Tenebroum-Chapter 220: The Last Day

Leo charged across the sky as soon as he received Jordan’s whispered warning, but he was too late. From where the solar palace sat on the far side of the world, he hadn’t even noticed anything amiss, and by the time he was whipping his team of horses to make them go even faster, the moon was already breaking up on the distant night sky.

That horrified him, but not as much as the strange pillar of night that he saw next. Leo had only taken his place as the sun for a short time, but he’d already grown used to the edge of night retreating in front of him even as it advanced behind him. It was a normal behavior. The idea that any darkness would stand in defiance of him, though, was more than odd; it was impossible.

Everything was impossible, though. Leo never had a very good view of the stars. Besides Cynara, it was one of the things he missed most. Usually, he could still see them distantly, at least, before they faded away completely. On this ride, though, they were almost all gone before he even got close, and those few that remained were falling.

It was a nightmare, and more than anything, he wanted to ask someone what he should do about it. There was no one to ask, though, not with Jordan gone. Leo took heart when he got closer and saw the skeleton, though. He had no idea what he was supposed to do about a tornado of darkness, but he knew exactly what to do with undead abominations. It was the only thing he was any good at.

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Of course, I’m better with a sword, he thought as he tied his reigns around the rail and reached down to string his bow.

Anything to do with a bow made him think of Cynara. No, that was a lie, he realized. Everything made him think of his wife. It was just that some things did more than others.

He didn’t let that distract him, though. Whatever this thing was, she was hundreds of miles from it, and he was sure that she would be okay. He would make sure she was okay. He had to. That was the only thing that kept him going. Jordan had promised him that when she died one day, her soul would be heroic enough to join his and that instead of becoming a star in the sky, she could join him and make him burn all the brighter, or she could become a handmaid in his palace. Either was better than the occasional glimpse he got of her some days as he rode across the sky.

That was what he thought about when he unleashed that first volley. Though he only nocked and released a single arrow, that arrow divided again and again until a hundred lances of light stormed across the sky. Even before they reached his target, he was already drawing back on another shaft of light to do it again.

By the time he was close enough to put away his bow and draw his sword, the giant, mountain sized skeleton was already crumbling into dust, which gave Leo hope, yet somehow, the pillar remained in defiance of it, and it was much larger than even the strange black spire he’d seen rising up from distant Blackwater. That thing had been an oddity when it had existed, but this was a menace.

He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do about it, but he’d already decided that he was going to have to make another pass. That was something that he wasn’t supposed to do, of course, because heating the world unevenly could cause all manner of problems, but those problems could wait. No problem he could create by accident would be worse than not ending whatever this was.

“Is it some kind of monster from out there?” he wondered as he drew his heavenly blade and looked to the night sky.

Jordan had told him that there were giant monsters in the dark that were bigger than any whale. That was his job, apparently. To protect the world from such monsters.

Leo supposed that was possible, but Jordan had described the creatures as being monstrous, with bulging eyes, dozens of mouths, and hundreds of tentacles, while the thing he rode toward, was a sleek, black pillar of darkness, that seemed to do nothing besides smoke faintly at his approach.

If it had been anywhere else, even the missing city that had so startled Jordan, Leo might have believed that. This darkness connected to the world below in a singular terrible place that made him kick himself for having underestimated it. It was the place where Brother Faerbar’s crusade had ended and the place where the dead that had devoured civilization had originally erupted. That could only mean that the lich that had started this had concocted some new and terrible spell and that—

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Leo jerked the reins hard, altering his flight path. He’d been rising closer and closer so he could hack away at the pillar. He hadn’t planned to ride directly to it. That was far too reckless. Instead, he was just going to make an exploratory attack and see how sturdy this thing really was when suddenly, the side facing him exploded into dozens of tentacles that raced toward him.

The ones that got closest to his horses burst into flames before they ever got close. The rest of the forest of tendrils largely missed, though a few grabbed hold of the left railing and wheel. Leo leaned over and cut away at the writhing mass before they could do much more than slow him down.

After that, he galloped in an ever tighter path around the thing, making his light burn that much brighter. He was scorching the mountaintops of the Wodenspine Mountains and melting glaciers, but he couldn’t worry about that now. Forests would burn, and if anyone lived them, they would die, but as long as this thing continued to do whatever it was doing, they would all die anyway.

Leo wasn’t great at driving his chariot yet, but the horses were far older than him and did much of the work themselves. He steered around only the largest tendrils and chose to smash right through the curtains of smaller waving fronds. Those were hectic moments as he struggled to navigate the three-dimensional maze, where the things got ever closer to blocking him on all sides.

By the third loop around the giant column, he was only just barely able to cut away at the thing with his sword, and even then, he was only able to do so by blazing it so brightly that it flared to maximum length. The result was instantaneous. The wall of blackness shattered at even the lightest touch of his celestial fire, and though the thing immediately tried to regrow, it was a slow enough process that Leo could see it was struggling.

All of this happened in only a moment, though. After that, he was forced to pull away and give wide birth to the thing as he evaded giant serpents of shadow that were chasing him from behind.

He and his team raced through the growing thicket of darkness that sought to trap him, but in the end, they finally broke free. It was only from that distance that it was able to see that the pillar of darkness had begun to resemble something more like a tree than a gleaming celestial pillar, as it had done previously.

Did that have significance? Leo wondered. He wasn’t sure.

The thing had no leaves, but the way entire forests of tentacles were waving in the unseen breeze in a bid to grab him made the comparison unavoidable. More disconcerting was the fact that he couldn’t even see any evidence of all the damage he’d done from this distance. He was going to have to hit it harder.

As he wheeled around to come in for another pass, he wracked his brain for the right answer. “You deal with a tree with an axe, but I don't think my…” his words trailed off as he looked from his sword to his team of horses and back again. He did have one thing that might work like an axe against a mile’s tall tree, he realized, but it was a really dumb idea.

Leo shrugged and said, “It’s what Brother Faerber would do,” before he turned his chariot and started straight toward the base of the towering structure, picking up speed the whole way.

I cut right through it before, like morning fog, he tried to reassure himself as he steadily lost altitude. He knew he shouldn’t do something so reckless, but he was out of options now.

So, instead of doing the smart thing, he roared down from the heavens like a comment, blowing away the storm clouds between him and the earth below like they were nothing more than a curtain. “I can do this, he reassured himself. Just one good hit, and this whole thing will fall apart, just like the tentacles and the…”

As the wall of shadows got closer and closer, it took up nearly his entire view. The horses grew nervous, but they didn’t disobey. Instead, they charged ever faster, right up until the last moment. When he reached the wall of shadows, it disappeared before him like it had never existed at all for the first several seconds. Leo thought sure that he’d made the right decision. He could practically see the giant tower leaning, and he was prepared for it to fall to the ground with a terrible sound.

Then, with no warning at all, he hit a wall. One moment, the darkness was retreating at the same pace he was moving forward, and then it solidified like a wall of dark iron, and it dashed him and his chariot to ruin. The chaos and the carnage was almost too much to take in, especially over the shock and the disbelief.

The wind was knocked out of him by the blow as the chariot came apart around him, but Leo was too stunned to even feel the pain as he realized that somehow he’d been outsmarted by whatever this was. He wasn’t able to see if the horses had been dashed to pieces as much as everything else, as the wall of darkness grabbed for him, but that was something he could worry about later.

The glowing wings that sprouted out of his back at that moment came as a complete surprise to him, but as he circled clumsily, trying to steer away from the wall of solidified darkness that had nearly cost him his life, he saw a large hole at the center of the ruined town that had once been Blackwater. He didn’t know what was down there exactly, but he knew that this awful tree had sprouted from it, and before it could resolidify, he was going to go down there and purge it with fire.