Tenebroum

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 singularly disreputable mage that had disappeared on a lonely road between liaisons to create a work of singular 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 glance, 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 to last 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 plans were much too far along, and even its enemy’s actions would play 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 planned 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 flame or the golden rictus of the magus that was its core. He just lay 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 planning 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 slaughter. 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 your lands will…”

The Lich’s voice trailed off as it heard the barest whisper from the broken man, and it paused to listen.

“Those are my lands,” Kelvun rasped, “They are the lands 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, it laughed. 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 place 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 plan. There is nothing—” 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 that comfort. When I am done with you shall be forced to remember every trauma and every outrage that I commit to this world, and it will all start with your precious lands.”

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 the labyrinth that lay above, and finally through the buildings of Blackwater that lay just above the Lich’s lair. 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 fertile lands below.

“You’ve never even seen all the lands that you claim 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 these lands 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 world laid 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 places 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 the lands near the Oroza River. There were spots in other places, of course. Fallravea was his, but there was also a spattering of gray blotches spread across the plains 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 the lands 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 those lands, it becomes 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 Templars. They would see - they would notice—”

“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 place of my choosing, and there is no place in this land that has been more prepared for my victory than the lands of Blackwater!”

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 the land, 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 too late.

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 the last 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 before landing hard on the cold stone of its throne room.

“The lands 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 his last 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 his lands, 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.