When it shattered its Dark Paragon, Tenebroum expected each of the four identical fragments to grow into a separate clone of the original. Not only would that allow it to better manage its sprawling armies that were scattered almost haphazardly across the land by this point, but it would allow them to focus on multiple tasks at once while it, devoted itself to more important projects.

This would only become more necessary as the scope of its wars increased. Soon, there would be more armies, more enemies, more fronts, and more factory cities for all of the above. Even as powerful as it was, it could not do all of those things while plotting to bring down the remaining gods. So, delegation to effective minions was no longer optional, if it had ever really been before.

The Lich had planned to devote one to advancing to the north, one to building its drowned fleet, another devoted solely to monitoring the mages, and the fourth to cleaning up any loose ends in its current domain.

Unfortunately, one of the four souls began to mutate almost immediately. It was easy to see the change, even after only a few days.

The other three were slender shards of ephemeral green glass that slowly rebuilt themselves, the way a mosaic might if you planted a single tile in fertile soil and gave it room to grow. The fourth one, though, was a spidery thing that continued to grow like a cancerous weed.

The Lich tried to trim it back to its crystalline core twice. Both times, it cut off so much that the thing almost dissolved completely into ether. That didn’t change anything, though.

If anything, the thing grew back more gnarled than before, with sharp edges and little barbs as it sought to defend itself against the unknown attacker. It lashed out at the Lich, which was almost enough for it to shatter the thing on principle. Still, it was harmless, and the barbs attempting to infect the maelstrom that was Tenebroum’s soul with were quickly snuffed out.

The deformed soul was a strange, aggressive thing, but it wasn’t strong enough to do any real harm. Still, as an experiment, it was interesting enough to preserve, but it was dangerous enough that the Lich couldn’t just let in grow unmonitored. So, it moved it back into the soul forge and locked it up tight until the appropriate binding circle could be built to contain it.

There was a wonderful aggressiveness about it, Tenebroum decided, and even if it would never become a general on the field of battle, it might yet become some new type of weapon. Even in failure, it could find purposes for most of its creations.

After briefly checking in on its twisted plant Goddesses and pruning them again while they learned to speak in a single voice, the Lich moved on to Rahkin to observe its naval preparations. There it found the Voice of Reason lording over a dead kingdom, and she quickly provided all the updates he requested, showing him not just the ships that were already refloated and repaired but the ones that still lay at the bottom of the harbor where the dead could work on them night and day without regard to the sunlight.

It was a clever arrangement, and the Lich approved. “Your efforts do you credit,” Tenebroum praised her. “See that they continue.”

Of course, they would for the foreseeable future. Its zombie leviathan had destroyed almost every ship in the harbor during its attack, and so there were still innumerable wrecks to choose from. Even when those started to run low, though, there were plenty of wooden structures in the city that could be torn apart for additional timber.

The fleet was undoubtedly ugly in the eyes of men, but that hardly mattered. Neither the eyes of men, nor their preferences were of any concern to the Lich. What mattered were the enchantments that were even now being laid on those blood-soaked keels. They would enable the black fleet to use unnatural storms and fog to both block out the hateful sun and to catch unwary ships at sea as they probed further north for weakness.

Tenebroum was under no illusions that it would catch them by surprise, of course. Even now, the meddling gods were already doing what they could to thwart it. It was certain that the people to the north would be better prepared than the Kingdom of Hallen. However, that mattered little since it was equally sure that it would crush them. These ships would make effective scouts, but they would make even more effective plague ships, and they would sow panic and blight wherever they landed when the time was right.

Of course, some of them would exist just to be bait for the Goddess of Sea and Storms, should she decide to intervene. Istiniss had, so far, largely stayed away from its plans. That was almost certainly because the Goddess of the seas had seen how easy it had chained her sister, the river Goddess, and opted to steer clear.

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The darkness knew that couldn’t last forever, though. Eventually, she would come for him, and he would have ships filled to burst with poison ready for her, just waiting to be ruptured. For a few days, it mulled over the idea of crafting the defective soul shard it had created into a harpoon of sorts and using it to snare the Goddess before deciding against it. If it was going to create projectiles sharp enough to pierce the soul of a God, then there were better targets to choose from.

. . .

Once those were all on track, Tenebroum returned to the most important task: watching the isolated citadel of mages as its invisible noose slowly tightened. Over the last few weeks, while its paragon shards grew to fruition, it had begun to fabricate Strangulite. The machinery to craft it had been finished years before, shortly after it had succeeded in making its shadow drake fly, but since Tenebroum had no pressing need for the stuff in all this time, it had never begun production.

Now that the time had arrived, it ordered its servants to kick things into motion. The giant cylinder that served as the door to its inner sanctum began to rise and fall rhythmically, hour after hour. It was both a door and an elevator, but it was something else, too: it was a pressure chamber. Though most of the shaft beneath it was devoted to the plumbing for the pressurized water that allowed it to rise and fall, the central core held a single hand-sized conduit of air.

When the runes activated, the air in the tall, narrow chamber was compressed, along with a very fine dust made of corpse ash and souls of those who had died of suffocation. The air crystallized, forming a lens no larger than a dinner plate, which could be carved into any number of shapes depending on the requirements of the spell.

In the same way that Cholerium would turn normal water to a poisonous acid and Stygium would not burn from normal fire, even as it burned the undead to ashes, Strangulite, in its raw form, did nothing but make the air that passed through it quite unbreathable.

That was of no concern to its servants, of course, but if properly cut and polished to form a lens with the right convexity, it poisoned the essence that passed through it in a similar way. These effects had been predicted by the heads in its library, but even so, when it came time for experimentation, those were done far from the seat of its power, by lesser mage souls that it would not be bothered to lose.

For this work, they were disposable, because it had no wish to track whatever the secondary effects of those foul magics were into any of its seats of power. The experiments started off simple enough. It took a mage with an ample supply of tainted essence and had it cast some very basic spells. It summoned fire and lightning. It attempted to raise the dead or use basic wards to protect it from the magic of its opponents.

None of those effects worked as expected. The flames appeared, but they sputtered and died before long; they were only ever more smoke than fire. Lightning likewise came into existence, but it arced and split more than it should, scarring the ground around its target without actually hitting it.

It was the wards that were the most interesting, though. Wards and binding rings were complex things, and each symbol and connection needed to work properly for them to function. Changing only a single symbol at random could make the whole thing behave differently than it should.

This was exactly what happened when the strangulite-tainted essence charged the symbols that had been drawn into the wet earth. The whole thing went haywire. First, power began to arc between symbols that had no connection, and then a few of them exploded under strain they should never have been subjected to before the whole thing imploded.

Unfortunately, the skull that the spirit that was performing these experiments was bound to was swallowed up in that vague spacial distortion and vanished without a trace. Even after extensive study, Tenebroum was unable to determine what happened to it and was forced to delay further testing for two days while another bound mage was delivered to the testing location.

All in all, the results were impressive, and the Lich’s only concerns were that releasing this weapon so near its lair might have unforeseen consequences for it in a way that the first two elements never did. Fortunately, the perverse wild magic effects seemed to fade almost immediately, falling by 90% within three days and 99% within two weeks.

While that still wasn’t enough that it would ever conduct experiments of this type near the giant rune encrusted catacombs that anchored it to the earth, it was enough that it no longer had qualms with the idea of embedding these gray cobweb filled lenses in the standing stones that were even now being constructed.

However, these interactions, would require some changes to the design. The Lich had not been aware of the effects that these perverse currents would have on the runes when construction had started. Now, with this new data, the stones seemed as likely to detonate themselves as they did to poison the Collegium’s magic.

So, it started again, where it had to, on better designs that would summon the storm winds and aim them in a particular direction for an extended period of time. As it did so, Tenebroum wondered idly how long it would take the mages to notice exactly what it was doing.

Would they try to attack its monoliths? Would they even be able to find them? Teneborum wondered. It wasn’t sure. Truthfully, it wasn’t even sure how it would go about looking for such a source and set a quartet of minds to the task immediately. How could you locate something when it warped the very divination that you sought it with?

It was only when it was fine-tuning those structures and raising the height of the lens so that the runic ring that anchored and powered each monolith was well clear of the poison it generated that it finally occurred to the Lich that it never found the mage it had sought in the immediate aftermath of Rahkin’s fall.