Tenebroum

Chapter 188: Desperate Times

Chapter 188: Desperate Times

Time ticked by full of characteristic indecision as Tenebroum tried to decide the best course of action. It told itself, at any moment, Malzekeen might return. This could be a trick... an ambush, and I should wait a little longer. That was only part of the truth, though.

The truth was that it was it didn’t know what to do as it swam back and forth through the skies above Blackwater, trying to devour every soul that slipped free of its grasp.

That, of course, was a losing prospect, but there was nothing else it could do in that moment. It was certain that the only way to sever its connection with the worm had been to shatter the only thing that the two of them had in common. That had been successful but at a terrible cost.

Now I need someone smarter than what I’ve become to help it decide... As Tenebroum had that thought, it realized that it still had that, at the very least. As soon as it realized that, it fled down at high speed, leaving more bits of other people’s souls in its wake as it fled to the library.

Malzekeen might well come back. There was nothing it could do about that. It might be in a day, a week, or even a year. The darkness couldn’t prevent that in its current state. All it could do was hemorrhage and grow weaker, and that was the last thing it wanted. Its enemies were going to come back, one way or the other. If not the ghastly chimera, then the forces of light or even one of the meddling gods like Lunaris. Someone would smell its weakness like blood in the water, and it had to be ready for that.

So, it dove through three floors of stone and into the library, hoping that it wasn't completely wrecked like so many other parts of its stronghold. There, it found the room completely intact. Here, there was row upon row of mismatched pottery. Only a few of the heads in this room were even relatively fresh. Most of them went back for years and decades. It was an arcane treasure trove. Normally, it would be picky and choose the right mage or mages for the job, but it no longer remembered which jar held which head, and Tenebroum could not reach out to the Skoeticnomikos to find the answer. So, picked one at random and dived toward it.

As it did so, there were some sounds echoing through the halls to indicate that either its surviving acolytes or some of the larger shards of its soul had gone berserk in some distant part of the labyrinth. For now, Tenebroum ignored that. Every minute and every distraction would cost it a part of its mind as it dwindled. The smaller it got, the slower it lost strength, but if it did not find a way to reverse this process in a day or a week, it would be nothing but a handful of murder victims lingering in the heart of what was once a swamp.

The head that it chose belonged to young master Bartholomew, an elemental mage that focused on earth magics. Tenebroum found that out immediately, but it took longer to remember where it had collected him from. That answer came back to it only as it forced energy in the mage to bring him to life. The man had been one of the men that the very late Count Kelvun had hired to dig a canal through its swamp.

The darkness bristled at that memory but stayed focused on the matter at hand as it commanded the mage’s slowly awakening soul.

“Tell me what I must do to solve this problem!” Tenebroum roared into the man’s mind.

The most unexpected thing happened then. The man actually fought him. Not for long, and not successfully, but for the first time in decades, one of its servants squirmed in its deathless grip like it had a chance to escape.

The way up to the surface was longer than the darkness remembered. It had been so long that it had traversed the path in physical form that it could not remember when it had done so. The past didn’t matter, nor did the difficulty. All that mattered was reaching its desperate goal.

There was no one to stop it on the surface, either. Indeed, the only obstacle it found there was that the blast furnace was almost out, and it was forced to set down its heavy load and retrieve a great deal of dried peat and charcoal, which had been set aside previously to get the thing back up to temperature.

Tenebroum had never known much about the metal works of its lair. It relied on its drudges and forgewights for that expertise. It knew that fire melted gold if it was hot enough, though, and it knew that it needed molten gold and the mind of a mage to replace what it had lost. How that worked? Why that worked? It had no clue. All it knew was that it was dissipating like fog on a sunny day, and it had to stop.

So Tenebroum loaded up the crucible with gold coins that it had looted from a dozen cities. Part of it worried that some of this gold might yet bear another spirit's touch, but right now, there was nothing it could do about it. Right now, anything was better than nothing. So long as it wasn’t Malzekeen’s gold, it would be enough for now.

What followed was a messy, clumsy process. The coins were slow to melt, even after Tenebroum figured out that it could work the bellows to increase the heat of the fire. It caught itself on fire twice, which was annoying, even if it did no real damage. Each mishap and mistake was more salt in the wound, though. A day ago, it had been a God; it had held the souls of hundreds of thousands and powered a war machine that functioned like clockwork, even half a continent away. Now, it was a bare chorus of ten thousand minds that were slowly bleeding away while it was forced to do all of the work itself.

It was humiliating, but worse than that, it was inefficient. To the lingering vestiges of Siddrim and the All-Father that it still held onto tightly, that was the most unforgivable sin of them all.

The remnants of the God of craftsmen cringed again when Tenebroum finally poured out the golden crucible onto the head of the mage, creating a tiny, ugly version of the phylactery it had possessed until recently. It was an effort that bordered on failure.

The head was hardly the heart that Albrecht’s preserved corpse had been, and the darkness gnashed its teeth in frustration as it tried to understand why. It had taken the mind of a mage and encased it in gold, just as it had done so long ago. This time, though, it wasn’t a new dark heart that it could gather endless amounts of power into. If its original phylactery had been an ocean, then this one was a pond or a very small lake.

Still, it was enough to staunch the bleeding. Even though Tenebroum felt like it filled the new thing up to bursting, it stopped hemorrhaging souls, and that was the important part. Now, it could even control a number of drudges once more, though they had to be close for it to do so.

This was still an unacceptable situation, but it was able to think and plan again, and using its drudge to carry its new quasi-phylactery around, the darkness went back down into its lair to ask its library for guidance on what to do next. Bartholomew was spent, but it had many other mages that could advise it on such things.