Tenebroum-Chapter 221: The Last Day (2)

Leo dove into the pit like a falling star and the foulness that reached for him from the walls burned away to ash long before it touched him. The place was a warren of nightmares, and as he fell down the hole, he saw dozens of intersecting passageways where the shadowed shapes of men and dwarves reached for him along with the tentacles and claws of monstrosities he’d never before dreamed of. It was like an anthill filled with nightmares, and no matter how brightly he burned, he could not banish their dark forms or hollow eyes completely.

Each of these nightmare visions was gone almost before he could take it in as his radiance burned them away, but that only added to the alienness of it all because there were always more horrors crowding in behind them. This gave the whole scene the look of forty ocean waves or boiling water, and the way that new horrors replaced the previous half-glimpsed ones faster than he could take them in was more than unsettling.

Still, Leo steeled himself. He’d seen more than enough evidence that some of these shadows could withstand his radiance, and he was under no illusions that there were worse things than this in the pit.

At the bottom of the shaft, he found a large cathedral tiled in blue tiles that were broken by brighter mosaics and frescos. Each of these pictures might have looked almost cheerful if you glanced at them for a moment, but if you studied them for any length of time, it was easy to see what they really were: blasphemies. Whether they were real events or they were fictional, Leo couldn’t say, but each of them was gruesome.

In his current form, he was almost twenty feet tall, which filled up the bulk of the room. And though he’d had to fold away his fiery wings, the armor of pure light that he was clothed in was more than enough to burn away the shadows that were constantly leaking away into the room, granting him a better view than he ever would have wanted.

This mosaic was of a woman chained into the chest of a dragon’s corpse, and that one was of a dwarf on fire… or was it a goblin? Leo shook his head. It was hard to say for sure. There was a woman with thorns growing from her skin and another with a man half made from shadows, but all of these paled in comparison to the one above the altar that showed a winged figure of light being crucified by shadows.

At first, Leo thought that it was meant to be him, but the moment he studied the figure’s face and saw how much older the man was, he was sure that it depicted the former Lord of Light, Siddrim. That’s when he understood what all of this was. It was some kind of trophy room, and these were the victories of whatever it was that dwelt down here.

How am I supposed to succeed where Siddrim failed? Leo wondered, letting his doubts blossom for a moment. This made the light he radiated dim, allowing the shadows to advance a bit closer before he ruthlessly pushed those doubts aside.

I will win because I have to. There’s no other choice, he told himself. I beat Malkezeen, and I was so much weaker then than I am now.

His light flared brighter than before, and he looked up, noticing that the tree that had towered above before had largely faded away now. It might have come at a terrible cost, but it looked like he’d indeed managed to destroy whatever that was.

As his light glowed brighter, the encroaching shadows were pushed back, and Leo looked around the room, trying to decide what it was he needed to do next. That was when he saw the skeleton step out of the boiling fog. No, it was not a skeleton, he realized. It was a knight that had been stylized to be the bizarre approximation of an almost human thing.

“Are you the one responsible for this?” He asked, pointing his solar blade at the steel warrior even as it materialized in his hand.

“You think that relic is me?” a voice boomed from somewhere deeper in the darkness. The voice sounded vaguely like a chorus of almost perfectly synched voices and seemed to come from all sides because of the disorienting echo. “I am too vast for anybody now, Sun God!”

Leo looked this way and that, trying to decide where it was the ambush was going to come from. “I don’t care what body you wear,” Leo roared out a challenge. “I will strike you down just the same.”

As he yelled, he shone all the brighter, and he grew even larger as he sought to push back the darkness and gain some sort of advantage against whatever trap was about to be sprung. This worked to his advantage, revealing several more of the strange steel warriors hidden deeper in the roiling shadows. Each of them was different and horrifying in its own unique way.

There were some with wings like birds or bats and others with similarly strange animalistic features. There was a multi-armed centaur, a man with the arms of a serpent, a serpent with the body of a man, and one that might have been a small dragon or a very large lizard man. It was hard to say.

Leo gripped his blade tighter and said, “Are these toys all you have to stop me? I will shatter your toys and cleanse the depths of your filth!” as he lashed out with a stream of flame against the closest knight he’d first seen. The thing was engulfed, but when the fire cleared, it seemed little affected.

“All?” The sourceless voice roared in outrage. “All?! Pride and hubris were the downfall of your predecessor, and they will be yours as well!”

As the echo of the words died, that cascade of shadows fell away to reveal yet more monstrosities, even past the ones that Leo had already seen. That wasn’t all, though. Even as he took a step forward to attack the nearest with his blade, the room itself began to expand in a very disorienting way.

The pillars didn’t grow in width, but the ceiling receded above Leo’s head in a way that made it feel like he was shrinking even as the floor expanded. The patterns that the tiles made, as this growth rippled outward, were all the more confusing. A moment ago, he’d been dominating the center of a moderately sized cathedral. Now, the thing was so vast that the hole he’d entered through was dozens of feet above him and receding while both the floor and the number of opponents were growing.

Leo didn’t understand it, but he didn’t need to. He didn’t even have to wonder which one of these abominations would be the first one to attack him, either, because the answer was all of them. Two dozen monstrosities charge him from all directions and the first opponent that he sliced in half ended in a spray of sparks, sending pieces of smoking armor in two different directions. The ones after that didn’t fare much better.

In all his time in Rahkin, he’d never fought anything this vile, save perhaps the bone dragon, but then he’d never been filled with so much light, either. Some of the terrors, like a giant steel dwarf, were as tall as he was, and others, like a mob of goblins that had been stitched together, were small enough that it was harder to hit them than it was to kill him. Very few of these abominations took more than a single hit from his giant sword of light to be reduced to scrap, though, and none took more than three.

“Is that all you have?” the voice mocked him from somewhere deep in the shadows while more abominations came out to meet him. “Fire and a sword?”

Though the situation had looked hopeless, at least at the beginning, it was beginning to look like whoever was the cause of all of this evil had no real way to defeat him. He was a font of light, after all. What weapon did darkness have against that?

He’d been in the room long enough that the bodies closest to him were glowing red-hot just from his presence, and the closest pillars were charred and starting to crumble. Maybe it means to bury me alive, he thought, parrying the axe of a giant ogre thing before gutting it. Maybe all of this is just a delaying tactic.

That might well be, but it didn’t change anything. He couldn’t leave here without finally putting an end to whatever was at the heart of this darkness.

Leo hacked at every shape that emerged from the darkness, leaving a trail of blazing wreckage in his wake. Some of those enemies were trivial, most weren’t much better, but only one was challenging. After a few minutes, he came across a person made purely of faces that had been sewn together, wielding a strange staff with a three-faced head on it. It was garish and gruesome, but it was closer to a fool wearing mostly than a real threat, and he brought his sword down on it hard so he could move on to other, more serious targets.

His sword never reached the strange puppet because when it started to sing from several of those mouths simultaneously, strange things started to happen. The first was that his initial blow missed. Instead of sundering the fleshy monstrosity neatly in two, the air around the thing rippled, and it moved enough to the right that his sword came down hard on the tile floor instead, sending shards of ceramic tile in every direction. Next came the ice.

Stolen novel; please report.

More voices were joining in the chorus now, from both the creature and the staff it carried. On their own, each screeched tunelessly, but together, they slowly rose into a thrumming chant that reverberated with power.

Shadows sprang up out of nowhere, deflecting attack after attack as he tried to push forward enough to end this. Leo even lashed out again with the full force of flames, but the rime of ice that was growing on the construct, as well as the floor between here and there, stopped that attack cold. Some of the fire actually flash froze mid-air before falling to the ground and shattering in a chain of small sparks. An icy wind was assaulting him now, pushing Leo back two steps for every step he moved forward. Despite the fires that danced across his skin and the armor of pure light that he war, he could actually feel his skin starting to go numb because of how cold he was.

“What’s the matter, Sun God,” the voice taunted again. “If it’s too cold, you can always flee…”

Leo ignored it and kept pushing. At least, that's what he did until he realized there was a trick to it. The wind was pushing him, true, and the frigid magic this thing was channeling was unbearable, but that’s now what was keeping it out of his reach. Instead, it was the ground beneath their feet that continued to expand.

I’m going to need to find some other way to do this, he told himself as he extended his wings and let them carry him back out of harm's way before taking to the air.

This time, he flew above the heads of the monstrous enemies that continued to crowd the floor even after all he’d done and swooped between pillars, looking to take this foe from above. If the voice was working so hard to protect it, then it must be important. As Leo flew, the world continued to flow strangely, and now he heard louder chanting somewhere off in the distance.

“I thought these were just toys,” the voice mocked. “I thought you said this would be easy.”

Leo ignored it, leaping off of one of the pillars to change directions and come at the thing from an unexpected angle as he tried again. The thing could taunt all it wanted; he was getting closer and closer to taking a key piece off the board, and with any luck, once it was done, he could go deeper into the abyss.

“All of you… heroes and Gods, you are all so predictable,” the voice called out again, but this time, it was only barely audible over the growing chanting. “You’re like puppets on strings, dancing exactly as I want you to.”

Leo didn’t have time to process those words. Instead, he shot the gap, diving down to the target below. He never even saw the black lightning that hit him until he was steaming on the floor, and his hauberk of light was cracked. The unseen puppet master had played him, though he could only see it in retrospect. It had made him fixate on a target, and then, when it knew exactly where and when he would be in a given location, he blasted him with a spell powerful enough to knock him senseless for a moment.

Even that wasn’t enough to put him out of the fight, though, and as the chanting continued, he struggled to move lest the thing strike him again. That was harder than he thought it would be because, at that moment, he needed to recover; the tide of rotting minions was upon him. He’d destroyed the largest and most dangerous-looking ones, but there were still dozens of them mobbing him at once, bearing him down simply by their weight.

Compared to them, he was a giant, and yet no matter how many of the things he ripped in two or tossed across the room, more and more came. With them came little stabs and pinpricks that were annoying more than they were painful, but Leo ignored them and continued to fight free.

“You’re where I want you when I want you, and exactly how I want you, young godling,” the voice continued. “I wonder what it is I could make from the corpse of a light god himself, hmmm? What monstrosity is it that you would become?”

Before Leo could even consider the answer, he was struck a second time and then a third. Each blast of terrible power destroyed every monstrosity he was wrestling with, but it also ripped through him, causing two waves of agony. The first was when the tainted lightning blazed through his body, and the second was when he burned brighter to heal from the attack.

For the first time in the whole fight, Leo considered that he might not be strong enough to fight whatever this was. He leaped to the sky, intending to fly free, or at least make sure he could, but as he approached the hole that had led him into this terrible place, it retreated away.

“Taking the coward's way out already?” the voice mocked. “And after facing only a few toys?”

Leo’s cheeks burned at the insult, but he didn’t respond. Living to save the world was more important than pride or honor. Unfortunately, it didn’t look like getting out was going to be an option. As he finally reached the vertical shaft and started flying up, a wave of darkness started to come down like a waterfall from somewhere high above.

Until now, he’d thought that the pillar he’d felled previously had sprung from this cursed earth, but now it seemed possible that it was the reverse; now it was a torrent pouring down from the heavens and into this hole.

Leo tried to press through, but with every beat of his wings, the shadows burned away more reluctantly. Soon, the things within that terrible cascade were grasping and clawing at him before they burned away, and he was forced to fold his wings and fall just to outrun them.

“There’s no way out there,” the voice gloated. “There’s no way out at all. How do shadows snuff out the light? They don’t. They simply trap it and wait for it to burn out of its own accord.”

“You think you can trap me?!” Leo roared. “I will burn this place down before I let that happen. I will melt the stones themselves!”

He’d actually already done quite a bit of damage to this place, but it was all lost to the growing pool of darkness. Until now, his coruscating aura had held it back, but now that trickle had become a flood, and gibbering nightmare shadows were gaining on him. Quickly, Leo looked around the room and gauged his options.

There were several doors exiting this not gigantic cathedral. Most of them weren’t very big, though. He willed himself to become smaller as he tried to decide which one would be his best bet. With all the games this thing had played with space, there was no guarantee that he could even reach one of them, but still, he had to try. It was that, or drown in an ocean of darkness.

Even as he looked at the exits, whoever it was that was running this awful place started to close them, and heavy brass doors began to slowly rumble into place. He could burn through any of those, of course, but he didn’t have time. The tide was rising, and though he could fly above them until the entire place filled up with squirming shadowy monstrosities, he would quickly lose access to the doors.

So, instead of delaying, he chose the one that looked like it had a door of lead. It wasn’t lowering any slower than the rest, but he would be able to burn through it much faster if he needed to.

Leo flew with all his strength. Now that he wasn’t much bigger than he’d been as a mortal, it wasn’t hard to squeeze beneath the thing and fly down the passage. There were a few shadows here and there, but they vaporized before he even got close.

Leo heard the rumbling of distant speech, but behind the door, he couldn’t quite make out the words. He saw a light up ahead and flew toward it, hopeful that it might be a way out or, barring that, something he could destroy. He was disappointed to find only a small lantern with a blue-white flame in an ivory-colored room, but he didn’t really understand what that was until the teeth slammed shut behind him.

Teeth? He thought incredulously. That didn’t make any sense.

He landed lightly and turned to face them, but that was indeed what they were. Teeth. Giant teeth connected to a giant jaw, set into a giant skull. This wasn’t a room he was in, after all. It was a skull that was dozens of feet tall.

“Where on earth could it have gotten something like this?” Leo asked himself as he blazed to life once more, “And why does it think that a skull has any chance of keeping me contained.”

The fire of the sun could melt stone and steel. Against that, teeth and bone weren’t much less flammable than charcoal. This thing must have been enchanted, though, because even as he poured on the heat, it didn’t even look scorched. The only difference was that with the flames, a thousand tiny runes sprang to life, writing on the surface.

The sourc𝗲 of this content is frёeωebɳovel.com.

“Come on!” he growled, burning even harder and focusing on the teeth to no effect.

Leo willed his sword into existence again and started hacking at it, but that didn’t leave a mark either, which was especially baffling, given how it had hacked through the worst abominations this place had to offer with less effort than this. After assaulting it for several seconds, he willed himself to grow ever larger until his feet could push off the ground while his hands and back could brace against the ceiling. If he couldn’t burn his way out, then he could shatter the thing and force his way free.

“You think that after thinking of everything else and preparing the way for you, I didn’t think of that?” the familiar voice asked. This time it was closer, and it took only a little searching to find that it was coming from the Erie blue lamp.

“I will burn you from existence!” Leo cursed, batting the thing away and sending it to the ground, where it was extinguished. “I don’t care what kind of trap you think you’ve set; there is always a way out!”

“Maybe,” the voice agreed, “But not for you.”

Leo smashed the thing, crushing and extinguishing it in a single motion as he gave in to the frustration. This wasn’t how this was supposed to go. None of it was. He needed to get out of here. He needed to make sure Cynara was okay.

He spent a few minutes wallowing in self-pity before he felt the cold starting to creep into his bones. Though the only visual effects to mark a change were his struggling flames and the way his breath fogged, something was happening. Something was stealing the fire from his soul in a way that wasn’t so different from the strange construct he had destroyed. Leo fought against it, but even as he did, he could see the light he radiated starting to fade.

He had no idea what was going on, but he got up and started struggling with the door again. If he didn’t find a way soon this was going to get ugly fast.