Tenebroum feasted for three nights running before it finally decided that the city was now a lifeless husk. That first night, it gorged itself on the great masses of the living, leaving only the souls of the palace for the Voice of Reason to harvest and the remaining generals for its Dark Paragon to feast on.
For the darkness, this wasn’t about harvesting great minds for future plans; this was about victory and a truly bottomless hunger. There were times in the swamp when a single bloated corpse had been an unimaginable luxury. Now, an entire city wasn’t enough to feed its bottomless hunger, and it had ripped the souls from the bodies of entire families at once.
It had spent the following day slowly digesting its banquet of tens of thousands of souls in the catacombs beneath the city while the many rat vessels of Ghroshian cowered in the corners, avoiding direct contact. They were an interesting abomination, and Tenebroum looked forward to exploring their tiny connected minds once it was done with Rahkin.
That wouldn’t be for several more days, though. On the second night, it boiled to the surface like a hungry shark, searching for those few crumbs that had fallen from its table the night before. The strong, the clever, and the small made up its meal that night, and though there were only a few hundred of those resourceful men and women at sunset, it savored every last one even more for their rarity.
By sunrise, none of them were left, and it retreated from the surface once again. This time, the rats were nearly as stuffed as Tenebroum, thanks to all the corpses their dark master had left in their wake. As a result, they were less skittish, and the two of them talked about many things while they sheltered away from the light.
In this strange multi-tiered conversation, the two of them covered many topics, though they largely focused on the things that the rats could remember from ages past as well as the things that they had forgotten. They were able to answer, at least in part, one of Tenebroum’s long-simmering questions: where were all the other evil spirits? Why were their Gods in the heavens but no evil Golds?
This was something that Tenebroum had wondered about for over a decade, but not even the most learned mages it had devoured had a satisfactory answer for it. Ghroshian did, though.
“Long ago, before the age of the age of dawn that we lived in until recently, there were other spirits. There was a Goddess of death and any number of lesser cults,” the rats whispered, “But as Siddrim rose in power, displacing the other lights in the heavens, he finally gained the strength to devour and obliterate them. Well, some of them. He was forced to bury my ashes after we rose from our own grave for the third time.”
“Why?” Tenebroum asked. “What makes you special?”
“We do not know,” the rats confessed, “But it has something to do with the primal nature of some spirits. A river goddess may not be killed while her river flows; she will only be born anew in a new form. The god of a city will not perish as long as people still live and trade in his domain. ”
“So you could not be destroyed because hunger still exists?” Tenebroum asked. “An interesting theory.”
In all their conversation, the darkness senses only meek obsequiousness and confusion from the rats. These tiny, fragile creatures might know its hunger, but they would never be a threat to the darkness.
On the third night, there were no living creatures left alive in the city. There were no humans hiding in houses, cats scurrying on rooftops, or fish swimming in the harbor. Everything that had once moved and breathed was now a room-temperature corpse.
That was when it began to devour the graveyards themselves. Groshin or other spirits had long ago devoured scraps of ethereal energy and memory that clung to the bones stacked in the mausoleums and crypts beneath the city, but in the graves of the churchyards, and the private sepulchers beneath the manses of noble houses, there was well-preserved dead that went back for centuries, and Tenebroum devoured each of their souls in turn, draining the city dry of every last spiritual remnant as it sought to purge it for its disobedience.
The ancient dead had long since given up their souls to whatever afterlife awaited them, but there were traces of the person they’d once been, and Tenebroum devoured those echos in a bid to fill the bottomless pit at the center of its own swirling maelstrom. This was unsuccessful, of course. It could devour the entire world and still feel the craving to know and possess more than it already did.
It did learn scraps about the history of the city as well as those that had lived in it, though few of those memories held any real value. It did find many graves where the long dead were buried in finary of silver and gold, though, and it added each of those locations to its drudges’ to do list.
Even now, they were ransacking the city in an orderly fashion, gathering and sorting everything of value, including bodies, parts of bodies, weapons, and wealth, and setting it aside to be turned into new bits of artifice and new soldiers for its growing army. It was only when all that was done that it called for a meeting for the other spirits that served it in the Grand Temple of Rahkin.
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The grand stone building was a place that had once been so holy that neither it nor any of its servants could have dreamed of standing there beneath the moonlit oculus of the vast place. Now, though, there was no one to stop them, and the assembled wraiths and skeletons stood there like something out of a mortal’s deepest nightmare.
Tenebroum came wearing only the skin of the nearest drudge, as its only body in the city that was worth wearing was still melted to slag. Repairing that might take half a year, given how far away its dwarven spirit-powered forges were.
Its lieutenants, on the other hand, made up for its drabness with their distinctiveness. To its right stood the Dark Paragon, flickering with dark fire from the neck of its imposing armor. To its left stood the Voice of Reason. She held the spender crown of the Kingdom of Hallen and looked much different than when he’d last seen her. Over the last three days, she had put the flesh surgeons to work and now wore the skin of the princess over her battered form, reclaiming most of the beauty she had lost in the explosion.
Across from Tenebroum stood its silent titan next to a smoldering Krulm’venor. The fire godling had become less talkative of late. That made it more obedient, but less fun to torture. The Dreamer floated between the two of them as little more than an iridescent outline. Past all of them, the Puppeteer flitted about the rest of them as a mass of tentacles wearing three heads attached to different limbs, and Ghroshian’s countless red eyes glimmered like stars in the background of the conclave.
Innumerable lesser spirits like its shadow dragon and the various flesh crafters that toiled endlessly for the Lich were missing, of course. Despite that, this was perhaps the greatest focusing of its strength in a single location that had ever experienced before, and the Lich took a moment to appreciate that.
Here, the shadows swirled so thickly that the world lost its color, and the very fabric of reality distorted slightly. It, along with its spirits, was a truly irresistible force, and it had not even finished its corruption of the captured nature spirits or finished some of its other specialized projects.
“My victory is complete,” it said finally, “This Kingdom is no more, and the only residents that yet live are those who venerate me!”
There was only silence there for a moment before the Voice of truth stepped forward and said, “Sire, this is yours,” before lifting the crown toward his head. Tenebroum leaned forward slightly so she could place it upon the brow of the skeleton it was wearing. It was odd, given that the thing otherwise wore only rags, but it accepted the token regardless.
“What are the next steps?” Tenebroum asked, turning to the Dark Paragon. “Where do my armies march now?”
“North, sire, across the sun-scorched deserts to Bastom and all the lands that lay beyond it. There are several northern empires, and each is ripe for—”
“A long march through the sunlit lands sounds less than optimal,” Tenebroum said cagily. “What about a nautical approach?”
“Ships could be built and made fast against the sun with wreckage from the harbor,” the Dark Paragon agreed, “But legions of soldiers should be safe enough in our approach as long as we stick to the dunes. We could—”
“Do it then. Both plans. We will take a few months to gather our strength and incorporate all of these new soldiers into the army, and then we will head north for fresh blood at the turning of the year,” Tenebroum ordered. “Be ready for it. I may have to divide you into pieces to create a new crop of generals, so I am not needed so far from my places of power.”
“As you command, my liege,” the general said with a slight bow, offering zero resistance to the idea of being lobotomized and used as spare parts to create a new series of spirits.
In a sense, the Dark Paragon would die to create sons that would replace him. Even if the creature had protested, it would have changed nothing, but the fact that it had no sense of self-preservation heartened Tenebroum. The perfect servant was as talented as it was disposable, and by that measure the Dark Paragon was the best that it had ever created.
It went around the room after that, asking for status updates and opinions on what it should do next. The Dark Paragon and the Voice of Reason both agreed that the Magica Collegium in Abenend should be their next priority, though both of them differed greatly on the right way to defeat such an enemy.
The Voice of Reason argued that diplomacy could pay dividends in such a circumstance, while the Dark Paragon argued that only a massive attack would work on such a cagey opponent. Tenebroum agreed with their instincts but already had a plan in place for how they would deal with the damn mages, so it said nothing and moved along around the circle.
The Dreamer delivered its answer in the form of a surrealist series of images where infants were planted in the dark earth and grew into crops of bloodthirsty men, the Puppeteer argued passionately in two different voices that it should winnow its growing priesthood and remove the most conniving, but only Ghroshian had something unexpected to tell them.
“Abenend…” a chorus of rats whispered. “We know that name. Yes, we have heard it.”
“What of it,” Tenebroum snapped loud enough to make a third of the undead rodents scurry for cover.
“The wolf,” the chorus said as one. “It’s where they keep the wolf!”
“The wolf, eh?” Tenebroum said to itself. The Rats had spoken to it before of a wolf and a worm before. It remembered that much. If the wolf proved to be as deathless as the rats had been, then that was all the more reason for the darkness to end those wretched mages for good and all. It could always use another interesting spirit to experiment upon.