Despite the setbacks at Banath, the Lich’s forces moved on. A small portion of its men and some imported chirurgeons were left behind to tunnel and triage, digging out what soldiers could be saved and building new constructs to fight from pieces of the old ones along with the corpses of those defenders that they found.

It was grisly work, and the effort was largely wasted as most of everyone had been crushed to powder. Fortunately, its servants could work quite well with unmatched parts like its drudges were finding, but there were other silver linings, too.

With the pass closed, armies to the east entirely lost access to the entire region, granting it an exclusive domain that measured perhaps a fifth of the continent and further isolating the remaining pockets of resistance its forces had not yet ground to dust on the northern coasts. Its more specialized units had largely been spared destruction as well, so the Lich’s general adapted its tactics to current resource levels and moved on without missing a beat. If its enemies thought that this desperate gambit would save them, they would be sadly mistaken.

The Lich let it make the important decisions there. After all, despite the stunningly terrible victory they’d accomplished, it did not blame the entity that led its forces. It would have been a fool to do that. Not one soul in its entire collection had the awful piece of knowledge that the fortresses might collapse in a single moment. It was truly unforeseen.

Besides, the Lich was busy with other, more interesting toys at the moment. Not only did it have the Ghroshian rats to play with and study, but it also had the last tree of Eldameer wood, which Krulm’venor had brought back to its growing laboratory in Constantinal. In the former case, it continued to research the origins of strange amalgamation without much success, but the latter case, it found to be especially diverting.

In many ways, a forest spirit was literally its equal opposite, and the Lich found that to be an irresistible riddle. For the first time in its entire existence, its fire godling had not found some way to disappoint it. Though the elves or fae that he’d spotted had managed to elude both capture and death, that had not stopped Tenebroum’s rabid little army of metal goblins from burning down the entire forest or from repeating the scorched earth on the night that followed on the splendid saplings that had sprung up overnight.

In the end, they did that repeatedly until only one tree remained. Then, the little gibbering horde dug it up and brought it back to its thriving dead city. Despite the fact that no one had lived there in months, Constantinal was thriving. Every day, it produced dozens of new constructs for the Lich’s armies, and there was something about the industrial ballet in what used to be the city’s grand temple.

When there were no other matters that required its immediate support, it would often linger there and watch the slow ballet of hundreds of hands and arms as they moved each unfinished corpse from station to station in a process that was as efficient as it was pleasing. Right now, it had many more important things to do, the most important of which was to plant the seeds that the sapling produced and plant them in soil from the swamp that had been imported just for this purpose.

Its true home had been burned to nothing, but the Lich could see the mana flows in that tree, and though the life element was diametrically opposed to its unlife element, it was going to enjoy studying it and perverting it. It was a long-term experiment that lacked the urgency of other matters, like those it entrusted to its Paragon, but the Lich couldn’t help but study the growth of each new leaf as it wondered when the thing would flower from an interesting botany specimen to a full-fledged nature spirit that it could learn from.

While the Lich focused on this, its war plans continued on without skipping a beat. In the short term, the Paragon did not try to conquer fortresses or hold territories. Instead, it merely sewed chaos. It sent small forces of fast-moving centipede cavalry in all directions, slaughtering resupply caravans and other, harder-hitting strike forces to destroy supply depots and communities that supported nearby garrisons.

For the moment, out of an abundance of caution, it actively avoided any significant forces that were pitted against it. If an advancing force needed to be met, it would be struck with magic or dark fire from a distance. There was simply no need to engage the enemy forces while they had a numerical advantage.

Beside the crude, ugly fort that the remains of Siddrim’s sheep had built near the Oroza, the Kingdom of Hallen was the last large army in the region. It had more than ten thousand men, and though many of these defended the city itself, almost half of the rest were in the field. Stolen novel; please report.

For the first time in months, the Lich’s forces were outnumbered, and it did not think that the fact that such a tragedy would befall it so close to Abenend was a coincidence. Magic had definitely been at work here, though whether that magic was human or dwarven had been the subject of much debate in its library.

There, the opinion was evenly divided. Some of its heads thought that this was exactly the sort of maneuver that Abenend would do to buy time by sacrificing the lives of others. Another contingent argued that since no obvious mana spikes or other signs of large-scale casting had occurred, the magic had to be old and deep and that the fortresses had likely always had such a self-destruct sequence built into them, but they’d never needed to use it before.

Either way, the souls of the dead that Tenebroum had devoured shed no light on the subject, though it had not yet found the corpse of either fort’s captain to question directly.

For now, it didn’t matter. What mattered was keeping the enemy force off balance. If they sent a cavalry force in its direction. It slaughtered enough villages down in the rear of the army to make them change course and investigate the new threat. If forests began to act in any way suspicious, then they were burned to the ground as a precautionary measure.

As the noose on Rahkin tightened, the only real problem for the Lich’s forces turned out to be adequate places to keep its advancing troops during daylight periods. In a normal siege, the enemy force would ring the opposing city and wait them out. Indeed, the undead were better suited to that than their human counterparts because they required neither sleep nor food. All they needed was the tremendous mana that Tenebroum provided as a dark, unending river and somewhere to shelter from the light each dawn.

This, of course, meant that its treacherous opponents had six to eight hours each day to do whatever they wanted. This forced its general to alter its plans, expanding them to create a very wide cordon on all sides of the city.

Attacking directly would be easier, but with so many of its forces eliminated so recently and direct reinforcements in the form of mages and Siddrimites only a few days to the south, that was a risky proposition. It wasn’t just the possibility that it could lose thousands of more constructs that stayed its hand. It was the idea defeat itself.

If such things became possible, then hope would rise further, and already it could feel what food had done to the morale of that nation. The mana had flowed so much more freely when they were frozen and starving. The Lich could easily foresee an outcome where the mages engineered its defeat, and the populace, driven by rising spirits, pushed it back and back again. It should easily be able to hold this line here, but if that fell, then it would have to fall all the way back to the tunnel it had bored through the Wyrmspires.

That would be completely unacceptable. Every square inch of land that the Lich had claimed would belong to it forever, and even as it surveyed the complicated battlefield, that resolve only strengthened. The snows would come soon. Then, not only would the men move slower, but the darkness would last longer.

Before the ground froze, though. There were preparations to be made. Tenebroum’s forces always claimed mines and caves near the zones of conflict where they could, but this time, given the sheer amount of ground they would have to cover, this was not going to be possible. It was going to build dozens of small lairs all throughout the region. Each would have to be close enough to each other to allow movement and close enough to the main trade roads to interdict traffic.

This would be impossible to do in a short period of time without magic, and even with magic, it was certain that everything it did was being watched. Neither Tenebroum nor its Paragon had any doubts that both the mages and the Gods themselves were spying on them. It was the only way to explain all the subtle counters that had occurred at every stage of this operation. From the dwarves locating its tunnel so quickly and the ambush in the woods to the collapse of the shields of Banath, something was helping the mortals, and that wouldn’t change until it was victorious or it had found to snuff out the gods.

Since, in most cases, the only way to accomplish the latter seemed to be to complete the former. In a battle of attrition, it seemed unlikely that a fragile foe like the humans could ever triumph over its deathless might, but with its most recent setback, Tenebroum was already beginning to face a shortage of some of its most valuable parts like skulls and martial souls. Steal or animal parts could compensate for one, and goblin souls could be used in place of the other, but even so, both choices would weaken the quality of the end product.

Its soldiers might last forever, but between its recent losses and the countermeasures that the humans were taking to secure the corpses of their dead where they could, the Lich could see a day years from now where it might have no way to create new servants. Such a fate was intolerable, of course. It had already dispatched drudges to the graveyards around the cities under its control, like Fallravea. There, centuries of dead waited for it, which made those places vast if finite resources.

Something would have to be done, but for the moment, the Lich was out of ideas. Trying to keep track of its arcane projects, its various servants, and the tactics and disposition of the various dungeons it would need to build to house its units during daylight hours was an overwhelming task. It was an infinite and ever-growing list, and the Lich would have been tempted to build a servant just to handle that for it if it had not already done so in the form of the Skoeticnomikos.