Tenebroum

Chapter 165: Sight Beyond Sight

Leo roared as he beat back Jamin’s wooden blade, trying and failing to move in for the kill. He couldn’t, though. His opponent’s shield was too large, and even though he was only a year older than Leo, his reach was too long. After a few tense moments filled with lightning-fast exchanges, Leo found himself on his back. He lay there in the soft, wet sand of the beach, breathing heavily, as a proper corpse should.

Many of the other children got up when they’d been defeated and left the battlefield to watch the rest of it play out, but not him. He wasn’t going to move to the sidelines and use the light to heal his wounds in the same way that almost all of the other kids had learned to do by now.

This was his shame, and he would suffer for it. Suffering would make him stronger.

Other than the occasional lucky blow, he knew he was never going to win in this place, so he had to get used to it. He was the youngest and the smallest of their group, and here they had all been frozen in time, which meant that he would never have the growth spurt he needed to change that.

It was incredibly frustrating, but he would not let that knowledge defeat him. Nothing will defeat me, he swore to himself. Yet, no matter how often he promised himself that, it changed nothing. He was still the runt of the litter, and even though he was the only one who spent all day pushing himself, he was the only one who lost every single morning.

It might have been enough to make him cry, but he’d run out of tears a long time ago, the day before Brother Faerbar had left them all. That was the day that the Templar had explained to Leo his dark origins.

“You are the son of a monster,” the old man had said simply after he’d separated Leo from the other boys before he went off forever to die in his fight against the darkness. “I’d kill you myself if I was sure it was the right thing to do, but there’s light in your heart, so as far as I’m concerned, that’s enough to give you a second chance, but never forget where you came from or how easy it is to fall. You might say you’re predisposed to it.”

Leo had asked a few questions about his father and received less than specific answers, though it seemed to him less like Brother Faerbar was trying to shield him from some terrible truth than that he’d just forgotten many of the details over time. His father was a “licentious wastrel of a Count” in the Templar’s words. Leo wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but he wasn’t about to ask Jordan or anyone else for those definitions. It sounded bad, and that was what mattered. He took some solace in the fact that he was named after his grandfather, who was apparently a good but weak man.

That was all the information that Leo needed, even if he didn’t really understand what it all meant. He knew what he had to do, even at that young age. He had to be better than his father and stronger than his grandfather. That was what he devoted his life to now.

So, when the fighting was done, and Cynara had won as she almost always did, he pulled himself to his feet. However, even as everyone else got ready to go help the villagers of Sanctuary with their chores, he retrieved his wooden sword. Then, beneath the judging eyes of everyone else, he got to work practicing his swing, his footwork, or whatever else it was he thought he needed to improve to finally start to beat some of the other younger kids on the field of battle.

Though he was sometimes tempted to tell his friends that he was actually Count Leo, the fifth ruler of Greshen County, he opted not to do so for obvious reasons. Not only would that secret be told to everyone within a day, but it would just give the other children something else to make fun of him for, and they had quite enough to do that already. He was the smallest, the last picked, and the first to die.

Some of the others were nice and never said anything mean to him. That was easy for people like Cynara because she was the biggest and the fastest now, and as long as time stayed stopped, she always would be. None of the boys would ever grow stronger than her here.

Other people, like Toman, never failed to remind him that he was the youngest and the smallest. Some days, they called Leo the craziest, too, if they found him praying all day. It was regarded as universally foolish, and even sister Annise had tried to dissuade him before she disappeared. He’d given up trying to defend the decision. Even if he had the words to explain himself, he didn’t really know how.

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It didn't matter to him that the others didn’t understand. Sometimes, Jenna or Sam would pray with him, but they were just trying to make him feel less alone. Their heart wasn’t really in it.

They couldn’t feel the light inside them burning brighter when they said the words that the Templar had taught them. They couldn’t hear the sound of some distant voice, with words just out of reach.

Leo didn’t tell anyone about that, not even Jordan. He already looked at Leo with more sadness than anyone else, and Leo didn’t want to make the man think that he was going crazy. That was why he didn’t tell anyone when he started to see things either because they were sure to think he’d gone insane after that.

About nine months after they arrived in Sanctuary, Leo’s whole world started to bend. Even before Brother Faerbar left them, most of them could see good and evil, but this was different. First, he saw the shimmering outline of the barrier that surrounded the whole peninsula and the colored lights coming off of the tower most hours of the day.

After that, he started to see other darker things. These weren’t the typical shadows of evil. They were more like dark ghosts, and they were usually around Jordan or the things that the man owned, like the strange book he read every night. There was a sort of mist of shadows that surrounded that thing, and sometimes, if Leo looked at it for too long, he felt like it was looking back at him.

It was an unsettling feeling, but Leo wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do about it. So, he did his best never to be alone with the Book of Ways, and he threw himself that much harder into training because, after a while, it was the only thing that made him feel sane.

“Why don’t you ever help us put food on the table,” Reggie complained one day as he pulled turnips while Leo swung his sword until he thought his arms were going to come off. “Every night, you eat, but you never put the work in. It's like you’re too good for it.”

In that moment, Leo almost told him that he was a noble and that he needn’t work in the soil like the rest of them. That would have been a terrible mistake, though. So, instead, he simply said, “We all need to do our part, but I have a higher calling. That’s all.”

That was a mistake, too. That was the day everyone started to make fun of him for his higher calling. It was upsetting, of course, because they couldn’t understand the way he could, even if he explained it. They didn’t see the light, and they didn’t have a connection to the divine like he did, not anymore. They were blessed by Siddrim, but he could feel himself going beyond that, one day at a time now.

Part of Leo felt sure he could walk right out of the barrier if he wanted to at this point, but he didn’t try. Not only were they under strict orders from their guardian, Jordan, never to approach the boundary, but he feared what was on the other side of the line. There, the shadows ruled and drifted on the wind. If the barrier was what he needed to avoid such evil, then he would gladly shelter behind it like a kite shield.

The day they started mocking him for being touched or being ‘blinded by the light’ was the day it all started to change. That was the day that his sight revealed to him something new: what his opponent was going to do next. At first, he thought they were just after images caused by the rage that was building up inside him. It was only after a particularly intense and violent flurry of blows left him standing above Jamin, who was bleeding on the sand beneath him, that he finally calmed.

The battle was stopped then, and the other young boy was healed, but people looked at Leo differently after that. They teased him less and shunned him more.

“You’ve got to be more careful,” Jenna chided him. “Save your anger for the enemy. Someday, it will be here, just as Brother Faerbar said, and on that day, we must be ready.”

He thought her words were unfair but said nothing because he wasn’t sure what to say. They always gave it their all. People got hurt. It happened nearly every week and was usually seen as the fault of the person who had been injured, but for some reason, when he finally won a bout, suddenly it was his fault.

That didn’t stop him from suddenly winning more, though. He couldn’t beat everyone, not even with his new trick, but suddenly, he could beat anyone who had less than a foot of advantage on him. Jamin, Sam, Rin, and anyone else who tried him suddenly found an implacable enemy that they had trouble landing a blow on.

Several of them had developed new abilities beyond merely the ability to see evil or to heal with a touch. Cynara was able to make her weapons glow with holy light, Toman could detect lies, and Sam could bless an object and make it almost indestructible. As far as Leo knew, though, he was the only one who could glimpse the future and see what move his opponent was about to make.

It felt like cheating, and he felt bad about that, but what was he to do? Simply pass on the advantage? He had no idea how it worked or how to turn it off. He thought about explaining it to Jordan at least but decided against it. The man had been an excellent guardian to all of them, but whatever he was reading in that book was making the darkness gather in his soul, and after several months without Sister Annise there, he found himself pulling away from the older man.

It wasn’t that he didn’t trust him exactly; it was that he didn’t understand, and honestly, he wasn’t sure he wanted to. He wasn’t going to see it, of course. He could see that many of the other children saw something as well, and slowly, the children of Sanctuary began to pull away from the adults.