Spring had not yet started when Tenebroum’s wraiths found the first city in their long search beneath the Wodinspine Mountains. They had found supply depots and holdouts before that point, and they waited to ambush the soldiers while they slept, draining the life from their bodies until they were still warm corpses.
They never found a large gathering of more than a few dozen men away from the front lines. The darkness was beginning to think they never would until one day, they heard the distant hammering of the forges echoing through a vent shaft. The inhabitants called the place Hugeldin, and it was a true city with more than 10,000 inhabitants.
That made it significantly smaller than Ghen’tal. However, according to the dwarven souls it had devoured, that was apparently typical for dwarven cities so near the surface, and most of their kind preferred the depths. Technically, Hugeldin was above the surface; one of the tallest peaks in the Wodenspines had been significantly hollowed out, and so it lurked there in the relative safety of its mountain fortress that only occasionally had to deal with the threat of goblins from below.
When the wraiths found it, though, they did precisely nothing. They did not even swarm around the dustier passages of the city. They merely lurked at the farthest edges to determine all approaches and left as Tenebroum instructed. It wanted to give them no warning after all. No one would know what was coming. No one would know the price to be paid for fighting the darkness until it was done.
The dwarves should appreciate that, the Lich thought wryly. After all, they were huge fans of holding grudges and settling debts.
Krulm’venor stirred slowly for the first time in a very long time when the Lich ordered him to rise. “The fire will rise once more, hound,” the deathless voice commanded. It sounded different now, though Krulm’venor wouldn’t have been able to say exactly how if he tried. “You are but a guttering spark, but I am a generous master, so I shall give you more chance to feast.”
He knew that the Lich’s words must be a trap. They always were, and any feast that was placed before him would surely be poisoned, but part of him still hungered for it. It had been a long time since he had tasted the flesh of the living, and he longed to do so again.
He felt more himself than he had… well, since before Mournden. Since before, the Lich had made him suffer. That was when he figured out the difference. He couldn’t hear the other voices. The voices that spoke to him with his own guttural goblin voice. He could still feel those dark spirits deep inside itself, though. They were a churning maelstrom of violence and discontent looking for any excuse to awaken, but he was too weak for that just now.
“Where must I go?” he asked.
“North,” the Lich commanded. “Ever north, deep into the mountains. The ravens will guide you.”
“You mean for me to strike the dwarves, then?” Krulm’venor asked.
“Will that be a problem?” the Lich asked.
“It is not,” the fire godling answered, surprised to find that it wasn’t.
He was no longer truly a dwarf, after all, not after everything that had happened. He could hear it in his voice and feel it in his posture. He had become something the All-Father could never accept. So, while parts of his mind genuinely wished for good fortune for his people, the other parts wanted to burn down everything that he could never have.
He thought about those warring feelings constantly on his walk north. During the brightest parts of the day, he buried himself in a shallow grave, and during the night and the long twilight that made up most of the day, he walked as a faint blue torch, visible to towns that he passed by as nothing but a will-o-wisp.
At first, he wondered why he didn’t get more attention from the villages and farm holds he passed. The first time he’d walked across the peninsula to do his dark master’s bidding, he’d attracted lots of attention from the superstitious locals. It was only later that he learned that everyone in the area had either died or fled.
That did little to warm his heart. Once, he’d been at the heart of a goblin horde that had rampaged through this whole region. He’d gloried in the blood that they’d spilled and the magic they’d wielded. Now, he couldn’t even bring himself to make small detours from the path to burn down the small clusters of buildings and glory amongst the ashes.
It was a strange dichotomy, and he didn’t understand it until he realized he sometimes remembered things that he’d never experienced. He remembered dying to a giant spider and having a family in far away Grom’ron. He remembered devoting his whole life to the way of the axe and the way of the anvil. All of these things were impossible because the two paths were entirely incompatible. He’d never even been to Grom’ron, had he?
The solitude of his journey gave him all the time in the world to contemplate these inconsistencies. However, every examination only deepened the questions until he arrived at his destination.
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The stone doors of Hugelden stood shut, and the moon was low in the sky as Krulm’venor approached them. There were guards present, and as soon as they saw that his queer blue light was the thing he was rather than something he carried, they sounded the alarm and began to shut the doors. It would be the last decision they’d ever make, and when the group of dwarven warriors chose to stay outside rather than retreat within, he saluted their bravery, though they would not survive it.
“Be careful, men!” the Sergeant shouted in dwarven, “It’s just another one of the metal mockeries we’re warring with in the depths!”
Metal mockery sounded just about right to poor, beleaguered Krulm’venor. His flames burned brighter as the dwarves in plate began to fan out around him in a defensive formation.
He wondered how surprised they’d be if his form suddenly exploded forth into dozens of other copies of himself but resisted. He could feel the goblin horde beginning to stir inside him, and he wanted to stay himself as long as possible. So, he would do this himself.
He’d been too long in the cold, and he desperately wanted to feel warm again.
As the first dwarf came at him, his fires burned brighter, and he lashed out in all directions, making them take a step back as he singed their beards. That was just an appetizer, though. Even as they were taken aback, he was charging forward, and before the Sergeant could do more than raise his weapon, Krulm’venor had removed his head in a shower of gore.
The rest of his men followed though they were not given such mercy. Each of them was burned alive and died screaming. It was only when their whimpers ceased and the fire godling had finished feasting on their pain that he started to come alive. Whatever veneer had been holding together, his shattered mind slowly fell away to reveal the yawning cracks that separated him into his multiplicity of selves.
Then he began to unfold, again and again, and again, multiplying every few steps. It was a single monstrosity that had killed the guards, but by the time it reached the doors, it had become a small army. Each time, he split. Krulm’venor’s mind shrank as his viewpoint grew. By the time there were 84 slavering versions of himself, he’d given himself over entirely to the horde of goblins that lay within him, but he could see everything that each of them did in a constant kaleidoscope of rage and hunger.
They attacked the door with fire first, but that did little. A handful of guards would not give him the strength to melt granite slabs into magma. That would come later.
Instead, they started clawing at that stone. Each of them was a mismatched, unholy construct that had been cobbled together by undead artificers. Almost all those claws were tipped with mithril, adamantine, or kobold teeth. Now, all 84 of them started to dig as one at a door that had stood for untold centuries and never once been breached. 171 hands began to dig. 941 claws sank into the stone, and a fraction of an inch at a time, they began to cut through the ancient bulwark.
The dwarves inside assumed that they were as safe as they’d always been, even with the alarm gongs sounding in the distance. They were wrong. These steel banded slabs were feet thick, but they wouldn’t last the hour. Before the moon was high in the sky, the mob that was Krulm’venor breached the defenses in a tide of gibbering, rabid madness.
The first two steel skeletons to scamper through the opening were demolished by the defenders. He was down to 82 members of his own private tribe now. He responded with an angry firestorm that scattered the well-ordered lines of the opposition long enough for a dozen versions of himself to pour through. Then, they were fighting the remaining guards, and all the rest flooded inside.
What was a fight for half a minute became a brawl for the next few as battle lines were dissolved by ferocity. Then, it just became a slaughter of blood and fire.
By the time the defenders were entirely broken, and the many versions of Krulm’venor were running throughout the city, he’d lost ten more versions of himself, but he’d left hundreds of dead and dying dwarven warriors in his wake, and the ground was slick with their blood.
The fire godling felt each life, his and theirs, as they slipped away. This wasn’t just because the darkness used his bodies as focal points to steal the souls of the dead, either. It was because, despite all that had happened, he felt the pangs of his own morality start to chip away at the numbness of his mental armor.
As disconnected as he felt from the dwarven race now, and as much as he hated them for everything he could no longer be, he couldn’t help but be moved by their final moments as the deaths poured in, especially not after the tribe of monsters that he was finished with the brave men and started to descend on the women and children.
He’d felt like this at Siddrimar, too, he recalls suddenly. To kill the holy warriors had been exhilarating, but the rooms with the priestess and the youngest acolytes had tasted only like ashes as he’d put them to the torch.
It was replaying again now, and there was nothing he could do about it. The Lich had built him the perfect prison as punishment for his earlier disobedience. He lacked the strength to control even one of his bodies when he was fully unfolded like this. Each skeleton was controlled by the angry spirits of dozens of goblins that had been skillfully woven together. They were simple but powerful constructs, and until they had sated their thirst for blood and death, all he could do was channel the Lich’s orders and wait for it to be over.
That’s when the fires started to rise. The 58 skeletons who remained burned because they enjoyed it, but Krulm’venor ordered them too simply to speed up the suffering and grant the survivors a quicker end.
Individually, each inferno was terrible, but together, they were a natural disaster. Within minutes, the smells of smoke and burning meat permeated everything. Shortly after that, the sounds of distant screaming were replaced by coughing. After that, the only sounds were his gibbering and war cries as the most barbaric parts of him celebrated their complete victory.
The temperatures would keep rising as they unleashed more and more destruction, and by morning, there would be only a single skeleton lying among the ashes of the main clan hall. The Lich had gotten his revenge, and all it had cost were the lives of thousands of dwarves and another piece of Krulm’venor’s soul.