Amon moved through the gray. His shirt, stripped from his cold back and knotted by the sleeves, served as a sack. Inside, a dozen hares huddled in the frozen stillness of death, their small bodies limp against the fabric. In his other hand, he dragged a wolf, a gaunt mangy thing that had breathed its last an hour ago.?

  The fog was not silent. It hummed with a low, vibrating purpose that only the dead could hear.

  Preserve.

  The compulsion was a gentle tug in his gut, a whisper of duty. When life ended within the domain, the mist knew. And now, Amon knew.?

  He didn't mind the work. Idleness had always been a sin on the farm, a waste of daylight. Now, daylight was irrelevant. The tar that saturated his veins, the Preserverant, had stripped away the need for sleep. His muscles did not tire; his lungs did not burn. He was a machine of bone and black magic, fueled by this Soul Core.?

  The forest was beautiful in the dark. The moon, full and silver, cut through the canopy in sharp beams. To living eyes, the woods would be a wall of shadow. To Amon, the tar-sight outlined every root, every leaf, every sleeping squirrel in crisp, ghostly white.?

  He reached the pool.

  A dozen other shapes moved in the gloom—skeletal hares, a badger made of woven ribs and tar—but they were slow, clumsy. They lacked hands. Amon set his burden down near the edge of the abyss, arranging the bodies with a farmer’s pragmatic care.

  Productivity.

  The word drifted into his mind, alien and precise. It wasn't his thought. It was Belugmah’s. The entity was constantly there, a pressure at the back of his skull, leaking concepts and knowledge like water through a sieve.

  Amon straightened, wiping his hands on his trousers.

  "Productivity," he murmured, testing the word.

  The constant flow of thoughts into his consciousness was a humbling experience, one that emphasized his limited comprehension of existence. Each revelation further illustrating the dire circumstance his homeland was involved in.

  It wasn’t just going to be the Tharnells—warriors from The Fearless Maws—who posed a threat. Anyone could come to this realm, if they had a connecting link with their own plane.

  Invaders from countless kingdoms, all seeking to take.

  As his lord prophesied, peace would be scarce in his home land, for its fertile grounds made it an irresistible target for the many who lacked, or had exhausted similar bounties.

  "Fertile lands bring eager raiders," Amon quoted, the old adage bitter on his tongue. And usually, the second half followed: 'Till Dragon, howling and raging, his due taken, comes and eats them all.'?

  Looking up into the night sky, stars shining bright, he wondered how long it would be before his local tyrant arrived. While small—and not something anyone brought up—Lavia the Demanding wasn’t one to tolerate invaders, especially not an army.

  He will not come.

  The thought from Belugmah was cold.

  If he comes alone, he dies. The Tharnells have weapons designed specially to end his kind.

  Amon frowned. "Dragons don't die," he whispered. "They are the land."

  Everything dies, little farmer. Even flesh gods.

  A shudder ran through the mist. It wasn't the wind. It was a ripple of distress, a psychic scream from the edge of the domain.

  Stop.

  Every servant in the clearing froze. The tar-badger, the skeleton birds, even the slow-moving tortoise constructs. They all turned their heads in unison, staring west.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Amon felt his vision double, then triple. He was seeing through a hundred eyes at once. He saw the edge of the forest. He saw the lights.

  They were blinding white, harsh beams that cut through the night, turning the ancient woods into a stark, bleached skeleton. And the noise, a grinding, shrieking roar that shook the earth.

  Harvesters.?

  They were monstrosities. Machines the size of barns, crawling on treads that crushed stone to powder. In front, massive circular saws spun with a blurring violence, screaming as they bit into hundred-year-old oaks.

  Trees fell. Not one by one, but in rows. The machines didn't just cut; they devoured. Claws of steel stripped the branches, debarked the trunks, and fed the wood into hoppers in seconds.

  Efficiency, Belugmah whispered.

  Amon watched, his jaw tight. This wasn't logging, it was erasure.

  Then, a siren blared. A low, rhythmic wail that made the mist recoil. The saws spun down, the lights swiveled, focusing on the wall of fog.

  They stopped.

  The machines sat there, engines idling with a deep, throaty rumble. They knew.

  The animal corpses began moving closer, and climbing trees to gain a broader perspective of this army, one spreading across the vast plane like a plague upon their land. Though Caregivers he looked out over the devastation. The forest was gone. In its place was a sea of mud and stumps, also being collected. All of it illuminated by the headlights of machines, and a convoy winding its way through the ruin, and army of harvesting machines.

  Smaller vehicles—armored war jeeps, equipped with turrets—pushed past the Harvesters, and stopped at the edge of the mist.?

  The doors opened, and Amon was granted a glimpse of the invaders without their concealing helms.? They were uglier than the vision had shown. Badger faced, with broad and bowed bodies, their fur matted with grease. They wore plates of scarred metal bolted over leather.

  One of them, a giant standing eight heads tall, slammed his fist onto the hood of his vehicle. The metal dented.

  "Hold the line!" he roared. The language guttural, full of clicks and growls, but the tar in Amon's brain translated it instantly. "Harvest around the Scar. Nothing goes in. Nothing comes out."

  He pointed a thick, clawed finger at the fog.

  "If it moves in that mist, kill it."

  With a resounding slam, leaving an impression upon the metal with his imposing fist, the leader beast retreated back into his machine, and departed, the tires tearing up the ground as he reversed away.

  The remaining Tharnells continued to point their weapons at the fog, vigilant against any attack, as Harvesters returned to work, some retreating away from the mist, and began sawing around the domain. As Amon witnessed the destruction of a once serene forest, he reluctantly withdrew, entrusting the Caregivers to protect the domain, while he focused on rescuing as many sleeping animals as possible, before danger reached them.

  ***

  With the task concerning animals completed, he returned to the pool, his mind still racing. The Tharnells were walling them in, cutting a firebreak of death around the domain. If no animals could enter, there would be no new Souls to preserve. No new mana. The pool would not grow.

  He sat by the edge, closing his eyes.

  Focus.

  He turned his attention inward, to the Core pulsing in his chest. It was a tiny thing, a spark in the dark, but it was his. He pushed his will into it, forcing it to spin faster, to draw more deeply on the ambient death-mana of the garden.?

  Grow.

  It resisted. It was like trying to push a boulder uphill with his mind. But he kept pushing. A day passed, then another. He felt the infinitesimal shift, the microscopic widening of the channel.

  Better.

  But not enough. The saws were still screaming in the distance. The circle was closing, and Belugmah felt his frustration.

  We do not starve.

  The pool erupted, and a fountain of black tar shot into the air, thick and roiling. It didn't splash. It hung there, defying gravity, knitting itself together. Tar bones formed, a wolf’s skull, bear ribs, femurs of stags, it all snapped into place within the sludge.

  A shape formed.

  It was a wolf, but a wolf from a nightmare. It stood as tall as a horse, its body a shifting mass of oil and shadow. Limbs protruded from its shoulders—extra arms, grasping claws—twitching with independent life.?

  It landed on the moss with a wet heavy thud.

  It had no eyes, just burning white pits of raw mana.

  The Tar Wolf stretched, the sound of grinding bone echoing in the clearing. It threw back its head and howled, a soundless, psychic cry that made Amon's teeth ache.

  Ride.

  The command wasn't for his body. It was for his mind.

  Amon closed his eyes and reached.

  His consciousness slammed into the wolf. He felt the cold power of the construct, the hunger, and the raw predatory joy. The wolf’s eyes open, and he witnessed its world, a kaleidoscope of heat signatures and soul-light.

  The Wolf grinned, a rictus of dripping tar, before the beast surged forward, tearing up the earth, and raced toward the sound of the saws.