Tenebroum

Chapter 183: Devoured Whole

Blows hammered like metallic thunder as each of the two titans battled it out. The axe and hammer each inflicted grievous wounds that might have felled an army or crushed the walls of a mighty fortress. It wasn’t enough to stop either the All-Father or Teneborum, though. Indeed, it wasn’t even enough to knock them to the ground.

The Lich’s body was built to withstand anything, but without the protective magics it had been relying on. Eventually, the cracks grew too numerous to patch, and it was forced to abandon its shadow-edged battleaxe for a three-hundred-pound short sword and a shield that was more than two inches thick.

It rang like a bell each time it was struck, which made the All-Father laugh. “You thought that you could forge something capable of defeating me?”

The Lich ignored the taunt and continued to hack and slash away at his opponent. The blade he’d switched to was small compared to the body it currently wore, but it was still four feet long and tipped with sharpened kobold teeth. So, it had no problem slicing through the All-Father’s formerly immaculate mithril chainmail, leaving it rent and tattered. The problem was that it didn’t wound the God. He simply did not bleed.

It was a different problem than the Lich was used to. Fortunately, the deity was slowly getting smaller. He’d lost several inches of height since the fight had started, and though that wasn’t so much, it meant that everything from his weight to his hammer had shrugged proportionally as well. That meant that the blows were noticeably lighter than they’d been before.

Still, the Lich was hardly in better shape. It had expected this to be easier. It had thought that the All-Father would be weaker and that its magics would make its armor much stronger. As it was, it was relying almost solely on the skill of the forgewights and the thickness of the metal in the armor they’d crafted.

Tenebroum could flee at any time, of course, as humiliating as that might be. It could abandon this body and fly from the room to grab another and another if that was what it took, but it was in no danger just now. The All-Father, on the other hand, did not have such an option.

The portal he had come through to end the Lich had long since faded when more than half of the heads that had chanted it into existence had turned into particularly foul-smelling candles. A few still sang on as a sad sort of background music, but it was barely audible over the sound of clashing weapons and brutal blows.

The dwarf lost another 6 inches before the Lich succeeded in striking a decisive blow, cutting off the dwarf’s weapon hand at the wrist and sending the hammer tumbling through the room, end over end. It tumbled across the rusty floor, leaving a series of dents and scrapes, but when it hit the far wall, it embedded in it for a moment. They destroyed dozens of tainted skulls at the moment, but as it shook the cavern, hundreds more fell from shelves.

When that happened, and they shattered on the rusted floor in a rain of glass that sounded almost musical to the Lich, it noticed the All-Father flinch in pain. Until that moment, the God had not uttered a word of complaint. No matter how deep the wound or how brutal the strike, the dwarf had simply healed and lashed out again. From time to time, he'd cursed Lich’s name, but that was it.

So he does have a weak spot, the Lich thought, stepping aside as the All-Father raised his newly regrown hand to catch the hammer that flew through the air to return to him.

All this time, the Lich had been poisoning the souls that made the God up to try to weaken or even shatter him, but it was only after seeing that it realized it might have misunderstood the correct strategy. Should it have simply been shattering or draining the things all along?

As the All-Father prepared to swing again, the Lich quickly took in the room. The skulls in their natural state glowed a very dim cyan, but the tainted ones that its minions had successfully poisoned might glow purple, deep blue, or even a dull olive green, depending on how tainted the soul inside that skull was after it was defiled.

Only the souls that were snuffed out completely weren’t glowing at all, and as Tenebroum looked around at the place, it decided there were definitely more dark alcoves than there had been before. The Lich let the braziers that had lit the room up until now gutter, so the well of souls it was in resembled a patchy night sky as the skulls which glowed brightest made constellations of different colors and sizes, save for the large dark spot where the All-Father’s hammer had done such damage.

“You think that the darkness can save you from my hammer?” the All-Father yelled. He was the brightest light in the room now, and his blazing hammer burned like a torch as he struck the Lich’s shield so hard that half of it bent inward, rendering it useless.

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The Lich tossed it aside and retreated to pick up the axe it had discarded earlier. It knew that dim light wouldn’t hide it from the eyes of a dwarf. That would have been a ridiculous strategy. It just wanted to make what happened next more dramatic, to twist the knife that much harder.

“We are both familiar with the darkness,” the Lich agreed, lashing out with his axe, “But that is not all we share.”

“I share nothing with you!” the All-Father proclaimed, launching a blow that the Lich actually managed to sidestep for the first time.

As the God was getting smaller, he was getting slower. It doubted that he had expected a fight to be this prolonged. Honestly, the Lich was fairly certain he didn’t fight often at all. He was made up of the souls of dwarves smart and tough enough to survive to old age; that meant each one of them knew how to fight, but it also meant that each one of them had stayed away from the battlefield long enough to live long lives.

That went a long way to explaining why a wrecking ball with this sort of power was loathe to leave his forges and enter the fray. It also explained why he was about to lose.

“We are both gods. We are both made from souls,” the Lich teased, shrugging off a blow to the chest before he lashed out with one of his giant feet and sent the All-Father sprawling flat on his back. The God reached out to grab his hammer again, but as he did so, the Lich brought his battleaxe down so hard that it cut right through the tattered armor and the magical flesh and bit deep into the rusted iron floor beneath the All-Father, pining him to the floor, at least for the moment.

“In a moment, we will have one more thing in common as well,” the Lich proclaimed, spreading his battered arms widely. “We will both be dead, like all of your subjects.

As the All-Father roared and struggled, Tenebroum reached out and began to pull at the swirling souls in the crystal skulls that surrounded them on all sides, drawing them to itself in a slow maelstrom of light and sparks, and they flowed to it like a luminescent whirlpool.

“All this time, I was overthinking it,” Tenebroum gloated. “All this time, I thought I had to corrupt and weaken you a piece at a time when really I just had to devour you whole.”

“You monster!” the dwarven God screamed, trying and failing to rise. “You think you can beat me? I’m thrown away slag that’s stronger than you. I’ve killed goblins that were—”

The Lich didn’t answer; it just pulled the axe free and started hacking at the shrinking dwarf again and again while the dwindling God struggled to rise. Each blow was more brutal than the last, and though the dwarf managed to parry a couple of them with his hammer, it was clear that the way the Lich was draining the souls it had collected in this room was taking a toll on the All-Father. None of that was a reason to show the God any mercy, though, as the Lich continued to maim him over and over again.

In truth, its body was creaking under the strain of it all and would likely be scrapped instead of repaired. The construct it had built to mock the dwarven God had been built with the finest materials and the most complex spells that the Lich’s craftsmen knew how to make, and still, it had all but collapsed through the course of the fight. The limbs were cracked and bent, the breastplate was partially caved in, and the jaw no longer closed completely.

However, despite all that, it had done its job. If it hadn’t contained so many valuable materials, it might have left it in this room as a monument for what was about to happen today.

Tenebroum butchered his opponent until he was all but a corpse. It was only at the end, when the All-Father was only a little smaller than a real dwarf, that it finally paused.

“What? Do you expect me to beg for mercy?” the dwarvish God asked peevishly.

“Begging isn’t your strong suit, but perhaps in time it could be,” the Lich said as it dropped its axe and picked up the dwarf as it rose to its feet. “But I don’t want to have you work my forges until you tell me your secrets. I want them now.”

The All-Father screamed in outrage, but those were Tenebroum’s last words before he swallowed the remnant of the God whole. One second, the All-Father was roaring in defiance, and the next, it was nothing but ashes as sparks as the Lich ground him into nothing.

It stood there, trying to enjoy the moment, but that was impossible because of all the new information that was rushing into its mind. When the Lich devoured a new soul, it learned things, but most of the time, these things were too trivial to rise to the level that it noticed, especially since it had devoured Siddrim. At this point, almost no soul had something new to tell it, and instead, it joined the swirling mass of undifferentiated souls, which was Tenebroum.

That was not the case with the All-Father. Even in its weakened state, the God was the second most powerful spirit that Tenebroum had ever tasted, and the power and knowledge that flowed out of it were overwhelming. Most of the details were in no way applicable to anything it was working on. It didn’t need to know the proper way to build a bridge or the appropriate way to pay homage to one's ancestors. Those annoying facts were only so much drivel, though, crowding around the nature of runic magic, the distillation of forgotten materials, the artifacts that the dwarf had mentioned earlier, and most importantly, the history.

Tenebroum’s mind struggled to take in the last bit, even as it drifted out of its body and floated there like a dark constellation in the now almost silent room. The world, according to Siddrim, had been a place that was only a handful of centuries old, but according to the All-Father, things went back millennia in a cycle of light and dark that the deity had long ago opted out of to focus on the world below. It was a treasure trove, and the Lich’s mind boggled at the implications.

It was a lot to take in. In fact, it was so much that much of the knowledge slipped through its fingers while it desperately tried to soak it all in. It couldn’t, though. Just like last time, it was slowly sliding into a state of torpor, like a snake devouring a meal that was much too large for it.