Tenebroum

Chapter 209: Primeval (2)

When the Titan emerged from the hole into the depths at the center of Tenebroum’s lair, it was just part of the flood. Shadowy monstrosities raged past it in all directions. In the past, the Lich would have gone to great lengths to avoid letting its enemies encroach on its domain, but sometimes, enemies were best fought at the very heart of one's power, despite the risks. After all, it had been necessary for Siddrim; who was to say it wasn’t necessary for this thing or whatever might flow out of the depths next.

The giant spirit looked no differently here than it had in the icy caverns miles below where they now stood, and it immediately tried the same tactics. It once again attempted to distort reality here, as it had done below, shifting the space between spaces to make the already large cathedral practically boundless so that it could, in turn, make its already huge size even larger, but that was a trick that Tenebroum no longer allowed.

Here, the Lich had absolute power, and nothing stirred even as the magic rippled outward through the stone and tunnels of its true body. It owned these stones by graven letter and magic links for half a mile in any direction, and the monstrosity would find not even the tiniest crack that it could leverage against it.

“That will not work a second time,” the Lich intoned loudly through the steam pipes of its organ in a series of voices that were almost musical. “Nor will I allow you to escape.”

“Escape?” The Titan asked with two dozen heads in its alien language, leaving the rest of them to laugh at the idea that it clearly considered preposterous. “You are the one that has fled. Since you led me to somewhere so interesting, though, I will forgive you for wasting my time. I—”

The Lich did not wait for the monstrosity to finish speaking before it struck. Instead, it lashed out from every direction at once with a swarm of hundreds of inky black tentacles. Here, it had the strength to manifest as much power as it wanted, and right now, it was overflowing with darkness to fuel even its strongest attacks.

It had dozens of appendages to fasten to each of the giant’s limbs. That was saying something considering that even without its strange distortions, it was nearly tall enough to reach the vaulted ceilings of the undertemple some forty feet above its head.

It ripped and tore at Tenebroum’s tentacles as it tried to get free and mound some kind of counter-attack. There was nothing for it to fight back against, though. The Lich was everywhere and nowhere now.

Sometimes, it succeeded in dissipating them completely with its monstrous strength, but when they were destroyed, it was no great loss. They were ephemeral things that were less connected to it than the zombies it wielded. More often, though, the Titan merely severed them after the things had started burrowing into its very soul to sap its strength. This was a trick that Tenebroum had learned from the Queen of Thorns and the way she devoured other nature spirits, and it served it well here.

“You think you can tie me down with these parlor tricks?” the dark Titan’s foul voice yelled in defiance, but the Lich ignored it.@@novelbin@@

The thing might feign unconcern, but it had already had a dozen arms and legs ripped off by the force of the Lich’s infinite attack, and many of the others were at least partially bound. Tenebroum saw no way for the creature to resist. It tried using its strange magic again, singing a complex chorus of words in a way that was similar to how the Lich had learned to cast its strongest magics, but the Lich was ready for that.

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It could not understand the language that was being used to cast the spell that the thing was conjuring, but it didn’t have to. It could feel the way that each word rippled in the ether as it tried to manifest some power that it thought would save it. The Lich could see those effects, and so it counteracted those efforts easily enough by creating a counterspell in real time and blasting it out of its eighty-eight mouths in scream after well-tuned scream.

It was long past the time that Tenebroum would have to adapt and endure to its opponents. From now on, that would be a problem for its enemies.

It was the lord of this place. It was a god of darkness with a shadow that was cast halfway around the world. No one could do anything in its presence if it did not allow it, certainly not an aging relic without a spark of light to fight against a force of darkness.

There was a moment, toward the end of the fight when the thing tried to communicate with Tenebroum again. It roared incomprehensibly in its alien tongue before it was silenced forever. Whether that was to beg for mercy or offer some kind of deal, the Lich would never know. This wasn’t an equal; it was just a larger piece of prey than normal, and it was now fully tangled in Lich’s web.

Slowly, the Titan’s bloodless blue limbs were wrapped one at a time by the Lich’s grasping appendages. Soon, the thing was drowning in inky blackness in a way that could no longer be properly expressed by darkness or shadow. It was no longer a part of the world in any real sense. It was already practically consumed and only a few more steps from being digested completely.

In the depths, the two of them had fought for days to a standstill, but up here, Tenebroum had all but won within an hour. Even now, the monstrosity that had dared defy it was all but dead. It might still struggle, but that was all that it could do now, and resistance only made the process of rending it apart that much more satisfying.

You weren’t as even as worthy a foe as the All-Father, Tenebroum thought bitterly, wishing that it had a real challenge.

The real challenge on its mind would almost certainly come in the form of the moon and the stars. It would be soon, too. Even as it started to formulate a new plan and exactly how it would best use this much power, though, the memories of the Titan that it had finally devoured began to bubble to the surface, and the Lich turned away to focus on those.

What it saw was confusing. There were no context clues to say where they were or even when they were. The mountains looked different, and the oceans had only the faintest waves. There did not seem to be much in the way of forests, either. Instead, it watched the Titan lord over a host of things that were barely men from the peak of a stone ziggurat.

The whole scene struck Tenebroum as primitive, though it took it a while to say why. Swamps and poverty existed in every age, after all. It turned out that the missing detail was that the creatures had not even invented steel or iron yet. Most of the troglodytes wielded implements of bronze or stone, but before the Lich could study that, the scene was shifting. There were other titans, too, though none of them were the size of the thing it had just defeated.

There were no remarkable insights here, the Lich decided, after watching the dizzying array of strange images flicker by it. It was ready to tune the entire affair out and refocus on the moon, and the situation outside that had passed by in its absence while it had been focused on the fires of creation.

It paused from doing that when it saw the sunrise, though. According to the memory, such a thing was unprecedented and threw everyone who saw it into panic. Before that moment, there had never been a sunrise before, apparently, which was an idea that the Lich found both odd and desirable. Instead, the world had been lit merely by wandering stars, and ugly, squat creatures had struggled with monsters amidst the foggy fern forests and the flat, swampy seas.

Such insights were inconsistent and sometimes even contradictory, but the idea that once there had been no sun, and then there was, fascinated the Lich. Moments ago, it was hopelessly bored with frog people or what it was they were doing, but now it was taking in every last detail as it struggled for insight on how to best fight the light.

There was no fighting the light, though. Not then. It razed the entire civilization to ashes in a single day and sent even their gods deep into the earth looking for shelter. Tenebroum watched as the decades and centuries played out after that in the blink of an eye, but still, the pale things merely cowered and did nothing to strike at the gods above. They simply raided the surface for food and retreated before the end of the night, much like the goblins now might.

That part of the things story might have gone on forever were it not for the dwarves. They had steel and slaughtered the primitive monsters, sending them ever deeper in their quest to get away. After that, the memories became indistinct. Tenebroum didn’t need to see more. All it needed to know was that these things had failed, and light had taken their world as a result. It would correct their mistake and would use their strength to do it.