Tenebroum

Chapter 88: A Night of Blood (2)

He’d been awake to watch the sunrise stop and transform into sunset, unleashing a wave of apoplexy upon the assembled priests and acolytes. Brother Faerbar had only spent a few seconds taking in the panicking and the disbelief before he left the Courtyard of Retribution and walked to the south gate. He’d known for a long time that the priesthood had largely become a vestigial part of the church. It was rather like a peacock’s tail in that regard.

It might have once served a purpose, but now it only got in the way of unleashing its talons. And in a moment of crisis like this, they would need to be ready to strike. Though he could still feel the light inside his breast and see it emanating between the stones, he walked quickly across like a bright mist. Their god was not dead, but something was dreadfully wrong, and they needed to be ready for what came next.

“Sir,” the guard on duty snapped to attention as the Templar approached. Brother Faerbar looked past him at the open gate. The drawbridge was down, and the only thing that prevented entry was the steel portcullis. This would not do at all.

“Raise the drawbridge and close the gates,” he demanded. “And send messengers to make sure the same is done on all six of the other gates as well.”

“On who’s authority, Sir?” the guard asked, taken aback.

“On my authority!” the Templar snapped.

“But sir, if I don’t have the watch commander’s say so, then he’ll—” the guard started to protest as the knuckles on Brother Faerbar’s hand turned white, but he would never get a chance to finish his protests, because that was when the Rose Window exploded.

Sidrimar was a vast Heptagram on the north bank of the Toleden River before it fed into the Ozora and continued its journey south. Its outer walls were impressive, and they sheltered several small cities worth of servants and craftsmen within their protective walls, but they were dwarfed by the castle-sized inner walls that shielded the grand temple from the fallen world. Even without Siddrim’s blessing, such a building should have been able to stand unflinchingly against a dozen armies.

But on this wicked, wicked morning, something had already managed to penetrate all their defenses and shatter a vast thirty-foot stained glass window that had stood for almost a thousand years since its completion. Even as both of them watched in awe and horror at the sight of hundreds of pounds of colored glass raining down the city below, Brother Faerbar still barked, “Close the gods’ damned gates and send those messengers on my command before this gets any worse!”

“Y-yes ssir,” the guard stammered, obviously shaken.

The Templar didn’t fault him for that, at least. Who could possibly blame him for fear? The sun had not risen, and the church was under attack. Brother Faerbar was not a particularly deep thinker. He saw evil, he fought evil, and he trained the next generation to do likewise. Right now, the evil he saw was overwhelming, and he and his men would be ready for whatever happened next. Even if the world was ending around them, they would die with their swords in their hands.

By the time he reached the small training courtyard that led to his cadre’s barracks, the entire city was awake. Everyone seemed to be frantically doing something, even if they didn’t know what it was they were doing. In that sense, Siddrimar reminded him of an anthill that someone had kicked over, but he didn’t let it deter him from what needed to be done.

Then he opened the door to his barracks, but the orders he’d been about to shout died in his throat as he saw blood everywhere.

“What in Siddrim’s name?” the man cursed, but the scene of carnage gave him few answers until he approached the body kneeling on the floor in a pool of blood and saw Brother Harnin’s bloody hands clasped in prayer.

“Our god… he has abandoned us and plunged us into darkness…” the kneeling man cried out as he wept.

Though it didn’t explain the blood, Brother Faerbar thought that his Brother was talking about the darkness outside and was about to bring him back to his senses with words or a swift slap across the face. That urge died the second his sworn Brother turned his head and was crying tears of blood from empty eye sockets.

Despite his composure, Brother Faerbar quickly pulled away from the injured man, wondering what could have happened. Even as he pulled his sword free from his scabbard and tried to decide whether he should try to strike the man down or heal him, a low bass rumbled passed through the stone walls of the building that was felt more than heard. They were under attack. By something huge, by the sounds of it.

“Please… please make this stop,” Brother Harnin begged, groping blinding toward Brother Faerbar.

That was when his apprentice and some of the other templars started to enter the room.

“Wha-what happened to him?” someone asked.

Brother didn’t know what to tell them. Under the circumstances, he might have tried to heal his Brother or at least understand what had happened to him, but he could feel the cloying, oily touch of evil from here. So, he didn’t hesitate. With a single smooth stroke, he brought his sword down at an angle, separating the man’s head from his body and sending it rolling across the floor.

“We are under attack, both from without and within,” Brother Faerbar said as he flicked the blade, spattering the blood on the floor before he resheathed it. “On this dark morning, remember that there isn’t time to save everyone. There might not even be time to save yourself. If you are to die, though, do it defending Siddrim’s holy sanctum.”

“For Siddrim!” some of his men shouted while others echoed, “For the light!”

Brother Faerbar could see that they All had questions, but he wasn’t going to answer them right now. Even if he’d known whether they wanted to know about the sun, the battle, or their dead Brother, he wouldn’t have wasted the time. Right now, the only thing that mattered was arming themselves and preparing for the battle that lay ahead.

With his squire’s help, Brother Faerbar donned plate and chain, and by the time he was striding out the door to see how much worse things had gotten, more than half his cadre was ready. He gave the last few another minute so that the squires could lace each other up and took advantage of that moment to watch the fires spreading on the west side of the city even as the worst sounds of battle came from the south.

“Where are we going?” one of his brothers asked finally, forcing a decision.

“Toward the sound of battle as any warrior of the light should!” he commanded, sounding much more confident than he actually felt.

They started jogging after that, and stride by stride, they made their way toward the sound of rumbling. It wasn’t long before they started to find ruined buildings that had collapsed under their own weight, but there was no clear answer as to what caused the collapse. All he could say for certain was that it was unnatural.

In places, the finely fitted stones appeared to have melted under intense heat like dragon fire. That wasn’t quite right, though. There was no scorching. Potters clay might have been a better metaphor. Brother Faerbar was still struggling to wrap his mind around the damage he was seeing when they finally spotted the first thing that didn’t belong. It was a giant, hulking creature, at least twice as tall as a man.

The behemoth was made of stone, or perhaps it had the thick grey-brown leathery skin of a zombie. It was impossible to say which from here, but what was unmistakable was the tarnished bronze armor.

“That must be our quarry,” Brother Faerbar said, unsheathing his blade and pointing it at the monster. “Attack as one. Give it no quarter—”

His words were drowned out by a shriek from above. He turned, lighting up his sword to strike whatever was about to attack them just in time to see a dragon soaring only twenty or thirty feet above their heads. It was an ebon monstrosity that radiated evil, but before they had the chance to do much else, it suddenly sprayed a gout of pure darkness down on them. It looked like flame and was hot like fire, but it erased the light.

For a few seconds, Brother Faerbar was smothered in that dark. It cut off everything. The power to speak, breathe, or even think were all too much for him. In the end, all that remained was his glowing sword. Then, light returned to the world. The dragon was gone, and so was the behemoth. He turned to the closest Templar to see if they knew which way it had gone but found that almost half of his men were in the process of boiling away to nothing.

“Si-sir…” his own squire gasped, holding up his hand as it, as well as the mace he’d been holding, crumbled to dust.

“Be strong, Aeldric,” Brother Faerbar said, reaching out to heal the wound even as he looked at the horror around him. The Dragonfire had melted everything, even the stones they trod on. All that had survived were those things that were closest to the warriors wielding holy light.

It was an insight he would have shared had a pair of screaming goblin skeletons not suddenly charged at them from out of nowhere. Though their skulls and hands glowed with a strange blue fire, white holy fire erupted wherever these things touched the ground.

Siddrim obviously cursed them, and that was enough for him, for Brother Faerbar, and he charged without a moment’s hesitation. Meeting the first one’s steel claws with his holy blade. The fight that followed was short and brutal as he and his men faced the two of them.

Neither of them was much bigger than a goblin, and they weren’t especially strong, but their bodies were more formidable than any knight in plate that he’d ever faced, and then there was the fire to consider. Though the templars parried almost every blow, even their shields did little against the gouts of vicious blue fire that these constructs flung around so casually, and by the time Brother Faerbar managed to chop the second one into small enough pieces that it finally stopped moving, his chest was heaving, and more than a tenth of his body was covered in painful burns. Some of them, like those on his left leg, went all the way to the bone, and he turned his attention to those first.

Siddrim’s light seemed weaker than usual since the moment sunrise had faded, but it had still been there to call upon, though. They wouldn’t have survived this insane battle without it. Under normal circumstances, Brother Fearbar’s wounds would have healed almost as fast as they were inflicted. Partway through healing his own burns after those monsters had been dispatched, though, the light inside his just vanished.

He could tell that every warrior still standing felt the same thing as him because, as one, all of their swords were suddenly extinguished. It was unheard of. It was impossible. Suddenly, they looked to each other in confusion, but the pain was written all over everyone’s face, including his own.

The loss of light hurt more acutely than his remaining burns. For almost three decades, he’d carried the lantern of Siddrim’s light inside of him, and now that it was gone, the world no longer looked the same.

Brother Faerbar glanced down at his no longer gleaming sword and past that at the shattered skeleton on the ground. This changed nothing, he realized. Even if their god had withdrawn his light from the world for some grave sin they did not fully understand, he would keep fighting until his last breath.