Tenebroum

Chapter 58: A Fitting Sacrifice

This was the second time it had caused the city of Fallravea to burn, and it was glorious. The Lich had done little else but watch things unravel once the Templars had made their appearance. The fighting and the dying had been interesting in their own way, but the longer things unraveled, the better things got. Even though the scents of death had barely begun to mingle with the thick smoke and rank fear that suffused the city, it already made for a better sacrifice this time than it did last time its minions had sacked the town.

This time things were only getting started, too. Previously the goblins had butchered at random, which had its charms. However, the genuine malevolence and corruption that it had been brewing beneath the city for years had finally been lanced by the Templars. The methodical nature of the way they did things turned the whole affair into almost a ritual sacrifice. Now that evil was flowing out into the streets and fleeing from the city under the cover of night. As contagious as The Drowning had been, panic was the faster of the two plagues.

The Templars hadn’t just killed the evil that the Lich had been cultivating, though. They had destroyed the religion that even the untainted members of the land had taken heart in for generations in one form or another. The worship of Oroza touched every life in the small city. Fishermen prayed to The River Dragon for still waters before they set off each day, the sick prayed to The Drowned Woman not to take them, and midwives prayed to The Lifegiver for a healthy birth.

For every member, the Lich had converted to The Cult of The Undying, a hundred people worshiped one of Oroza’s more benign aspects. However, that didn’t matter to those that walked in the light. They smashed every other god with equal fervor. It made for an enlightening lesson for the Lich. However, that was less important than the fact that they had ripped the heart out of that community by their actions almost as surely as its chirurgeon Granzarious had ripped the heart out of one of their companions as they had tried to purge the underchapel of evil.

Even now, the heart still beat slowly as it hung by a slender silver thread in the center of its fleshworks. So captivated had the chirurgeon been by the clean way it had cut it out of the warrior that it had been unwilling to let it stop just yet. Though the Lich did not know what they would do with it at present or how it would pry the holy spirit out of the lump of flesh without damaging it. For now, the Lich was content to let it reverberate alone in the dark while the darkness watched its comrades blunder around, making a bad situation worse.

The Lich had been slightly surprised at how easily they cut through the leviathan. As large and powerful as its flesh crafters had made it, it had been little more than a clumsy parody of the River Dragon. Even if the monstrosity hadn’t been its best work, the Lich had still expected to kill more of the holy warriors before it finally succumbed to them. Either way, it had learned a great deal from both the way the forces of light had fought and the way that its creations endured that terrible brightness, of course, but next time wouldn’t just be a test. It would have to improve its creatures if it wanted to crush the enemy utterly.

Its undying army was deadly and larger than ever, but in the fight, it had not been the swords that had struck the mortal blow but the radiance of their wielders that had boiled them from the inside out. The Lich had felt the revulsion and the fear surge through the hardened warriors at the sights they had been forced to endure in those fights and vowed to make its creations going forward even stranger than they had been to date to make better use of both emotions. Why wouldn’t it? Those dark emotions paralyzed and weakened its foes almost as well as its magic did, and they cost it nothing.

Everything was in motion now, and most of it was going splendidly. Its minions had managed to peel its pet Lordling completely before the quivering mass of flesh that had been left behind was finally allowed to expire. The only change to its original plan was that instead of keeping Kelvun’s spirit amongst its other trophies, it was currently bound in a skull set aside to observe exactly what was being done with the parts of his body step by step. It would, of course, be reunited with them in time, but only when its newest abomination was complete.

Its dragon continued to make progress in that regard, but it still could not fly. The Lich was tempted to replace the scales with hardened black iron, but its chirurgeons rightly cautioned against such changes for reasons related to weight. The beast was so massive that each time they tested it for flight, it had to be taken apart to be brought outside and then put back together for testing, which had thus far been fruitless.

That had been frustrating to no end. Even with three sets of wings: Manticore, Wyvern, and Drake, it simply lacked the energy to take to the sky. All it could manage was to leap from hills or to glide from the top of a boulder pile near the area where it did its testing. Its fiery servant burned without issue, and its aquatic servant had no problem swimming, but the winged servant that was being built to swoop down from the darkness and smite its enemies simply couldn’t get airborne.

At this point, it couldn’t stop the Templar’s messenger even if it had the inclination to.

Its shadow raptors that had been stitched together from darkness and appropriate swamp fowl had found a dozen minor air spirits. Generally, these fast-flying servants took the form of four-winged ravens, though lately, vulture corpses using two wings that had been lengthened and modified showed excellent results too. Sadly when it came to the magic of flying, symmetry appeared to be a core part of the process, which was not a complication that mattered to any of its other servants.

Symmetrical design was an alien idea to the mind of the Lich as well as its servants, and it struggled with it. How much different would they have turned out if it had been forced to build its dungeon or its swamp dragon with such principles? The Lich tried to imagine what that world would look like, but it could not. Every glimpse of the perfect symmetry that Krulm’venor offered from the dwarven city had baffled it in much the same way.

No matter how many aerial spirits were stitched into the wings of its greatest creation to date, it had yet to solve the problem. The bird’s prey had not been enough to buoy it into the skies. Normally they would be busily out hunting even now, even though half of them never returned to the rookery from their dangerous night flights. That wasn’t the case tonight, though. Tonight they hung thickly over Fallravea. Dozens of them circled the city in low, lazy circles. Most of them basked in the fear and distrust that was radiating throughout the city, but some of them watched the positions of the Templars and the city watch, whispering their information to the Lich as it changed.

Though darkness was everywhere, its attention couldn’t focus on everything at once. With the help of its servants, though, the Lich could keep an eye on the whole city, whispering into the ears of its agents and any other evildoers that might show promise on how best to escape the tightening noose. Many of its agents would die in the prisons and the torture chambers of the just in the coming weeks, but many more would be innocents, and the Lich hungered for those terrible travesties almost as much as it hungered for the public executions and pyres that would certainly follow.

Other than perhaps its torments of the Late Kelvun, and everything that was going to happen to him in the coming months while his new body was shaped to purpose, it could think of nothing it wanted more than to watch good men dirty their hands with the blood of those who had done nothing wrong. Even the light could not blot out the spots of darkness on the souls of the just.

The Lich could see them even now. It could see that one of the most dangerous Templars tended to do terrible things when he was drunk, which was most nights, and that another’s body was riddled with venereal disease as much as his soul was riddled with perversion. Even the young child that seemed to be the apprentice or servant of the band’s leaders had blood on his hand from the children he had murdered. All of these things were things that it could touch and manipulate if the circumstances were right. They made the Lich’s mind race with possibilities, but none of the servants of the god of light were as filled with darkness as the unconscious priest was.

That man still stood on death’s door, even after two days of healing magic. It was not the light that saved him, though - it was that the Lich planned to hold back death and disease as long as it would take for the weakling to recover. The priest hadn’t been a particularly bad person before this adventure. His worst sins had been greed and pride, which were things the Lich understood well, but its shadow hydra had bitten deeply into the man, and even after the priest had eradicated the thing’s first two heads with a powerful spell, the teeth that had been buried in the man’s arm had stayed behind, burrowing ever deeper into the man’s necrotic flesh. Even though the Templars had wisely removed the arm the next day, that darkness had already traveled through the priest’s bloodstream and into his heart.

The priest might not be the Lich’s creature exactly, but only because the Lich wanted him to keep his connection to the light. When the time was right, it would take the pawn completely, but now it would let the wounded man fester spiritually in equal measure to the way that the disease refused to take root in his physical wounds.

Few others would merit its mercy, though. The thin trickle of death that was leaking from the city now was nothing but the appetizer for a promised banquet. It would claim the souls of the few who had died on its cursed earth, but they would serve only to whet its appetite for the carnival of death that was sure to follow.

The servants of the light had already sent a messenger back to the holy city they resided in, and it was certain that messenger came to beg for reinforcements, so the Lich would do nothing to bar its way. After all, when it had finally decided to devour his puppet ruler in such a public fashion, it had known that a day of reckoning for such a brutal piece of theater was inevitable. All it could do now was learn from it but let the priests and pontiffs show off as many of their tricks as they liked so that it would be prepared for the great war to come.