Tenebroum

Chapter 189: The View From Above

Jordan spent those first few frantic months as the Lord of the Night Sky just trying to understand what it was he’d been entrusted with. While he was thankful that his eyes slowly healed with time, sight, or lack thereof, seemed to be among the least of his difficulties. What he needed now were answers.

Before all this, he’d been grateful for the insight about everything that was about to happen. Truthfully, he still didn’t know how much the book changed events so much as it witnessed them. However, whatever it was the Book of Days had done to him as he read it, it had quickly reversed once he’d become a god. That was what he was now, though it still felt strange to him to say or think it.

He missed that book, too, and sorely wished that he’d kept it because there was no instruction manual as far as what it was he was supposed to be doing. Eventually, Jordan discovered that Lunaris’s palace did contain a library. At least, that’s what he thought it was. Instead, when he finally found a moment where the world wasn’t about to end and had a chance to peruse it, the place turned out to be nothing but the journals.

Not that the discovery mattered. Reading was a luxury he did not have time for. This was because the stars demanded near constant attention, but between fighting back the dark and checking on the children’s progress, he did eventually discover the palace that apparently belonged to him, and during those forays, he discovered one more fact about the shelves full of journals.

They did not all belong to Lunaris, nor was she the first God or Goddess of the moon. There was a whole list of people that had apparently been lunar deities before her, and though the answers as to what had happened to them were probably within the pages of those ancient tomes, just leafing through, he found a Selenara, a Craton, and a Mare.

“Still no Jordans,” he said with an uncertain smile as he closed one and put it away. The joke was an attempt to cover up his nervousness. He was entirely out of his depth. He might never have time to read all of these, but if every page in the vast room was a single day, then the world was thousands of years older than he thought it was.

Jordan, like every other young mage, had been taught that the world was half a millennia old. Technically, it had been older than that for some unspecified period of darkness, though that time before time didn’t count. History, so far as both the church and the Magica Collegium agreed, only started when light dawned. It had been almost five hundred years since the sun had first risen and banished the darkness forever.

That no longer made sense when there were moons before Lunaris. There were probably suns before her, too. He could probably find their names with a little research if he had more time. Jordan could probably find out a lot more than that, too. Entire ages had passed and were entirely lost to time, and he was too busy staving off the dark to dig deeper into the topic.

Suddenly, forever didn’t feel so long anymore. Nothing felt long anymore. There was no time to eat or sleep, and though he didn’t need to do either anymore, he was surprised to find he missed both.

There was no time to sleep when the stars needed him, though. It was getting to the point where he could tell what was happening out there just by the way that the subtle music of the spheres changed and flowed.

He supposed that would have been helpful if things were normal, and he had time to work on other things until an emergency arose, but right now, things almost always seemed to be an emergency. He had a beautiful palace filled with glowing servants. They would even bring him ethereal food, but he was too busy to enjoy any of it.

Instead, he lay around outside, staring up at the sky and willing the stars to move into place for each new attack as he used the light of the moon to reinforce them where he had to. Each bright spec was not a tiny hole in the celestial sphere as he'd been taught; it was a tiny glowing chess man fighting to hold the darkness back. It didn’t take long to see why Taz had been practicing his game so much throughout Jordan’s stay. The rules weren’t quite the same, but the same concepts of territory and reach applied across the vast swaths of the invisible board that was the night sky.

He’d do so much better at this than me, Jordan thought with a sigh as another one of his tiny glowing warriors winked out of existence. If only he hadn’t been a monster.

Tazuranth was a genius. There was no doubt in Jordan’s mind that he would have done a better job, but there was also no doubt that he would have used those powers to terrible ends, too, and the longer that he played his little chess games with constellations, the more he understood that.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Slowly, the pieces came together for Jordan. For a few weeks, he wondered how it was there were any stars in the sky at all at the rate he was losing them. That was when he noticed that sometimes when someone died in the world far below him, they would drift off as a little spark. Not every soul could become a star, but it wasn’t a privilege limited to mythic heroes either. There were plenty of farmers who died defending their farms from goblins and women who died standing up to protect their children from drunken husbands.

It was those souls that saved the world. All he needed to do was move them into the right position, which was where the constellations came in.

Of course, these brave celestial spirits were only half of the battle. The other half were the monsters they faced. Jordan was not well studied in eldritchzoology, but even if he’d read every tome in Magister Brimly’s personal library, he doubted that he would have discovered half of the creatures that squirmed and churned out there in the dark.

Jordan knew about umbral hazards, of course. He knew that there were shades that could steal the souls of men easily enough. Those sorts of hazards were largely restricted to tunnels and caves deep beneath the ground. Up here, those weren’t so much the problem, though.

The monsters of men looked like men, but these looked like something else that was so alien that they might as well have never seen the glowing men they fought every day. The night sky was filled with serpents of nearly infinite length, lizards with a hundred limbs and a thousand claws, and hydras made of leaches and madness. Those were just the medium varieties of the monsters that could be found in the dark.

Out there past the stars, everything was darkness, and even if he wanted to know what horrors it contained, there was no way to see just what was teeming out there beyond the starlight. Every day, Jordan observed, the light beat back the darkness, and he saw some new variety of monsters. Last night, it had been a five-headed dragon with fins that swam through the abyss instead of flying, and the day before, it had been a swarm of locusts that were each the size of a horse. As far as he could tell, every bit of the universe existed to devour the fragile lives on the world below, and only the light of heroes kept them at bay.

Still, the longer Jordan kept at his watch, the easier things got. He didn’t attribute that so much to any improvement on his part, so much as the note that Lunaris had left behind on the last page of her journal when she knew she was about to die.

‘My final day. One day, my replacement will read this. They will come up for air in those frantic final days of the prophecy, and they will notice that the number of stars in the sky is growing again, no matter how many they lose. It will not be their imagination, either, for once.’

Jordan had thought about that. For a while, it seemed like it had been his imagination, but he was growing increasingly sure that wasn’t the case. He just didn’t know why until she told him.

‘Siddrim always kept the night sky in a fragile equilibrium, consuming more heroes than he ever truly needed to glow ever brighter. When he was lost to us, the darkness devoured those souls instead. The prophecy says that the darkness’s hunger will soon abate, though, and that the children will play their part in striking it down forever. I can journey to the hereafter with satisfaction that I have done my part.’

Jordan thought that the note was vague, but then he imagined it was supposed to be. Anything is vague once you’ve been given glimpses of the future, he reminded himself.

He wondered where she got her prophecy, of course, but that didn’t seem to be a power that he had. Jordan had no means to predict the future. All he could do was desperately react each time a leviathan from the deep brushed up against his fragile net of stars, reorienting them to optimal positions to make sure that the forces of light had every advantage possible.

It was a terrible equilibrium, and after less than a month, he knew he was not the right person for this job, no matter what Lunaris might have said. Still, it wasn’t like he had a choice. The only way out was to die, and to date, no one had come to the moon to do the deed, even if that was what he wanted.

So, as the situation stabilized, he found himself taking breaks to look down on the state of the world. Something certainly seemed to have happened. For once, darkness was not on the march in every direction, and though it did not seem likely that his former wards were responsible, they were certainly doing their part and had fought more zombies than children should be expected to at this point.

Of course, they weren’t children anymore. Most of them weren’t, at least. He might have joined Markez’s crew when some of them were little more than toddlers, but now the oldest girl was nineteen, and the youngest child was fourteen. At this point, every one of them was a hard-bitten warrior in their own right, and though Jordan kept expecting the Lich to appear and smite them, somehow, that never quite happened.

Of course, as much as he wanted to help little Leo and all the other children, he couldn’t do much. While it was true the moon’s light could be turned to the world to burn away the dark, Jordan knew the world could not avoid the terrible cost of that just now. Things were getting better, but they were nowhere near good, and as much as he might love those glowing-eyed kids he’d cared for so long, they were worth trading hundreds of stars for. Besides, he told himself as he turned his attention back from their little campsite far below and back to the stars above; Lunaris said they’re part of the prophecy, whatever that is. They’ll be fine.