Laryn found Thallon sleeping in his forge area. Large piles of smoldering wood buried in dirt sent tendrils of smoke into the sky as he prepared charcoal. Thallon had constructed a partial forge.

  A poorly disguised pile of goods stolen from the elves lay nearby, lose leaves and limbs strewn over it. Laryn poked the man with his toe, waking him.

  “Tell me about your night. Who went with you? Who was involved?”

  Thallon stretched, looking around. “It was just a few of us. Hela suggested it. Said we needed to start killing void cultist elves before they had a chance to pick us off.”

  “Did she go with you?”

  “No,” Thallon said, shaking his head. “She said that you had talked to her about it.”

  “And you believed her?”

  “Well…” Thallon squinted into the distance. “Not really. I think we liked her plan enough that none of us really worried about it. The filthy stick grubbers can’t boss us around like that. We had to stand up for ourselves. Besides, you weren’t doing anything about it.”

  “At least you’re honest,” Laryn said. He sighed. “Who was it. Give me names.”

  “Me, Gall, Hober, and Widan,” Thallon said.

  “All my days,” Laryn muttered. “Widan too?” The boy had had it rough, since his father died in Jardensvale.

  Thallon nodded.

  “The elves know,” Laryn said. “They are interested in making a deal with us, but they want me to turn over the perpetrators for justice before they will.”

  Thallon paled. “How? You can’t… You wouldn’t….”

  “I can,” Laryn said. “I hate that some of my most useful subjects were involved. I and I hate the fact that it makes the decision harder for me. You need to be punished.”

  “Are they all cultists?” Thallon asked. “Honestly, they should be thanking us that we killed one of them. Void cultists are nuts. Elemental foci misaligned, you know?”

  “How much do you know about the void cult?” Laryn asked. “I mean, other than what Hela told you?”

  Thallon shook his head. “I don’t know much. There’ve been void cultists in Cataria for a long time. As long as I can remember, people whispered about the strange cult that worshiped the void. But they never did anything. Until now. I think it’s good to kill them off.”

  Laryn appreciated the man’s simple straightforwardness. He left Thallon to continue working on his forge.

  Laryn paced the beach. Would any of this information change Ilydia’s mind? After his lie to Ilydia, would the elf even believe it if he said Savena was a cultist? The ring wouldn’t prove anything. Ilydia must have seen similar jewelry and pendants around, and he hadn’t seemed to know they indicated void cult members.

  Would Ilydia even be able to look at the ring? The void heart gemstones had the strange quality of pushing your eyes away, distracting you from even noticing it was there. Only voidtouched people like him or Hela seemed to even be able to see them.

  Was Ilydia a secret void cultist himself? If so, why all the song and dance?

  Laryn needed some way to prove to the elf that there were void cultists in Annar. And if he couldn’t prove it to Ilydia, maybe he could go back to Annar and speak to Lawal again. She would believe him.

  “Adi, what do I do?” Laryn muttered.

  As always, Adi appeared beside him when he called. “It’s a big problem,” she said.

  “So what should I do?”

  “What do you think you should do?”

  “You always throw my questions back at me,” Laryn said. “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking. You have experience running kingdoms. What should I do?”

  “My function isn’t as an advisor,” Adi said. “I’m an administrator. I take whatever you decide to do and try to make it work. But now that you bring it up, you should probably start assembling a circle of advisors.”

  “Isn’t that advice?” Laryn asked.

  “Okay, you caught me,” Adi said, flashing a wry smile. “I am secretly and advisor and I do know the answer to your problem. You just have to… um… strip naked and run around chanting ‘wubby wubby wubby’ and everything will work out.”

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Really?” Laryn asked, rolling his eyes. “This isn’t the time for that.”

  “Come on!” Adi shouted, laughing. “You’re always so serious. Duh. Look, I have advice for you about how to organize things and administrate things. Not for specific issues you encounter.”

  “So you don’t have any ideas for me? You haven’t watched other rulers in a situation like this? What did they do?”

  Adi shrugged.

  “I know what my father would do, if he were here,” Laryn said. “He’d sell out the perpetrators. Chop their heads off and deliver them on platters.” He imitated his father’s deep bass tone. “To build a kingdom that can withstand the tests of time, you must make hard choices.”

  “Is that what you’re going to do then?”

  “I’m not my father. I don’t want to do that,” Laryn sighed. “But I’m struggling to think of another plan that doesn’t involve killing all the elves. And losing half our population in the process.”

  “Which are you leaning toward? Sellout or murder spree?”

  “When you put it like that, neither,” Laryn said. “There’s a time and a place for killing, and I don’t think this is it.”

  “Have you considered claiming their land?” Adi asked. “Not that I’m recommending it, I’m just saying… We kind of glossed over that part of the tutorial, so I want to make sure you know how it works.”

  “You mean claiming the tiles they have already claimed?” Laryn asked. “Why would I do that?”

  “Don’t you want that land?” Adi asked. “You don’t need to make a deal with them. You could just take it. During your visit to Annar, I examined the tiles you entered. They’ve got around one and a half influence there. At your current influence level, you would be able to claim some of their tiles.”

  “That’s true,” Laryn said. “I wasn’t even thinking about claiming claimed tiles. I just want to claim the unclaimed tiles that they’re claiming.” He rubbed his scalp. “That’s… a bit confusing. But I guess I should think about what it would mean to claim their tiles.”

  “There are four ways that you can take claimed tiles from an opponent,” Adi said. “Three that you can use now. Influence overwhelm, core capture, or core destruction.”

  “What’s the fourth?”

  “Physical possession. You use claim stakes to capture their tiles, but you can’t make those at this kingdom tier.”

  “Got it. So if I destroy their core, obviously all their tiles will revert to neutral tiles. But what happens if I claim the tile with their kingdom core? I take it?”

  “You claim their whole territory,” Adi said. “And having another core allows you to create classes you can assign stat boosts to. But you’d have to increase your influence a bit to be able to do that.”

  “It might be a viable strategy,” Laryn said. “Talk me through the math?”

  “Because you can’t have non-continuous portions of your kingdom, to claim the tile that their core is on, you’ll need to use influence overwhelm. To claim a tile with influence overwhelm, you simply add up the influence of every tile you have that is bordering the tile that you want to claim, and compare it to the sum of influence of the tile you’re targeting plus every tile they have claimed that is bordering the target.

  “A common example is a tile on the border. You have two tiles bordering their tile. They also have four tiles boarding that tile. Let’s say that their kingdom has two influence. Each of the defending tiles contributes to the tile you are attacking, so your attacking tiles will need to exceed ten influence to overwhelm. Divide that by two, and you get five.”

  “Influence overwhelm means you need to be quite a bit stronger than your enemy,” Laryn observed. “Also, each time you take a tile, you’re spreading your influence further.”

  “True,” Adi said. “If you were to try using it against the elves, you would need a very high level of influence to go straight for their core. The most direct route to requires you to take four of their tiles,” Adi said. “But that would require increasing your influence a lot, since you’d only have one attacking tile against five defending tiles.

  “With their influence of one and a half, you’d be one attacker against a tile with five defenders, so you’d need more than nine to take the tile. It’s not a great strategy unless you are significantly more powerful. A better way is to eat away at the perimeter, so that you have more supporting tiles.

  “Doing the math here… Their edge tiles are supported by four other tiles, so those sum to seven and a half influence. There are only two neutral tiles adjacent the side tiles, so even if you took both of those your attack would only be a little more than five, which isn’t enough. But…

  “Their weakest tile is a corner, which has three supporting tiles. Four times one point five is six. You could capture that tile if you took the three unclaimed tiles adjacent to it. Your three tiles would sum to nearly eight. You could claim it. Proceeding straight to the center tile would mean you’d need to have more than nine influence, but you could now capture a former edge tile, since you’ve now eliminated one supporting tile and replaced it with one of your own, turning it into a new corner.

  “If you proceed this way, you could capture Annar row by row and maintain a high enough influence to eventually capture their core.”

  “You’re saying I could do it right now,” Laryn said. “I could just capture their core, from here.” He knew that rulers could manage their kingdom without being on the front lines, but it still felt strange. He didn’t even have to have anyone out there to capture the tiles.

  “You’d have to do it one by one, so it would take a bit of time,” Adi said. “They’d realize what you were doing, and could take steps to stop it. They might try to boost their influence, or they could counterattack with claim stakes and try to reduce your influence. Or maybe they just run over here and try to kill you all.”

  “Yeah, it’s an interesting idea though,” Laryn said. “It’s good to have in my back pocket, but I don’t think it really helps us that much right now.”

  “Well, the point is that if you claim their kingdom core, the elves automatically become subjects of your kingdom. It would force their hand; it would become very challenging for them to then fight against you. They wouldn’t be able to use claim stakes to destroy your influence, and you’d be able to use their village against them.”

  Laryn considered this. “It’s an intriguing option,” he said. “If a fight breaks out.”

  “Also, a word of advice about the time rewind,” Adi said. “Sometimes it can be tempting to use it to escape a mistake or a bad situation. As you saw today, that can often lead you into an even more challenging problem. I don’t recommend a rewind unless you know exactly what to do to avoid the problem you ran into.”

  “Yeah,” Laryn said. “It’s more useful when a simple, clean mistake is immediately available, like a stumble during combat. When things are more complicated… I’ll be careful.” He sighed, rubbing the short, prickly hair on his scalp.

  “That doesn’t solve my problem, though.”