Tenebroum-Chapter 219: Free For All

Even though Tenebroum’s mortal enemy was approaching from somewhere over the horizon hours earlier than he normally would, the spirit of darkness felt no fear. Why should it? In a single stroke, it had just shattered the sky, murdered the moon, and snuffed out nearly every star. A few remained as they stood alone against the dark, but they only emphasized the darkness now, with their pathetic light, and it felt no need to move against them right away.

Instead, the God of Darkness focused on other threats. Dawn was not its only enemy in this moment. It could feel the world turning against it. Though it stood miles tall right now as a bridge between the twin abysses of the night sky and the bottomless depths, it could feel storm clouds gathering high above the earth. As high as they were, though, they only reached the middle of its towering, nightmarish form.

Lightning flashed, and thunder rolled, but any wounds those electric arcs caused healed as soon as the darkness returned. Even someone as great as the Goddess of Sea and Storms could no longer hurt it, and the Goddess of Nature didn’t even attempt to come close. How could she? It had poisoned the land for dozens of miles in every direction now. There was nothing natural about Tenebroum anymore.

There are almost certainly dozens or even hundreds of middling and small gods that would love nothing more than to strike at me now, it thought, but how can they? They are anchored to their mountains, rivers, and cities. The only ones who had a chance at defeating me are already dead!

The swirling maelstrom of darkness wasn’t surprised even a little by the febrile response. Dawn would be the decider. It had always known that and dawn was coming.

That’s not the way it worked out, though. Instead, somewhere below the ineffectual storm that raged around what had once been blackwater, another figure approached. They were the only person on that desolate plain, but that wasn’t what caught Tenebroum’s attention. It was that the hooded figure moved an impossible distance with every stride, and with each step they got closer, they grew.

Soon, she was bigger than Siddrim’s corpse had been before Tenebroum had taken it apart for essence and raw materials, but it had no clue who she might be. It wasn’t about to take any chances, though, and it blasted her to ruin with similar magics to what it had used on the moon. It had no need to moderate its power at this point. It would never run out of the dark energies that powered it now; the only possible danger was in overexerting its phylactery, which it was in no danger of doing just now.

For a moment, the horizon was blotted out by the tangle of violent tentacles, but when they cleared, she had grown ever larger and showed no signs of distress. That’s when it finally saw the bones beneath her skin and understood. This was the Goddess of Death, and she had at last come for him.

How she had managed that trick, it had no idea. According to everything it had learned, the Lord of Light had either slain or imprisoned her. Tenebroum had longed assumed that to be the case, both because of what the Lord of Light had done to Malkezeen and because it had never run into her during all of its struggles and efforts. To see here now, though, on the eve of its success, was concerning.

“You have no claim on me,” Tenebroum rumbled, so loud that its echoing voice blotted out even the storm that was raging below it for a moment.

“All dead things are my domain,” she answered calmly, “and had Siddrim not killed me in his effort to make a more perfect world, then you would never have grown as strong as you are now, spirit.”

“If you are dead, then how is it you are here?” it asked. Even as it spoke, the heads at the root of its tower had begun to sing a different song, and it was analyzing her with magic now, in all the ways it knew how, as it struggled to find the right way to strike at her.

“I’ve enjoyed my time in the afterlife,” she smiled, the illusion of her dark skin getting thinner to reveal the bony form underneath. “But you have robbed this place of all life. It’s my home now more than it’s yours, and I think you’ve done quite enough damage to the natural order.”

“You think you can stop me?” Tenebroum asked in a voice filled with derision. That was when it felt its lands start to sink, for lack of a better word. Nothing moved, and its tower to the heavens did not sway, but still, something was shifting, and it could feel itself being drawn into the underworld, which, of course, it could not allow.

“This is mine!” Tenebroum roared. “All of it. From the deepest pit to the tallest mountain! Mine!”

“Well, if that’s the case, and your dead heart belongs to me, then I suppose they all belong to me as well,” she answered with a shrug. “And frankly, I’m not interested in any more territory than I already have.” She wasn’t even fighting him. That was the worst part. She was just standing there, halfway to the sky, a pale phantom, and somehow, she was winning.

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Did it really have a dead heart at its core anymore, though? Tenebroum wondered. The souls of the humans that had nurtured it were such a small thing compared to what they’d once been.

As it studied both its own soul and hers, it eventually decided that she had it exactly backward. While there was only a little death left in itself, there were oceans of darkness left in her. As it decided that and figured out exactly where she was pushing and where it could apply pressure in return, the slow sinking sensation slowly ground to a halt, and she looked at it in concern for the first time.

“No,” Tenebroum said definitely. “Darkness can exist without death, but in death, there is only darkness. You confuse who is in charge of who at your own peril. Flee now and leave me to fight the sun while you still can.”

She didn’t move, though, and it didn’t really expect her to. Thanks to millennia of death, she had an ocean of power behind her that was nearly as large as the reservoirs Tenebroum commanded.

Such things could not be settled with violence. This was instead becoming a battle of will between the two dark titans, and even though she was a power to be feared, Tenebroum did not fear her. Instead, it let her tear the last of its humanity free from it, unmooring it completely from the last shreds of mortality, losing her grip on it in the process.

They were nothing now. A thief, a murderer, and a few traitors. They were the seed but not the mighty oak that it had become. It watched them go but fell no weaker for it. The greater parts of its soul had long since been made up of shadows and the spirits of dead gods.

Next, she tried again, and it felt her tearing at its phylactery, trying to rip that free and unmoor it completely. Death was still there, of course. That was the last inextricable connection where death played a part in its existence because that was what connected it to this world.

Were she to succeed, Tenebroum might end up as a rampaging behemoth with no more control or understanding than the terrible monstrosities from the outer darkness that it feasted on so regularly. It was unafraid, though. It had already guessed those would be her next targets.

After all, where was death stronger, anywhere in the world,l than in the depths of its lair? There could be no graveyard or mausoleum that was closer to the underworld than that place, and even as she tried to claim it completely, it knew that she would not succeed.

Tenebroum had taken no chances in the construction of its lair, and though it had done nothing to protect against this Goddess especially, there were lairs of glyphs and enchantments that bound each piece of itself to every other. It was a knot of impossible complexity, and she would never untangle it. While she did so, its tendrils began to worm its way into her soul, too.

The plains around its ring were writhing with the hands and claws of a million dead reaching up out of their own graves to drag it into the underworld, but even so many limbs could not cross the boundary that it had set in stone so long ago.

The two gods probed each other, looking for weaknesses that they could exploit while the faraway sun began to rise. Tenebroum felt the burn, but it knew that death felt it too. Her movements were growing desperate and wreckless. The thing that Tenebroum had feared most, for the longest time, besides that little speck of hallowed ground at the heart of the swamp was the daylight. It might be able to inflict a mortal wound on death, but it knew that it could withstand what she could not.

That was why it had wormed its tentacles deep inside her bottomless soul. It had not sought to claim her, and she was trying to do with him. It merely sought to tangle and hold the ancient skeleton so that she could not escape. She didn’t find that out, though, until the fires of the heavens became too great for her. They were both smoking by that point, but whereas Tenebroum remained a perfect pillar of obsidian night, her voluminous cloak was already burning away to reveal the ivory skeleton beneath.

“I will leave our new Lord of Light to finish you,” she proclaimed, “But if you manage to best him, I will still return to claim you.”

“No one who has ever attempted to take something from me has survived the attempt,” Tenebroum gloated, “And you shall not be the first.”

She opened her mouth to speak but closed it again when she realized she was stuck fast. A forest of thorny briars had grown inside her and chained her fast to Tenebroum. There would be no escape for her.

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“What did you do!” she cried out. “The dead cannot claim death any more than shadow can endure the light.”

“And yet here I am,” Tenebroum answered as she started to burst into flame. “When the light kills you, I shall claim your kingdom too, and then your strength will become my strength.” Truthfully, even from this distance, the light of the sun was already hurting a great deal, but it would never show that.

“Death cannot die!” she shouted.

“It cannot endure the light of day, either,” Tenebroum said mockingly.

In the end, it did not have to kill death. It would let her allies do that. Even as whatever blurry shape it was that had replaced Siddrim drew his bow and fired the first volley of heavenly light at it, it used her as a human shield, letting the dead god absorb as much of the punishment as she could before fading away to nothing.

None of that mattered, though. All that mattered, in the end, was whether light was stronger than dark. For Tenebroum’s entire existence, the opposite had been true, but it had already upended the rest of the natural order, so this was its final task.