Once the Tenebroum’s forces had been pushed out of the valley that sheltered the dead city of Abenend on its third assault, it had never managed to get an agent close enough to investigate again. This wasn’t due to any ineptitude on the part of its servants, though. It was because of the talent of the mages.

In many ways, the Lich feared them more than the gods arrayed against it. Humans were fragile things, but they were clever too, and the mages came up with all sorts of arcane countermeasures to keep its minions at bay. In fact, some of them were so convoluted and unexpected that it took some time to unravel their secrets.

First, there was the net of air they’d managed to weave over the entire Collegium. Many black birds had crashed to the earth ruined before the Lich had figured out that the fragile things had been failing at higher rates than usual and had them perch on trees further from the grounds instead to watch for signs of weakness among the mages.

That worked well until the mages started to pick them off, one at a time. At first Tenebroum thought that was being done with spells that detected evil in some way, but when it it had the fly further afield, circling well out of arrow range, it still found that they were being sniped from the mage’s last hold out.

The answer turned out to be rune carved arrows that were drawn to undeath. It was a clever bit of magic, and Tenebroum filled away those tricks vowing to find some way to use them against the gods themselves in due time.

After that, it started to use shades and wraiths exclusively, even though they couldn’t penetrate the compound directly because of ancient wards inscribed into the bedrock itself. It was deeply frustrating to know that its enemy was behind fragile stone walls working on new sinister plans like their crystallized dragon fire that had wounded it so recently, but it couldn’t stop them or even spy on them.

After that, the lights started to go up. Visually, they didn’t seem to be anything special at first. They were just paper lanterns hung outside the walls of the castle with a tiny shard of sunlight instead of a candle or an oil lamp. They were a nuisance at first, though Tenebroum would extinguish the ones furthest out when it could.

Soon, there were hundreds, and then thousands, though. Every day, they seemed to amplify in the light of one of the suns, and every night, they would dim back to their lantern strength. At first, the Lich thought the whole thing was a novelty, but soon after, the entire valley was lost to their collective glow, and it was forced to build creative spies from the eyes of keen-sighted men and women and the bodies of sure-footed goats to spy on their continued activity from the closest mountain peaks.

In time, these clever constructs were dashed as well by the mages and their protective spells, but not before they saw what was happening. The mages weren’t just baring the darkness from their long river valley. They were barring winter from it as well. Even as the icy fist closed around the world with more force than usual, ice and snow never settled for long on the glowing valley.

That let them import thousands of refugees and put them to work. Before Tenebroum’s rise to power, Abenend had been a sleepy backwater, and after it’s victory over Siddrim it had been reduced to ash. Now, even with Constantinal fallen, it was stronger than it had been before. In fact, in all the world that Tenebroum could see it was the only place that was growing and flourishing.

Some of the towns and duchies that the darkness had claimed for its own on its long march east were still doing fine. People still got married, had children, and harvested their crops between prayers for the darkness to keep them safe. There was no growth there, though. There was no vitality. All there was were people in fear going through the motions.

Not so in Abenend. There, even as the Lich laid siege to Rahkin and prepared to fight the mages when that was done, it saw that they were getting stronger. When the last vestiges of the Siddrimites received news that their fortification alongside the Oroza had been flanked, they abandoned it and quickly retreated up into the mountains to make common cause with the mages, turning the whole place into an armed camp.

The priests might no longer have any magic of their own, but they had strong backs and experience with war. Soon, all passes except the main one were barred by controlled avalanches or manned palisades, and the main pass beside the river quickly became a new fortress in its own right.

Aside from the northern kingdoms, and the far away islands across the sea, that tiny valley swaddled in light was now the biggest threat to the Lich’s plans, and it was still gallingly near its own seat of power as it was less than two hundred miles from the spire of darkness rising from the ice shrouded ruins that had once been Blackwater. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

Even lightning strikes to try to sabotage these defenses, or at least sew fear and chaos, met with little success. Calvary was picked off by the mages' arc lightning and flame strike spells before they ever did real damage, and even something subtle as a neuroid couldn’t get close enough to do real damage before it was detected and eliminated.

When the sky and land failed it, the Lich sent its legion of rust to dig beneath and find some way through, but an earthquake of almost certainly unnatural origin collapsed the tunnel as soon as it got near enough to the surface to be detected.

At one point, the Lich sent a few of its rodents in to try to bridge the gap that way, but based on the way that Groshian’s other nearby parts screamed for a day and a night, it was safe to say that the mages found them immediately and did something horrible to them.

It was only when the lights of Rahkin were snuffed out, and every mage that had been sent there to bolster their defenses died, that Tenebroum was finally able to turn its attention to the troublesome valley. That was when it had started to poison the very mana itself with its Strangulite powered monoliths. The results were subtle enough not to be noticed at first, but that could not last forever.

In time, the Lich’s vigilant goats noticed small groups attempting to reach the summit of the mountains it was using to poison them. While these efforts were sometimes successful, it was very easy for the Lich to tear them apart by night before they reached the peak, so these expeditions were invariably costly and only rarely successful.

It was from the souls of those that it murdered there on those high glaciers that it learned the most.

“Dozens of my brothers died trying to use teleportation to reach these cursed high places,” the soul of Artem moaned as the Lich tormented it in the search for answers. “Magic no longer works as it should there, and even the Archmages do not know why.”

“Of course they don’t,” Tenebroum gloated. “And they will only figure it out when I claim their souls for all of eternity!”

It was heartening to discover with every new expedition, it claimed that they still had no idea what it was doing or why it would damn them, though.

Week by week and month by month, the web of tainted artifacts slowly became a noose, and eventually, that noose began to choke the nascent revival of the mages and their allies. At first, this was only visible in the number of lights that failed after a storm went through, leaving gaps in the otherwise perfect field of lights that were hung all throughout the valley now.

These were replaced, but it was done slowly enough to show the limits of its enemy’s resources. In time, the Lich dispatched more blackbirds to spy on the place since, unlike the wraiths, they could endure at least a little light. To the Lich’s surprise, almost none of them were detected immediately, as so long as they were circumspect and stayed moving, the mages could no longer shoot them out of the sky as they’d done with such impunity for so long.

That was when the Lich knew that their destruction would come sooner rather than later. In less than a year, it was certain that it would purge every scrap of light from that place and devour everything that lived there.

Still, despite its eagerness, the Lich did not rush things. It knew that these mages were the favorites of Lunaris, and that when the time came to crush them, she would do everything that was within her power to aid them.

That was so predictable that it was planning a trap for her too, should such an opportunity arise, of course, but for now, it focused on other, smaller details, like forcing Groshian to attempt to infiltrate the place a second time.

“No, please!” the rats wailed piteously as the Lich commanded hundreds of them into dozens of cages that were to be dropped at random along the length of the valley by large six-winged buzzards that the darkness did not expect to survive the trip. “It… the mages did things to us! We can’t! Never again! The pain!”

The Lich silenced them with a single command before it continued. “You will go, and you will die, in time, like all my other constructs. This is the way of things, but until then you will feast on their fields that are heavy with wheat. If you can, you shall devour their books and learn their secrets.”

“Wheat? Secrets?” the rats echoed, their hunger growing.

“Indeed,” the Lich said. “There are many things worth feasting on, and the winds of magic are changing; you will find ways to do more damage and undermine their foundations further. In return, I will continue to spread you far and wide so that you can grow strong and become a stronger servant to me.”

To say that the small, hungry god agreed to those terms would be inaccurate, but it did obey, and that was enough. The Lich had dissected many versions of the rats, but it had found nothing remarkable, and it doubted the mages had either. It didn’t matter to it if the rat god had ten thousand bodies or ten thousand and one. All that mattered was that it labored to advance Tenebroum’s plans, and it could think of no better way to exacerbate the decaying situation of the mages than by unleashing famine and disease to accompany their growing troubles with magic itself.