Published at 23rd of January 2024 7:35 am

Chapter 94 Slowly Stirring

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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 places, it did precious little good. Only Siddrimar and Abenend were exceptions to that.

The mages had survived its assault largely intact, thanks to the strength of their 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 to come 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 had lasted for day after day, but still, they insisted on becoming 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 slave 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 to come. 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 plagued 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 were largely 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 might come available soon.

Only Oroza still functioned at anything close to full strength, and the Lich unleashed her without a second thought. It commanded 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 similar 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 its soul had been changed, though it would take a long time to truly understand the extent of what had happened to it. 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 underlay 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.

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 that lay ahead, though. Of that, there was no question. In places 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 Templars 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 succeeded; 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 hornets’ nest.

A failure this time, or even a partial success, might mean that they would breach its temple or, worse, the mazes below. So it did every last 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 Blackwater 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 plague on the survivors that huddled inside the 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 populace afraid enough that they looked for new victims to blame this on and burn in effigy. That had been their way for the last few years, and Tenebroum would never grow tired of the smells of the innocents roasting on a pyre.

The plagues 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 the last 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 its lair.

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 plagues, and they might accelerate 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 plans 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 toxic 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.

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