Tenebroum had hoped that the hound would have been able to provide it the answers it craved, uhe i swarm of rats, Ghrosian. In that way, at least, it was disappoihe thing had a powerful soul, even in its weakeate, but there was no intelligehere. Instead, there was only an overflowing font e that swirled in its core.

  That wasn’t pletely different from the rats, of course, save that they swirled in fear. It could see how the two of them were patible in that sense and that they might fit together. Not that it would ever bring them together, of course. The Lich had the nameless hound tied to a stake in a cave and allowed to tio deinate for a month before it was brought back to Tenebroum’s ir for further experiments.

  The hound spent most of its time sealed in a room ohird level, far from the caged rats that the Lich had brought here for study previously. The two might have very patible souls that could fit together, but that did not mean that the Lich had any desire t them together. That was one experiment that was simply too dangerous until it knew more.

  At first, those were a matter of simple bloodsport. It would pit the thing against various beasts before having it fight men and even undead abominations. Though the hound was huge, it was also barely skin and bones when these matches started. Yet despite that, it never lost. There was a terrible ferocity in it that the Lich could not fully uand but was eager to see in a. In its first match against a grizzly bear, the hound tore it to shreds despite beiirely outcssed in both size a. It was a bloody spectacle that simply had to be seen to be believed.

  It scarcely killed any quicker when it faced off against a man in full pte mail. Somehow, despite any specific magics that Tenebroum could identify, the thing simply shredded its oppos, always being strohan them, and after each bloody bout, it grew visibly. At first, it had been the size of a rge hunting dog, but now it was something closer to a small horse, and even with its colr on, it paced bad forth pensively whehe Lich locked it away.

  Sometimes, when Tenebroum brought its test pet out of its cage, it would not be for its own private bloodsport. Instead, it would experiment ohing while it bayed and howled. Sometimes, these experiments would be simple disse and vivise, as it wondered what made this thing tid ated for its strange immortality. Other times, it would be bound within one or more magic circles of the Lich’s devising while it sought to study the thing with divination magics. It found nothing useful, which was as rare as it was frustrating.

  How could such a simple creature evade my uanding of it! Tenebroum thought in annoya is more animal than spirit!

  Eventually, for ck of anythier to do, it released it into the Red Hills just to see what it would do to the poor, woefully unprepared goblin tribes that still existed there. The Lich still kept an outpost of undead at the gold mine where drudges sved away endlessly, and it occasionally sought out unwilling goblins for experiments, but by and rge, that pce had lost most of its importao the Lich, who was now focused on other fronts.

  The hound tore through the pce like a force of nature, dev a new ir nearly every night. It didn’t matter if they used poisid if they fought with ons or cws, nothing could stand against the monster.

  In fact, its performance was shtening that Lich immediately began to work both on a better binding colr and a method of eliminating the wolf, should it ever find a way to turn on its owner. It clearly did not like being forced to obey, and the Lich had little doubt that if it ever broke free in the same way that the troublesome river spirit had, it would not end well.

  So, it set to work on several ooze-based solutions that would be entirely immuo the teeth and cws of the hound so that it would have options should the need arise. One of its fleshcrafters suggested that the Lich could install a failsafe alchemical charge ihing, but given how poorly the Lich’s attempts to graft better ons to its cws had gone, su experiment seemed uo end well.

  It is not a creature, dead or alive, the Tenebroum remiself. It is a godling, the same as my twisted dryads or that cursed moon.

  It was easy tet that, given that all it did was fight and kill and devour. The hound had a certaiory intelligence, but nothing more than that. Were it not for the golden colr that it wore around its neck, it would be nothing but a berserk, sveri.

  After months of study, the Lich eventually lost i in its pet a it to rampage in the Red Hills while it turs attention to older projects; in time, when Tenebroum was sure the thing had stopped growing, it would send it to the front to fight with the rest of its minions, but it wanted no surprises.

  As it searched through its catalog of unfinished abominations, it found noher. Its carefully pruned nature goddess no longer spent all of her time screaming and begging to die. Instead, she’d decorated the small garden it had allowed her in that barren stantenal courtyard with deadly nightshade and any number of other toxic herbs and flowers, humming away while the thorns that pierced her skin bled as they always did.

  She still cowered in its presence, but the Lich was certain that when she was set free, she’d be happy to do as bidden and hunt down her former peers. However, for now, the Lich was tent to watch her grow and ge, studying her as the scars tio fade, looking for any clues as to what she might bee when she was plete and finally blossomed.

  It spent some time examining the new juggernauts that were being created in stantinal and some of the new vessels that incorporated parts whales and sharks in lieu of wood in Rahkin, but eventually, the Lich found itself once again focused on its plot to undermihe All-Father again.

  Its poison was still spreading through the moon, and she was rarely seen in the sky as anything but a waxing or a waning crest anymore. There had been some sighat she might mao fight off the cerous soul that had been ied into her, but each time she made progress and seemed to get brighter, a few weeks ter, there would be a repse, and she would lose all the progress she’d made.

  The Lich didn’t ualy what was happening, but it didn’t care either. As long as she was weak and suffering, it could focus to hunt down and break ods, and for some time now, it had chosen the dwarf to deal with .

  This wasn’t because the All-Father was the most powerful or the most dangerous. It wasn’t even because it had dared to y a finger on the Li their single real enter. It was simply because he was accessible.

  Oenebroum had decided that Krulm’venor would not be useful in the war against the mages now that they’d developed some way of nullifying the magics that animated the godling, Tenebroum had sent him into the depths te other dwarven cities with fire. This was for the death and the pain it provided Tenebroum as much as anything, but each quest allowed it to steal away a few more dwarven relics, and that, it had decided, was the key to breaking the All-Father’s soul.

  As a god, it was better known to the Lich thanks to the wealth of stolen source materials it had taken from the charred cities and tombs it had ransacked over the st several years. It was also simpler thahers it had tried to learn about. The secret that Krulm’venor had tried to hide for so long when it had been in every book and mural: the All-Father was literally an amalgam of all the honored dwarvehat had gone before.

  Though it did not yet fully uand why dwarves ossified as they aged, it was now very clear that when a dwarf finally could live no longer, its flesh would turn gray and shrivel into something like soft sandstone before falling to dust, leaving only the partially crystallized skeleton behind. It was the skulls that the dwarves were ied ihey buried the body, which meant that it was the skulls the Lich was ied in as well.

  It had structed many abominations from the bones of dwarves at this point, which meant that its flesh crafters had dissected thousands of corpses, and these ges only seemed to start sometime around three hundred years old. The very oldest dwarves might reach three hundred and fifty years of age, but the exact age didn’t seem to matter, only that they lived a life of honor and sted until it was their time.

  For a while, the Lich had merely crushed the skulls to extract a lifetime’s worth of essence, but retly, it had beore ied in a simple question: if the All-Father was a giant structure built brick by brick from the souls of the honored dead, then how many of those souls would the Lich have to corrupt or drive insane before the whole thing colpsed.

  On the face of things, the All-Father was an indomitable warrior who spent almost all of his time deep in his earthen fortress where no one could touch him. That wasn’t true, though. The God’s seat of pht be there, but iy, he read across a hundred cities, and a thousand graveyards, and the Lich was determio destroy as many of them as it had to before the God finally came apart at the seams.

  Of course, it was much too busy to do such things itself, but with a little effort, it had driven a handful of dwarven priests insane, and now they bored day and night in the Lich’s warehouse of crystal skulls with forbidden ruhat flicted and warred with each other, carving them into the crystalline skulls o a time. This was not an effort that would pay dividends tomorrow. It was like the erosion of water on stone. Each drip was imperceptible, but taken together, they could wear away a whole mountain range.

  Wheo attack a god that had been around as long as the All-Father, that was certainly an apt metaphor. Tenebroum’s slow but insidious efforts would break him, and then it would devour whatever pieces were left.