The very earth shook with Tenebroum’s undiluted rage as the river goddess slipped the leash and succeeded in sliding back into her river, where she immediately vanished. In that moment, she accomplished something that no one had ever done before - she had escaped the Lich, defeating it in a way that bordered on humiliating, even if it had only lost a single soul in the process.

Its very first thought, before the clouds of anger had even cleared, was to begin to imagine ways it might get her back. It could inscribe her true name on nets of woven metal. It could dig a reservoir deep beneath and trap her forever. It could build a giant cauldron and then boil her until she was nothing but cloudy vapor.

All of these were dismissed by it as being utterly impractical. Instead, it forced itself to accept what it really needed to do: crush her without mercy. In all the years it had owned her, it had never succeeded in breaking her spirit the way that it had with Krulm’venor’s. The Lich had never determined if it was her element’s nature or her fierce spirit that was the source of her resilience, but at this point, it no longer mattered.

Even in its most paranoid flights of fantasy, it never presumed that the goddess would muster the strength to escape or to help its enemies. It was unimaginable. Up until now, the most she’d been able to do was struggle to spare children or followers and, once, to delay her attacks long enough to try to get that pathetic creature Paulus to help her.

None of those acts had even hinted that she’d be capable of something like this, though. As it studied the wreckage of its oldest and best servant, it was plain to see what had happened. Salt and time had done their worst to the runes, and she’d waited patiently for her waters to do their slow, inevitable work. It was frustrating but easy to see how it had missed it in its single-minded quest to destroy the light. The version of Tenebroum that had emerged from that experience vowed to focus more on those minor details going forward. It would never let this happen again.

After all, it had been bad enough to lose one of its most powerful servants and watch the lone surviving Templar escape, but it did not realize the full depth of her betrayal until it finished the slaughter in the deeps and tried to dispatch a legion across the river to Dutton to finish the bloodbath it had started there. There was evidence that Siddrim’s church was regrouping, and it hoped to launch a sneak attack on their tenuous supply lines, but it very quickly found out that was a bad idea.

The first three ranks were getting close to the opposite shore when the river dragon suddenly appeared like the force of nature that she was. One moment, the water was just water, but moments later, it became impenetrable scales and devastating claws. In an instant, those clean ranks of bone, flesh, and steel that would have been difficult for even strong men to sunder were dashed to pieces by the treacherous currents.

The Lich immediately reversed course and sounded the retreat, but it was clear that going forward, the long, familiar paths that it used to shield its soldiers from the light were lost to it. This was doubly painful since it had already destroyed all the strong stone bridges upriver in its quest to slow down the Crusaders.

It tried to mend the crossing near Fallravea with timbers and magic, but no sooner had it made the way crossable than the waters around the central pillar began to boil and throb until the whole central support fell away into the dark, churning waters along with several zombies rendering the chasm unbridgeable.

This outraged the Lich even further. Though its domain over the waters had been slipping constantly since her rebellion, it did not think she had the power to do something so blatant, but she did.

“You trifle with me at your peril, woman!” Tenebroum roared. “If you seek war with me, then you shall have it!”

It continued its reconnaissance of the lands beyond, noting the fear had ebbed to some degree as people had started to accept the new state of things. It doubted that would last long, though. This was a chilly summer, and the signs of the starvation to come were already starting to show in most fields. Grain would grow increasingly scarce this far south, and not even the increased hours of sunlight was enough to combat just how thin and weak that light had become.

The darkness might not have won in a single stroke like it hoped, but if this was the peak of summer, then the world was in for a cruel awakening come winter. The Lich considered holding off on its advances until ice covered the Oroza once more in a few months.

There was no telling what that frigid bitch would do then, though, it decided. So even trying to cross on a river that was completely frozen over probably still wouldn’t be a good idea because she was very clearly fixated on thwarting it for the foreseeable future. In that, at least, it could not blame her. Albrecht had only caged its soul for a few years, and it still burned with hatred for the long-dead mage that became the skeleton of who it had become. This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

It had to come up with some other way to unleash its legions of death on the world. Ultimately, that probably meant killing the goddess and her river, but it wasn’t sure how best to go about that. Tenebroum had already poisoned her river once, and though it wasn’t sure when Paulus had removed the cholarium sieve, it was very clear that it was indeed missing from the spring where it had been installed when it sent a few shades to inspect it one night.

That was almost ironic. It had noted that the poison levels in the river were falling, but it had never made the connection because it had kept a watch on the area with dead-eyed ravens and four-winged vultures for years, and the man had never appeared. The Lich silently fumed at that as it berated itself for its fixation on preparing the Temple of Dawn, but all it could do now was address the issue and install a new one.

As soon as it did, something odd happened, though. The spring stopped flowing.

Its servant placed the tainted metal in the pool just as it had done before, but as the drudge stood there, slowly dissolving from the caustic water, the pool became still, and the small stream that ran downhill slowly began to dry up. It took several minutes for Tenebroum to figure out what had happened. The goddess had literally chosen to cut off part of herself rather than allow it to poison her the same way twice.

“If Siddrim had possessed such steel, there would still be a sun in the sky.” the Lich growled with the faintest hint of appreciation as it watched her reject it completely. “I wonder if your discipline will waver when we repeat this experiment at all your other headwaters.”

The goddess gave no response to that. It was not something that it could execute tomorrow, though. Creating so much of the brittle anti-water would take a long time. It did set the necessary works in motion, though, just as it dispatched its leaded earth titan to the Red Hills.

“If she wants to reject my gifts and dry up rather than embrace me, then we shall have to find a new source to flood the Oroza,” it mused. “Go west and dig a channel that reaches all the way to the sea. Connect Kelvun’s canal with the ocean, and let’s see if that doesn’t twist the knife a little more for her.”

Once that was done, and the poisoning of the river goddess was set in motion from all angles, it was free to focus on what needed to happen next. It needed a new way forward.

In the end, it was forced to send the iron men that it had been building to cut it a new, deeper path to freedom. The legion of rust it had been building ever since the sacking of Mournden used cast rune plates to force the skulls of the dwarves it had so many of these days to create something that its fire godling had never been: obedient and loyal.

The dwarves had a strong spirit, it was true. Each and every one of them, except for its mutilated and mutated hound, were much more likely to break than bend, but with their true names so helpfully engraved onto the mortal remains, it was easy to lead even the most obstinate ox with the right spell.

It had been planning on unleashing a legion of a thousand such warriors to cut right through the walls of Abenend, which still had not fallen despite its best efforts. It was the last remaining holdout in the whole region, but it was not a priority right now.

The church had been crushed, the last gasp of an army had been shattered, and their feeble efforts to build some kind of fortification to keep it contained were worrisome, but only because of their proximity to the river on the one side and the magic school on the other.

As much as it would love to purge it from the map, that assault would have to be delayed for now until it could strike at all of them from some unexpected angle. Even though it would have much preferred to use the unique anti-magic properties of these soldiers, its need to be cut free of the box it found itself in was far more important.

Every direction was barred to it, with the Wodenspine in the north, the Oroza to the east, and the Relict Sea to the west and south. Right now, the only conceivable way out of that box was to the northeast, through the narrow gap in the foothills.

The problem with that was that all of its enemies expected it to do exactly that. They were converging there, and though Tenebroum could still likely win the exchange, it would come at a great cost, and after the damage the last army had done, it was in no hurry to lash out again unprepared. It would find another way that no one would expect.

The good news was that the peninsula well and truly belonged to it now. There was little that still lived on it, but the creatures that did, be they human, goblin, or lizardmen, belonged to it body and soul. The bad news was that its fortress was also a cage.

It hungered for fresh blood and souls as it always did, and no matter how much power it had siphoned from Siddrim’s dying soul, that well would eventually run dry if it found nothing new to feast on. And there was so much life to the north. More than even it knew about until it glimpsed the world through the eyes of the Lord of Light. Fallravea wasn’t even a large city by comparison, and it hungered to read the bloody harvest that those rich farmlands could provide, but first, it had to reach it in force, and the only way to dig a tunnel like that in anything approaching an acceptable timeline was to bend its army of tireless dwarves to the task.

Once it did the math and realized that the zombie drudges would take decades to carve the path, it required them with mithril-tipped picks rather than the steel swords and shields it had been forging for so long now. Yes, the path over the mountains was much too rugged, but a tunnel just below them might be completed in only a year or two. Then, It would vomit forth death on the continent in a manner that would leave no survivors.