While Tenebroum engaged in its slow war of attrition with the Mages, it did not sit idle and t the days until victory. That was only one pn among many.

  Uhey broke the cordon that slowly tightened around them by doing something pletely ued, there was o watch them day by day. Instead, the darkness monitored the progress that its servants were making to the north, the speed with whiew armies were assembled in the east and the rate at which its new generals grew deep in the heart of darkness.

  Everything was going acc to pn. Then its scouts finally found what might have been the ruins they’d searched for, for so long. The tipede cavalry unit that found the wastend of stone and gss deep in the Mulkara desert had long been modified for both traveling in su inhospitable pce by day and burrowing deep into the desert sands by night to escape the caress of the sun.

  That was why, even when a dark rider reached it with the news of what had been found, it was still several weeks before the Lich could look with its own eyes. It was simply too far for any of its bckbirds to fly and survive the long day, and the darkness was uo fly there alone as a mist in case the moon should notice it and turn her gaze once more upon it where it had no way to hide.

  So it waited until a fine, four-armed, eight-legged taur-spider was crafted for it, plete with armor polished to a mirror sheen to drive away as much of the light as possible should the worst happen. It was only when that strange new body was ihat it made the long journey across the desert to where its forces waited to show it what they had found.

  The jourook three nights running as fast as its spindly limbs would allow, and three long days buried beh he dunes waiting for the suns to pass by overhead. The experience was strao Tenebroum, who was not used to being trapped in a singur body for such a long period of time.

  It had expected this, though, and the giant nightmare crab that it occupied had been built spaciously enough that it was no trouble t along a small chorus of dead mages and schors with it. That way, it had something to pass the time while it dwelled nearly alone in that custrophobic darkness.

  By night, it strode along sinuous dune ridges as it got ever closer to its goal. Sometimes, it saw animals and, even more rarely, elementals. Near dawn and dusk, fire elementals dang like heat mirages could be seen dang across the cold sands, and sometimes it saw the swells of earth elementals swimming somewhere beh it in ways that made the sand ripple. None of these creatures strayed close enough to the Lich to devour them, but it did make a note about new elemental traps that it hoped to catch them in for further study aime.

  By day, it curled up into an armored ball deep uhe sand, and it discussed Malzekeen with the minds that khe stories best. There were a dozen different versions of the story. The Siddrimites wrote that it was a terrible, fallehat was old when the sun was still young. To them, it was replete with human sacrifice, and it was the city's destru that marked the first true year of the light. Others said that the destru came much ter and that the pce was only a holdout where evil had gathered after the forces hteousness burhem out of their more traditional strongholds elsewhere in the wide world.

  The ats didn’t even agree oher or not the desert had been in here in those days. It was either ‘a verdant area that had been reduced to nothing but dust in the face of Siddrim’s might,’ or ‘a trackless p the edge of the wastes, that was not enough to hide them from the light.’

  When Tenebroum finally arrived, there was not enough to say with real certainty. The sand around the edges of the city had indeed been burned so badly that it had melted into a fractured yer of thin, dun css for hundreds of feet. It ched underfoot with each step that the Lich took in its strange body.

  Whatever had dohat had reduced most of the city to ash. Now, only foundations and low brick walls sprinkled between the dunes hi the vast numbers of people who had once lived here.

  It would not have e all this way for that alohough. Even the tral temple, with its colpsed dome and its markings that had been worn away by the sand and the wind, were iing, but not particurly telling. It was only as it moved ihat fallen pd saw the entrao the catabs below that it glimpsed what had made the jourhrough suhospitable territory worthwhile.

  Navigating the stairs into the depths in a wide-footed body meant falloping across the sweltering sands was challenging but not impossible; the flesh crafters had known about this part of the trip when they had structed this body, after all. Oenebroum desded into the depths, it released a handful of modified death’s heads to begin a proper searbsp;

  These differed from the typical ones in many ways. Not only were they smaller because they’d been made from children’s skulls, they weren’t even made to explode. They were simply vessels to house the myriad of souls it had brought with it so that they could look around for what critical clues might yet be found.

  It crowded those souls into the tiny vessels two and three at a time, at random. Then, it released eae down a different corridor so they could begin their search, and it stood there waiting for the ao e ie the ungainly way those skulls floated here and there while the souls crammed inside fought for trol of their tiny little world, Tenebroum didn’t have to wait long.

  The first facts that were gathered were basiough, but after that things grew steadily more iing. Based on the inscriptions and faded murals, the pce was an ossuary devoted to the fod of death, Anhnkhanin.

  The historians of Siddrimar insisted that their god had sin him as well, though other histories merely said that he had fled beyond the edges of the world to escape. The idea that a god of death could be killed was ludicrous to Tenebroum, and it would have doubted that official narrative even if it had not known all that Ghrosian had expio it about certain fual parts of life and the way they powered certaiies.

  Even If the pce was filled with bones dedicated to one god, though, that did nothing to ge the fact that it was also crammed full of the corpses of others too. The dead that beloo Anhnkhanin were stacked ly in the alcoves that had been dug out of the soft sandstoh Malzekeen.

  The bodies which were scattered across the floor in every corridor, though none of those had been interred here inally. A few of them he stairs were grave robbers who had been sied by the miasma here, but most of the rest were those poor souls who sought to survive the day that the city above them had died.

  They had been unsuccessful, but in their attempt they had actally preserved a wealth of knowledge. Some of the bodies that were far enough away from the door that natural predators had never had the ce to pick their bones had even been mummified, preserving eveattoos in addition to the possessions they carried and the jewelry they wore. Each yer of those artifacts represented a wealth of clues.

  Slowly, the story came together for the Lich. This was not some grand battle. This was a sughter, and though the three dark gods that it was trying to uand had not died here, after enough research, it was fairly certain that they had been born here at least.

  In every scroll and inscription that Tenebroum uncovered, there were only ever three gods who were mentioned. However, none of them were Ghrossian, and none of them were wolves or rats. Instead, all the Lich’s floating servants found were refereo Siddrim, Anhnkanin, and Malkezeen.

  That was telling, of course, but it was only when they found a mummified corpse with the tattoo of a truly unique chimera did Tenebroum finally uand: ohe rat, the wolf and the worm had been a single deity as it had already suspected.

  They were separate now, of course. Still, it was sure that their survival from this terrible event was what had broken them apart into the separate shards of divinity that they were now.

  Even with that knowledge, the image was arresting. The god, at least acc to this one actal record by one of its worshipers, was a giant two-headed chimera with the head of a wolf and a rat, surrounded by a tentacled mane of leaches and worms that made it look more like a deformed lion in its way. It was a wonderfully revolting sight, but even as the Lich sidered how feasible it might be to build one of these from spare parts, its mere existence raised more questions than answers.

  If Ghroshian was simply part of a rger whole, should it eveh the wolf o had quered the Magica Collegium? Should it look for the worm at all?

  The answer was, of course, that it must do those things, but only so it could learn from them and steal their power for itself. It would not abandon such riches merely because it was fearful or because it had doubts. It would just have to keep them apart until that was doo prevent any mishaps. If it brought them together, it would be at a time and a pce of its choosing, when they were bound and leashed. Maybe Tenebroum would simply devhroshian before the other two were uhed to prevent any plications altogether.

  It would brood on it ter. For now, it studied this pce, and in doing so, it felt a strange sort of kinship with the creatures that were born here. Tenebroum had been born of a siortured soul in a s, and in doing so, there had been enough life to feed and nurture it for a long time. If the city above had been rebuilt, it had no doubt that the same thing would have happened here.

  Instead, the god that had died left behind fragments forced to seek out new sustenance elsewhere, and in doing so, they had bee separate. If it were ever to fracture in such a way, where would it find the fault lines in its soul? Darkness? Death? Disease?

  Tenebroum couldn’t say, and holy, it hoped o find out. It was a thought-provoking question, though, and it po while it waited for more information in that cursed pce. If Siddrim had sundered Malkezeen into his po parts, then might Tenebroum have dohe same thing to Siddrim? Was that what those tiny stars represented? It was impossible to say, but now that it had articuted the question, it dearly wahe answer.