Tenebroum Ch. 54-55 (Patreon)

Ch. 54 - Gone

Brother Verdinen was slow to rise every morning, even though it was a small sin in of itself not to get up at dawn and greet the sun god Siddrim when he graced the mortal realm with one more day of light and life. Normally he justified such bad behavior by telling himself that he was up far too late studying the scriptures, but today he had no such excuse. All he could say was that several days on the road had done him no favors, and several nights of sleeping on rocks had been far from restful. By the time he was dressed up and out of his tent to greet the dawn, the Templars and their squires were just finishing their dawn prayers, instantly banishing that fig leaf.

If he never took another trip on behalf of the church, it would suit him fine, he thought, chastising himself for failing to maintain his focus on dawn’s cleansing glory. The truth was that he was exhausted, and today was certainly going to be one of the longest he could remember.

When Brother Verdinen finally finished the slow ritual movements of his prayer dance, he went to the campfire looking forward to breaking his fast but found only squires that were helping their masters to put on their chain mail hauberks and breastplates. Brother Faerbar gave him a knowing look that seemed to go right through him and simply said, “After. No one is going to want to eat before we go inside. Nausea will foul your helmet.”

The priest-candidate tried to hide his annoyance because, however, he might outrank the veteran Templar on paper, it was never a good idea to get on the bad side of a well-liked veteran warrior. Paladins had their place - it just wasn’t in the halls of power.

“As you say,” Brother Verdinen agreed quickly, noting the way that Brother Faerbar’s squire kept giving the nearby palace fearful glances like he expected something to come rushing out of it in broad daylight. It seemed quite out of character for a paladin to pick a cowardly squire, but for now, he reserved judgment. After all, he could feel the fear too, however distantly and unlike this boy, he was a grown man.

When they finally set out, there was no one to bar their way, and the doors were not locked. The smell of death and putrefaction that came boiling out of the entrance hit him like a physical force, though, and he gagged, finally understanding what it was that the Paladin had meant with that knowing glance. He’d obviously checked the palace out before the rest of them had woken up, at least to this point. It was a dirty trick not to warn him more thoroughly, Brother Verdinen thought, but he was still grateful on some level that he hadn’t vomited.

“Open every curtain and every window squires,” Brother Faebar ordered grimly. “Everyone else spread out in groups of three on the ground floor only and look for the hole that the message spoke of. That is where we begin our search!”

As if to further illustrate his point, his sword began to grow dimly at that point as he invested lord Siddrim’s holy light into the ancient blade. It wasn’t a trick that everyone could do, but it was one of the few things that all the great Paladins throughout history had in common, and Verdinen felt pangs of jealousy as half of his men did the same. This was clearly a blessed group, loved by their creator, and he should be grateful for that, but as he watched the cadre splinter and drift off to explore the entrance hall, he couldn’t help but feel exposed. With every passing minute, the dark hall brightened, but that only made his feeling of dread worse, and eventually, the priest candidate was forced to return to the Paladin’s side simply to feel safe again.

He couldn’t help it. This place looked like a butcher’s floor, and each step he made on the stone floor made awful sticky sounds that said everything about where he was, even though he purposefully looked away. They went room by room, and other than the evidence of violence, the place was completely untouched. Nothing had been stolen or defaced. Whatever had done this had neither an axe to grind nor pockets to line. Anyone of that bent would have taken the golden candelabras or the silver dinnerware. Instead, all they had taken were the people that had once populated this beautiful building, and all they had left behind was evidence that they hadn’t gone willingly.

It was a sobering thought; he oscillated back and forth between that and the idea that no matter how many rooms they searched, they couldn’t find a trace of the creatures that had done this. It wasn’t long after that that the floor was pronounced clear, and everyone joined together to descend into the basement. It was there that they immediately found the hole, almost as he’d pictured it days ago. It was like an open wound in the basement’s stone floor.

There were only 17 of them there in that basement, but Brother Faerbar didn’t even pause to delay. He just flared his sword a little brighter and went into the darkness without a word, along with another Templar. The opening was huge and easily big enough for two men to walk abreast, and they went in a few at a time without any preparation or discussion, which struck Verdinen as more than a little rash. Each group that followed waited only long enough to give the pair in front of them enough room to maneuver before joining them in the darkness. So, moment by moment, the once crowded room got emptier and emptier while he stood aside. At first, he’d considered finding an excuse to stay behind, but now that he was almost alone, that sounded like a terrible idea, so he joined the last of the squires and descended into the stinking pit with a silent prayer on his lips.

There was still a blood trail, though it got thinner and less consistent as they went along until it was lost in the darkness along with everything else. After that, the silence quickly became the most chilling part of the whole ordeal. It spoke to the professionalism of the Order of Purgative Flame, and it should have been reassuring. Instead, the crunch of rocks and dirt beneath their feet as they descended lower and lower into the earth made his thoughts race with imagined evils. If the shadows worked through the idle hands of men, then they traveled into their minds on taut and empty silences like this one.

Brother Verdinen was almost tempted to hum a hymn to comfort himself. Only knowledge that the silence was a tactical decision and that making unnecessary noise would earn him a rebuke kept him quiet. Instead, he tried to focus on the surrounding details to keep his flights of fantasy at bay. His vision of this place had been reptilian and slimy, but reality hadn’t borne any of that out. Even so, he couldn’t help but imagine that the rough surface he was walking on was the scales that some titanic snake had sloughed off, mixed with the bones of its victims, and no matter how many times it tried to shake it by reassuring himself that this tunnel had been carved by men, not even touching the tool marks on the wall as they walked could completely shake that fear.

After almost two minutes of walking, they finally paused as they came to a room. Well, it wasn’t a room, really. It was an intersection of five different passages that met in a messy, overlapping intersection without any apparent rhyme or reason. Despite the tool marks he’d seen earlier, the priest-candidate began to doubt that humans had been behind this after all. Just looking at the way that the corridors met gave him a headache. All of them met at uneven angles, and none seemed to be the continuation of the others. It was as if someone was just digging around beneath Fallravea almost completely at random.

The leaders debated the best course of action quietly for a few minutes there, giving Brother Verdinen a chance to push his way closer to the front of the line.

“Well, what’s the plan then,” he said softly after making sure that the man he spoke over wasn’t anyone important. “Clearly, getting lost down here could easily be a factor. Perhaps we should go fetch extra members of the guard and chalk so that we can—”

“We continue ahead, acolyte,” Brother Faerbar said, with just a hint of annoyance in his voice. The only question is if we make ourselves more vulnerable by exploring the auxiliary branches first or if we move directly down the primary one.”

“I don’t see a difference,” Brother Verdinen hissed back, snatching a torch from one of the nearby squires and looking from one rough-hewn tunnel to the next, looking for drops of blood or other clues that might point such things out but seeing nothing.

“It’s not in the seeing,” the Paladin whispered, taping his ear. “It’s in the hearing.”

For a moment, the priest-candidate looked at the three tunnels that were roughly ahead of him, letting his gaze drift back and forth as he tried to decide. All three passages looked the same: they were empty, dusty, cooked, and occasionally spattered with blood. It was true that there was the faint sound of water down the one that drifted off to the right, but as he moved the torch back and forth, he saw it flicker slightly when it moved in front of the leftmost tunnel, and his smile of superiority reasserted itself.

“It looks like this one goes back to the surface. Perhaps if we cleared it first, we could—-” Brother Verdinen started to say, trying to prove his worth to the veterans. But as he spoke, his words trailed off because the torch began to gyrate and sputter wildly.

“Get back,” the cowardly squire said, “something is coming!” The boy spoke at a normal volume, but the silence had smothered them all for so long that it might as well be a shout, and the idea that a lowly squire could command him to do anything, especially when the passage was clearly empty raised Verdinen’s hackles. He started to turn to rebuke the boy when something moved in the shadows.

No, it wasn’t moving in the shadows. It was the shadows. Almost faster than he could see, the dark, shimmering outline of a snake that was almost as big around as his whole body struck out from the wall of night that began where his torchlight ended, and with a mouth full of jagged obsidian teeth, it bit down on the right forearm holding the torch and yanked him forward hard enough that it pulled him completely off his feet and began to drag him down the tunnel almost as fast as he could run.

He shrieked as everything happened at once, but it was more in surprise and horror than pain. In truth was that the pain of being dragged across the rough stone floor was much worse than the pain of coming from his arm, which was almost numb.

Brother Verdinen forced himself to stop screaming, and for the first time in his life, it wasn’t for appearances either. It was so that he could focus on reciting the words to invoke Siddrim’s holy light.

Ch. 55 - Things that Should not Be

Things happened all at once after that. One second the haughty priest-candidate was arguing with his master and the next, he was being dragged off into the shadows too quickly for anyone to understand what happened, let alone stop. His panicked screams echoed off the walls, and the light that he managed to hold onto got further and further away. The very first thing that Todd had noted when they were getting ready this morning was that the man had only bothered to bring what was obviously a ceremonial weapon with him, which had struck Todd as laughable when one considered where they were going. Even someone that thought that going almost unarmed into a bastion of shadows like this palace didn’t deserve this fate, though.

Before he could react, Brother Faerbar and Brother Lucius were charging down the hall after the wailing priest. Their chain mail rattled as they went, and Brother Faerbar’s sword glowed all the brighter as he prepared to engage the enemy, but they didn’t even get halfway to the priest before there was a sudden explosion of light rippled outward, and his motion ceased. That was when Todd started to charge, too, with his mace in hand. He didn’t know what that was, but he knew what would happen next and what his master would want him to do. Brother Faerbar would slay the vile pit spawn that had dared to attack a servant of the light, but while he was doing that, someone would need to save the priest.

As Todd ran to aid the fallen priest-candidate, he tried to puzzle out what that abomination might have been, but he could think of nothing that he’d been taught which could match that description. For a split second, he’d seen it. It had appeared as a viper larger than a horse made of almost pure shadow, which meant that it had to be what? A demon? A work of clever and malicious sorcery? He knew that it couldn’t be natural, but he wasn’t sure of anything beyond that, and he didn’t have the time to wish that he’d focused less on swordplay and more on learning his letters.

When Todd arrived, he’d thought for a split second that the red-robed acolyte was practically unharmed. It was only when he grabbed him to pull him into a sitting position that he realized that those robes were soaked with blood, almost completely hiding the extent of the man’s injuries. Todd quickly peeled them back from the priest-candidate’s obviously broken arm and pushed him back against the wall when he started to squirm.

“By the light, that hurts!” he yelled, but Todd ignored him, trying not to gasp audibly as he saw the ruin that the priest-candidate’s arm had become. The blast of holy light had annihilated the beast that was attacking him, at least in part, but it did nothing for the crushed bones or the portions of the jet-black teeth that were already buried in the man’s pale flesh.

Todd mumbled a prayer of healing, and he saw the flesh try to knit together, but his strength wasn’t nearly enough to override the trauma that the injured man had received. His efforts did little, if any, good, though. Even with the gift of sight, he had little talent for healing and none for summoning the holy light. So, rather than try again, he pulled off his belt and wrapped it tightly around the injured man’s bicep to stem the flow of blood. This took longer than it should with all his squirming, but once he stopped cursing and passed out from the pain, it became easy enough to finish the task.

It was only when the priest-candidate’s life no longer hung in the balance that he looked up to his master’s fight. Though the thing had only seemed to have a single giant head moments ago, it had three now. One was half the size the previous one had been and would have had trouble making the sorts of marks that the injured man bore, but the two smaller heads were only big enough to latch onto perhaps one of his hands rather than the entire forearm as it had done. For all their reduction in size, they were no less threatening, though. Instead, single strikes with the shocking sort of power that could drag a man to his death, they now struck in a series of dizzying patterned attacks that were almost hypnotic and no less dangerous than the single giant head had been.

The only thing that was faster were the swords of the Templars that fought it. In the dim light, Todd couldn’t really see Brother Lucius’s blade, but his master’s blurred like a living thing, leaving streaks of light that wove patterns that were almost arcane as he smoothly switched from attack to defense and back again, holding the monstrous threat at bay in a grudging stalemate.

Todd had no idea what was going on, but as Brother Faerbar parried a barrage of attacks, Brother Lucius charged in and cut off one of the two smaller heads. Almost immediately, it grew back into two more heads that were each half the size of the original. That was what finally made the pieces fit together for him. He hadn’t known that there was such a thing as a subterranean species, but this was very clearly a hydra of some sort. The reptiles were said to be creatures of flesh and blood that were almost as dangerous as the trolls that dwelled in the same swamps, but this one was practically incorporeal.

As he struggled to think about how he could help, his eyes fixed upon the torch that the priest-candidate had managed to hold onto. Instantly, he knew what to do. Fire was said to stop the creatures from regenerating, but even if he didn’t know how that would work for a creature made of shadows, he had to think that such a state would be even more vulnerable to the purging flame. So, without thinking of his own safety, he picked up the guttering torch and ran forward between the two Templars, plunging the flaming end of the torch deep into the spongy wall of shadows that was the thing’s body. The smallest heads burst into flame and then ashes. Its largest remaining head lasted a few seconds longer, giving it a chance to snap at Todd, but its teeth didn’t get through his leathers before his master had a chance to push him back and out of the way.

The thing smoldered on the ground for a few seconds after that before dissolving into smoke and ash. It left no trace to study, making him think of the nightmares that haunted him last night. This palace was cursed. Anyone could see that much, but in his dreams, the shadows tore at his flesh, trying to drag him down and drown him. He wasn’t the only one that had slept fitfully, he was sure, but he didn’t truly feel clean again until dawn’s light had cleansed him during morning prayers.

“Brace yourselves, men,” Brother Faerbar called out as the sounds of shuffling and moaning grew louder. “The light will protect you!”

As soon as the shadow finished dissolving, it revealed a wave of zombies coming down the hall behind it. No, he realized as he rushed towards his mace. The sounds of battle coming from behind him weren’t just echoes. There were zombies there, too, now. Coming from two, no three other corridors. For a long moment, Todd was conflicted about which group needed the most help, but then tightening his grip on his mace, he ran to his master’s side.

The bulk of the cadre was facing far more zombies, but they had 13 people, and right now, Brother Faerbar only had his glowing holy sword and a single Templar to support him, which was enough to face any single evil, but it might not be enough to face such a horde. The next few minutes would be both critical and terrifying. Todd had been lectured many times about fighting the undead, but after all the mundane opponents he’d faced to date, he wasn’t sure he’d ever see something so fantastical. In the last year, as they’d dealt with nothing but bad people, he’d grown increasingly sure that the more fantastical opponents he was trained to fight were just myths. He was wrong.

“Hold the line!” he heard someone yell behind him, but there was no time to turn around and see how the rest of the cadre was doing. Not when half a dozen dead men were clawing and biting at the three of them, with who knows how many more lurking in the darkness behind them.

These were old dead, and they fought with strength and brutality, but without the speed of the living, that would make them a truly fearsome opponent. The real danger was how many of them there were. If there were dozens, they would finish cutting through them in minutes, but if there were hundreds, then they might well drown beneath the waves of the enemy no matter how many they slew in the process.

Todd held his master’s left flank, beating back every monster that came at him with his mace and shield until his arm began to feel like lead from the repeated, almost mechanical blows. They were so regular that they made him feel like he was practicing on the dummies back in Siddrimar rather than fighting a deadly evil, but the moment certainly put those rigorous drills into the proper perspective. These enemies were easy to hold off but hard to kill, and lacking Brother Faerbar’s height, he had to content himself with breaking arms and knees - maiming the undead into harmlessness rather than beheading them outright and granting them the peace of true death, which required almost more endurance than he had.

Fortunately, after only a few minutes of desperate combat, the tide of the dead began to wane until there were more dead bodies scattered on the floor than there were standing against them. Once the endless flow of the dead peaked and stopped, the battle was over in seconds. Without infinite reinforcements, the zombies were barely a threat at all to properly trained warriors. After that victory, the cadre quickly reformed in the intersection and counted only two squires, a paladin, and their priest candidate among the injured, but except for the red-robed acolyte, no one was seriously hurt.

“Brother Samael - take the others to the surface and tend to the priest. We will continue without you,” Brother Faerbar ordered. “Should the worst happen, then I trust you will put the torch to this palace so that none of this filth escapes.”

Samael nodded tersely, and a whole conversation was exchanged in that gaze. Of course, he could be healed and stay in the fight, but if he stayed, the priest would surely perish, so ultimately, no matter badly he wanted to fight, someone had to go, and his bloody wound made the choice an obvious one. He was obviously not pleased with being ordered to withdraw but knew better than to argue, and the wounded squires quickly made a litter with a cloak to carry the unconscious priest candidate to safety.

While Todd was securing the acolyte to the makeshift stretcher, he bandaged the man’s shattered arm and noticed that the terrible broken teeth that had embedded themselves had vanished. Though the most likely answer was that they had simply ceased to exist when the monster they belonged to was slain, he couldn’t help but visualize those broken shards of shadow burying deeper and deeper into the dying man’s flesh until they disappeared from view.

With a shudder, he shook the image from his mind and stood, readying his mace and torch as they prepared to head even deeper toward the sound of running water.