Tenebroum PLUS Ch. 217-218

Ch. 217 - Something Missing

Something terrible was happening, but Jordan did not know what. He could barely even point to something specific, but that didn’t matter. What mattered were the things he couldn’t see or had glimpsed only briefly. 

“But the prophecy was fulfilled, and Malkezeen is no more,” he sighed, rubbing his eyes. “So what is this feeling?”

With a sun back in the sky for half the day, his job had become much easier. He no longer had to spend most of his time micromanaging the stars and could instead focus on learning from the past and studying the loose threads of the future. 

Still, beyond clouds of swirling darkness that he’d spotted on the last several nights, he would be hard to point to a single piece of evidence that proved anything. The All-Father was still missing, but according to both the gods of today and the journals from the past, that wasn’t so uncommon. He really did just disappear for decades and centuries sometimes. If he begged Niama or one of the other terrestrial gods, they might seek him out for Jordan, but as God of The Moon, he was remarkably poorly placed to look for someone who built his kingdom beneath the mountains.

He left the Book of Ways open on his desk all the time now, hoping to catch it twitching to life in some unguarded moment, as it sometimes did. That never happened, though.  He was left in the dark, with no clear way to determine what the problem that was nagging at him might be. 

He’d brought it up to Leo yesterday at Sunset, just before moonrise, after the boy had finished his ride, but the new Sun God didn’t share his concern. “Evil yet lingers, I agree,” he said, looking right through Jordan as he stepped off of his flaming chariot, “But nature is healing. It’s only been a couple of weeks, and I can already see it. Everywhere by Blackwater is—”

“Exactly!” Jordan exclaimed. “If the Lich is dead, then why does that shadow remain.”

“I don’t know,” Leo answered with a shrug. “The land is too stained to make much sense of it. There’s no life left to feed on there or people left to hurt. Even the Red Hills doesn’t have too many goblins left. I could try burning the land to ash to see if that helps nature take its course, but…”

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Jordan answered with a shake of his head. “We should focus on the healthy parts of the world, not those that are past saving.” Though he would be more than happy to intervene or call for his fellow gods to do the same if only they had a proper target, striking blindly would only cause new problems. 

“Malkezeen is finally eradicated, I think,” Leo volunteered hopefully. “That’s good news, right? I’ve found no more of his rats in the last couple of days, and I looked hard.”

Jordan smiled at that. Despite inheriting so much awesome power, Leo was still just a young man who was eager to please. Sometimes, Jordan forgot that. He wished that he had more advice to give their young sun, but neither of them had much experience in their current roles. Apparently, that wasn’t uncommon in the wake of periods of darkness when the slate was cleaned. The world would survive somehow. It always did before, in the never-ending cycle of darkness and light that seemed to be the only common refrain throughout history. 

“I did notice that a city seemed to be missing today,” Leo said finally. While Jordan was still lost in thought. “That’s weird, isn’t it? How do you suppose a whole city vanishes?”

“What? Where?” Jordan asked, instantly concerned. He’d been so busy looking for things that didn’t belong that he hadn’t even bothered to look for something that might be missing.

Leo didn’t know the name of the city, but he described the location, and Jordan murmured, “Tanda, hmmm… That’s a big place. They were recovering nicely from their recent brush with that beast, too. I wonder what could have happened?”

Neither of them had any answers, but as soon as the half-moon rose later that night, that was the first place that Jordan looked, and it was, in fact, gone. There was only a faint trace of darkness in the sands, but that wasn’t what stood out to him. Slowly, he increased the light of the moon to look for any clues as to how a large and prosperous city might just vanish into thin air. When he did so, he didn’t find what he was looking for, but what he did notice was the way that his light refracted strangely around a portion of where the city once stood.

As he studied it, he heard the faintest whisper, “Leave me be, but it notices you.”

There was fear in that voice, but even before Jordan could even wonder at who it was he was talking to or ask a question, a single woman strode out of thin air to appear on the glowing sands. The sight would have been strange with any woman appearing like that, but the sight of this woman took his breath away. She was made of marble, shot through with veins of gold. Even if she hadn’t been moving, she would have been one of the most beautiful statues he’d ever seen. 

Jordan took a moment to look for a trap, and then when he found nothing obvious, he manifested on the sands not so far from her in his ghostly pale form. Leo had called it offputting, and said that he looked like he as dead, but Jordan thought he looked regal and mysterious like this. 

“You think your light will protect you?” she asked, not even a little surprised that he’d appeared. “Not from it. The darkness has grown too strong to fear the light.” 

“I… who exactly?” Jordan asked. “And who are you exactly?”

“I am the Voice of the City,” the woman said simply, with only the smallest of bows, “And you are the man in the moon.”

“Well, I suppose that’s one way of putting it,” Jordan said with a chuckle. “But who is it you’re afraid of, and what exactly happened to your city?”

“Tanda has been… put away,” she answered after thinking about it for a moment. “It is too dangerous to leave the city lying around where anyone could find it.”

“But Malzekeen is dead,” Jordan said. “The danger is over. You can—”

“Malzakeen is not at issue, and honestly, I am shocked that my predecessor did not do the same thing to protect her gleaming white walls,” the city goddess answered dismissively, “but she valued the happiness of the people more than her own survival. I, on the other hand, will do what is best for them, no matter how much they might hate me for it.”

“Predecessor? If you know that Malzekeen is dead, then who is it you’re afraid of?” he asked. 

As he spoke, he studied the way the light refracted around her, revealing an invisible doorway just behind her. Somehow, she’d hidden away her city in a strange little pocket dimension. It made a strange sort of sense to him, given that the Gods and Goddesses of Cities were said to have absolute power over everything inside their boundaries, but even so, he'd never even imagined this sort of use for the power before, much less heard of it being used like that before.

“The darkness has become unchained,” she said, looking around nervously. “My master… I-I wish I could still serve it, but it has thrown off the shackles of humanity or mortality that it might have once possessed. It has become a great haboob now, and I fear it will scour this world clean.”

“Who is… was your master?” Jordan asked. “I have seen nothing.”

“You are the light,” she snapped, “And the light cannot see the darkness. I—”

“Here you are, my child…” A voice echoed out from somewhere deep in the night. That stilled the woman instantly. “You thought you could hide from me in the light? You thought you could work with them?”

The voice was a echoing, grating thing, and it put Jordan’s teeth on edge from the first moment he heard it. It put him on his guard too, and he increased the brightness of the moon, pushing the darkness back even further from the dune the two of them stood upon as he looked for the source. 

There was something swirling out there at the edge of the light, but each time Jordan adjusted the glow it slipped away to somewhere else. Each time it left behind only the indistinct impression of a man.

“I make alliances with no one,” the woman said solemnly, “And I would never betray you. Please know that, but I have other obligations now. I must—”

“Your only obligation is to me!” the voice roared. “Anything else is a betrayal.”

The woman gave no reply to that. Instead, she bowed once more and stepped backward into nothingness. The gate that led into her domain vanished as soon as she’d finished using it, leaving Jordan alone on the pale sands, looking for an enemy it could not quite locate. 

“It is no matter,” the disembodied voice growled. “She cannot escape me for long, I will deal with you first.”

Jordan’s first impulse was to flee as well, but instead, he started to cast a spell. That was something that he hadn’t done in a long time, and it felt good to do so. As a student, he’d known perhaps two dozen spells, and he’d only really been good at three or four of them, but now his knowledge of magic was almost encyclopedic. He probably still didn’t know quite as much as Taz, but he almost certainly knew more than any living mage. 

Instantly, he was surrounded by a constellation of tiny, flickering stars that rotated around him. This would have been a fairly useless spell against anything else, but if the thing that was attacking him was so strongly aligned with the darkness, then he could do much worse than summon a swarm of fireflies. They were not insects, of course. They were glimmering motes of pure moonlight typically used to fight the shadowy monstrosities that had managed to slip by the stars from time to time. At first, Jordan thought that was what this thing might have been, but it was clear this was something larger.

The darkness that was swirling hundreds of feet away from him started to encroach despite the bright moonlight that surrounded him. That was a troubling sign, and with a word he sent thousands of motes of lite shooting off in all directions, looking for his true enemy. Even as he did so, though, he was already summoning a second wave. That was good because the darkness was growing, not shrinking. 

The inky blackness rose up like a wave around his clearing of light on all sides, swallowing every one of the tiny motes with little more than a ripple. Then, despite the focused moonlight, it surged toward him. 

Jordan was not defenseless, of course. He summoned beams of light as well as domes and barriers even as the light of the moon continued to increase above him. He blasted whatever this was back in a dozen places, but still, through all that, he could find nothing vital to strike at. He was fighting an undifferentiated mass of evil, and retreat was quickly beginning to look like the most valid option as the walls of darkness grew ever closer and higher while they encroached on his position.

Ch. 218 - A Starless Sky

While a single tendril of Tenebroum’s vast spirit distracted the glowing man that could only be the new God of the Moon, The newest of its dark riders raced skywards. The man was doing damage to it, and it could feel whole stretches of shadow boiling off every minute, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to keep the man busy while it struck at the stars. 

It was only by luck that the God of Shadows had stumbled across him in this place. It had planned to strike at the stars again with another towering shadow while it launched its main attack elsewhere, but that would not be necessary now. The mystery of the missing city had drawn both of them here, and thanks to that, Tenebroum now had an answer to that riddle, too. Its Voice of Reason had somehow become the Goddess of that city, and she was holding it somewhere far away where it could not devour it.

Where it could not devour the city yet, Tenebroum clarified. It was a morsel that it would feast on eventually, but not today.  

For now, it needed to fight larger battles. First, it would strike out at the moon and stars, and then when those were dealt with and it had access to the eternal abyss of night that lay beyond them, it would strike out at the sun. When that happened, only one of them would survive, and Tenebroum was fairly certain it would be victorious. 

So, it tested and probed and at times let the new Moon God think that he was winning while its new bat winged servant soared ever higher into the unwatched night sky. It would probably be the first and last flight of the shadowy creature; Tenebroum very much doubted that it would survive the fireworks that it was about to unleash. 

The dark rider did not head toward a weak point in the arcane array of the constellations, though there were several. Instead, it flew right toward the heart of the densest constellation of stars. It was a large circular mass that was almost as bright as any of the others, and the humans called it the Shield for good reason, even if it doubted they had any idea that it was the lynchpin for the entire spell that kept the infinite night at bay. 

Tenebroum chose to strike there both because the night sky was a lot stronger now than it was when it had last attempted to crack the barrier via sneak attack and because when that constellation came undone, the ripple effects would be enormous. 

As each moment passed, the darkness waited for the Moon God to notice and do something, but the man was more concerned with the shadows boiling around him than anything that was happening in the sky. That was a terrible mistake. 

Just after midnight, the skull that had been Krulm’venor until so recently detonated in a black fireball that would have been invisible to any mortal onlookers despite its mammoth size. The dark violet fireball rippled out, finally ending the existence of the long-suffering godling. It wasn’t a mercy of any sort, though, because Tenebroum’s efforts to maximize what would follow in the wake of that explosion had rendered it well and truly insane. 

The same was true for the thousands of copies that rippled out from that singularity of evil, though. Each one of them resembled one of its explosive death's heads that had become so ubiquitous during its recent military campaigns than it did the fire godling, but they were anything but simple explosives. 

The world might not have seen that explosion, but the Mood God did, and he vanished instantly, returning to his domain in a gleam of light even as the moon began to rotate. That was no matter. The element of surprise didn’t last forever, and it was already much too late. 

While the forces of light tried to react, its weapon had already reached its many targets, and each of those tiny fiery heads exploded again. This snuffed out a few of the weakest stars all on its own, but that was not all they’d been built for. Out of every one of those explosions, dozens of midnight black, distilled goblin souls crawled out of the violet flames, hungry and spoiling for a fight. 

One moment, the entire night sky was defending against the darkness as usual, in an interlocking phalanx of light that spanned from one horizon to the other, and the center of that formation was facing a knife in their backs. The goblins alone were nowhere near enough to turn the tide, but then, they weren’t alone. Under the best of times, the stars faced an infinite midnight menagerie of formless, shapeless monstrosities. Now, its distraction was overwhelming them, and even as Tenebroum watched, whole waves of stars were winking out of existence. 

It began to move then, back to its lair for what came next. All the stars in the sky were moving now as the Moon God attempted to compensate for the sudden and unexpected loss at the center of its formation. Those disruptions rippled out, over and over again, through the night sky, creating endless weak links and minor leaks. When Tenebroum reached its lair, it targeted the one that was most directly overhead and soared skyward, far above the heights that it usually lingered at.

Last time it had done this, it had been as a tenuous needle, attempting to complete only the barest of circuits with the infinite abyss. This time, it was a tower, that was still nearly a mile wide as it rapidly approached the stars while dozens of its heads sang the songs that held the magic for such a maneuver together. 

Everything was going according to plan now. As it rammed into the central hub of the Ram constellation, it shattered it utterly, taking out dozens of defenders without slowing down. Those defenders were not the point anymore. Now, it had access to two wells of infinite darkness, and it was linked to them above and below. Even as the moon began to bloom to life and focus its rays on it, Tenebroum was ready and shrugged off the first focused attack that it launched. 

Once, long ago, when the children of the forest had pinned it with their arrows, those moonbeams had burned right through its misty form. Now, they were lost in the tower of darkness that it had become. There was nothing for it to strike at any longer. It had become a singularity, and only oblivion existed inside its vast spirit now. 

Tenebroum lashed out with dozens of tendrils this time, instead of the singular one it had been forced to fight with last time, and every second, more and more stars went out as it lashed out with them against the tiny defenders. That widened the hole around it until the constellation was all but erased, causing a great rift of stars to widen, stretching halfway across the sky to connect the two breaches. 

Shadows were raining down on the world now. They were bleeding from the open wound it had rent across the night sky, and the moon was flailing ineffectively to prevent any of this. It couldn’t. It lacked the power. The only thing that might be able to stop it was the sun, and it would not yet rise for hours. At least, it wasn’t supposed to. 

Tenebroum knew full well that the God of the Moon had almost certainly warned it, and so, the new Lord of Light might appear on the horizon at any moment, which was why it was all the more important that it finished this quickly. 

Tenebroum had accounted for this, too, though. It had already prepared a spell of unbelievable complexity, and even as 22 of the heads were singing a spell that held it up to the sky in such a way, the remaining 66 joined in, singing a new discordant melody in counterpoint. 

It could feel the power building now, miles up, as its tendrils reached out past the starlight barrier into the void. There was a very small chance that somewhere out there, some leviathan or behemoth of such size existed that might disrupt Tenebroum’s plans, but it ignored that now as it got into position for the final thrust. 

The moon was already attacking it and its tendrils with everything it had as the remaining stars in this quadrant of the sky marched on it or soared across the sky as fleeting shooting stars. assaulted it from all directions. Even those attacks were as buzzing flies, though, and the God of Darkness ignored them as its spell built to a crescendo. 

Then, when all was in readiness, a single trembling note was all that was needed to unleash hell. The moon existed as a shield to shelter the world from the terrors of the night. It was a powerful, durable weapon against the darkness. In this case, though, the attack did not come from where it was aimed, though. It came from directly behind it, and that single ebon thrust of baleful energy was enough to shatter the giant glowing orb completely.

One second, it was lighting half the world and ineffectually burning away against Tenebroum’s outermost lair like a spotlight, and the next, its glow was fading as it broke into pieces, and each of those pieces dimmed to nothing.  

As expected, the stars began to wink out of existence immediately. This started out, one by one, but soon became a cascade as the darkness spread farther and father. The night sky was being consumed, and soon, the rest of the world would follow. 

What it had not expected was for the rush of magic to fill it as the moon started to reform as a dark orb, hanging as a dull red against the night sky where the old moon had hung. For a moment, it thought that it was about to be cheated of its victory against the Gods once more, but instead, as knowledge flooded its mind unbidden, it quickly realized that it was the God of the moon now and all that came with it. 

Tenebroum hadn’t realized that was how that worked until that moment, but even now, it wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with a moon as the details blurred before it. Mentally, it shrugged and pushed all of that away as it focused on everything else. There was a thin blush of blue on the horizon now, which meant that he was coming. 

Tenebroum very much doubted that it would be coming alone, either. None of this could be hidden, and the screams of the people around the world as they were eaten alive by shadows could not be ignored either. The world was over now, and when this was done, only Tenebroum would remain.