Tenebroum

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 catacombs 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 population, it was certain that there was one more trick awaiting it. There always seemed to be. The moon had seen how much those infernal flames had weakened it, and she would rally some new hero to strike the final blow. So it laid 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 plains 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 become back into the true pool of night that was its nature. Surely they will take advantage of this moment, the voice gibbered in its head in half a dozen tongues. Surely, they will strike me down when I am out of my strongest constructs.

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 Templar, 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 claimed 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 most complex of plans.

In a perfect world, it would already be preparing a new combat form for tomorrow’s slaughter. 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’t coming. 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.

Shadows lacked the strength of flesh, but what they did have was versatility. It could become anything in the shadows. A dragon, a mass of writhing tentacles, or even a bizarre combination 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 according 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 slaughter to come. 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 so large that the cramped dungeon could barely contain its majesty.

Ironically, in this form, the Templar 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 claws 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, replaced 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, replacing claws with bladed 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 every last 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 play 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,” it commanded. “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 too comfortable with, it had become 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 shape coming 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 never come. They feared zombies, but tonight they would face something much worse than anything it have ever build of steel or bone.

When it landed in the battered merchant quarter, it landed as a wall of darkness that penetrated every building that it brushed against. There, its attention to detail paid off, and even before it had folded its wings completely to dissolve into the next stage of hideous abomination that it had created for the once-capital city, its blade 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 blade 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 it latched on to the very core of their being, and if a larger 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 the lattice that it crawled over as much as the cobblestones and tunnels. How could you escape from the darkness when it already had its claws 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 a late 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 becoming 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.