Gathered around the kingdom core, dirty, exhausted faces stared up at Laryn.

  “Are you a cultist?” someone shouted. “We kill cultists!”

  “They’re helping us,” another said. “They’re not cultists.”

  “We’re not cultists,” Laryn agreed. “We killed several of them back that way though. They were waiting to ambush us.”

  He watched the faces of the villagers. They all seemed surprised, and turned to look at an older man, standing near the core.

  “My name is Laryn,” he said. “The people with me came from Jardensvale, after it was overrun.”

  “Why are you here?” the old man demanded. “What do you want from us?”

  “We came to help,” Laryn said. “And to destroy the voidbloom. It presents a danger to every village in the region; why haven’t others come to your aid?”

  “We’ve been abandoned,” the old man said. “The wildlands are too dangerous for men.”

  “The bloom is not far from here,” Laryn said. “Will you come with us to destroy it? We will welcome all the help we can get.”

  “No!” the old man cried out. “We cannot abandon the core! We’ll be overrun! Will you help us?”

  Laryn grimaced. The rest of his party gathered behind him. Thallon and two Orfswell men cheered as their tile was claimed for Orfswell, then they began jogging back over.

  “We can claim more tiles!” Thallon said. “Expand the control…” he trailed off as he saw the look on Laryn’s face.

  “That’s right!” the old man cried. “We need to push back the void!”

  “Who is the [Ruler] here?” Laryn asked. “Is it you?”

  “It’s me. I’m Orf. So if you want to help us, then start hauling stuff over here. We need more essence. More stuff to [Sift]!”

  Laryn approached, entering the central circle where the kingdom core stood. Orfswellers backed away from him as he approached, leaving Orf alone standing beside his core.

  Examining the core, Laryn looked for the marks that would tell him the capabilities of this particular obelisk. He found the runes, and identified the marks. This core was a modern creation, and so Laryn had no problem reading the important features. The core’s daily burn rate was the square root of total essence, which was not bad but not great. It seemed to grant the [Ruler] constitution buffs exclusively, based on the amount of land controlled.

  Laryn glanced at the old man and felt bad for him. He would be used to a much higher constitution stat to keep him going. Probably why he was so desperate to claim more tiles.

  “Are you going to help us or what?” Orf asked.

  Laryn scanned the pile of timber lying nearby. Only enough logs for two or three [Sift]s sat there.

  “That’s not going to be enough,” Laryn said. “The only way you survive is by destroying the bloom. Otherwise it will overrun you.”

  “Laryn!” Hela stood just outside of Orfswell, on one of the void claimed tiles. She waved her arms. “It’s happening! Influence has stabilized at four!”

  Laryn turned to Orf. “You’re lucky that you’ve survived this long,” he said. “But there’s a rapidly growing void bloom over there. It’s been sucking essence out of the ground and using it to grow as fast as possible, instead of creating voidlings. It just stopped growing.”

  Orf paled.

  “Well… don’t just stand there,” he said. “If there’s going to be a fight, we want all the influence we can get!”

  “You don’t have enough to sift—”

  “Don’t tell me what I have,” Orf spat. “We’ve already sifted every living thing we could get our hands on! The cows, the horses. I even used [Sift] on my dog!”

  Laryn glanced at the people gathered anxiously around.

  “Not them,” Orf said, following Laryn’s gaze. “Only people already dead.” He shook his finger at Laryn. “I didn’t kill people and then sift them!”

  A man stepped up from the crowd. “You did suggest it though,” he said, a deep scowl on his face.

  “I was panicked.” Orf waved away the comment. “I was just throwing out ideas, and that was a particularly bad one.”

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  The man did not seem placated, but folded his arms and scowled.

  “Listen,” Laryn said, raising his voice slightly so that the Orfswellers could hear him. “If any of you are going to survive, it will be because we destroyed the bloom. We’re going to go try and do that. If you join us, we double our numbers. Our odds increase dramatically. Will you come with us?”

  “No!” Orf shrieked. “No, no, no, no. Nobody is leaving. We all have jobs to do here and we need to stick by them. We can’t leave the core unprotected. We need to claim more tiles!” He broke out into a fit of coughing.

  Laryn understood. If the core was destroyed, Orf would die.

  “Orf, your village is in deep trouble. If we can’t destroy that bloom soon, you’re going to be overrun.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. We build up a high enough level of influence, then it doesn’t matter how many voidlings come our way, we’ll squash them.”

  “You were trying to claim more tiles,” Laryn said. “Why? That will spread out your influence. You get a better constitution bonus the more tiles you own?”

  The old man coughed, looking around nervously. “I… Yes, I do,” he said.

  “It’s keeping you alive,” Laryn guessed. “The vigor and health that come from your bonus. They’re keeping a disease at bay. You almost died when you lost control of the nearby tiles that we helped you reclaim.”

  “What’s it to you?” Orf snapped, wheezing again. “You going to help or are you just here to distract us? Everyone, get back to work.”

  A few of the villagers took a few steps, but most remained, staring at the confrontation.

  “I’m sorry, Orf,” Laryn said. “Staying here and claiming tiles is a fools errand. You won’t be able to hold them against what’s coming.”

  “Laryn!” Hela shouted again. “If we’re moving against the core, we’d better do it now!”

  “If we defeat the bloom, Orfswell may survive,” Laryn said. “Who will come with me? Bring weapons. We’re going.”

  “Wait!” Orf shouted, but he broke into another fit of coughing, and leaned up against the kingdom core with one hand as he tried to catch his breath.

  Laryn turned and walked away. The Vallorians fell in with him. He didn’t look back until they were half way up the far ridge.

  The entire population of Orfswell had abandoned their [Ruler], and now followed Laryn. Orf sat on the ground, slumped against the kingdom core.

  “He may live yet,” Thallon said.

  “He will not,” Laryn disagreed. “This is the end for him. If he’d made wiser decisions, his town might not have been destroyed by the blight. It will overcome him and destroy his core before we return. A shame that we couldn’t claim the core somehow, but it’s too far away from Vallor.”

  They trudged up to the top of the rise, going made more challenging by the high influence of the void over the land. The tiles here had suffered from the blight for some time. Nothing stood higher than Laryn’s waist, and the dusty blight ash flowed around their feet, ankle deep.

  At this depth it became dangerous, potentially concealing holes that could turn an ankle.

  As Hela had indicated, the bloom was not far. Large petals blossomed, just visible over the next rise.

  “This isn’t even that far,” Laryn muttered to Thallon. “They could have run out here and destroyed it when the spores were landing.”

  “Orf inadvertently walked closer to death along the path he took to avoid it,” Thallon agreed.

  The sun set, throwing them into darkness. They wound down into the dale and back up to the top of the swell. The last light faded from the sky as they stared down at the flowering Void bloom.

  Black petals against a grey landscape, the bloom towered over the tile below. A stalk—so thick that two men wouldn’t be able to join hands around it—stretched upward, reaching the height of ten men. The blossom opened up wide, spreading out, shading nearly the entire tile from the light of the moon overhead.

  In the darkness about the bloom’s roots, something moved.

  “It’s so big,” Kenna whispered.

  Laryn nodded. He’d been lucky enough to destroy void blooms before they managed to grow this large. This one had obviously been focused more on growth than on creating voidlings.

  “It’s a fast grower,” Hela said, “But it’s not a swarmer. The essence it’s been sucking down has been going into spores, rather than voidlings. That’s good for us, but it means we have to burn the thing before it can release them.”

  The dark petals lining the face of the flower reminded Laryn of dandelions, just before they transformed into fluffy balls and sent their seeds flying through the air.

  “How do we destroy it,” Laryn asked, turning to Hela. “Fire?”

  “Yes,” she said. “We’ll have to burn it. And be gentle about it. It’s not yet in the spore stage, but if it starts producing spores, jostling the stalk will simply release them before we can burn it.”

  As she spoke, the flower head began folding in on itself, closing up. “By Ishtoran,” Hela muttered. “It’s preparing to spore. We need to hurry.”

  Laryn worked quickly to coordinate the people. They set up near the edge of the void bloom’s tile, beginning by building a fire.

  Among the Orfswellers were a few fighting men. They all had bows. Laryn assigned them to Thatch.

  “As soon as we step into the arena, it’ll lock us in,” Laryn said. “So everyone needs to move at the same time. We can’t be slow about it, because the sepals close fast, and anyone caught in transition is going to be caught by them. I saw a voidling sliced in half once.”

  As they approached the matted tangle of roots that marked the barrier of the voidlord’s domain, the voidlord moved out to meet them.

  The monstrosity loomed large overhead, many times bigger than any creatures Laryn had previously seen. A long, flat body, covered with thick armored plates reminded him of a crab. It even had large pincers on the ends of it’s front limbs.

  No eye stalks or visible mouth presented a target for the archers. Long, antenna like tendrils sprouted from a nub on the back of the creature. A few test arrows simply bounced off the armor. Flaming arrows, fired at the bloom and stalk, began to send curls of smoke up into the air.

  For a moment Laryn thought they might simply be able to burn the bloom, and not be forced into fighting the voidlord.

  But the gigantic crab beast scuttled up onto the stalk and doused the flames, spraying a white foam from its underside which extinguished the flames.

  “Okay, move on with the plan!” Laryn cried. He and his men stepped up to the edge of the arena. Hober, Thallon, Gall, and Widan stepped up alongside him. Thallon carried his heavy smith’s hammer, and the others wielded spears. Behind them Thatch and Jarik led the archers. Hela and Kenna tended to the fire, as the other Orfswellers worked throwing fuel on the flames.

  “Ready!” Laryn cried, making sure the others were with him.

  “On three!”

  The fighting men tensed, preparing to spring.

  “One!”

  “Two!”

  “Three!” Laryn leaped forward. The voidlord charged out to meet them.