Published at 1st of December 2023 10:41 am

Chapter 68 Mournden

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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 flames 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 only lay 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 clanless 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 place 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 lest laying on the cold stone be interpreted as defiance by all the spirits that dwelled within him now. There would be no delaying 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 regular 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 place 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 particularly loudly, accusing 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 and 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 if they instead went a few hundred feet up, there was only 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 flame, and no matter how the shadows circled, they could not hope to taste the souls that dwelled there.

So, other than the occasional 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 the last thing Krulm'venor 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 questions, Krulm’venor explained.

He told the darkness in his head about the lantern 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 oil lamps, 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 of all.

Not that it would have stopped Krulm’venor from turning the lot of them into charred meat at the Lich’s command, 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 then 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 so 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’s command he flared outward, and bathed the arrow slits in waves of unnatural blue flame, 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 splashed harmlessly off the doors, but the white flame was much more powerful. Not only was it bright enough to weaken the Lich’s hold on him for a moment, but it 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 flared 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 plaques 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 used 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 placed 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 crystalize completely, 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 places 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 the last 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—-”

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 slaughter your kin, rather than help, then so be it. I’ll do this myself.”

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