As he walked through the woods, Krulm’venor didn’t dare think about how close the Lich had come to being murdered on this very spot. That wasn’t because the thought made him uncomfortable, though. It was because it made his heart sing like nothing had in years.

Now that he had a skull full of goblins, keeping secrets bordered on impossible, so it was better simply not to think at all. In that sense, he had finally become the perfect automaton that the Lich had wanted him to be for all these years. He didn’t think about who he killed or why he did it. He didn’t think about all those dwarves he had burned alive. He certainly didn’t think about Oroza and how she had finally managed to slip the chains of the Lich’s commands.

All he thought about was the next goal, and today’s goal was a simple one: to burn this forest and everything in it to ashes. He didn’t start that immediately, even though it would have been satisfying. Instead, he wandered through the moonlit glades, hoping to attract some sort of attention from the locals.

Each time some small beast like a fox or an owl flickered across his path, the voices in his head would open up in a hungry chorus of baying and obscenities. For a moment, his only desire in life was to run the thing down and rip it to bloody shreds, but he resisted. He was here for bigger game.

“Kills it!” a small chorus of goblins screeched.

“Feed us!” another shouted over a gibbering, unintelligible din of madness.

Krulm’venor struggled for a moment to retain control. While he moved through the forest, he kept the blue flames that were his tortured soul at the very minimum. The only visible fires were those that burned in his eyes. Everything else stayed bottled up inside his bones, which were filled with ever-burning coals and rage instead of marrow.

He could feel strange magics here. The shadows were full of them, though they were not the dark sorceries of his master nor anything to do with flames or other elements that he had a passing knowledge of. They were thinner than that; they were insubstantial, like cobwebs or the oil sheen upon still waters.

It could very well be a trap, Krulm’venor realized. Behind these illusions, or whatever they were, there might be whole armies waiting in ambush just beyond what he could see. He didn’t care, though. He welcomed death, and that was even true when he was still relatively whole. Each time the Lich sent Krulm’venor against a new opponent, he hoped that the darkness would finally commit some fatal overreach and that he would finally meet his match and be put out of his misery.

Once he broke apart into dozens of lesser versions of himself, he didn’t care what happened to himself at all. This didn’t make him brave. There was no bravery left in his hollow metal bones. He was filled only with fire and madness now. He would have felt sorry for himself if he still had the privacy for self-pity.

When the first arrow finally came at him, it was much too quick for him to dodge. It streaked through the night, leaving a trail of white light in its wake, but just before it hit his skull and they saw whether its enchantments or the Lich’s forges were stronger, he ruptured, splitting into two. Each version of him was now a little to either side of the arrow, and it passed harmlessly between them before embedding in a nearby tree, where it exploded in a shower of sparks.

Maybe this will finally be the end, both versions of himself thought hopefully as they charged into the woods after their unseen target. Neither of them ran directly where they thought it would be. Instead, one version of the fire godling ran wide to the left, and the other ran wide to the right. More arrows came. Enough to know for certain that there was more than one of his opponents. Some even found their mark, and the copy that they stuck was either mangled or eliminated.

Most of the arrows missed their ever-multiplying targets, even though each division made Krulm’venors fires glow brighter each time, and soon the woods were full of flickering blue lights that might have looked like will-o-wisps to anyone watching the scene play out. The trees didn’t begin to burn, though, not until Krulm’venor had fully surrounded his quarry.

Thinking was harder now, but the plan was not a complex one. Surround the enemy so they couldn’t escape, then burn them alive. This was where the godling gave in to the dark voices that overwhelmed it somewhere around twenty different minds and bodies. This was when they began to cackle out loud in his voice instead of simply shouting obscenities in his head.

“No escape left for you!” one shouted.

“We can smell your fear!” another one yelled from somewhere not so far away. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Then, at an unseen signal, as soon as eighty-something copies of him completed the nearly quarter-mile loop, they all flared to life and began to burn with the unearthly heat they’d wanted to do for so long. By then, the godling’s mind was lost. Each version of it held only a single sliver of sanity that was overshadowed by the gibbering madness that boiled up inside it.

These goblins had never tasted elves if that was indeed what they were hunting, but they were hungry to sample them, and each lurching steel form ran at full speed, eager to beat out all the other versions of itself to be the first to taste the warm flesh of their enemies. While they moved, the forest lit up behind them in a curtain of flame.

There would be no escape in that direction. Not for anything of flesh and blood, at least.

The first instance of Krulm’venor arrived just in time to see the last of the elves disappear through the shimmering, mercury veil of some strange new portal magic. It immediately felt a pressure in its mind as the Lich moved forward to investigate it, but before either of them could do much more than glimpse it, the magic faded, leaving only the hoary old oak behind and an empty tree hollow bereft of magic.

There were more fire godlings in that burning glade now, and all of them advanced on that giant tree, driven to find the path that their meal had used to escape. For the original version of Krulm’venor, so much fire would have been enough, but the thing that he had become craved slaughter even more than the ashes that he left in his wake.

They’d never get the chance to find out more. Even as the first half dozen copies reached the tree and watched the spindly cobweb enchantments burn away to reveal the woods were alive with any number of other dangers, they knew this would not play out as they thought it might only moments before.

The hunters had become the hunted. The trap they’d sought to spring on their enemies had become a trap of its own. There were too many Krulm’venors left to care about that, though. As each giant beast and thorned dryad sprung from their hiding place, the field of battle became ever more crowded.

Suddenly, wooden talons and powerful jaws were tested against the steel that bound the many molten fragments of Krulm’venor’s soul, but in almost all cases, they were found wanting. Even bears and dire wolves lacked the strength to do much more than dent skulls or bend bones, and every one of them was immensely and enjoyably flammable.

Soon, the whole, smokey section of the forest smelled of burning meat, but that was only the warm-up act for the giant oak. It began moving as soon as a few versions of Krulm’venor approached it. However, before they could reach it, the tree giant came to life and smashed three of him to pieces with its two-foot-thick limbs.

Treant, the word came to mind. It was supplied by the Lich because he had never heard it before. “Perhaps she’s even a godling,” the Lich whispered. “Capture it if you can; kill it if you must.” Then it was gone again, leaving its pack of hunting dogs alone to fight the thirty-foot-tall giant.

“You tread on hallowed ground, monster!” the tree boomed in a voice that sounded like wind roaring through branches. “This will be the grave of all who are foolish enough to invade my domain!”

Krulm’venor wouldn’t have bothered to answer its foe intelligently, even if it had been capable of such a thing. Instead, hit hurled insults as much as fire, as the dozens of small battles and depravities were forgotten in favor of the new challenge. The goblins were now in the driver's seat, and they weren’t much more loyal to the Lich who had woven and bound their wretched souls than Krulm’venor was, but they didn’t need to be. They craved violence, and a giant that could crush their rigid steel bodies like they were nothing but dried leaves was nothing if not violent.

“I have beaten you once, and I shall do so again!” she screeched.

The longer the tree fought against them, and the more it manifested, and shaped itself to resemble a giant woman with thick, rough bark instead of skin and leaves and vines for hair. She might have even been beautiful if she wasn’t on fire.

The old wood was not yet burning, but the leaves had already flown apart into ashes, and the bark was smoldering. Even awash in curtains of blue flame, the oaken monster still raged. Every blow and swipe caused at least one version of Krulm’venor to wink out of existence. As the total number of its copies drifted down somewhere below 100, the diffuse consciousness that was the core of its mind found itself rooting for its failure almost as much as its victory.

Slowly, her cries of defiance morphed into cries of pain. The fire godling understood that all too well. Some small distant point of hope remained that she managed to die properly at least and that no trace of her was left behind for the Lich to study and corrupt because, to his myriad of eyes, it was looking less and less likely that she was going to win.

As strong as the behemoth was and as many steel goblins as it shattered, it could not bear the heat of the Lich’s unfire for more than a couple of minutes. Soon, wood was splitting as sap boiled into steam, and the wooden goddess was screaming in pain as much as rage as her strikes got slower and slower. After two minutes, she scarcely had the speed to connect her terrible blows with her agile tormentors, and after five, all she could do was make weak warding gestures as the goblins used metal talons to dig deeper and deeper into the veins of charred wood that penetrated almost all the way to her core.

It wasn’t until she stopped moving completely, and the entire grove had been reduced to a charred ruin, that the sixty-eight copies of Krulm’venor spread out into the night. Freed of their chains, they moved into the dark of the woods, looking to kill and burn.

They had no idea if they would find the elves or even other opponents worth fighting. They didn’t care. They only wanted to maim and destroy, and Krulm’venor had no choice but to let them. He’d long ago lost control of the mob, and now he was just along for the ride as waves of blue fire spread throughout the forest in all directions, replacing what should have been the coming with an endless inferno.