Chapter 92: A New Dawn

Chapter 92: A New Dawn

It was Tenebroum’s greatest triumph, exceeding even the ring or its subversion of the Temple of Dawn to catch a god in its trap. To the darkness, there could be no greater victory than a night that lasted forever. However, on the seventh day, after a week of darkness, light once again appeared on the horizon.

At first, it was a swarm of falling stars that pelted the region in a tiny lightshow that lasted for less than an hour. The Lich ignored it, treating it as nothing more than an astronomical oddity that was not as important as its slumber, even as it bombarded cities and fields with little fireballs. As far as the darkness was concerned, it did nothing but add a little fiery devastation to the icy grip that was even now beginning to seize the world.

Even as that was finishing, though, the smudge of light on the horizon stayed fixed in its position. It looked like the sun was about to rise once more on a world that had given up on that oft-repeated miracle. In this case, though, it was the wrong horizon.

The sun was supposed to rise in the east and set in the west, but on that morning, there was a glow on the horizon to the southeast. It was little more than a blue-gray stain and not even enough to force all but the Lich’s most sensitive shadow creations to seek shelter. Still, it brightened, minute by minute, and eventually colored the sky in reds and pinks that made the whole world hold its breath in hope.

It was that hope that was the real problem. Tenebroum had long worked around the limitations of the light that the sun had forced on it. The fear, though - it was a constant and refreshing source of energy that seemed from the world to where it slept, curled in the bottom of its lair, and the moment that the cursed sun rose, that steady river of terror dried up almost immediately.

The light that this new sun shed was wan and thin compared to Siddrim’s light, and it only glowed at perhaps a tenth of the former God of Light’s brightness. Still, that was enough to finally force the retreat of the goblins, some of the undead abominations, and all the other foul evils that had plagued humanity unchecked for a week.

It was also enough to force Tenebroum to stir as a few of its slower servants vaporized into a painful flurry of fire and ash. N0v3lRealm was the platform where this chapter was initially revealed on N0v3l.B1n.

“Impossible!” the Lich raged as it tried to understand how this could possibly be happening.

Even more confusing was that the light shone everywhere in its territories except for the vast circle at its heart. There, past the line demarcated by its binding ring, the light simply ceased to shine. It was the one spot in the whole world that kept its shroud of eternal night while the rest of the world was flooded with the thin rays that might be more normal on a cold winter morning.

A few hours later, a second sun started to rise from the southwest, which was even more baffling, but that insanity only increased when, a few hours after that, a third began to rise from the northwest. It was as if the whole world had gone mad, and for once, it was not the Lich’s doing.

For the next few hours, the Lich lived in dread that a fifth sun would rise next and deny it a true night altogether, but that did not seem to be the case. Instead, when the fourth pale sun finished its arc, there was at last true darkness, but it only lasted for five hours before the first sun started to rise all over again.

The Lich set a dozen scholars to the task of studying this new phenomenon so that they could understand what exactly was happening and chart a new rhythm for the celestial bodies. That, in turn, instantly set off a chain of new instruments that would need to be built so that they could better monitor the sky. That would require all manner of instruments, apparently, including lenses and mirrors, which were not a craft that it had mastered previously.

It was beneath Tenebroum to worry about such trivium, though, and instead, it delegated the tasks to its craftsmen and the sages that would ultimately need the strange implements. It would unravel this mystery, and then it would figure out how to slay the new lights one by one if it had to, even if it had to tear its shadow dragon down to the bones and rebuild it from scratch so that it could fly high enough to devour one of the wandering stars.

. . .

In the days that followed, it learned that the schedule of the new stars seemed to be somewhat fixed. This resulted in only about five hours of true day and five hours of true night, with all of the rest of the time falling somewhere in between the two. Ultimately, it was still a boon for the Lich’s forces. They could march and fight for about half the day now without suffering too many ill effects. This helped with its ongoing extermination efforts of the nearby cities that its elite forces were in the process of slaughtering.

Its more shadowy creatures, on the other hand, were severely limited. The dark rider and the shadow dragon were almost useless for now, and its ferryman wasn’t much better off. There was only so far that even its magical barge could get in the nighttime mists when it only had five hours to work with. It was unsure what it could do about that for the time being except alter its plans to account for their losses in its plans and move its terrible swamp dragon and its earth titan into more important roles in their place.

It was a shame, of course, because despite its clumsy nature, the shadow drake had done more damage to Siddrimar than the other three of its prime evils combined. That was doubly true once the priest’s damnable lights had finally gone dark shortly after the death of their god. Its ability to simply make a unit disappear or a wall crumble as solid stone dissolved into air was nothing short of extraordinary.

Originally, the Lich had hoped to turn its dark machinations next on the dwarvish All-Father, but those hopes would have to be set aside for the foreseeable future. It had not yet suffered any repercussions from that race of stone dwellers yet. However, the darkness was not about to open another front on its war with the gods until it understood exactly what it was that had happened here, and by the best estimates of the scholar spirits that it had set to the task, it would require at least a full year to monitor the patterns and discover how they affected the seasons and the tides as well.

The only consolation that the Lich could think of was that this would baffle and terrify the mortal realms even more than it had frustrated the Lich. How would they know when to set sail or farm their lands in this strange new world? How would they determine when to reap and sow when the wandering stars seemed to move at random through the sky?

A new day had dawned on the world, it was true, but the Lich would work hard to see that the men who dwelled under the new and untrustworthy lights saw them as a curse as much as a blessing.