Tenebroum PLUS Ch. 95-96 (Patreon)

Ch. 95 - The March to War

In a world of darkness, a man with a little light was king. That’s what they said about him, though Brother Faerbar downplayed it. No matter what accolades his brothers tried to place upon him, he would only accept Paragon. That was why they marched, after all. They were a vengeful crusade that would see justice done for their fallen god.

He had almost ten thousand men with him now. Less than half were true warriors in any real sense, but most of them had Siddrim’s light in their eyes, and they walked with purpose. No matter how many detours they had to make because the roads were washed out or bridges were toppled, they found a way.

On peaceful days, sometimes whole villages would join their numbers as they passed toward Fallravea. Those were the minority, though. Most days now involved minor skirmishes with the dead. They seemed to have erupted from every passing graveyard and family plot that they passed through now.

None of the small bands of zombies and skeletons were particularly dangerous, but they were a nearly constant nuisance. They no longer even waited for full dark to harry his men and would often attack as soon as there was only a single star left in the sky, slowing their march more than causing casualties.

“That’s the real aim,” Brother Faerbar insisted around the fires of his war council at night. “The evil has been sorely wounded by the light, and it fears us. Even now, it waits for arrival.”

“How could it possibly know we are coming,” someone asked. “How could you know that?”

“Because it is inevitable,” the Templar spoke, gazing into the coals of the fire. “Because darkness exists to be purged by the light, and it knows that we will never be safe until all the flickering candles of the righteous are snuffed for good and all.”

They were still two days out from the capital of Greshen County, so the conversation devolved from that into pure theology after that. It was a conversation that Brother Faerbar welcomed, even if he was no theologian. He’d told his men days ago that Siddrim had been struck dead in a titanic battle by an opponent that had lain in wait for him like a spider or a viper, but most still did not believe it.

How could they? Did they not still all shine with Siddrim’s radiance? Could they not still feel his love? None of that changed his certainty, though. Their god was lost, and this terrible gift left Brother Faerbar reliving that losing battle every night, though he was not sure if those dreams were meant to warn him about what awaited or to goad him to action. It did both, though he was pleased that no one else was forced to watch what had happened to his apprentice.

Brother Faerbar’s heart went out to Todd. He’d tried too hard to fight the darkness, but in the end, he’d fallen victim to the sins of his youth, and in doing so, he’d become a weapon himself. By the end, it was obvious he’d been driven half-made and was little more than a gibbering stake being driven through the breast of their god.

Still, he vowed not to let the same thing happen to him or to any other holy man who traveled with him. Cadres were always stronger because of their strength in numbers, and ultimately, it was Brother Faerbar’s mistake to send his young protege on a mission alone. He would rectify that, he vowed. He would rectify everything.

They were less than a day away from Fallravea’s gates, and he expected to make it before it was truly dark when they encountered a procession coming toward them. Their growing crusade encountered refugees almost every day. Usually, they were small family groups or the survivors of some massacred village, and they rarely numbered more than a score. This was some two hundred armed men, though, and when they got close enough, Brother Faerbar could finally make out Priest Cawleon at the head of the line of horses and wagons that he understood what this was.

It was the procession of Siddrim’s forces from Fallravea slinking back to the church out of fear of what had happened or, more correctly, rats from a sinking ship.

“Thank goodness you’re here, brothers!” the priest called out as soon as the forces met. “You are a sight for sore eyes.”

They spoke at length, and Brother Faerbar let the priest do most of the talking, but there was little new information to be gained. Darkness had enveloped the land here as badly as it had everywhere else, and the sepulchers that were filled with the dead of ages past had vomited them forth in the terrible days of darkness. Once that was done, though, the goblin attacks on outlying villages had become relentless, and they produced a constant stream of refugees producing only hunger and disease to the point that the ancient city was about to collapse under its own weight.

More than anything, though, what Brother Faerbar learned was that the priest was a coward. “It is men like you that brought the church so low,” the Paragon said, startling everyone. It was dark enough now that the fire was burning in his eyes. “You have been charged to protect and guide this city, and yet you run with their meager foodstuffs for the safety of the church’s walls!”

“Who dare you speak to me like this!” the shocked priest gasped. “I am a priest of—”

“The walls have fallen, and Siddrim is dead,” Brother Faerbar roared, “And men like you are the reason why.”

The priest was still sputtering when Brother Faerbar ordered his men to seize him. His own guards drew their own weapons, and for a moment, Brother Faerbar worried there would be bloodshed, but as the day dimmed further and they could see that they dealt with thousands of men who had been enlightened rather than a single one, they quickly surrendered, and fell into line with the rest of the soldiers and returned to the city they’d only marched from so recently.

As bad as the priest had made it sound, it was worse than Brother Faerbar had expected. The city was thick with smoke, and the wailing cries of the dying, and that was by night. He didn’t even want to imagine how much worse it would look during the day.

Still, they were not going to wait for the weak light of day to begin to rectify the problems, and he quickly devoted his men to all the important tasks. Some were dedicated to hauling the bodies outside the city gates, and some to guarding those gates and ensuring public order. The most devout were tasked with healing the sick or using their miracles to turn one loaf of bread into many and feed the hungry.

They could not afford to stay here long, of course. There was still a week of marching ahead of them, but a few days would be enough to right this shambles. It was only a few years ago when he’d bled to purify this place from Oroza’s taint, and he would be damned if he’d let all of that effort go to waste.

The following day, they had a brief trial for the priest, as tradition required, before finding him guilty of dereliction of duty and the abandonment of his post in the face of the enemy. Normally, such charges would be met with a public bonfire so that he would be allowed to repent with his final screams, but given the acute shortage of firewood and the vast number of bodies that needed to be burned outside the walls of the city, a simple hanging was had instead.

It brought Brother Faerbar no joy to hang one of his own, but cowardice in the face of what they were facing was the last thing that they needed. The tragic waste of the day did have one silver lining, though. It brought those with an excess of darkness from their soul crawling out of the woodwork to watch the spectacle.

He had as many of these as he could see rounded up and executed as well, though he had to be selective, of course. If he’d lined up a date with the headman for everyone with a little darkness, the city would be scourged clean, but it was easy to look someone in the eyes and see the difference between a fallible man who indulged in a little theft or whoring, and a demon wearing the flesh of a man that was a blight upon the world. He no longer needed the inquisition to make such choices. He was the Paragon now, and as he spoke, the world moved to obey him.

Slowly, over the next three days, peace was restored, and though hunger was not wiped out by any means, the number of men and women who died each day slowed to a trickle as light purged the darkness from the bodies of his people. Along with the help and hope they offered, his light spread further, too. Most nights, he could walk and see lights in the eyes of those who took a peek at his procession as he walked through the streets.

“Hope is contagious,” he liked to say whenever one of his me asked him about the sight. “All one needs to do to let the light into their soul is to see the good it does in the world. Remember that, even if I should fall.”

He hoped that they would because his survival was hardly guaranteed. Men who led from the front rarely lasted long. That was why, even before all this, the only old men in the Brotherhood of the Purgative Flame were those priests and high priests who stood at the apex. He was past forty now, and it was starting to show.

Still, he wouldn’t let his age slow him down more than he’d let the plague or the zombies, and he walked everywhere he went in his plate mail so that he was constantly ready for attacks. Still, he announced that they would leave on the morrow. He just had one more thing to decide on: the baby.

Priest Cawleon had at least had the good sense to bring the child with him when he’d fled the city in shame, but there were no good answers regarding Leo the fifth, the last of his name. Brother Faerbar could send him back to Siddrimar or leave him here, of course, but both of those felt wrong. Leaving him in the care of anyone else felt like something he should not do. There was something to this child, and if the Templar had been able to find even a scrap of evil in its soul, he would have killed it himself.

There wasn’t any, though, so in the end, he was forced into the only decision that made any sense to him: he would have to take the child with him. On his face, it was ridiculous, of course, but his army was over ten thousand strong now, and there was no end to the number of orphans and camp followers that tagged along at the rear and the fringes. One more squealing mouth and a nursemaid would not add to that in any appreciable way.

It was a decision he agonized over, but by the time he was ready to depart, it felt right. That child was important, and when the time came, he would find out how and see justice done.

Ch. 96 - Penumbral

Jordan would never know how long the night had truly lasted because it wasn’t until he’d wandered for days in the dark, frost-covered stretches, as he went from village to empty village, that he discovered the edge of the night quite by accident.

Teleportation magic was dangerous as a rule, and if you screwed up something minor like he’d done, it could send you all sorts of crazy places. Honestly, he was lucky he hadn’t ended up a hundred feet in the air or at the bottom of the sea. However, attempting to use it when you had no idea where you were was downright insane. Unfortunately, this meant very sore feet after countless hours spent walking, searching for any sign of life. By the time he’d found the first village, he was numb and exhausted, and all he’d cared about was the bed with a blanket on it.

It was only in the morning, or at least what would have been morning if the sun still existed that he realized the whole place had been abandoned. He’d screamed himself hoarse, yelling for help, but was not the least bit surprised when no one answered.

The fact that whoever had lived here had left in quite a hurry, leaving all of their worldly possessions behind, was more interesting than the fact that they were missing. He’d balked at that little detail the first time, but by the time he came to the third village where everything was intact but the inhabitants, he simply accepted it. With everything strange going on, who was he to quibble with the fact that they’d left bread on the table when they vanished?

“Perhaps the gods have whisked everyone away to their bosom, and the world has ended,” he grumbled to himself as he struggled to start a fire in his new abode. “And left only the mages and other sinners here to rot just like the priests always said that they would.”

Jordan was sleeping in his third temporary home, and despite the cold temperatures, he was finding less and less to eat as he continued along on his journey into the darkness, but as he went outside to check the hen house to see if there were any eggs on offer, he found the strangest possible thing: the sun.

No, even stranger, there were two suns, but one was on the other side of the wall of darkness, and its rays reached him only faintly. Still, it was baffling, and for a moment, he just stood there dumbstruck, sure he’d gone insane.

“What in the name of the light…” he whispered, as he took two steps back the way he came and found that the light vanished once more.

It was like there was an invisible wall, and somehow, it separated the place he’d been from the rest of the world. That theory was borne out with further exploration. The further he walked away from the thing, the longer the wall stretched until it very clearly became a singular tower of darkness that stretched from horizon to horizon and all the way up to the faint sky itself.

On the one hand, Jordan was overjoyed that the light had returned to the world. Even if the sun looked strange and seemed to have divided into two, it was better than the darkness that was slowly freezing the earth solid in the place that he’d been in, and he was hesitant to go back inside, even briefly, to retrieve his meager supplies and a flaming brand so that he could light a new fire outside.

The reality of the thing, even after the sun had set and he could no longer see the difference, was almost enough to send him running as far and as fast as he could. The mage inside of him would not let him shrink from such a strange sight, though, and he knew he must learn all he could to share with anyone else who might have survived that terrible assault on Abenend.

So, making sure to stay outside of the bounds of the evil thing, Jordan began to travel slowly south, day by day, looking for more information, but all he found was madness. Still, as he went, he made notes of the madness with scavenged paper and tried to do his sums to calculate the total size of the area encompassed by darkness, but it was inconclusive.

He discovered that there were four different suns now, but none of them had the warmth or light that he was used to, that his pillar of night went all the way to the Oroza, and most importantly, he found out that the undead abominations that had already almost killed him once could be out during daylight hours now.

Jordan wasn’t sure what that meant or how that was even possible, but it was. He’d been lectured on the subject of the unquiet dead in classes before, and he’d always been taught that light was their greatest weakness, but if he hadn’t been able to cast invisibility and slip away while the small mob of decaying creations hunted for him, he would most certainly be nothing but a cooling corpse himself.

Light or not, the world really had ended, he decided, and he was left alone with the damned. That was when he started walking away from the evil thing along the banks of the Oroza. If there were any people left in this world… real, live people, and not just their shades, they would be in a big city like Fallravea, or gods help him, in Siddrimar.

He shuddered at that thought. The last place on earth any mage wanted to end up was in the holy city, but he didn’t see what choice he had. If it was a choice between the zealots and the walking dead, he would choose the latter. At least if the priests of Siddrim killed him, they would pray for his soul and send him to heaven, he thought cheerfully as he continued to walk north along the course of the river.

It wasn’t the first wrecked ship that Markez had seen on their way up the Oroza. Even without having to fight the dead or the eternal night, it had been an ugly week, and he’d barely gotten any sleep as he tried to keep his crew of children and incompetents from doing anything stupid. However, when he spotted the wreckage in the thin blue light of morning, he knew immediately that it was the dainty little two-masted brigs that had passed them on its way upriver the day before yesterday. The crew of the vessel was smart and professional, and unlike so many of the other ships he’d seen over the last few days, Markez had never once worried they might be pirates intent on boarding them.

In fact, from their bearing and direction, he would have guessed that they were after the same thing that he was — the safety of Siddrimar. The only difference between them, of course, was that they were certainly some dignitary or messenger. They might even be from the king himself, but that wasn’t Markez’s business. His only task was to manage their dwindling food supplies, try to find somewhere safe for all the children he’d been saddled with, and somehow keep the hopelessly inept lubbers from beaching them either shore.

That was just one of the many reasons he was so worried now, even if no one else noticed the wreckage of the ship as they glided upriver. No one was paying attention to anything but that damn pillar of darkness.

It had loomed on the horizon for days now. Every night, it disappeared against the night sky, and every morning, it reemerged as an impenetrable column of darkness. And it was getting closer.

Hour by hour and day by day, it grew, but now it was almost dead ahead of them, and it took up half of the horizon. He was fairly sure they would hit it today. He just didn’t know when.

Markez would have loved nothing more than to slow them down a bit and give the problem a good thing, but that wasn’t really an option.

For the last few days, some unsavory-looking boats had been gaining on them. He hadn’t made a fuss about it to everyone else. He’d just watched them as he manned the rudder, but he’d seen the look in the eyes of those men yesterday. Before his sails had caught a more favorable wind and left them in the dust, they’d almost had them, and he was convinced that it was only Lunara or some other goddess that loved children that had saved them, but he was equally sure that wouldn’t work a second time.

Now the dogs were back. They were only an hour behind, or perhaps two, and Markez only had two choices: he could go with the devil he knew and prepare to be boarded, or he could choose the devil he didn’t want to know and go headlong into the wall of night that was expanding ahead.

Given that he knew what would happen in the case of the former, he knew for damn sure that there was no one on this craft who could help him fight off someone that wanted trouble. Some of the older kids would try, of course, but that fop of a nobleman would be no help at all.

Like thinking about him managed to summon the man, Dian came over. “What do you think we should do about the darkness?” the noble asked almost conspiratorially.

“I think we should pray,” Markez said tiredly, not even bothering to look at the greater danger that was closing in behind them or the hints of what might happen to their ship when they crossed that threshold spread out on the waters before them.

“Pray?” Dian asked in disbelief, “Isn’t there something more we can do?”

“You could go below and gather the last of the lamps so we can see what we can see, but beyond that…” Markez let his voice trail off. The last thing he wanted to do was to encourage the man to draw the sword on his hip. He’d probably just hurt himself with it. Lamps would be enough of a challenge for him, though he’d send one of the girls with the noble to make sure he didn’t burn the place down, and if they were all very lucky, he would still be somewhere below when they finally crossed the threshold.

And that moment was coming faster all the time. Even as Markez stood by the rudder, the wall of night seemed to approach faster and faster, though since that seemed true of the nearest vessel behind them, it could have just as easily been the sense of danger knawing at him. In the end, he beat the thing into the dark by 100 yards. For a moment, he was tempted to extinguish all lamps to try to hide from the other boat, but even with all the light they mustered, he could barely see the near shore of the river. Without light, they would surely ground the craft.

“Ease up on the starboard line, lads!” he called out, trying to get them to tack the ship to boost the speed a little bit without causing a panic.

The children did as bid, though clumsily, and they spilled so much air from the sail that they lost as much speed as they gained. Markez sighed as he lashed the rudder into place and picked up his boat hook as he watched the other vessel drawing closer and closer along their port side. If there was going to be a fight, then it was going to be now.

The determination was momentarily interrupted when he heard the sounds of screaming and the planks of wood cracking. Markez spun around just in time to see the two lamps that had illuminated the barge and its rowers, though he’d wished that he hadn’t forever afterward.

Something large, sinuous, and utterly inhuman had come up out of the water and effortlessly snapped the boat in two. He didn’t know what it was, but he knew that it had a giant maw and that it could bite a man in half almost as easily as a ship.

The noise was impossible to hide and sent a flurry of people running to the stern to see what had happened, but the show was over, and even the splashing sounds of whoever was left breathing were quickly drowned out by the dozens of feet running across the deck and the shouting. By the time they reached the back rail and began to pepper Markez with questions, there was nothing back there but darkness, and the danger lurking behind it.

“What is it?” one of the older boys shouted.

“What happened?” Lara asked. “Did you see? Can you see?”

He ignored them. “See? See?! You see here. All of you. The boat that was behind us — they’ve run aground on the rocks there,” Markez lied. “Now watch the sails and the rigging, or we’ll meet the same fate before we’re clear of this cursed dark!”

He opted not to worry about the monster lurking behind them. If that thing wanted to eat them next, there was nothing he could do to stop it, so he decided it was best not to worry anyone about it and focus on getting away from here as quickly as possible.