When it shattered its Dark Paragon, Tenebroum expected each of the four identical fragments to grow into a separate e of the inal. Not only would that allow it to better mas sprawling armies that were scattered almost haphazardly across the nd by this point, but it would allow them to foultiple tasks at once while it, it devoted itself to more important projects.

  This would only beore necessary as the scope of its wars increased. Soon, there would be more armies, more enemies, more fronts, and more factory cities for all of the above. Even as powerful as it was, it could not do all of those things while plotting t down the remaining gods. So, delegation to effective minions was no longer optional, if it had ever really been before.

  The Lich had po devote oo advang to the north, oo building its drowned fleet, another devoted solely to monit the mages, and the fourth to ing up any loose ends in its current domain.

  Unfortunately, one of the four souls began to mutate almost immediately. It was easy to see the ge, even after only a few days.

  The other three were slender shards of ephemeral green gss that slowly rebuilt themselves, the way a mosaic might if you pnted a siile iile soil and gave it room to grow. The fourth ohough, idery thing that tio grow like a cerous weed.

  The Lich tried to trim it back to its crystalline core twice. Both times, it cut off so much that the thing almost dissolved pletely iher. That didn’t ge anything, though.

  If anything, the thing grew back more shan before, with sharp edges and little barbs as it sought to defend itself against the unknown attacker. It shed out at the Lich, which was almost enough for it to shatter the thing on principle. Still, it was harmless, and the barbs it attempted to ihe maelstrom that was Tenebroum’s soul were quickly snuffed out.

  The deformed soul was a strange, aggressive thing, but it wasn’t strong enough to do any real harm. Still, as an experiment, it was iing enough to preserve, but it was dangerous enough that the Lich couldn’t just let in grow unmonitored. So, it moved it bato the soul fe and locked it up tight until the appropriate binding circle could be built to tain it.

  There was a wonderful aggressiveness about it, Tenebroum decided, and even if it would never bee a general on the field of battle, it might yet bee some ype of on. Even in failure, it could find purposes for most of its creations.

  After briefly cheg in on its twisted pnt Goddesses and pruning them again while they learo speak in a single voice, the Lich moved on to Rahkin to observe its naval preparations. There it found the Voice of Reason l over a dead kingdom, and she quickly provided all the updates he requested, showing him not just the ships that were already refloated and repaired but the ohat still y at the bottom of the harbor where the dead could work on them night and day withard to the sunlight.

  It was a clever arra, and the Lich approved. “Your efforts do you credit,” Tenebroum praised her. “See that they tinue.”

  Of course, they would for the foreseeable future. Its zombie leviathan had destroyed almost every ship in the harbor during its attack, and so there were still innumerable wrecks to choose from. Evehose started to run low, though, there were plenty of wooden structures iy that could be torn apart for additional timber.

  The fleet was undoubtedly ugly in the eyes of men, but that hardly mattered to the eyes of men. What mattered were the entments that were even now being id on those blood-soaked keels. They would ehe bck fleet to use unnatural storms and fog to both block out the hateful sun and to catwary ships at sea as they probed further north for weakness.

  Tenebroum was under no illusions that it would catch them by surprise, of course. Even now, the meddling gods were already doing what they could to thwart it. It was certain that the people to the north would be better prepared than the Kingdom of Hallen. However, that mattered little si was equally sure that it would crush them. These ships would make effective scouts, but they would make even more effective pgue ships, and they would sow panid blight wherever they nded wheime was right.

  Of course, some of them would exist just to be bait for the Goddess of Sea and Storms, should she decide to intervene. Istiniss had, sely stayed away from its pns. That was almost certainly because the Goddess of the seas had seen how easy it had ed her sister, the river Goddess, and opted to steer clear.

  The darkness khat couldn’t st forever, though. Eventually, she would e for him, and he would have ships filled to burst with poison ready for her, just waiting to be ruptured. For a few days, it mulled over the idea of crafting the defective soul shard it had created into a harpoon of sorts and using it to she Goddess before deg against it. If it was going to create projectiles sharp enough to pierce the soul of a God, then there were better targets to choose from.

  . . .

  Ohose were all on track, Tenebroum returo the most important task: watg the isoted citadel of magES craft as its invisible noose slowly tightened. Over the st few weeks, while its paragon shards grew to fruition, it had begun to fabricate Strangulite. The maery to craft it had been finished years before, shortly after it had succeeded in making its shadow drake fly, but sienebroum had no pressing need for the stuff in all this time, it had never begun produ.

  Now that the time had arrived, though. It finally ordered its servants to kick things into motion, and the giant der that guarded the served as the door to its inner sanctum began to rise and fall rhythmically hour after hour. It was both a door and aor, but it was something else, too: it ressure chamber. Though most of the shaft beh it was devoted to the plumbing for the pressurized water that allowed it to rise and fall, the tral core held a single harm-sized duit of air.

  When the runes activated, and the air iall, narrow chamber was pressed, along with a very fine dust made of corpse ash and souls of those who had died of suffocation, the air crystallized, f a lens that could be carved a lens ner than a die, which could be carved into any number of shapes depending on the requirements of the spell.

  In the same way that Cholerium would turn normal water to a poisonous acid and Stygium would not burn from normal fire, even as it burhe uo ashes, Strangulite, in its raw form, did nothing but make the air that passed through it quite uhable.

  That was of no to its servants, of course, but if properly cut and polished to form a lens with the right vexity, it poisohe essehat passed through it in a simir way. These effects had beeed by the heads in its library, but even so, when it came time for experimentation, those were done far from the seat of its power, by lesser mage souls that it would not be bothered to lose.

  For this work, they were disposable, because it had no wish to track whatever the sedary effects of those foul magito any of its seats of power. The experiments started off simple enough. It took a mage with an ample supply of tainted essend had it cast some very basic spells. It summoned fire and lightning. It attempted to raise the dead or use basic wards to protect it from the magic of its oppos.

  None of those effects worked as expected. The fmes appeared, but they sputtered and died before long; they were only ever more smoke than fire. Lightning likewise came ience, but it arced and split more than it should, scarring the ground around its target without actually hitting it.

  It was the wards that were the most iing, though. Wards and binding rings were plex things, and each symbol and e o work properly for them to fun. ging only a single symbol at random could make the whole thing behave differently than it should.

  This is exactly what happened wherangulite-tainted essence charged symbols that had been drawn into the wet earth. The whole thi haywire. First, pan to arc between symbols that had no e, and then a few of them exploded urain they should never have been subjected to before the whole thing imploded.

  Unfortunately, the skull that the spirit that erf these experiments was bound to was swallowed up in that vague spacial distortion and vanished without a trace. Even after exteudy, Tenebroum was uo determine what happeo it and was forced to dey furether testing for two days while another bound mage was delivered to the testing location.

  All in all, the results were impressive, and the Lich’s only s were that releasing this on so near its ir might have unforeseen sequences for it in a way that the first two elements never did. Fortunately, the perverse wild magic effects seemed to fade almost immediately, falling by 90% within three days and 99% within two weeks.

  While that still wasn’t enough that it would ever duct experiments of this type he giant rune encrusted catabs that anchored it to the earth, it was enough that it no longer had qualms with the idea of embedding these gray cobweb filled lenses ianding stohat were even now being structed.

  However, these iions, though, would require some ges to the design. The Lich had not been aware of the effects that these perverse currents would have on the runes when stru had started. Now, with this new data, the stones seemed as likely to detohemselves as they did to poison the Collegium’s magibsp;

  So, it started again, where it had to, oer designs that would summoorm winds and aim them in a particur dire for aended period of time. As it did so, Tenebroum wondered idly how long it would take the mages to notice exactly what it was doing.

  Would they try to attack its monoliths? Would they even be able to find them? Teneborum wondered. It wasn’t sure. Truthfully, it wasn’t even sure how it would go about looking for such a sourd set a quartet of minds to the task immediately. How could you locate something when it ed the very divination that you sought it with?

  It was only when it was fiuning those structures and raising the height of the lens so that the runig that anchored and powered each monolith was well clear of the poison it geed that it finally Occurred to the Lich that they’d never found the mage it had sought in the immediate aftermath of Rahkin’s fall.