Tenebroum

Chapter 200: The World Below

Tenebroum had no idea where Krulm’venor got off to. That annoyed it, and not just because that vile godling could have helped with pest control once it started boring deeper into the earth. It was also that the Lich hated the idea that the arrogant dwarf might have finally managed to slip his leash. Tenebroum found that idea almost as intolerable as the idea that Oroza had gotten away and vowed to recapture him, even if it wasn’t strictly necessary.

It would either own its hound or it would have the beast put down. There was no third option.

The hard part was now over, fortunately. After dealing with the overland logistics from its Wyrmspine Tunnel, it finally had what it needed to dig a very deep hole. These things were not easy when its army was practically down to a skeleton crew, but in the weeks that followed, it made do without any losses.

The dark titan had been left just where the Lich had finished with it. This wasn’t because it maintained some loyalty to it. It was because its leaden armor prevented it from phasing with the stone and escaping into the depths without the Lich’s magic, and there was no other way out of the side tunnel it had been cast aside into when the work was done.

It was impossible to determine what impact the long isolation might have had on the thing, but that didn’t matter as long as the creature obeyed. It did, too, however grudgingly. As soon as the Lich touched its soul, it began to move and obey orders once more.

The Lich didn’t care about tormenting the earth elemental too much, though, because it had never figured out how to do so in a satisfying way. Even at the height of its power, the thing was completely alien to it, and unlike Krulm’venor or Oroza, it had never found the right levers to make it suffer properly.

Of course, Tenebroum hadn’t even been expecting to find the thing, anyway. It had barely sensed the creature until it was practically on top of it. It had come for the Devourer. Though the machine would have to be taken apart and then reassembled to dig vertically instead of horizontally, it was the perfect construct for what came next, even if it had lain dormant for such a long time.

Tenebroum’s current plan was a simple one. It was going to dig ever deeper into the dark and search for more shadows to feast on as it made its way toward its real goal: the All-Father’s forges. It had only the dimmest idea of where those might be, of course, thanks to the God’s memories, but that was as good of a place as any to start. If the stars held back one source of darkness, then it would dig as deep as it needed to find the power that it needed. If the stars held back one ocean of darkness, then it would snuff out the All-Father’s forges and find another.

All of this would, of course, require it to further mar its glorious undertemple as rigging and scaffolding were set up so that the Devourer could be put into place. The thing was made of bone and steel, along with the clever arrangement of the teeth and claws of over a thousand kobolds that had been gathered throughout Krulm’venor’s long trip in the depths. It was a complicated device in that almost everything was a moving part, so some work had to be redone by its remaining forgewights before it could be locked into place. Such progress was slow, but every day, the glittering crystalline monstrosity stood a little higher and a little more complete until, one day, it was so tall it practically touched the ceiling.

That was just an inconvenience, though. The real problem was the sheer amount of waste rock that the thing generated. There were other problems, too, like the way the vibration damaged nearby components and the way the whole lair could shake quite disturbingly at times. Thanks to Tenebroum’s constant construction and the growth of its lair for nearly its entire existence, there was some capacity to dispose of such dross, but not on this scale.

Rather than speed up digging, that quickly became the dark titan’s full-time job: liquifying and disposing of as much rubble as possible. This had the added side effect of strengthening the walls of the ever-growing well, but it was mundane work for a creature of such terrible power. Those magics became much more useful when the Lich’s efforts ran into tunnels and caves periodically, letting it reinforce such areas without sending its digging contraption crashing to the floor.

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While its digging never paused in such places, Tenebroum’s attention did. It turned out that most of the ground beneath the earth was taken up by stone. Its godling's infinite journey through the darkest places of the world made it seem like there would be more caverns, but they were indeed a rarity, and each time the Lich’s efforts discovered one, it would explore it in search of anything that might be able to killed or put to better use. At this point, shorthanded as it was, it would even consider reanimating goblins as drudges, if only to dispose of excess rubble.

There were no goblins to be found, though. Not at first, at least. Instead, the first thing it discovered were dwarves or at least the remains of some. Their souls had long since departed their bodies, but the evidence showed they were up to a construction project of their own that had been interrupted when their entire race had been intentionally infected with madness. After that, it found a nest of kobolds that it toyed with for a while.

Tenebroum made sure to kill those with shadow magic to leave the bodies whole, so their prodigious digging talents could be put to use wherever necessary. Even such additions did little to speed up the progress of things. Digging this deep was a laborious business, and the Lich only focused on it when it found something interesting.

After the kobolds it was a den of giant spiders and then a subterranean river that quickly evolved into a large subterranean lake only a few dozen feet below that. Tenebroum’s constructs had no need for breathing, though. They merely kept digging, no matter what they found, and when another cavern complex was found below that, the waters above were quickly drained into unimportant tunnels and offshoots to drown whatever might have lived there.

After that, there was a cavern of endless fungus that briefly gummed up the complicated components of the Devourer. The Lich was briefly interested in the slow-moving fungal people that occupied a small portion of the larger cavern, but once its experiments showed that the creatures neither had souls to capture nor bones to reuse in large projects, it sent a few forgewights to burn the place until it was nothing but ashes. That was the last form of life that it saw for quite a while.

There wasn’t a lot this deep, though. It recalled that Krulm’venor had mentioned that once, but increasingly, the few caverns that were found were completely empty without so much as a stray shadow to devour. Such ideas swirled around in its mind from the souls of other dwarves, too. Above a certain depth, monsters existed, and below a certain depth, there were only shadows and worse. Dwarves preferred to live in the quiet area between the two, but Tenebroum wanted to drill well past those depths and keep going until it reached the center of things.

After a while, whole weeks could pass where the Devourer found nothing but bedrock. Those times were enough to make the Lich second guess this whole plan, but it would not be denied. It could not yet have the night sky, so it would have the dark heart of the world instead. It felt sure that the swirling shadows that had devoured so many dwarven cities were still down there, and it would feast on all of them. Ironically, that would make the depths safer than ever for the dwarves, but it was unlikely that there were any of the little men left at this point.

Its continued diffing efforts found a slender vein of gold, once, which excited the Lich enough that it paused the larger mining project to start a smaller one almost a thousand feet beneath the surface, but that was only a distraction to pass the time. It needed the gold, of course, but even a vein ten times as rich found have been a distraction.

In the fragments of dwarven memory, it knew that there was more wealth than it could ever put to use in the dwarven God’s lair. Of course, finding that was the question, but barring another enemy to fight, the Lich could continue at this pace in perpetuity until it found what it sought. The Devourer was a very efficient machine, and digging ever deeper cost Tenebroum very little.

It also gave the Lich plenty of time to plan and begin to lay out how its structure would need to change in subtle but important ways to accommodate the wellspring of evil that it hoped to tap. Most of the work had already been done in its rebirth, of course, but based on its first dual with the Moon Goddess’s minions, there were some improvements left to be made. At this time, though, it saw no need to reinforce the well, which was growing ever deeper with runes in the same way that it had done to trap Siddrim so long ago. n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

It imagined what that would look like, as delicate golden glyphs spiraled down into the dark, repeating its true name over and over. It would have been a work of pure beauty, and the part of itself that had once been Sidrim saw value in that, but in the end, Tenebroum decided against it for reasons that were more utilitarian. Such measures were time-consuming and not strictly necessary.

No matter how deep it dug, though, and no matter how many side passages it explored, it never found its wretched little godling. That surprised it, given that it had to be much closer to Krulm’venor than it had been on the surface, but then it had yet to find the Queen of Thorns or the Voice of Reason, either, which was evidence enough that it remained quite diminished in some ways. Tenebroum would fix that if it was the last thing it did.