Tenebroum

Chapter 163: Digging for Answers

Tenebroum had hoped that the hound would have been able to provide it the answers it craved, unlike the incoherent swarm of rats, Ghrosian. In that way, at least, it was disappointed. The thing had a powerful soul, even in its weakened state, but there was no intelligence there. Instead, there was only an overflowing font of rage that swirled in its core.

That wasn’t completely different from the rats, of course, save that they swirled in fear. It could see how the two of them were compatible in that sense and that they might fit together. Not that it would ever bring them together, of course. The Lich had the nameless hound tied to a stake in a cave and allowed to continue to decontaminate for a month before it was brought back to Tenebroum’s lair for further experiments.

The hound spent most of its time sealed in a room on the third level, far from the caged rats that the Lich had brought here for study previously. The two might have very compatible souls that could fit together, but that did not mean that the Lich had any desire to bring them together. That was one experiment that was simply too dangerous until it knew more.

At first, those were a matter of simple bloodsport. It would pit the thing against various beasts before having it fight men and even undead abominations. Though the hound was huge, it was also barely skin and bones when these matches started. Yet despite that, it never lost. There was a terrible ferocity in it that the Lich could not fully understand but was eager to see in action. In its first match against a grizzly bear, the hound tore it to shreds despite being entirely outclassed in both size and weight. It was a bloody spectacle that simply had to be seen to be believed.

It scarcely killed any quicker when it faced off against a man in full plate mail. Somehow, despite any specific magics that Tenebroum could identify, the thing simply shredded its opponents, always becoming stronger than them, and after each bloody bout, it grew visibly. At first, it had been the size of a large hunting dog, but now it was something closer to a small horse, and even with its collar on, it paced back and forth pensively whenever the Lich locked it away.

Sometimes, when Tenebroum brought its latest pet out of its cage, it would not be for its own private bloodsport. Instead, it would experiment on the thing while it bayed and howled. Sometimes, these experiments would be simple dissection and vivisection, as it wondered what made this thing tick and accounted for its strange immortality. Other times, it would be bound within one or more magic circles of the Lich’s devising while it sought to study the thing with divination magics. It found nothing useful, which was as rare as it was frustrating.

How could such a simple creature evade my understanding of it! Tenebroum thought in annoyance. It is more animal than spirit!

Eventually, for lack of anything better to do, it released it into the Red Hills just to see what it would do to the poor, woefully unprepared goblin tribes that still existed there. The Lich still kept an outpost of undead at the gold mine where drudges slaved away endlessly, and it occasionally sought out unwilling goblins for experiments, but by and large, that place had lost most of its importance to the Lich, who was now focused on other fronts.

The hound tore through the place like a force of nature, devouring a new lair nearly every night. It didn’t matter if they used poison or magic, and if they fought with weapons or claws, nothing could stand against the monster.

In fact, its performance was so frightening that Lich immediately began to work both on a better binding collar and a method of eliminating the wolf, should it ever find a way to turn on its owner. It clearly did not like being forced to obey, and the Lich had little doubt that if it ever broke free in the same way that the troublesome river spirit had, it would not end well.

So, it set to work on several ooze-based solutions that would be entirely immune to the teeth and claws of the hound so that it would have options should the need arise. One of its fleshcrafters suggested that the Lich could install a failsafe alchemical charge in the thing, but given how poorly the Lich’s attempts to graft better weapons to its claws had gone, such an experiment seemed unlikely to end well.

It is not a creature, dead or alive, the Tenebroum reminded itself. It is a godling, the same as my twisted dryads or that cursed moon.

It was easy to forget that, given that all it did was fight and kill and devour. The hound had a certain predatory intelligence, but nothing more than that. Were it not for the golden collar that it wore around its neck, it would be nothing but a berserk, slavering beast.

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After months of study, the Lich eventually lost interest in its newest pet and left it to rampage in the Red Hills while it turned its attention to older projects; in time, when Tenebroum was sure the thing had stopped growing, it would send it to the front to fight with the rest of its minions, but it wanted no surprises.

As it searched through its catalog of unfinished abominations, it found none, either. Its carefully pruned nature goddess no longer spent all of her time screaming and begging to die. Instead, she’d decorated the small garden it had allowed her in that barren Constantenal courtyard with deadly nightshade and any number of other toxic herbs and flowers, humming away while the thorns that pierced her skin bled as they always did.

She still cowered in its presence, but the Lich was certain that when she was set free, she’d be happy to do as bidden and hunt down her former peers. However, for now, the Lich was content to watch her grow and change, studying her as the scars continued to fade, looking for any clues as to what she might become when she was complete and finally blossomed.

It spent some time examining the new juggernauts that were being created in Constantinal and some of the new vessels that incorporated parts whales and sharks in lieu of wood in Rahkin, but eventually, the Lich found itself once again focused on its plot to undermine the All-Father again.

Its poison was still spreading through the moon, and she was rarely seen in the sky as anything but a waxing or a waning crescent anymore. There had been some signs lately that she might manage to fight off the cancerous soul that had been injected into her, but each time she made progress and seemed to get brighter, a few weeks later, there would be a relapse, and she would lose all the progress she’d made.

The Lich didn’t understand exactly what was happening, but it didn’t care either. As long as she was weak and suffering, it could focus on trying to hunt down and break other gods, and for some time now, it had chosen the dwarf to deal with next.

This wasn’t because the All-Father was the most powerful or the most dangerous. It wasn’t even because it had dared to lay a finger on the Lich in their single real encounter. It was simply because he was accessible.

Once Tenebroum had decided that Krulm’venor would not be useful in the war against the mages now that they’d developed some way of nullifying the magics that animated the godling, Tenebroum had sent him into the depths to purge other dwarven cities with fire. This was for the death and the pain it provided Tenebroum as much as anything, but each conquest allowed it to steal away a few more dwarven relics, and that, it had decided, was the key to breaking the All-Father’s soul.

As a god, it was better known to the Lich thanks to the wealth of stolen source materials it had taken from the charred cities and tombs it had ransacked over the last several years. It was also simpler than the others it had tried to learn about. The secret that Krulm’venor had tried to hide for so long when it had been in every book and mural: the All-Father was literally an amalgam of all the honored dwarven dead that had gone before.

Though it did not yet fully understand why dwarves ossified as they aged, it was now very clear that when a dwarf finally could live no longer, its flesh would turn gray and shrivel into something like soft sandstone before falling to dust, leaving only the partially crystallized skeleton behind. It was the skulls that the dwarves were interested in when they buried the body, which meant that it was the skulls the Lich was interested in as well.

It had constructed many abominations from the bones of dwarves at this point, which meant that its flesh crafters had dissected thousands of corpses, and these changes only seemed to start sometime around three hundred years old. The very oldest dwarves might reach three hundred and fifty years of age, but the exact age didn’t seem to matter, only that they lived a life of honor and lasted until it was their time.

For a while, the Lich had merely crushed the skulls to extract a lifetime’s worth of essence, but recently, it had become more interested in a simple question: if the All-Father was a giant structure built brick by brick from the souls of the honored dead, then how many of those souls would the Lich have to corrupt or drive insane before the whole thing collapsed.

On the face of things, the All-Father was an indomitable warrior who spent almost all of his time deep in his earthen fortress where no one could touch him. That wasn’t true, though. The God’s seat of power might be there, but in reality, he was spread across a hundred cities, and a thousand graveyards, and the Lich was determined to destroy as many of them as it had to before the God finally came apart at the seams.

Of course, it was much too busy to do such things itself, but with a little effort, it had driven a handful of dwarven priests insane, and now they labored day and night in the Lich’s warehouse of crystal skulls with forbidden runes that conflicted and warred with each other, carving them into the crystalline skulls one at a time. This was not an effort that would pay dividends tomorrow. It was like the erosion of water on stone. Each drip was imperceptible, but taken together, they could wear away a whole mountain range.

When used to attack a god that had been around as long as the All-Father, that was certainly an apt metaphor. Tenebroum’s slow but insidious efforts would break him, and then it would devour whatever pieces were left.

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