Tenebroum PLUS Ch. 210-211

Ch. 210 - A Brief History Lesson

From his view of the glowing orb high above the world, Jordan saw many things. He saw places he’d never dreamed of and faraway cultures he’d never even heard of before. There were too many to list, though the ones that worshiped the moon in some capacity were most apparent to him, and not all of them were in a pleasant way. 

In the faraway land of Rogan, the Ananani dwelt high in the mountains, and each month, they sacrificed living, breathing men and women to him every month to make sure that the new moon regrew and had the energy to become the full moon once more. On the plains of Morrin-kahm, the horse lords of Vargol held ecstatic rituals and dances on the night of each full moon. People didn’t die to these, at least, but they could be crippled or maimed just the same. 

Jordan would have rather spent his time watching over the children, but the Lich’s efforts had let a host of shadows sneak through the barrier in places where they were spread too thin. Now, it was up to him, as much anyone, to resolve that and expunge them one thin moonbeam at a time, wherever he found them. This, of course, required him to spend as much time turned away from the heavens as he ever had before, but he’d gotten so good at the constant game of chess in the sky that it was slowly but surely become an afterthought, letting him track down monsters made of darkness one at a time. 

Shades, silent, shadow behemoths, and the menagerie of evil that lurked out in the outer darkness of the night sky were fearsome opponents for the living, but they were nothing to him. All he needed to do was spot them, focus for a moment, and they would evaporate into nothingness. 

Sometimes, he found other opponents that could not be dealt with quite so easily. He noticed that Tanda seemed to be recovering from its brush with a fearsome monster, but there were no signs of undead about. Indeed, the strangest thing about the city was the shadows that it cast. Something wasn’t right about the place, but he could not exactly put his finger on what it was. 

Still, as his gaze drifted further north, he saw that the Lich’s armies had almost completely stopped their efforts to conquer. They no longer had the strength to take the field against an army of prepared men. Instead, they dwelled in caves and prowled in the shadows, looking for the unwary. Despite the fact that some of the monsters's more powerful servants still existed and several castles were still firmly under their sway, they were no longer a force to be feared. Instead, they were an endemic pest that would still kill hundreds or thousands more before they were rooted out. 

Even with all that searching, though, it took time before Jordan spotted the true threat once more. Unlike the servants of the Lich or the shadows, the beast that Lunaris’s prophecies spoke of moved fast and hid cleverly. It was only because Jordan traced the path of destruction down from Tanda that he found it at all. 

As soon as he found it, though, Jordan knew where it was going. Leo. Jordan did not know when or where the two of them would meet, but as long as Leo held the silvered blade, they would have to. That was the way that destiny was written, after all. As Jordan watched the giant chimera, it became apparent that it was searching for the light-eyed boy, too. 

As the monster moved south once more and prowled angrily through the ruins of Rahkin following the months-old scent of light, Jordan could not intercede directly, though. Theoretically, nothing stopped him, of course. His knowledge of things that should not be was the only thing that bound his hands; if he’d never seen that damned book, he would have done his best to kill or weaken the thing, but as it was, that was not his part to play. 

He could have, at any point, tried to strike Malzekeen down with pure moonlight, even though it wouldn’t have worked. He could have also warned the children directly that it was coming. 

Prophetic dreams were certainly in his purview as the God of the Moon and stars. However, except for the occasional dream to assure his children that Leo would one day return and that the boy was fine, Jordan resisted the urge. Were it not for what he’d read, both in the Book of Ways before he’d ascended and the other journals that he’d begun digging through now that the stars had returned to their proper places, he would have, but he knew two things with certainty now. 

The first was that this was hardly the first time such a scenario had played out. Jordan had reviewed hundreds of volumes of his library, often at random, and he had found nothing but the same miserable histories playing out over and over. For human nature, he expected that much, of course, but it seemed that in the same way night followed day, bad times followed good, and evil rose up again and again throughout history. 

Malzekeen wasn’t the only agent of this destruction, of course, but they were one of the most common and most powerful, thanks to the unholy combination of war, plague, and famine that had fused together. There had been others throughout the ages, though. The Weapers, Pardeshmerah, the Star Stealers, Kalagoth’s Horde, and even giant monsters from the deep had all risen up at some point to endanger the world, but each time they’d been beaten back. 

The Great Serpent of Gadorah had eaten the sun once, and now its bones merely made up an archipelago of some size far off the western coast. The Gods had apparently worried that it would arise once more, just as Malkazeen seemed to every few centuries, but so far, they had stayed quite quiescent, with only a single volcano that erupted boiling blood to indicate that any life remained in that old darkness. 

The second thing that he knew, thanks to the things he’d read in the Book of Ways, was that any intercessions he could make were likely to make things worse. At least, that had been the way of things when he was a mortal, and it didn’t seem likely to have changed now that he’d become a God, especially since he no longer had the book. 

Well, since the book no longer works, he thought in frustration as he looked at where it had sat on the shelf. He’d let it sit in the field for months before finally risking a trip to the world below to retrieve it, but it was nothing but a book full of empty pages now. It was inert.

Still, as it had slowly taken his sight, he’d learned many things that all amounted to the same thing. To see the future was to see the path laid out before you, and the temptation to leave it and try to find some shortcut would only amount to folly. He’d seen a hundred ways to kill Taz, but all of them had ended with some or all of their deaths. 

It was ironic, but the right answer had been to simply sit on his hands and read while his eyesight faded. It was the opposite of heroic, and he expected that Sister Annise had suffered much the same fate. After all, she’d come to warn them of danger, only to lead directly to her own death. 

Why have a book that told the future if he didn't dare to do anything to change it? He couldn’t say. 

The tome was a tool of prophecy, but that was hardly unprecedented throughout history, and he was slowly discovering that. Prophecies seemed to be almost as regular in their rhythms as the cycles of the moon. There were prophecies for when this sun would die and when that evil would rise, and right now, the prophecy that seemed to matter most was when the new dawn would come and chase away the shadows that had haunted the world. 

He could only find parts of that one in Lunaris’s journals. She had not thought to leave him a complete version of the thing for easy reference, but then maybe that’s because he wasn’t meant to know it. It was clear enough to him at this point, though. A boy born of darkness would wield a sword of light and cause the sun to rise once more. It wasn’t especially clear if Leo would be that sun or he would die in the fight, but there was little Jordan could do about that just now.

Despite scouring her books, that was all the information he could find. Well, that and all the information that Siddrim had taken to prevent it. For a new sun to rise, the old one would have to set, and apparently, the Lord of Light had done his level best for centuries to avoid that fate. He’d devoured many a would-be hero’s light just to make sure that they would never rise to eclipse him. 

Lunaris didn’t think much of this practice, but it wasn’t her place to stop him. Still, she dropped lines here and there about this prophecy as if she’d heard it from someone,  even if she’d never said who. 

Jordan had asked Niama about that, but the Goddess had merely shrugged. She’d told him there was no God of Fate, at least not currently.  “They’ve existed before and will exist again, but destiny is not as enduring a force as nature or the stone beneath the feet of the mortal world, so sometimes it just… fades away.”

“So you’ve always been the Goddess of nature, and you’ve known more than one God of Fate?” Jordan had asked, trying to nail down the details. 

“Always is a long time,” she’d laughed. “Nothing is always. Nothing except the dance between light and dark and life and death. I concern myself with living, though, so like the All-Father, I’ve been around longer than most. I’d tell you to try it, but Gods of Light… they don’t last quite so long as other forces.”

Jordan had thought about those words long after she’d left. It reinforced just how little he knew about what was going on. He didn’t even know where the All-Father was, though no one seemed particularly concerned about that. “He’s the oldest of us and rarely gets involved in these things beyond making something from time to time,” the Storm Goddess had said at their last meeting. “Now that he’s made the blade, he might retreat from the realm of mortals for a decade or more. It’s his way.”

Jordan was unconvinced, but who was he to gainsay another Goddess when he’d barely gotten his feet wet. He was fast becoming an expert at stars, but that was it. What he wanted, even more than to stop fighting that endless battle, though, was to find someone to talk to about all this strange destiny magic. 

If you can simply hand out prophecies to end evil, then why not do so for all evils of the world and be done with it? He often wondered. That would have been too easy, of course. There had to be some reason for it, even if he didn’t know what it might be. Still, as Jordan watched Malzekeen’s progress back toward the children’s tiny village, he desperately hoped that this time the prophecy would not fail.

One way or another, it would all be over soon, and at this point, all he could do was watch.

Ch. 211 - A Taste of Light

They were married after the harvest, less than a year after his return. Everyone would have said that was long overdue, of course, but Leo hadn’t noticed. He’d been too busy spending time with Cynara while he worked through his complicated emotions and what he wanted versus what it was he thought he should be doing. Still, no matter what he thought the right thing to do was, his heart won out, and on a bright day, they stood before the entire village and said their vows. 

It was a simple ceremony, as all things were in Wayward, but the cake that was served was made from real wheat that had been ground from their own fields and real sugar that had been boiled from sugar beats they’d only recently harvested. It was the best, and perhaps last, good day of Leo’s young life. 

It had been so strange to see Cynara in a borrowed dress and blushing nervously, considering that he’d always looked up to her as a warrior first and foremost. Those days were long behind them now, though. He was taller than her now and had been for a long time, and even if she was four years older than him, he didn’t care. They were both in their twenties, and neither even remembered their parents, so it wasn’t like anyone could tell them what to do. 

At this point, all either of them wanted was to be together, which was easy enough. Reggie and Toman were already helping Leo to build a small house for the two of them. By the time the first snows of winter fell, they would be safe and warm together in a way that no one could interfere with. At least, that was the plan. They never made it that far. 

It was later evening, when the fires were lit and dancing was started that the thing struck. Leo had not noticed anything amiss in the woods while cutting down trees in the days leading up to his wedding, but then how could a man in love notice anything at all. The Lich might have hidden an army in the shadows of those groves, and he would have been too busy thinking about the way that Cynara’s hair smelled or the way her laugh sounded as he counted down the days to their blessed event. 

So when the beast howled and smashed down the beginnings of the palisade that they’d been building to flinders, it took everyone by surprise. No one was wearing armor, and only a few people had anything, even approaching a weapon nearby, and the first man that the giant wolf-thing picked up and bit in half didn’t even have time to scream. He was just gone, and only his boots and a bit of his legs remained. 

The next surprise, though, was when the thing spoke through its second head while it continued to devour with its first. “Yes! At last! We taste the light on this one. I have found it at last!”

At first glance, Leo had thought it was a wolf, albeit one that was larger than a horse. That was not the case. What stood before it was not a wolf but a chimera of some kind. Even as almost everyone else ran, either for safety or for weapons, he stood there, studying it. It had the head of a wolf, the head of a rat, and the mane of a lion, and it stood almost twice his height. It was a terrible monster, but it was far from the most terrible monster he’d fought so far, and he did not shrink from it. Instead, he took a step toward the thing. 

“Leo,” Cynara hissed, “You can’t. Not dressed like that.”

“I would protect you even if I was unarmed,” Leo answered before kissing her, “But I am never unarmed so long as I have the light.”

The monster tensed as if it was about to pounce toward Sam, and the dark eyed boy she’d been dancing with, but paused the moment Leo shouted out, “No! you will not have them!”

That gave the chimera a moment of pause, but even so, it might have continued to ignore Leo until it saw the silvered blade manifesting in his hand. Then, both its head and all of its aggression focused on Leo instead. 

When the Goddess had given him the weapon, it had glittered brightly even before he’d wielded it in anger for the first time, but now that he’d purged so much evil with it, the thing burned with inner light as much as a reflected light at this point, and it shimmered like a piece of the sun itself. That glare made the thing flinch ever so slightly when it saw it. 

“You think that you can defeat me? Even with that?” The wolf rumbled in a dark tone that promised violence. “I shall feast on your strength!”

That was the only warning that Leo received before the monster bounded forward. Cynara stayed by his side, but only for a moment before she decided that she should get her weapon or perhaps her armor. He didn’t care so long as she was out of danger. 

Leo, on the other hand, stood there perfectly still, waiting for the thing to reach him. He didn’t have to wait long. Despite the fact that it was almost a hundred feet away, it only took a few strides before it was on him like an avalanche. That was when Leo moved. 

The wolf's head struck at him first, with reactions almost too quick to follow, but he could tell the blow was meant to miss and drive him toward the second blow, which would come from the rat’s giant incisors. Leo sidestepped the first blow, and then, instead of parrying those awful yellowed teeth with the second as he’d intended, he cut right through them and deep into the lower jaw of the beast as it recoiled in pain. 

“I know not who you are or for what dark purpose the Lich created you, but you picked the wrong village,” Leo shouted as he pivoted back into a guard position to await the next surprise. 

“You think that shade created me?” the thing laughed through its wolf mouth while its rat mouth slowly healed in a grisly, slow-motion sort of way. “It is but an echo… a memory… It has only lived for decades, but I have existed and have already devoured it.”

Leo had no idea if that was a bluff that was meant to intimidate it or not, but he didn’t have time to weigh the truth of the words because the thing attacked again and again. It snapped twice at him, predictably, and then it tried to rake him with its claws. Even rusty as he was, without armor, he was moving incredibly fast, though, and dodged each of these blows. It wasn’t until the thing’s mane attacked him that it finally struck a blow, though. 

What he’d thought was just some strange decorative element suddenly became a tide of tentacles, and even as he forced the wolf to pull back with a feint, a wave of them came after it, latching painfully to his flesh in a dozen places. Leo felt them start to pick him up, but with the backswing, he severed the connections, sending him tumbling instead as the stumps that had latched onto him slowly shriveled up and flaked off of him. 

The wolf growled at him and then prepared to pounce while he was on the ground. It would have, too, if an arrow hadn’t suddenly sprouted in its eye socket. He didn’t know who fired it, but as the beast howled in pain, he rose to his feet and saw his wife standing in a nearby doorway, holding her bow. 

“You think your friends can save you, whelp?” the rat roared. “I’ve devoured whole towns a hundred times larger than this one with no effort at all.”

The chimera lashed out at him again, but this time, Leo was ready for the third attack, and he sliced away the tentacles before they ever reached him. One of the Johansen boys wasn’t so lucky. There were other warriors joining the fight now, but the monster seemed to ignore them and their steel blades. Leo didn’t quite understand why until Kal got too close to the main while he was hacking away with his axe, and the slimy tendrils reached out to grab him. 

Leo shouted a warning, but it was too late. They didn’t yank the older boy off his feet as they’d done with Leo. Instead, they drank him dry in moments as his skin became wrinkled and sunken. One moment, he’d been a young man with his whole life in front of him, and the next, he was a desiccated corpse. 

“What out for the mane!” he yelled, though he wasn’t sure anyone heard him over the din of battle. 

Leo only had a few moments to wonder why he hadn’t met a similarly grisly fate, but the answer sprang to mind almost immediately: the light. It was only the blades that had been illuminated that the thing seemed particularly concerned about. None glowed half as brightly as his, of course, but even Reggie’s dully-lit blade made wounds that didn’t heal immediately, unlike the steel weapons that most people had. 

Unfortunately, every time it was sorely wounded, it just devoured another villager, and in seconds, it was as good as new. It still fought Leo, but now Leo understood. This wasn’t a single combat to the death against an unintelligent beast. This was a battle of attrition. The fight continued on, and he and other warriors both struck excellent blows that would have killed or maimed anything else, but it would simply devour another opponent and keep on fighting. 

That didn’t really hit home, though, until the thing sent Toman tumbling to the ground covered in blood. The older boy had fought fiercely, but he hadn’t noticed the subtle shift, and the beast had whirled around, raking him with one of its terrible claws. 

Leo wanted to rush to him and save him, but there was no time for that. He wouldn’t have been able to do that even if it was Cynara who lay dying at his feet, no matter how much he might want to. Instead, all he could spare was a quick glance at his dying friend and a silent prayer that he would manage to heal his own wounds and recover. 

“This ends here, beast!” Leo yelled. “I’m sending you back to the lowest pit where you belong!”

The beast turned and regarded him, and Leo thought he saw something like recognition flicker across its bestial features. “You are no Siddrim,” it growled, “You are no Eldrim or Tearin-Far or any of the other Sun Gods that came before him. You have no chance to defeat me!” 

Leo had no idea who most of those people were, but despite those bold words, the monster seemed more cautious than it had at the start. That made sense, though. It wasn’t just his eyes and his blade that were glowing with light now. It was his whole body. He was radiating enough light to turn night into day now, and that worried that thing. He could tell. 

Leo was tired, too, of course, but there was nothing for it. This was the reason he’d been gifted this blade. He could tell. He could feel it in the way it moved in his hand. The Goddess had told him that he would purge a great evil, and though he hadn’t been impressed by this at first sight, there was obviously more to this monster than he’d first expected.