Tenebroum

Chapter 48: The Betrayed

Author's Note: This chapter is one of the darker ones to date. Probably not the darkest, but certainly top five. Reader discretion is advised.

Kelvun didn’t stop for anyone or anything as he ran up the stairs in the dark. He was in such a hurry to make it to his rooms that he didn’t even bother to find a real sword. Along the way, he briefly considered running to the nursery to fetch his infant son but decided against it because of how far away it was. He didn’t need a weapon or a child. He needed a safe place to hide until morning’s light would burn away the evil that had somehow turned up in his own home.

He idly wondered if his wife was safe and tried to remember where she’d been before the lights went out, but he couldn’t recall for the life of him. Remembering anything was impossible, with blood-curdling screams rising from the grand hall. There were closer ones too, but with the discordant symphony that the bard was still playing, he couldn’t figure out exactly how close any of that was from him.

It didn’t matter, though; nothing did. Once this was over, he could find a new wife, and he was sure he’d grow to love little Leo the Sixth almost as much as he loved Leo the Fifth. He just had to keep running; he would either stay ahead of it and get to his chapel, or he wouldn’t. He simply had to trust that the gods would protect a righteous man like him.

They did too, and as he closed and barred the door of the tiny room behind him, he was forced to admit to himself that he’d known they would the whole time.

“If there’s a silver lining in this, it’s that everyone who heard the message of that awful phantasm won’t live long enough to repeat it,” he assured himself as he lit a few of the candles in the room to try to dispel the darkness while he thought of some possible story he could spread in the wake of this event to divert the blame.

A peasant uprising might work, he supposed, but it would make him look weak as a leader. A goblin attack would be very appropriate for the goblin’s bane, but he hadn’t seen any reports of goblins within leagues of the city in years, so no one would believe it. Perhaps he could declare it to be an assassination by Dutton agents that was only partially successful, he thought to himself, brightening slightly as he paced back and forth in the tight confines of his chapel.

“I’m sure I still have those ridiculous papers from Gelwin about those raids that were supposed to happen,” he mused. “If I were to—”

Kelvun’s words were cut off by the sound of someone pounding on the door. He raised his flimsy weapon towards the sound as he quietly backed away from it, but whatever was out there didn’t sound strong enough to get through.

“Kelvun, you unbelievable coward, open the door!” a woman that sounded an awful lot like his wife shouted.

Kelvun only stood there quietly, trying to decide if this was a trick. If it was, then the door certainly needed to stay closed, but what should he do if it wasn’t? Should he take the chance?

“Kelvun,” she shrieked again. “I know you’re in there, and I know you’ve got a secret door for when you go see your whores; now let me in before those things find me, or I swear to all the gods I’ll never stop haunting you.”

For a moment, Kelvun thought about leaving the door closed, even though the pettiness in the face of death was more proof than he ever would have needed that it was really her. If she died, she would definitely haunt him until the end of his days, he admitted grudgingly as he lifted the bar on the door. That wasn’t the reason he was letting her in, though. He was saving her because it would make him look more sympathetic.

“Darling, I’m so glad you’re safe. I…” the lie died on his lips as he opened the door enough for the light to spill out on the malformed shape that was waiting for him. He only saw it for an instant before he decided to slam the door shut again, but that glimpse would be enough to haunt his nightmares for the rest of his days.

Only pieces of his wife were waiting there to greet him with open arms. Even in the darkness, it was clear she’d met a violent end and that whatever had done this to her had gone to great lengths to make sure that her face had been completely untouched. But the strange shadow that lurked behind her and talked through her mouth had a body that defied description entirely. It was a mass of tentacles and disjointed limbs more than a man or a monster.

The door swung shut, and the tentacles came forward, immediately pulling it open once more and pitting him in a terrible tug of war that Kelvun was slowly but surely losing.

“Kelvun - my darling husband, why didn’t you save me?” the thing that was using his wife’s corpse as a hand puppet called out to him. “Where were you when we needed you? Where was the hero that the bards sing about while your guests were being devoured by zombies?”

He gritted his teeth in the face of the horror, but the taunts sapped his strength, and slowly but surely, the sinuous limbs found their way through the gap, and finally, before they could grab him, he let go of the door, leaped backward, and picked up his flimsy sword.

“You can’t touch me here, vile demon!” he yelled in defiance. “Return to the pit that spawned you, or face my righteous wrath!” Defiance was the only emotion he had left that could overwhelm the terror and sadness that flooded his body. It was one thing to let someone die, but it was something else entirely to view the result like this.

“Darling,” the head of his wife whispered as the thing that wore her skin took a step forward. “Consecrated ground doesn’t stay quite so holy if you use it to bang the maids. Everyone knows that you weren’t praying all those hours you were locked away in there…”

The abomination slowly ignited with flickering white bursts of holy fire here and there as it advanced into the room. It didn’t seem too disturbed by this, and the end result only gave him a better view of the inhuman puppet master as it moved toward him.

Kelvun considered himself a brave man. He’d ridden into battle on countless occasions and was beloved by the people for his deeds, but this was too much, even for him. As much as he might not have loved his wife, seeing her like this broke fragile parts of his mind, and with one slash at the air to try to keep the thing back, he turned and ran for the far wall. With his free hand, he fumbled with the candelabra that was the switch for the secret door and pulled it. If he could just escape until morning, then he could…

The passage that opened up behind the small altar was dark, and it should have been empty, but as Kelvun charged in, he ran into something soft and cold almost immediately. He raised his sword to strike without knowing quite what was blocking his way, but the grip of slender fingers on his wrist stayed his hand for a moment as whoever it was pushed him back into the room that he was so desperate to leave.

“No!” he yelled out, somehow powerless before the shadowy creature’s gentle grip, “I have to… We have to run before it—”

“Shhhh, calm down, Kevvie…” a familiar voice soothed.

“That’s right - relax. Everything is going to be just fine…” a second voice agreed.

For a moment, Kelvun experienced a wave of relief as he realized that Beatrice and Emalin were safe after all. He’d feared the worst when they’d gone missing weeks ago amidst the heat and the mobs, but now, when he needed them most, they’d come to save him. Then he realized that was impossible. Not only would they have no way to be here right now, but it would have been impossible for these two women to work together in anything.

This had to be some trick of evil, he decided as he brought his sword down as hard as he could against the creature that barred his path. “Kevvie - why would you hurt us after all we’ve been through?” Beatrice’s voice warbled in a cruel mockery of her normally sonorous tones.

The first blow bent the bejeweled ornamental blade, but that didn’t stop him. The fear and the rage boiling up inside him demanded an answer, and this was the only weapon he had. It took two more strikes to snap it off at the hilt entirely.

“It looks like my little lord’s sword gave out again,” Emalin tittered.

“Doesn’t it always, though?” The thing wearing his wife’s skin answered from behind.

The monster that was holding him laughed at that in both of her voices as it finally stepped into the light. After what the evil had done to his wife, Kelvun had steeled himself for the worse, but the result was more terrible than he could have possibly imagined. Something had killed these women and stitched together the pieces of their corpses in a way that was as asymmetric as possible, leaving him with a two-headed five-armed shambling horror. The fifth arm hinted that more than two bodies made up this monstrosity, but Kelvun tried very hard not to think about how his third mistress Annise might fit into that answer.

“Wha-what do you want with me?” he demanded of the horror as it started to smoke in place, and the remains of the holy incantations made it smolder slightly.

“I just want to be with you, Kevvie,” Beatrice answered, “Forever and ever and ever…”

“That’s right - the darkness promised us that after it was done with you, we could spend all eternity together!” Emalin agreed.

“No!” Kelvun screamed. He was trapped, but he’d be damned if he’d let them take him alive. He still had the useless hilt of his sword in his hand, but the cheap metal had fractured at an angle, leaving a few inches of steel on the hilt. He swallowed as he jabbed it toward his neck. He wasn’t sure if it would be enough to kill him quickly, but he hoped it would be. It would be better to drown in his own blood than to endure any more of this horror show.

The blow never landed, though. Inches before the steel would have buried itself in his right jugular, one of the tentacles from his wife’s puppeteer wrapped around his wrist and stopped him. “Now, now darling,” she cooed. “If you died now, you couldn’t share eternity with each other. You’ve loved making all of us scream for so long. Now it’s time to return the favor.”

Kelvun didn’t have a chance to finish wrapping his mind around that awful idea before he was dragged into the darkness by the two monstrosities. He was halfway down the winding private passage before he realized the sound he was hearing were his own screams, and they only stopped when he saw that the passage now intersected a new rough-hewn tunnel that someone had built to invade his home.

That shocked him. How had someone dug a tunnel underneath his palace without his notice? How long had this plot against him been brewing? Suddenly the memory of the moment he’d short-changed the swamp forced itself into his mind unbidden. That was when he was certain he was damned.