Tenebroum

Chapter 201: Purging the Darkness

For week after week, Leo slaughtered his way through the countryside. Without anyone with him, he could go further and faster than ever before, and he gloried in it. Several times, he found a lone family sheltering in a cave or a farmhouse somewhere well off the beaten path. Each time, he told them where wayward was and how to get there, using the landmarks of his quest to guide them around anywhere he considered dangerous.

He didn’t accompany them, though, and he had no idea if they made it to safety or not. He felt guilty about that. The right answer would have been to cease his quest and make sure every one of those lives was saved, but every day not spent purging the darkness felt like it would be a waste to him. He had a sword that could not be resisted glowing in his hand and a light that was only burning brighter in his heart.

Food, or the lack of it, no longer held him back. He could make his own bread when he had need of it, but it was the light that fed him now, and the only real nourishment he needed was after he’d been wounded, which happened on more than one occasion. Each battle where he was wounded badly enough to need to repair his armor afterward was a wake-up call for him. Some small part of his mind told him that if he wasn’t careful, he would fall, and no one would ever find his body.

He wasn’t one to back down from a challenge, though. Every near-death experience only taught him what not to do in the future, and he learned from each of them, be they a horde of zombies or a floating brain with tentacles that had tried to make him kill himself without much luck.

Leo slowly circled around Rahkin, planning to come at it from the north after he’d purged the various dungeons that surrounded it. They vented evil like volcanic geysers and were impossible to miss. Soon, he was able to gauge the threat of whatever lay within based solely on the color and thickness of the miasma. That made him overconfident and almost cost him his life when he found one of them full of strange, rusted men.

He had fought all manner of abominations, including many that were made of obvious animal parts, but these were the first he’d seed that weren’t human in any way. At first, he thought they were children trapped in iron armor, which was a horrific thought. But as he’d discovered that the strange meta men knew how to fight better than almost any war zombie he’d ever faced, he quickly reached another conclusion.

“Dwarves,” he grunted as he parried the blow from a deadly axe.

Such creatures were a myth, but there was nothing else that made sense with the beards and the weapons. He’d always thought that dwarves were made of flesh and blood, but maybe the stories got it wrong. Perhaps they were creatures of stone and metal, and when the Lich reanimated them, they rose up just the same.

He didn’t have a lot of time to consider the question while he was fighting them, though. They weren’t so fast, but they were skilled and strong. Worse, unlike most of the abominations he’d put down, they actually exhibited teamwork, which made their combined attacks that much worse.

Those thoughts stuck with him for a while after that. Until now, he’d assumed that the creatures he faced, from the ragged birds to the centaurs made from the rotting remains of plow horses and farmers, were no more than the scraps that the darkness had on hand at the time, but sometimes, he found creatures that made that seem less likely. Twice, he found rotting Templars whose rotting forms had been covered with very shiny armor in a mockery of the light, and in the second case, the man exploded with a thick yellowish gas when Leo put him down.

That had made him sick for days while the light healed his burned lungs from the inside out. “At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised to find a dragon,” he said to himself once he finished coughing up blood.

Eventually, though, he decided he was just dragging his feet. For so long, he’d told himself he needed to go into Rahkin, and now that it was there, on the horizon, he kept finding reasons not to go. There was evil out here that needed purging. His friends would look for him there. He thought of any reason except the real one: There might be something in that shadow-shrouded city he couldn’t beat.

Oh, it was one thing to secretly believe you could do anything and kill any abomination that existed, but something had killed Brother Faerbar, and no matter how hard Leo practiced and how many of the walking dead he slew, he doubted he would hold a candle to that man.

Still, on the day Leo purged the last of the barrows he could find, he reluctantly decided that tomorrow would be the day he would find out what was really in there. The result was… underwhelming.

At first light he entered the town to find it halfway leveled. There was nothing left within the walls that resembled life. He could find neither crows nor rats. He couldn’t even find creeping ivy that wasn’t withered and brown. Something awful had happened here. He was sure of it. He didn’t know what, but it had drained every last ounce of light and life that might have ever existed in that place.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Still, that was all the more reason to stay and wait to see what came out at night. That night, after he finished exploring the city for any sign of survivors, he chose the largely intact castle as the place where he would have his fight. He took the last few hours to prepare the ground and barred what doors he could to ensure he wouldn’t be surrounded, and he’d have several fallback locations if he’d truly bitten off more than he could chew. What found him at sunset was underwhelming, at least at first.

When the red sunlight finally faded and was replaced by the cold, distant stars, the first creatures to scuttle out of cellars and crannies in the rubble where the mangled pieces of zombies who had been killed at least once before waited out the day away from the sun’s harsh light. None of them had all four limbs, and few of them had more than one or two, making them easy to dispatch as they crawled forward in a quest to devour his light.

He was glowing literally now. That was a first, even for him. He barely took note of it while he was hacking the monsters to pieces, but when he did, he doubted it would last once he left this cursed place. After all, anything halfway to decent would burn with light in a place so dark, and no matter how many souls he set free, the miasma clung to everything like a stubborn fog.

Those dead were merely the warm-up act, though. Other, larger, broken things came after that. There was the upper half of an armored ogre that had long since lost its legs, there was a giant spider made from the parts of men that only had five limbs and three eyes left to attack him with, and there were a few war zombies that were still in mostly decent shape, though there was nothing special about them otherwise.

None of them stood a chance. Oh, the ogre could certainly have killed Leo if it had gotten a grip on him with those giant hands. They ripped out a door frame without an issue, and he doubted his bones would fare any better. Still, it couldn’t turn fast enough to stop him from climbing its exposed spine like a ladder and embedding his glowing sword deep into its thick skull.

The spider hadn’t even been that hard. Maybe when it had been fresh, it had been a quick, dangerous enemy. Now, it was simply an arthritic zombie on stilts, which again made him wonder about whatever it was that had created it. Something or someone had labored for months and years to create this panoply of horrors, and he had trouble imagining that.

Once those monsters were dispatched, Leo was starting to grow confident. At least until he felt the ground start to rumble and shake. It didn't take him long to realize that something was attacking the castle because it was too large to get at him inside. So, he went up top of the battlement to take a look. The result wasn’t quite a dragon, but it might as well have been.

Someone had taken the broken pieces of sunken ships, the severed parts of sea monsters, and a seemingly endless variety of human hands and feet and created a three-story hermit crab. The thing was vile, and even after all of Leo’s experience up until now, the smell made him gag. n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

When his light showed up on the parapet, the thing noticed him immediately, but it was much too large to climb, so it continued to attack the wall, as it alternated between roaring in frustration and

Still, he mounted the battlement and prepared to jump.

Leo had no doubt he could jump onto its back. He just had no idea how he was supposed to kill the thing. The other creatures had been easy enough. Even the ogre had an obvious weak point, but this thing? It was armored in three inches of wood, and under that, it was nothing but a writing mass of evil.

He studied the problem while the beast thrashed and flailed, and then when he identified what he thought was a cluster of eyes, he decided to make that his target. “I’d rather fight the dragon,” he said with more than a little disgust before he finally lept down to the monstrosity fifteen feet below.

In that moment, Leo had considered a lot of things. He’d considered where he would land and how he should strike. He’d considered his escape plan and the thing’s reach. The one thing he hadn’t considered, though, was how slimy it was. He’d never fought a sea monster before, and when he landed on its rough back, his legs instantly went out from under him, sending him sliding down the thing’s back toward its many limbs.

Leo buried the silver blade into the thing’s side, using it to slow his descent, but as it moved, his hand slipped, and he was sent tumbling to the thick wood of the drawbridge. He was up immediately but immediately wasn’t fast enough for this thing. It wasn’t a dried-out, desiccated husk like so many of the creatures he’d fought up until now. Its movements were fast and slick. And before he could do more than rise, rotting tentacles had wrapped around the young man and were slowly squeezing the life out of him.

Leo’s life flashed before his eyes for a moment as he looked at the glittering hilt of his magical sword embedded in the monster a dozen feet away. If I had that, I could cut myself free, he thought into despair. That moment of weakness was dispelled when the thing began to crush him even tighter as it dragged him toward its maw. The thing wasn’t a proper mouth. It was just a cavern lined with rusting swords; it was nothing but a mockery of life, and it was that moment of indignity that made his light shine brighter.

Leo Garvin the Fifth would not go out like this. He would not let the darkness take him as it had his forebearers. Leo struggled as hard as he could against the vice-like grip, determined to use its slimy nature to his advantage. It did nothing, though.

Well, nothing, physically. His light had been visible as an aura nearly all evening in this vile place, but the more he struggled and fought, the brighter it grew. Eventually, only a few feet from rotting, certain death, the thing’s tentacles burst into flame, and it shied away as Leo’s light began to take a real toll on the creature.

He thought about pressing his luck but decided against it. First, he needed his blade. Even his silver sword glowed when he pulled it out of the creature, and that made him smile grimly. As it tried to move away from him, flailing widely, he thought about pressing the fight but decided it was too risky. He could feel his broken ribs still trying to mend, and he knew that light or not, he wasn’t at 100% yet.

Instead, he pulled back, and before the thing could leave the drawbridge, he attacked the chains holding the thing in place. Each severed cleanly with a single stroke from his radiant blade, sending the bridge and the giant crab zombie tumbling into the dried-up moat. It fell there, hopelessly pinned, which was good enough for Leo.

“Let the sun take you,” he spat as he went back inside. He would find a place to heal and rest, and then, in the morning, he would continue his purge. If there were still things like this around, then there was more work to do.