Tenebroum-Chapter 217: Something Missing

Something terrible was happening, but Jordan did not know what. He could barely even point to something specific, but that didn’t matter. What mattered were the things he couldn’t see or had glimpsed only briefly.

“But the prophecy was fulfilled, and Malkezeen is no more,” he sighed, rubbing his eyes. “So what is this feeling?”

With a sun back in the sky for half the day, his job had become much easier. He no longer had to spend most of his time micromanaging the stars and could instead focus on learning from the past and studying the loose threads of the future.

Still, beyond clouds of swirling darkness that he’d spotted on the last several nights, he would be hard to point to a single piece of evidence that proved anything. The All-Father was still missing, but according to both the gods of today and the journals from the past, that wasn’t so uncommon. He really did just disappear for decades and centuries sometimes. If he begged Niama or one of the other terrestrial gods, they might seek him out for Jordan, but as God of The Moon, he was remarkably poorly placed to look for someone who built his kingdom beneath the mountains.

He left the Book of Ways open on his desk all the time now, hoping to catch it twitching to life in some unguarded moment, as it sometimes did. That never happened, though. He was left in the dark, with no clear way to determine what the problem that was nagging at him might be.

He’d brought it up to Leo yesterday at Sunset, just before moonrise, after the boy had finished his ride, but the new Sun God didn’t share his concern. “Evil yet lingers, I agree,” he said, looking right through Jordan as he stepped off of his flaming chariot, “But nature is healing. It’s only been a couple of weeks, and I can already see it. Everywhere by Blackwater is—”

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“Exactly!” Jordan exclaimed. “If the Lich is dead, then why does that shadow remain.”

“I don’t know,” Leo answered with a shrug. “The land is too stained to make much sense of it. There’s no life left to feed on there or people left to hurt. Even the Red Hills doesn’t have too many goblins left. I could try burning the land to ash to see if that helps nature take its course, but…”

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Jordan answered with a shake of his head. “We should focus on the healthy parts of the world, not those that are past saving.” Though he would be more than happy to intervene or call for his fellow gods to do the same if only they had a proper target, striking blindly would only cause new problems.

“Malkezeen is finally eradicated, I think,” Leo volunteered hopefully. “That’s good news, right? I’ve found no more of his rats in the last couple of days, and I looked hard.”

Jordan smiled at that. Despite inheriting so much awesome power, Leo was still just a young man who was eager to please. Sometimes, Jordan forgot that. He wished that he had more advice to give their young sun, but neither of them had much experience in their current roles. Apparently, that wasn’t uncommon in the wake of periods of darkness when the slate was cleaned. The world would survive somehow. It always did before, in the never-ending cycle of darkness and light that seemed to be the only common refrain throughout history.

“I did notice that a city seemed to be missing today,” Leo said finally. While Jordan was still lost in thought. “That’s weird, isn’t it? How do you suppose a whole city vanishes?”

“What? Where?” Jordan asked, instantly concerned. He’d been so busy looking for things that didn’t belong that he hadn’t even bothered to look for something that might be missing.

Leo didn’t know the name of the city, but he described the location, and Jordan murmured, “Tanda, hmmm… That’s a big place. They were recovering nicely from their recent brush with that beast, too. I wonder what could have happened?”

Neither of them had any answers, but as soon as the half-moon rose later that night, that was the first place that Jordan looked, and it was, in fact, gone. There was only a faint trace of darkness in the sands, but that wasn’t what stood out to him. Slowly, he increased the light of the moon to look for any clues as to how a large and prosperous city might just vanish into thin air. When he did so, he didn’t find what he was looking for, but what he did notice was the way that his light refracted strangely around a portion of where the city once stood.

As he studied it, he heard the faintest whisper, “Leave me be, but it notices you.”

There was fear in that voice, but even before Jordan could even wonder at who it was he was talking to or ask a question, a single woman strode out of thin air to appear on the glowing sands. The sight would have been strange with any woman appearing like that, but the sight of this woman took his breath away. She was made of marble, shot through with veins of gold. Even if she hadn’t been moving, she would have been one of the most beautiful statues he’d ever seen.

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Jordan took a moment to look for a trap, and then when he found nothing obvious, he manifested on the sands not so far from her in his ghostly pale form. Leo had called it offputting, and said that he looked like he as dead, but Jordan thought he looked regal and mysterious like this.

“You think your light will protect you?” she asked, not even a little surprised that he’d appeared. “Not from it. The darkness has grown too strong to fear the light.”

“I… who exactly?” Jordan asked. “And who are you exactly?”

“I am the Voice of the City,” the woman said simply, with only the smallest of bows, “And you are the man in the moon.”

“Well, I suppose that’s one way of putting it,” Jordan said with a chuckle. “But who is it you’re afraid of, and what exactly happened to your city?”

“Tanda has been… put away,” she answered after thinking about it for a moment. “It is too dangerous to leave the city lying around where anyone could find it.”

“But Malzekeen is dead,” Jordan said. “The danger is over. You can—”

“Malzakeen is not at issue, and honestly, I am shocked that my predecessor did not do the same thing to protect her gleaming white walls,” the city goddess answered dismissively, “but she valued the happiness of the people more than her own survival. I, on the other hand, will do what is best for them, no matter how much they might hate me for it.”

“Predecessor? If you know that Malzekeen is dead, then who is it you’re afraid of?” he asked.

As he spoke, he studied the way the light refracted around her, revealing an invisible doorway just behind her. Somehow, she’d hidden away her city in a strange little pocket dimension. It made a strange sort of sense to him, given that the Gods and Goddesses of Cities were said to have absolute power over everything inside their boundaries, but even so, he'd never even imagined this sort of use for the power before, much less heard of it being used like that before.

“The darkness has become unchained,” she said, looking around nervously. “My master… I-I wish I could still serve it, but it has thrown off the shackles of humanity or mortality that it might have once possessed. It has become a great haboob now, and I fear it will scour this world clean.”

“Who is… was your master?” Jordan asked. “I have seen nothing.”

“You are the light,” she snapped, “And the light cannot see the darkness. I—”

“Here you are, my child…” A voice echoed out from somewhere deep in the night. That stilled the woman instantly. “You thought you could hide from me in the light? You thought you could work with them?”

The voice was a echoing, grating thing, and it put Jordan’s teeth on edge from the first moment he heard it. It put him on his guard too, and he increased the brightness of the moon, pushing the darkness back even further from the dune the two of them stood upon as he looked for the source.

There was something swirling out there at the edge of the light, but each time Jordan adjusted the glow it slipped away to somewhere else. Each time it left behind only the indistinct impression of a man.

“I make alliances with no one,” the woman said solemnly, “And I would never betray you. Please know that, but I have other obligations now. I must—”

“Your only obligation is to me!” the voice roared. “Anything else is a betrayal.”

The woman gave no reply to that. Instead, she bowed once more and stepped backward into nothingness. The gate that led into her domain vanished as soon as she’d finished using it, leaving Jordan alone on the pale sands, looking for an enemy it could not quite locate.

“It is no matter,” the disembodied voice growled. “She cannot escape me for long, I will deal with you first.”

Jordan’s first impulse was to flee as well, but instead, he started to cast a spell. That was something that he hadn’t done in a long time, and it felt good to do so. As a student, he’d known perhaps two dozen spells, and he’d only really been good at three or four of them, but now his knowledge of magic was almost encyclopedic. He probably still didn’t know quite as much as Taz, but he almost certainly knew more than any living mage.

Instantly, he was surrounded by a constellation of tiny, flickering stars that rotated around him. This would have been a fairly useless spell against anything else, but if the thing that was attacking him was so strongly aligned with the darkness, then he could do much worse than summon a swarm of fireflies. They were not insects, of course. They were glimmering motes of pure moonlight typically used to fight the shadowy monstrosities that had managed to slip by the stars from time to time. At first, Jordan thought that was what this thing might have been, but it was clear this was something larger.

The darkness that was swirling hundreds of feet away from him started to encroach despite the bright moonlight that surrounded him. That was a troubling sign, and with a word he sent thousands of motes of lite shooting off in all directions, looking for his true enemy. Even as he did so, though, he was already summoning a second wave. That was good because the darkness was growing, not shrinking.

The inky blackness rose up like a wave around his clearing of light on all sides, swallowing every one of the tiny motes with little more than a ripple. Then, despite the focused moonlight, it surged toward him.

Jordan was not defenseless, of course. He summoned beams of light as well as domes and barriers even as the light of the moon continued to increase above him. He blasted whatever this was back in a dozen places, but still, through all that, he could find nothing vital to strike at. He was fighting an undifferentiated mass of evil, and retreat was quickly beginning to look like the most valid option as the walls of darkness grew ever closer and higher while they encroached on his position.