Published at 24th of February 2024 11:53 am

Chapter 96 Penumbral

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Jordan would never know how long the night had truly lasted because it wasn’t until he’d wandered for days in the dark, frost-covered stretches, as he went from village to empty village, that he discovered the edge of the night quite by accident.

Teleportation magic was dangerous as a rule, and if you screwed up something minor like he’d done, it could send you all sorts of crazy places. Honestly, he was lucky he hadn’t ended up a hundred feet in the air or at the bottom of the sea. However, attempting to use it when you had no idea where you were was downright insane. Unfortunately, this meant very sore feet after countless hours spent walking, searching for any sign of life. By the time he’d found the first village, he was numb and exhausted, and all he’d cared about was the bed with a blanket on it.

It was only in the morning, or at least what would have been morning if the sun still existed that he realized the whole place had been abandoned. He’d screamed himself hoarse, yelling for help, but was not the least bit surprised when no one answered.

The fact that whoever had lived here had left in quite a hurry, leaving all of their worldly possessions behind, was more interesting than the fact that they were missing. He’d balked at that little detail the first time, but by the time he came to the third village where everything was intact but the inhabitants, he simply accepted it. With everything strange going on, who was he to quibble with the fact that they’d left bread on the table when they vanished?

“Perhaps the gods have whisked everyone away to their bosom, and the world has ended,” he grumbled to himself as he struggled to start a fire in his new abode. “And left only the mages and other sinners here to rot just like the priests always said that they would.”

Jordan was sleeping in his third temporary home, and despite the cold temperatures, he was finding less and less to eat as he continued along on his journey into the darkness, but as he went outside to check the hen house to see if there were any eggs on offer, he found the strangest possible thing: the sun.

No, even stranger, there were two suns, but one was on the other side of the wall of darkness, and its rays reached him only faintly. Still, it was baffling, and for a moment, he just stood there dumbstruck, sure he’d gone insane.

“What in the name of the light…” he whispered, as he took two steps back the way he came and found that the light vanished once more.

It was like there was an invisible wall, and somehow, it separated the place he’d been from the rest of the world. That theory was borne out with further exploration. The further he walked away from the thing, the longer the wall stretched until it very clearly became a singular tower of darkness that stretched from horizon to horizon and all the way up to the faint sky itself.

On the one hand, Jordan was overjoyed that the light had returned to the world. Even if the sun looked strange and seemed to have divided into two, it was better than the darkness that was slowly freezing the earth solid in the place that he’d been in, and he was hesitant to go back inside, even briefly, to retrieve his meager supplies and a flaming brand so that he could light a new fire outside.

The reality of the thing, even after the sun had set and he could no longer see the difference, was almost enough to send him running as far and as fast as he could. The mage inside of him would not let him shrink from such a strange sight, though, and he knew he must learn all he could to share with anyone else who might have survived that terrible assault on Abenend.

So, making sure to stay outside of the bounds of the evil thing, Jordan began to travel slowly south, day by day, looking for more information, but all he found was madness. Still, as he went, he made notes of the madness with scavenged paper and tried to do his sums to calculate the total size of the area encompassed by darkness, but it was inconclusive.

He discovered that there were four different suns now, but none of them had the warmth or light that he was used to, that his pillar of night went all the way to the Oroza, and most importantly, he found out that the undead abominations that had already almost killed him once could be out during daylight hours now.

Jordan wasn’t sure what that meant or how that was even possible, but it was. He’d been lectured on the subject of the unquiet dead in classes before, and he’d always been taught that light was their greatest weakness, but if he hadn’t been able to cast invisibility and slip away while the small mob of decaying creations hunted for him, he would most certainly be nothing but a cooling corpse himself.

Light or not, the world really had ended, he decided, and he was left alone with the damned. That was when he started walking away from the evil thing along the banks of the Oroza. If there were any people left in this world… real, live people, and not just their shades, they would be in a big city like Fallravea, or gods help him, in Siddrimar.

He shuddered at that thought. The last place on earth any mage wanted to end up was in the holy city, but he didn’t see what choice he had. If it was a choice between the zealots and the walking dead, he would choose the former. At least if the priests of Siddrim killed him, they would pray for his soul and send him to heaven, he thought cheerfully as he continued to walk north along the course of the river.

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It wasn’t the first wrecked ship that Markez had seen on their way up the Oroza. Even without having to fight the dead or the eternal night, it had been an ugly week, and he’d barely gotten any sleep as he tried to keep his crew of children and incompetents from doing anything stupid. However, when he spotted the wreckage in the thin blue light of morning, he knew immediately that it was the dainty little two-masted brigs that had passed them on its way upriver the day before yesterday. The crew of the vessel was smart and professional, and unlike so many of the other ships he’d seen over the last few days, Markez had never once worried they might be pirates intent on boarding them.

In fact, from their bearing and direction, he would have guessed that they were after the same thing that he was — the safety of Siddrimar. The only difference between them, of course, was that they were certainly some dignitary or messenger. They might even be from the king himself, but that wasn’t Markez’s business. His only task was to manage their dwindling food supplies, try to find somewhere safe for all the children he’d been saddled with, and somehow keep the hopelessly inept lubbers from beaching them on either shore.

That was just one of the many reasons he was so worried now, even if no one else noticed the wreckage of the ship as they glided upriver. No one was paying attention to anything but that damn pillar of darkness.

It had loomed on the horizon for days now. Every night, it disappeared against the night sky, and every morning, it reemerged as an impenetrable column of darkness. And it was getting closer.

Hour by hour and day by day, it grew, but now it was almost dead ahead of them, and it took up half of the horizon. He was fairly sure they would hit it today. He just didn’t know when.

Markez would have loved nothing more than to slow them down a bit and give the problem a good think, but that wasn’t really an option.

For the last few days, some unsavory-looking boats had been gaining on them. He hadn’t made a fuss about it to everyone else. He’d just watched them as he manned the rudder, but he’d seen the look in the eyes of those men yesterday. Before his sails had caught a more favorable wind and left them in the dust, they’d almost had them, and he was convinced that it was only Lunara or some other goddess that loved children that had saved them, but he was equally sure that wouldn’t work a second time.

Now the dogs were back. They were only an hour behind, or perhaps two, and Markez only had two choices: he could go with the devil he knew and prepare to be boarded, or he could choose the devil he didn’t want to know and go headlong into the wall of night that was expanding ahead.

Given that he knew what would happen in the case of the former, he knew for damn sure that there was no one on this craft who could help him fight off someone that wanted trouble. Some of the older kids would try, of course, but that fop of a nobleman would be no help at all.

Like thinking about him managed to summon the man, Dian came over. “What do you think we should do about the darkness?” the noble asked almost conspiratorially.

“I think we should pray,” Markez said tiredly, not even bothering to look at the greater danger that was closing in behind them or the hints of what might happen to their ship when they crossed that threshold spread out on the waters before them.

“Pray?” Dian asked in disbelief, “Isn’t there something more we can do?”

“You could go below and gather the last of the lamps so we can see what we can see, but beyond that…” Markez let his voice trail off. The last thing he wanted to do was to encourage the man to draw the sword on his hip. He’d probably just hurt himself with it. Lamps would be enough of a challenge for him, though he’d send one of the girls with the noble to make sure he didn’t burn the place down, and if they were all very lucky, he would still be somewhere below when they finally crossed the threshold.

And that moment was coming faster all the time. Even as Markez stood by the rudder, the wall of night seemed to approach faster and faster, though since that seemed true of the nearest vessel behind them, it could have just as easily been the sense of danger knawing at him. In the end, he beat the thing into the dark by 100 yards. For a moment, he was tempted to extinguish all lamps to try to hide from the other boat, but even with all the light they mustered, he could barely see the near shore of the river. Without light, they would surely ground the craft.

“Ease up on the starboard line, lads!” he called out, trying to get them to tack the ship to boost the speed a little bit without causing a panic.

The children did as bid, though clumsily, and they spilled so much air from the sail that they lost as much speed as they gained. Markez sighed as he lashed the rudder into place and picked up his boat hook as he watched the other vessel drawing closer and closer along their port side. If there was going to be a fight, then it was going to be now.

The determination was momentarily interrupted when he heard the sounds of screaming and the planks of wood cracking. Markez spun around just in time to see the two lamps that had illuminated the barge and its rowers, though he would wished that he hadn’t forever afterward.

Something large, sinuous, and utterly inhuman had come up out of the water and effortlessly snapped the boat in two. He didn’t know what it was, but he knew that it had a giant maw and that it could bite a man in half almost as easily as a ship.

The noise was impossible to hide and sent a flurry of people running to the stern to see what had happened, but the show was over, and even the splashing sounds of whoever was left breathing were quickly drowned out by the dozens of feet running across the deck and the shouting. By the time they reached the back rail and began to pepper Markez with questions, there was nothing back there but darkness, and the danger lurking behind it.

“What is it?” one of the older boys shouted.

“What happened?” Lara asked. “Did you see? Can you see?”

He ignored them. “See? See?! You see here. All of you. The boat that was behind us — they’ve run aground on the rocks there,” Markez lied. “Now watch the sails and the rigging, or we’ll meet the same fate before we’re clear of this cursed dark!”

He opted not to worry about the monster lurking behind them. If that thing wanted to eat them next, there was nothing he could do to stop it, so he decided it was best not to worry anyone about it and focus on getting away from here as quickly as possible.

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