Looking within me was a strange experience. It was a comforting place to look, as once my mind descended into itself, I could surround myself with the Void. It was like pulling a fleece blanket over oneself during a cold winter morning. It was incredibly comforting, and frankly intoxicating.
Meditating like this was even more dangerous, as the outside world no longer mattered, and time no longer held much meaning to me. Amidst my thinking on the matter, I realized I had no idea how long I had sat there in the middle of the field, “hiding” within myself.
As soon as I returned to the outside world, even before I had opened my eyes, my ears were greeted with the harshest of noises—a fierce battle to the death. Quickly opening my eyes and jumping to my feet, I quickly made sure my mask was in its Void Herald form, before contacting a voidling for an update.
To my surprise, four of the voidlings were standing around me, forming a protective circle. But the strange part was they weren’t doing anything, that wasn’t to say there were letting people through, on the contrary there was nothing there to even stop from coming through. Even more confused I quickly reached out to one of the voidlings for clarification on what exactly I was seeing.
Without any signal, the missing voidlings transmitted a quick image of what they were doing, one of them was transporting bodies from the battlefield into the backyard like I had ordered them to do before. For the first time I could finally see the results of the Void weapons on human flesh. It looked like it wouldn’t completely “consume” people like my Void powers could, instead it was almost like their weapons were extremely hot, simply melting through weapons and pieces of armor, like castaway slag through fresh ice. Some of the bodies seemed better survived then others, and even some weapons seemed to be almost completely intact.
The basic qualities of a knight were two-fold, some form of skill with a weapon/armor and the blessing of a god. Other then getting extremely, extremely lucky the only way to gain the acceptance of a god or goddess would gain access to their contacting ritual. Afterwards, through regular prayer it would become possible to gain great powers, none of which were your own. Instead, they would be borrowed form their patron deity.
Now the second wasn’t a hard requirement, in fact raising a full regiment of these knights was considered extremely expensive and outside of members of the family smaller noble houses would only have one or two “sainted” knights. Instead, many would just fill their ranks with the destitute, knights who didn’t have a patron deity. Destitute knights weren’t weak, especially towards normal people and the common soldier. Instead, it was more an indicator of how strong they would end up if given the same amount of time. I wondered if there would be any significant difference between voidlings created from a sainted or destitute knight.
The last missing voidling was at the far end of the street, facing off against seven grey knights. These must be some of their better fighters as they were able to able to safely parry the voidlings weapon, but it also appeared that while they could counterattack, they couldn’t exactly inflict any damage to my little buddy.
With a glance I send two more voidlings to help the one still in battle and send one more to help cart all the bodies back. This left me one voidling to help sort through all these rotting corpses.
Quickly deciding that I should first test the quality of the puddles created by the destitute, and to also test the voidlings created from the bodies of the destitute.
With a quick test I was able to confirm that no matter the type of body, the quality of the puddle remained constant.
The interesting bit came from when the body of a destitute was used to create a voidling. No matter the type of puddle used, a voidling wouldn’t come out. Instead, I would have to place four more, for a total of five, destitutes into a puddle to form something. Even then this creation was clearly not a voidling, even though they seemed to come from very similar tears. What came out still appeared to be a smoke monster, but with a closer inspection you could see that it was a short, small creature that was floating in the air.
It had a disgusting appearance, where voidlings were completely sharp everywhere, this creature appeared to be smooth and soft everywhere. It appeared to be a mass of organs just simply floating in the air, with an intestine like trunk forming its “speaking appendage”. And speak they did, while voidlings seemed to only communicate through our psionic channel and only released a feral scream when engaging in combat, these “Hands of the Void” as I had dubbed them could speak. Their voices were gurgled, like they were talking underwater, and they would exude this toxic substance when they spoke, which seemed to be a vert toxic mix of Void and some unknown biological material that seemed to be just as destructive as my blood.
While the voidlings exceeded at using strength, the Hands were extremely smart, and seemed to be capable of creating and leading the voidlings. While the voidlings held a dangerous amount of Void, when used it would only destroy and no puddle would form. The Hands, on the other hand, thanks to the mysterious biological component to their slurry allowed them to create puddles, and therefore were able to create new voidlings.
Telling the destitute from the sainted was difficult, and I would need more training to sense the two, there were two easy ways to spot. One, was that the sainted were always rich, meaning anyone freed from the farm was a destitute, and two if their armor was mostly unscathed it meant there was a force protecting it from the glory of the void. In other words, they were sainted and were partially protected by their patrons. Now, this wasn’t a perfect system but for the most part it worked out well enough.
Setting my Hand to work, I ended up creating five more Hands, and then using these hands converted the rest of the bodies to Voidlings (using the rest of the destitute as fuel for the puddles). Halfway through our cleaning process the rest of the voidlings returned, with the seven grey knights dragging behind them.
It was really a shame I wouldn’t be able to text out my new strength against them, but they seemed to be very advanced sainted. Their armor even after a fierce battle seemed to be in perfect condition, and ignoring the scorch marks on their weapons, their weapons too were also in pristine condition. In fact, what seemed to cause their deaths was stab marks in the gaps of their armor. What was even stranger though, was if you had told me that a normal weapon had done the stabbing, I would have believed you. It seemed these sainted held great arcane resistance but almost no physical one, further supporting the theory that these grey knights were an anti-mage squad. The saddest part was, I couldn’t turn these sainted into puddles nor into voidlings or workers. Instead, when placed into a puddle nothing would happen, and if I dripped some of my blood on them, instead of melting they would burn, turning into a fine grey ash. It was strange, and only seemed to allude to the fact that the sainted’s protection seemed to seep into the next life also. Deciding to turn the rest of the bodies to ash as I didn’t want to leave evidence behind, I turned the rest to ashes and then when to complete the cleaning.
The cleaning process took the rest of the day, and lead into the morning of the next. At the end of the day, I had six hands, my original six voidlings, and one hundred and seventy-three voidlings. These voidlings too didn’t share many similarities in physical deformities or numbers of limbs but I could still feel their angry bloodthirst, ready and willing to tear this world asunder.
But I knew, I knew that right now I was simply a frog at the bottom of the well, that I was nowhere near as strong as I would need be to bring this world back into the fold, to beat it into submission. I decided that I would need to hide, hide behind a facade that wouldn’t hinder me, but would also not lead me into direct conflict with the entire world at once. I decided I needed to turn the Uurak empire into one of conquest, but I couldn’t be the one leading this change, I was more of a background character then one that would be leading this charge.
Luckily, this border town would be the perfect place for Adam to die and for Amos to be born. With a quick order, five hands and the one hundred and seventy-three disappeared from my sight, quickly heading past the fortress and into the wilderness and beyond. I knew that there was no creature strong enough to kill them in that wilderness, if not for a lack of strength, then for a lack of speed and accuracy. My voidlings seemed to be very resilient to damage and could move quicker then the human eye. Still, being careful, I ordered them to hunt carefully, to head deep into the forest but not too deep, and to avoid contact with humans. While it would be nice to increase the amount of voidlings and hands, the last thing I needed was someone to mistake them for a hoard of beasts and for some strong enemy to come from the shadows and squash my newly formed army.
After dismissing my army all I was left with was a street full of empty houses and six of my original voidlings. Having them switch into their sainted stance, the void energy surrounding me quickly vanished, replaced by an almost holy aura. It was ironic almost, that the god’s greatest enemy seemed to fit the part of their puppets better then anything they could make did. With a tap, the slug around my face seemed to fall off me, detaching itself from my face and curling around my arm like it wouldn’t let me go. Patting it with my other hand and ordered my void knights to start a fire. Quickly grabbing scraps of wood, a massive bonfire was started in the backyard of the house. Ordering the void knights to throw any remnants of clothing into the fire, then once the fire was nice and hot, I ordered one of the void knights to grab a piece of wood and to press it against my face. Holding back my scream, I could feel half of the flesh on my face melting and cauterizing. I could feel the Void within my circulate, protecting my skull and brain, but I consciously kept it from healing my place. I needed to make certain I wouldn’t be recognized as Adam, even if my mask was taken off for some reason. After waiting a couple of seconds, I had them remove the burning plank, and I once again placed my slug back onto my face. While the void knights didn’t seem to be too perturbed my actions, I could feel the slug on my face voice its concern. It was cute, and it made me feel this strange feeling of comfort.
Looking around I ordered the void knights to go and spread the fire to the rest of the houses, it was time for this whole street to burn.
It must have made for a weird picture, for a man petting his mask while a bunch of silvery knights went around with torches, destroying the rest of the houses.
Watching the houses burn from the street, I looked with the flames, and a plan started to form in my head, my plan for Uurak, my plan for Ariel and my family, and my plan for my life as Amos…
