Tenebroum

Chapter 82: Divine Fury

The altar glided to a stop, fixing in its original place as the hunched figure began to laugh. It was a rasping, dry sound that sounded utterly forced. That only made it more bizarre, though. Then the thing began to point at Siddrim’s avatar, though it did not hesitate.

Instantly, the room filled with light as a blazing pillar of holy light descended from the oculus in the roof and consumed the dark creature in a cascade of divine retribution. With so many unknowns, he wasn’t about to take chances. For a moment, everyone was blinded, and it was only when that light faded that the avatar could see the golden skeleton that Todd had seen before rising to his full height. The mantle it had worn to hide its true form from the light had burned away to nothing, but otherwise, it appeared strangely unharmed.

Skeleton might have been the wrong word, though. Like everything else in this place, it was a bizarre mockery of life with three legs and four arms, and worse, a suit of armor built to match the subtle asymmetry that seemed to twist the whole monstrosity and leave its body and posture slightly off-center.

Armor might have been the wrong word too. After another moment of examination, he decided that it had much more in common with a crab’s carapace than it did with a suit of well-crafted plate mail. The joints seemed almost organic in the way that the plates rotated and moved around each other rather than covering the gaps with an underlying sheet of chainmail. None of them seemed to stop it from spreading its arms wide in a mocking bow.

“You fight when you should have run, and you chose this place of all places as your battleground… a very foolish move for a god,” it accused him, irritating the avatar further.

“When I strike you down, I will descend into the depths and slay everything you’ve built before I purge it with holy fire!” Siddrim’s avatar shouted before gesturing with his sword and consuming the foul creature in a torrent of flames.

That was when the pumps started again. The avatar ignored them, but it could feel the building shudder as something large beneath his feet began to stir. For a moment, the room was filled with rainbow as the spray over the oculus filled the afternoon light, but then, that prismatic cascade was replaced with darkness as something darker and opaque began to spray in its place.

Suddenly, for the first time in centuries, the avatar felt himself cut off entirely from his own godhead. Even though avatars were given enough of a divine spark that they didn’t need that connection, it had always been an ever-present thing until now.

Instantly its assessment of the danger in this place increased dramatically. No other villain in living memory had been able to cut it off from the light before, but somehow this creature had, and that meant it had to get outside.

As soon as the avatar’s flames slackened off and it prepared to leap to the main doors and out to the safety that the setting sun would provide, though, the skeleton spoke again. “You should be careful. We are in your sacred place, and such magics will only harm the beautiful decorations I have made for you!”

The avatar looked around and could see the truth in the abominations’ words, but he didn’t care. Let all the statues melt, and all the decorations burn. This place was an abomination on more levels than it could understand, and he would be happy to reduce the place to rubble and ash and build something more proper in its place.

“Well, for us, really,” the golden skeleton continued. “We will be spending a lot of time together going forward. Forever, actually.”

The avatar ignored the grating words, and instead, he spread his wings and bolted across the room. Well, he tried to. Partway across the room, though, one of the melting angels that decorated the pillars in the center of the room reached out unexpectedly and grabbed his wrist.

The hand broke off immediately as he glided by it, but the very act that something had grabbed him sent him spinning as he landed in a defensive crouch, giving his opponent all the time in the world to interpose itself between the angelic avatar of light and the door.

“You’re not going anywhere,” the skeleton asked. “You can’t. All of this is for you. Decades of effort and planning. All for you, in this moment in this place.”

Siddrim’s avatar wanted to shoot back about how ridiculous this all sounded, but he couldn’t as he watched the horror show unfold all around him. He’d known that this whole temple was corrupted, but once the gold started to come off of the scorched pillars and melted statues, it showed all of the foul corruption that lay under that thin, gilded layer.

Each man-shaped figure hid an undead construct. Some of them were skeletons made to mock the religious figures they depicted, and others were utterly inhuman. They were the only abominations hidden beneath gold and plaster, either. Under every flaking copy of Siddrim’s holy sign was a defaced copy or a blasphemous symbol waiting to be revealed. As each symbol of its power faded and was replaced by its enemy's mockery, the avatar could feel the very air turning to poison.

A moment ago, this was a temple of light. A strange one that bore all the hallmarks of heresy and sabotage, to be sure, but a home of Siddrim nonetheless. Now it was an abomination. The walls writhed with mocking corpses, and every symbol worth mentioning was degrading into something terrible before his very eyes. Even the oculus on the ceiling that should have let him commune with the rest of his own divinity was blocked by foul water and blood so dark it was almost black.

It was a trap, and somehow he’d managed to fall into it without ever suspecting its existence. There was only one answer for this, it decided grimly as he lifted his right hand to the bottom of his large hilt. He would have to cut his way out.

The avatar’s first impulse was to turn to the side and cut through the two-foot-thick sandstone wall that separated him from freedom with his blade of light, but now sooner did he pivot than the mocking abomination lunged toward him, forcing him to parry the shards of darkness that the thing was suddenly wielding in all four of its hands.

“You cannot hope to best me in combat, you monster,” the avatar yelled, beating him back. “No matter what trickery you plan, this is still hallowed ground and…”

His sword struck a glancing blow on the silvered carapace but barely left a mark. Since a lance of light could easily piece steel, he was left wondering what enchantments had been used to fend off his blow. That’s not what distracted him, though. What distracted him was the feeling of the light fading from the earth beneath his feet.

The avatar had no idea how the monster he was facing had done it. In fact, he was fairly sure it shouldn’t even be possible, but unless it was a foul illusion, he couldn’t deny it was happening. A moment ago, the ground beneath his feet had added to his strength with every beat of his heart, but now it felt like he was wading through polluted mud with every step.

“Is it?” the monstrosity asked. “I confess, I look forward to better understanding that little trick after I have devoured your soul.”

A single shard of fear shot through the avatar at such a vile statement. That was something else that should be impossible, but with everything else that was happening, well - he needed to end this.

This time he didn’t try to strike out at the wall. He struck out at the vile creature that seemed to be in charge. He rained a series of savage blows that would have been enough to sunder an iron-bound gate or any suit of plate mail he’d ever seen before now, but the construct shrugged off blow after blow. Twice he shattered the short dark blades that continuously moved to parry his wild slashes and thrusts, but each time a new weapon of the same design appeared in the monster’s hand.

Without a conduit to the sky, striking him down with pure, holy light again wasn’t an option, but then, neither that blast nor the holy fire he’d tried several times since had done much to slow this monster down. All it had done was remove a few of its abominable gilded servants from the battlefield. The ones that were left were still assaulting him, and even though they were little more than a nuisance, their grasping hands and claws were enough to slow him at critical moments in the fight.

Even so, eventually, his superiority in both weapons and skill became obvious when his four-armed enemy was forced to sacrifice his lower left arm to keep his skull from being cleaved in two. The severed arm clattered loudly to the floor as he raised his sword again to cleave the vile monster in half. He was careful to avoid the spray of dark fluid that came out of the hollows of the ulna and radius bones, though.

“The only fate that can possibly await darkness when it meets the light is death! You—” The angelic Avatar’s firey wings flickered for a moment as it felt a jolt of cold fire in his back, somewhere near his left kidney, just before the whole area started to go numb.

Even as he avoided giving the creature the satisfaction of crying out in pain, he instantly knew what had happened. The monstrosity hadn’t lost an arm on accident. It had lost it on purpose, and once it had fallen to the ground, one of its other servants had picked it up and thrust it between a joint in his armor.

The avatar reached down with his left hand to pull the blade out but found that there was nothing there. It instantly worried about where the thing might have gone, but it didn’t have too much time to think about it because as soon as he had only one hand on his hilt, the necrotic abomination lurched forward again, attacking with its remaining three weapons to press its newfound advantage.

Todd’s body was, at this moment, an embodiment of the concept of light. It was a vessel filled to the brim with an avatar of his god, and that powerful radiance spilled out of him everywhere. It took the form of the fiery wings behind him and the glowing armor that encased him. It even made up his giant five-foot-long blade that was a source of solar radiance itself.

He was also the only light left in the room now that everything else had been polluted and plunged into darkness, and now he was flickering. Even though he continued to fight, cutting stone and bone in his quest to purge his vile opponent, he could feel something twisting and changing. He was the avatar of Siddrim, but increasingly he remembered that he was Todd too. Underneath the divine might was another hero, one that would not waiver and would not fail.

At least, that is what he would have said a few minutes prior. Now though. As the light faltered, his eyes were playing tricks on him, somehow. The bodies that lay all around him were no longer the shattered mocking corpses he’d dispatched or the last few bound worshipers that he’d tried so hard to save a few hours ago. In the fading light of his wings, they were the fallen templars from years past and all the other people he couldn’t save. To his left was a miner that had gone missing when the goblins came for thieves, and to his right sat his mother holding his father’s mauled body in her arms.

Todd ignored the obvious trick, continuing to attack his shadowy opponent with a newfound rage. “This will not save you,” he shouted, “You toy with my memories at…”

His words faded as he brought his sword to a halt inches above the mutilated young boys that stood in front of him. He instantly recognized them as Bradwin and Cole, and even though he knew it was some strange sort of trick, the guilt that he felt over these two deaths, in particular, left him unable to attack them.

“Go on, Toad,” Bradwin said, taking a step forward. “You already killed us once. Doing it again shouldn’t be so hard.”