Tenebroum

Chapter 172: The Ashes of Civilization

Krulm’venor could no longer remember how many fortresses, mining settlements, and cities he’d sacked. However, the fact that he now traveled as a small band of himself most of the time instead of as a singular entity was enough to make him at least as much goblin as dwarf. That made thinking harder, but even if it hadn’t, he’d been down here so long that all of those conquests made everything blur together after a while.

Not thinking was preferable to the alternative, though. Krulm’venor had not been able to drink a good dark ale or a bright golden wheat beer in ages. The closest he’d come was the smell of them burning as he and his many copies had burned down countless taverns and breweries. Still, the faint fuzziness as his mind started to slip away from being divided so many times was the most comparable sensation he’d yet discovered.

The fire godling had figured out many months ago that if he simply existed as five or six of himself all the time, his cares and suffering would be just far enough away that they wouldn’t bother him too much. The Lich had not yet figured that out, but it no doubt would one day. Until then, even if he had to deal with the random mutterings and outbursts of his copies, it was worth it. After all, drinking was nothing if not the excuse to feel like this while you were surrounded by idiots anyway.

So, he and the shards of himself walked ever on, almost at random, in the depths, looking for new things to destroy. The Lich had released any number of wraiths down here to map the tunnels and find everything worth snuffing out or burning alive, so Krulm would receive frequent messages in the form of whispered words from the dark, but he had no talent for the arcane or the necromantic, so it wasn’t always possible to determine what it was the things were trying to tell him.

Still, as long as he kept moving, the cursed bones that bound him slumbered, and the Lich largely left him, and all his other copies, alone to suffer in the dark. It had bigger issues to worry about, not that it had conquered half the world.

If Krulm’venor was braver, then he would have asked the Lich why it even needed to keep fighting this war so far from anywhere. Dwarves were never a numerous people, even before the fighting had started. These days, he purged more goblin caves and kobold lairs than dwarven outposts.

The fire godling said nothing, though. He knew the answer already. Inside every dwarven settlement were things the Lich craved, even beyond the blood of the living and bodies capable of being reanimated. The monster that owned it body and soul was forever in need of more gold, silver, and steel to create new abominations. Even more, it forced Krulm’venor to sack every tomb and shrine in search of more mithril and adamantine.

Even the bones of the honored dead were not safe. He did not know what the Lich planned to do with them, but he was sure it was nothing good. Krulm’venor regretted giving those up to his master wherever they were found, even more than murdering a city full of dwarves trying to live their lives. New families could be created, but a hero of old was a work of singular life well lived, and once the Lich stole it away through its dark portals, it was gone forever.

Today, it wasn’t a shrine they were moving toward, at least. Today, they were too shallow for that. By his reckoning, they were only a couple hundred feet below the surface. He and his noisy copies had spent the last few days burning out goblin warren after goblin warren.

Yesterday, they'd found a luminescent mushroom forest that might have been a dwarvish plantation before it had gone wild. They’d left all of those caves as nothing but ashes, of course, but the trend was toward civilization. When they found the vent shafts for the coal mine, he was only surprised that dwarves were still working on them.

“Feed us!” the spirits clamored in his soul, but Krulm’venor suppressed them.

In fact, he pulled all of his duplicates back together. That wasn’t for the clarity, though. It was because if he was careful, he could destroy the place without killing many besides perhaps himself.

Krulm’venor was always on the lookout for two things: ways to keep his master happy and ways to end his miserable existence in a way that didn’t trigger the agonies that the Lich had layered throughout his body to ensure his obedience.

Last year, most of his copies had gotten caught in an underground landslide, but enough had survived for him to be reconstituted, and more vessels for his guttering soul had been built. Several months later, he’d been swallowed whole by a giant purple boring worm. Krulm had hoped that the thing’s acids would have been enough to melt down its body for scrap and release his suffering soul. Instead, its flames had eventually killed the creature, and he’d ripped his way out of its belly to find his metal skeleton polished to a fine silvered sheen.

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Nothing, it would seem, was enough to defeat the Lich’s craftsmanship, which had only grown better now that it harvest the souls of dwarves to work its forges instead of random drudges. If anything was going to do it, though, a mine shaft that led to a warren of mines following a coal seam might be enough to do the trick. He hoped it would, at least, because short of finding the All-Father or one of his sacred champions and being smote from existence by a blessed forge hammer, he was unlikely to ever find an end to this awful existence.

That didn’t stop Krulm’venor from leaping into the hole and bursting into flames as he fell toward the unsuspecting miners thirty feet below him. They barely had time to look up before he and the wall of fire trailing behind him reached them. They’d done everything right. They’d watered the walls to avoid explosions, and they were using bronze picks and shovels to prevent sparks. No amount of safety precautions could do much to stop a burning skeleton, though.

Despite his sudden appearance, the fire godling was surprised that some of the dwarves managed to escape the death trap it created. It wouldn’t chase them, though.l Even if they were shouting in alarm, trying to warn their fellows now, their lungs would be cooking from the hor air soon enough.

Instead, Krulm’venor watched the orange flames that had started this show gutter and fade as the blue flames replaced them. These weren’t the blue flames of its unfire, but they did look very similar. They were the oxygen-starved methane flames leaking off the coal as all the air was sucked out of the room.

That wouldn’t last long, of course. Even how it could feel the increasing wind as the chimney effect took hold. Soon this whole mine would be a blast furnace, desperately sucking in air, only to convert that air into more fire, repeating the vicious cycle.

He walked slowly, ignoring both the growing heat as well as the gibbering voices in his mind begging to release. Instead, he focused on the destruction all around him as he walked as slowly as possible toward the entrance.

Along the way, the fire godling found a few charred bodies and other dwarves who had given in to smoke inhalation but had not yet burst into flames. He ignored all of those and continued on. The flames had long since outrun him, and though more than anything, he wanted to stay standing where he was, the smoldering timbers were just enough for the angry spirits that were always watching him to demand he keep moving.

He did, but as he did so, he felt something he hadn’t felt in a long time, at least as a single entity. During the razing of every city, he felt the terrible, primitive joy of a goblin tribe running roughshod over their enemies, but it wasn’t the same as this.

It took him some time to figure out just what it was, but it wasn’t enough until he could see the exit and the small stone town that lay in the cavern beyond that he finally understood. It was the fire.

It had been a long time since Krulm’venor had experienced enough heat to make him feel true exaltation, and even at the height of his powers, he’d never experienced a fire like this. The mine had become exactly the blast furnace that he hoped it would be. The air roared into the mouth of the cave, sending waves of orange fires along the walls and ceiling. They almost reached him, too, before turning the blue color that saturated the rest of the mine.

It was so much heat that it was reaching through the cold steel barrier that the Lich had bound him in. For the first time in years and years, that heat actually reached him and warmed his soul. It wasn’t hard to see why. His entire skeletal body had taken on a dull red glow. He was so warm that his body’s temper was damaged; if any dwarf could withstand such terrible conditions, they might even be able to strike him down in this weakened state.

The tribe of nearly a hundred copies of himself squired and writhed inside of him, demanding to be free, but he ignored them. Instead, he basked in the warm glow of a sensation that had been gone so long he’d forgotten what it felt like.

As he stood there like this, it was almost enough that he could believe he was still back there in Fallravea, feasting on the goblin slaughter, or even before that, feeling the power of the forges as the dwarves hammer steel beneath his…

The sound of the collapse somewhere behind him wasn’t enough to shake the godling free of his reverie. Neither was the tumbling stone. However, the stone blocked the smooth flow of the air, instantly killing the blast furnace he was enjoying so much and reducing the entire thing to an ordinary inferno.

It was disappointing, but no good thing could last forever, certainly not in his torturous existence. Even though the fire godling was still hundreds of degrees, it could already feel itself glowing colder as the ephemeral heat left it as what had been for so long: a dead soul trapped in a lantern of unflame shaped like a skull.

This sad thought was enough to finally make him feel real self-pity, and as he walked out of the coal mine and passed the large stacks of coal that had no doubt been meant for export to some nearby city, he began to unleash the horde inside him.

As Krulm’venor reflected on how none of this would ever reach its destination, he started to fission, becoming two, then four, then eight twisted metal skeletons instead of the one that was there only a moment before. He wasn’t looking to let all the demons out. He didn’t want to cease to exist, as his doppelgängers began to rush toward the frightened townspeople who were clustered under glow stones under the far end of the street, trying to understand what had happened. He just wanted to take the edge off, and for that, a little slaughter was exactly what the doctor ordered.