Tenebroum PLUS Ch. 144-145 (Patreon)

Ch. 144 - A Wider View

“Is it really over then?” Oroza asked, looking at the images the moon played upon her waters. “Is the age of man over? How long will the darkness rule this time?”

Lunaris shook her head. “The Kingdom of Hallen might encompass your whole world, Oroza, but it is but a small part of everything. The Underkingdoms are still largely intact, so I’m told, and even if the mages did not still stand, or the children of the forest, there would still be other champions. The Northern Kingdoms, the Westerlands across the sea, and even the Isles yet remain untouched, and they are just as full of heroes as anywhere else. This evil may fester and grow here, but like any fire, it will run out of fuel and exhaust itself soon enough.”

The two goddesses sat there on the small delta island looking at the moon Goddess’s scrying magic as the city burned, and crazed shadows multiplied to devour the whole place like a growing tumor. Both of them looked worse for wear after the last several years of ever-increasing violence. 

Oroza’s skin and begun to wrinkle, and her hair was more than half gray now. She’d never been particularly vain, and wouldn’t have cared about that if she wasn’t so weak. The Lich’s poisoning of her watershed with saltwater via the canal was taking it toll. She’d collapsed the thing again and again, but each time, it was rebuilt, and more plants and animals that made up her little world died as a result. 

The moon Goddess, by contrast, was looking as young as ever, but she was paler than usual, and she seemed thin and worn out. That was the way of things since that last terrible ambush on the moon. A full conclave of the divine had not happened since that awful night, but that didn’t bother Oroza. Someone would tell her if important things were happening, and the rest of the time, she would focus on thwarting the darkness wherever she could.

As Lunaris spoke, she waved her hand, and the nightmare that was Rahkin was replaced by a wider view of the word from high above. Oroza could only barely make out the peninsula that her river traversed as it lay there in the shadow of the Wodenspines. At this scale, it was impossible to see cities, but she knew where places like Abenend and Siddrimar must be. 

She’d spent some time exiled to the oceans, where she’d prowled restlessly and devoured what ships she could find when her river had been so forcefully dried out. So, she’d known that the world was much larger than she could see from the snow-capped mountains where her headwaters originated. Still, it was one thing to know and another thing to see. 

Even as vast a domain as the Lich now controlled, it wasn’t even close to the majority, and from this height, she could scarcely even see the slender tower of darkness that marked its domain. 

“Does it really stretch so far up into the sky?” Oroza asked, noting the black thread that rose far above even the tallest mountains before disappearing in the night sky above the two gently glowing women. 

“Indeed,” Lunaris nodded. “It goes past the domain of the wandering stars and even the fixed stars beyond them. According to the All-Father, it descends deep into the core of the earth as well. We know not what that monster plans to do with such a thing, but there are many possibilities.”

“It doesn’t seem to move or even do anything at all,‘ the river Goddess said as she dragged her fingers across the waters and dispelled the ugly illusion lest it somehow draw the dread eye of the Lich itself. 

“It doesn’t have to move,” Luaris breathed, suddenly speaking quieter. “There is very little darkness in the sunlit world, but past the domain of the dwarves, and forever churning in the night sky the number of shadows is truly endless. If the fiend ever figures out how to make contact with the reservoirs, who know which deity he might attempt to slaughter next.”

“It has been trying and failing to kill me for years now, and it has yet to succeed,” Oroza said with a thin smile, trying to put a brave face on their predicament. “Surely, when it comes to Niama or to you—”

“Niama is still grieving the loss of her daughters,” Lunaris said with a shake of her head. “And most of my battles will never reach your shores. Pray that they don’t, or we would all be lost.”

Oroza’s eyes drifted up to the sky, where the flickering constellations held the endless void at bay. From the moon, one could see the arcane arrangements that the stars held, like giant wards, but from here, all she could make out were the general shapes, like the Hunter and the Leviathan. The river goddess had no idea what it was such things must fight, and honestly, she didn’t want to. She had her own nightmare to face and was better off not knowing what the constellations and the moon warred against each night. 

The two Goddess talked a while longer after that, but since Lunaris had already given Oroza her message and begged her to abandon her one-woman war against any undead that should find themselves within arms reach of her river, she finally left in a ray of light to attend to other matters. 

That left the river goddess alone to ruminate on what it was she should be doing. The kingdoms of men had largely fallen everwhere that she could see, and other than a few small settlements like the Siddrimites that held the gap between the mountains and her banks, and the farm where the children of light lived in their tiny bubble of peace so far from the fighting, the rest of the world seemed to be dead or dying. 

That was true of places well beyond her salt-poisoned borders. The All-Father had sworn that he would repair Siddrim’s chariot so that his fiery steed could be gathered once more, but until the dwarf did that, the world withered, snows gathered, and mold blossomed. Oroza couldn’t remember the last time it had been warm; even the hottest days were merely pleasant now, and there were far too few of them. She could hear it in the whispers of grasshoppers and the creaking of the growing glaciers. 

According to the stories, that was the way of things in the last age before Siddrim’s rise, too, but Oroza did not know the old stories well. Until all of this, she’d been wrapped up in the rhythm of the seasons before all of this had happened to pay such ancient history much attention. She dearly wished she could go back to the days when she was only concerned about today, without care for the things that might or might not have happened hundreds of years before. 

Oroza glided back into the water at that thought, looking for some sort of comfort, but she found little. Though this river would always be her body and her home, it was dying. The resurgent darkness that the Lich called Cholorium sickened her, and the ever-growing amounts of salt stung her eyes. 

Still, neither one could stop her as she swam up river with ever increasing speed. The Oroza river spanned hundreds of miles from one end to the other, and she could navigate the entire length in less than an hour. This was not something she’d done much in the past, though.

Why should she ever be in a hurry when she could linger in the mangrove roots or explore shipwrecks that had been unearthed once more after the latest storm? That had been her way for the longest time, and she missed it terribly, but it wasn’t enough to stop her from soaring now as her long, sinuous river dragon form swam with mighty strokes of its tail. 

There were only a few spots she did not navigate the world like that at this point. The upriver shallows prevented it, of course, but not half so much as the wall of darkness that bisected her river almost directly in half. It was there, where the perpetual crust of ice marked a line in her domain, that she always paused. 

She could swim through. She told herself that. Even if the Lich had created some awful new trap, she could probably fight her way free.  

She didn’t try to, though. Some fears could not be escaped from so easily, and though she no longer had a real body, she could still feel those terrible shackles around her wrists and ankles. 

Instead of risking it, she rose from the water as a mist and dispersed along the band of grasses that ringed the edge of the shadows that were still part of her domain. When she’d first escaped and had a chance to study this thing, she feared it would continue to expand until her domain was cut in half. 

That never happened. Instead, it had merely sat there unmoving, issuing foul monsters nearly every night. So, while she could traverse her whole domain in less than an hour, this one spot took nearly half that time, and she was always on guard that some new terrible thing might exist to ambush her if she traveled during the night. 

Tonight at least she was lucky, and nothing stirred, letting her travel ever more north. Eventually, she left her river and her dragon form behind as she swam up the streams, fanning out into her headwaters. Her at least she could feel clean again. 

Oroza looked for the hand of man throughout the whole of her trip as she always did, but they were rarer now than they had ever been before. They were practically an endangered species. 

It was only when she reached the glaciers frozen solidly into mountain passes that she finally paused to think clearly. Here, she could do little to save the world or help anyone, but she doubted very much that anyone could hurt her either. She could probably crawl up into this giant block of ice and slumber away an age, hoping that when she woke, someone else would have solved this problem. 

She didn’t do that, though. She couldn’t. 

Her life, precious to her as it was mattered little in all of this. What did, was that she found something to do to turn the tide in all of this. Oroza no longer knew whether she would live a year or a decade. Until now, she’d been functionally immortal, but death didn’t scare her. Only the idea that she might waste that time without striking a blow against the darkness was enough to give her real fear.

Ch. 145 - Ever On - End Book 3

In the end, it was the children that convinced Jordan. Sister Annise’s book had certainly proved that there was something amiss, of course. It wasn’t hard to do that, the way the pages changed from day to today. It was clearly some kind of powerful artifact, but despite all his efforts to study and understand it, the only thing he’d even found within its pages were riddles. 

The idea that she’d made it herself was preposterous, of course. A blind woman, holy woman, could not do anything that a mage, or even an appearance like him, couldn’t, and yet he wouldn’t know where to start with something like this. He’d drawn up simple scrolls before and copied longer spells from ancient spellbooks, and in both cases, he could feel the magic intrinsic in the act. 

In this case, though, there was nothing. Flipping through the book, he could not point to a single sign or seal that radiated arcane might. Instead, the deeper he went into the tome, the less things made sense as the handwriting became more crazed and the messages it contained more nonsensical. 

Of course, the fact that the messages drifted away to be replaced by other contradicting ones didn’t make them seem any saner. Why should he care about who the wolf would hunt when freed from its bonds or what the rat would become when the missing piece was finally revealed. 

All he cared about was keeping the people in his care safe and finding a weakness to fight the evil that plagued the land. Though the former had gone very well the last couple of years, the latter, well, to say he’d made no progress would have been charitable. All this time, he’d had a dread relic forged by their enemy in the form of that terrible golden manacle, but he lacked the knowledge to understand its workings, let alone figure out how to turn its secrets against its owner. 

Still, until the night when he was woken up by a dozen children with tears in their eyes, he was content to pursue both mysteries in tandem. Why should they need to flee a warm, safe house that finally had enough food when there were no threats. 

The threat was coming though, the children promised him that much once the crying stopped and precocious little Leo explained, “Brother Faerbar has fallen, and the city with him.”

“How can you possibly know that?” Jordan asked. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe the child, but the fact that they could know something so preposterous only frustrated him more. 

As if to answer, most of the children suddenly pointed to the same spot in the sky. Jordan looked around but didn’t see anything beyond a scattering of stars. One was brighter than the rest, but it was nothing special, at least not until the children explained it. 

“His light has left his body, and returned to the sky where it was borrowed from,”Cynara explained. 

“His light?” Jordan asked. “You mean his soul?”

“No,” Toman answered. “High light - the light of Siddrim which was gifted to him. It has returned to protect the heavens, and he has gone with it.”

Most everyone else was unnerved by the glowing eyes of the children, but for Jordan he’d always been more concerned about the way they acted years older than they were. Sister Annise was bothered by neither and stood quietly in the doorway, watching this whole exchange with the patience of a grandmother.

“We must go now,” Reggie said next. “All of us. The keep is broken, and the way is clear; nothing will stop the darkness now. All we can do is outrun it.”

“Outrun it?” Jordan asked. “Better to defend what we have then—”

“We can’t!” Cynara pleaded as she gripped him by his robes. “Don’t you understand? What is coming is… it's like the tide. It cannot be stopped. They will come… not for us, but for everything that smells of light or life…”

Cynara was only eleven, or thereabouts, but the way that she gripped him by his robes while she tried desperately to talk some sense into him was remarkably grown up. It would have been adorable if the moment wasn’t so strange. However, when he met her desperate gaze, flickers of the terrible scenes she referred to drifted through his imagination. 

Moment by moment, the other children mobbed him, too, each pleading and grabbing, but as they did so, the most peculiar thing happened: the threads of their delusion encompassed him. Each one of them seemed to be trying to force their own little spark of awareness to make him understand. 

Separately, that was only enough to make scenes of distant battle or a darkened city flit across his mind, but when they all spoke to him with such urgency and stared at him with those glowing eyes, he was unexpectedly overwhelmed, and their vision became his vision. 

Suddenly, he was standing there at the shattered gates of Rahkin, gazing upon the complete ruination of the city. In front of him was Brother Faerbar’s charred body; Jordan knew it was him even though the corpse had been burned beyond recognition. 

The street was filled with corpses. Most of them lay where they had fallen, but some of them walked the streets looking for the living or piling the corpses of the recently dead into wagons for some foul purpose. None of that was able to tear his attention away from what was happening in the sky above the city. 

While columns of smoke still rose here and there, they were all but blotted out by the shadows of something darker and all together more terrible. Jordan’s mind could’t quite resolve it, but to his eyes it seemed like a mass of tentacles reaching from the heavens to devour the whole city. 

He’d seen engravings like that in some of the old books that described the time before time, but to see it in person, or whatever this was, his mind simply rejected the idea. It was too terrible to contemplate, and he stood there staring up in horror at the throbbing, undulating shapes until the vision finally faded. 

When he looked around the finally quiet room at the fearful gazes of the children, his resolve stiffened, but only for the sake of appearances. “Do you see now?” Sister Annise said. “The pyre burned, but its brightness was unable to burn away the smoke, even with so much kindling. Now, we must be away before the darkness stretches so far to the south.”

“Yes,” Jordan agreed with a shaky voice. “We must be away from that… thing at once.”

The only problem was there was nowhere to go. The Tolden River barred travel to the south, and the nearest ford was a day to the east, but there wasn’t much between here and the sea. South of the Tolden were the Trollmoors. Past that, there was only a narrow band of pine forest along the highlands before it reached the sea. 

There were a few villages that way, or at least there had been before the world ended. Jordan had no idea if they were still there now, but that was because it was no fit place for man or beast. Without their crusader with them to purge things like goblins, he didn’t really think that their herds would do very well. 

When he shared his concerns with the blind woman, she merely shrugged. “What need have you for herds or retainers when we reach the headlands? The Hermit would never welcome them.”

“Hermit? Headlands?” Jordan asked. He had no idea who the Hermit was, but he knew exactly where the headlands were, he just had no idea why they would ever want to visit them. They were an ugly storm beset series of mountains that took the worst of the weather that came in from the sea to the east. “I’m not sure what it is you're playing at, but I expect we will all get more than a little acquainted with starvation if we don’t provision ourselves properly for a trip to such a bleak place.”

“A few sheep for the road might suffice,” she shrugged, ignoring almost all of his questions, “But we must move quickly lest the dark rider or his flying rats catch us unawares.”

“I agree,” Jordan said, content with the knowledge that things he didn’t understand were in motion now. “By tomorrow, or at most, the day after, we should be gone from—”

“Tonight,” she hissed, grabbing him by his robe’s sleeve with her free hand. “Have you learned nothing from the book of ways? We must leave tonight at the latest, or all will be lost.”

“Tonight?” Jordan asked, looking at her like she was crazy. “But there is so much to do. Possessions to pack, people to organize, and, of course, we must—”

“Tell them to come if you like,” she said with a shake of her head, “But not where we are going. Say you travel Siddrimar, or past that to Abenend, but not to our true destination.”

“Why would you ask me to lie to everyone,” he asked, noting the children were already packing. “Surely they—”

“When they stay, and their souls are pulled from their cooling bodies, the dark one will know all that they do,” Sister Annise said as her blind eyes teared up. “It will know about the children and about us, but not where we will go. And that makes all the difference in the world.”

Jordan listened to her in this, but only because he knew enough about necromancy to be able to say that what she believed was entirely possible. So, reluctantly, he began to rouse everyone, and when most of the people who dwelled within his walls had assembled in the courtyard, he told them about his vision. 

That was a lie, too, of course, but it was the easiest way. He told them that he’d scryed past the horizon and see that evil was stirring this way because even that made a lot more sense than ‘the children see unimaginable horrors and a crazy lady and her even crazier book insist we run while we can.’

That spurred a massive debate, but almost to a man, everyone agreed that it was better to fortify and defend this place than it was to flee across unknown territory in search of safety. He could understand that. Jordan had felt exactly the same way less than an hour ago. 

That wasn’t enough to stop him from imploring them to listen to him, though. By the end, the mage’s words bordered on the apocalyptic, but only a few were willing to take him seriously, and almost all of those had a trace of light in their eyes. 

He thought about ordering them to come with him, but there seemed to be little point to it. So, eventually he wished them the best, and those who were going to flee alongside him. They took a small share of the wheat, some goat cheese, two of the cured hams, and wagon for bedding and other supplies along with a single draft horse and half a dozen sheep. 

It wasn’t enough to damage the prospects of those they left behind, and it would be more than enough to keep the bellies of the 17 souls that joined him as they made their way east after first looping around to the west. 

By the time they were heading toward their destination, Jordan could see a thin line of blue on the horizon. The idea that it would soon be light should have comforted him. That would be enough to protect them from any lingering evils after all. 

Still, it only made him feel more exposed. They were wandering toward a destination he could not yet see and did not understand with only the slenderest threads of hope, and that seemed to be enough for the children. For him, at least, it left a lot to be desired.