Whean emerged from the hole into the depths at the ter of Tenebroum’s ir, it was just part of the flood. Shadowy monstrosities raged past it in all dires. In the past, the Lich would have goo great lengths to avoid letting its enemies encroa its domain, but sometimes, enemies were best fought at the very heart of one's power, despite the risks. After all, it had been necessary for Siddrim; who was to say it wasn’t necessary for this thing or whatever might flow out of the depths .

  The giant spirit looked no differently here than it had in the icy caverns miles below where they now stood, and it immediately tried the same tactics. It once again attempted to distort reality here, as it had done below, shifting the space between spaces to make the already rge cathedral practically boundless so that it could, in turn, make its already huge size even rger, but that was a trick that Tenebroum no longer allowed.

  Here, the Lich had absolute power, and nothing stirred even as the magic rippled outward through the stone and tunnels of its true body. It owhese stones by graveer and magiks for half a mile in any dire, and the monstrosity would find not evei crack that it could leverage against it.

  “That will not work a sed time,” the Litoned loudly through the steam pipes of its an in a series of voices that were almost musical. “Nor will I allow you to escape.”

  “Escape?” The Titan asked with two dozen heads in its alien nguage, leaving the rest of them to ugh at the idea that it clearly sidered preposterous. “You are the ohat has fled. Since you led me to somewhere so iing, though, I will five you for wasting my time. I—”

  The Lich did not wait for the monstrosity to finish speaking before it struck. Instead, it shed out from every dire at oh a swarm of hundreds of inky bck tentacles. Here, it had the strength to ma as much power as it wanted, and right now, it was overflowing with darko fuel even its stro attacks.

  It had dozens of appeo fasten to each of the giant’s limbs. That was saying something sidering that even without its strange distortions, it was nearly tall enough to reach the vaulted ceilings of the uemple some forty feet above its head.

  It ripped and tore at Tenebroum’s tentacles as it tried to get free and mound some kind of ter-attack. There was nothing for it to fight back against, though. The Lich was everywhere and nowhere now.

  Sometimes, it succeeded in dissipating them pletely with its monstrous strength, but when they were destroyed, it was no great loss. They were ephemeral things that were less ected to it than the zombies it wielded. More often, though, the Titan merely severed them after the things had started burrowing into its very soul to sap its strength. This was a trick that Tenebroum had learned from the Queen of Thorns and the way she devoured other nature spirits, and it served it well here.

  That would not be enough, though, because the Titan tio gain strength the same way that Tenebroum did: by dev and abs the neverending herd of monstrosities that was still erupting from the depths. That was why the Lich had decided on this form of attack, though. It didn’t seek to murder its oppo; that would be terproductive. It wao co it away from the world so that it had nothing to feed on. In a way, it wasn’t so different from what the small god of stantinal had doo it so long ago. The only difference was that Tenebroum would finish in hours what that godling had hoped to aplish in decades.

  “You think you tie me down with these parlor tricks?” the dark Titan’s foul voice yelled in defiance, but the Lich ig.

  The thing might feign un, but it had already had a dozen arms and legs ripped off by the force of the Lich’s infiack, and many of the others were at least partially bound. Tenebroum saw no way for the creature to resist. It tried using its strange magic again, singing a plex chorus of words in a way that was simir to how the Lich had learo cast its stro magics, but the Lich was ready for that.

  It could not uand the nguage that was being used to cast the spell that the thing was juring, but it didn’t have to. It could feel the way that each word rippled iher as it tried to ma some power that it thought would save it. The Lich could see those effects, and so it teracted those efforts easily enough by creating a terspell iime and bsting it out of its eighty-eight mouths in scream after well-tuned scream.

  It was long past the time that Tenebroum would have to adapt and eo its oppos. From now on, that would be a problem for its enemies.

  It was the lord of this pce. It was a god of darkness with a shadow that was cast halfway around the world. No one could do anything in its presence if it did not allow it, certainly not an aging relic without a spark of light to fight against a force of darkness.

  There was a moment, toward the end of the fight whehing tried to unicate with Tenebroum again. It roared inprehensibly in its alien tongue before it was silenced forever. Whether that was to beg for mercy or offer some kind of deal, the Lich would never know. This wasn’t an equal; it was just a rger piece of prey than normal, and it was now fully tangled in Lich’s web.

  Slowly, the Titan’s bloodless blue limbs were ed o a time by the Lich’s grasping appendages. Soon, the thing was drowning in inky bess in a way that could no longer be properly expressed by darkness or shadow. It was no longer a part of the world in any real se was already practically ed and only a few more steps from being digested pletely.

  In the depths, the two of them had fought for days to a standstill, but up here, Tenebroum had all but won within an hour. Even now, the monstrosity that had dared defy it was all but dead. It might still struggle, but that was all that it could do now, aanly made the process of rending it apart that much more satisfying.

  You weren’t as even as worthy a foe as the All-Father, Tenebroum thought bitterly, wishing that it had a real challenge.

  The real challenge on its mind would almost certainly e in the form of the moon and the stars. It would be soon, too. Even as it started to formute a new pn aly how it would best use this much power, though, the memories of the Titan that it had finally devoured began to bubble to the surface, and the Lich turned away to focus on those.

  What it saw was fusing. There were no text clues to say where they were or evehey were. The mountains looked different, and the os had only the fai waves. There did not seem to be mu the way of forests, either. Instead, it watched the Titan lord over a host of things that were barely men from the peak of a stone ziggurat.

  The whole se struck Tenebroum as primitive, though it took it a while to say why. Ss and poverty existed in every age, after all. It turned out that the missiail was that the creatures had not even ied steel or iro. Most of the troglodytes wielded implements of bronze or stone, but before the Lich could study that, the se was shifting. There were other titans, too, though none of them were the size of the thing it had just defeated.

  There were no remarkable insights here, the Lich decided, after watg the dizzying array of strange images flicker by it. It was ready to tuhe entire affair out and refocus on the moon, and the situation outside that had passed by in its absence while it had been focused on the fires of creation.

  It paused from doing that when it saw the suhough. Acc to the memory, such a thing was unpreted and threw everyone who saw it into panic. Before that moment, there had never been a sunrise before, apparently, which was ahat the Lich found both odd and desirable. Instead, the world had been lit merely by wandering stars, and ugly, squat creatures had struggled with monsters amidst the foggy fern forests and the ft, sy seas.

  Susights were insistent and sometimes even tradictory, but the idea that ohere had been no sun, and then there was, fasated the Lich. Moments ago, it was hopelessly bored with frog people or what it was they were doing, but now it was taking in every st detail as it struggled for insight on how to best fight the light.

  There was no fighting the light, though. Not then. It razed the entire civilization to ashes in a single day a even their gods deep into the earth looking for shelter. Tenebroum watched as the decades auries pyed out after that in the blink of an eye, but still, the pale things merely cowered and did nothing to strike at the gods above. They simply raided the surface for food areated before the end of the night, much like the goblins now might.

  That part of the things story might have gone on forever were it not for the dwarves. They had steel and sughtered the primitive monsters, sending them ever deeper in their quest to get away. After that, the memories became indistinct. Tenebroum didn’t o see more. All it o know was that these things had failed, and light had taken their world as a result. It would correct their mistake and would use their strength to do it.