Tenebroum

Chapter 51: Darkest Past

The gates of bronze were familiar to him, even battered and tarnished as they were. Krulm’venor had been here before, even though he did not remember when or why. He was sure of that much. The stonework in the tunnels that lead to the twenty-foot tall doors was wide and open, presenting multiple layers of defenses and lines of fire in an unmistakably dwarven way. However, the shapes that moved behind the walls - the shadows he could see flickering from gap to gap in the shadowy recesses of the firing slits were unmistakably goblin.

He was thankful that he couldn’t smell anything because, as befouled as the entrance was, the sight was almost enough to make him gag. Seeing the glory of the past desecrated like this was truly tragic, but the presence of goblins did worse things than sadden him. It made him itch. He could feel them crawling inside his bones now. That monster had locked the frayed souls of dozens of their kind in here with him, and they haunted him, muddying the edges of his precise dwarven soul with their filth and hunger. It was a disgusting process but one he could do nothing about. All he could do was take out his frustration on the still-living goblins he encountered.

That thought made the blue flames that licked his skeleton flare brighter. Boiling these creatures alive in their skin was the only thing that would make him feel better.

The interior of the ancient fortress wasn’t in any better shape than the exterior had been. Only the highest parts of the tapestries remained unshredded, and any ornamentation near the ground had been ravaged and ruined; the frescoes on the ceilings were largely intact besides the black stains that had accumulated from countless small fires in this room.

The rooms of the dwarven fortress were nests or battlefields, and sometimes they were both at once as the goblins constantly waged war with each other one room at a time. As Krulm’venor moved from room to room, the tiny creatures that infested the place ran before him, eager to flee his eerie blue light. That just gave him more time to study the place and wrack his mind for some clue as to why he would have walked these halls before, though.

It wasn’t until he reached the library, or at least what was left of it on the second floor, that he discovered that answer. The leather tomes had long ago been devoured, and the pages and scrolls were only ash now. The stone shelves carved into the exterior walls could never be erased by such crude creatures, and the mosaic of All-Father on the ceiling was equally out of reach. It was the beauty of that piece that brought him back. The ancient, white-bearded dwarf stood there in a finely appointed smithy wearing an apron of dragon leather and a look of judgment.

Such was the skill of the nameless artist, though, that if you looked past the obvious, you could see that the All-Father was made up of hundreds of tiny dwarves, each a seamless part of the greater whole that had been found worthy. That was the dwarven afterlife. Krulm’venor knew that because once, long ago, he’d been a part of that. He’d been… a jolt of pain assaulted him as fragments of discordant memories assaulted him.

In his mind, he could see ossuaries stacked with the bones of dwarves. The youngest who died in battle were honored in their own way, but their gleaming white skulls would never achieve unity with the divine. It was only the older skulls that had lived hundreds of years and tested their mettle against every adversity that were free to join him in the afterlife. All the other dwarves would have to take another trip to the fire to have their mettle tested once more because only the crystal skulls of the ancestors could genuinely connect with the divine.

If that was true, though, then why was Krulm’venor not still in the afterlife, helping the All-Father to forge creation forever more? A loose thread of a memory pulled at him - something about how in times of dire need, a dwarf would be selected and— He almost had it, but in the time it had taken him to remember these things, his fires had begun to dim, and it was in that near darkness that the goblins crept closer and closer.

He could feel them, or at least the goblins locked inside this cursed cage could, but he was so focused on trying to remember that he did nothing and so emboldened they crept closer and closer. It was only when the first one attacked him that those memories drifted away like smoke, leaving Krulm’venor with only the coals or wounded pride and raging resentment that was all that was left of his dwarven soul.

The sharp stone that the goblin struck his steel femur with could never hope to scratch this terrible body. However, the single clear note of the impact rang out, and like a single drop of water in a still pool, it clarified everything. Revelation could wait. Knowledge and memory could wait. Even revenge on the Lich that had done these terrible things to it and trapped it in this bag of rats could wait. What couldn’t wait was killing these disgusting, insignificant vermin.

“Do not touch me,” Krulm’venor rasped.

For a moment, the goblins that surrounded him flinched in unison, wavering at the sound, but when no action followed. They surged forward, emboldened. At that moment, the world burst into flames. They emerged from where Krulm’venor’s heart should have been, like a nova, and flooded the room with liquid fire.

For the first time in decades, this room was lit brightly enough for every detail to be seen, but the only thing anyone would ever see here was a massacre. The goblins closest to him could touch him with their weapons, but that was all. Even as they achieved that remarkable victory, the hands that held them burned to ash. Those goblins that were further away had a chance to scream as the heat of the fire made their rancid green skin steam before the flames reached out to crisp them to shades of brown and black.

The goblins that were furthest away tried to flee, but the magnitude of Krulm’venor’s fury kept rising, so that was impossible. He paced through the three-story structure, burning away every goblin, as well as every sign that they’d ever existed. The totems and graffiti they used to mark the ever-shifting line of their territory vaporized almost as easily as the warriors that fought over them, along with any remnants of the dwarves that had once lived here.

Only when all that had burned away did Krulm’venor start to feel clean again. He couldn’t erase the many stains on his soul that the swamp had put there, but the purity of fire could hide them with its all-consuming light for a time. He would gladly stay like this forever if he could have, as the heart of his own tormented sun. However, when he saw the bronze fixtures were starting to melt and the perfectly dressed blocks of dwarvish stone were cracking under the heat, he couldn’t keep going.

Being buried alive by the collapsing structure wasn’t his concern either. He was happy to die. He was getting to the point where he welcomed true death and the oblivion awaiting him, but he wouldn’t harm dwarves. Even as tarnished as this building was, an ambitious clan could one day reclaim it. Their job would be that much easier now that he had purged it of vermin and filth with fire, he thought, looking for some silver lining to all of this.

Now he could go back downstairs and examine the mosaic to his heart’s content until he remembered what he’d forgotten. The Lich wouldn’t even protest such an activity. It was precisely what that foul creature wanted him to do. The last thing he wanted to do was give that evil access to more information about his people, but in this matter, he couldn’t resist his own terrible compulsion to find out more about himself. For years now, all he’d been was a spark of the divine, and for who knows how long before that, he was reduced to little more than smoke in a filthy cave. He needed to understand why he would ever subject himself to such a fate; part of that answer was why he’d been separated from the Allfather; he was sure of it.

When Krulm’venor reached the library once more, his spirit sank. In his mind, he’d been expecting to see a now cleansed room that had been turned from the midden heap it had become into the shrine to the only god that mattered it should have been.

Instead, he found he had cleansed the whole place entirely too well. The goblins were reduced to ash, and the trash had been vaporized as well, but he’d burned too hot for too long, and the artwork that had managed to survive the goblins for who knows how long had been blasted to ruin by the full force of his dark fires.

Krulm’venor could have wept for the feeling of loss he felt then, but there were no tears left to cry. Indeed, there was nothing left at all. Just an empty skeleton in an empty fortress surrounded by the new and the old dead. He turned to leave, and that was when he finally felt his master’s dark gaze upon him.

“That picture. The one you destroyed. What was it?” the Darkness in the back of his mind asked.

“That was the Allfather, lord of the dwarves, and I bitterly regret its loss. I wasn’t attempting to hide anything from you.” As he responded, Krulm’venor realized that perhaps it was for the best that it was gone. The Darkness couldn’t quite read his mind, but it could compel the truth from him and leave him suffering in agony until he told it everything that it wanted to know. Less evidence meant fewer questions to ask.

“The dwarves only have one god then, while the humans have multitudes. Why is that?” This time the Lich pressed harder like it suspected something, but Krulm’venor merely shrugged.

“Who knows why the humans do anything,” he rattled. “The dwarves have one god because there is only one way to do anything right. That’s as true for stone cutting and steel forging as it is for worship.”

There was a long, uneasy moment where it worried the Lich would press harder still, but as quickly as it appeared, the dark pressure on his mind eased. His master was gone, leaving him alone in the infinite dark to worry in private.

He desperately wanted to know more about his past than the growing pile of scraps he had, but the more he learned, the more the Lich would too. What terrible deeds could such an entity do with the knowledge that the dwarven god was made up of the souls of all the dwarven elders who ever lived?

Krulm’venor prayed silently that it would never find out as it exited the ash-filled fortress and continued his long silent walk into the deeps.