Tenebroum

Chapter 179: Catching the Scent

The Queen of Thorns loved nothing more than to hunt and prowl in the woods. She did it almost every night without attempts to slack or shirk, and she regularly brought her lord fresh corpses and carcasses to keep its favor. Somehow, though, despite that, the dread Lich still saw fit to ruin her joy by saddling her with a new responsibility.

“But I don’t need help,” she protested. “Have I not bested every small God and Goddess that I have caught the scent of?”

“You have,” the Lich agreed. “This is not a punishment, though it can be if you wish it. It is exactly as you said. I need to catch the scent of something, but know not where it is.”

“But I can—” she started to protest.

“Silence!” the Lich roared through her mind, making the Queen of Thorns tremble as the power of that command froze every part of her being. She felt it briefly sift through her soul, looking for signs of disloyalty before it continued to speak.“This is an old grave from centuries past. I must find it, and so I will add it to your endless hunt.”

The dark Goddess knew better than to question the darkness roiling in her mind a second time. Instead, she merely nodded and answered, “Whatever it is you require, I shall do.”

The Lich went on at length after that, explaining the worm to her in broad strokes and how it expected it to be some ancient god of decay or death that it wished to harvest and dissect. That was also when it explained the nature of the hound to her and how he’d vivisected to better understand it before releasing it into her service.

“It will obey you in all things,” the Lich promised her, “But never remove its collar. It is a powerful, single-minded thing, and it will rip you to shreds should you give it the chance.”

The Queen of Thrones doubted that as she eyed the gaunt and mangy, pony-sized wolf, but it had only taken a couple of weeks in the nighttime forests with it to see that there might be some truth to it. The thing was a monster that could rip the throat out of anything they encountered and had a nose sharp enough to hunt down anything she cared to name.

Neither of those frightened her. It was the way it looked at her, with a glimmer of malicious intelligence, that made her worry about what it might be scheming or planning. The Lich had told her it was no smarter than an animal, but she’d fought and devoured almost every animal that the forests had to offer her at this point, and none of them looked at her like this, no matter what form she took.

None of this was enough to stop her from doing what she had been created for; she just enjoyed it less now. Bloodshed was always fun for her. She enjoyed ripping her pretty to pieces when she was allowed to do so, but even more than that, she enjoyed stalking and hunting her prey for nights at a time before she attacked it to truly understand it.

That was impossible with this giant wolf in tow. It was a giant ball of rage and violence that never failed to charge loudly through the underbrush, baying for blood. Its prey wouldn't get away very often, but it was exhausting work that could be handled much more elegantly.

Despite that, they were still largely successful. Together, over the next few months, they brought down small groups and large game, but there was no joy in it. It had become work instead of pleasure, and her trusty hound made short work of even notoriously difficult-to-kill beasts like hydras with their nearly infinite capacity for regeneration.

Of course, there were some monsters that tested the hound’s limits as well. The Lich had told her that the thing could not be killed, but on a day when they were ambushed by a hunting party made up of a vengeful goddess and a band of angry forest children armed with those terrible blows, the Queen of Thorns was fairly certain that the thing was dead, at least for a day or two.

That was bound to happen eventually, since it had sense of stealth or timing. The beast rampaged everywhere that it went like a force of nature, but the Queen of Thorns didn’t mind. She just melted into the foliage and hunted them one at a time until the only living things left in that piney wilderness were small birds chirping pleasantly away while she tried to decide what to do with the beast.

The answer, of course, turned out to be vast quantities of blood. It healed or perhaps revived nicely after that. She wasn’t sure which.

After that, she stayed away from the forest for a while, instead leading the things through swamps and anywhere else she could think of that a worm might like to be. She was desperate to get rid of this burden and return to the life she’d had until she’d been saddled with it.

However, they found no trace of whatever it was the Lich was looking for. Not until one day when they were crossing a particularly rugged section of foothills on the north side of the Wyrmspires. The two of them were there in search of fresh hunting grounds where the denizens wouldn’t be expecting them enough to set an ambush, when suddenly the hound stood stock still, sniffing the air.

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The Goddess paused, unsure of what had happened. Did it sense another trap? She wondered.

However, before she could even attempt to draw that information out of the beast in its limited way, it bounded off into the night. The Queen of Thorns let her legs grow longer so that she could stride ever further in an attempt to keep up with the thing’s desperate sprint as it charged through the hills, but eventually, she was forced to transform into a cat just to keep up.

When it reached the Barrows, the only reason it stopped was because she yelled out, “Freezzze…” in a strangled voice that was more of a cat screech than human words.

Still, it chaffed at her command, and for the first time since the Lich had assigned her this monster, it tried to disobey her. It struggled at its collar and tried to push forward the last few feet to what it had found. It even growled at her, but in the end, there was nothing it could do. Their Master’s magic was much too strong.

She didn’t know what it was the thing had found, but there was no way she was going to let it go even one step further before she found out. That would have to wait until she recovered from the unexpected exertion, though. She took a few minutes to catch her breath and watch her hound’s lungs heave like it expected to start breathing fire at any moment. They’d eaten up miles in only a few minutes, and both of them were spent.

When the Goddess recovered, she asked, “What is it? What’s down there? Is it the worm our Master seeks?”

The hound didn’t answer. It couldn’t, but it barked as it pawed the ground restlessly in a way that she read as restless. Honestly, despite its strange bestial intelligence, that was as close as she’d seen it come to warning her so far.

Once she walked past it and started to descend into the gaping doorway, it began to bark and growl more loudly. Was it concerned about her? Was it dangerous down here?

She didn’t know, but it didn’t matter to her. There were few things in this world more dangerous than her, and to prove the point, the claws on all six of her hands grew as she descended the stairs, and she traced the stone with them, just loudly enough to let whatever was down here know that she was coming.

Sadly, the effort at intimidation was wasted. The tomb, or whatever it had been once, was empty. Worse, it was ransacked. Something had been here once, but the sarcophagus was broken on the floor, and the bodies in the alcoves had been desecrated and smashed. Whatever it was the Lich had been looking for was probably long gone.

The Goddess of Thorns sighed. Now, she would never be rid of that beast.

She stood there for several moments, studying the scene. If the hound outside wasn’t still baying and desperately howling like it had chased the fox back to its lair, she wouldn’t have given this place a second look. It had obviously been sacked and looted by men long ago. Still, the beast seemed certain, so she would look harder.

The Queen of Thorns reached out to the plants that had taken root in the cracks between the stones that made up the floor, the molds and fungus that blossomed in the corners, and the slime in the areas nearest the door where water pooled. Then, when she had collected her audience, she began to hum a melody.

It was a sad song, and she’d long since forgotten the words. She wasn’t even sure which part of her had known it at first. Still, even so, the leaves and the mushrooms began to sway slowly in time to it.

Then, slowly, they grew and blossomed, sending little roots and tendrils wherever they could, searching for something that didn’t make sense. This was a slow process, for the dance of a plant was a very sedate thing. Even so, almost an hour after she started, a climbing vine on a wall near the far end of the tomb found something.

The Queen of Thrones walked to it specifically, and when she reached it, she placed three of her hands on it and began to hum louder. The effect was immediate. Plants might be slow to dance, but they were fast to grow, and as she filled it with life energy, it spidered across the wall, sending tendrils deep enough to make the outline of the hidden door unmistakable. Once she had that, she started to rip it apart with her bare hands, which didn’t take long, considering how old the stones were and how rotten the mortar had become.

The door revealed a set of stairs descending into the darkness. She strode down them fearlessly, though she had no idea what to expect. What she found, though, was nothing special. It was simply proof that whoever had built this tomb had been smart enough to create a decoy. That the chambers above had contained a false tomb and treasures was a little strange.

Surely the treasures should have been down here, she thought briefly before discarding the thought. Humans didn’t have to make sense. That was what separated them from the animals.

The room here was ancient and dusty, but it was still possible to read the carvings, and the squiggly lines that were probably worms combined with the carvings of skulls and starving me made it very clear that something terrible had been buried here. More importantly, though, there was every indication that this might, in fact, be what the Lich had sought for so long.

When she reached the casket and saw it was still sealed with a bead of lustrous lead and runes that were well beyond her comprehension, she stopped. This part of the tomb was still undisturbed, unlike everything else she’d seen so far, and she was almost certain that her master would flay her until she was nothing but shredded leaves and scraps of flesh if she screwed this up. This was what it wanted, and this is what it would get.

The dark Goddess carefully walked back the way she came, careful not to step anywhere she hadn’t already stepped, and then when she reached the area that had already been ransacked, she turned and exited the ancient mound to where the hound still paced outside in agitation.

She ignored how badly it wanted to slip the leash and go inside. Instead, it would find the closest blackbird and let the Lich know. Then perhaps it might reward her by freeing her from this slavering beast so she could go back to the joy of prowling the wild places on her own once more.