Tenebroum

Chapter 199: Wayward

One rescue at a time, the small community that Leo and the others nourished grew. That didn’t make things easier, though. That only made them harder. Even though they found more survivors on their far-flung journeys throughout the area, food remained as elusive as ever. In fact, if not for the obviously divine intervention that made nuts and berries spring into existence nearly every day, even in the winter, he was quite certain that most of these people would have starved to death.

Leo had learned Brother Farbaer’s trick to make loves of bread spring from nowhere, but it was harder than healing magic, and he couldn’t do it all the time. Instead, he mostly stuck to fighting. He and his friends had broken up into two groups now. Now, half of them struck out every week to search for survivors, threats, and anything else that might be useful. As they did that, the other half of the group stayed here to defend the little town of Wayward, which had stuck, despite Cynara insisting the whole thing was a joke.

“I just meant that the wayward people could stay here until we found somewhere better!” she said half the time someone brought up the name around her, but that just made people want to use it more. For better or worse, it was going to be Wayward until they found somewhere to take all of these people to, and so far, the options were looking grim.

Unlike everyone else, Leo never stayed with the group that defended Wayward. Some always stayed in the little seaside community to defend the nearly hundred souls they’d gathered into one spot, and some came with him on some of his expeditions. However, he was only ever in Wayward for a few days at a time before he was back out again. At this point, there wasn’t much out there, he reflected as he watched a few of the women making a meager stew with more water than roots in a large cauldron they’d found on a recent trip.

It was a good find. It was going to be a long time before anything new was made of cast iron in the area. Even basic blacksmithing was currently beyond them. That wasn’t a problem now, but it would be when they ran out of weapons and armor to scavenge.

“You look worried,” Toman said, sneaking up on Leo as he sat there on his stump. “You guys find something out there?”

Leo just shook his head and answered, “Nothing to find.”

That wasn’t quite true, of course. There was Rahkin. He’d seen it on the horizon on more than one trip now, along with its plume of evil that hung over it like the thick smoke over a forest fire. He’d wanted to go and explore it, but each time he’d told his friends, he’d been outvoted. It wasn’t that they feared the dark exactly. It was that they thought he was foolish.

And he was foolish; he didn’t say that, though, not to Toman or anyone else. Instead, he just said, “It’s slim picking out there. If we want to find anything worth finding, we’re going to have to go farther. Maybe when it warms, we can take everyone to the northwest and see if any of the Eastern Kingdoms still stand.”

It was a fair question, but Leo didn’t answer it. He didn’t know. He just knew that he couldn’t just stay here. He’d wanted to save these people more than anyone, but now, the longer he stayed, the more he felt like a hound pacing nervously in his kennel. He needed more than this. There were horrors and nightmares out there that only he could slay, and his enchanted blade was meant for more than this.

After Leo’s sullen silence could be borne no more, Toman finally volunteered, “I do think you’re right, you know. When the weather warms, we should move on and try to find something worth finding because this… Well, I don’t want to stay here two winters in a row.”

That was true enough, and Leo smiled as he remembered how miserable the winter had been to most of these people without proper houses. The light warmed him, though, so he barely felt the touch of the cold. He’d spent half the winter in a tent out in the world, looking for things to fight, but not everyone was so lucky.

Leo was about to comment on that, but when Sam and Rin came over to join them, Leo decided not to. Moving on was an unpopular opinion, and he didn’t want to upset anyone. Increasingly, he was of the opinion that he was probably going to need to go out on his own and find someplace he could lead everyone else to, but he knew that would not go over well.

Leo spent the rest of the evening pretending to care about the conversations that happened around him, and he managed to make a couple loaves of bread to share with the young and infirm, but none of those moments quieted his mind or made him change his mind. That night, when he watched Lunaris slowly cross the sky and lost himself in the twinkling of the constellations, he made up his mind. He was going to go north. First to Rahkin and then to all the places that lay beyond it.

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There might not even be anything there left to fight, he told himself. We’ve searched a few of the dungeons left behind by the dead, and nothing was moving in any of them.

Was he telling himself that because he hoped there was no great evil left to face or because he was trying to let himself down easily before he went there and found nothing worth fighting? He wasn’t sure, but he knew that going there was the right thing to do. He could feel it in his heart and, more importantly, in his sword. He was certain that this is what Brother Faerbar would have wanted him to do, though he couldn’t quite say why.

Even though Leo’s mind was made up, he didn’t leave that day or the day after. Instead, he tried to work up the nerve to tell his friends or at least make peace with the fact that leaving them was a betrayal.

What if marauding zombies or worse attack while you’re gone, and people die? He asked himself. Can you live with that? Could you live without yourself if Cynara or anyone else was dead because you weren’t here to save them?

He couldn’t. He knew that he couldn’t, but that didn’t change anything. Neither did the fact that Cynara still sometimes beat him with wooden swords. Without the silvered blade, he was only one of the best warriors among them, but with it… well, he didn’t believe anything could stop him.

Humans hadn’t managed to survive in this place by chance. The forest was protecting and nurturing them. Nature deities might rank pretty far below the Lord of Light to him, but they were still a damn sight higher in his books than the evil that wandered the land. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

He struggled with the whole thing until one morning when he just didn’t anymore. After that, he didn’t tell any of his friends about his change of heart; he just wrote a small note and put it somewhere where they were sure to find it before he left. He didn’t try to explain himself because he couldn’t, and he was done tying himself up in knots about it.

He just wrote, ‘I’m going where the Gods take me. When I find out where we are meant to be, I will return, and we can take the survivors there instead. Leo.’

Then, just like that, he was gone, going north fast enough that no one would be able to catch him easily. Leo walked through the first night and most of the second one before exhaustion finally caught him, and he slept in an abandoned farmhouse. They’d look for him, but with a day’s head start, they would not catch him, and eventually, they would realize the error of their ways and turn around; at least, that’s what he told himself.

In the days that followed, Leo took the long way, exploring every village and crypt that had been considered too polluted by his companions to explore on previous trips. It was in those places he finally found things worth fighting.

Most of the dead he and his friends had encountered these days just lay there or moved weakly. It was only those who clung to the foulest patches of land, with air that polluted the lungs of anyone who breathed it, that were truly dangerous anymore. Leo couldn’t see the spirits of the damned, but the old blood splatter told the story as often as not; these were places of slaughter and death.

Sometimes, he found a mob of shuffling zombies in an old temple. Those were easy enough to dispatch. Other times, though, he encountered something larger and meaner. Those were the fights that Leo looked forward to. Fourteen-legged calvary. Siege ladders made out of a mob of people. Giant zombies with armor under their skin. Each of them was a challenge in their own way, and he learned something from ending each of them.

It was only when the flesh giant dug itself free from the graveyard, where it had lain dormant for who knew how long, that Leo could finally admit to himself that this was the reason he’d struck out on his own.

As he dodged limbs thicker than his entire body and wove between blows that would have struck him dead, he felt truly free for the first time since they had all left Sanctuary's gilded cage. This is what I’m for, he thought as he sliced through the rotting Achilles tendon on the thing’s left leg before he scampered away from where the thing was about to crash to earth. This, right here, without having to worry about anyone else getting hurt. It’s just me, the sword, and whatever it is that needs to die a second time.

It was a thrill, both because this thing might strike him dead at any moment and because this was the first creature he’d faced that had been a challenge in such a long time. Challenge or not, once the thing could no longer stand, it was a sitting duck, literally and figuratively, and Leo soon chopped it to ribbons. It was a slow death, but not because he was trying to make it suffer if the abomination was even capable of such a thing.

First, he crippled its legs and then its arms, and it was only then that he took out its spine in enough places that he could climb the shifting pile of rotting flesh and sever the giant head with blows that were more like a woodsman with an axe than a warrior with a sword. It was just too big to slay with any finesse.

Still, when his lungs were heaving, and he stood there splattered in ichor, he watched the miasma that clung to the place start to dissipate, and he smiled. “Well, at least that confirms it,” he told himself. “There’s definitely something in Rhakin that’s still worth killing.”