It was Verdenin who thought of it. Tenebroum would have to credit the man with that much, at least. That was why he still had a pulse after all.

Because the priest loved power, and he had some wonderful ideas about how to get more, he’d been allowed to stay alive. That, combined with the fact that he was as loyal as a turncoat could be, almost made it worth the trouble of keeping so many living on the second level in a part of its labyrinth once made to exclusively house the dead.

The priest had spent the whole winter exhorting those ideas to the other survivors of Blackwater and telling them all about the new world that was being born, as well as their place in it. “The darkness is inevitable,” he told them. “Death chases every one of us our whole lives, but it will not take you. Not if you are useful to it! Let us serve the night in all the ways it requires, and we shall live forever, unchained by the conventions of morality and the rules of light!”

The Lich still did not know how it felt about living followers, but it hurt nothing to give it a try. After all, all the other Gods and godlings it was aware of cultivated a flock of their own, so there must be a reason for it. Still, most of them had no other ready source of essence beyond their worshipers, where Tenebroum could always fall back on blood and suffering.

In fact, it doubted that an entire church could provide the same level of power as a single brutal night of fear and death, as one of its armies slaughtered a small town, but it had Kelvun make a note to conduct that experiment just as soon as the next phase of its war started. That was why it had constructed the dreamer. Both to delegate the task of surveilling their enemy and to increase their fear of what was going to happen next.

The Lich was proud of its many creations, and this latest one was no exception; even if it was more similar to the ones that had gone before than it was different, it was still something entirely new. More than anything, the dreamer was a shade, like the dark messenger that had served it so loyally for so long. In its case, though, the horse that it rode on was composed of pure shadow, just like the rest of its body.

So, it would need to find a grave or a pool of murky water to hide from the rising sun. If it did not, it would cease to exist as the rays of dawn reduced it to nothing but vapor and an unintelligible chorus of discordant screams as the many souls that made up its dreamer came apart at their very carefully sewn seams.

That and its inability to murder anything were its primary weaknesses. Its strengths were manifold, though, both literally and figuratively. It had the dark sense of human understanding of its puppeteer, it could spring apart into a hundred different copies like Krulm'venor, and it could speak in the sweet words of its herald so that no man could easily ignore it.

The Lich didn’t care if the dreamer or the missionary, as his priest referred to it, caught a single new worshiper to join its growing flock. What it cared about were the things that the dreamer learned as it prowled the dreams of the unwary, night after night.

That, and the uncertainty that the shadow monster left in its wake made it a most worthwhile investment of time and resources. The Lich created it by stitching together the souls of fervent Templars and priests that it had harvested by the score. As it turned out, it was easy enough to lobotomize such a soul, keeping its devotion but vivisecting the cause that it was so fervent about. That is the way it created such a loyal servant by stitching the souls of a hundred lobotomized servants of Siddrim to a single true believer of the darkness.

With only one thing left for them to believe in, they all believed it eventually, after enough pain and confusion. Some resisted, but the more souls that fell, the quicker the rest of them gave in. Finally, after 66 days and 66 nights, it had a quivering ball of shadows that was practically begging to go out and proselytize to the masses.

And the Lich was happy to let it. Tenebroum had once spent most nights invading the dreams of those that dwelled with its domain, but there were few survivors left in that area now, and it had better things to do with its time than harvest a tiny trickle of mana from a single nightmare.

Besides, the dreamer, or the nightmare as Verdenin referred to it, could invade the dreams of a whole village at once. In fact, within a few days of it being unleashed it was doing exactly that, almost every night, as it galloped from town to town.

The first few villages were a mixed bag that showed the need to fine-tune the way its dreamer operated because rather than a series of horrific nightmares about what would happen if they dared try to hold back the darkness, it turned out to be something closer to a psychic scream that woke up everyone that it didn’t kill or put into a coma as visions of a blood-drenched world assaulted the sleeping peasants.

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

So it tried again and again. On its fourth attempt, as the shadowy steed rode into the tiny square of the village of Muttson, it even managed to burrow inside the heads of every last resident for a few hours without waking a single soul.

By the time its dreamer reformed and retreated to the graveyard to escape the coming dawn, Tenebroum doubted that the people it had touched would ever feel quite safe again, of course, but that was progress. Night by night, it learned to whisper instead of scream, and slowly but surely, it began to learn things of great interest to Tenebroum.

It learned to separate the strong from the weak as it sorted the wheat from the chaff one community at a time. It learned that fear ruled the day, especially in the south, where people were close enough to hear about the fall of Siddrimar. There, they dreamed of armies of the dead marching on their lands and taking no prisoners.

That was where the dream that became known as the prophecy by so many over the next few months first started. It started by accident, but after a while, the Lich decided to honor it and see how it played out.

“You can be safe from all of this, Tanyana,” a fragment of the dreamer, pretending to be a woman’s dead mother, had reassured her in a dream. “Just tell me who the strongest warrior in the village is…”

“That’s… Braken,” Tanyana said, uncertain of what was happening. She knew that her mother had been dead for four years and that if she looked up at the speaker, she’d see only a desiccated corpse of the woman in that terrible logic that dreams had. Still, as long as she looked away and felt her mother stroke her hair, everything would be okay.

“Braken, of course,” her mother said soothingly. “I always knew that he’d grow up to be big and strong. If you want the village to be safe, then all you have to do is kill him and bury him under the road that leads here. That way, he can defend you from the dead, and you and all my little grandchildren can be safe and sound…”

It was meant to be a horrible choice that would nibble at the woman’s conscience whenever the suns set, and she feared the shadows. The dreamer had told hundreds of people thousands of crazy and terrible things that mostly involved worshiping the Lich, but none of them had actually done it, not until Tanyana.

She lured the man into her home to seduce him and then poisoned his beer. When her fellow villagers saw what she had done as she tried to bury the body, she defended her decision.

“Don’t you understand?” she yelled as they readied the noose. “I did this for you! For all of us! It’s the only way to save us from what’s coming!”

Her friends and neighbors still hung her, but they did bury both her and her victim under the road as her dream prophecy suggested. There was such a wonderful thrill to all the layers of that betrayal that the Lich had its dreamer deliver that prophecy to every village it invaded by night.

In the south and the east, where the war was the fiercest, the dreams offered a promise of peace, but in the north, where the mountains protected them from violence, at least for the moment, they promised a good harvest instead.

“The sun is weak,” the dreams whispered. “The growing season will be too short. By the time the snows come, all that will be left to harvest are stalks and rot unless you make a sacrifice to keep it at bay.”

It was a terrible prophecy, but day by day, it spread across an already hungry land. It was enough to keep every farmer awake at night as he feared for his livelihood and the health of his children. You will die. Your animals and progeny will die. Everything will die.

That was true enough. Once Tenebroum figured out how to snuff the infernal lights a second time, it planned to starve everyone and build an army with their frozen corpses. All that would come later, though. For now, all it could do was watch and see what the good people of the realm would do.

Not every village fell, of course. In some regions, whole swaths of them resisted the urge to sacrifice one for the many. Perhaps twenty percent of them did, though, to its surprise, and the Lich was sure that many of the warriors that were the most likely candidates for such sacrifice in other towns and villages that had not yet given in lived in constant fear.

It turned out that most of the good men and women of the world found a way to justify a little blood on their hands in the same way that the Templars had when they set out to purge the temples to Oroza. It was an interesting lesson, and Tenebroum took it to heart.

Even as its armies began to march north through the vast tunnel that was finally quiet and finished, it was these choices that determined where and how it would strike. Over the winter, it had assembled thousands upon thousands of new monstrosities in every form. It had created its centipede cavalry and living siege engines. It had repaired its shadow drake and Krulm’venor. More than anything, though, it had created a nearly unending supply of armored zombies and given them a general without equal.

Now, it was about to unleash them on a corner of the world that thought itself safe, but it would save those who were willing to bend the knee for last. After all, even with its vast and ever-expanding armies, it could not be everywhere at once. If they were willing to kill their own friends and family, then what else would it be able to get them to do before this war was done.

Tenebroum wasn’t sure, but as people began to pray to the darkness to spare them, it found that it finally understood the appeal for why Gods worked so hard to attract their little chorus of worshipers.