Tenebroum slept as the world burned, but it still dreamed, and through those dreams, it watched fitfully as events played out.

It couldn’t help it. The Lich was both the darkness at the center of its domain, controlling everything like a spider in a web, as well as every drudge and construct that was currently marauding across the face of the world. So, its sleep would never really be dreamless. It couldn’t be when ten thousand parts of it were in constant motion.

It had never been able to see so far as it could see right now in its slumber. It had always imagined that the world stopped at the shores of land where its ravens had reached and its bard’s songs had traveled. Now, it could see that the world was a much bigger place than those boundaries. There were far off places beyond the seas, and other islands and continents in all directions. Some of them were even more populous than its current home, while a few had never known the hand of man.

Past that, there was only infinite ice… but if Tenebroum stretched even further, which it could only do because the sun had set forever, it found an ocean of inky blackness that only got stranger as it went further out.

In that outer darkness, it could see things just out of reach that would drive a lesser mind mad. Out there, the only boundary were the stars. They stood between the world that it knew and the distant edges of frayed reality before the void consumed everything. That swirling darkness beyond those tiny celestial warriors wasn’t empty. It was filled with monsters, and twisted structures that curved and recoiled infinitely on themselves in the most impossible ways.

At least the darkness thought that’s what they were. As it reached out to inspect them to inspect the things as closely as it could without drawing the ire of the stars, it found that they were not the calcified relicts of a bygone age that it had presumed that they were. The vague light that even now swirled through its darkness was enough to make them spring to life and recoil, escaping out into the darkness of the void where it could not follow.

It was another unsuspected layer of reality that the Lich had never really been aware of. Without the sun in the sky, it could drift far above the world and see that what it thought of as everything was merely a few warring kingdoms atop a tortoiseshell in the midst of a storm-tossed sea.

It was only the stars that kept it from journeying further out and exploring beneath the Stygian waves that lapped at their tiny world. Some part of it knew that as large and as powerful a predator it had become, in the darkness of the depths it was merely bait for the things that lurked down there, and it retreated to escape any chance that it might gain their attention.

Even as the Lich returned to its island of relative sanity, before it became hopelessly lost, it was distracted by the way that the world warped and warped again. At first, every speck that floated in that ocean was reduced to the flatness of a map, and their connections and distances were charted and labeled in a constantly mutating language that made no sense.

Later, as it got close enough that it could finally, once again, see the continent where its lair resided, everything became spherical, like hanging gemstones drifting through space in rings that connected them and tiny concentric orbits. It was only then that Tenebroum understood that what was mutating the its vision of the world were the timeless observations and knowledge of the Sun God it had devoured so recently.

Siddrim had lived twenty times longer than Tenbroum had existed, and those lifetimes of knowledge poured through his soul. Many of those moments drifted by too quickly to understand, but burned away as light and darkness reacted to cancel each other out. There were endless important moments that swirled by it. It saw the way that the god made alliances with Lunaris, and the way it killed dozens of lesser evils and small gods that had offended its strict sense of honor over the course of its life.

These moments might have been epic to Siddrim, but to Tenebroum they were just fleeting embers that drifted by before they could make an impact. There was simply too much to take in.

Between the shifting nature of the world and the centuries of patchy, out of order memories, the darkness would have been hard-pressed to say which version of what it had seen was the truth. Very likely all of the strange scenes it witnessed contained some aspect of the truth, even if it could not yet understand them completely in this time.

The sheer amount of power that resonated through it in the wake of its victory was enough to distort the world as a whole, and it did not yet trust the insights it was gleaning. It might even be the case that nothing it had seen so far had been changed at all, and that the only thing that was changing were the eyes that viewed it.

It would have all time in the world to evaluate this during the eternal night it had created. Already that night had lasted for three days, and it showed no sign of ending. The stars still twinkled, but the smaller plants had already begun to droop, and ice was beginning to gather in the higher parts of Oroza’s watershed along the banks.

Only a few days ago, when the sun had still shone, it had been a warm spring day, but now, only days later, all of the summer had been skipped, and winter was coming. The Lich did not mind that. The dead did not feel the cold. Though it made its stiff zombies slightly less effective, in time it would create newer, better minions that could resist this too.

All that mattered was that the light had been slain, and Siddrim’s bones lay half a mile across, outside the city where they were slowly dissipating into nothing. It was the only victory that mattered.

So, whether the people of Irbrahim and Movahn’s Rest banded together and struck down the moldering dead that had erupted from their cemeteries or whether that endless tide of limping old warriors eventually succeeded in slaughtering the living of those cities mattered little to it.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

If this wave of dead did not succeed, then the next one would, and if it didn’t, then the starvation and snows of its endless night would surely finish the job. Life was doomed, but no matter how much the Lich enjoyed watching the last struggles of humanity, it would not miss them when they were gone.

Instead, it would reach out with its bony hands and grasp ever larger chunks of the world until everything was under its control. Once that was the case, and every living creature had been brought back as its undying slave, then it could establish caravans to collect and gather all the wealth of the dead world and bring it back to Blackwater, where it would melt it down to create a monument to its greatness.

First, it would have to deal with the dying embers of humanity. They were everywhere, like the dying embers of a freshly scattered campfire. They were in barges and fishing boats along the coast where the survivors of the goblin raids sought peace and safety of the larger cities.

There would be no safety there, though. Tagel-by-the-sea was already overwhelmed with the dead that had spent the last few days marching along the bottom of the river. Now, the implacable army of zombies led by its juggernaut were ravaging that rich trading hub, and only the lonely keep that looked out at the sea yet stood against its monstrous forces.

Only a few places had resisted Tenebroum’s grasp with any kind of success, and they were either far away or places of immense power, like the Magica Collegium at Abenend and the holy warriors at Siddrimar. Nothing that the Lich had done had severed the bonds of magic to the mages of Abenend, so they stood alone in annihilating the first army that it had sent its way, but despite the loss of the light, the warriors of Siddrimar had done better than it would have thought them capable of.

Somehow, despite the fact that their holy city was in ruin, they had managed to wound all four of its strongest minions. They hadn’t managed to completely destroy any of them, but even so, sending them back to its fleshcrafters so they could be repaired was quite a victory, and it would take time before any of them would see battle once more.

All in all, it was not the absolute victory that Tenebroum had hoped for, but it was a start. It was a stepping stone on the path to the extinction of all life. Almost every city on this continent had been put on notice that death was at the gates.

The dark God enjoyed these bloody, transient scenes as they played across its mind, but they were a flickering light show and nothing more. Its focus, as always, was on itself and its core.

The battle with Siddrim had been a vicious, close fought thing. The immense amount of light energies that it had drained from the god’s dying body were taking a terrible toll to integrate. It was much more painful than incorporating the watery nature of the Oroza had ever been.

Then, it had been a matter of alignment and understanding, but in this case, it was one of annihilation as the light and dark destroyed each other. Fortunately, Tenebroum clung tenuously to that third force that was released by their annihilation: oblivion.

Tenebroum did not truly understand it in much the same way that it had not understood the anti-elements when it had first synthesized them. It would, though. No matter how many mages and scholars it had to burn out in that quest for knowledge it would figure this out too and become stronger for it.

It ordeal had almost cost it Albrecht’s ancient corpse. The Lich had left the body intended for battle and returned to its true seat of power at the heart of its dark labyrinth. However, only hours into devouring the Lord of Light’s carcass, that gilded statue had began to warm and smolder.

Even now, its drudges were dumping buckets of water on it to keep the whole thing from melting down like the statues in the mangled Sunset Temple far above it. Tenebroum was not completely sure that it needed its phylactery any longer, but it wasn’t about to let the thing burst into flames and find out that it had the hard way.

It had hoped that the giant focuses and binding rings would have been enough to prevent that from happening, but it wasn’t. No amount of magical infrastructure was enough to truly and completely insulate the Lich, as it slowly catalyzed into something new.

Throughout its existence, Tenebroum had slowly collected souls until it became a haphazard agglomeration of all of the things it had ever murdered or claimed. Now that the essence of the light was burning through it, what was left was smaller but stronger. The weakest parts of it were being burned away, and beneath layer after layer of muck and madness, there was sterner stuff that held up to even the worst assaults.

In time, the darkness decided that it would build a new core to hold its essence at the seat of its domain, but it would be stronger than Albrecht had ever been, and it would stretch all the way from the temple above to the treasury below. It could picture a column of more than three hundred spines, twisting together and clad in gold growing from the root of its power. On that terrible tree, it would hang the severed heads of its most important foes like terrible fruits and…

“No!” it chastised itself even as the idea started to solidify.

Even in a world of darkness. Even in a world where there were no more living to plot against it, Tenebroum would still keep its secrets far from prying eyes. To build such a perfect form for itself only for one of those mages from Abenend to summon a storm and sunder it with lightning would be a waste of irreplaceable resources.

Just imagining the irreplaceable heads that fermented in its archives popping like overripe fruit because of the magical heat was enough to make it change its mind and focus on an entirely different model. One that focused more on spinal roots that reached down to the depths of the world instead. There were goblins down there that might cause damage, and Kobolds that would gnaw on the lead and brass that it would use to secure such things, but perhaps with deadly poisons and alchemical gasses it might yet secure them against vermin.

Death knights, too, housed in the repurposed skeletons of dwarves, could hold off those pests. However that would take high-quality souls. The question became one of energy expenditure at that point…

Before Tenebroum could finish that thought, it was already drifting back to the world above as it watched another city burn. This time it was Charis, in the west, and the burning was a trap by the living to defeat their undead enemy. It was only a pyrrhic victory.

It had lost corpses that had not even belonged to it a few nights ago, but the people of Charis had lost their livelihood, their shelter, and their stores of food. When winter inevitably got worse, they would all freeze to death in the rising snow until Tenebroum reached out to take the fools into its collection.

Some places were doing better than others, of course. An army was marshaling in Fallravea based on rumors and fear, which was ironic given that it was one of the cities that had been least affected by all of this, given the recent Templar purges.

There was no rhyme or reason to any of this, though. Some strong cities burned while other weaker ones held up against the initial assaults and chaos. It was impossible to predict, and Tenebroum was unable to determine if that was because of the fugue state it currently dwelled in as it slumbered and adapted or if the world really had gone as mad as it thought it had. Time would tell.