Tenebroum

Chapter 36: Big Game

The darkness didn’t pay much attention to the tribe's transplanted lizard men for months, because it had more important matters to deal with. So, it missed how much they struggled at first in the unfamiliar territory that was the high valleys of the Woden Spine mountains, but even with those hardships, they were hardy creatures that still managed to thrive. At least, they did once their wanderings led them to find a series of hot springs and sulfurous vents that would help them survive the winter without going into hibernation.

Even with that advantage though, building a new camp and erecting a new totem to their dark god was a process that took months, not weeks. The first creature they carved into that pole was an ogre that ruled the nearby swamp. It claimed the lives of two lizard warriors, and injured several more so badly that they would have perished too if the Lich had not shown them its favor and blessed them with a deathless strength that made it all but impossible for disease or blood loss to claim them while their bodies knitted themselves back together.

Most of the lizard men did their best to resist the darkness that offered itself so freely to them in those moments of mortality, in the way that the goblins never did. Not Tsson’vek though, that hunter embraced it, and the anger that came with it. This interested the swamp on several levels.

In the past the lizard men had been so alien that it had only been able to touch their minds with great difficulty while they slept in a place of power. Their minds had become no easier to read in the decades since that first summer, but the darkness’ power had doubled several times since then. Until now, it had observed their habits, and even some of their religious ceremonies, but it had never gotten so deeply inside their head to find out an individual name. It didn’t even know that individuals had names until that moment.

What it did understand was the base desire he found lurking inside that primitive mind. Behind the sluggish thoughts and the black and white vision that saw less than a fragment of the world that the Lich could see, it found a deep throbbing hunger. Tsson’vek hungered for food and mates, he hungered for power, but most of all for dominance. The goblin mind wanted to devour the world for the thrill of killing and bloodshed, but lizard men, or at least this lizard man had a desire to possess and control the lands that would fulfill its other needs more than it desired the killing that would take place to ensure it was successful.

It was an interesting juxtaposition that left the darkness somewhere between the two viewpoints. It needed to murder the living to feast on their souls, but it wanted all the lands it could see as well due to the primal covetousness that its dark heart of gold inspired. The payments of its little lording was helping with that of course, but no matter how much he paid, it would never truly be enough for the Lich. One day it would rule over the entire world, and nothing would stop it.

Tsson’vek had more reasonable ambitions, though. He didn’t even want to rule over its tribe. Not yet at least. He was too young, and he hadn’t made kills that were impressive enough for a mate, let alone one that would be memorialized on their nearly bare totem. The closest it had come was to narrowly avoid death after his ambush failed to slay the swamp ogre. Even poisoned that behemoth had managed to swing its club with such force that all he could do was lay broken in the mud while the other members of its hunting pack finally brought it down. While the rest of the tribe celebrated the victory with a grand feast, he had laid there for weeks waiting for death.

Death came for him eventually, but instead of claiming him and dragging him from the mortal world to the hunting ground of his ancestors, it held the darkness at bay while he healed. A few weeks later, all that he had to show for his foolhardy brush with mortality was a number of jagged black scars that meandered through his dull green scales.

It was a harrowing experience, but that brush with the spirits of darkness changed him forever. He became more aggressive after that, and more eager to prove himself. This wasn’t just to secure mates and nests when spring came though: it was a desire to please the dark god that watched over them. Now that he had felt its strength course through his shattered body, even its limited reptile mind knew that it could have more of that power if it gave the darkness what it wanted, and what it wanted were the totems and the corpses that came from ever more dangerous hunts.

If that was what those dark, deathless eyes wanted, then Tsson’vek would bring them down. The chimera, the wyvern, and even the griffon - he wasn’t as strong as any of them, but he would be. He would bring all of them down, or die in the attempt.

The desire to please it was so strong that it was hard not to think of the lizard men as its most loyal pets, the Lich thought idly while it watched its fleshcrafters at work. Zombies only obeyed because they had to. They were literally powerless to say no to it, much as some of the spirits that were bound to their own rotting corpses might want to. The lizardman's level of loyalty would have been enough to warm its heart, if it had one. They were practically like the hounds that the humans seemed to love so much, albeit ones that were significantly more useful and deadly.

Generosity wasn’t an emotion that the darkness was capable of. It was even rarer than happiness or gratitude in its dark and flinty heart, but as it watched the fleshcrafters meticulously skin the ogre that the reptiles had brought down for it, it felt something almost that strong for the first time in a long time.

The beast was over nine feet tall, with thickly muscled limbs that were each as wide as a normal man. Even if it had been resurrected like this, it would have been a terror, but the Lich wouldn’t dream of doing something so wasteful. The raw potential was nothing compared to what it would be when it had tainted and reinforced every inch of the Ogre and filled it with so much rage that it would never know peace. Right now they were in the earliest stages of preparation. The skin had not yet been tanned, nor had the hundreds of steel plates that would eventually make up its second skin been riveted to it yet. That would take weeks, and all the while, the fleshcrafters would be carving the creature up, dissecting one muscle at a time to be embalmed and treated, so they could get to the skeleton and reinforce it.

Of course, not all the flesh would be worth preserving, and the bones would be moved into the beetle vat until they were entirely flensed. Even though the rest of the process took weeks, the final step took only hours. A living body could be devoured down to the bones in less than a day, but a thoroughly butchered corpse took far less time. It was only after all that was done that the entire skeleton would be submerged into molten bronze, and then rebuilt a layer at a time until it wasn’t just an unstoppable juggernaut, but an undying one as well.

The Lich didn’t need to be involved with any of this of course. That was why it had created its fleshcrafters to run its abattoirs. They handled all the mundane tasks like this one. Creating a war zombie was nothing special. The Lich had amassed dozens like this in the vaults where they awaited use. In the ogre's case, the only thing that was special was the specimen, not the technique. That was why it built all of its most skilled necromantic chirurgeons with the souls of doctors and healers. Their souls might twist and rebel at being forced to do such grisly work, but they had a talent that was impossible for almost anyone else to match.

It certainly didn’t hurt that their own bodies were modified to make them even better at these tasks. Their necks were longer and more prehensile than any living man, and their arms each had an extra set of joints. The only way that one might tell one from another was the number of eyes and fingers each had. Five eyes was the least number of eyes a servant could have in a role like this to get the proper depth perception of course, but some of the newest ones had almost twice that. Fingers though - fingers were purely a function of skill. Not counting the four armed lovers that still labored here in the depths, its first chirugeon only had 13 fingers, some of which ended in fine clamps and blades, but the famed doctor Zumassen who had disappeared one spring on a voyage down river - he had 19 fingers, and though he might wail and gnash his teeth at his current fate, that grief and horror never stopped him from making perfect cuts every time.

That was why he was assisting the Lich and his library on the most delicate of tasks: the forging of a human spine. Each vertebra was invested with a single human soul that had died violently due to fire. The pieces were cast in bronze before they were carved into perfect shape, and fitted together. It was only after the runes of binding had been carved into them, and they had been gilded so that they would never tarnish, that ligaments of thin wire had been attached and woven together into patterns that were a nightmarish mockery of real muscles. The webs of steel had one important advantage over preserved tissue though: they were entirely fireproof.

If all went well this would function as the prototype for its own new vessel, but more testing was required first. This project was less than a quarter done, the Lich would leave it to its minions once it had completed the most critical steps. It was even more critical than the cyclopian skull that was being formed from steel at the forges even now. The skull would merely house the thing that powered this terrible body. It was the spine that was the leash that would bind the automaton to its will. The Lich had learned much in the year since he’d bound the river dragon to its swamp dragon in a match that was truly made in hell. Even as strong as that creation was, the Oroza had threatened to crack it on several occasions already, necessitating further upgrades. She was simply too strong and defiant to be tamed, just like the river that shared her name.

That was even more true now that worship of her was resurgent. Gone were the temples to the languid serpent or the verdant lady though. Now the people focused on the raging tide, or worse, the hag of the delta or the crone of the tide waters. Where once the stories of her were about how she brought life and washed away evil with her purifying waters, now they were about the terrible gifts she would grant to those who sacrificed to her. The people of the area still believed that river would give them what they needed, but in the back of their mind they understood that someone would have to pay for that bounty.

It was almost a pity that the energy from all those sacrifices, and the power from all those prayers was stolen from her as soon as she received them. Instead, it was channeled to her captor, making it ever stronger while she writhed and withered, just like her namesake at the turning of the seasons.