Tenebroum

Chapter 181: Just an Appetizer

When the greyhaired woman with a hairstyle more elaborate than most men’s beards stabbed the merchant in the eye over a disagreement about the ripeness of the mossfruits she was buying, Krulm’venor didn’t notice until the man started to scream. She’d done it so normally and with such calm that his eyes had simply slid over the act as another market transaction in this place. He had been lulled into complacency by the normal rhythms of dwarven society as he studied this small part of Hammerheim and waited for his time to strike.

From the moment the Lich had whispered, “The time is coming, be ready,” Krulm’venor had been ready. He had to be. If he drifted off too far, his bones would start to heat as a warning of the retribution that would follow.

Still, a coiled spring could stay coiled only so long, and after three days of watching, ready to rip open the grate and pounce on the unsuspecting dwarves below, everything started to blur together until suddenly, it didn’t. After that stabbing, the guards were called, and the matron was taken away, but soon after that, there was the sounds of a scuffle somewhere out of sight and, later, the smell of something burning.

Something is wrong, the fire spirit thought to himself. The voices in his head threw out a dozen different things that it might be, but their conclusion was just the opposite. Something was very right, and soon, they would get to feast.

Some faint strain of madness had gripped the city of Hammerheim, and Krulm’venor wasn’t sure quite what to do. This wasn’t enough to justify an attack yet, but it also wasn’t something he should just watch, was it? For a while, things almost got back to normal. Then, he heard the bells begin to toll in the distance. First, it was from a single watch post, and then another and another picked up the brassy, methodical rhythm.

It was a continuous toll. That was the signal to take shelter and that the city was under attack. That couldn’t be the case, though. Did the Lich send another army to assist me? Krulm’venor wondered. That didn’t make sense, but given the things that its master could do with the shadowy portals this far beneath the ground, it wasn’t impossible.

The fire spirit watched for a few more minutes before he decided there was no attack. Not yet. Did they discover my position? Were they warned? Krulm’venor worried.

He’d done nothing to give himself away, nor would he now, but still, at this point, it was undeniable that something was off. Dwarves would not ring the alarm for no reason.

Even so, he hesitated, more confused than concerned. It would take more than whatever this something was to give him a chance in hell of taking down the dwarvish capital. Here, there were not only armies of the most well-equipped dwarves in the world, but there were other more dangerous enemies, too. There were almost certainly a few high priests of the All-Father, as well as a full-blown forge father.

Such things were roughly equivalent to what the humans called small gods. That is what Krulm’venor had been so long ago before his city had fallen to the shadows and he’d cowardly fled. He knew that now, but only intellectually. The only memories he had of the experience were blurry moments of pride and shame.

No matter what he remembered or didn’t, he knew that no amount of fire would do much against a god who was made of fire, though, even a small one. It had tried to explain this to the Lich, but it had ignored Krulm’venor’s council. It always did.

Why would a master listen to their hound, he thought sullenly before he berated himself for that moment of weakness. Let that monster ignore good council. Maybe then the All-Father will crush him and me both.

The godling’s thoughts warred in his head, which succeeded in keeping the chatter and the screams of the goblins down to a dull roar, at least, until he next heard the sounds of conflict. This wasn’t something like a riot, though. This time, he could very clearly hear the clash of steel, and it was getting closer.

The next group he saw, judging by their colors, were two different clans fighting with each other. They were obviously trying to settle some sort of grudge, but when members of the city guard tried to intervene, both groups turned and beat them back before they continued.

For a moment, he considered that this might be a coup of a sort. Someone might be trying to overthrow the King. That could explain this much chaos. The only thing that made him doubt that was the viciousness of the insults that were being tossed back and forth. This was clearly personal.

Krulm’venor still knew that blood feuds and grudges were part of dwarven culture on some level, but mass combat and blood in the streets struck him as uncommon. There was nothing honorable about shedding dwarven blood in the streets. It was only by watching these various scuffles and beefs that often left at least one body in the streets that he understood why this seemed familiar, though.

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“Goblins,” he breathed. “They’re acting like thrice damned goblins.”

Just those words were enough to rile up the pests inside him, and Krulm’venor had to focus to mute the sound of them baying for blood. He had no idea how one could take the highest tier of dwarven culture and turn it into this, but the Lich, certainly.

Why else would it have told him to be ready? It had poisoned the Oroza and every other thing that it had laid its cold dead hand on, so why not the soul of the whole dwarven race?

Does that mean the bastard tainted the All-Father? Krulm’venor wondered, in shock. He was the very wellspring of the dwarven soul, but somehow, that didn’t seem possible.

Krulm’venor didn’t understand it. In fact, he didn’t try. Instead, he just got angry. He’d been poisoned by the Lich’s magic for decades now, but somehow the awful creature had managed to do the same thing to the rest of his people? It was monstrous and utterly unforgivable.

He wasn’t sure if this was the right time to strike, but he no longer cared. For once, he didn’t want to die or throw his life away against an impossible opponent. Instead, he wanted to burn it all down. He would rather that there be no dwarves at all than dwarves that behaved like this.

As these awful thoughts chased each other in circles, Krulm’venor’s grip on the bars of the grate he was crouched behind only grew tighter and hotter. As he watched the madness escalate below, the bars grew red-hot until they were easy to bend and pull up out of the way. Someone paying attention might have noticed such a thing. They might have noticed his suddenly bright blue eyes that were full of roaring flames.

They didn’t, though. There was no one left in the Iron City to notice anything that was out of the ordinary because there was nothing ordinary to compare it to. The world had gone mad.

As Krulm’venor fell twenty feet from his hiding place to the crowded streets, he looked out over the city for the last time with dwarvish eyes. He saw the central pillar, which was both the tremendous structure that held up the giant cavern that housed the Iron City, as well as the imperial palace, which had been hollowed out over the course of centuries. It might have dwarfed the other stalagmite and stalactite towers that had also been turned into buildings on both the ceiling and the floor, but it did nothing to diminish the beauty of the scene. He was struck by it and would have cried tears of joy if he’d been capable of such a thing anymore.

He might have fallen from that vent as a dwarf, but when he landed in the crowded, bloody street below, it was as something else. He wasn’t even a single dwarf anymore. He was two. He was two skeletons, burning with blue fire, and by the time he started tearing his way through the crowd, he’d increased to four. Even as he started tearing into dwarves, his bloodlust did not sate his anger. He was still capable of thinking, and everything he thought was awful. So, he became eight and then sixteen in his bid to become a mob rather than a man, or whatever it was he was now.

Every few seconds, the number of burning skeletons doubled, but strangely, this still wasn’t enough to stop the clans from fighting each other. Copies of him spread up and down the street and forced their way into the homes of dwarves, whether they’d been smart enough to bar them or not. Wood could not keep him out, and metal only lasted a little longer.

In less than a minute, there were over a hundred of him, and it was only then that Krulm’venor was spread so thin that he no longer cared. The chorus of screeching in his collective skulls had finally grown loud enough to cover up both his sense of self-loathing at what he was doing and his anger that he had to.

At that point, he was a kaleidoscope of violence. He was spread so thin that it was becoming hard to identify with anybody for more than a few seconds. Those that were feasting on fresh kills and bathing in warm, coppery blood drew its attention the most often, but each new scream drew its mind somewhere else.

This wasn’t enough, though. The alarm was still ringing, but since it had lost none of its terrible doppelgängers, there was no reason to think it was because of him. So, he continued to fan out, and the mob continued to expand, devouring whole neighborhoods like locusts in minutes and leaving a trail of burning buildings in their wake.

Somewhere past two hundred copies of itself, it was starting to lose any sense of self at all. It was no longer a crowd. It was just a hungry bonfire, and it saw the progress it was making only in a series of images that flashed through its mind before they went up in smoke. The only thing that would bring it to the level of consciousness was when one of its bodies was struck down by the guards. That pain was enough to make Krulm’venor focus, but only for a moment before it drifted off again.

They were everywhere now, working in tight formations and only occasionally collapsing into berserk rages that caused their lines to fall apart in curtains of fire. The dwarves were losing. There was no excuse for it, but they were losing, and in the rare moments they weren’t, and some group of dwarfs stood up to the mob as heroically as all of them ought to, the army of flaming skeletons either surrounded them or fled and pivoted somewhere else, depending on their size.

Hammerheim was burning. There were fires in the upper city and the lower city now, but it was burning worst where Krulm’venor was raging. It was a grand view, especially when viewed from all angles through more than four hundred eyes, but Krulm’venor no longer had the mind to appreciate it. To him, it was all just fuel for his fire now, and beautiful temples were burned just as thoroughly as ugly warehouses.

Aesthetics didn’t matter to an army of deathless, bloodthirsty goblins. All that mattered was death and destruction, and today, they experienced exactly that beyond their wildest dreams.