Tenebroum

Chapter 178: New Moon

The moon was black now, but thanks to Taz’s endless conversations about celestial objects, and tables of solar and lunar motion, Jordan still knew that it was time for it to rise. It was nothing but a shadow in the sky now as it rose, but even if his eyes worked as well as they used to, he doubted very much that he’d be able to find it, even with Taz’s telescope.

More than that, though, even beyond the knowledge of where it would be in the sky, and when, he could feel it calling to him. All through his long talk with the children, and even during dinner, he could feel it like a pressure on the back of his mind. Even if he knew it was related to the moon, though, he did not know why. Was she angry with him for murdering her chosen champion?

Eventually, that pressure became impossible to ignore, so he stepped out into the cold night air. He wasn’t sure if he would make the long walk to the tower and try to find it with the telescope, or what, be he felt the need to be outside that throbbed in time with his heart. It turned out that it wasn’t the fresh air, he required, though. It was the solitude.

As soon as he got far enough from the light eyed children that he could no longer hear their talking and chatter, though, he could hear something closer to a whisper or a buzz, from somewhere far away. This confused Jordan, but even if he wanted to resist it, he couldn’t have. It was practically a compulsion. So, he followed it, ever deeper into the unharvested fields of Sanctuary, where the darkness and the distant sounds of the ocean combined to create something deeper than silence. It was there he heard the words clearly for the first time.

“Come to me, Jordan. There’s not much time left,” the voice whispered.

“Come to you?” he asked, confused. “Where? How?”

“Jump,” the whispery voice breathed, so close that it tickled his ear and made him turn around to find no one there. “Take a leap of faith, as you did so long ago…”

Jordan’s blood ran cold as he suddenly understood who it was that was speaking to him, and what it was she was asking him to do. His first urge was to ask where he was supposed to go, but he suppressed that too, because he already knew the answer, and it was simply too absurd to hear aloud.

The moon. She wants me to teleport to the thrice-damned moon! He thought, as he stood there, gazing half blind into the night sky.

Jordan sighed at the impossibility of the request. No one had ever teleported half so far and lived to tell the tale, but somehow, she wanted him to cast a spell that he hadn’t used in years, and reach a place so far away that no mortal had ever trod upon in all of recorded history?

Perhaps it’s not Lunaris, he thought in a moment of self-doubt. Perhaps it's merely some wraith trying to trick me into destroying myself.

That was practically a joke of course. If something was watching him there were easier ways to strike down an out of practice apprentice like him than using self-doubt. Still, he clung to that delusion for a moment in an attempt to ignore the memory of his last and only brush with the Goddess so long ago.

Of course, it was impossible to forget moments like that. He still had nightmares about the moment he felt the world freezing into place, locking him beyond time in space so he could bitterly regret his miscalculation until his mind disintegrated from madness.

In his nightmares, though, there was no Goddess to pull him free. Of course. He was just trapped there in the dark with nothing but Brother Faerbar’s eyes glowing in accusation forever.

Jordan took a few deep breaths to calm down, as he started to run the incantations through his mind that would let him step between worlds. He probably still trusted himself to jump across the several hundred yards that stood between him and the tower. In the daytime, at least. Jordan knew every inch of Sanctuary, and of that tower, still, further that that seemed like a death sentence, and the moon was a lot further away than the top of Taz’s now empty tower.

Jordan searched the horizon, looking for the place without a single blurry star, and when he finally found it, he wondered if such a thing is even possible. “Are you really going to do whatever a voice in your head tells you to?” Jordan asked himself, as he tried to talk himself out of this. He already knew the answer, though.

Suicide or not, he had been called, and he was going. His only regret was that he hadn’t told one of the children. They would wonder where it was he’d gone. They would feel like he’d abandoned them, but he’d taken care of them for as long as he could, and he could not resist the way the Moon Goddess’s plea tugged at his soul.

Then, without even so much as a backward glance at the house, he took a deep breath and started to chant. Despite its risks, teleportation was a relatively straightforward spell, when used as intended. This, though, was longer and more complicated. It took time to gather this much power. One could not hope to cross vast distances without proper preparation.

So, even though he knew that it was impossible, he let the essence build inside of him for several minutes. He continued until his body started to hum with barely suppressed power, and the air around him started to twinkle with motes of essence. Only then, when he could handle no more did he release the spell.

The world jerked hard immediately. The sensation of motion was so violent that the battered old copy of the Book of Ways that he’d been holding fell into the field as a spasm of shock wracked his body. He couldn’t worry about that, though. Instead, he could only focus on the destination.

When a mage teleported, technically he didn’t move. It was the world that moved around him. Still, that knowledge wasn’t enough to stop him from feeling like he was soaring into the night sky. He was flying skyward in a journey that could not end well, but that did not stop him from moving forward like an arrow from Cynara’s bow.

Eventually, though, just like an arrow, he slowly lost speed, and hovered there, lost in the darkness between heaven and earth. Unlike the proverbial arrow, though, he would never return to earth and dash himself to pieces against the ground far below. Instead, he would simply be lost between places. At least, he would be, if not for a lifeline from the Goddess.

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When last they’d met in the inbetween he was in the darkness beneath the ground, and though her hand glowed so brightly it was hard to appreciate her beauty, it was smooth to the touch. This time though, it was the hand of a mother, or a grandmother, care worn with age, and the pull he felt as she grabbed his hand and pulled him forward was weaker than it had been before.

Weaker was a relative word, though. After a few seconds he was soaring almost as fast as he’d been at the start, and the distant, blurring stars were soaring by him like a swarm of myopic fireflies. Still, he kept going further and further away.

Honestly, he never dreamed the moon was this far away. He’d expected that his leap into the void would have gotten him most of the way there, but it did not. Instead, for minute after minutes he was dragged skyward, until the dark of the moon blotted out everything, and he was in the void once more.

Then, just as quickly as his journey started, it stopped, and he was standing there amongst the ruins of some giant work of cyclopian architecture, with only Lunaris’s fading light to hold back whatever it was lurking in the squirming shadows. And he was holding her hand. He was holding the Goddess’s hand while she regarded him with faint amusement.

He pulled his hand away like he’d been scalded, and bowed as low as he could. “My lady,” he said, not sure how one addressed a divinity. “I… your, uhmm—”

She dismissed him. “Please,” she said. “There’s no time for that. There are more important things right now than stuffy formalities.”

“Tell me what you need then,” Jordan said, rising.

“I need you to kill me,” she said, producing a silvery knife from seemingly nowhere. “Before it wins.”

As she spoke the word ‘it’, she nodded to the dark, to where the squirming shadows lay. For just a moment, her light flared bright enough that even his failing vision gave him a pretty good idea of the throbbing, serpentine nightmares that lay beyond her dim ring of light.

“Kill you?” he repeatedly, dumbly, as he took the knife and looked at it. “Why?”

“Because sometimes, that is the way that my divinity is passed, from person to person, in a chain that goes back to the very beginning of these terrible cycles,” she answered with a wan smile. “and if the Lich’s cancerous servant is the one to strike me down… well, there is no telling what darkness it will unleash. It will snuff out the stars and open the floodgates, which will almost certainly wash the world away.”

As she spoke, he gazed up into the night sky and saw an orb that was much like the moon used to be, only it was colored in greens and blues. Is that the world? He wondered. Is that where I was? It looked so tiny and distant.

He didn’t ask about that, though. Instead, noticing that the ring on light that the two of them stood in had gotten slightly smaller he asked, “Why me? I’m… I’m not even a full mage. It should have been Taz. I—”

“That man was a monster as you well know,” she chided him. “I only held out as long as I did because I knew that the oath I swore so long ago to keep him from making more mischief would be absolved by his death. No, Jordan Sedgim, you are not much as a mage, it’s true. I wasn’t either, though, when I was chosen. You are a good man, though, and you saved those children even though no one forced you to. That is all that matters to me. You’ll figure everything else, in time.”

Her words made sense, but they did nothing to address the real concern. That concern was overridden by the darkness that was crawling every closer. He couldn’t make out the details, but he could see the surface of the moon bubbling beneath their feet as something grew there, or perhaps attempted to burrow to the surface.

“Don’t worry,” she said, trying her best to smile. “The boy already has his blade, and the shadows grow overconfident. You will see everything when the moon is whole once more. It is all falling into place”

In the end, Jordan lacked the steel to plunge the knife into the dying woman’s heart. He simply couldn’t do it. All he could manage to do was hold the blade steady while she stepped forward and did it herself, spilling red blood all over her fine white dress.

Jordan suppressed the urge to apologize. Whether he was apologizing for what he was doing or wasn’t doing, though, he wasn’t sure. In that tense silence, though, he could see the shapes in the dark start to wither and die, and he could feel a terrible power flowing from the blade that held the knife into him.

It started slowly, but as Lunaris’s eyes closed, and she began to fade away like a ghost, that trickle became a flood. Soon it was a dozen times more overwhelming than the essence he’d gathered for his most recent teleportation spell. It wasn’t overflowing, though. It was consuming him. He was on fire, and as he started screaming in agony, he knew that it was his humanity that was burning away.

Knowing didn’t stop him from blazing white brightly enough that it drove back the things that lurked in the darkness. No, it’s not driving them back, he realized. It’s erasing them.

Unmaking them was probably a better word, but it only occurred to him after he watched the toppled stones of the coliseum fade away, to be replaced by a structure that was probably what it looked like before the collapse. Once he looked beyond himself, though, he found it hard to return to his burning body. Instead, his view spiraled further and further out.

The moon itself was being reborn, and though the stars themselves were not brightening, their patterns were becoming clearer to him by the minute. So were the horrible things that they were holding back, in the darkness beyond that vast and complicated net. Jordan turned away from all of that, and looked instead back to the world he’d left behind. He didn’t understand any of what was happening. Taz might have been a monster, but he was a monster that had trained for lifetimes to be ready for this. Jordan was just the third son of a minor house that knew enough to cast a few spells.

I was a man, he corrected himself.

He definitely didn’t suffer from that limitation anymore. That was the reason he could look down on the world beneath him with such clarity that he could see the children out with lanterns now looking for him, and why he could see Leo standing in the surf talking with a ghostly dragon while he held a gleaming sword in his hand.

It was all too much to take in, and as soon as he tried to study the blurry vision in more detail a wave of dizziness took him and he pulled back showing him the wider view, and the way that the entire region was polluted by darkness so badly, that not even his bright, clear moonlight could do much to penetrate the fog.

That’s because the moon is not the sun, he reminded himself with something he’d never heard before, as if it was something he’d known forever. The Sun’s job is to burn away the dark, and mine is to hold back the night.

With some reluctance, he turned away from the world and back toward the net of constellations that kept the monsters of the beyond at bay. He needed to figure all of this out, and that was the first place he needed to start.

In the end, the only evidence that anyone would find when they looked for him outside later that night was the book of ways lying in the dirt where he’d dropped it. That, and a bright full moon hanging in the sky where the dark and battered one had been earlier that evening. Lunaris was dead, and for now at least, Jordan would reign in her place.

I’m going to need to come up with a better name before I get any priests or whatever, he thought in embarrassment. Who ever heard of a God named Jordan?