Tenebroum

Chapter 197: Drinking the Ocean

When all was in readiness, and Tenebroum had drunk its fill from every corner of its fading region, it waited for the first new moon to strike. It had long deliberated on this moment and decided to plan its attack when the heavens were weakest. Truthfully, I should have done this when Lunaris was dying; before she’d somehow managed to rejuvenate, the Lich berated itself before setting that blame aside.

That opportunity was lost to it now. It had been too focused on its plan, and as a result, it had not examined the playing field widely enough. That mistake would not happen again. It was impossible, now that it had almost two hundred pairs of eyes staring into the void now.

Its new form had thrown off the last vestiges of humanity that had bound it until now. For so long, it had drifted among the world as a fog or rested in its phylactery as something resembling a man. Its drudges and its armies had been thought of as arms and hands and fingers. All of those metaphors were gone now. Creating a phylactery that could be measured in miles had changed it.

Tenebroum no longer had hands. There weren’t enough hands in the world to do what needed to be done. It was a swarm, sunk seven lairs deep into the land that had once been a swamp, and now, when it reached for something, tentacles of darkness coiled around it, and dozens of drudges moved to carry out its will.

Tonight, though, its goal was entirely beyond the fearsome grip of the corpses that served it. Tonight, it was reaching for the sky, literally. In the days leading up to the new moon, it had planned carefully and sucked dry every reservoir in an effort to tap what it saw as a truly unlimited source of power: the endless night.

To that end, it had bled the goblin tribes, slaughtered any survivors it had found along the coast, and reduced the once mighty Oroza to a dead zone as it sucked the last dregs of life out of the Blackwater region. It martialed everything it had for this moment, and then, just after midnight, it struck.

There was no moon in the sky, and it would be hours yet before the first grayish light touched the horizon. Only the stars were out, and the Lich had no doubt that it could punch cleanly through the thin barrier of stars, which were all that was lying between it and the thing that it desired most when it launched its attack.

The tower of darkness that it created so long ago already soared thousands of feet into the air. It was taller than any man-made structure Tenebroum had ever seen. That was not enough, though. Not for what it had planned, and as the new glyphs and circuits activated, the whole thing became that much taller and thinner, soaring toward the sky.

No one could see the assault, of course. It was a dark sword soaring through the night sky, but the Lich didn’t care. The element of surprise was a valuable asset, and the Lich would take it. When it was surging with power from this newfound source, all would know of its triumph soon enough. Such a monumental event would be impossible to hide.

Higher and higher, the spire soared as it raced toward the thin lines of force that were the stars and the arcane patterns that were woven between them. From the ground, all that Tenebroum could see were the little pinpricks of light, but up here, he could see they were ten thousand thousand tiny warriors, all battling back against the darkness that writhed beyond them.

The Lich practically salivated in anticipation at that as it remembered the feast of shadows that Krulm’venor had given it so long ago. The feasts of Ghen’tal and Mournden were, but appetizers compared to the shadowy creatures that lay before it now. Tenebroum had no doubt that it would need to consume only half a dozen of those strange, constantly shifting leviathans, and it would be overflowing with enough power to re-establish contact with its armies and continue its conquest. It had subsisted off the dregs of its former conquests for long enough. It wanted to feast once more.

When the Lich’s blade was more than a mile high, it began to feel the strain of its magics as the ground they were anchored to thrummed with power. It was no longer a miles-wide blade but a rapier no wider than the mage’s tower that had stood here so long ago. Once it was over five miles tall, it thinned further, becoming little more than a needle of perfect darkness that sought to touch the heavens.

That would be enough, though. As its giant, celestial spear scraped the very heavens themselves, it pierced one of the nameless, faceless little stars that held back the dark, dissipating the warrior instantly into a thousand shards of fading light and touching the darkness beyond it.

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For a moment, Tenebroum brushed against something ancient and powerful. This monstrosity was a slug with no eyes and a thousand yawning toothless mouths. It was too old for teeth. It was primordial. All that the monster wanted in life was to fight its way past the stars and feast on the world below, but the Lich feasted on it instead, feeling raw, primordial power thrum through it. The monstrosity struggled in its grip, of course, but it could do nothing to stop a god of shadows from devouring it whole.

Then, just on the verge of Tenebroum’s triumph, the giant entity was ripped away from it, and the connection was gone. It took the Lich a moment to understand why. That was when it realized that the other stars in the area were spiraling and moving closer.

Like a swarm of birds or a school of fish, the glowing dots reoriented, and as they did so, the shifting lines of power between them altered and reformed. That blocked the hole in the cosmic net that Tenebroum had created. It roared in outrage and pushed harder against the flimsy boundary, even as it lashed out at the stars that tried to encroach on its position.

At first, only a handful of stars got within its reach, and each of them was easily struck down by a single thrust through their heart as its slender, miles-long limb danced and wove around their blows. That only worked when their numbers were few. Once there were dozens trying to strike it down, such a strategy became impossible.

Things quickly shifted from the covert assassination it had planned to a full-on battle in the heavens as it swung and struck out against the increasing swarm of stars. At this point, it was light fighting a swarm of gnats, and it lacked the tools to fight such a battle effectively.

Worse, the way they moved and danced made it immediately clear to the Lich. They weren’t trying to strike it down. They were trying to bind it up in the magics that they used to hold back the night. Those glimmering things had been created specifically to fight the darkness, and soon, Teneborum was almost entirely on the defensive. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

In that way, it was suddenly no different than the creatures that the tiny glowing warriors fought normally. The only difference was that its body was so far away that it was difficult to martial any real power from this distance and was reduced to shattering and skewering the defiant little bastards one at a time.

Still, even with that, Tenebroum might have been able to force its way through eventually. Gnats were fragile things, and the night still had many hours to go. There were only so many stars in this part of the sky that could be brought to bear, and the Lich would not be denied.

That was when the moon started to turn. One moment, it was nothing but a black orb, visible only in that it blotted out a small portion of stars. The next moment, it was a thin, glimmering line of light, like some giant god waking up from its sleep. Tenebroum had not planned for this.

The Lich’s schemes had called for a lightning assault that would allow it to tap the unlimited darkness above its head before anyone had noticed it was even there. It had done this on the darkest night of the month to ensure that the only person who might interfere would be unable to. Now that the first part of its plan had failed, it would seem the latter was as well.

Even as the moon’s crescent began to widen, Tenebroum retreated. It was out of time. It had felt the moon’s light before, but even when it had been pinned by those strange silvery arrows, it was not as vulnerable as it was in this moment. Right now, most of Tenebroum’s power was a mile’s long tower that stretched toward the sky, and as diffuse as that structure was, it might be obliterated in a single moment by the moon’s full power.

So, the two deities raced. Tenebroum sought to shrink and resolidify itself, and the moon slowly increased its brightness as more and more of its wide surface began to glow with light. It was a near thing, but by the time Lunaris had turned even three-quarters of her face to shine on the dark tower, it was gone.

That didn’t stop the moon from releasing the full might of its pale glow for several seconds. Instead of shining on a thin and vaporous tower that stretched to the heavens, though, the light found only an obsidian hard dome of pure darkness that was now only just large enough to cover Tenebroum’s domain. The thing wasn’t as impressive as before, but it was more defensive, and it used much less power.

It was the second part that concerned Tenebroum more than anything, though. Despite its taste of darkness, it had expended nearly half of its reserves in this monumental undertaking and had nothing to show for it. Oh, it had cost the sky a hundred stars, and in a few months, it could try again, but without a more significant advantage, it would take centuries to snuff out every star in the sky, assuming that the gods didn’t have some way of making more.

Tenebroum coiled back into its lair and seethed in frustration at this latest setback, and brooded about what to do next. It released its grip on the individual skulls that dotted its outer ring, letting the individual pieces of its soul argue about what to do next. There were many plans there. Some were quite insane, but others were less so. Gradually, though, a consensus began to watch over the collective heads.

A new plan had been decided on, and for it to work, the Lich would have to summon its fourth horsemen and dig deep into the earth.