Power without understanding is just a faster way to die.
The Void understood this better than most.
He walked for three hours before he found the village.
Or rather — what was left of it.
Kael smelled it first. Smoke and something sweeter underneath, the kind of sweetness that had no business being pleasant but was, in the way that rot sometimes mimics ripeness before you look close enough to tell the difference. He crested a low ridge of black rock and stopped, one hand braced against the stone, and looked down at the collection of broken shapes that had once been a settlement.
Eleven buildings. Maybe twelve, once — it was hard to count ruins. Timber frames collapsed inward like the structures had simply exhaled and given up. A well at the center of the dirt road, its stone lip cracked clean in two. Fences trampled. A cart overturned, one wheel still spinning slowly in the wind as if trying to remember what it had been doing before everything went wrong.
No bodies.
That was the part that made his jaw tighten. Destruction he understood — war had shown him every flavor of it. But destruction without bodies meant the bodies had been taken, and that told a different kind of story. One he recognized from the Empire's eastern campaigns, where Darien's conscription units would sweep through border villages and take anyone capable of lifting a sword.
Or a pickaxe.
Or a child small enough to fit in a mine shaft.
Slavers, Kael thought, and felt something cold move through him that had nothing to do with the Void.
He descended the ridge slowly, scanning the perimeter out of old habit — exits, high ground, choke points. The Golden Spear's instincts didn't die just because the Golden Spear had. His eyes catalogued everything: the direction the cart had been facing when overturned, the boot prints still visible in the half-frozen mud, the way the fences had been pushed outward rather than inward, meaning whatever had come through had come from inside the village, not outside.
Interesting.
He crouched beside the well and studied the cracked stone. The break was clean — almost surgical. Not a battering ram. Not an explosion. Something had pressed down on it from above, with focused, deliberate force.
A mage. A strong one.
One of Darien's enforcement units, he concluded. The Prince is already consolidating. Moving fast. He shouldn't have been surprised — Darien had always been methodical in his cruelty, the way a surgeon is methodical. No wasted motion. Every cut deliberate. He'd framed Kael and had the border villages swept for conscripts within the same week. Efficient. Ruthless.
Kael filed it away and kept moving.
He found the survivor in the third building — the one with most of its roof still intact, its walls scorched but standing. She was tucked behind a collapsed shelf, knees pulled to her chest, a kitchen knife held in both hands with the grip of someone who had never used one as a weapon but had decided tonight was the night to learn.
She was perhaps fourteen. Dark eyes, wide and burning with a fear that was rapidly losing the battle against fury. A bruise across her left cheekbone, still fresh and swollen. Her clothes were ash-stained and torn at the shoulder.
She looked at Kael the way cornered animals look at things bigger than them — calculating whether to run or bite.
"I'm not with them," Kael said.
"Everyone says that," she replied.
Fair point. He raised both hands slowly, palms out, and stepped back to give her the doorway as an exit. She didn't take it — just watched him, knife steady, jaw set with the kind of stubbornness that outlasts most things.
"How many were there?" he asked.
A pause. She was deciding whether the question meant he was an enemy or an ally, and he appreciated that she was thinking it through rather than just answering. Smart kid.
"Twelve soldiers," she said finally. "One mage. They came before dawn." Her voice was flat in the way voices get when emotion becomes too heavy to carry in tone. "They took everyone between fourteen and forty. Said it was Imperial Conscription Order Seven." A beat. "My mother was thirty-eight."
The words landed quietly and stayed there.
Kael lowered his hands. "Which direction did they go?"
Her eyes narrowed. "Why?"
"Because I'm going to find them."
She stared at him for a long moment — really looked, the way people rarely do, scanning past the surface for the thing underneath. He wondered what she saw. A ragged man in destroyed clothes, no weapons, no insignia, standing in the ruins of her home with a shadow that moved slightly wrong. Not exactly reassuring.
"South," she said. "Toward the Ironway road. They had a transport wagon." She hesitated. "There were children too. Younger than me. They said the mines need small hands."
Something in Kael's chest went very still.
He turned south.
"Wait —" she scrambled to her feet, knife still raised. "Who are you?"
He paused in the doorway without turning around. Outside, the wind had picked up, carrying ash and the smell of old smoke. His shadow stretched ahead of him across the scorched ground, pointing south like a compass needle that had chosen its own north.
"Someone who was taken once," he said. "And didn't enjoy it."
He walked out into the dark.
He caught up to the convoy an hour later.
They hadn't hurried — why would they? A dozen Imperial soldiers and one enforcement mage, moving through territory that belonged to the Empire by law and by sword. The transport wagon rumbled along the Ironway road with the casual confidence of people who had never once considered the possibility of consequence.
Kael watched from the tree line for two full minutes before moving.
He counted: twelve soldiers as the girl had said, armed with standard Imperial steel and one each of the short-range suppression staves the enforcement units favored — good against mages, devastating against civilians. The mage walked beside the wagon rather than riding it, which meant either arrogance or alertness. Kael wasn't sure which was more dangerous.
The wagon itself was iron-barred. Through the gaps he could see shapes — people sitting with their backs against the bars, some slumped, some rigid. A sound drifted out that his brain tried to categorize as something else before he let it be what it was: a child crying very quietly, with the muffled quality of someone who had learned that crying loudly made things worse.
He felt the Void stir inside him, responding to something in his chest that wasn't quite rage — deeper than that, quieter, the kind of feeling that doesn't need to shout because it has already made up its mind.
Show me, he thought at it.
The Void didn't respond in words this time. It responded in sensation — a sudden, absolute awareness of the darkness around him. Not just the visible dark between the trees, but the dark inside things: the shadows pooled beneath the wagon, the darkness inside the soldiers' armor, the small pockets of lightlessness in every fold and crease and hollow of the world around him.
He could feel all of it.
Like fingers he hadn't known he had, suddenly unfurling.
Interesting, he thought.
He stepped out of the tree line.
"Hold." The nearest soldier raised a fist — convoy stop, Imperial signal. The wagon creaked to a halt. Twelve sets of eyes found Kael, and he watched them run the same quick assessment: no armor, no weapon, no insignia. Ragged. Alone. The mage's hand drifted toward the focus-stone at his belt with the laziness of someone who didn't expect to need it.
"Imperial road," the lead soldier said. "State your business and your papers."
"I don't have papers," Kael said.
"Then you're in violation of—"
"I'd like you to let those people out of the wagon," Kael said pleasantly.
Silence. Then, somewhere in the convoy, a soldier laughed — short and genuine, the laugh of someone who finds a thing funny before they remember they're supposed to be intimidating.
The lead soldier didn't laugh. He had the flat eyes of a man who had done this enough times to have stopped needing to feel anything about it. "Take him," he said simply.
Three soldiers moved forward.
Kael reached for the dark beneath their feet.
He didn't know exactly what he was doing — the Void offered no instruction manual, no structured guidance. It offered only access, and the dim, patient understanding that he already knew how to use it in the same way a man born near water eventually learns to swim. He reached for the shadows pooled beneath the soldiers' boots and he pulled.
The darkness moved.
It didn't explode or roar or announce itself with the dramatic flair that mage-fire favored. It simply rose — slowly, almost gently — wrapping around the three soldiers' legs like deep water, darkening as it thickened, and squeezing. Not enough to break. Enough to hold.
All three stopped mid-step as if the ground itself had grabbed them.
The silence that followed was a different quality than the silence before.
The mage's hand closed around his focus-stone. Kael felt the man's magic probe the air between them — a standard scan, looking for a mage's core signature. It swept over Kael and found nothing. No core. No magical frequency. No classification.
The mage's face did something complicated.
"What—" he started.
"The wagon," Kael said. "Open it."
The lead soldier drew his sword instead. The remaining eight fanned out with the practiced efficiency of trained men, surrounding Kael in a half-circle that would have been very effective against most opponents. Kael noted their positions, noted the angles, noted the mage stepping back to create casting distance —
And reached for every shadow in the road at once.
What happened next was something Kael would spend a long time thinking about afterward, trying to find the precise words for it. It wasn't violence, exactly — or not only that. It was more like a demonstration. The darkness between every torch and lantern along the convoy simply deepened, drinking the light down until the road existed in a twilight that had no business being there under a sky with two moons. The shadows the soldiers cast stretched and thickened and wrapped, not to crush or kill, but to hold — every soldier standing suddenly finding their feet locked, their arms weighted, their bodies suspended in a grip that had no physical form to push against.
The mage threw his working. A concentrated bolt of suppression energy — the kind that collapsed mage cores — hit Kael square in the chest.
Kael felt it.
And felt the Void absorb it the way deep water absorbs a thrown stone: a ripple, a disturbance, then stillness.
The mage stared.
"That's not possible," he whispered.
"I've been hearing that a lot lately," Kael said.
He walked to the wagon. The lock was standard Imperial iron — heavy, enchanted against conventional force. He wrapped one hand around it, felt the shadows inside the metal itself, and squeezed at something structural and internal.
The lock cracked and fell away in pieces.
He pulled the door open.
Inside: fourteen people. Seven adults, four teenagers, three children — the youngest perhaps six years old, tear-streaked and bewildered, clutching the sleeve of a woman who was probably her mother with both hands. They stared at Kael from the dimness of the wagon interior with the careful, wounded look of people who had learned not to hope too quickly.
"You can go," he said simply. "North. There's a village — what's left of one. A girl there. She'll need company."
Nobody moved for a moment. Then the woman with the child climbed down first, moving with the slow dignity of someone who refuses to be seen scrambling even now, and the others followed.
Kael turned back to the soldiers, still held in their shadow-bonds, and looked at the lead soldier specifically.
"Tell your Prince," he said quietly, "that the Ashen Wastes aren't empty anymore."
He released the shadows.
The soldiers stumbled, caught themselves, looked at each other with the expression of men who have encountered something their training gave them absolutely no framework for. The mage was already backing away, focus-stone dark and useless in his hand.
Kael let them go.
He stood in the middle of the empty road and watched the freed prisoners disappear north into the dark and the soldiers scramble south in considerably less order, and he felt the Void settle back inside him like something satisfied — not with violence, but with purpose.
Was that mercy? he asked it silently. Letting them go?
The Void's answer was almost wry.
That was intelligence. Dead soldiers tell no tales. Frightened ones tell everyone.
Kael looked down at his shadow. It was doing the thing again — moving independently, fingers spread, reaching slightly ahead of him as if impatient.
He was beginning to understand it wasn't separate from him.
It was him. The part of him that the Void had claimed, given form and hunger and a direction.
What am I becoming? he wondered.
The answer came not from the Void but from somewhere older inside himself — from the part that had survived war and betrayal and death and come out the other side with its backbone intact.
Something Darien should have made sure stayed dead.
He turned north to check on the girl.
Behind him, the road was empty and dark, and his shadow stretched long and hungry in both directions at once, as if it couldn't decide which way was forward and had decided that didn't matter.
Every direction led somewhere useful, when you were the Void King.
Even if you hadn't chosen the crown yet.
The girl's name was Sera.
She didn't offer it willingly — he had to wait until the reunions in the ruined village had quieted down and the woman with the six-year-old had cried herself still and the children had fallen asleep in the least-damaged building with the particular immediacy of the very young, who can find rest in the ruins of things adults cannot stop staring at.
Sera sat beside the broken well with her kitchen knife still in her hand and watched him with those dark, calculating eyes.
"You stopped them," she said.
"Yes."
"How."
Not a question exactly. More like a demand for accounting.
"I'm still figuring that out," Kael said honestly.
She considered this. "Your shadow moves wrong."
"I know."
"Are you a demon?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
He almost smiled. "Reasonably."
She was quiet for a moment. Around them the ruined village breathed with the soft sounds of exhausted people finding sleep. Above, the twin moons had shifted west, painting everything in pale silver and deep purple. Kael's shadow stretched behind him, still, for once.
"My mother is still in that wagon," Sera said. Her voice was level. Controlled with an effort he could feel from three feet away. "They split the convoy at the Ironway junction. The adults went east. To the Thornwall mines."
Of course they did.
Kael looked east, in the direction the road disappeared into darkness and distance.
"The Thornwall mines are three days east," he said. "Inside Imperial territory. Guarded."
"I know," Sera said.
"I'm one person."
"I know," she said again, and looked at him with eyes that had done the math and arrived somewhere beyond fear. "But you stopped twelve soldiers and a mage with your hands in your pockets." A pause. "So."
Kael looked at her for a long moment.
Then he looked east.
The Void stirred quietly — not urging, not demanding. Just present, the way deep water is present beneath a thin layer of ice: patient, vast, and going exactly nowhere.
One step at a time, he thought. The Empire didn't build in a day.
And it won't fall in one either.
But it would fall.
He was beginning to be very certain of that.
"Get some sleep," he told Sera. "We move at dawn."
For the first time since he'd found her behind that shelf with a kitchen knife and a spine made of iron, something in her face shifted — not quite relief, not quite hope, but the quiet, careful precursor to both.
She nodded once and didn't argue.
Kael sat with his back against the broken well and watched the east and let the Void hum softly in the hollow of his chest, and thought about mines and soldiers and a Prince sitting warm on his golden throne, entirely unaware that the dead man he'd thrown away had just taken his first step back.
Sleep well, Darien, he thought.
While you still can.
— End of Chapter Two —
Next Chapter: "Thornwall" — Kael enters the most feared prison mine in the Empire. What he finds inside isn't just captives — it's the first piece of a secret that will change everything he thinks he knows about the Void, the Empire, and himself.
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© Echoes of the Void King | The Shattered Throne, Book One
Written by Daoistaglcx