For week after week, Leo sughtered his way through the tryside. Without ah him, he could go further and faster than ever before, and he gloried in it. Several times, he found a lone family sheltering in a cave or a farmhouse somewhere well off the beaten path. Each time, he told them where wayward was and how to get there, using the ndmarks of his quest to guide them around anywhere he sidered dangerous.

  He didn’t apany them, though, and he had no idea if they made it to safety or not. He felt guilty about that. The right answer would have been to cease his quest and make sure every one of those lives was saved, but every day not spent purging the darkness felt like it would be a waste to him. He had a sword that could not be resisted glowing in his hand and a light that was only burning brighter in his heart.

  Food, or the ck of it, no longer held him back. He could make his own bread when he had need of it, but it was the light that fed him now, and the only real nourishment he needed was after he’d been wounded, which happened on more than one occasion. Each battle where he was wounded badly enough to o repair his armor afterward was a wake-up call for him. Some small part of his mind told him that if he wasn’t careful, he would fall, and no one would ever find his body.

  He wasn’t oo back down from a challehough. Every near-death experienly taught him what not to do iure, and he learned from each of them, be they a horde of zombies or a floating brain with tentacles that had tried to make him kill himself without much lubsp;

  Leo slowly circled around Rahkin, pnning to e at it from the north after he’d purged the various dungeons that surrou. They vented evil like volic geysers and were impossible to miss. Soon, he was able to gauge the threat of whatever y within based solely on the color and thiess of the miasma. That made him overfident and almost cost him his life when he found one of them full of strange, rusted men.

  He had fought all manner of abominations, including many that were made of obvious animal parts, but these were the first he’d seed that weren’t human in any way. At first, he thought they were children trapped in iron armor, which was a horrific thought. But as he’d discovered that the straa men knew how to fight better than almost any war zombie he’d ever faced, he quickly reached another clusion.

  “Dwarves,” he grunted as he parried the blow from a deadly axe.

  Such creatures were a myth, but there was nothing else that made seh the beards and the ons. He’d always thought that dwarves were made of flesh and blood, but maybe the stories got it wrong. Perhaps they were creatures of stone aal, and when the Lich reanimated them, they rose up just the same.

  He didn’t have a lot of time to sider the question while he was fighting them, though. They weren’t so fast, but they were skilled and strong. Worse, unlike most of the abominations he’d put down, they actually exhibited teamwork, which made their bitacks that much worse.

  Even after he’d dispatched the creatures and studied their remains, he still couldn’t decide if the things that had almost cut him off at the knees were really mythological creatures that had beeurned from the dead or if they were mockeries of the myths. “Why would a monster do such a thing, though?” he asked himself. Surely, such tricks required a sense of humor, or at least irony, and the dead had no room for anything but hunger in their souls.

  Those thoughts stuck with him for a while after that. Until now, he’d assumed that the creatures he faced, from the ragged birds to the taurs made from the rotting remains of plow horses and farmers, were no more than the scraps that the darkness had on hand at the time, but sometimes, he found creatures that made that seem less likely. Twice, he found rotting Temprs whose rotting forms had been covered with very shiny armor in a mockery of the light, and in the sed case, the man exploded with a thick yellowish gas when Leo put him down.

  That had made him sick for days while the light healed his burned lungs from the i. “At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised to find a dragon,” he said to himself once he finished coughing up blood.

  Eventually, though, he decided he was just dragging his feet. For so long, he’d told himself he o go into Rahkin, and now that it was there, on the horizon, he kept finding reasons not to go. There was evil out here that needed purging. His friends would look for him there. He thought of any reason except the real ohere might be something in that shadow-shrouded city he couldn’t beat.

  Oh, it was ohing to secretly believe you could do anything and kill any abomination that existed, but something had killed Brother Faerbar, and no matter how hard Leo practiced and how many of the walking dead he slew, he doubted he would hold a dle to that man.

  Still, on the day Leed the st of the barrows he could find, he relutly decided that tomorrow would be the day he would find out what was really in there. The result was… underwhelming.

  At first light he ehe town to find it halfway leveled. There was nothi within the walls that resembled life. He could fiher crows nor rats. He couldn’t even find creeping ivy that wasn’t withered and brown. Something awful had happened here. He was sure of it. He didn’t know what, but it had drained every st ounce of light and life that might have ever existed in that pbsp;

  Still, that was all the more reason to stay and wait to see what came out at night. That night, after he finished expl the city for any sign of survivors, he chose the rgely intact castle as the pce where he would have his fight. He took the st few hours to prepare the ground and barred what doors he could to ensure he wouldn’t be surrounded, and he’d have several fallback locations if he’d truly bitten off more than he could chew. What found him at su was underwhelming, at least at first.

  When the red sunlight finally faded and was repced by the cold, distant stars, the first creatures to scuttle out of celrs and ies in the rubble where the mangled pieces of zombies who had been killed at least once before waited out the day away from the sun’s harsh light. None of them had all four limbs, and few of them had more than one or two, making them easy to dispatch as they crawled forward in a quest to devour his light.

  He was glowing literally now. That was a first, even for him. He barely took note of it while he was hag the moo pieces, but when he did, he doubted it would st once he left this cursed pce. After all, anything halfway to det would burn with light in a pce so dark, and no matter how many souls he set free, the miasma g to everything like a stubborn fog.

  Those dead were merely the warm-up act, though. er, broken things came after that. There was the upper half of an armored ogre that had long since lost its legs, there was a giant spider made from the parts of men that only had five limbs and three eyes left to attack him with, and there were a few war zombies that were still in mostly det shape, though there was nothing special about them otherwise.

  None of them stood a ce. Oh, the ogre could certainly have killed Leo if it had gotten a grip on him with those giant hands. They ripped out a door frame without an issue, and he doubted his bones would fare aer. Still, it couldn’t turn fast enough to stop him from climbing its exposed spine like a dder and embedding his glowing sword deep into its thick skull.

  The spider hadn’t evehat hard. Maybe when it had been fresh, it had been a quick, dangerous enemy. Now, it was simply an arthritibie on stilts, which again made him wonder about whatever it was that had created it. Something or someone had bored for months and years to create this panoply of horrors, and he had trouble imagining that.

  Ohose monsters were dispatched, Leo was starting to grow fident. At least until he felt the ground start to rumble and shake. It didn't take him long to realize that something was attag the castle because it was te to get at him inside. So, he went up top of the battlement to take a look. The result wasn’t quite a dragon, but it might as well have been.

  Someone had taken the broken pieces of sunken ships, the severed parts of sea monsters, and a seemingly endless variety of human hands a and created a three-story hermit crab. The thing was vile, and even after all of Leo’s experience up until now, the smell made him gag.

  When his light showed up on the parapet, the thing noticed him immediately, but it was much te to climb, so it tio attack the wall, as it alternated between r in frustration and

  Still, he mouhe battlement and prepared to jump.

  Leo had no doubt he could jump onto its back. He just had no idea how he was supposed to kill the thing. The other creatures had been easy enough. Even the ogre had an obvious oint, but this thing? It was armored in three inches of wood, and uhat, it was nothing but a writing mass of evil.

  He studied the problem while the beast thrashed and filed, and then when he identified what he thought was a cluster of eyes, he decided to make that his target. “I’d rather fight the dragon,” he said with more than a little disgust before he finally lept down to the monstrosity fiftee below.

  In that moment, Leo had sidered a lot of things. He’d sidered where he would nd and how he should strike. He’d sidered his escape pn and the thing’s reach. The ohing he hadn’t sidered, though, was how slimy it was. He’d never fought a sea monster before, and when he nded on its rough back, his legs instantly went out from under him, sending him sliding dowhing’s back toward its many limbs.

  Leo buried the silver bde into the thing’s side, using it to slow his dest, but as it moved, his hand slipped, and he was sent tumbling to the thick wood of the drawbridge. He immediately but immediately wasn’t fast enough for this thing. It wasn’t a dried-out, desiccated husk like so many of the creatures he’d fought up until now. Its movements were fast and slick. And before he could do more than rise, rottiacles had ed around the young man and were slowly squeezing the life out of him.

  Leo’s life fshed before his eyes for a moment as he looked at the glittering hilt of his magical sword embedded in the monster a doze away. If I had that, I could cut myself free, he thought into despair. That moment of weakness was dispelled whehing began to crush him even tighter as it dragged him toward its maw. The thing wasn’t a proper mouth. It was just a cavern lined with rusting swords; it was nothing but a mockery of life, and it was that moment of indignity that made his light shine brighter.

  Leo Garvin the Fifth would not go out like this. He would not let the darkake him as it had his forebearers. Leled as hard as he could against the vice-like grip, determio use its slimy nature to his adva did nothing, though.

  Well, nothing, physically. His light had been visible as an aura nearly all evening in this vile pce, but the more he struggled and fought, the brighter it grew. Eventually, only a few feet from rotting, certaih, the thing’s tentacles burst into fme, and it shied away as Leo’s light began to take a real toll on the creature.

  He thought about pressing his luck but decided against it. First, he needed his bde. Even his silver swlowed when he pulled it out of the creature, and that made him smile grimly. As it tried to move away from him, filing widely, he thought about pressing the fight but decided it was too risky. He could feel his broken ribs still trying to mend, and he khat light or not, he wasn’t at 100% yet.

  Instead, he pulled back, and before the thing could leave the drawbridge, he attacked the s holding the thing in pce. Each severed ly with a siroke from his radiant bde, sending the bridge and the giant crab zombie tumbling into the dried-up moat. It fell there, hopelessly pinned, which was good enough for Leo.

  “Let the sun take you,” he spat as he went baside. He would find a pce to heal a, and then, in the m, he would tinue his purge. If there were still things like this around, then there was more work to do.

  Well everyone, I have a couple pieces of information. The first is that book 3 will be stubbi week (through chapter 150). I ged the title and description of Tenebroum st week to give people a heads up, but fot to post that in a ent on Sunday's chapter.

  The sed, and more important point is that Tenebroum is finally ing to an end after two and a half years ur posting. You are wele to keep reading here at two chapters a week for the couple months, or if you prefer you go to my Patreon and read all the way to chapter 222 with my Tenebroum PLUS tier by clig the link below. No stress either way. Just letting everyone know. I have also posted 5 chapters for my evil story (this one is about a cursed sword). you read those on my Patreon as a free member.