Tenebroum was loath to trust its servants. Even the ones that could think and act on their own were watched from afar by blackbirds and wraiths when they weren’t being puppeted by it directly. This had always been the case since long before Oroza broke free of his grasp.

The anger surged inside the maelstrom that was its soul as it thought about how narrowly that bitch had swum free of a trap that it had spent months preparing, distracting it from what it had been focused on. Worse, she had lived! For a week, it had taken solace in the fact that at least her escape had only managed to commit a particularly showy form of suicide, but then she reappeared in its river and began to harry and destroy its servants once more.

It was intolerable, especially when the setbacks in the tunnels under the Wodenspine mountains were taken into account. It had annihilated their city, and paradoxically that made the dwarves below fight harder instead of retreat. It had hoped to break the spirits of the stout men when it had unleashed the fire godling to char and devour every last dwarf in the mountain, but instead, it had caused a new surge of violence and guerilla warfare on its nearly finished tunnel.

The world was filled with nothing but bad news lately. The suns still rose, the dwarves still fought, and the river dragon still lived. So, it would need to further ratchet up the pressure on its enemies.

It had taken to seeding the river with tiny slivers of cholarium each night to further pressure that obstinate goddess since she would no longer allow poisoned springs to flow. It would gladly add so much poison to the river that all life would cease if that was what it took to end her.

A river of poison would not produce nearly as much essence for it to siphon off as a river full of life, but it would make due. Power was not an issue right now, thanks to the year of slaughter and suffering it had inflicted on the world, and it would become even less of a problem once its growing army finally penetrated the mountains and flowed into the sleepy lowlands that existed to the north.

All the dwarves were doing was giving it time to rebuild its forces, one limb and sword at a time. Even now, it was experimenting with cavalry units that were somewhere between centaurs and centipedes. Though it annoyed the Lich that the rippling motion that allowed them to move with the most speed required an even number of limbs to move properly, but it had tried configurations with between eight and eighteen legs and still not settled on an optimal choice.

The longest of them would be usable as siege weapons, though, and on the advice of its library, it built siege ladders onto their backs so that other minions could flood over the tops of fortress walls that it thought sure it would soon be forced to topple.

However, that would only be true if it could manage all of the threats that it faced simultaneously, and right now, that was impossible. It could not effectively use all of its resources because it could not be everywhere at once. Last month, the humans building their fortress at the edge of the river had used an unseasonably warm period to try to make contact with mages that were still under siege in Abendend, and in the two days it had spent making sure that expedition would be a miserable failure, the dwarves have renewed their attack in three different places along its tunnel.

So, it had begun to synthesize a general of its very own. Something intelligent enough to make the correct choices in these tedious but important conflicts but not so ambitious enough that it would ever betray it. In fact, as far as Tenebroum was concerned, its general should barely understand the concept of betrayal.

That was why it had been building a new sort of operating theater on its lowest floor for months now. It was a clean room in every sense of the word. Lined in lead and surrounded in a triple bounding circle that glowed with flames so dark they were only barely visible violet to the naked eye, it was built to reject all outside influences so that it could operate on the souls it had stolen with no concerns about cross-contamination with outside elements. It had many rooms for manipulating and constructing the dead, but it only had one for manipulating the soul with precision.

This was not a task it could entrust to anyone either. Not yet. The Lich could not hand this off to even its most skillful surgeons or mages, though that was because of practicality as much as paranoia. They simply lacked the skills to see and manipulate the soul-stuff well enough to do the work that needed to be done.

By contrast, the Lich had been manipulating the souls of its creations for many years now. Its first efforts were crude, and there were more failures than there were successes. For every puppeteer or herald, there were dozens of semi-imploded psyches that were barely fit to wield a pick or shovel in the tunnels. Thanks to Krulm’venor’s constant misbehavior, though, its techniques had grown more advanced, and its mental scalpel had grown sharper. This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

So, when it finally moved to create such an important pawn, started with that pure loyalty as a baseline, siphoning threads of that spirit from its honor guard, which had served it loyally and unblinkingly for decades now. The lizard men were incapable of betrayal, except for very rare exceptions like Tsson’vek. It simply wasn’t their nature.

To that, he added to that scraps of the souls of its enemies in measured amounts. They were the ones with the most knowledge of how to defeat themselves, after all. So, it tore the knowledge and tactics from the wriggling souls of the defeated without any regard for the pain it caused them, and then it very carefully cut away all of the excesses.

The Lich did not want vengeance any more than it wanted justice. It wanted only the need for victory. In the end, after slicing and dicing the minds of dwarf and Templar alike, it had something that was very nearly what it wanted: a crude, focused mind that looked at each engagement as a game to be won. It did not care for the sides or the larger goals. Victory was not the means to another end. It was the end because that’s all Tenebroum wanted out of such a minion. Any more than that would be dangerous.

All of that work was only enough to bring the project halfway to completion, though. The most dangerous step was the last one. It had to give the clever abomination a spark of drive and initiative, and for that, Tenebroum chose to borrow a fragment of its own expansive soul.

It had long considered dividing itself up so that it could be more places at once. That solution would have solved its current conundrum better than the solution that it was currently pursuing. It resisted the idea time and time again as its library suggested it.

“Do you not see how effective it was for Siddrim?” one head asked, before Tenebroum had boiled its brains in its skull. “It escaped our trap because it was able to split its grand soul into pieces. Surely we could do the same!”

“And Krulm’venor! Is he not more effective now that you have made one many?” another head asked on a different occasion just before it lit the vat that contained it on fire.

The Lich would love to create an army of itself, but it simply could not trust that its interests would always align. Another version of it would covet the same treasure and the same blood that it did. Eventually, it would likely even fight over it.

No, full copies of itself could never happen. The only thing it truly feared was itself now that the light was all but vanquished. It would have to make do with lesser crippled copies instead, and this experiment only proved the wisdom of that mindset.

The moment that Tenebroum fished a mote of its being out of the maelstrom of its mind, struggled and fought for more resources. It was like a cancer. Though barely an infant, it reached out to the minds of the dead that were closest and sought to wrestle with the true darkness for control.

That was why it had to be smothered immediately. Even this much of itself was more than it wanted to give to anything. So the Lich sliced the fragment into a sliver, and then let it grow again, before it repeated the process, getting closer and closer to the fragment it wanted to keep.

It was only when that process was done that it set that well-polished soul shard amidst the patchwork puzzle box of the general it had created. It sat there like a gem amidst the complicated ephemeral pieces that were too carefully crafted and precise to have ever been shaped by mortal hands, even if they were capable of seeing it. It was a tiny thing, no bigger than an acorn, but more complicated than every last detail that had gone into creating The Temple of Dawn, which still stood dozens of feet above where it now worked.

When it was finally done, the Lich studied its creation. Scrutinizing it from every angle and with every scenario that its dark imagination could dream up, the Lich was in no hurry. The chamber it had built had another purpose, too: with a thought, it could trigger the terrible magics it had imbued into the leaden walls and annihilate the fragile soul until it was nothing but void.

Such a choice would mean that months of intense focus would be wasted, but that outcome would be infinitely preferable to the alternative. After seven days and nights of inspection, it pronounced the inspection satisfactory, released the little mote of tactical might from its prison, and fastened it into a new body. It was a simple drudge, only slightly more durable than average. Tenebroum would upgrade it only after it had proven itself and its loyalty.

“Are you satisfied, Paragon?” it asked the fumbling corpse as it struggled to stand.

Of all the ironies that were a part of its creation, the Lich enjoyed that one the most. It named its general after the leader of the vanquished crusader who had cowardly fled. Someday, when it collected that soul, it would pit the two of them against each other and show the feeble holy warrior who thought that it was appropriate to wear that title what a true apex predator looked like.

“Without battle, there can be no satisfaction,” it said mechanically as it took stock of its new surroundings.

The Lich took a dark sort of pleasure in those words. That was exactly what it was hoping for. It did not complain about its humble vessel. Instead, it asked only to serve, and that was all that Tenebroum could ask from any of its servants.

In time, when Paragon had proven itself and defeated the dwarves, it would split the thing's mind and make as many copies as it needed to prosecute the coming war against the realms of men.