Tenebroum’s armies had only just reached the twin fortresses of Banath and were pausing to gauge King Borum’s response to its generous terms when its carriage was detonated in front of the city gates of Rahkin without warning. One moment, The Voice of Reason had been riding sedately toward the open gate, and the guards seemed to have no interest in baring her way, and then next, fire arced out from a pair of mages on the castle wall, turning its beautiful carriage into an inferno.

The Lich was outraged by this turn of events but not so wroth that it turned away from whatever was going to happen next. The fire was destructive, but the tank of noxious gases that held its new plague in the bowls of that glossy vehicle was even more so. Though the flames likely destroyed all the infectious magic they possessed, it still took some joy in the fireball that expanded outward in a second, larger explosion that engulfed a dozen guards as the explosion became an eruption of liquid flame.

The fire melted away the flesh of the forms the horses and the carriage driver, crisping them in the preservative oils that had been used to keep them looking natural. So, the things that strode out of the fire looking for vengeance looked even more inhuman than they otherwise might have. Each of them strode out of the smoldering wreckage to make sure that those who had done this did not live to regret it.

First came the four horses, or the things that had been disguised as horses. Those skins had only hidden the predators that lay beneath, and now the long-legged dire wolves revealed themselves. Their legs stayed long, but their spines lengthened, and their claws extended as they charged the main gate. The results were as bloody as they were terrifying.

The men that had been spared the fire were caught completely off guard by the slavering beasts of bone and steel as they darted forward and grabbed those closest to the violence in the giant mouths. They shook their prey like rag dolls, crushing bones, and snapping spines before releasing the corpse and moving on to the next target.

Amidst all the screams, no one noticed what happened to the other two occupants. The ripper delayed a moment in attacking as its extra arms finally unfolded, and it could, at last, do what it had been made to do. It ignored the guards and ran straight for the wall, where it started to climb like a giant, six-legged insect.

Its task was just as simple and straightforward as that of the wolves. It existed to kill, but its capabilities were greater, and its targets were of a higher priority. The mages didn’t even notice it until it was already halfway up the forty-foot walls. All the lightning and fire that they rained down on it in an effort to kill it did more damage to the stone than it did to the Lich’s revenge.

It would not be dissuaded in its task, and by the time it reached the first mage, it still had 3 arms and a heart full of rage as it ripped the young woman to pieces. Only the intervention of three guards with pikes delayed it long enough to allow the second mage, a graybeard, to flee down the rampart in panic. Those extra few minutes of life he might yet have cost everyone else their lives, though.

Pikes and spears were terrible weapons with which to face the undead. Without the cross guard of a partisan or coresque, there was nothing to stop it from searching up the shaft and ripping the head off the wielder. Even a boar-hunting spear would have been a better choice and told Tenebroum exactly how far those pitiful fools were from being ready. If they wanted a war, it would give them one, and instead of taking their dregs as payment, it would claim every last life in Rahkin.

As everyone else fought for their lives, The Voice of Reason finally made her way from the carriage and walked away from the city with all the dignity that her broken form could muster. She was missing her left arm at the elbow, and most of her hair of, spun gold, had melted together into a single lopsided lump that clung to her scalp.

Her entourage was so effective that no one watched her cracked, soot-covered form walk away from the city as fast as she was able. All she had to do was hide until nightfall, and someone would come for her. Until then, she was a broken toy that would have to think about how she might do better in the future. The Lich might allow her to try to mediate similar conflicts again in the future, but repeated failures would be rewarded only with being scrapped and turned into a drudge or worse.

. . .

Tenebroum turned its attention from its servant's failures and toward the battle that was already starting here. Behind it, to the west, lay a series of blood-soaked kingdoms they had already marched through. There, the only towns and villages that were left standing were those that it had chosen to spare. A number of ruined castles dotted its path, and though there were still a few holdouts in the kingdoms to the north, the forces of darkness had ripped through the whole area already like a scythe.

Now, there was only one pass separating it from the Kingdom of Hallen and the areas that had been denied it for so long by the intervention of the mages of Abended, the Siddrimites, and the Goddess Oroza. It had been forced to dig a tunnel all the way through a mountain range, war with the dwarves in the deeps, and fight through half a dozen smaller kingdoms barely worth the name to reach here, but it had done so. It was only perhaps a hundred miles north of Abenend now but on the wrong side of the Woden Spine.

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All it needed to do was cross this pass, and to do that, only two fortresses stood in its way. For better or worse, though, they were some of the toughest defensive structures on the whole continent. Its General, Paragon, had argued that they should simply be bypassed via increased tunnel digging and dealt with at a later date or simply starve out, but Tenebroum would not hear of it.

“It is not enough to win. We must crush the living, and they should know it,” it commanded. “There will be survivors. They will spread the truth: the darkness can breach even the highest, toughest walls. It cannot be beaten. That is the message that will spread from one man to the next until the whole world reeks of fear.”

“Did we not accomplish this by defeating the undefeated city?” the General asked.

The Lich was forced to concede that that was exactly what they’d done. But it wasn’t enough. “A city, no matter what its reputation, is nothing compared to a fortress. All of their strongholds must be turned into tombs, or they will think that resistance is possible.”

After that, the General did not argue. It merely planned and prepared to carry out the darkness’s will. In this case, the problem was that the two fortresses stood on either side of the pass. One could attack neither the western nor the eastern fortress without being in the line of fire of the other. They were built that way to prevent sieges, and their weapons were quite formidable. However, though catapults and ballistas could do almost as much damage as war mages, arrows did little to zombies and even less to skeletons.

So, as the fourth sunset, the bulk of its armies advanced on both structures without fear, and their dread footsteps echoed off the walls of the mountains as the war zombies marched in perfect lockstep. Even if they were capable of such a worthless emotion, they would have nothing to be afraid of. The humans had so little that could hurt it, whereas its General’s hardest problem was often deciding which weapon of the darkness should be brought to bear for which challenge.

In this case, given the simultaneous nature of the strike, it chose two: Its earth titan and shadow drake. Each of the imposing structures had been carved from the same granite stones as the rest of the mountain by means of magic; and their fifty-foot vertical walls were meant to hold out against an army. They were considered all but impregnable according to the souls it had interrogated.

Neither Tenebroum nor its general thought that either would be considered a problem, though. So, as its blocks of thousands of troops each reached the high, crenelation-topped walls of the imposing gray stone structures, the shadow drake swooped down from the night sky and released a gout of flame that caused the stone of the eastern fortress to burn just as readily as the stout oaken door which was immediately engulfed in the monster’s all consuming ebon flame.

At the same time, the Lich’s titan appeared out of the stony ground as if it were nothing but a swimming pool and strode toward the towering walls as it began to rip them apart piece by piece. Despite the thing’s compliance, the Lich still considered this toy its greatest failure. Even as it watched its lead gauntleted hands rip out a stone large enough to collapse a whole section, it became annoyed that it had learned so little about the thing.

Both fortresses were breached in the opening salvos of the encounter, and its dark elementals retreated immediately. Though there would be losses even after such a maneuver, victory was all but certain at that point. It was all over but the dying, so the Lich focused on other things, like its lackluster titan.

It obeyed, always, in all things, but its mind was so alien that Tenebroum still had very little idea of how to make it suffer. The Lich took some solace in the fact that it looked perpetually sad, but it was still far from unraveling the element of stone in the way it had water and fire, and it had been shocked to find out that the dwarves had learned scarcely more than it had already known as drained the priests of their knowledge.

Why didn’t the dwarves work together more with the humans, it reflected, as it stood there in a shell on a rocky outcrop next to its General.

There were definite synergies. Mentally, the darkness began to make notes for its fleshcrafters to try a few iterative combinations of humans and dwarf parts to determine an optimum mix for toughness and reach, but before it could completely document the new project, disaster erupted.

It had been a couple of hours since the first shots had been fired and twenty minutes since the walls had been breached. The killing was going steadily, and the Lich had no cause to be concerned, and then suddenly, just as its forces were largely engaged in the assault, both of the shield fortresses collapsed.

No, collapse wasn’t a strong enough word for what happened. They imploded, collapsing inward on themselves, and as they did so, the cliff faces that they were carved into gave way, collapsing together like a giant hammer and anvil and sealing the pass completely.

A path could be reopened, of course, but there would be no point. The point was that at a stroke, it had lost six or eight thousand soldiers, including all of its heavy infantry. It was a catastrophe that shocked both it and Paragon to their cores.

“What happened!” The Lich bellowed as rage overwhelmed it.

With the air full of dust and debris, no one could say obviously, but the General proceeded to lay out several theories about the nature of the rock and how the attacks of the titan and the shadow drake had weakened the superstructure, but given the symmetrical nature of the collapse, this seemed unlikely.

Someone had done this to it intentionally, and though it didn’t know if it was due to dwarves or magic, it would find out and make sure that whoever was responsible for it died screaming.