Tenebroum was still heming souls as it fled down the maze-like halls of its ir, and Malzekeen roared in pursuit. The monstrosity bowled over everything in its path like a force of nature. Even as the structs wound down, some of them still fought, but against the reformed god from an age past, none of them stood a ce. Metal and bone were sundered by powerful cws and even more powerful teeth, and any flesh that touched it was left desiccated and decayed by the powers of hunger and rot.

  The beast was the ination of destructiveness, and against that, in this vaporous form. Even its most powerful bodies might do little good against this mohough. If Tenebroum had been itself, then it might have activated all of them at ond caused a true battle for the ages, but iate, it was in now, it wasn’t sure that it could even possess a single strud use it to its full potential.

  The phyctery that it had allowed it to store immense amounts of power within itself. It had been the perfeion of the mind of a mage and the power of its hoard, and now its golden focus was gone. As a result, it could feel whole aspects of itself sloughing off like an eroding cliffside, falling into the hungry sea a bit at a time.

  The darkness should have wondered about that gold, even before all of this. It should have been able to detect the touch of another hungry spirit, but it didn’t. Everything had happened so long ago when it had known. That was no excuse, though, and even as Tenebroum’s mind started to e unraveled, it found time to curse itself.

  As the wounded spirit fled through the halls, it left a trail of smoke in its wake. It wasn’t smoke, though. It was streamers of dozens or even hundreds of spirits fissioning from it every sed. No matter how fast it moved, they were left behind it in a trail that not only gave away its position as it sought to hide from the monster pursuing it. They also weake. Every soul that left its ade it a little weaker and a little slower. Tenebroum hated that reality bitterly, but there was nothing it could do to ge that just now.

  The darkness didn’t o follow the corridors. It could charge right through walls like they weren’t even there. That didn’t help it escape its pursuer, though. The monstrous hound was gaining. Sometimes, it lost a few steps when it had to go around the walls and obstacles, but other times, it charged straight through, shattering the thin limestone walls.

  It shouldn’t be that strong, Tenebroum realized. Nothing should, at least nothing that had just been resurrected. That strength was one more testament to just how much strength the creature had already siphoned from the darkness before Tenebroum shattered the e.

  “Tenebroum…” Malzekeen growled. Now that the slender e that had tied it to the worm was go could no longer whisper sibintly into its mind. Instead, the beast had a voice that had taken on some of the characteristics of all three creatures. It was a low, violent thing with an uone of whispers, and it repulsed the darkness. “I’m ing for you, Tenebroum… These scraps won’t be enough to sate my hunger…”

  Tenebroum ig. Instead, it tried to fling structs between it and the monstrous chimera, though that did little good. Many of them would not respond to its calls and instead tio do whatever it was they’d st been assigo do, while others simply dropped where they were, pletely without power.

  It had been the heart of everything. That wasn’t an act. It had been the heart of it all. The phyctery was ected to the soul web, which wound through its gigantiderground ir like a work of arteries, and now that heart had been ripped out, and the body was dying.

  That was something that Tenebroum was more than familiar with. It had killed more people and animals via its minions and its experiments than anyone else in the world. Perhaps even more than anyone else who’d ever existed, and now its mighty war mae was dying the same way. The darkness was uo imagine a crueler irony.

  It gave some thought as to how its armies and other, more plex servants would fair in this terrible, wreng moment, but that ending the moment that Malzekeen bowled over an acolyte, practically ripping the young man in two as it charged after the dying spirit that had once been the Libsp;

  It was a desperate race, and even if Tenebroum won it, it was still likely to bleed to death at the finish line, but that roblem to be worried about ter. O reached the uemple, the darkness finally remembered there were more dires than just forward and backward, and it surged up, looking for a pce to hide and heal while Malzekeen’s sughter of its flock was covered by the sound of a terrible dirge that ying on the pipe an.

  “You think I will not follow?” the chimera bellowed. “I…” whatever threats it made after that were lost to the music. The Litered the widest of the an's pipes and soared all the way to the surface, where night always reigned. Normally, it could look beyond the veil it had created easily enough and see if it were day ht for the rest of the world, but for some reasht now, it couldn’t. It was blind to everything outside the boundaries circumscribed by its true name.

  Tenebroum sought to reach out to his most powerful agents and avatars, to try to uand more about what was happening through their eyes, but it was uo touch their minds. Even Krulm’venor, who was bound to it the most tightly of all, no longer seemed to exist. Either its e to its structs had been ended, or they'd died along with its phyctery. Regardless, there was no way to be sure, but it was angered just the same.

  Curse that filthy animal for this, Tenebroum’s soul cried out in pain. Curse it for finally allowing that pathetic fme to be snuffed out!

  The darkness flew through the air above Bckwater as the music slowly became more erratic before finally dying in a single long, mournful hat lingered for minutes. While it did so, it studied the town that it had possessed for so long. The pce had mutated iime sihe Lich had crafted its absolute barrier.

  When the curtain of eternal night had closed over the backwater, it had been a small town that was halfway buro the ground by Siddrim’s final bout of fury. Now, it was a ramshackle series of workshops and warehouses covered in patchy snow and a thin rhyme of frost. In the summer, that could melt away because of the warm winds, but right now, the roof edges were a forest of ice circles.

  Up here, the eys of its smelters still exhaled smoke, but there was no work. There should have been regur hammer blows and the sound of dead feet g on rotten snow. Instead, it was so silent you could hear a pin drop. Not even a breeze rustled the dead pce.

  Despite the rge cage of its own making, Tenebroum felt trapped, but there was nothing it could do about that. So, instead of rattling the bars of its cage, it perched there at the tallest tower in its factory of abominations and studied its own wounds.

  Its soul was only half the size it had been before all of this. It might even be less. It had lost most of the cyiplexity it had possessed before aed to some earlier state. Tenebroum couldn’t remember what its soul had looked like before it had coalesced into its phyctery, but it was certain it was something like this. It was no longer a maelstrom. It was just a thunderhead, and as it dissipated, it realized it might bee less than that, even. The nd around it was its forever.

  It couldn’t die, not truly, but it could easily fall until it was nothing but the thi shade of itself. It could bee a dark version of Krulm’venor, living amongst the ruins of its greatness with no real uanding.

  As it thought about that, another soul slipped free and started to drift away, but Tenebroum shed out like a raptor, dev it again. I hold myself together, it seems, it thought to itself, but for how long.

  Tenebroum’s fear drove it higher than it had in a long time. Perhaps ever. It had build this ring to bar the light from ever toug its domain again, but in all that time it had rarely used the full height of the tower that existed. Now it did. Part of it wao escape forever into the night sky.

  That proved impossible, unfortunately. Eventually the darkness flew so high that it reached nearly to the stars itself. That was when it finally detected the warded es that linked between the glowing dots, and it shied away from that a power. There’s something to be learned here, it thought as it slunk back from the shimmeri. But I’m in no fit pce to learn it.

  Still, as Tenebroum iably drifted back down, it sidered what it had seen. It had long known that there were dark and terrible things in the spaces betweears thanks to the blurred recolle of Siddrim’s overwhelming memories, but in the moment of weakness it sorely wished it could feast on them.

  As the darkness studied this problem and tried to decide the best way to ha, its world tracted down to a single point. At least, that was the case until it heard the sounds of a rge beast padding around the tower three stories beh it.

  Tenebroum unched into the air again a moment before the thing us mane or worm and leach tentacles toward it. I for a moment, the dark sky between them was a forest of death, and each slimy limb sought to capture Tenebroum in its weakeate. It was able to avoid the monster, but only at the cost of shedding a dozen more minor souls and shrinking even further.

  “Look how weak you already are,” the beast taunted. “I could keep hunting you, but what good would that do me? I already have much of your strength and find your pathetic toys to be a waste of energy.”

  The darkness said nothing to give away its location. Instead, it swirled high above the dark god that had ruined so mud kept on its guard for the attack from an ued quarter while the beast tinued on.

  “I could do that, but it would be a waste of my time, and the Lord of Light has already e turies,” it growled. “So, I leave you to your fate. Let this pce be your tomb while I go and devour the rest of the world.”

  The darkness watched it from high above while it walked to the border and then outside of it. Tenebroum was tempted to watch it go from there, but something wouldn’t let it try to step across. So it didn’t. Instead, it slowly hemed souls as it waited.

  What do I do now? It wondered as it reflected on the words of Malzekeen and slowly came apart. How do I survive this?

  It was the only question that mattered, but in that moment, Tenebroum had no good aoo much of who it was had already started to drift away, and it wasn’t half the genius it had been even an ho.