Published at 26th of December 2023 9:46 pm

Chapter 86 The End of Days (part 2)

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Their invisible, twisted struggle occurred 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 occurred. 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 he lay there, sprawled across the leagues of lowlands near the charred ruin of blackwater 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 penetrate 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, comatose 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 and large cities, but even outside of those, the Lich could see that he held some sway everywhere. Even Blackwater 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-glass windows or make the reliquaries of a martyr burst into flames. It could make the devout cry tears of blood or suddenly develop a stigmata and writhe in agony under its terrible scrutiny. 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 population.

These weren’t the powerful, brutally efficient killing machines its fleshcrafters had labored 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, combined with the poison and the agony that tainted it, made it palatable 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'd sought to constrain had almost ruined them.

Once, years ago, the river dragon herself had come almost as close to shattering her binding ring, but it had been a much cruder implement that had only succeeded by accident. 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 play.

The right move would have been to sever the arm or finger or whatever appropriate appendage the avatar had been, but Siddrim lacked 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, combined with the spiritual obesity of his church, had been the defining feature of Siddrim for the last 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 villages. Without the sun to oppose them, it was unstoppable. Even so, though, it gave the command, 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 would come 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 every last vestige of a god normally, but if that night were to last 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 the land 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.

As large and complex as its lair 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 Skoeticnomikos struggled to keep up with the words that were pouring out of the Lich’s mind and Kelvun worked tirelessly to document its plans, 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 swirling cloud of embers as it collapsed in on itself. The lights swarmed out of the body in a flurry 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 escaped completely, disappearing over the horizon as they burned their way through every net 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 become 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 place 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.

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