The very earth shook with Tenebroum’s undiluted rage as the river goddess slipped the leash and succeeded in sliding bato her river, where she immediately vanished. In that moment, she aplished 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 os of woveal. It could dig a reservoir deep beh 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 o 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, oo dey her attacks long enough to try to get that pathetic creature Paulus to help her.

  None of those acts had even hihat she’d be capable of something like this, though. As it studied the wreckage of its oldest a servant, it in to see what had happened. Salt and time had doheir worst to the runes, and she’d waited patiently for her waters to do their slow, iable 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 Tempr escape, but it did not realize the full depth of her betrayal until it fihe sughter in the deeps and tried to dispatch a legion across the river to Dutton to finish the bloodbath it had started there. There was evidehat Siddrim’s church was regrouping, and it hoped to unch a sneak atta 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 ter, it became imperable scales aating cws. In an instant, those ranks of bone, flesh, and steel that would have been difficult for even stroo sunder were dashed to pieces by the treacherous currents.

  The Lich immediately reversed course and souhe 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 si 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 thaers around the tral pilr began to boil and throb until the whole tral support fell away into the dark, ing waters along with several zombies rendering the chasm unbridgeable.

  This ed the Lich even further. Though its domaihe waters had been slipping stantly since her rebellion, it did not think she had the power to do something so btant, 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 tis reaissance of the nds beyond, noting the fear had ebbed to some degree as people had started to accept the ate of things. It doubted that would st long, though. This was a chilly summer, and the signs of the starvation to e 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 bat just how thin ahat light had bee.

  The darkness might not have won in a siroke like it hoped, but if this was the peak of summer, then the world was in for a cruel awakening e wihe Lich sidered 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 pletely 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 bme 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 bee.

  It had to e 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 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 i it one night.

  That was almost ironic. It had hat the poison levels in the river were falling, but it had never made the e because it had kept a wat 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 happehough. The spring stopped flowing.

  Its servant pced 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 happehe goddess had literally chosen to cut off part of herself rather than allow it to poisohe same way twibsp;

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

  The goddess gave no respoo 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 el that reaches all the way to the sea. ect Kelvun’s al with the o, a’s see if that doesn’t twist the knife a little more for her.”

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

  In the end, it was forced to send the irohat it had been building to cut it a new, deeper path to freedom. The legion of rust it had been building ever sihe sag of Mournden used cast rues 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. Ead every one of them, except for its mutited 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 pnning on unleashing a legion of a thousand such warriors to cut right through the walls of Abenend, which still had not fallee its best efforts. It was the st remaining holdout in the whion, but it was not a priority right now.

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

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

  Every dire was barred to it, with the Wyrmspires in the north, the Oroza to the east, and the Relict Sea to the west and south. Right now, the only ceivable way out of that box was to the northeast, through the narro in the foothills.

  The problem with that was that all of its enemies expected it to do exactly that. They were verging there, and though Tenebroum could still likely win the exge, it would e at a great cost, and after the damage the st army had do was in no hurry to sh out again unprepared. It would find another way that no one would expebsp;

  The good news was that the peninsu well and truly beloo it now. There was little that still lived on it, but the creatures that did, be they human, goblin, or lizardmen, beloo 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 nothio feast on. And there was so much life to the north. More tha knew about until it glimpsed the world through the eyes of the Lord of Light. Fallravea wasn’t even a rge city by parison, and it huo read the bloody harvest that those rich farmnds could provide, but first, it had to reach it in force, and the only way to dig a tunnel like that in anything approag an acceptable timeline was to bend its army of tireless dwarves to the task.

  O did the math and realized that the zombie drudges would take decades to carve the path, it required them with mithril-tipped picks rather thaeel swords and shields it had been f for so long now. Yes, the path over the mountains was much ted, but a tunnel just below them might be pleted in only a year or two. Then, It would vomit forth death on the ti in a mahat would leave no survivors.