Tenebroum-Chapter 210: A Brief History Lesson

From his view of the glowing orb high above the world, Jordan saw many things. He saw places he’d never dreamed of and faraway cultures he’d never even heard of before. There were too many to list, though the ones that worshiped the moon in some capacity were most apparent to him, and not all of them were in a pleasant way.

In the faraway land of Rogan, the Ananani dwelt high in the mountains, and each month, they sacrificed living, breathing men and women to him every month to make sure that the new moon regrew and had the energy to become the full moon once more. On the plains of Morrin-kahm, the horse lords of Vargol held ecstatic rituals and dances on the night of each full moon. People didn’t die to these, at least, but they could be crippled or maimed just the same.

Jordan would have rather spent his time watching over the children, but the Lich’s efforts had let a host of shadows sneak through the barrier in places where they were spread too thin. Now, it was up to him, as much anyone, to resolve that and expunge them one thin moonbeam at a time, wherever he found them. This, of course, required him to spend as much time turned away from the heavens as he ever had before, but he’d gotten so good at the constant game of chess in the sky that it was slowly but surely become an afterthought, letting him track down monsters made of darkness one at a time.

Shades, silent, shadow behemoths, and the menagerie of evil that lurked out in the outer darkness of the night sky were fearsome opponents for the living, but they were nothing to him. All he needed to do was spot them, focus for a moment, and they would evaporate into nothingness.

Sometimes, he found other opponents that could not be dealt with quite so easily. He noticed that Tanda seemed to be recovering from its brush with a fearsome monster, but there were no signs of undead about. Indeed, the strangest thing about the city was the shadows that it cast. Something wasn’t right about the place, but he could not exactly put his finger on what it was.

Still, as his gaze drifted further north, he saw that the Lich’s armies had almost completely stopped their efforts to conquer. They no longer had the strength to take the field against an army of prepared men. Instead, they dwelled in caves and prowled in the shadows, looking for the unwary. Despite the fact that some of the monsters's more powerful servants still existed and several castles were still firmly under their sway, they were no longer a force to be feared. Instead, they were an endemic pest that would still kill hundreds or thousands more before they were rooted out.

Even with all that searching, though, it took time before Jordan spotted the true threat once more. Unlike the servants of the Lich or the shadows, the beast that Lunaris’s prophecies spoke of moved fast and hid cleverly. It was only because Jordan traced the path of destruction down from Tanda that he found it at all.

As soon as he found it, though, Jordan knew where it was going. Leo. Jordan did not know when or where the two of them would meet, but as long as Leo held the silvered blade, they would have to. That was the way that destiny was written, after all. As Jordan watched the giant chimera, it became apparent that it was searching for the light-eyed boy, too.

As the monster moved south once more and prowled angrily through the ruins of Rahkin following the months-old scent of light, Jordan could not intercede directly, though. Theoretically, nothing stopped him, of course. His knowledge of things that should not be was the only thing that bound his hands; if he’d never seen that damned book, he would have done his best to kill or weaken the thing, but as it was, that was not his part to play.

He could have, at any point, tried to strike Malzekeen down with pure moonlight, even though it wouldn’t have worked. He could have also warned the children directly that it was coming.

Prophetic dreams were certainly in his purview as the God of the Moon and stars. However, except for the occasional dream to assure his children that Leo would one day return and that the boy was fine, Jordan resisted the urge. Were it not for what he’d read, both in the Book of Ways before he’d ascended and the other journals that he’d begun digging through now that the stars had returned to their proper places, he would have, but he knew two things with certainty now.

The first was that this was hardly the first time such a scenario had played out. Jordan had reviewed hundreds of volumes of his library, often at random, and he had found nothing but the same miserable histories playing out over and over. For human nature, he expected that much, of course, but it seemed that in the same way night followed day, bad times followed good, and evil rose up again and again throughout history.

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Malzekeen wasn’t the only agent of this destruction, of course, but they were one of the most common and most powerful, thanks to the unholy combination of war, plague, and famine that had fused together. There had been others throughout the ages, though. The Weapers, Pardeshmerah, the Star Stealers, Kalagoth’s Horde, and even giant monsters from the deep had all risen up at some point to endanger the world, but each time they’d been beaten back.

The Great Serpent of Gadorah had eaten the sun once, and now its bones merely made up an archipelago of some size far off the western coast. The Gods had apparently worried that it would arise once more, just as Malkazeen seemed to every few centuries, but so far, they had stayed quite quiescent, with only a single volcano that erupted boiling blood to indicate that any life remained in that old darkness.

The second thing that he knew, thanks to the things he’d read in the Book of Ways, was that any intercessions he could make were likely to make things worse. At least, that had been the way of things when he was a mortal, and it didn’t seem likely to have changed now that he’d become a God, especially since he no longer had the book.

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Well, since the book no longer works, he thought in frustration as he looked at where it had sat on the shelf. He’d let it sit in the field for months before finally risking a trip to the world below to retrieve it, but it was nothing but a book full of empty pages now. It was inert.

Still, as it had slowly taken his sight, he’d learned many things that all amounted to the same thing. To see the future was to see the path laid out before you, and the temptation to leave it and try to find some shortcut would only amount to folly. He’d seen a hundred ways to kill Taz, but all of them had ended with some or all of their deaths.

It was ironic, but the right answer had been to simply sit on his hands and read while his eyesight faded. It was the opposite of heroic, and he expected that Sister Annise had suffered much the same fate. After all, she’d come to warn them of danger, only to lead directly to her own death.

Why have a book that told the future if he didn't dare to do anything to change it? He couldn’t say.

The tome was a tool of prophecy, but that was hardly unprecedented throughout history, and he was slowly discovering that. Prophecies seemed to be almost as regular in their rhythms as the cycles of the moon. There were prophecies for when this sun would die and when that evil would rise, and right now, the prophecy that seemed to matter most was when the new dawn would come and chase away the shadows that had haunted the world.

He could only find parts of that one in Lunaris’s journals. She had not thought to leave him a complete version of the thing for easy reference, but then maybe that’s because he wasn’t meant to know it. It was clear enough to him at this point, though. A boy born of darkness would wield a sword of light and cause the sun to rise once more. It wasn’t especially clear if Leo would be that sun or he would die in the fight, but there was little Jordan could do about that just now.

Despite scouring her books, that was all the information he could find. Well, that and all the information that Siddrim had taken to prevent it. For a new sun to rise, the old one would have to set, and apparently, the Lord of Light had done his level best for centuries to avoid that fate. He’d devoured many a would-be hero’s light just to make sure that they would never rise to eclipse him.

Lunaris didn’t think much of this practice, but it wasn’t her place to stop him. Still, she dropped lines here and there about this prophecy as if she’d heard it from someone, even if she’d never said who.

Jordan had asked Niama about that, but the Goddess had merely shrugged. She’d told him there was no God of Fate, at least not currently. “They’ve existed before and will exist again, but destiny is not as enduring a force as nature or the stone beneath the feet of the mortal world, so sometimes it just… fades away.”

“So you’ve always been the Goddess of nature, and you’ve known more than one God of Fate?” Jordan had asked, trying to nail down the details.

“Always is a long time,” she’d laughed. “Nothing is always. Nothing except the dance between light and dark and life and death. I concern myself with living, though, so like the All-Father, I’ve been around longer than most. I’d tell you to try it, but Gods of Light… they don’t last quite so long as other forces.”

Jordan had thought about those words long after she’d left. It reinforced just how little he knew about what was going on. He didn’t even know where the All-Father was, though no one seemed particularly concerned about that. “He’s the oldest of us and rarely gets involved in these things beyond making something from time to time,” the Storm Goddess had said at their last meeting. “Now that he’s made the blade, he might retreat from the realm of mortals for a decade or more. It’s his way.” РÅ𐌽ÓᛒÈṢ

Jordan was unconvinced, but who was he to gainsay another Goddess when he’d barely gotten his feet wet. He was fast becoming an expert at stars, but that was it. What he wanted, even more than to stop fighting that endless battle, though, was to find someone to talk to about all this strange destiny magic.

If you can simply hand out prophecies to end evil, then why not do so for all evils of the world and be done with it? He often wondered. That would have been too easy, of course. There had to be some reason for it, even if he didn’t know what it might be. Still, as Jordan watched Malzekeen’s progress back toward the children’s tiny village, he desperately hoped that this time the prophecy would not fail.

One way or another, it would all be over soon, and at this point, all he could do was watch.