Tenebroum

Chapter 191: Poison Jar

When it finally felt strong enough to investigate, Tenebroum was horrified to discover the source of the noises in the depths of its lair. It wasn’t simply constructs that had run amuck as it first feared… it was far stranger than that. Whole aspects of itself that had been sloughed off as it bled out a torrent of souls in those first few minutes had congealed into smaller copies of itself, and they were at war with each other, ruining many of its remaining constructs and whole sections of its lair in the process!

At first, such an outcome struck it as extremely strange, but it was only when it realized that it would do exactly the same as soon as it was within its power that everything became clear. I would never let myself be devoured by a lesser of myself either, it quickly realized.

Tenbroum immediately retreated after that. Many of its less durable construct forms were already destroyed and lay strewn across the halls of the rooms it had carved out to display them in an orderly manner.

Fortunately, the things rarely strayed into the undertemple for too long, so their interruption to the Lich’s plans were limited. It had created three golden phylacteries out of the heads of mages, and though each of them was inferior to the original, once it linked them together with dark magic, it started to feel like something approaching a shadow of its former self.

Even though Tenebroum had shattered into thousands of pieces, putting itself back together seemed like it was going to be slightly easier than it had initially feared. It had but to create a new vessel, and it would fill almost instantly thanks to the miasma of lost souls that it had vomited forth so recently. It just wished that it could move faster to collect enough energy so that shards of itself would stop wrecking the place.

It couldn’t, though. The mages of its library still couldn’t reach any real consensus on why it was that its new phylacteries were so inferior to its original vessel. There were a nearly endless number of possibilities. The most popular contenders included the fact that Albrecht had been alive when he’d been entombed, he’d suffered more, he’d had a greater connection with the swamp in life, and the lingering touch of the Worm’s magic.

The Lich thought that it was unlikely to be because of the Worm’s dark magic. Even though it couldn’t rule that one out, it still hated the idea that it owned that monster anything. The rest, though, all of them were good choices, and though the Lich had planned to experiment by coating high priest Verdenin in a thin layer of gold to see if connection or suffering was the deciding factor, the other aspects of itself had already smeared the man and the other living acolytes across the walls of the blue tiled undertemple, leaving it with living test subjects.

What a waste, the Lich hissed to itself for the hundredth time as it continued to supervise the work of the drudges. It couldn’t make a phylactery of any power, but the number of heads and gold it possessed was nearly endless, so it could make nearly as many of them as it wanted, and that’s exactly what it was doing now. It had a new plan; since it was not likely to replicate its initial success, it would try another path.

First, it had to go down and quell the fighting, though, and it couldn’t do that until it had created enough heads to siphon up enough of the swirling power that lingered in the backdrop of its lair, and that would take time. Still, after a few days, it had created ten vessels that differed only in the expressions on the faces of the mages. They were all equal in their mediocrity, and for now, that was enough.

Ten vessels weren’t enough to replace the old one, but it was with them in tow that it reached its throne room and set them up for now on a temporary basis once the scraps of anything that might have been tainted by the Worm were swept away. It was only once that was done, and it could again feel some connection to the labyrinth as a whole, thanks to the soul net, that it activated its defunct honor guard and sent them up into the fray to quell the violence.

The Lizardmen had moved very little in all the decades since they were embalmed. Other than a few upgrades it had given them in the wake of Oroza’s attack, they were basically unchanged since its earliest days. They were still some of the most dangerous warriors in the complex, though, and the Lich wished to disrupt the battle that was raging somewhere above it to force the dozens of small spirits that thought they were Tenebroum to flee the bodies they hid in so it could devour their spirits directly.

Were it stronger, it would simply rip them out without the intervening steps, but it wasn’t even at half strength, and it still lacked the ability or the range to connect to its far-flung servants, and that ate at it. It had sent drudges beyond the barrier to confirm that it still could, and once it verified that it was dark out, there were no difficulties with it peering out to take a look, but despite that, it lacked the will to do much more than that with Lunaris hanging so brightly in the sky.

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It was not time to focus on the wider world once more, though. Now was the time to put its own house in order, and that meant ending the destruction and returning silence to the Lich’s great lair. The six members of its honor guard made short work of a construct that was meant for casting more than fighting. The piece of Tenebroum that tried to flee into another form was siphoned away before it could do that, though. Next, they encountered a body that was meant to wield shadows against masses of armed men.

The Soul Stealer, the Lich remembered fondly. It had tens of thousands of shadows tucked away inside its reservoirs. It had considered making it a minion in its own right but decided that, in time, it might become too powerful.

Anything that could devour on its own might grow to eclipse its master in time. So, instead, the Lich had made it one more body to wield in specialized situations. In this case, though, it was entirely useless against the already dead lizard men, and no matter how fiercely it lashed at them with dark and otherworldly forces, the most it could do was cause a thin rhyme of frost to coat their skin before they beheaded it and forced it to flee its body.

The Lich had its forces retreat after that. That wasn’t because they were in any danger, of course. It was because it had run out of room for more soul fragments. Over the last few decades, Tenebroum had gorged on the lifeblood of the world, and now, every attempt to soak up as much of this power as possible was met with the same problem: it had insufficient places to put all of it.

Over the next few days, Tenebroum repeated this same vicious cycle. Craft an inferior phylactery, link it to the network it had already created with sigils and materials that had once been part of its now ravaged soul web, and then devour another piece of itself in an effort to bring stillness to its layer and wholeness to itself.

The work took longer than it would have thought possible, though it picked up over time. As the Lich steadily gained strength, it brought more workers under its sway, and in time, it even ignited the forges in the heart of the labyrinth once more. Gone were the sweet prayers of the devout and the haunting hymns that often accompanied its giant pipe organ. In its place, there was only the ever-dwindling sound of battle, but still, it was progress.

When all this was done, and the under temple was repaired and returned to its dark beauty, the Lich vowed to seek out new mortal men and women to worship it. Now was not that time, though.

In the end, the Lich was left without only a few of the ravaging monstrosities. Each of the things that were left was fighting to devour the others as they had before. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that those who remained were also wearing some of Tenebroum’s finest constructs. It had no wish to destroy those if it didn’t have to, and the things seemed too evenly matched to finish off each other. That made sense, at least.

Every shard of itself that yet lurked in these halls was perhaps one percent of its former strength. That was more than enough to reanimate a dozen drudges, but it was far too little to properly utilize a finely tuned masterwork of necrotic engineering that was built to fight a god.

In the end, it simply walled off that portion of its labyrinth for a time and revived a few fleshcrafters to repair and alter the thing. It was a relatively simple matter that took only a few weeks to switch the creature from wielding shadows as a weapon to simply drawing them inside it like a terrible vacuum.

When that was complete, it made exceptionally short work of the remaining monstrosities. Before the thing wielded whips and nets of braided shadows. It released them in gouts and in waves before reharvesting them once more. Now, it skipped all that and simply used the magics that it had to harvest the shadows to directly harvest the remaining aspects of Tenebroum instead.

It was shockingly quick and simple to do. Once it was finished, and the Lich animated it, the fighting was done in the space of minutes. Rather than defeating them, it simply ripped their souls to pieces and consumed them directly. This left the crumpled forms of its other selves on the floor, only a little worse for the wear.

The Lich berated itself for not having something like this years ago. It might make an effective weapon against any number of minor deities that it might encounter, and its powers were really only an amplification of its already existing ability to control souls.

It might be forced to rely on such tricks more often, though, because without whatever powers the Worm had given it, whole regions of its powers seemed to be missing. The ability to suppress and inflame disease seemed to be nonexistent now, and though it was still firmly connected to the land around Blackwater, the animal and insect life that remained seemed more distant than ever.

Is that because I am still too weak? Tenebroum wondered, Or is that because this is as strong as this new crippled form will ever get?

Though the newly reconstituted Lich feared the latter, it would not give up. There was always a way to get stronger. It had been diminished before, and it would learn from this terrible event as well.

Even as it schemed and fretted, the majority of drudges that were still functional returned to life and began to clean up the terrible mess that had been made. Everything that had suffered the touch of Malzekeen would be locked away in a crypt of its own for the time being. Everything else would either be set aside for repair or spare parts. Now that all of these distractions were finished, it could turn its gaze back to larger projects.