Tenebroum PLUS Ch. 152-153 (Patreon)

Ch. 152 - A Long Time Coming

At dusk Jordan received an invitation to dine with the man that the villagers called the Wise One, or more commonly, Tazuranth, the Great and Powerful. This struck Jordan as a little ostentatious, but then there were many Mage Lords at the Magica Collegium that insisted on such pomp as well. 

They rarely named themselves after mages of legend, though, he thought ironically. 

Despite not being invited, Sister Annise insisted on coming, and when Jordan told her, “You should probably stay behind until I learn more about our host, and we come to some sort of arrangement,” but she ignored him. 

“The Book of Ways says that I am there at dinner tonight,” she insisted as if that meant anything. “So, I am afraid I must attend.”

Jordan sighed inwardly but didn’t pursue the issue further. Surely even the most callous host wouldn’t deny a blind woman food, would he?

Jordan’s concerns were needless, as it turned out, and the servants invited her in, almost as if they’d expected her, further deepening the mystery. It was only when they sat down at a table heavy with food that their host finally joined them.

He wasn’t at all what Jordan had expected. He’d expected a gray master in elaborate robes and extensive titles. He’d expected the typical obsession with protocol and pecking order that he’d come to associate with mages powerful enough to have their own demesne, let alone mages with enough power to raise some kind of illusion around it to protect it from the outside world. 

What he found instead was a man that was little older than him, in stained shirt sleeves, who began eating almost as soon as he sat down.

“What?” he asked with a mouth full of roll as Jordan looked at him in confusion. “Dig in. The food will get cold. We can talk about your journey after we’re done. I have an important astronomical alignment to observe in 44 minutes. We must be quick about these things!”

Though Sister Annise continued to look at the man as if he were a snake, the absurdity of the situation was enough to put Jordan almost immediately at ease. This wasn’t an archmage; instead, he was just like any number of other senior students from the Collegium, and that memory was enough to make him smile wide for the first time since Brother Faerbar had left the manor, never to return. 

The three of them devoured the best meal that Jordan had eaten since last year's harvest in record time. Honestly, they ate like kings; everything was good, from the mashed potatoes and the boiled carrots to the buttered rolls and the piping hot prime rib. 

There was some conversation throughout dinner, but it was limited largely to pleasantries, and whenever Jordan or Sister Annise tried to ask about something more substantive or explain something he would deflect right back to the food, or ignore the statement entirely as he focused on his feast, or checked the hourglass that he’d brought with him from somewhere upstairs. 

Through all that, Jordan managed to learn a couple of things.  Foremost was that their host seemed to insist on calling him Taz, and he seemed almost allergic to formality. He did listen, though, when his manservant said, “Please, sir, do try to keep your elbows off the table when we have company over.”

Those were all normal enough, but in places, like when Taz said, “Well, sometimes stars do surprising things, even after you’ve been staring at them for a century or two. It’s always best to keep an eye on them lest they start to wander too far.”

The idea that anyone could watch anything for a century or two was impossible, of course, unless they’d stumbled into the lair of a small god, of course. The man almost certainly meant that he was continuing someone else’s vigil that was documented in an old book, or perhaps he was part of an order that devoted themselves to such things. 

Jordan didn’t know. What he did know was that he needed to get to the bottom of this. The man was obviously a mage, though. Even though he seemed too young and too relaxed to have any real power, the way he would casually use minor spells to summon food from across the table after he’d cleared his plate or animate a napkin to dab at his mouth instead of simply wipe at his mouth showed that he had real power. 

He enjoyed every mouthful, and it was only when the servants were asking about desert that he suddenly stood and said, “Sorry, out of time. Perhaps next time, Bernard.”

He jumped up with his hourglass and ran to the stairs. It was only when he reached them and said, “Well, are you coming? You’ll want to see this, trust me. Its not often that a constellation reorganizes!”

Those words, strung together in that way, meant nothing to Jordan, but he still wanted to see what his host was talking about. So, he stood and followed the other man up the stairs. By the fourth floor of the steep spiraling staircase, he was beginning to regret that decision, but even so, Sister Annise kept up with him while he huffed and puffed without any complaint. 

In fact, if anything, she looked grim, and he made a note to ask her about that when they returned to the barn that had become their temporary home. Right now, there was no time for that, though. Instead, there was just enough time to appreciate the quality of the mage’s observatory and the view it afforded him of the dark sea before the real show started. 

Taz had one of the nicest telescopes that Jordan had ever seen. It was the size of a large wine barrel with a mirror near the back, which was certainly an unconventional arrangement. He was just trying to figure out how much light that monstrosity might be able to gather and what the level of magnification could be when their host muttered a few words, and the large circular window in front of it suddenly became… something else. 

A moment ago, it had been a large, circular window frame that would have been more than big enough for Jordan to crawl out to the ledge beyond if he’d wanted to. After the runes on the frame began to glow with a soft blue light, though, the air inside of it began to condense and thicken, adjusting its optical characteristics. One second, it had been an open window, and the next, it was a giant magnifying lens almost four feet across. 

Taz leaned down to the telescope’s eyepiece, and as he did so, he said, “It’s just a little trick I learned to observe the stars with better resolution. That’s all.”

He spoke as if he’d read Jordan’s mind, but he’d probably just observed his look of shock. Over the next few minutes, he lectured about the phenomena he was looking for. “Stars don’t last forever, you see,” the strange wizard explained. “Just like Siddrim, they all burn out eventually, and its always interesting to see what the given constellation replaces them with.”

The mage laughed at his joke about Siddrim, but no one else did. When Jordan looked at Sister Annise, he was unsurprised to see that her expression had soured.

Before he could say anything about that, though, Taz wave him over, and said, “go on, take a look. Be quick about it. Its hard tonight, because Lunaris is spending more of her power on the affairs of mortals than she should, but that happens sometimes.” 

The stars didn’t look any dimmer to Jordan than any other night, but that didn’t stop him from looking through the telescope. It was then that he saw something he never expected to see. 

Jordan had seen the heavens through smaller telescopes before at the Collegium, but never one with this level of magnification before. In the past they’d always appeared as glimmering dots, but here, now, as he stared out into the void what he saw was a flowing figure, locked in mortal combat with an inhuman monstrosity that he might have best compared to a hydra, or perhaps a jellyfish.

“What in the name of Lunaris…” Jordan swore softly as he looked on in wonder. “What is it I’m seeing here?”

Taz took the scope back, chuckling softly. “Surely they still teach you the nature of the heavens in school, do they not? That each star is a god onto itself in the service of Mother Lunaris?”

“Of course,” Jordan answered, wondering how the man knew what he’d learned in school. “But it’s a metaphor, not a literal…”

Jordan’s words trailed off as the other mage started to laugh. “A metaphor, he says. If they were only metaphorically defending the world, I assure you that the darkness would have consumed us long ago. No, they are very real, and though not all of them have flaming swords, they all work together to hold back the night.”

Jordan tried to digest what it was he was hearing, and as he did so, he watched the stars through the lens. From that device, he lacked the magnification to make out the details of any of the stars, but he could see the constellation of the Orchid and another wandering star moving toward the one he’d just observed. 

“What’s going to happen next?” Jordan asked, watching with rapt attention, even as the stars got closer and closer. 

“All stars get old, and they need to be replaced,” Taz told him, “That is the natural order of things.” As he spoke, he made frenzied notes into a journal while he watched through the eyepiece, Jordan saw two stars meet, and then, after a bright flash, there was only one, fixed in the heavens. The constellation adjusted, but only a little. 

“Does that still look like an orchid to you?” Taz asked. “No, I think it does. We can leave it unchanged. I was worried it might become the rose or the tulip, and I’d have to change all of my charts.”

“What happened to the other star?” Jordan asked. \

“It was devoured,” the mage smiled. “Nothing goes to waste, not on that scale. All the gods are cannibals. Did they not teach you that either?”

“Well, not in so many words, but I understand your meaning,” Jordan agreed. 

“Do you, though?” Taz said, finally looking up from his cosmic light show now that whatever he’d been waiting for had happened. “It’s not a metaphor either. Gods die, and new gods rise up to replace them. I know. I’ve seen it plenty of times myself.”

“You have?” Jordan asked, making no effort to hide his confusion. 

“He has,” Sister Annise agreed. “Tazuranth the Remarkable is well over four centuries old. He has seen almost as much as Lord Siddrim.”

“He… he what?” Jordan asked. 

“More, actually,” the young man said with a slight bow. “After all, I’ve seen all the terrible things that have happened since he slipped up and died, haven’t I?”

“He’s also killed every mage that his stumbled upon his own private world in all the time between then and now,” she said, making Taz’s smile go even wider.

“How does someone… what?!” Jordan blurted out. He’d planned to ask about how even magical immortality could last so long, but Sister Annise’s latest revelation disrupted that entirely. “If he kills mages, then why did you bring me here?”

“Don’t worry,” Taz said, dispelling the lens and sitting down in a chair. “There’s no need to end you at this point. Not only are you an apprentice instead of a fully vested mage, but you’re trapped here. With that monstrosity out there, there’s literally nowhere else for you to go, is there?”

Ch. 153 - A Long Time Coming (part 2)

“Besides,” the mage continued. “In this case I am afraid it is the priestess that must die.”

Jordan’s mind was reeling as each new revelation assaulted his mind more than the last one had as he looked back and forth between the two other people in the room. Taz was leaning forward on his chair, looking far too amused for what he’d just said, while she gazed sightlessly back like a person resigned to her fate. 

“Can one of you just calm down and explain what in the hell is going on to me?” Jordan asked, worried that this could turn violent at any moment. He stepped in between Annise and Taz, but if this mage was as powerful as he claimed, there was very little protection he could offer her. 

“Well, you seem to know so much,” Taz said, gesturing very widely. “Why don’t you tell him.”

“I only know the what but not the why,” she said simply. “Siddrim has not shared that with me.”

“Siddrim is it?” the mage laughed. “You really do believe that, don’t you? Very well, we shall leave it at Siddrim for now.”

“We are here, all of us, because I won a game of chess a very long time ago. It was a game I should never have played, of course, but since I won, well… it all worked out.”

“And who was it you were playing?” Jordan asked, even though he was almost afraid to. 

“Well, I’ll give you a hint,” Taz smiled. “Unlike Siddrim, she’s still hanging around.”

“You played a game of chess with the moon goddess herself?” Jordan asked, fairly sure he was right. He seemed to remember a legend along those lines, but he didn’t associate the vague memory with Tazuranth, but he couldn’t be sure. “And what were the stakes?”

“Oh, I wanted to be her successor when she finally became tired of her nightly march across the sky,” and if I won, she agreed that I might have what it took to hold her nightly vigil. If I lost, well - I would have had my soul ripped out for my insolence, but it was a small price to pay for the opportunity. It took over a year, but in the end, I managed to beat her at her own game.”

“That’s some chess game,” Jordan nodded, trying to decided if he was serious. He didn’t doubt the Goddess’s existence. He’d felt her touch, after all. 

“It was,” Taz agreed, looking into space as he reminisced. “It was a giant thing with thousands of squares and hundreds of pieces. I’ve been tempted to build a copy of it off and on for all these centuries, but trying to find an opponent worth playing would be a pointless endeavor.”

“But how is it you managed to stay alive since then?” Jordan asked. 

“Time doesn’t function here,” Sister Annise volunteered. “Not the way you think of it, at least.”

“She’s right,” Taz agreed, staring at her a little closer. “I don’t know who it is that’s been talking to your friend out of turn, but our patron Goddess long ago struck a deal for me with the god of time so that I would have a place to wait until our margin was concluded, and that is this place.”

“So, in all these centuries, you’ve never left?” Jordan asked, boggling at the idea. 

“Why would I?” Taz said flippantly. “If I leave the light of my tower and travel beyond the vale, four centuries of aging would catch up with me in an instant. It’s rather hard to become the God of magic and the true defender of the world if you suddenly turn to dust.”

“Siddrim is the true defender of the world,” Sister Annise insisted. 

“Siddrim’s job was to keep the darkness that mankind generates at bay, and he failed at it,” Taz said, laughing again. “Lunaris has a much larger and much more thankless task, she must hold off all the darkness beyond the world, and that, I assure you, is nearly infinite. Siddrim might have ruled the day, but he would have buckled under the weight of a single night.”

Sister Annise looked unconvinced but said nothing. Instead, she sat there impassively, clutching her book to her chest like it was some sort of shield. 

“Besides, you don’t even serve Siddrim anymore,” Taz continued, pointing an accusing finger at her. “There’s only one God of death, and he’s missing in action too. No, someone else is pulling your puppet strings.”

“So you’re going to kill her because she’s serving another god?” Jordan asked, more than a little horrified. “Does that mean you’ll come for the children next? This place was supposed to be a refugee.” 

“A refuge according to who?” the mage asked. “You shouldn’t have even been able to find me here.”

Jordan didn’t answer. Instead, all he did was look at Sister Annise’s book, but that was enough. With a gesture, Taz pulled it from her grasp and glided slowly across the room to his. Once he had it in hand, he opened it, leafed through a few pages, and then set it on top of a messy stack of books to his right. 

Jordan could see the pages he looked through, but didn’t recognize them. Rather than the scrawled, crazed messages he was used to seeing in there, it had somehow returned to a perfectly normal devotional tome. If it was placed on the shelf next to any other Book of Days, he wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. 

“I led the Shepard here for the sake of his flock,” Sister Annise repeated. “Siddrim showed me the way. My sight has left me, but his remains.”

“It’s an interesting delusion, I’ll grant you that,” Taz said, “but think about it. If it's Siddrim’s ghost that talks to you, then how do you know that—”

“The light cannot die!” she insisted. “This is my destiny. I have come as bidden and—”

She probably never even felt the bolt that struck her. With a complicated gesture, a single shard of obsidian buried itself in her chest, and her body began to crumble like it was made of sand. The frightening shockwave traveled through her body, and her final act was to look Jordan in his eyes before she crumbled into a pile of dust on her chair. 

He was certain that she’d been trying to communicate with him, but he was unsure of what it was she was trying to communicate. Was it that she’d expected this? Was this all going according to her deranged plan? 

Jordan spread his arms and was about to cry out, but the other mage said, “You should stay calm and have a seat. I don’t want to hurt you. Those children will need someone, and Lunaris knows it won’t be me. I’m much too busy.”

He ignored the fact that Taz had pointed to the chair where the dust of his companion remained and instead slumped down into the one beside it. “I can’t believe you murdered her—”

“Murder is a strong word,” he said with a shrug. “Technically, I annihilated her, but really, what I did was prevent her patron from manipulating my domain.”

“How does that justify anything,” Jordan said, trying and failing to stay calm. “you don’t even know who it was that was behind her gift of prophecy.”

“I know it wasn’t Lunaris, and that’s all that matters to me,” Taz said, growing suddenly serious as he studied Jordan. “You are in my house and will respect my rules. That is the price for safety against the malignant spirit currently devouring the world, and I cheap one at that, I should think.”

Jordan wasn’t about to argue whether Sister Annise’s life was worth a temporary refuge, so instead, he pivoted, asking, “What of the children? Will you annihilate them as well because they have been touched by Siddrim?”

“Why would I?” Taz asked, genuinely confused. “That God is no more. He cannot meddle in my affairs at all. As such, the children are worthy of study, not butchery.”

“And me?” Jordan said finally, 

“What about you?” Taz asked. “You can be my apprentice if you like once you get tired of babysitting. Perhaps we might even teach you something about—”

“No,” Jordan said. “Not that. Why are you letting me live? Why not simply murder me, like Sister Annise said you did to all the other mages.”

“I didn’t murder them either,” he said, with a shake of his head. “All the ones before you came here on purpose. They each challenged me to a dual, and I accepted. Each of them lost and died for it. That is the nature of magical duels, is it not?”

Jordan nodded slowly. That point he was at least forced to concede to. Magical duels were as deadly as they were rare, and it was far more likely that both mages died than that both of them survived when they unleashed such powerful forces to kill their opponent. 

Jordan spent the next few minutes being lectured on the nature of Taz’s position, and when it was over, he stood and said, “Thank you for clarifying things.” That wasn’t what he wanted to say at all. He wanted to call the man an unhinged monster, but he didn’t dare do that. There was nothing that Jordan could do to stop a four-century-old mage from doing whatever he wanted, so for the sake of the children in his care, he did his best to play the grateful supplicant. 

“Of course,” Taz agreed. “I just have one more question. How do you think that woman knew so much, both about this place and about me.”

The question was asked casually, but the gaze behind it was an intense one, and Jordan wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised if the man was using some sort of truth-sensing magic at this very moment, so he didn’t dare try to lie.

Instead, he told the truth. “I honestly have no idea. She said different things at various times, but I believe she got visions. Part of me had doubts that they came from Siddrim, as you’ve made very clear, but… Well, I don’t think you understand how dark it is out there now, Tazuranth. The world is ending. I was happy for any sort of divine intervention, I think, no matter the source.”

The other mage nodded and said. “I understand, and someday, if you are here long enough, you will understand that this has happened before and will happen again. It is the way of things.” 

“May I have her book back at least?” Jordan asked, trying to sound nonchalant. “For the children, you understand. They will miss her, but Siddrim’s words will be a balm for that.”

Taz looked at Jordan for a long moment, then studied the book briefly. He cast the basic version of detect magic then, and Jordan saw half the things in the room begin to glow with their own colorful aura that hinted at what they did. The book stayed strangely dull. 

Jordan didn’t understand that result, but he wasn’t surprised by it either. He’d found the same thing when he studied it all those months ago. 

“Very well,” Taz said, handing him the book. “You may leave. I am busy most evenings, but if you would like to come by for a friendly game of chess or just to discuss topics your masters might have neglected up until now, you are welcome to come by for lunch.”

Jordan nodded and thanked the man. Then he departed. 

He left with the book in hand, unsure what he should do next. Was it really safe to stay here with such an unhinged lunatic? Was it really safe to leave? He didn’t know what the right decision was. Right now, it wasn’t like he had a choice. 

He sighed as he walked back to the barn. What was he going to tell the kids about where Sister Annise had gone? He thought about that for several minutes, but ultimately he looked down at the book. It would probably have the answer to that, too. Should he look, or should he go with his gut and see if he got it right after everyone else went to sleep? 

It didn’t matter. They’d come here to escape the madness, but now it had only intensified.