That night was a long one for Leo. Not because of his injuries, though; they were severe. It was because of the evil dreams. In a pce this dark, he felt like he was suffog. And each time he fell asleep, the glowing nimbus around him faded enough for that darko touch his soul. The results were iably shog.

  He dreamed of families betraying and poisoning one another. He dreamed of food riots and people killing each other for loaves of bread. Worst of all, he dreamed of some dark, t monstrosity looming above the city that was so diffuse that no matter how many times he swung at it with his glowing bde, it simply reformed befoing on to devour more families.

  In the dream, Leo’s light protected him, but that did little good for anyone else, and all he could do was struggle in vain against it while he wished to be strohere was nothing he could do against a monster like this, though. The brighter he glowed, the more it retreated, but that didn’t stop him from eating the rest of the world, like some kind of miles-tall jellyfish or hydra.

  Leo woke bathed i as he tried to sort out dreams from reality and looked for threats in the small room he’d sealed. Fortunately, he was alone, even if it didn’t feel that way.

  “Were those just dreams or…” he wondered aloud, uo finish the thought. Or did those things actually happen.

  It was a hard thing to sider, but he didn’t really have another choice. He’d never dreamed such awful things before, so either the evil here was toying with his mind, or some parts of what he’d seen had actually occurred. It was a terrifying thought to sider. What could have possibly happeo these people to make me think their souls had been ripped out like that en masse? He wondered as he started taking apart the barricade that had kept him safe st night and started poking around the castle.

  The rest of the building held no answers either. It tained a few bodies here and there that he beheaded just to be sure, but except for an ominous bloodstain ihrone room, there were no real signs of violence. Anything valuable had been stripped from the pce. There were her tapestries on the wall nor anything made of gold or silver.

  Leo wasn’t sure if that was the evil that had dohis, though, or if looters had e after. “Looters would mean that someo there is still breathing, at least,” he said hopefully. Trying and failing to imagine what undead evil would want with tapestries old s.

  Leaving the castle was somewhat harder thaering it had been because it no longer had a funing drawbridge, but when Leo went outside, he saw that the giant grab was now nothing but a sm pile of ooze. He found a way across that gave him a wide berth to that mess, and then he spent the rest of the day searg basements iher rge buildings of the city.

  That became his routine for the few weeks. He’d thought that the ruination of Rhaki that searg through the city would go quickly, but instead, it just meant that there were more pces for the darko hide.

  Some days, he found abominations ying in wait beh the stairs or in the darkest crevices beh colpsed buildings, and some days, he found nothing at all, but every night, more monsters rose up from the dead and sought him out. As always, they were made of mangled flesh and rusted metal, though, occasionally, he found mhostly oppos that only needed him to burn brightly to dispel.

  He wao. He wao keep purging this city of evil until the bck plumes that showed its taint had vanished pletely, but it wasn’t that easy. The reality was that after the first couple of days and the first dozen nights, there really wasn’t much left to kill. Terrible things had happened in this city, but when the evil that had sughtered this pce was do had left to go destroy something else, and only the dregs were left now.

  It felt like such a waste, and he wao ask himself what all this destru was for, but theruth was the destru was what it was for. “Evil for evil’s sake,” he sighed, remembering the lihat Brother Faerbar often quoted from the Book of Days. “The dark requires her logior purpose. It darkens and despoils merely because it is.”

  The words might be true, but they offered him no soce. Leo wished then that the Tempr had told him and the others more stories about fighting the dark. He’d seen more than a had, for obvious reasons, beeant to delve too deeply into the topic when speaking to an audience of children.

  “Perhaps I should go to Bckwater,” Leo mused. He didn’t know where that was exactly, but he k was somewhere to the southwest. If Jordan’s stories were to be believed, you could see it from dozens of miles off because of the inky spire of shadows that soared into the sky, but realistically, it wouldn’t be hard to find. All one had to do was follow the river west until it became the Oroza and then follow that south until…

  “Until what?” he asked glumly, kig rocks. “Whatever happehere is even older than whatever happened here. Whoever’s behind all of this… whatever happehey’re likely long gone anyway.”

  It was depressing. It was like the world had been abandoned, and Leo and the rest of them had bee behind. Even Jordan was gone now, and Leo was fairly certain he hadn’t seen a hundred people since Sanctuary shattered.

  There were only two choices, though, and sine of them involved returning to his friends so that he could apologize for running off on his own, he chose the other: kill everything that moved. Leo spent the few weeks methodically going from house to house and purging anything he found.

  He said prayers for the dead that looked like victims more than monsters, and he chopped the monsters into pieces so small they’d never rise again. When all that was done, he looked at what else there was to do, and it was only then that he found the catabs beh the city.

  That was where he found monsters made of pure shadow. Oh, there were creatures of flesh and blood, too, but it was the inky wraiths that surprised him.

  Leo finally thought he’d found the true evil that huhis city when he was attacked by a sinuous twelve-headed hydra from the darkness, but he was wrong. As terrifying as the things were, they were incredibly easy for him to defeat. The wraiths might look terrifying, but uhe shadowy leviathan of his dreams, they were utterly obliterated by the touch of his glowing bde.

  When the hydra shed out at him, he cut off half a dozen heads with his glowing bde on impulse, cauterizing the stumps and doing enough damage that the thing began to fade away almost immediately. That fight was over before it started, and the ohat followed were not much longer.

  Gruesome creatures of every description lurked iabs and ossuaries beh the city. There were slender shadows of men with knives for fingers and animals that belonged in nightmares and mythology. They were less of a menagerie and more of a tide, but Leo fought his way through the flimsy force without pint, dissipating as many shadows as he could until one day, he found himself wandering the crypts, utterly alone.

  Like moths, they’d been drawn to the fme only to die from it. They couldn’t help themselves, and now, just like that, the wound had been nced, and there were no more shades left for him te. To say it was disappointing was an uatement. Still, there were the occasional skeletoo fight, so even though all this work had dotle to remove the pall over Rahkin, he kept going.

  Every monster I kill is ohan ever hurt anyone else agaiold himself as he delved ever deeper. The words rang hollow, though. He still felt like he was wasting his time.

  That was when he found the wyrm. It wasn’t a real dragon. It couldn’t be, but it was a colle of bohat was held together by dark magic that might as well have been. One moment, Leo was walking through the winding paths of an overloaded ossuary with a ceiling so high that his light was lost in the darkness, and the … well, the , he was standing amidst a storm of bones, doing his very best to parry the worst of them, as a gigantic dragon assembled, and shed out at him.

  He hadn’t even suspected that there’d been something this dangerous left in Rahkin, not after all the ret days with so little to show for them. Now, suddenly, he was fighting for his life as blows rained down on him. Uhe shadows, this thing was a very real threat. Though its swirling bones weren’t strong enough to get through his armor, the blows of its giant cws or its snapping jaws would have been enough to crush him or cut him in two.

  Leo dove and rolled as much as he parried and struck, desperate to stay oep ahead of the beast. He succeeded in that much, but even if he’d wao escape, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to make it to such a far destination before the thing devoured him.

  How do I even kill this thing? He wondered in frustration as he did his best to cleave boer endless bohere were tens of thousands of the things, though, and he would run out of the energy to swing his sword long before it ran out of pieces for its body.

  Whehing looked like it was about to breathe fire on him, Leo thought it was all over for a moment. He could get hurt pretty bad and recover, but something like dragon fire or a storm of bone shards might well flense him to nothing.

  That wasn’t what happehough. Instead, it was nothing but a cloud of darkhat was burned away by his light. He had no idea what su attack might do to someone who wasn’t so well-prepared, but then, no one would ever find out because he was going to finish this. As his light pierced the dark and dissipated that foul breath on, he’d seerue core of the thing hiding there ihe bony skull, arubsp;

  Leo didn’t run toward it or leap in the air to strike it. Instead, he extehe light from his bde, striking at the thing from halfway across the room like it was some sort of no, it was lohan that. It was a beam of pure light, and in the instant it pierced the dark heart of the draistrosity, the whole thing fell apart.

  It was only then, as bone pieces rained down all around him, that he leaned heavily against the wall, gasping for breath, that he noticed the rats. Leo’s first thought was that they were the first he’d seen expl this city. The sed was that they didn’t appear to be alive. Dead or not, that didn’t stop them from looking at him with intense, hungry eyes.

  Leo had e a long way since he first tried to el enough light to take out a bckbird. This time, it was effortless. He simply reached out, and the first one burst into white fmes. The others scattered as that happened, but they weren’t fast enough. Fire followed them, even past his gaze. Some magic he did not uand lihem together, and where one burned, another soon followed. He watched the light ripple its way down the hallway he’d beeing ready to go down as easeen rat briefly became a torch before it was snuffed out food.

  “Who would reanimate rats?” Leo asked, with a shake of his head. Perhaps an evil mage still lives somewhere here, he thought to himself. Perhaps he’s spying on me from afar.

  Leo didn’t know whether that made him want to keep digging through the rubble for more evil or if he should try to escape before whatever trap ruher way, it sent a chill down his spine and made him think that perhaps he should make some time to see his friends soon. Things were getting weird. He’d been gone for months now, and if he didn’t show up soon, they’d almost certainly decide that he’d died somewhere along his adventure.