instead, they echoed through the ether in a sibnt, voiceless whisper, in the same way that the Lichmanded its minions. This was the least expected option, but even so, it was progress.


    ¡°Tell me your name, Imand you,¡± Tenbroum ordered.


    ¡°My¡­ name?¡± the worm answered in confusion. There was more squirming beneath the bloodstained earth. Worms was probably more urate, given the patterns in the mud, but the Lich was less concerned about the exact form this thing took than it was about what could be learned from it. ¡°I am¡­ the ruiner offf nationsss¡­ the consssumer of men¡­ the wassster of livesss¡­¡±


    ¡°I have read the stories,¡± The Lich said carefully, trying to decide whether feeding it more would prod it to life or if torment would do a better job of that. ¡°I am well aware that you are the portion of Malkazeen that is pestilence and death.¡±


    ¡°I am not death,¡± the Worm whispered. ¡°No, ssshe is sssomeone elssse. I am Pessstilece, decay, and¡­ and¡­¡±


    ¡°And what?¡± the Lich asked, losing its patience.


    ¡°And not Malzzzekeen,¡± it whispered. ¡°But I will¡­ we will all be the Malzzekeen, in time¡­ that isss the way of thingsss. First, we join and devour thend and the people on it, then we flee from the sssun and¡ª¡±


    ¡°The sun is gone!¡± squeaked the chorus of rats. ¡°The sun is shattered, and the Lord of Light is no more!¡±


    Tenebroum thought about punishing the rats for overstepping but decided against it. It would see where this went instead. ¡°Dead¡­ but that isss not the order of things¡­¡± the worms whispered, squirming more violently. The level of the soil was lower than it had been before, and the movements were easier to see. ¡°If it isss gone, then nothing can ssstop usss from what mussste next.¡±


    ¡°Whates next is that I will study the three of you, and when I have found a way to bind you to my power, then¡ª¡±


    ¡°We cannot be bound until we are bound together¡­¡± the Worm responded.


    ¡°I find that unlikely,¡± the Lich answered sourly, studying the growing aura of the thing in an attempt to find insight, but it found little.


    The Wom was markedly less powerful than the Wolf. There was little reason why it should be the most talkative and intelligent of the three, and yet it seemed to be. The Wolf was four times the size of Groshian and the Wormbined, and thanks to how well-fed it had been during its time with the Queen of Thorns, it was bursting with power. It should have been the master, but it seemed to be the servant. Rage and violence came before hunger or disease, though.


    The Lich set it aside. The why was not important. It was the how that was important.


    The Lich had already dissected both the Wolf and the rats for clues as to their nature. It was tempted to do the same with the Worm, but something about its nature¡­ it decided against that for now. Experiments were much safer behind the walls of magic that were painted on the floor.


    ¡°Tell me what you recall, and I will reward you with more blood,¡± the Lich lied. If the thing had needed more power toe back to life, it would have dly drowned it in ake of blood, but it looked quite healthy as things stood. Honestly, it looked a bit too healthy, but that was just one more mystery to unravel.


    ¡°I remember¡­¡± it paused as if it was searching for an answer. ¡°I remember light, and then¡­ darknessss¡­¡±


    ¡°The Light!¡± Groshian squeaked in a chorus that made the wolf howl mournfully.


    ¡°The Light is gone,¡± Tenebroum answered with growing annoyance. ¡°I slew it in singlebat. Now tell me what else you know.¡±


    ¡°You?¡± the Worm asked. Several of them had broken to the surface and were squirming about violently as if they were looking for something. ¡°But you are jussst a ssspirit¡­ You are not ssstrong enough to defffeat the light¡­¡±


    ¡°I am the lord of death and darkness,¡± Tenebroum spat. ¡°I have defeated both the Lord of Light and the All-Father, along with dozens of small gods. I am the most powerful force of all in the world, and if you do not find a way to make yourself useful to me, I will devour your soul and use it to fuel my other experiments and conquests.¡±


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    The Lich well understood that sometimes patience needed to be afforded to certain spirits that had lost their bearings. Life and death wasplex business. That said, to the Lich, this did not feel like a spirit slowly waking from a long sleep. It seemed like it was stalling for time.


    ¡°We¡­¡± the Worm Answered. ¡°We remember what God ffflessssh fffelt like, and how wonderffful it wasss to wreak havoc on the world above¡­ A leassst until a new Lord of Light wasss chosssen.¡±


    ¡°A new Lord of Light?¡± the Lich asked, confused. ¡°Why would there be more than one?¡±


    ¡°Why would there only ever be one?¡± the Worm answered. ¡°That isss the way offf thingsss. We ssstrike one down to begin the age of strifffe, and a new one ssstrikesss usss down in turn to renew light and lifffe to the world. It isss you who are the aberration.¡±


    ¡°Abberation?¡± The Lich asked. ¡°Exin yourself.¡±


    ¡°Can¡¯t you fffeel it?¡± the Worm asked, in its slimy voice. ¡°Our connection? It issss not your time, and thisss isss, not yource¡­¡±


    The thing was beginning to talk nonsense now, and Tenebroum was very close to ending this conversation. Only the strange churning of the worms and their continued growth kept it here watching.


    ¡°There is no connection,¡± the Lich growled, shifting ufortably as it tried to put a finger on this feeling that it was feeling.


    ¡°But we are connected, can¡¯t you feel it?¡± the worms asked? There were so many of them now that the earth was all but gone, and they were squirming almost to the edge of the sarcophagus.


    Tenebroum decided it definitely wasn¡¯t going to feed them further at that point. What little life energy it had given the worms couldn¡¯t possibly ount for such tremendous growth. So, until it had more of its questions answered, the only motivation the things would receive would be in the form of pain.


    ¡°I feel nothing,¡± the Lich barked. It was a lie, though. It did feel something in its soul. There was a strange sort of connection between it and the sarcophagus twenty feet away, even though that was impossible. It was a slender etheric thread, and when Tenebroum tried to sever it, a new sprang into existence just as quickly.


    The Lich took a step back. It wasn¡¯t fear that made it do so. Instead, it was an abundance of caution.


    It had never touched the ancient stone sarcophagus or even approached it. Both it and its upant were locked behind a triple ring of the strongest wards that the Lich knew. A quick check revealed they were intact and working as intended, and yet still, it did not feel safe.


    The coffin was overflowing with worms now. There were so many they were falling on the floor now and squirming blindly around. It was meaningless because they couldn¡¯t escape their confinement and had no way to chew through stone, but somehow, that sight put more fear into the Lich than anything had since Albrecht had so long ago.


    Something was very wrong. Just to be on the safe side, the Lich ordered all the zombies to move away from the ring. In fact, halfway through the order, it changed its mind and directed them to a corner of the room. If something had managed to contaminate them, it didn¡¯t want them to spread it to the rest of itsir. It would leave them in here and destroy them with fire if that was necessary.


    ¡°Don¡¯t go¡­¡± the worms called out to the Lich as it moved toward the door. ¡°You can join usss and be Malzzekeen too¡­ maybe together we could be¡­ more than the Malzzekeen¡­¡±


    The Wolf growled at that, and the rats chittered excitedly, but the Lich ignored both. Instead, it was distracted by a strange motion in its body, and it looked down. It was strange to feel anything at all in a corpse, let alone one that had been tanned, treated, and left to work in the dark for decades. It wasn¡¯t impossible that an insect would make it into itsir from time to time, but as Tenebroum looked down, it saw that wasn¡¯t what this was.


    There, in the middle of its chest, was the outline of a long, slender worm crawling around in the skin beneath its chest. It was a horrifying sight, not because it was disgusted by such things, but because it was impossible.


    ¡°This cannot be!¡± it roared. Lifting its right hand and using the scalpel on its sixth finger to cut the flesh open and remove the thing. It was exactly what it thought it was, and it immediately dropped it on the ground and crushed it under its heel.


    But beyond that, there was nothing it could do. It didn¡¯t matter if it was impossible. It was happening. There were more now. Worms were crawling around its current body in ces that they never should have existed.


    No, in ces that they didn¡¯t exist in until a moment ago. It was quite sure of that. The Lich still had dim memories of what it had been like to be no more than a swamp. It knew the feeling of leaches and slugs crawling through it, and this ce had, thanks to the caustic chemicals it used to embalm all of itsplicated creations, this corpse had been sterile.


    Now, it wasn¡¯t, though. Now, grey finger-thick earthworms and ck tworms were crawling under its skin and out between the stitches where the flesh was long ago joined together. Worse, the ck mist that made up its true form was leaking from these wounds like it had been injured.


    Tennebroum realized that it had been injured, though, and immediately fled the body, letting it drop to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut as it sought to put distance between it and those terrible worms. It had fought the All-Father in violent singlebat for several minutes, and the God had done no more than total one of the many bodies that the Lich had constructed for itself, but to damage its soul, even in a small way?


    As the Lich pulled away, it could feel it. Something was terribly, terribly wrong.

 Chapter 186: Shattered - End Book 4

    Chapter 186: Shattered - End Book 4


    Worms were crawling all the way up to the edge of the boundary circle now. They were pouring out of the sarcophagus like there was some sort of portal in there. They were flooding the ce, but except for the few that had sprung from the corpse that Tenebroum had been wearing only a moment ago, there was none outside the binding rings.


    That was good, but there should have been none at all outside the binding rings. The spirits were separated from the rest of the world; at least, they should have been.


    The Lich woke up every head in its library at once to demand answers but knew that such answers would take time, even if they came at all. While it did so, it was torn between fleeing the room and sealing the stone door and between watching what might happen next. If it stayed, then whatever foul magic it was that connected it to the Worm might get stronger, but if it fled, then it wouldn¡¯t be able to see or stop what happened next.


    The very idea of fleeing in its own ce of power was preposterous, but that¡¯s exactly what was about to happen. It would have, too, if it had not seen the worms from its corpse inching their way across the floor toward the cage of rats.


    Tenebroum silently ordered the closest drudge to walk over and stomp everyst worm until there was nothing left. It might not be able to do anything about the overflowing sarcophagus yet, but fire-wielding forgewights were on their way. They didn¡¯t have a tenth of the strength of Krulm¡¯venor, but they were more than enough to sterilize this room.


    As the zombie crushed all the worms until they were nothing but goo with thick booted feet, the Worm cried out. ¡°You don¡¯t need to do thisss¡­ you can join usss¡­¡±


    ¡°I do not have partners or allies, and I do not join pantheons,¡± the Lich barked. ¡°And I only use servants that¡ª¡±


    ¡°Not a pantheon¡­¡± the worms whispered. ¡°No¡­ A creature like you¡­ we desire your power¡­¡±


    The Lich should have roared in outrage. It wanted to, but instead, it could only stare in mute horror as the drudge that had crushed the worms began to bulge and bloat. Tennebroum ordered it to move back to the far end of the room, but it didn¡¯t reach it before it exploded in a shower of t and roundworms of all shapes and colors. The door to the room slid shut behind its ephemeral form with the loud sound of stone grating against stone. Such a burial wouldn¡¯t stop the Lich from doing as it wanted, but it would keep whatever was happening here from spreading.


    Realistically, it should draw the life force out of these cursed things and devour their spirits whole. It had considered that with Groshin many times, but now it was d that it had not. There was no telling what terrible effect that might have had.


    The worms were everywhere now. They were in all three circles and on several of the drudges. They were on the walls and the ceilings. Tennebroum was more than a little disturbed. Fortunately, that¡¯s when the forgewights arrived.


    The dwarven ghosts were usually used to hammer armor into shape and make metal skeletons for one of a hundred different projects. For that, they wore iron gauntlets bound to their souls so they could use tools and interact with objects. Today, they had a different task: extermination.


    ¡°You want my power?¡± Tennebroum asked. ¡°Then burn with it.¡±


    As the Lich finished speaking, fire flooded the room. In fact, the light of it was ufortably bright enough that it moved to hide in the shadow of the sarcophagus lid that had been propped against the near wall. It didn¡¯t need to see everything to know what was happening, though. It could hear it. It could hear the shrieks of the rats and the howl of the wolf as much as it could hear the crisping of the worms as the world filled with fire.


    <em>ording to the legends, that was how Siddrim purged them, wasn¡¯t it?</em> Tenebroum thought to himself.


    The fire went on for almost a minute before the oxygen waspletely depleted, and the forgewights fled as slender blue mes before they were extinguishedpletely. This let the Lich spread outpletely in the darkness to see what it had wrought.


    The results were not what it had hoped. It had expected to find only charred bodies that had gone still. The Queen of Thrones herself had mentioned that this wolf could die if enough damage had been done to it, but somehow, despite its wounds, it was still snarling even as it was covered in burns. Some of the mice were moving, too, and the Worm¡¯s sarcophagus was beginning to churn again.


    ¡°Fire¡­ heat¡­ it isss not enough¡­¡± the Worm whispered again. ¡°Not without the light thatesss with it.¡±


    The Lich¡¯s blood froze at those words. Light was the one thing it could not wield against these things. It had minions that could use any of the four elements, shadows, acid, and any number of other strange weapons. There was no light, though. Instantly, its mind started to race through the antielement options it might have. There was no strangulite in itsir, but for everything else¡ª


    Tenebroum¡¯s train of thought was derailed when it Heard the wolf growl more loudly and then pad forward, one shaky step at a time. The beast shouldn¡¯t have been able to move forward past the rings that bound it, but it only took the quickest nce at the rings to see what had happened.


    The marks that had been painted on the floor had been made in a dark pigment that wouldn¡¯t be harmed by the mes, but the worms that hadnded on them during the gorey explosion had been burned to a crisp until they carburized them. One wed ring could ruin such a working or even make it dangerous, as the mages of Abenend had found out the hard way. In this case, it had set the Wolf free. No, it realized, to its¡¯ horror, it had set them all free.


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    ¡°There is no choce,¡± the Worm whispered as the wolf ripped open the cage and began to devour the rats, bing one with them. ¡°Malzzekeen will flourisssh and devour everything until the light ssstopsss usss. Even you¡­¡±


    The Lich had its remaining drudges charge the thing, but it knew they stood no chance. Even before it had finished ripping them to pieces, its tail was changing into that of a rat, and its second head was growing. This was the worst-case scenario in its mind, and even as it retreated through the door made of eight inches of solid stone, drudges were pushing a heavy wooden beam across it to make it nearly impossible to open while reinforcements headed this way.


    The Lich wasn¡¯t sure what it would do if they breached the door. It had many projects that were halfway through construction, but other than its honor guard, it had very few warriors in its own inner sanctum these days. They simply were not needed. There were its own constructs, of course. It would likely have to animate one of the more powerful models and¡ª


    ¡°Ahhhh¡­ I see atst,¡± a new voice whispered the way that the Worm had. It was a chorus too, like the rats had been before now, but it was subtler and dripping with malice. New or not, though, there was only one person it could be. Malzekeen.


    ¡°We had been wondering what the connection was between an immortal being like the Worm and a paltry specter like you, and now we see it atst,¡± Malzekeen purred. ¡°It¡¯s the gold, isn¡¯t it. You robbed our tomb and cut your throat; isn¡¯t that ironic¡­¡±


    Even as warriors flooded down the corridor to stand ready against whatever was about to happen, The Lich suddenly realized what it was that the caged god was talking about. ¡°It¡¯s my gold,¡± the Lich roared as it fled back to the heart of darkness: its throne room and the phctery it contained.


    Every resource that it had in the ce was in motion now. Drudges were fetching untested alchemicalpounds, and half-finished warriors were springing to life and shambling toward the lonely hallway where all hell was breaking loose. Everything was being mobilized.


    ¡°To think if you¡¯d left that gold where it belonged, then you would¡­¡± the distant echoing voice paused. ¡°Oh, but you couldn¡¯t¡­ could you¡­ Tenebroum¡­¡±


    To hear its own name from the lips of another was enough to stop the Lich in its tracks for a moment. Such a thing was impossible. It was unthinkable. It was the one thing that was not written in the Skoetomikos. It was the one fact that the library did not know. It was forbidden. The only ce it even existed was in the great mand that surrounded its territory, which let it dictate the very rules of the world here.


    Even in that ce, though, had been specifically carved by a handful of drudges under its watchful eye, and they were obliterated afterward. There was simply no way that Malzekeen could know unless¡­


    Suddenly, it looked down at that slender thread that seemed to unravel off of it and back toward that monster. It was reading its mind through this cursed link.


    ¡°I am,¡± it purred. ¡°That and so much more. You are but a paltry ghost, but you¡¯ve been up to so much. And you have such strength, too. We cannot wait to devour it.¡±


    Tenebroum paused, almost to its throne room, and assessed itself. It did not feel weak, but not that it was focusing on it; it could detect a notable drain.


    In the distance, something boomed. The beast was trying to get free.


    With all the souls like this, it had gathered, it could probably endure this a long time, but that wasn¡¯t good enough. It needed to sever this strange connection once and for all. There was only one way to do that, though, and the thought was terrifying.


    The connection to the Lich was through the gold in its phctry. What it didn¡¯t know. What it could never have known was that that gold had already touched something else. That was what those adventurers found, and that was what Cutter and Riley had stolen from them. That was the core of everything.


    Suddenly, certain questions that Tenebroum had never asked before were answered. Why did it have powers over disease in those early days? Why did it slip so easily into the swamp and its many predators? More than anything, why did it all feel so right?


    The Lich was horrified by those realizations and more as it sped to its throneroom. There was a terrible bang again. This time, it was apanied by the sound of cracking stone. Even eight inches of limestone wasn¡¯t enough to keep that thing at bay.


    ¡°Nothing can stop me,¡± Malzekeen whispered in his mind. ¡°I¡¯ming for you, Tenebroum, and there¡¯s nothing you can do about it¡­¡±


    It briefly tried to reverse the link and pry into the mind of this foreign entity, but it was a terrible idea, and it only sped up the power that was being sapped from it. The Lich stopped and ignored it. It had already made up its mind.


    It issued amand that it never thought it would have to make, and suddenly, its lizardman honor guard that had stood still for so long sprang to life. They hesitated only briefly as Malzekeen tried to stop it, but whatever hold it had over Tennebroum was tenuous, and it only barely extended to the Lich¡¯s minions.


    ¡°You think this will stop me?¡± Malzekeen roared in Tenebroum¡¯s mind like the beast he was. ¡°I am primeval. I am unstoppable. You cannot hope to defeat me!¡±


    As the beast blustered and shattered the stone doorway that held it back, the Lich¡¯s eight lizardman warriors brought their halberds down hard on the phctery, hopelessly mangling it. Albrect had stood there silently for such a long time, and now, with no warning at all, he was being destroyed. The warriors delivered blow after terrible blow until the golden shell was in pieces, and dust was leaking from the mummified corpse.


    And just like that, the ghostly link vanished, along with a good chunk of what made the Lich who it was. For a long time, it had been a maelstrom. It had been lightning in a bottle, but now there was no bottle, and it began to unravel immediately. Now, its soul spun out of control, hemorrhaging spiritsrge and small. With each one, a bit of expertise or knowledge vanished, and Tenebroum slowly but surely unraveled into nothing.


    It wasing undone. It was no longer a Lich. It was merely one specter among many, desperately flying through the dark as its world ended. It wasn¡¯t alone; there were tens of thousands of spirits flying to pieces in all directions, and it had no idea what would be left when everyst spark and shard that made it who it was was gone. Thest thing that Tenebroum saw before it flew off to hide in the darkest corner of itsir was that awful chimera tearing its way through the guards it faced.


    It had be exactly like the texts had said it would. It was a deranged two-headed predator, asrge as a man, with the head of a wolf and a rat, ringed all around in a terrible mane of worms, and any minute now, that thing would be hunting it.

 Chapter 187: Hunted

    Chapter 187: Hunted


    Tenebroum was still hemorrhaging souls as it fled down the maze-like halls of itsir, and Malzekeen roared in pursuit. The monstrosity bowled over everything in its path like a force of nature. Even as the constructs wound down, some of them still fought, but against the reformed god from an age past, none of them stood a chance. Metal and bone were sundered by powerful ws and even more powerful teeth, and any flesh that touched it was left desated and decayed by the powers of hunger and rot.


    The beast was the incarnation of destructiveness, and against that, in this vaporous form. Even its most powerful bodies might do little good against this monster, though. If Tenebroum had been itself, then it might have activated all of them at once and caused a true battle for the ages, but in the state, it was in now, it wasn¡¯t sure that it could even possess a single construct and use it to its full potential.


    The phctery that it had allowed it to store immense amounts of power within itself. It had been the perfect union of the mind of a mage and the power of its hoard, and now its golden focus was gone. As a result, it could feel whole aspects of itself sloughing off like an eroding cliffside, falling into the hungry sea a bit at a time.


    The darkness should have wondered about that gold, even before all of this. It should have been able to detect the touch of another hungry spirit, but it didn¡¯t. Everything had happened so long ago when it had known. That was no excuse, though, and even as Tenebroum¡¯s mind started toe unraveled, it found time to curse itself.


    As the wounded spirit fled through the halls, it left a trail of smoke in its wake. It wasn¡¯t smoke, though. It was streamers of dozens or even hundreds of spirits fissioning from it every second. No matter how fast it moved, they were left behind it in a trail that not only gave away its position as it sought to hide from the monster pursuing it. They also weakened it. Every soul that left its core made it a little weaker and a little slower. Tenebroum hated that reality bitterly, but there was nothing it could do to change that just now.


    The darkness didn¡¯t need to follow the corridors. It could charge right through walls like they weren¡¯t even there. That didn¡¯t help it escape its pursuer, though. The monstrous hound was gaining. Sometimes, it lost a few steps when it had to go around the walls and obstacles, but other times, it charged straight through, shattering the thin limestone walls.


    It shouldn¡¯t be that strong, Tenebroum realized. Nothing should, at least nothing that had just been resurrected. That strength was one more testament to just how much strength the creature had already siphoned from the darkness before Tenebroum shattered the connection.


    ¡°Tenebroum¡­¡± Malzekeen growled. Now that the slender connection that had tied it to the worm was gone, it could no longer whisper sibntly into its mind. Instead, the beast had a voice that had taken on some of the characteristics of all three creatures. It was a low, violent thing with an undertone of whispers, and it repulsed the darkness. ¡°I¡¯ming for you, Tenebroum¡­ These scraps won¡¯t be enough to sate my hunger¡­¡±


    Tenebroum ignored it. Instead, it tried to fling constructs between it and the monstrous chimera, though that did little good. Many of them would not respond to its calls and instead continued to do whatever it was they¡¯dst been assigned to do, while others simply dropped where they were,pletely without power. It had been the heart of everything. That wasn¡¯t an ident. It had been the heart of it all. The phctery was connected to the soul web, which wound through its gigantic undergroundir like awork of arteries, and now that heart had been ripped out, and the body was dying.


    That was something that Tenebroum was more than familiar with. It had killed more people and animals via its minions and its experiments than anyone else in the world. Perhaps even more than anyone else who¡¯d ever existed, and now its mighty war machine was dying the same way. The darkness was unable to imagine a crueler irony.


    It gave some thought as to how its armies and other, moreplex servants would fair in this terrible, wrenching moment, but that ending the moment that Malzekeen bowled over an acolyte, practically ripping the young man in two as it charged after the dying spirit that had once been the Lich.


    It was a desperate race, and even if Tenebroum won it, it was still likely to bleed to death at the finish line, but that was a problem to be worried aboutter. Once it reached the undertemple, the darkness finally remembered there were more directions than just forward and backward, and it surged up, looking for a ce to hide and heal while Malzekeen¡¯s ughter of its flock was covered by the sound of a terrible dirge that was ying on the pipe organ.


    ¡°You think I will not follow?¡± the chimera bellowed. ¡°I¡­¡± whatever threats it made after that were lost to the music. The Lich entered the widest of the organ''s pipes and soared all the way to the surface, where night always reigned. Normally, it could look beyond the veil it had created easily enough and see if it were day or night for the rest of the world, but for some reason, right now, it couldn¡¯t. It was blind to everything outside the boundaries circumscribed by its true name.


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    Tenebroum sought to reach out to his most powerful agents and avatars, to try to understand more about what was happening through their eyes, but it was unable to touch their minds. Even Krulm¡¯venor, who was bound to it the most tightly of all, no longer seemed to exist. Either its connection to its constructs had been ended, or they''d died along with its phctery. Regardless, there was no way to be sure, but it was angered just the same.


    <em>Curse that filthy animal for this, </em>Tenebroum¡¯s soul cried out in pain. <em>Curse it for finally allowing that pathetic me to be snuffed out!</em>


    The darkness flew through the air above ckwater as the music slowly became more erratic before finally dying in a single long, mournful note that lingered for minutes. While it did so, it studied the town that it had possessed for so long. The ce had mutated in the time since the Lich had crafted its absolute barrier.


    When the curtain of eternal night had closed over the backwater, it had been a small town that was halfway burned to the ground by Siddrim¡¯s final bout of fury. Now, it was a ramshackle series of workshops and warehouses covered in patchy snow and a thin rhyme of frost. In the summer, that could melt away because of the warm winds, but right now, the roof edges were a forest of ice circles.


    Up here, the chimneys of its smelters still exhaled smoke, but there was no work. There should have been regr hammer blows and the sound of dead feet crunching on rotten snow. Instead, it was so silent you could hear a pin drop. Not even a breeze rustled the dead ce.


    Despite therge cage of its own making, Tenebroum felt trapped, but there was nothing it could do about that. So, instead of rattling the bars of its cage, it perched there at the tallest tower in its factory of abominations and studied its own wounds.


    Its soul was only half the size it had been before all of this. It might even be less. It had lost most of the cyclonicplexity it had possessed before and reverted to some earlier state. Tenebroum couldn¡¯t remember what its soul had looked like before it had coalesced into its phctery, but it was certain it was something like this. It was no longer a maelstrom. It was just a thunderhead, and as it dissipated, it realized it might be less than that, even. Thend around it was its forever.


    It couldn¡¯t die, not truly, but it could easily fall until it was nothing but the thinnest shade of itself. It could be a dark version of Krulm¡¯venor, living amongst the ruins of its greatness with no real understanding.


    As it thought about that, another soul slipped free and started to drift away, but Tenebroumshed out like a raptor, devouring it again. <em>I can hold myself together, it seems, </em>it thought to itself, <em>but for how long. </em>


    Tenebroum¡¯s fear drove it higher than it had in a long time. Perhaps ever. It had build this ring to bar the light from ever touching its domain again, but in all that time it had rarely used the full height of the tower that existed. Now it did. Part of it wanted to escape forever into the night sky.


    That proved impossible, unfortunately. Eventually the darkness flew so high that it reached nearly to the stars itself. That was when it finally detected the warded connections that linked between the glowing dots, and it shied away from that ancient power. <em>There¡¯s something to be learned here,</em> it thought as it slunk back from the shimmering. <em>But I¡¯m in no fit ce to learn it. </em>


    Still, as Tenebroum inevitably drifted back down, it considered what it had seen. It had long known that there were dark and terrible things in the spaces between the stars thanks to the blurred recollection of Siddrim¡¯s overwhelming memories, but in the moment of weakness it sorely wished it could feast on them.


    As the darkness studied this problem and tried to decide the best way to handle it, its world contracted down to a single point. At least, that was the case until it heard the sounds of arge beast padding around the tower three stories beneath it.


    Tenebroumunched into the air again a moment before the thingunched its mane or worm and leach tentacles toward it. I for a moment, the dark sky between them was a forest of death, and each slimy limb sought to capture Tenebroum in its weakened state. It was able to avoid the monster, but only at the cost of shedding a dozen more minor souls and shrinking even further.


    ¡°Look how weak you already are,¡± the beast taunted. ¡°I could keep hunting you, but what good would that do me? I already have much of your strength and find your pathetic toys to be a waste of energy.¡±


    The darkness said nothing to give away its location. Instead, it swirled high above the dark god that had ruined so much and kept on its guard for the next attack from an unexpected quarter while the beast continued on.


    ¡°I could do that, but it would be a waste of my time, and the Lord of Light has already cost me centuries,¡± it growled. ¡°So, I leave you to your fate. Let this ce be your tomb while I go and devour the rest of the world.¡±


    The darkness watched it from high above while it walked to the border and then outside of it. Tenebroum was tempted to watch it go from there, but something wouldn¡¯t let it try to step across. So it didn¡¯t. Instead, it slowly hemorrhaged souls as it waited.


    <em>What do I do now? </em>It wondered as it reflected on the words of Malzekeen and slowly came apart. <em>How do I survive this? </em>


    It was the only question that mattered, but in that moment, Tenebroum had no good answer. Too much of who it was had already started to drift away, and it wasn¡¯t half the genius it had been even an hour ago.

 Chapter 188: Desperate Times

    Chapter 188: Desperate Times


    Time ticked by full of characteristic indecision as Tenebroum tried to decide the best course of action. It told itself, <em>at any moment, Malzekeen might return. This could be a trick¡­ an ambush, and I should wait a little longer. </em>That was only part of the truth, though.


    The truth was that it was it didn¡¯t know what to do as it swam back and forth through the skies above ckwater, trying to devour every soul that slipped free of its grasp.


    That, of course, was a losing prospect, but there was nothing else it could do in that moment. It was certain that the only way to sever its connection with the worm had been to shatter the only thing that the two of them had inmon. That had been sessful but at a terrible cost.


    <em>Now I need someone smarter than what I¡¯ve be to help it decide</em>¡­ As Tenebroum had that thought, it realized that it still had that, at the very least. As soon as it realized that, it fled down at high speed, leaving more bits of other people¡¯s souls in its wake as it fled to the library.


    Malzekeen might welle back. There was nothing it could do about that. It might be in a day, a week, or even a year. The darkness couldn¡¯t prevent that in its current state. All it could do was hemorrhage and grow weaker, and that was thest thing it wanted. Its enemies were going toe back, one way or the other. If not the ghastly chimera, then the forces of light or even one of the meddling gods like Lunaris. Someone would smell its weakness like blood in the water, and it had to be ready for that.


    So, it dove through three floors of stone and into the library, hoping that it wasn''tpletely wrecked like so many other parts of its stronghold. There, it found the roompletely intact. Here, there was row upon row of mismatched pottery. Only a few of the heads in this room were even rtively fresh. Most of them went back for years and decades. It was an arcane treasure trove. Normally, it would be picky and choose the right mage or mages for the job, but it no longer remembered which jar held which head, and Tenebroum could not reach out to the Skoetomikos to find the answer. So, picked one at random and dived toward it.


    As it did so, there were some sounds echoing through the halls to indicate that either its surviving acolytes or some of therger shards of its soul had gone berserk in some distant part of thebyrinth. For now, Tenebroum ignored that. Every minute and every distraction would cost it a part of its mind as it dwindled. The smaller it got, the slower it lost strength, but if it did not find a way to reverse this process in a day or a week, it would be nothing but a handful of murder victims lingering in the heart of what was once a swamp.


    The head that it chose belonged to young master Bartholomew, an elemental mage that focused on earth magics. Tenebroum found that out immediately, but it took longer to remember where it had collected him from. That answer came back to it only as it forced energy in the mage to bring him to life. The man had been one of the men that the veryte Count Kelvun had hired to dig a canal through its swamp.


    The darkness bristled at that memory but stayed focused on the matter at hand as itmanded the mage¡¯s slowly awakening soul. ¡°Tell me what I must do to solve this problem!¡± Tenebroum roared into the man¡¯s mind.


    The most unexpected thing happened then. The man actually fought him. Not for long, and not sessfully, but for the first time in decades, one of its servants squirmed in its deathless grip like it had a chance to escape.


    ¡°Tell me!¡± Tenebroum raged again.


    This time, the spirit gasped and iled. ¡°I don¡¯t understand the question¡­ the problem? What is it you need?¡±


    Patience was the veryst thing that Tenebroum had at that moment. Still, it stopped itself, and instead of trying to pour a book''s worth of information into a single thought, it carefully exined what had happened to the mage and told it all about the destruction of its phctery and its eventual dissolution as it drifted slowly apart. Having a physical form, even in the form of this borrowed head, seemed to help with that, but the darkness was still losing power, and it did not think that Malzekeen was the cause.


    ¡°You must build a new one,¡± the mage said eventually, ¡°or you will continue to devolve into lower energy states as you equalize with the natural world.¡±


    Tenebroum took that in and was shocked that it had not considered that itself until the head said as much. <em>Am I really so far gone? </em>It asked itself, balking at the obvious solution as it fled the mage¡¯s head and sought the closest drudge that was still in one piece to do everything that needed to be done next.


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    The darkness skipped over several that bore the telltale signs of rot that indicated a brush Malzekeen before it found an aging specimen that was deactivated but otherwise unharmed. Tenebroum hated that it couldn¡¯t simply beckon to itsir and have these thingse to it, but even worse was climbing into such a flimsy thing and forcing itself to its feet. Walking had always beenplicated for the darkness, even when it had been a Lich. Now, though, it staggered down the hall toward its library and was barely able to stay upright with the use of the wall.


    Once there, the Lich wrestled the lid off of the jar it had just interrogated, and then, grabbing the mage by the hair, it headed toward its treasury. On the way there, it saw no signs of the battle that it could hear, but it made no attempt to look for it. The veryst thing the darkness needed right now was a fight. It was trapped inside a fragile, limping relic, and it was slowly bleeding to death on a spiritual level. It needed no other hardships.


    Fortunately, it found none either, as it made its way to the treasury. Well, none, but the difficulty of retrieving and carrying a bag of gold with it up to the surface. The zombie that it was wearing was strong, but bnce was made harder with such a heavy weight. Eventually, the darkness was forced to retrieve two bags just to bnce it out as it trudged toward the surface.


    Along the way, it saw many terrible things. Even if that monstrosity had only been in itsir for a few hours, it had wreaked havoc. Walls were knocked over, sections of tunnels had partially copsed, and everywhere the soul web was snarled. It seemed to recall that the Temrs had done less damage when they invaded, but it was hard to say. The darkness kept confusing that invasion with some of the smaller ones done by adventurers before that.


    Then it reached the undertemple and found that its flock had been ughtered, almost to a man. There were still a few praying, including Verdenin, who seemed to be dying, but Tenebroum ignored them. Their survival didn¡¯t matterpared to its own, and right now, it did not need prayers; it needed a smelting cup and enough precious metal to fill it.


    The way up to the surface was longer than the darkness remembered. It had been so long that it had traversed the path in physical form that it could not remember when it had done so. The past didn¡¯t matter, nor did the difficulty. All that mattered was reaching its desperate goal.


    There was no one to stop it on the surface, either. Indeed, the only obstacle it found there was that the st furnace was almost out, and it was forced to set down its heavy load and retrieve a great deal of dried peat and charcoal, which had been set aside previously to get the thing back up to temperature.


    Tenebroum had never known much about the metal works of itsir. It relied on its drudges and forgewights for that expertise. It knew that fire melted gold if it was hot enough, though, and it knew that it needed molten gold and the mind of a mage to rece what it had lost. How that worked? Why that worked? It had no clue. All it knew was that it was dissipating like fog on a sunny day, and it had to stop.


    So Tenebroum loaded up the crucible with gold coins that it had looted from a dozen cities. Part of it worried that some of this gold might yet bear another spirit''s touch, but right now, there was nothing it could do about it. Right now, anything was better than nothing. So long as it wasn¡¯t Malzekeen¡¯s gold, it would be enough for now.


    What followed was a messy, clumsy process. The coins were slow to melt, even after Tenebroum figured out that it could work the bellows to increase the heat of the fire. It caught itself on fire twice, which was annoying, even if it did no real damage. Each mishap and mistake was more salt in the wound, though. A day ago, it had been a God; it had held the souls of hundreds of thousands and powered a war machine that functioned like clockwork, even half a continent away. Now, it was a bare chorus of ten thousand minds that were slowly bleeding away while it was forced to do all of the work itself.


    It was humiliating, but worse than that, it was inefficient. To the lingering vestiges of Siddrim and the All-Father that it still held onto tightly, that was the most unforgivable sin of them all.


    The remnants of the God of craftsmen cringed again when Tenebroum finally poured out the golden crucible onto the head of the mage, creating a tiny, ugly version of the phctery it had possessed until recently. It was an effort that bordered on failure.


    The head was hardly the heart that Albrecht¡¯s preserved corpse had been, and the darkness gnashed its teeth in frustration as it tried to understand why. It had taken the mind of a mage and encased it in gold, just as it had done so long ago. This time, though, it wasn¡¯t a new dark heart that it could gather endless amounts of power into. If its original phctery had been an ocean, then this one was a pond or a very smallke.


    Still, it was enough to staunch the bleeding. Even though Tenebroum felt like it filled the new thing up to bursting, it stopped hemorrhaging souls, and that was the important part. Now, it could even control a number of drudges once more, though they had to be close for it to do so.


    This was still an uneptable situation, but it was able to think and n again, and using its drudge to carry its new quasi-phctery around, the darkness went back down into itsir to ask its library for guidance on what to do next. Bartholomew was spent, but it had many other mages that could advise it on such things.

 Chapter 189: The View From Above

    Chapter 189: The View From Above


    Jordan spent those first few frantic months as the Lord of the Night Sky just trying to understand what it was he¡¯d been entrusted with. While he was thankful that his eyes slowly healed with time, sight, orck thereof, seemed to be among the least of his difficulties. What he needed now were answers.


    Before all this, he¡¯d been grateful for the insight about everything that was about to happen. Truthfully, he still didn¡¯t know how much the book changed events so much as it witnessed them. However, whatever it was the Book of Days had done to him as he read it, it had quickly reversed once he¡¯d be a god. That was what he was now, though it still felt strange to him to say or think it.


    He missed that book, too, and sorely wished that he¡¯d kept it because there was no instruction manual as far as what it was he was supposed to be doing. Eventually, Jordan discovered that Lunaris¡¯s pce did contain a library. At least, that¡¯s what he thought it was. Instead, when he finally found a moment where the world wasn¡¯t about to end and had a chance to peruse it, the ce turned out to be nothing but the journals.


    Not that the discovery mattered. Reading was a luxury he did not have time for. This was because the stars demanded near constant attention, but between fighting back the dark and checking on the children¡¯s progress, he did eventually discover the pce that apparently belonged to him, and during those forays, he discovered one more fact about the shelves full of journals.


    They did not all belong to Lunaris, nor was she the first God or Goddess of the moon. There was a whole list of people that had apparently been lunar deities before her, and though the answers as to what had happened to them were probably within the pages of those ancient tomes, just leafing through, he found a Selenara, a Craton, and a Mare.


    ¡°Still no Jordans,¡± he said with an uncertain smile as he closed one and put it away. The joke was an attempt to cover up his nervousness. He was entirely out of his depth. He might never have time to read all of these, but if every page in the vast room was a single day, then the world was thousands of years older than he thought it was.


    Jordan, like every other young mage, had been taught that the world was half a millennia old. Technically, it had been older than that for some unspecified period of darkness, though that time before time didn¡¯t count. History, so far as both the church and the Magica Collegium agreed, only started when light dawned. It had been almost five hundred years since the sun had first risen and banished the darkness forever.


    That no longer made sense when there were moons before Lunaris. There were probably suns before her, too. He could probably find their names with a little research if he had more time. Jordan could probably find out a lot more than that, too. Entire ages had passed and were entirely lost to time, and he was too busy staving off the dark to dig deeper into the topic.


    Suddenly, forever didn¡¯t feel so long anymore. Nothing felt long anymore. There was no time to eat or sleep, and though he didn¡¯t need to do either anymore, he was surprised to find he missed both. There was no time to sleep when the stars needed him, though. It was getting to the point where he could tell what was happening out there just by the way that the subtle music of the spheres changed and flowed.


    He supposed that would have been helpful if things were normal, and he had time to work on other things until an emergency arose, but right now, things almost always seemed to be an emergency. He had a beautiful pce filled with glowing servants. They would even bring him ethereal food, but he was too busy to enjoy any of it.


    Instead, hey around outside, staring up at the sky and willing the stars to move into ce for each new attack as he used the light of the moon to reinforce them where he had to. Each bright spec was not a tiny hole in the celestial sphere as he''d been taught; it was a tiny glowing chess man fighting to hold the darkness back. It didn¡¯t take long to see why Taz had been practicing his game so much throughout Jordan¡¯s stay. The rules weren¡¯t quite the same, but the same concepts of territory and reach applied across the vast swaths of the invisible board that was the night sky.


    <em>He¡¯d do so much better at this than me, </em>Jordan thought with a sigh as another one of his tiny glowing warriors winked out of existence. <em>If only he hadn¡¯t been a monster. </em>


    Tazuranth was a genius. There was no doubt in Jordan¡¯s mind that he would have done a better job, but there was also no doubt that he would have used those powers to terrible ends, too, and the longer that he yed his little chess games with constetions, the more he understood that.


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    Slowly, the pieces came together for Jordan. For a few weeks, he wondered how it was there were any stars in the sky at all at the rate he was losing them. That was when he noticed that sometimes when someone died in the world far below him, they would drift off as a little spark. Not every soul could be a star, but it wasn¡¯t a privilege limited to mythic heroes either. There were plenty of farmers who died defending their farms from goblins and women who died standing up to protect their children from drunken husbands.


    It was those souls that saved the world. All he needed to do was move them into the right position, which was where the constetions came in.


    Of course, these brave celestial spirits were only half of the battle. The other half were the monsters they faced. Jordan was not well studied in eldritchzoology, but even if he¡¯d read every tome in Magister Brimly¡¯s personal library, he doubted that he would have discovered half of the creatures that squirmed and churned out there in the dark.


    Jordan knew about umbral hazards, of course. He knew that there were shades that could steal the souls of men easily enough. Those sorts of hazards werergely restricted to tunnels and caves deep beneath the ground. Up here, those weren¡¯t so much the problem, though.


    The monsters of men looked like men, but these looked like something else that was so alien that they might as well have never seen the glowing men they fought every day. The night sky was filled with serpents of nearly infinite length, lizards with a hundred limbs and a thousand ws, and hydras made of leaches and madness. Those were just the medium varieties of the monsters that could be found in the dark.


    Out there past the stars, everything was darkness, and even if he wanted to know what horrors it contained, there was no way to see just what was teeming out there beyond the starlight. Every day, Jordan observed, the light beat back the darkness, and he saw some new variety of monsters. Last night, it had been a five-headed dragon with fins that swam through the abyss instead of flying, and the day before, it had been a swarm of locusts that were each the size of a horse. As far as he could tell, every bit of the universe existed to devour the fragile lives on the world below, and only the light of heroes kept them at bay.


    Still, the longer Jordan kept at his watch, the easier things got. He didn¡¯t attribute that so much to any improvement on his part, so much as the note that Lunaris had left behind on thest page of her journal when she knew she was about to die.


    ¡®My final day. One day, my recement will read this. They wille up for air in those frantic final days of the prophecy, and they will notice that the number of stars in the sky is growing again, no matter how many they lose. It will not be their imagination, either, for once.¡¯


    Jordan had thought about that. For a while, it seemed like it had been his imagination, but he was growing increasingly sure that wasn¡¯t the case. He just didn¡¯t know why until she told him.


    ¡®Siddrim always kept the night sky in a fragile equilibrium, consuming more heroes than he ever truly needed to glow ever brighter. When he was lost to us, the darkness devoured those souls instead. The prophecy says that the darkness¡¯s hunger will soon abate, though, and that the children will y their part in striking it down forever. I can journey to the hereafter with satisfaction that I have done my part.¡¯


    Jordan thought that the note was vague, but then he imagined it was supposed to be. <em>Anything is vague once you¡¯ve been given glimpses of the future, </em>he reminded himself.


    He wondered where she got her prophecy, of course, but that didn¡¯t seem to be a power that he had. Jordan had no means to predict the future. All he could do was desperately react each time a leviathan from the deep brushed up against his fragile of stars, reorienting them to optimal positions to make sure that the forces of light had every advantage possible.


    It was a terrible equilibrium, and after less than a month, he knew he was not the right person for this job, no matter what Lunaris might have said. Still, it wasn¡¯t like he had a choice. The only way out was to die, and to date, no one hade to the moon to do the deed, even if that was what he wanted.


    So, as the situation stabilized, he found himself taking breaks to look down on the state of the world. Something certainly seemed to have happened. For once, darkness was not on the march in every direction, and though it did not seem likely that his former wards were responsible, they were certainly doing their part and had fought more zombies than children should be expected to at this point.


    Of course, they weren¡¯t children anymore. Most of them weren¡¯t, at least. He might have joined Markez¡¯s crew when some of them were little more than toddlers, but now the oldest girl was neen, and the youngest child was fourteen. At this point, every one of them was a hard-bitten warrior in their own right, and though Jordan kept expecting the Lich to appear and smite them, somehow, that never quite happened.


    Of course, as much as he wanted to help little Leo and all the other children, he couldn¡¯t do much. While it was true the moon¡¯s light could be turned to the world to burn away the dark, Jordan knew the world could not avoid the terrible cost of that just now. Things were getting better, but they were nowhere near good, and as much as he might love those glowing-eyed kids he¡¯d cared for so long, they were worth trading hundreds of stars for. <em>Besides, </em>he told himself as he turned his attention back from their little campsite far below and back to the stars above; Lunaris<em> said they¡¯re part of the prophecy, whatever that is. They¡¯ll be fine.</em>


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 Chapter 190: Dark World

    Chapter 190: Dark World


    They¡¯d expected another empty town. At worst, Leo and his friends had thought they might find a zombie or two. However, when the things boiled out of the nest that they¡¯d turned one of thergest barns that were still standing into, they¡¯d all reassessed that as they drew their des and shouted ns to each other as they pulled out their weapons and spread out to take out the foes that looked to be the most vulnerable.


    In a sane world, Leo would have noticed the barn a long way off based purely on the amount of evil it exuded. This wasn¡¯t a sane world, though, not anymore. Everything was tainted. Only the wildest of ces or the holiest of ruins weren¡¯t covered by a thin film of evil.


    Darkness hadn¡¯t just broken the sun. It had covered the world like soot after a wildfire, and just walking through it was enough to make Leo feel tainted. Right now wasn¡¯t the time to worry about that, though. Instead, he charged the center of the enemy line, seeking to bring down as many as possible, heedless of his own safety.


    He had to. He was the one with the silverde.


    They¡¯d finally found enough steel weapons for everyone else, but they were nothing special. Only he wielded a weapon that had been crafted by gods to strike at the very heart of evil, and it would have been a tragedy to waste that.


    That was why he took the head off the first two zombies to get within range. He sliced right through their necks, leaving a trail of ashes and cinders as the holy magic in this de annihted the darkness.


    The next opponent was wider than thest two put together and appeared to be a monsterrgely made of swine that had been stitched together. He took it apart in a single sh right down the middle.


    That blow revealed some sort of alchemical contraption in its bloated belly. For a moment, he thought the thing might blow him up. Brother Faerbar had talked about such enemies long ago. Fortunately, either time or his holy de disarmed the thing, and the worst it did was shower him with ichor as it fell into two.


    Leo wiped the gore from his face as he took in the dwindling enemies left on the battlefield. A few of his friends seemed to be wounded, but none of them seemed to be in too much trouble. They¡¯d all be in trouble if they didn¡¯t keep moving, though. So, instead of worrying, he gripped his silverde that much tighter and charged the biggest monster left on the battlefield. This one was a sloppy monstrosity that was obviously made from leftover farm parts. That wasn¡¯t an exaggeration, either. It was a sort of centaur made from the parts of two or three cows. Only the skull on top, and presumably the soul that powered the thing, was human. Even its arms were the wrong shape for a man, but two of them ended with huge rusted scythes that had once been used to harvest grain were now used to harvest flesh instead.


    Leo rolled smoothly under the first one as he closed the distance and brought his sword up to parry the second. A rusted scythe had no chance against a divinely forged de of light, though, and as the two weapons met, his slightly glowing de cut right through the other, sending the tip tumbling into the scraggly grass on his left, even as the stump of the de continued off to his right.


    Once, he¡¯d thought that he was weakpared to his friends, but with a growth spurt, he¡¯d learned the truth: they¡¯d all gotten strong; they¡¯d just practiced together for so many years that they¡¯d never noticed. They¡¯d never had something weak topare themselves to, and monsters like this, though brutal and horrific, were slower and clumsier than he¡¯d been at the age of eight. Leo could dance rings around them, but in this case, he would settle for chopping them into pieces.


    Both of the blows were powerful and might have cut an unarmored man in two as easily as they sliced through the air. However, now that they were past him, there was no way that the bony monstrosity would be able to reverse its des and bring them to bear before he struck it down.


    The only problem was that the beast was more than a little too tall for him. That, at least, was easily remedied. Leo cut off both of its forelegs at the mid-thigh, then ran past it before it could topple onto him. It was only when it was iling on the ground in an attempt to right itself that Leo was finally able to split the skull in half, and the darkness that had filled it left its empty eye sockets in a whiff of ck smoke.


    ¡°They¡¯re really getting down to it,¡± Reggie joked as he walked over to Leo, now that everything was dead. ¡°Sending farmers and farm animals after us.¡±


    Leo thought about reminding his friend that all they¡¯d really encountered were the dregs of some vast force. Somewhere, there were huge, dark armies marching across thendscape, but these weren¡¯t it. They were the broken cast of bits of a muchrger force. Even these didn¡¯t leave them entirely unscathed, though.


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    Today, it had been reanimated farmers. Two days ago, it had been soldiers missing limbs or otherwise mutted. The dead were everywhere. Sometimes, it was just one zombie staggering in circles or trying to walk repeatedly through a solid object like a wall or trunk.


    ¡°I¡¯m not sure anyone is sending these things,¡± Leo said with a shake of his head. ¡°I think they¡¯re just kind of everywhere these days.¡±


    ¡°You worry too much,¡± Jenna said,ing up behind him and ruffling his hair. She was bleeding, but if she wasn¡¯t worrying about it, then he wasn¡¯t either. Almost all of them could heal minor wounds. He didn¡¯t have to risk being called a show-off by insisting he be the one to take care of it. ¡°Me, I think the war¡¯s over, and this is all that¡¯s left. We clear these things out, and we¡¯ll all be heroes. They¡¯ll tell stories about us.¡±


    ¡°They will,¡±<em></em>Leo agreed, adding mentally <em>If there¡¯s anyone left besides us to tell them. </em>


    They¡¯d found plenty of broken-down monsters and empty viges. They¡¯d found forests too afraid for birdsong and fields that had been abandoned for years. The one thing they hadn¡¯t found though, was any survivors.


    Some of the children had initially argued they should go back to Jordan¡¯s home, Sedgim Manor. Others had argued that made no sense and that the reason they¡¯d left that ce was because Jordan knew that something bad was going to happen to them if they stayed.


    They¡¯d looked to Leo for answers, but the Goddess hadn¡¯t given him answers. She¡¯d only given him a sword. So, he¡¯d argued they should return to Siddrimar. A holy city like that might have survivors.


    Everyone had agreed with that, but the ruins had been just as empty as all the towns they¡¯d passed through before and after that destination. All that Siddrim¡¯s most favored city had were weapons of steel that were untainted by darkness. They¡¯d even found some armor, though it didn¡¯t fit anyone very well. They¡¯d have to make do.


    ¡°It¡¯s going to be okay,¡± Cynara agreed as she walked up to join the rest of them. ¡°Surely the capital still stands, even if the rest of the world has fallen, and if it hasn¡¯t? Well, then other survivors are likely heading there, too.¡±


    ¡°Screw other survivors,¡± Reggieughed, ¡°I want some real food!¡±


    There were a fewughs or muttered agreements at that. They hunted enough that none of them starved, but there were few fruits this time of year, and though they asionally found grain tucked away in vige granaries, it was inevitably moldy or otherwise ruined. Sometimes, they found a few random crops in the field, but it wasn¡¯t enough to feed them. It was just enough to make all of them hunger for more.


    ¡°Food, people, it¡¯s all going to be in the same ce, I expect,¡± Leo said with a shrug. ¡°Where this darkness ends, life begins. We just need to find the edge.¡±


    Leo was heading toward Rahkin just as much as he was heading away from the darkness to the south. He knew that with his de, he should probably be heading straight toward it, but he wasn¡¯t strong enough yet, even with this sword.


    He knew that one day, he¡¯d have to go south and fight whatever it was that was lurking there in the darkness that Jordan had described to all of them. Part of him felt badly that he wasn¡¯t just going straight away, but then, he had everyone else to think of. If anyone should die, even Toman, then he¡ª


    ¡°There¡¯s another one,¡± Cynara said, pointing at a nearby tree andpletely interrupting his train of thought.


    Leo looked up and noticed that there was a bird sitting on one of the branches of a tree at the edge of the field. It wasn¡¯t a bird, though, not a natural one, anyway. It was one of the spies that the Lich had scattered across the world.


    Honestly, he was surprised he hadn¡¯t seen it before now. The bloom of evil on the thing was enough to taint the tree that it stood upon, and it took flight almost as soon as he looked at it with his glowing eyes.


    Leo focused hard, shutting his eyes tight as he held his empty hand up and gestured vaguely at the ckbird. It wasn¡¯t the first red-eyed monstrosity he¡¯d brought down, but it was always a challenge. Sometimes, they got away. It was those nights that where feared they¡¯d wake up to some terrible ambush. So far, that hadn¡¯t happened, but that didn¡¯t mean he wanted to tempt fate.


    Leo pulled at the light inside him just like he might have if he was trying to heal an especially grievous wound, and then, with a silent prayer to a dead god, he released it and opened his eyes. The result was nothing impressive. He didn¡¯t smite it with his gaze or shoot a beam of fire like Jordan might have. Instead, the clouds that covered the overcast sky cleared ever so briefly, and a single sunbeam from the bluish wandering star that was out just now struck the thing.


    The abomination that had once been a crow, or perhaps a raven, burst into mes mid-flight and fell from the sky, leaving a trail of greasy ck smoke behind it.


    ¡°Come on,¡± Leo said. ¡°We should keep moving. Rahkin is still a long way away.¡±


    Everyone fell into line with him after they¡¯d retrieved their packs where they¡¯d dropped them before the fight, and the group started moving north again. It used to be that no one listened to him, but even if Leo knew it was mostly because of the glowing sword and the story about the Goddess that had given it to him, he still enjoyed the fact that people were finally taking him seriously, and he smiled as began to cross the fallow, weed-strewn field.


    They still had hours before dark, and he wanted to find something a little more defendable than this. It wasn¡¯t a matter of if the next monstrosities found them. It was a matter of when.


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 Chapter 191: Poison Jar

    Chapter 191: Poison Jar


    When it finally felt strong enough to investigate, Tenebroum was horrified to discover the source of the noises in the depths of itsir. It wasn¡¯t simply constructs that had run amuck as it first feared¡­ it was far stranger than that. Whole aspects of itself that had been sloughed off as it bled out a torrent of souls in those first few minutes had congealed into smaller copies of itself, and they were at war with each other, ruining many of its remaining constructs and whole sections of itsir in the process!


    At first, such an oue struck it as extremely strange, but it was only when it realized that it would do exactly the same as soon as it was within its power that everything became clear. <em>I would never let myself be devoured by a lesser of myself either, </em>it quickly realized.


    Tenbroum immediately retreated after that. Many of its less durable construct forms were already destroyed andy strewn across the halls of the rooms it had carved out to disy them in an orderly manner.


    Fortunately, the things rarely strayed into the undertemple for too long, so their interruption to the Lich¡¯s ns were limited. It had created three golden phcteries out of the heads of mages, and though each of them was inferior to the original, once it linked them together with dark magic, it started to feel like something approaching a shadow of its former self.


    Even though Tenebroum had shattered into thousands of pieces, putting itself back together seemed like it was going to be slightly easier than it had initially feared. It had but to create a new vessel, and it would fill almost instantly thanks to the miasma of lost souls that it had vomited forth so recently. It just wished that it could move faster to collect enough energy so that shards of itself would stop wrecking the ce.


    It couldn¡¯t, though. The mages of its library still couldn¡¯t reach any real consensus on why it was that its new phcteries were so inferior to its original vessel. There were a nearly endless number of possibilities. The most popr contenders included the fact that Albrecht had been alive when he¡¯d been entombed, he¡¯d suffered more, he¡¯d had a greater connection with the swamp in life, and the lingering touch of the Worm¡¯s magic.


    The Lich thought that it was unlikely to be because of the Worm¡¯s dark magic. Even though it couldn¡¯t rule that one out, it still hated the idea that it owned that monster anything. The rest, though, all of them were good choices, and though the Lich had nned to experiment by coating high priest Verdenin in a thinyer of gold to see if connection or suffering was the deciding factor, the other aspects of itself had already smeared the man and the other living acolytes across the walls of the blue tiled undertemple, leaving it with living test subjects.


    <em>What a waste,</em> the Lich hissed to itself for the hundredth time as it continued to supervise the work of the drudges. It couldn¡¯t make a phctery of any power, but the number of heads and gold it possessed was nearly endless, so it could make nearly as many of them as it wanted, and that¡¯s exactly what it was doing now. It had a new n; since it was not likely to replicate its initial sess, it would try another path.


    First, it had to go down and quell the fighting, though, and it couldn¡¯t do that until it had created enough heads to siphon up enough of the swirling power that lingered in the backdrop of itsir, and that would take time. Still, after a few days, it had created ten vessels that differed only in the expressions on the faces of the mages. They were all equal in their mediocrity, and for now, that was enough. Ten vessels weren¡¯t enough to rece the old one, but it was with them in tow that it reached its throne room and set them up for now on a temporary basis once the scraps of anything that might have been tainted by the Worm were swept away. It was only once that was done, and it could again feel some connection to thebyrinth as a whole, thanks to the soul, that it activated its defunct honor guard and sent them up into the fray to quell the violence.


    The Lizardmen had moved very little in all the decades since they were embalmed. Other than a few upgrades it had given them in the wake of Oroza¡¯s attack, they were basically unchanged since its earliest days. They were still some of the most dangerous warriors in theplex, though, and the Lich wished to disrupt the battle that was raging somewhere above it to force the dozens of small spirits that thought they were Tenebroum to flee the bodies they hid in so it could devour their spirits directly.


    Were it stronger, it would simply rip them out without the intervening steps, but it wasn¡¯t even at half strength, and it stillcked the ability or the range to connect to its far-flung servants, and that ate at it. It had sent drudges beyond the barrier to confirm that it still could, and once it verified that it was dark out, there were no difficulties with it peering out to take a look, but despite that, itcked the will to do much more than that with Lunaris hanging so brightly in the sky.


    This tale has been uwfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    It was not time to focus on the wider world once more, though. Now was the time to put its own house in order, and that meant ending the destruction and returning silence to the Lich¡¯s greatir. The six members of its honor guard made short work of a construct that was meant for casting more than fighting. The piece of Tenebroum that tried to flee into another form was siphoned away before it could do that, though. Next, they encountered a body that was meant to wield shadows against masses of armed men.


    <em>The Soul Stealer, </em>the Lich remembered fondly. It had tens of thousands of shadows tucked away inside its reservoirs. It had considered making it a minion in its own right but decided that, in time, it might be too powerful.


    Anything that could devour on its own might grow to eclipse its master in time. So, instead, the Lich had made it one more body to wield in specialized situations. In this case, though, it was entirely useless against the already dead lizard men, and no matter how fiercely itshed at them with dark and otherworldly forces, the most it could do was cause a thin rhyme of frost to coat their skin before they beheaded it and forced it to flee its body.


    The Lich had its forces retreat after that. That wasn¡¯t because they were in any danger, of course. It was because it had run out of room for more soul fragments. Over thest few decades, Tenebroum had gorged on the lifeblood of the world, and now, every attempt to soak up as much of this power as possible was met with the same problem: it had insufficient ces to put all of it.


    Over the next few days, Tenebroum repeated this same vicious cycle. Craft an inferior phctery, link it to thework it had already created with sigils and materials that had once been part of its now ravaged soul web, and then devour another piece of itself in an effort to bring stillness to itsyer and wholeness to itself.


    The work took longer than it would have thought possible, though it picked up over time. As the Lich steadily gained strength, it brought more workers under its sway, and in time, it even ignited the forges in the heart of thebyrinth once more. Gone were the sweet prayers of the devout and the haunting hymns that often apanied its giant pipe organ. In its ce, there was only the ever-dwindling sound of battle, but still, it was progress.


    When all this was done, and the under temple was repaired and returned to its dark beauty, the Lich vowed to seek out new mortal men and women to worship it. Now was not that time, though.


    In the end, the Lich was left without only a few of the ravaging monstrosities. Each of the things that were left was fighting to devour the others as they had before. That wasn¡¯t the problem. The problem was that those who remained were also wearing some of Tenebroum¡¯s finest constructs. It had no wish to destroy those if it didn¡¯t have to, and the things seemed too evenly matched to finish off each other. That made sense, at least.


    Every shard of itself that yet lurked in these halls was perhaps one percent of its former strength. That was more than enough to reanimate a dozen drudges, but it was far too little to properly utilize a finely tuned masterwork of necrotic engineering that was built to fight a god.


    In the end, it simply walled off that portion of itsbyrinth for a time and revived a few fleshcrafters to repair and alter the thing. It was a rtively simple matter that took only a few weeks to switch the creature from wielding shadows as a weapon to simply drawing them inside it like a terrible vacuum.


    When that wasplete, it made exceptionally short work of the remaining monstrosities. Before the thing wielded whips ands of braided shadows. It released them in gouts and in waves before reharvesting them once more. Now, it skipped all that and simply used the magics that it had to harvest the shadows to directly harvest the remaining aspects of Tenebroum instead.


    It was shockingly quick and simple to do. Once it was finished, and the Lich animated it, the fighting was done in the space of minutes. Rather than defeating them, it simply ripped their souls to pieces and consumed them directly. This left the crumpled forms of its other selves on the floor, only a little worse for the wear.


    The Lich berated itself for not having something like this years ago. It might make an effective weapon against any number of minor deities that it might encounter, and its powers were really only an amplification of its already existing ability to control souls.


    It might be forced to rely on such tricks more often, though, because without whatever powers the Worm had given it, whole regions of its powers seemed to be missing. The ability to suppress and inme disease seemed to be nonexistent now, and though it was still firmly connected to thend around ckwater, the animal and insect life that remained seemed more distant than ever.


    <em>Is that because I am still too weak? </em>Tenebroum wondered, <em>Or is that because this is as strong as this new crippled form will ever get?</em>


    Though the newly reconstituted Lich feared thetter, it would not give up. There was always a way to get stronger. It had been diminished before, and it would learn from this terrible event as well. <em></em>


    Even as it schemed and fretted, the majority of drudges that were still functional returned to life and began to clean up the terrible mess that had been made. Everything that had suffered the touch of Malzekeen would be locked away in a crypt of its own for the time being. Everything else would either be set aside for repair or spare parts. Now that all of these distractions were finished, it could turn its gaze back torger projects.


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