Tenebroum

Chapter 157: Sands of Time

While Tenebroum engaged in its slow war of attrition with the Mages, it did not sit idle and count the days until victory. That was only one plan among many.

Unless they broke the cordon that slowly tightened around them by doing something completely unexpected, there was no need to watch them day by day. Instead, the darkness monitored the progress that its servants were making to the north, the speed with which new armies were assembled in the east and the rate at which its new generals grew deep in the heart of darkness.

Everything was going according to plan. Then its scouts finally found what might have been the ruins they’d searched for, for so long. The centipede cavalry unit that found the wasteland of stone and glass deep in the Mulkara desert had long been modified for both traveling in such an inhospitable place by day and burrowing deep into the desert sands by night to escape the caress of the sun.

That was why, even when a dark rider reached it with the news of what had been found, it was still several weeks before the Lich could look with its own eyes. It was simply too far for any of its blackbirds to fly and survive the long day, and the darkness was unable to fly there alone as a mist in case the moon should notice it and turn her gaze once more upon it where it had no way to hide.

So it waited until a fine, four-armed, eight-legged centaur-spider was crafted for it, complete with armor polished to a mirror sheen to drive away as much of the light as possible should the worst happen. It was only when that strange new body was in place that it made the long journey across the desert to where its forces waited to show it what they had found.

The journey took three nights running as fast as its spindly limbs would allow, and three long days buried beneath he dunes waiting for the suns to pass by overhead. The experience was strange to Tenebroum, who was not used to being trapped in a singular body for such a long period of time.

It had expected this, though, and the giant nightmare crab that it occupied had been built spaciously enough that it was no trouble to bring along a small chorus of dead mages and scholars with it. That way, it had something to pass the time while it dwelled nearly alone in that claustrophobic darkness.

By night, it strode along sinuous dune ridges as it got ever closer to its goal. Sometimes, it saw animals and, even more rarely, elementals. Near dawn and dusk, fire elementals dancing like heat mirages could be seen dancing across the cold sands, and sometimes it saw the swells of earth elementals swimming somewhere beneath it in ways that made the sand ripple. None of these creatures strayed close enough to the Lich to devour them, but it did make a note about new elemental traps that it hoped to catch them in for further study another time.

By day, it curled up into an armored ball deep under the sand, and it discussed Malzekeen with the minds that knew the stories best. There were a dozen different versions of the story. The Siddrimites wrote that it was a terrible, fallen place that was old when the sun was still young. To them, it was replete with human sacrifice, and it was the city's destruction that marked the first true year of the light. Others said that the destruction came much later and that the place was only a holdout where evil had gathered after the forces of righteousness burned them out of their more traditional strongholds elsewhere in the wide world.

The accounts didn’t even agree on whether or not the desert had been in here in those days. It was either ‘a verdant area that had been reduced to nothing but dust in the face of Siddrim’s might,’ or ‘a trackless place on the edge of the wastes, that was not enough to hide them from the light.’

When Tenebroum finally arrived, there was not enough to say with real certainty. The sand around the edges of the city had indeed been burned so badly that it had melted into a fractured layer of thin, dun colored glass for hundreds of feet. It crunched underfoot with each step that the Lich took in its strange body.

Whatever had done that had reduced most of the city to ash. Now, only foundations and low brick walls sprinkled between the dunes hinted at the vast numbers of people who had once lived here.

It would not have come all this way for that alone, though. Even the central temple, with its collapsed dome and its markings that had been worn away by the sand and the wind, were interesting, but not particularly telling. It was only as it moved inside that fallen place and saw the entrance to the catacombs below that it glimpsed what had made the journey through such inhospitable territory worthwhile.

Navigating the stairs into the depths in a wide-footed body meant for galloping across the sweltering sands was challenging but not impossible; the flesh crafters had known about this part of the trip when they had constructed this body, after all. Once Tenebroum descended into the depths, it released a handful of modified death’s heads to begin a proper search.

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These differed from the typical ones in many ways. Not only were they smaller because they’d been made from children’s skulls, they weren’t even made to explode. They were simply vessels to house the myriad of souls it had brought with it so that they could look around for what critical clues might yet be found.

It crowded those souls into the tiny vessels two and three at a time, at random. Then, it released each one down a different corridor so they could begin their search, and it stood there waiting for the answers to come in. Despite the ungainly way those skulls floated here and there while the souls crammed inside fought for control of their tiny little world, Tenebroum didn’t have to wait long.

The first facts that were gathered were basic enough, but after that things grew steadily more interesting. Based on the inscriptions and faded murals, the place was an ossuary devoted to the former god of death, Anhnkhanin.

The historians of Siddrimar insisted that their god had slain him as well, though other histories merely said that he had fled beyond the edges of the world to escape. The idea that a god of death could be killed was ludicrous to Tenebroum, and it would have doubted that official narrative even if it had not known all that Ghrosian had explained to it about certain fundamental parts of life and the way they powered certain deities.

Even If the place was filled with bones dedicated to one god, though, that did nothing to change the fact that it was also crammed full of the corpses of others too. The dead that belonged to Anhnkhanin were stacked neatly in the alcoves that had been dug out of the soft sandstone beneath Malzekeen.

The bodies which were scattered across the floor in every corridor, though none of those had been interred here originally. A few of them near the stairs were grave robbers who had been sickened by the miasma here, but most of the rest were those poor souls who sought to survive the day that the city above them had died.

They had been unsuccessful, but in their attempt they had accidentally preserved a wealth of knowledge. Some of the bodies that were far enough away from the door that natural predators had never had the chance to pick their bones clean had even been mummified, preserving even their tattoos in addition to the possessions they carried and the jewelry they wore. Each layer of those artifacts represented a wealth of clues.

Slowly, the story came together for the Lich. This was not some grand battle. This was a slaughter, and though the three dark gods that it was trying to understand had not died here, after enough research, it was fairly certain that they had been born here at least.

In every scroll and inscription that Tenebroum uncovered, there were only ever three gods who were mentioned. However, none of them were Ghrossian, and none of them were wolves or rats. Instead, all the Lich’s floating servants found were references to Siddrim, Anhnkanin, and Malkezeen.

That was telling, of course, but it was only when they found a mummified corpse with the tattoo of a truly unique chimera did Tenebroum finally understand: once the rat, the wolf and the worm had been a single deity as it had already suspected.

They were separate now, of course. Still, it was sure that their survival from this terrible event was what had broken them apart into the separate shards of divinity that they were now.

Even with that knowledge, the image was arresting. The god, at least according to this one accidental record by one of its worshipers, was a giant two-headed chimera with the head of a wolf and a rat, surrounded by a tentacled mane of leaches and worms that made it look more like a deformed lion in its way. It was a wonderfully revolting sight, but even as the Lich considered how feasible it might be to build one of these from spare parts, its mere existence raised more questions than answers.

If Ghroshian was simply part of a larger whole, should it even unearth the wolf once it had conquered the Magica Collegium? Should it look for the worm at all?

The answer was, of course, that it must do those things, but only so it could learn from them and steal their power for itself. It would not abandon such riches merely because it was fearful or because it had doubts. It would just have to keep them apart until that was done to prevent any mishaps. If it brought them together, it would be at a time and a place of its choosing, when they were bound and leashed. Maybe Tenebroum would simply devour Ghroshian before the other two were unearthed to prevent any complications altogether.

It would brood on it later. For now, it studied this place, and in doing so, it felt a strange sort of kinship with the creatures that were born here. Tenebroum had been born of a single tortured soul in a swamp, and in doing so, there had been enough life to feed and nurture it for a long time. If the city above had been rebuilt, it had no doubt that the same thing would have happened here.

Instead, the god that had died left behind fragments forced to seek out new sustenance elsewhere, and in doing so, they had become separate. If it were ever to fracture in such a way, where would it find the fault lines in its soul? Darkness? Death? Disease?

Tenebroum couldn’t say, and honestly, it hoped never to find out. It was a thought-provoking question, though, and it pondered it while it waited for more information in that cursed place. If Siddrim had sundered Malkezeen into his component parts, then might Tenebroum have done the same thing to Siddrim? Was that what those tiny stars represented? It was impossible to say, but now that it had articulated the question, it dearly wanted the answer.

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