Tenebroum-Chapter 218: A Starless Sky

While a single tendril of Tenebroum’s vast spirit distracted the glowing man that could only be the new God of the Moon, The newest of its dark riders raced skywards. The man was doing damage to it, and it could feel whole stretches of shadow boiling off every minute, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to keep the man busy while it struck at the stars.

It was only by luck that the God of Shadows had stumbled across him in this place. It had planned to strike at the stars again with another towering shadow while it launched its main attack elsewhere, but that would not be necessary now. The mystery of the missing city had drawn both of them here, and thanks to that, Tenebroum now had an answer to that riddle, too. Its Voice of Reason had somehow become the Goddess of that city, and she was holding it somewhere far away where it could not devour it.

Where it could not devour the city yet, Tenebroum clarified. It was a morsel that it would feast on eventually, but not today.

For now, it needed to fight larger battles. First, it would strike out at the moon and stars, and then when those were dealt with and it had access to the eternal abyss of night that lay beyond them, it would strike out at the sun. When that happened, only one of them would survive, and Tenebroum was fairly certain it would be victorious.

This chapter is updat𝓮d by freēnovelkiss.com.

So, it tested and probed and at times let the new Moon God think that he was winning while its new bat winged servant soared ever higher into the unwatched night sky. It would probably be the first and last flight of the shadowy creature; Tenebroum very much doubted that it would survive the fireworks that it was about to unleash.

The dark rider did not head toward a weak point in the arcane array of the constellations, though there were several. Instead, it flew right toward the heart of the densest constellation of stars. It was a large circular mass that was almost as bright as any of the others, and the humans called it the Shield for good reason, even if it doubted they had any idea that it was the lynchpin for the entire spell that kept the infinite night at bay.

Tenebroum chose to strike there both because the night sky was a lot stronger now than it was when it had last attempted to crack the barrier via sneak attack and because when that constellation came undone, the ripple effects would be enormous.

As each moment passed, the darkness waited for the Moon God to notice and do something, but the man was more concerned with the shadows boiling around him than anything that was happening in the sky. That was a terrible mistake.

Just after midnight, the skull that had been Krulm’venor until so recently detonated in a black fireball that would have been invisible to any mortal onlookers despite its mammoth size. The dark violet fireball rippled out, finally ending the existence of the long-suffering godling. It wasn’t a mercy of any sort, though, because Tenebroum’s efforts to maximize what would follow in the wake of that explosion had rendered it well and truly insane.

The same was true for the thousands of copies that rippled out from that singularity of evil, though. Each one of them resembled one of its explosive death's heads that had become so ubiquitous during its recent military campaigns than it did the fire godling, but they were anything but simple explosives.

The world might not have seen that explosion, but the Mood God did, and he vanished instantly, returning to his domain in a gleam of light even as the moon began to rotate. That was no matter. The element of surprise didn’t last forever, and it was already much too late.

While the forces of light tried to react, its weapon had already reached its many targets, and each of those tiny fiery heads exploded again. This snuffed out a few of the weakest stars all on its own, but that was not all they’d been built for. Out of every one of those explosions, dozens of midnight black, distilled goblin souls crawled out of the violet flames, hungry and spoiling for a fight.

One moment, the entire night sky was defending against the darkness as usual, in an interlocking phalanx of light that spanned from one horizon to the other, and the center of that formation was facing a knife in their backs. The goblins alone were nowhere near enough to turn the tide, but then, they weren’t alone. Under the best of times, the stars faced an infinite midnight menagerie of formless, shapeless monstrosities. Now, its distraction was overwhelming them, and even as Tenebroum watched, whole waves of stars were winking out of existence.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

It began to move then, back to its lair for what came next. All the stars in the sky were moving now as the Moon God attempted to compensate for the sudden and unexpected loss at the center of its formation. Those disruptions rippled out, over and over again, through the night sky, creating endless weak links and minor leaks. When Tenebroum reached its lair, it targeted the one that was most directly overhead and soared skyward, far above the heights that it usually lingered at.

Last time it had done this, it had been as a tenuous needle, attempting to complete only the barest of circuits with the infinite abyss. This time, it was a tower, that was still nearly a mile wide as it rapidly approached the stars while dozens of its heads sang the songs that held the magic for such a maneuver together.

Everything was going according to plan now. As it rammed into the central hub of the Ram constellation, it shattered it utterly, taking out dozens of defenders without slowing down. Those defenders were not the point anymore. Now, it had access to two wells of infinite darkness, and it was linked to them above and below. Even as the moon began to bloom to life and focus its rays on it, Tenebroum was ready and shrugged off the first focused attack that it launched.

Once, long ago, when the children of the forest had pinned it with their arrows, those moonbeams had burned right through its misty form. Now, they were lost in the tower of darkness that it had become. There was nothing for it to strike at any longer. It had become a singularity, and only oblivion existed inside its vast spirit now.

Tenebroum lashed out with dozens of tendrils this time, instead of the singular one it had been forced to fight with last time, and every second, more and more stars went out as it lashed out with them against the tiny defenders. That widened the hole around it until the constellation was all but erased, causing a great rift of stars to widen, stretching halfway across the sky to connect the two breaches.

Shadows were raining down on the world now. They were bleeding from the open wound it had rent across the night sky, and the moon was flailing ineffectively to prevent any of this. It couldn’t. It lacked the power. The only thing that might be able to stop it was the sun, and it would not yet rise for hours. At least, it wasn’t supposed to.

Tenebroum knew full well that the God of the Moon had almost certainly warned it, and so, the new Lord of Light might appear on the horizon at any moment, which was why it was all the more important that it finished this quickly.

Tenebroum had accounted for this, too, though. It had already prepared a spell of unbelievable complexity, and even as 22 of the heads were singing a spell that held it up to the sky in such a way, the remaining 66 joined in, singing a new discordant melody in counterpoint.

It could feel the power building now, miles up, as its tendrils reached out past the starlight barrier into the void. There was a very small chance that somewhere out there, some leviathan or behemoth of such size existed that might disrupt Tenebroum’s plans, but it ignored that now as it got into position for the final thrust.

The moon was already attacking it and its tendrils with everything it had as the remaining stars in this quadrant of the sky marched on it or soared across the sky as fleeting shooting stars. assaulted it from all directions. Even those attacks were as buzzing flies, though, and the God of Darkness ignored them as its spell built to a crescendo.

Then, when all was in readiness, a single trembling note was all that was needed to unleash hell. The moon existed as a shield to shelter the world from the terrors of the night. It was a powerful, durable weapon against the darkness. In this case, though, the attack did not come from where it was aimed, though. It came from directly behind it, and that single ebon thrust of baleful energy was enough to shatter the giant glowing orb completely.

One second, it was lighting half the world and ineffectually burning away against Tenebroum’s outermost lair like a spotlight, and the next, its glow was fading as it broke into pieces, and each of those pieces dimmed to nothing.

As expected, the stars began to wink out of existence immediately. This started out, one by one, but soon became a cascade as the darkness spread farther and father. The night sky was being consumed, and soon, the rest of the world would follow.

What it had not expected was for the rush of magic to fill it as the moon started to reform as a dark orb, hanging as a dull red against the night sky where the old moon had hung. For a moment, it thought that it was about to be cheated of its victory against the Gods once more, but instead, as knowledge flooded its mind unbidden, it quickly realized that it was the God of the moon now and all that came with it.

Tenebroum hadn’t realized that was how that worked until that moment, but even now, it wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with a moon as the details blurred before it. Mentally, it shrugged and pushed all of that away as it focused on everything else. There was a thin blush of blue on the horizon now, which meant that he was coming.

Tenebroum very much doubted that it would be coming alone, either. None of this could be hidden, and the screams of the people around the world as they were eaten alive by shadows could not be ignored either. The world was over now, and when this was done, only Tenebroum would remain.