As Tenebroum watched the latest skirmish preparing to unfold outside the walls of the capital, it had trouble focusing on the details. It wasn’t because it was upset that the Templar, with the light in his eyes, had made it unharmed into the city or even that they had as of yet been unable to find where the man had sheltered for so long. Even the growing light behind Rahkin’s walls wasn’t enough to make the Lich too angry.

That the man had failed to fall into the trap that the Lich had prepared for him so long ago was disappointing but not unexpected. He did not seem to be half so weak as his squire had been. Still, even this latest twist was unlikely to deny it the city. The man had not been able to rally his thousands-strong Templar army against it at its nadir, and it was much stronger now than it had been before.

It was just how well the events had played out on the moon the other day. That was enough to make all of this seem trivial.

The gods themselves are afraid of me, it pondered to itself in equal parts contentment and gloating.

After that, as delicious as the feasts of the battlefield were, any victory tonight simply wouldn’t compare. After all, last night, it had dined on the flesh of the divine for the first time in a long time. Nothing compared to that.

Not even victory, it had struck by sending real fear into the hearts of the gods that were arrayed against it. The Lich had spent months growing that corrupted dryad in Constantinal, and for most of that time, she was a scrawny, withered thing that hung on the edge of life and death. It was only shortly before the nature Goddess had called her to the conclave that the dryad looked like she might survive, and the Lich had seized on the opportunity and stitched a truly nasty surprise inside of her.

It had intended to leave the relic it had embedded inside of its wooden servant as a measure of last resort when some God or another detected its presence. Only none of them had. His construct had simply been pitied by Niama for the terrible fate that Krulm’venor had inflicted on her, and she had been escorted to a seat so that she could speak her words of warning toward the end of their little meeting.

Sitting behind her eyes, the Lich had soaked up all it could from that meeting. After all, while killing or even kidnapping a god would be an incredible victory, spying on the whole affair and leaving while its enemies were none the wiser would have been even better. At least, that’s what it had thought until it saw her there.

It knew that Oroza yet lived, and though even the sight of her was enough to make its anger boil over, it resisted the urge immediately. The Lich was content to note her weakness and gloat over her eventual demise. When she revealed secret after secret that belonged to it, though, that was when it grew truly enraged and changed its mind.

The Lich could not yet tell if its efforts to poison the All-Father’s soul were bearing fruit or that God was naturally a curmudgeonly sort; with a dwarf, it could well be either. Either way, it approved of the stone man’s need for secrecy, as well as the way it hamstrung all the other gods as they tried desperately to get help for their own concerns while desperately trying to frame it as working together.

They were like a gaggle of panicked chickens trying desperately to avoid slaughter, which was exactly the opposite of the way that it worked with its slowly developing pantheon. In the grand scheme of things, Tenebroum was not yet a full-fledged deity, but even now, some of its servants rivaled the weakest of the true demigods, and every single one of them was permanently and completely loyal to it. Even those like Groshian, the long imprisoned God of hunger and rats, was loyal to the darkness, if only because they feared the Lich’s strength, and for now, that was enough.

Once this war was done, layer more enchantments to make that loyalty unbreakable, but all of that would have to wait for more urgent things, like the Lich’s sudden, overpowering need to taunt these fools and show them just how powerless they really were. Later, it might regret it. It knew that even as it whispered the final words to unseal the complicated puzzle box that connected to a room in its inner sanctum, six full floors beneath the earth, in the bottommost realm of its lair.

It was there that the portal opened, and it spewed vitriol and hate at the assembled gods and goddesses. Even as the item unfolded from a dull metal cube into a delicate origami flower, it channeled a massive burst of dark essence into its bearer whether she wanted it or not. This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

None of the deities that were about to face the consequences of that would have any idea how hard the Lich’s servants had labored to create that delicate link where two far-away spaces were, for a moment, a single place. It was the realization of insights that it gained when studying the nature of this world and the way it fit into the large cosmos, but even so, it was a fragile thing with tidal forces and distortion ripples that would have been enough to kill any mortal transmitted in such a fashion.

Tenebroum did not have to worry much about the consequences of life and death, though. In this case, the result of the violent essence surge was explosive, instantly killing its fragile dryad, though it would be several minutes before she knew that. Instead of dying outright, her body mutated into a spiraling cancerous mass of impossible vegetation that was powered by pure darkness rather than any natural impulse.

To the Lich, it was a violent work of art, and it savored the moment even as the battle was joined. Why shouldn’t it? Despite the thicket only being ten or fifteen feet on a side, the interior was close to infinite, and the perfect spiraling shapes would never occur in nature.

Any creature that found its way inside of it, divine or otherwise, would be lost forever. Well, it would be lost until Tenebroum collapsed the strange singularity, dumping whoever it captured into the same room where its shadowy cast-offs and rejects had come from. The object itself was only a gate. It was those creatures it relied on to do the real damage to those in attendance.

One moment, the Gods that sat around its cursed dryad Breeandwyn were whispering amongst themselves about what could be done, and the next, they were swallowed up by its dark, lacerating vines. It was a sight to behold, and the Lich would forever remember the sight of those beautiful women screaming even as they were dragged into its large and growing maw by bladed vines. They would never be seen again, at least not in any form that anyone was likely to recognize.

Part of the Lich wished it had tried to capture Lunaris itself with such a trap, but it knew that the odds of this working on a Goddess with real power, let alone powers over light and magic, were slim to none.

Capturing half a dozen different minor deities for later vivisection could not be called a failure by any stretch of the imagination, though, and watching all those around its dark beachhead struggle with the monsters that poured out of that well of darkness was more than satisfying as well. Tenebroum’s one regret when the whole thing was done was that it had not been able to pull Oroza over the threshold.

That would have made the whole thing perfect, it decided fondly, as the Lich looked out the eyes of a swarm of ravens at the Walls of Rahkin while it viewed the skirmishes that its dark Paragon was engaged in on a nearly nightly basis. They were an ongoing process that typically consisted of one or two fronts of low-quality drudges and worn-down war zombies to attract the defender’s attention while some new abomination or another damaged a wall or wreaked havoc from an unexpected quarter. Today, it was a frontal assault to test out the limits of their mage’s range while specters assaulted the smallest gate on the northern side of the city.

If that went well, they would let in a unit of death knights who would do real damage as they fought their way toward the city’s largest granary, but Tenebroum was not confident it would be successful. The only way it was likely to take this city was in a large-scale battle where it committed everything in the area to overwhelm the defenders, and it was unwilling to do that as long as it and its general suspected they still had trucks up their sleeve.

So instead, they opted to inflict a death by a thousand cuts until the defenders’ edge were suitably dulled. Often, very little was accomplished, but sometimes, it found a vulnerability and wreaked true havoc. That had been the case last week when it had sent a brigade of zombies across the ocean floor and into the city’s harbor at night.

Its Paragon had given it a two-thirds chance of losing the whole expedition to an ocean god or another spirit like Oroza, but no one had noticed, and instead, the sodden zombies had come ashore without issue. That, in turn, led to the damage and destruction of dozens of vessels and hundreds of deaths before the city watch had finally vanquished the last of them.

Repeat performances hadn’t worked any better than this frontal assault was working now. Even as it watched through the eyes of its flock, it could see that the dregs that were assaulting the gate tonight were already being mowed down with a mixture of arcane magic and holy might.

Every attack was a small victory, though. Tonight, it would allow the Lich and its minions to better understand the range and capabilities of the dwindling defenders, and in the case of its recent battle for the harbor, it had forced the humans to station guards all around the harbor, now only further stretched their already dwindling defenses.

As it watched a watchman with light in his eyes hold back the specters long enough for reinforcements to arrive, denying the death knights entry and forcing them to retreat, the Lich sighed. In time, the city would break, and the Lich was confident of that. No matter what magic Brother Faerbar brought to wield against it, it would not be enough to stop what was coming