Tenebroum

Chapter 115: Better Left Buried

Even with the small tide of blood that it had devoured, the thing that had bound away in the dusty stone sarcophagus lacked the strength to force off the lid. Such a feast had served only as an appetizer to the hunger that had awoken in it.

Its recollections of what had happened to bring it to such a nadir or even who it was were too complex to contemplate right now. It had been buried until it had become nothing but dust; it could worry about those thoughts later. All that its tiny mind could focus on tight now was the single crack in its prison. It would have been enough to let in light or even a breeze. Those things didnt exist this far below the city, though.

Even in its much-reduced state, such a gap was not large enough for it to escape. So, it began to bite and chew. It gnawed at the very stone, seeking to expand the hole enough for it to escape. Teeth and claws werent as hard as the stone, but they grew back, over and over again, for day after endless day.

It did not even understand what it was. Not really. All it knew was that its tiny teeth could cut through even stone given enough time and that its hunger was too large to fit in any prison.

The blood hadnt just woken it up from its timeless slumber; it had given it the strength to suffer. And suffer it did, widening that tiny gap only a little at a time as the days cycled somewhere above it. Then, at long last, it widened the hole enough that a single part of it could escape, and it did.

The small creature only realized what it was after it forced its way through the opening. It was a mouse. A tiny desiccated mouse that had been dead so long that there were only bones underneath its patchy white fur. That was when it knew that the rest of its body was much the same.

It had not been able to fit any of the larger bodies that belonged to it through such a tiny gap. It knew that now. It also knew that all that blood had only been enough for a single minor miracle. So, none of the larger, more powerful rats that could expect to put up a good fight against a seasoned tomcat had been resurrected in its place. It wasnt even a moderately sized rat that some tiny part of it knew that it preferred. In the end, only the smallest field mouse was able to escape the prison and scramble free on the rubble below.

It was a shriveled speck of a thing, and it twitched from one side to the other as it looked for danger in the darkness. It was practically defenseless, but it found no threats. The tiny twice-dead mouse scampered through the rubble that partially entombed its tomb.

It had hoped that seeing the place that it was bound would bring back memories. Maybe it would have given time, but when it spied the first ancient corpse that had been laid to rest in the wall niches further down the hall, all of those thoughts were lost to the hunger that burned inside it once more.

Danger forgotten, the little mouse scurried across the dusty floor and into the niche, where it began to nibble at the remnants of parchment skin and leather that it found. It wasnt enough, but then it doubted that anything would be enough the way it currently felt. It gnawed through the top of the femur and began to chew on the desiccated marrow, but still, it wanted more.

From body to body and room to room, it traveled. The mouse lost all track of time as it searched for scraps. That was where it encountered a real rat for the first time. This one was more than just skin and bones, and it had real beady eyes in its eyesocket instead of a faint glowing red light.

The rat made the mistake of bouncing on the corpse of the mouse, sure that it was food. It soon regretted it, but there was no escape. The mouse wasnt just snapping at it and trying to devour it. It was melding with it.

They were two now, and both of them were dead, but the way that their tails twined together and they moved as a single thing, it would have been difficult to tell. They could eat twice as fast as one, and slowly, they moved through the crypt, gnawing here and there as they hunted their own kind and merged with them.

By the time the mob of rats had grown to 13 and the rat kings tails had knotted together completely, it found its first corpse. Though any evidence of what had happened here had long since been obliterated by the predators beneath the city in the days since the corpse had been dumped in the sewers. Despite that, it could feel the betrayal and the anguish coming off of the body like a bad smell. It was interesting but not as interesting as the taste of the mans liver. So, the rat king dined deep on his entrails for days as it feasted, but it appreciated the subtle strains of suffering, too, as it tried to understand why it should care about them.

Other rats tried and failed to steal a few morsels for themselves. Few of them lived long enough to regret it as they joined one at a time with the swelling, ghoulish rat king that grew well past the size of a cat as it gorged itself on its bloody feast.

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It was only partway through devouring the mans brain that it realized how much knowledge it was gaining from the act. Names poured into its mind a piece at a time. Hektan. Was that the name of the victim or... No - it was the murderer? And the reason? What was it? Gold? Revenge?

No, the rat king realized adultery. It was a strange word, and it only recognized it as being distantly related to a different sort of hunger than the kind that gnawed at it. It pushed those facts aside. All it cared about was feeding the bottomless hole inside of it.

Even as it brushed them aside, though, it continued to learn. The name of streets. The riots and the cold above. The light.

It was always afraid of the light, though it did not know why. There was nothing down here that it could not eat, so why should it be any different in the world above. Still, it did not go up there, not even when it heard the sounds of violence or smelled the fresh scent of coppery blood. Something that it could not name held it back.

There were other bodies, but none of them seemed linked. This was not a plan. It was just the very edge of chaos. It felt like the whole city might yet topple over into nothing, but it didnt mind that. More chaos meant more food.

When it was strong enough, it stopped subsisting on the corpses of the recently deceased and began to attack the sickly and weak who hid away where they would be safe from the predators above.

Its first victim was a dying old man who had taken refuge in the catacombs under a temple. Part of it feared the temple, too, but not enough to resist those weak, watery breaths as the vagrant attempted to fight off gray fever.

He wouldnt make it more than another night or two anyway, not that the Rat King cared. Life had no value when it was hungry. All that mattered were that its many slavering maws and its even more numerous eyes trembled with desire to devour him whole, and he was weak enough that he had no chance against an impossible melding of rats that was larger than a child.

That didnt stop him from gasping and screaming until the rat king tore out his throat so completely that the man drowned in his own blood. More words and concepts bombarded it then, more than even the corpses it had devoured, but it pushed all of them aside in favor of the warm spray of arterial blood.

This is what it had craved from the moment it had been revived. Not the ancient mummified flesh of the interned or even the cold maggot-ridden corpses of the murdered. No, it hungered for the life force that could only come from death, and together, its dozens of mouths tried and failed to slake its thirst.

That was when it started to listen to the rippling thoughts and emotions that it devoured along with the meat of the corpse. Safety was the biggest one. The dead man felt sure that the temple he sheltered beneath should have been a safe place. The Temple of Saint Anothian... It was in the city of Rahkin. The names meant little to the rat king. It wasnt until it realized that the temple belonged to Siddrim that it finally paused as a tremble of fear and recognition went through it.

It remembered Siddrim, and once it remembered that awful god, it remembered what happened to it, too. The memories came flooding back like a storm, and all the rat king could do was stand there and yowl in distress as disconcerting facts began to lock into place. Fire. Death. Pain.

It was only after all of those puzzle pieces came together that it finally knew who it was, no, who they were. Ghroshian was not a rat or even a rat king. They were more than that. They were more than all rats, even. They were hunger itself!

To rediscover one's selves was a curious thing, it realized. One moment, they had been an animal, but now they realized theyd always been so much more than that. The animals were just the tinder to the bonfire that was its mind.

As that thought completed, it was like a bell being rung in their mind, and it catalyzed everything. Before, it had only been a growing chorus of hunger and discordant thoughts as it picked up the discarded secrets of the dead while it feasted on their flesh. Now, it was a single chorus as Ghroshian took control of hunger rather than letting it take control of them.

Their giant rat king burst apart into several smaller murderous contracts at the same moment as the sarcophagus that held the rest of its moldering form shattered as it could no longer contain the dark god that it had held for so long.

Out of that wretched prison poured hundreds and then thousands of rats and mice. It was an unending stream of vermin, and every one of those humble creatures was a part of themself. It was a symphony of whispers more than it was a legion of being, but it was both. In hours, it would spread to every part of this city. It would learn what had happened since it had been defeated and imprisoned by Siddrim.

Siddrim. Even that name caused a flash of pain as it remembered the light invading every hole and crevice to flush it out when it had finally nibbled enough to draw down the wrath of the Lord of Light. Ghroshian could not remember what happened to Malzekeen - not exactly, but it knew that it was nothing pleasant.

That was the only thing to temper their growing hunger: the fear of the light. Even as they spread through the catacombs under Rakhin and into the sewers and cellars where the narrow, labyrinthine openings allowed, they shied away from even the smallest sliver of light. Not even candlelight was to be trusted. It was all that kept Ghroshian from rising up and devouring the city whole.

Indeed, it was tempting to take a peek at the surface, almost overwhelmingly so. It smelled not just people and hunger but turmoil that promised a near-infinite amount of secrets for it to devour, and it desperately wanted them to add to its collection.