Tenebroum PLUS Ch. 164-165 (Patreon)

Ch. 164 - Soon

“This is what I wanted to show you,” Jordan said finally, unwrapping the dirty cloth that covered the manacle that he’d kept hidden for so long and showing it to Taz for the first time. 

The archmage didn’t look at the cursed thing, though. Instead, he simply stared deeper into Jordan’s eyes, searching for something. The silence lingered for almost a minute before the ageless man said, “Why didn’t you bring this to me earlier?”

“Because I wasn’t sure I could trust you,” Jordan said, mostly truthfully. “Not after… well, you know…”

The truth was that it wasn’t the way that this man had ended Sister Anisse without a second thought. It was the way that he continued to sniff around and ask probing questions. Taz knew that Jordan was hiding something from him; he just didn’t know it was the book. So, Jordan was offering him this as a gambit to try to muddy the waters. While he doubted the archmage would be happy to discover that an artifact of the Lich had been smuggled into his domain, he was certain that he would be much more upset if he found out that Jordan had been hiding a book that told the future all this time. 

Of course, it was also hard to trust Tazuranth, given the things the book had been hinting at lately. Jordan pushed those thoughts from his mind, though, as he met the other man’s gaze, lest he somehow sniff out Jordan’s stray thoughts. 

“After all this time you still think I mean to hurt you?” Taz asked with a cold smile, pretending to be hurt. “You’re my apprentice, of a sort. I could never do that. Besides, now that the Collegium has fallen, you might be the last mage left on the continent beside me. When I ascend and beat back the darkness, I’ll need you to refound the school for me.”

“I… what?” Jordan gasped, his mind reeling. “The Collegium fell? But how? I thought that it was holding up better than expected?”

This was hardly the first time they’d talked about the place. For a time, it had been flourishing, at least according to Taz. His divination spells had shown him a valley of lights, which had become a bastion against the darkness that had swept across the rest of the land, and now all that seemed to have reversed, and somehow, the ageless man didn’t seem particularly upset by the news.

“It was,” Taz nodded, “But the Lich unleashed some new weapon that undid the very rules of magic itself. Things fell apart rather quickly after that.”

“But that shouldn’t be possible,” Jordan answered, uncertain if that was true but even more uncertain as to whether or not Taz cared very much about what he was saying. Jordan had certainly never been taught such a thing, but then, his education was far from complete. “Is that what injured the moon, then?”

Taz had reached down to pick up the corroded manacle. He was busy studying it, but as soon as Jordan spoke, his gaze lifted back up to meet Jordan’s eyes. “How do you know about that?”

“You can s-see that something has happened, even without your fancy telescope,” Jordan stammered, realizing he’d tipped his hand a little too much. “There hasn’t been a full moon in over a month now, and there’s a growing stain in the lower quarter.”

In truth, it was barely more than a dark smudge through the naked eye, but he’d seen much more detailed drawings in the book. Though all it would say is that ‘the Lich struck a blow that could not be healed,’ as it showed off the worm-like cancerous growths that were spreading on the moon, which was either the body of the goddess or the place where she lived, depending on which page of the book he read. 

“It might be related,” Taz said finally. “It’s hard to say. She hasn’t spoken to me since the incident. She may yet recover from it, or this might be the first sign that I’m about to replace her. We should know soon in either case.”

Soon was, of course, an impossible measurement when dealing with Tazuranth. He might mean a few months or a few decades from now, so Jordan simply ignored the statement. 

“So what will you do then?” Jordan asked. 

“I will be patient, as always. I will study this bauble you’ve brought and see if we can find some way to turn it to our advantage, and I will learn what I can so we can be ready when the moment arises.”

Some version of this was Taz’s answer to almost everything, and Jordan fought to avoid rolling his eyes. It said exactly nothing, which was probably exactly what the ageless wizard meant to say. 

“Do you think this will be useful to you?” Jordan said finally, gesturing toward the manacle, “Or do you think we should destroy it before the Lich uses it to track us down?”

“Through the barrier?” Taz laughed. “If it can manage a spell that leads it past the edge of the world, I would be very impressed. No, it should be safe enough. It’s a crude thing, but it certainly gives me some insight into the magic it prefers to use. This is a hentarctic formulation. Very basic stuff. It tells me that we might be misreading this situation altogether. Perhaps what we face is no mastery of sorcery but some other kind of aberration.”

Tazuranth started an impromptu lecture and length then. Sometimes, when you wanted an answer the man would dodge and weave avoiding anything that might appear conclusive, but if your discussion happened to tread into magical theory, he might spend an hour, or even two discussion the minutia of ancient history, and the merit of different theoretical approaches. 

Jordan paid attention as best he could. At times, he would try to return the topic back to the fate of the Magica Collegium, but the most detailed answer that Jordan could get from Taz was that “Scrying spells became unreliable several months ago and only recently started to work again.” 

Even that wasn’t enough to hold Jordan’s attention, though, and his attention began to wander, he stood up and wandered around the room instead. He still answered Taz’s questions as best he could, and even tried to ask some semi intelligent follow-up questions where they were appropriate, as Jordan struggled to remember his ancient runic languages. 

Still, as he worked his way around the room, he noticed that the ancient mage’s telescope was pointed down toward the beach and not up at the sky where it usually was. He didn’t approach it directly, and he definitely didn’t look through the eyepiece. That would have shown that he noticed. Instead, Jordan continued his slow loop around the room, looking at different odds and ends while he discussed the nature of binding rituals on unquiet spirits with the other mage. 

Still, when he was in the right spot, across from the wide picture window, he looked down and noted the part of the beach the telescope was pointed at. Jordan immediately recognized it as the place where the children held their practices and tourneys when the tide was low. Right now, the tide was high, so the sandy strip was almost completely underwater, but still, the fact that the man had been watching… It was the first confirmation of some of the things the book had been hinting at for a while now. 

Jordan tried to push the thought from his mind, at least until he got back to the little farm he called home, but it distracted him until Taz had finally had enough of the conversation. Then the ageless wizard assigned him some light reading from three massive tomes about the nature of rune construction and then sent him on his way as the last sun was heading toward the horizon. 

Though the meeting had largely been boring, it had given Jordan much to think about. Really, he should have been obsessed with the school. If he’d returned there as he’d planned to do so often, he’d be dead right now. 

Or maybe I would have managed to turn the tide somehow, he thought to himself. As if one more apprentice could have done anything useful. 

In the end, it wasn’t the Collegium’s fall, or even the moon’s wound, that he thought about, though. It was the children. He spent the whole walk back worrying that what he’d read was going to come to pass. It almost had to at this point. There was no way around it if Tazuranth was studying them discreetly from a distance. He really was going to use them in some sort of twisted experiment. Maybe not soon, but someday. The book had been very clear about that. 

In a place where time has little meaning, someday is forever, but someday, just the same, the mage that covets their light will try to find a way to take it for himself. Given that he is entirely undefeatable, such eventualities are unavoidable. 

However, the thoughts never left him, even when he came home to find the older children already cooking a fish stew. Still, he tried to keep the worried expression off his face for their sake. Instead, he listened to them as they told him about their day. They were a large and unruly tribe at this point, and he was likely to be the only parent they ever had. 

One by one, between different fights and bouts of bickering, each one of the twelve light-eyed children told him about their day, and he nodded, asking questions as he pretended to be interested and engaged. They’d all spent the earliest part of the morning looking for a lost lamb once their drills had been done at dawn, of course. That was a devotion that never wavered, even if Brother Faerbar hadn’t been around in more than a year now.

After that, though, they’d gone in half a dozen different directions to help the good people of Sanctuary and earn their keep. Toman and his brother had mended nets, Cynara and some of the other girls had helped the village’s wise woman gather herbs that were just coming into bloom for the season, and Reggie and some of the other boys had helped to weed the fields. All in all, it was a productive day, and it might have sounded like a hundred others they’d had since they’d come to this strange place. 

Indeed, the weather was better than average here, and most days were cool and clear, so they really did start to blend together. In the end, as they all ate, everyone got the chance to tell their story. The only one who didn’t say a word was young Leo. That was to be expected. He’d talk if Jordan asked what he’d done today, but there was no need to do so. The young man had almost certainly spent the day praying and training just like he always had.

He was frighteningly intense for a boy of eleven. Technically, he was almost two years older than that now, but the boy didn’t age beneath the barrier the same as everyone else, which made his focus and maturity all the stranger. Jordan had never planned on being a parent, and certainly not to twelve children, so he had no idea what to do about that sort of behavior; in the end, he resolved simply to ignore it in the face of larger issues, though he knew that wasn’t healthy either.

Ch. 165 - Sight Beyond Sight

Leo roared as he beat back Jamin’s wooden blade, trying and failing to move in for the kill. He couldn’t, though. His opponent’s shield was too large, and even though he was only a year older than Leo, his reach was too long. After a few tense moments filled with lightning-fast exchanges, Leo found himself on his back. He lay there in the soft, wet sand of the beach, breathing heavily, as a proper corpse should. 

Many of the other children got up when they’d been defeated and left the battlefield to watch the rest of it play out, but not him. He wasn’t going to move to the sidelines and use the light to heal his wounds in the same way that almost all of the other kids had learned to do by now. 

This was his shame, and he would suffer for it. Suffering would make him stronger. 

Other than the occasional lucky blow, he knew he was never going to win in this place, so he had to get used to it. He was the youngest and the smallest of their group, and here they had all been frozen in time, which meant that he would never have the growth spurt he needed to change that. 

It was incredibly frustrating, but he would not let that knowledge defeat him. Nothing will defeat me, he swore to himself. Yet, no matter how often he promised himself that, it changed nothing. He was still the runt of the litter, and even though he was the only one who spent all day pushing himself, he was the only one who lost every single morning. 

It might have been enough to make him cry, but he’d run out of tears a long time ago, the day before Brother Faerbar had left them all. That was the day that the Templar had explained to Leo his dark origins. 

“You are the son of a monster,” the old man had said simply after he’d separated Leo from the other boys before he went off forever to die in his fight against the darkness. “I’d kill you myself if I was sure it was the right thing to do, but there’s light in your heart, so as far as I’m concerned, that’s enough to give you a second chance, but never forget where you came from or how easy it is to fall. You might say you’re predisposed to it.”

Leo had asked a few questions about his father and received less than specific answers, though it seemed to him less like Brother Faerbar was trying to shield him from some terrible truth than that he’d just forgotten many of the details over time. His father was a “licentious wastrel of a Count” in the Templar’s words. Leo wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but he wasn’t about to ask Jordan or anyone else for those definitions. It sounded bad, and that was what mattered. He took some solace in the fact that he was named after his grandfather, who was apparently a good but weak man. 

That was all the information that Leo needed, even if he didn’t really understand what it all meant. He knew what he had to do, even at that young age. He had to be better than his father and stronger than his grandfather. That was what he devoted his life to now. 

So, when the fighting was done, and Cynara had won as she almost always did, he pulled himself to his feet. However, even as everyone else got ready to go help the villagers of Sanctuary with their chores, he retrieved his wooden sword. Then, beneath the judging eyes of everyone else, he got to work practicing his swing, his footwork, or whatever else it was he thought he needed to improve to finally start to beat some of the other younger kids on the field of battle. 

Though he was sometimes tempted to tell his friends that he was actually Count Leo, the fifth ruler of Greshen County, he opted not to do so for obvious reasons. Not only would that secret be told to everyone within a day, but it would just give the other children something else to make fun of him for, and they had quite enough to do that already. He was the smallest, the last picked, and the first to die. 

Some of the others were nice and never said anything mean to him. That was easy for people like Cynara because she was the biggest and the fastest now, and as long as time stayed stopped, she always would be. None of the boys would ever grow stronger than her here.

Other people, like Toman, never failed to remind him that he was the youngest and the smallest. Some days, they called Leo the craziest, too, if they found him praying all day. It was regarded as universally foolish, and even sister Annise had tried to dissuade him before she disappeared. He’d given up trying to defend the decision. Even if he had the words to explain himself, he didn’t really know how. 

It didn't matter to him that the others didn’t understand. Sometimes, Jenna or Sam would pray with him, but they were just trying to make him feel less alone. Their heart wasn’t really in it. 

They couldn’t feel the light inside them burning brighter when they said the words that the Templar had taught them. They couldn’t hear the sound of some distant voice, with words just out of reach. 

Leo didn’t tell anyone about that, not even Jordan. He already looked at Leo with more sadness than anyone else, and Leo didn’t want to make the man think that he was going crazy. That was why he didn’t tell anyone when he started to see things either because they were sure to think he’d gone insane after that. 

About nine months after they arrived in Sanctuary, Leo’s whole world started to bend. Even before Brother Faerbar left them, most of them could see good and evil, but this was different. First, he saw the shimmering outline of the barrier that surrounded the whole peninsula and the colored lights coming off of the tower most hours of the day.

After that, he started to see other darker things. These weren’t the typical shadows of evil. They were more like dark ghosts, and they were usually around Jordan or the things that the man owned, like the strange book he read every night. There was a sort of mist of shadows that surrounded that thing, and sometimes, if Leo looked at it for too long, he felt like it was looking back at him.

It was an unsettling feeling, but Leo wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do about it. So, he did his best never to be alone with the Book of Ways, and he threw himself that much harder into training because, after a while, it was the only thing that made him feel sane. 

“Why don’t you ever help us put food on the table,” Reggie complained one day as he pulled turnips while Leo swung his sword until he thought his arms were going to come off. “Every night, you eat, but you never put the work in. It's like you’re too good for it.”

In that moment, Leo almost told him that he was a noble and that he needn’t work in the soil like the rest of them. That would have been a terrible mistake, though. So, instead, he simply said, “We all need to do our part, but I have a higher calling. That’s all.”

That was a mistake, too. That was the day everyone started to make fun of him for his higher calling. It was upsetting, of course, because they couldn’t understand the way he could, even if he explained it. They didn’t see the light, and they didn’t have a connection to the divine like he did, not anymore. They were blessed by Siddrim, but he could feel himself going beyond that, one day at a time now. 

Part of Leo felt sure he could walk right out of the barrier if he wanted to at this point, but he didn’t try. Not only were they under strict orders from their guardian, Jordan, never to approach the boundary, but he feared what was on the other side of the line. There, the shadows ruled and drifted on the wind. If the barrier was what he needed to avoid such evil, then he would gladly shelter behind it like a kite shield. 

The day they started mocking him for being touched or being ‘blinded by the light’ was the day it all started to change. That was the day that his sight revealed to him something new: what his opponent was going to do next. At first, he thought they were just after images caused by the rage that was building up inside him. It was only after a particularly intense and violent flurry of blows left him standing above Jamin, who was bleeding on the sand beneath him, that he finally calmed. 

The battle was stopped then, and the other young boy was healed, but people looked at Leo differently after that. They teased him less and shunned him more. 

“You’ve got to be more careful,” Jenna chided him. “Save your anger for the enemy. Someday, it will be here, just as Brother Faerbar said, and on that day, we must be ready.”

He thought her words were unfair but said nothing because he wasn’t sure what to say. They always gave it their all. People got hurt. It happened nearly every week and was usually seen as the fault of the person who had been injured, but for some reason, when he finally won a bout, suddenly it was his fault. 

That didn’t stop him from suddenly winning more, though. He couldn’t beat everyone, not even with his new trick, but suddenly, he could beat anyone who had less than a foot of advantage on him. Jamin, Sam, Rin, and anyone else who tried him suddenly found an implacable enemy that they had trouble landing a blow on. 

Several of them had developed new abilities beyond merely the ability to see evil or to heal with a touch. Cynara was able to make her weapons glow with holy light, Toman could detect lies, and Sam could bless an object and make it almost indestructible. As far as Leo knew, though, he was the only one who could glimpse the future and see what move his opponent was about to make. 

It felt like cheating, and he felt bad about that, but what was he to do? Simply pass on the advantage? He had no idea how it worked or how to turn it off. He thought about explaining it to Jordan at least but decided against it. The man had been an excellent guardian to all of them, but whatever he was reading in that book was making the darkness gather in his soul, and after several months without Sister Annise there, he found himself pulling away from the older man. 

It wasn’t that he didn’t trust him exactly; it was that he didn’t understand, and honestly, he wasn’t sure he wanted to. He wasn’t going to see it, of course. He could see that many of the other children saw something as well, and slowly, the children of Sanctuary began to pull away from the adults.