Tenebroum

Chapter 202: Purging the Darkness (2)

That night was a long one for Leo. Not because of his injuries, though; they were severe. It was because of the evil dreams. In a place this dark, he felt like he was suffocating. And each time he fell asleep, the glowing nimbus around him faded enough for that darkness to touch his soul. The results were inevitably shocking.

He dreamed of families betraying and poisoning one another. He dreamed of food riots and people killing each other for loaves of bread. Worst of all, he dreamed of some dark, towering monstrosity looming above the city that was so diffuse that no matter how many times he swung at it with his glowing blade, it simply reformed before going on to devour more families.

In the dream, Leo’s light protected him, but that did little good for anyone else, and all he could do was struggle in vain against it while he wished to be stronger. There was nothing he could do against a monster like this, though. The brighter he glowed, the more it retreated, but that didn’t stop him from eating the rest of the world, like some kind of miles-tall jellyfish or hydra.

Leo woke bathed in sweat as he tried to sort out dreams from reality and looked for threats in the small room he’d sealed. Fortunately, he was alone, even if it didn’t feel that way.

“Were those just dreams or…” he wondered aloud, unable to finish the thought. Or did those things actually happen.

It was a hard thing to consider, but he didn’t really have another choice. He’d never dreamed such awful things before, so either the evil here was toying with his mind, or some parts of what he’d seen had actually occurred. It was a terrifying thought to consider. What could have possibly happened to these people to make me think their souls had been ripped out like that en masse? He wondered as he started taking apart the barricade that had kept him safe last night and started poking around the castle.

The rest of the building held no answers either. It contained a few bodies here and there that he beheaded just to be sure, but except for an ominous bloodstain in the throne room, there were no real signs of violence. Anything valuable had been stripped from the place. There were neither tapestries on the wall nor anything made of gold or silver.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

Leo wasn’t sure if that was the evil that had done this, though, or if looters had come after. “Looters would mean that someone out there is still breathing, at least,” he said hopefully. Trying and failing to imagine what undead evil would want with tapestries or gold coins.

Leaving the castle was somewhat harder than entering it had been because it no longer had a functioning drawbridge, but when Leo went outside, he saw that the giant grab was now nothing but a smoldering pile of ooze. He found a way across that gave him a wide berth to that mess, and then he spent the rest of the day searching basements in the other large buildings of the city.

Some days, he found abominations laying in wait beneath the stairs or in the darkest crevices beneath collapsed buildings, and some days, he found nothing at all, but every night, more monsters rose up from the dead and sought him out. As always, they were made of mangled flesh and rusted metal, though, occasionally, he found more ghostly opponents that only needed him to burn brightly to dispel.

He wanted to. He wanted to keep purging this city of evil until the black plumes that showed its taint had vanished completely, but it wasn’t that easy. The reality was that after the first couple of days and the first dozen nights, there really wasn’t much left to kill. Terrible things had happened in this city, but when the evil that had slaughtered this place was done, it had left to go destroy something else, and only the dregs were left now.

It felt like such a waste, and he wanted to ask himself what all this destruction was for, but then the truth was the destruction was what it was for. “Evil for evil’s sake,” he sighed, remembering the line that Brother Faerbar often quoted from the Book of Days. “The dark requires neither logic nor purpose. It darkens and despoils merely because it is.”

The words might be true, but they offered him no solace. Leo wished then that the Templar had told him and the others more stories about fighting the dark. He’d seen more than anyone but had, for obvious reasons, been reluctant to delve too deeply into the topic when speaking to an audience of children.

“Perhaps I should go to Blackwater,” Leo mused. He didn’t know where that was exactly, but he knew it was somewhere to the southwest. If Jordan’s stories were to be believed, you could see it from dozens of miles off because of the inky spire of shadows that soared into the sky, but realistically, it wouldn’t be hard to find. All one had to do was follow the river west until it became the Oroza and then follow that south until…

“Until what?” he asked glumly, kicking rocks. “Whatever happened there is even older than whatever happened here. Whoever’s behind all of this… whatever happened… they’re likely long gone anyway.”

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It was depressing. It was like the world had been abandoned, and Leo and the rest of them had been left behind. Even Jordan was gone now, and Leo was fairly certain he hadn’t seen a hundred people since Sanctuary shattered.

There were only two choices, though, and since one of them involved returning to his friends so that he could apologize for running off on his own, he chose the other: kill everything that moved. Leo spent the next few weeks methodically going from house to house and purging anything he found.

He said prayers for the dead that looked like victims more than monsters, and he chopped the monsters into pieces so small they’d never rise again. When all that was done, he looked at what else there was to do, and it was only then that he found the catacombs beneath the city.

That was where he found monsters made of pure shadow. Oh, there were creatures of flesh and blood, too, but it was the inky wraiths that surprised him.

Leo finally thought he’d found the true evil that hunted this city when he was attacked by a sinuous twelve-headed hydra from the darkness, but he was wrong. As terrifying as the things were, they were incredibly easy for him to defeat. The wraiths might look terrifying, but unlike the shadowy leviathan of his dreams, they were utterly obliterated by the touch of his glowing blade.

When the hydra lashed out at him, he cut off half a dozen heads with his glowing blade on impulse, cauterizing the stumps and doing enough damage that the thing began to fade away almost immediately. That fight was over before it started, and the ones that followed were not much longer.

Gruesome creatures of every description lurked in the catacombs and ossuaries beneath the city. There were slender shadows of men with knives for fingers and animals that belonged in nightmares and mythology. They were less of a menagerie and more of a tide, but Leo fought his way through the flimsy force without complaint, dissipating as many shadows as he could until one day, he found himself wandering the crypts, utterly alone.

Like moths, they’d been drawn to the flame only to die from it. They couldn’t help themselves, and now, just like that, the wound had been lanced, and there were no more shades left for him to purge. To say it was disappointing was an understatement. Still, there were the occasional skeletons left to fight, so even though all this work had done little to remove the pall over Rahkin, he kept going.

Every monster I kill is one less than can ever hurt anyone else again, he told himself as he delved ever deeper. The words rang hollow, though. He still felt like he was wasting his time.

That was when he found the wyrm. It wasn’t a real dragon. It couldn’t be, but it was a collection of bones that was held together by dark magic that might as well have been. One moment, Leo was walking through the winding paths of an overloaded ossuary with a ceiling so high that his light was lost in the darkness, and the next… well, the next, he was standing amidst a storm of bones, doing his very best to parry the worst of them, as a gigantic dragon assembled, and lashed out at him.

He hadn’t even suspected that there’d been something this dangerous left in Rahkin, not after all the recent days with so little to show for them. Now, suddenly, he was fighting for his life as blows rained down on him. Unlike the shadows, this thing was a very real threat. Though its swirling bones weren’t strong enough to get through his armor, the blows of its giant claws or its snapping jaws would have been enough to crush him or cut him in two.

Leo dove and rolled as much as he parried and struck, desperate to stay one step ahead of the beast. He succeeded in that much, but even if he’d wanted to escape, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to make it to such a far destination before the thing devoured him.

How do I even kill this thing? He wondered in frustration as he did his best to cleave bone after endless bone. There were tens of thousands of the things, though, and he would run out of the energy to swing his sword long before it ran out of pieces for its body.

When the thing looked like it was about to breathe fire on him, Leo thought it was all over for a moment. He could get hurt pretty bad and recover, but something like dragon fire or a storm of bone shards might well flense him to nothing.

That wasn’t what happened, though. Instead, it was nothing but a cloud of darkness that was burned away by his light. He had no idea what such an attack might do to someone who wasn’t so well-prepared, but then, no one would ever find out because he was going to finish this. As his light pierced the dark and dissipated that foul breath weapon, he’d seen the true core of the thing hiding there inside the bony skull, and he struck.

Leo didn’t run toward it or leap in the air to strike it. Instead, he extended the light from his blade, striking at the thing from halfway across the room like it was some sort of lance. No, it was longer than that. It was a beam of pure light, and in the instant it pierced the dark heart of the draconic monstrosity, the whole thing fell apart.

It was only then, as bone pieces rained down all around him, that he leaned heavily against the wall, gasping for breath, that he noticed the rats. Leo’s first thought was that they were the first he’d seen exploring this city. The second was that they didn’t appear to be alive. Dead or not, that didn’t stop them from looking at him with intense, hungry eyes.

Leo had come a long way since he first tried to channel enough light to take out a blackbird. This time, it was effortless. He simply reached out, and the first one burst into white flames. The others scattered as that happened, but they weren’t fast enough. Fire followed them, even past his gaze. Some magic he did not understand linked them together, and where one burned, another soon followed. He watched the light ripple its way down the hallway he’d been getting ready to go down as each unseen rat briefly became a torch before it was snuffed out for good.

“Who would reanimate rats?” Leo asked, with a shake of his head. Perhaps an evil mage still lives somewhere here, he thought to himself. Perhaps he’s spying on me from afar.

Leo didn’t know whether that made him want to keep digging through the rubble for more evil or if he should try to escape before whatever trap was sprung. Either way, it sent a chill down his spine and made him think that perhaps he should make some time to see his friends soon. Things were getting weird. He’d been gone for months now, and if he didn’t show up soon, they’d almost certainly decide that he’d died somewhere along his adventure.