In the end, it was the children that convinced Jordan. Sister Annise’s book had certainly proved that there was something amiss, of course. It wasn’t hard to do that, the way the pages changed from day to today. It was clearly some kind of powerful artifact, but despite all his efforts to study and understand it, the only thing he’d even found within its pages were riddles.

The idea that she’d made it herself was preposterous, of course. A blind woman, holy woman, could not do anything that a mage, or even an apprentice like him, couldn’t, and yet he wouldn’t know where to start with something like this. He’d drawn up simple scrolls before and copied longer spells from ancient spellbooks, and in both cases, he could feel the magic intrinsic in the act.

In this case, though, there was nothing. Flipping through the book, he could not point to a single sign or seal that radiated arcane might. Instead, the deeper he went into the tome, the less things made sense as the handwriting became more crazed and the messages it contained more nonsensical.

Of course, the fact that the messages drifted away to be replaced by other contradicting ones didn’t make them seem any saner. Why should he care about who the wolf would hunt when freed from its bonds or what the rat would become when the missing piece was finally revealed.

All he cared about was keeping the people in his care safe and finding a weakness to fight the evil that plagued the land. Though the former had gone very well the last couple of years, the latter, well, to say he’d made no progress would have been charitable. All this time, he’d had a dread relic forged by their enemy in the form of that terrible golden manacle, but he lacked the knowledge to understand its workings, let alone figure out how to turn its secrets against its owner.

Still, until the night when he was woken up by a dozen children with tears in their eyes, he was content to pursue both mysteries in tandem. Why should they need to flee a warm, safe house that finally had enough food when there were no threats.

The threat was coming though, the children promised him that much once the crying stopped and precocious little Leo explained, “Brother Faerbar has fallen, and the city with him.”

“How can you possibly know that?” Jordan asked. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe the child, but the fact that they could know something so preposterous only frustrated him more.

As if to answer, most of the children suddenly pointed to the same spot in the sky. Jordan looked around but didn’t see anything beyond a scattering of stars. One was brighter than the rest, but it was nothing special, at least not until the children explained it.

“His light has left his body, and returned to the sky where it was borrowed from,”Cynara explained.

“His light?” Jordan asked. “You mean his soul?”

“No,” Toman answered. “High light - the light of Siddrim which was gifted to him. It has returned to protect the heavens, and he has gone with it.”

Most everyone else was unnerved by the glowing eyes of the children, but for Jordan he’d always been more concerned about the way they acted years older than they were. Sister Annise was bothered by neither and stood quietly in the doorway, watching this whole exchange with the patience of a grandmother.

“We must go now,” Reggie said next. “All of us. The keep is broken, and the way is clear; nothing will stop the darkness now. All we can do is outrun it.”

“Outrun it?” Jordan asked. “Better to defend what we have then—”

“We can’t!” Cynara pleaded as she gripped him by his robes. “Don’t you understand? What is coming is… it's like the tide. It cannot be stopped. They will come… not for us, but for everything that smells of light or life…”

Cynara was only eleven, or thereabouts, but the way that she gripped him by his robes while she tried desperately to talk some sense into him was remarkably grown up. It would have been adorable if the moment wasn’t so strange. However, when he met her desperate gaze, flickers of the terrible scenes she referred to drifted through his imagination.

Moment by moment, the other children mobbed him, too, each pleading and grabbing, but as they did so, the most peculiar thing happened: the threads of their delusion encompassed him. Each one of them seemed to be trying to force their own little spark of awareness to make him understand.

Separately, that was only enough to make scenes of distant battle or a darkened city flit across his mind, but when they all spoke to him with such urgency and stared at him with those glowing eyes, he was unexpectedly overwhelmed, and their vision became his vision.

Suddenly, he was standing there at the shattered gates of Rahkin, gazing upon the complete ruination of the city. In front of him was Brother Faerbar’s charred body; Jordan knew it was him even though the corpse had been burned beyond recognition.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

The street was filled with corpses. Most of them lay where they had fallen, but some of them walked the streets looking for the living or piling the corpses of the recently dead into wagons for some foul purpose. None of that was able to tear his attention away from what was happening in the sky above the city.

While columns of smoke still rose here and there, they were all but blotted out by the shadows of something darker and all together more terrible. Jordan’s mind could’t quite resolve it, but to his eyes it seemed like a mass of tentacles reaching from the heavens to devour the whole city.

He’d seen engravings like that in some of the old books that described the time before time, but to see it in person, or whatever this was, his mind simply rejected the idea. It was too terrible to contemplate, and he stood there staring up in horror at the throbbing, undulating shapes until the vision finally faded.

When he looked around the finally quiet room at the fearful gazes of the children, his resolve stiffened, but only for the sake of appearances. “Do you see now?” Sister Annise said. “The pyre burned, but its brightness was unable to burn away the smoke, even with so much kindling. Now, we must be away before the darkness stretches so far to the south.”

“Yes,” Jordan agreed with a shaky voice. “We must be away from that… thing at once.”

The only problem was there was nowhere to go. The Tolden River barred travel to the south, and the nearest ford was a day to the east, but there wasn’t much between here and the sea. South of the Tolden were the Trollmoors. Past that, there was only a narrow band of pine forest along the highlands before it reached the sea.

There were a few villages that way, or at least there had been before the world ended. Jordan had no idea if they were still there now, but that was because it was no fit place for man or beast. Without their crusader with them to purge things like goblins, he didn’t really think that their herds would do very well.

When he shared his concerns with the blind woman, she merely shrugged. “What need have you for herds or retainers when we reach the headlands? The Hermit would never welcome them.”

“Hermit? Headlands?” Jordan asked. He had no idea who the Hermit was, but he knew exactly where the headlands were, he just had no idea why they would ever want to visit them. They were an ugly storm beset series of mountains that took the worst of the weather that came in from the sea to the east. “I’m not sure what it is you're playing at, but I expect we will all get more than a little acquainted with starvation if we don’t provision ourselves properly for a trip to such a bleak place.”

“A few sheep for the road might suffice,” she shrugged, ignoring almost all of his questions, “But we must move quickly lest the dark rider or his flying rats catch us unawares.”

“I agree,” Jordan said, content with the knowledge that things he didn’t understand were in motion now. “By tomorrow, or at most, the day after, we should be gone from—”

“Tonight,” she hissed, grabbing him by his robe’s sleeve with her free hand. “Have you learned nothing from the book of ways? We must leave tonight at the latest, or all will be lost.”

“Tonight?” Jordan asked, looking at her like she was crazy. “But there is so much to do. Possessions to pack, people to organize, and, of course, we must—”

“Tell them to come if you like,” she said with a shake of her head, “But not where we are going. Say you travel Siddrimar, or past that to Abenend, but not to our true destination.”

“Why would you ask me to lie to everyone,” he asked, noting the children were already packing. “Surely they—”

“When they stay, and their souls are pulled from their cooling bodies, the dark one will know all that they do,” Sister Annise said as her blind eyes teared up. “It will know about the children and about us, but not where we will go. And that makes all the difference in the world.”

Jordan listened to her in this, but only because he knew enough about necromancy to be able to say that what she believed was entirely possible. So, reluctantly, he began to rouse everyone, and when most of the people who dwelled within his walls had assembled in the courtyard, he told them about his vision.

That was a lie, too, of course, but it was the easiest way. He told them that he’d scryed past the horizon and see that evil was stirring this way because even that made a lot more sense than ‘the children see unimaginable horrors and a crazy lady and her even crazier book insist we run while we can.’

That spurred a massive debate, but almost to a man, everyone agreed that it was better to fortify and defend this place than it was to flee across unknown territory in search of safety. He could understand that. Jordan had felt exactly the same way less than an hour ago.

That wasn’t enough to stop him from imploring them to listen to him, though. By the end, the mage’s words bordered on the apocalyptic, but only a few were willing to take him seriously, and almost all of those had a trace of light in their eyes.

He thought about ordering them to come with him, but there seemed to be little point to it. So, eventually he wished them the best, and those who were going to flee alongside him. They took a small share of the wheat, some goat cheese, two of the cured hams, and wagon for bedding and other supplies along with a single draft horse and half a dozen sheep.

It wasn’t enough to damage the prospects of those they left behind, and it would be more than enough to keep the bellies of the 17 souls that joined him as they made their way east after first looping around to the west.

By the time they were heading toward their destination, Jordan could see a thin line of blue on the horizon. The idea that it would soon be light should have comforted him. That would be enough to protect them from any lingering evils after all.

Still, it only made him feel more exposed. They were wandering toward a destination he could not yet see and did not understand with only the slenderest threads of hope, and that seemed to be enough for the children. For him, at least, it left a lot to be desired.