Tenebroum

Chapter 85: The End of Days (1)

It was a tense, still twilight, but when dawn first colored the horizon, nothing happened. Not right away. It wasn’t until the upper limb of the sun made its way above the horizon and slowly colored the muddy waters of the Oroza with dawn’s morning light that an errant sunbeam made its way to the temple and searched for the missing piece of itself.

The light would have expected Siddrim’s champion to be standing outside triumphantly to greet the dawn, but instead, it found dark, empty streets. The light found a temple that was almost unchanged on the outside but filled only with a paradoxical mix of ruin and worshipers on the inside.

His avatar must have won, he realized, even if the surroundings offered few clues about what it was that had happened. The worshipers sang his hymns welcoming the dawn, but the notes were off-key, and something felt off. He’d taken the strange scene in an instant, but it was only when he found the body of his avatar at the bottom of a well that should not have existed that he knew something terrible had happened.

Slowly, the errant sunbeam bent, moving ever deeper at an impossible angle so that it could reach the devout young warrior he’d empowered. It was only when Siddrim could feel Todd’s weak heartbeat and the information of the last day’s events that it had reached down to touch what appeared to be his slain avatar that the trap was sprung.

That connection was enough to reclaim the avatar’s spark of divinity. In fact, that was itself a necessary step in accessing the memories of his shard. Even before Siddrim began to make sense of the terrible images that flooded out of that twisted, broken mind, though, it was already too late. The darkness had forged a connection, and that connection was trapped at the center of a series of concentric binding rings that only throbbed with power when he tried to escape.

The first time that Siddrim tried to pull back, he felt himself unable to do so, and in a panic, he pulled harder, but all that did was cause the runes to flare to violent life and increase their grip. Several things happened at once after that.

The first was that whatever was controlling these actions behind the scenes allowed water to start flowing into the well. Apparently, it no longer mattered if their bait drowned now that he’d been caught.

The second was that the sun began to fade where it kissed the horizon. It was a small change, and even if the average person would have been awake, he doubted that most would have noticed it. Still, for a god of light, this was a worrisome moment.

Third, and finally, the worshippers that had been singing so discordently up until now all fell silent in unison. Then, as one, they said, “I welcome you, Lord of Light, and thank you for christening your new temple personally.”

Siddrim did not respond, nor did he try to pull back again. That was a painful thing that seemed to redirect all the force he used to escape right back at him. He would deal with that in a moment. For now, he turned inwards, ignoring all the other distractions as he tried to understand the darkness that was surging through him so he could bind and purge it.

It was not an attack. It was an infection.

Darkness should not be able to exist in the presence of the light, and yet even as it burned away moment by moment, it flowed deeper inside the Lord of Light. Just being able to see darkness made him feel dirty. Such things were normally banished by his very arrival! Whole mountain ranges of shadows were supposed to flee into caves as he rose each day, and it was only when he rested from those exertions that they finally came out to cover the land once more. But now they were inside of him, and no matter how brightly he flared, he could not dispel them completely.

“I once feared you, you know,” the voice inside him whispered even as the water levels in the well continued to rise, and his dying servant started to choke and cough. “I once had reason to, though. A little patch of land blessed in your name was all that was required to destroy me utterly.”

“All of this land is mine!” Siddrim roared, bombarding the temple with light so fierce that steam began to rise from the damp rooftop. “I will burn you away, foul spirit! Not even dust will remain to mark your grave!”

For a moment, he did. Light bombarded the whole area. First, it was in the temple, and then the streets of Blackwater, and finally, all the surrounding fields and glens. It burned all the way to the bottom of the Oroza as it made those murky waters translucent and bent to move around curtains and under doors.

For a few seconds, shadows simply did not exist anymore. That should have been enough, he thought. Nothing evil could survive such intense focus, but still, the darkness flowed in his veins, and as soon as he relented so as not to catch the people and the homes of this town on fire, it surged with a vengeance.

“Light is strong,” the darkness whispered once more. “Strong enough to burn away everything, but it is a slender, fragile thing, and even if it is everywhere, it is a shallow ocean. Darkness, on the other hand - it descends for hundreds of miles. It goes to the roots of the mountains and the bottom of the sea.”

There was a pause, just long enough for the god to consider the words that were being hissed so insistently in his ear, and then he felt something shift inside him. Until now, the darkness that swirled inside him was a hazy mist that was being burned away almost as fast as he flowed in from the damaged soul of his servant, but as the drowning mad became a corpse, that trickle became a flood and raced toward his core like a dagger in the night.

“And that’s enough to swallow even the Lord of Light…” These last words were said with a sneer, but the tone did nothing to disguise the threat.

Siddrim shrank back from the attack even as he tried to pull free from the trap that held him here. Both actions caused the light to dim further as it slowed its ascent. A moment ago, it had been sunrise, but now it was twilight once more, and the sun was no brighter than the moon as the stars again became visible in the sky.

The darkness closed upon the center of the light God’s being, like a fist wrapped around his heart as it began to squeeze. Until a moment ago, he had all the light in the universe at his disposal. Now, he felt like a guttering oil lamp as he strained against his invisible bonds.

For a ten-thousand years, since he had cast off mortal flesh and become the strongest of all the gods, his heart had been a temple, perfect in its purity. Today, that changed. Today, it filled with sludge, and the restless dead inside it grasped and clawed at everything, ruining his peace and sancitiy with their touch even as the Lord of Light burned them to ash.

Then, even that holy of hollies was plunged into darkness as the eternal flame at the center of his being was snuffed out. No, not snuffed. Such fires could never be truly extinguished. It burned yet, under layers of filth, where no one would ever see it again.

Siddrim felt the rage growing inside of him at the very idea. Other divinities and lesser gods would still light the night sky when he was gone, but neither Lunara nor her sisters would be able to keep the ice at bay. The lesser gods and the small gods would do no better. Without him, the whole world would die; he knew that. That was why humanity honored him so. He kept the snows from falling and the dead in the ground.

It was the certainty that gave Siddrim the strength to dig deep one more time and burn away the sticky, foul substances that continued to pump inside him. It was viscous like tar and lit by his rage, it burned even better than he might have imagined.

The sun on the horizon flared briefly to life once more, and with it came fire. This time, the Lord of Light didn’t hold back. Siddrim focused his fury on Blackwater, and once more, the light swelled, and one at a time, things started to burst into flames.

At first, it was the thatched roofs as well as clothing and cloth curtains. Within a minute of enduring the sun’s gaze, most of the buildings were on fire. Those who fled the flaming structures for their lives burst into flames immediately as they reached the outdoors, but those who stayed in their homes only managed to keep breathing a little longer.

Soon, the whole city was on fire, with the notable exception of the temple. The worshiper’s songs had long since turned to screams, and then silence, and the tattered tapestries and carpets blazed away to ash. The stone structure endured, though. Even when the water in the central well began to boil from the combined heat of the runic binding circle and heaven’s flames, nothing changed.

The river steamed, the docks burned, and the animals in the fields smoldered, but nothing changed. No matter how much damage the Lord of Light did to the area, he could not cauterize the source of the darkness that poured into him, and when the power of his indignant rage curdled into hopelessness, he was again overpowered by that dark tide and collapsed inward, like a dying star.

“So much for the vaunted Lord of Light,” the darkness murmured. “You control the very heavens but can do nothing to stop the darkness that seeps from the depths. All you can do is murder your own followers and feed me their souls.”

Those words struck Siddrim like a hammer blow. No matter how hard Siddrim fought, he couldn’t escape. The strange trap that held him merely tightened and strengthened as he tried to resist. As his flames guttered, though, and he drifted down into the darkness, he realized that there might be no way out of something that had been created especially for him.

The sun ceased moving in the sky, lingering at the horizon as the sunrise quickly became a sunset, plunging the world into a suddenly unexpected night.

The men who had awoken early to begin their work fell to their knees and began to pray. The watchmen and acolytes hurriedly began to wake bishops and pontiffs who routinely slept through the morning prayers to let them know that disaster had befallen the world.

The Gods saw what was happening, too, of course. There was no hiding it. Siddrim’s cousins and his enemies both gazed at the unthinkable display, wondering what it was that had happened and, of course, what was going to happen next.

All of them knew one thing, though: the age of light was over. The dark ages had begun.