The courier bird didn't so much arrive as crash.
It was half-dead, its wings ripped by claws and its feathers matted with a dark, sticky substance Miren immediately identified as void corruption. A sealed letter was still attached to its good leg, scrawled in a frantic, panicked hand.
"Easthollow Settlement," Elder Stoneheart read aloud to the council chamber. "They're under a coordinated void attack. Multiple entities. Organized. They need immediate military aid."
Silence. Easthollow was a three-hundred-person settlement on the edge of known territory. It had been quiet for months. No warnings.
"How many?" Master Dren asked, his voice flat.
"At least seven," Stoneheart said, scanning the page. "Coordinated patterns. They've held for two days, but defenses are failing. They figure they have one more day. Maybe less."
I exchanged a look with Kaela. Seven. *Coordinated.* We'd only ever faced isolated creatures, maybe pairs. Seven, working together, implied something new. Something terrifying. Intelligence.
"We send a relief force," Elder Ironwood said, his voice a hammer. "Full combat team. This is an invasion."
"Or a test," Lysara said quietly from the back. She'd become the default youth representative since the Sera incident. "They're testing our response time. Our capacity."
"So we let them die?" Ironwood shot back.
"No," Lysara said, her voice steady. "But we should understand what we're walking into. Seven entities acting in concert means something is *directing* them. This isn't random. It's strategic."
Elder Stoneheart looked at me. "Your assessment, convergence-marked?"
The title still felt strange, but it was what they called me. "Lysara's right. It feels like a probe. But ignoring it signals weakness. The cult will exploit that."
The vote was unanimous. A relief force of thirty scouts. Master Dren would lead. Kaela, Lysara, and I were going. Our first official mission as soldiers, not just protectors.
We traveled for two days, and the land got uglier the further east we went.
The world was sick. Dead trees streaked with black rot, ashy soil, animal skeletons picked clean. The corruption grew thicker until we were moving through a dead zone.
The second night, we camped at the edge of a forest that was... wrong. The trees were still standing but they looked hollow, like they were made of shadow. Lysara reached out to touch one. Her hand sank into the trunk up to the wrist, as if she were pushing through cold smoke. She yanked it back with a shudder.
"They're phase-locked," she reported to Dren. "Partially in our world, partially in void space. If we try to cut through, we might just... pass *into* it."
"Can you navigate it?" Dren asked.
"Maybe. But I'd have to keep us all anchored to material reality. Constantly."
"Not worth the risk," Dren decided. "We go around. Safety over speed."
That night, Kaela found me at the edge of camp, staring into that dead forest.
"You want to go through it," she said. It wasn't a question.
"The curse does," I admitted. "It... recognizes something in there. Something it considers kin."
She stood beside me, and we just existed in the silence for a long minute. We did that a lot more since my birthday. It was its own kind of talking.
"Think Lysara's right?" Kaela asked finally. "A test?"
"I think it's a message," I said. "They *want* us to know they're smart. That they can plan."
"Then we're walking into an ambush."
"Probably," I agreed. "But that's what soldiers do, right? Answer the call, even when it's a trap."
Her hand found mine in the dark. "When did we become soldiers?"
"Around the time people started dying, I guess."
She squeezed my hand. We watched the dead forest, knowing that whatever was waiting for us at Easthollow was going to test everything.
Easthollow was dying.
The walls were breached in three places. The void entities were pressing in, and the defenders were on their last legs. You could see it in their eyes—the desperate, breaking-point exhaustion.
We arrived just as a massive, tentacled *thing* with too many mouths tore through a secondary wall.
Master Dren's voice cut the air before we even stopped. "Delta and Gamma squads, left flank! Epsilon, support the south! Ren, Kaela, Lysara—with me. We hit the northern breach!"
It wasn't training. It was a meat grinder.
It was fast, dirty, and a thousand times more complex. Fleeing civilians, exhausted scouts, and void creatures moving with a terrifying tactical awareness. I drew my shadow-steel sword and the curse roared to life, the blade igniting in violet flame as I met the first creature—a scorpion made of liquid malice.
It saw me. Instantly.
"It's recognizing him!" Lysara shouted from behind me, her hands already glowing. "It knows he's convergence-marked! They're targeting him!"
The scorpion's tail whipped at me. I dodged, but not fast enough. It clipped my shoulder like a sledgehammer. Void corruption flooded the contact point, but my curse flared, repelling it violently.
The creature *screamed*.
"They feel your power!" Kaela yelled, flanking it. "They know you're a threat!"
I pressed the attack, the realization hitting me: this thing was tactical. It was deliberately keeping me pinned, *using* me as a distraction while its friends tore the settlement apart. This wasn't just an attack. It was warfare.
Around us, hell. Master Dren was fighting two smaller entities at once, his blade a blur. A young scout—couldn't have been more than sixteen—took a void talon to the leg and went down, screaming.
Lysara ran to him, throwing up a shield, but she was exposed. A second creature saw the gap and moved to exploit it.
"Lysara!" I yelled, trying to break off, but the scorpion anticipated me, blocking my path.
Kaela moved. She abandoned her own fight, throwing herself between Lysara and the creature. Her sword came up, but the impact sent her flying. She crashed into a wall and crumpled.
"No!" I dumped everything I had into the curse, channeling it through the sword until the blade burned white-hot. The scorpion creature hissed, pulling back from the raw power. It sounded... frustrated.
I didn't give it time. I charged, my blade sinking deep. The void entity convulsed.
But it didn't die. It *shattered*.
It split into three smaller, separate entities. A tactical retreat. A way to spread us thin.
"Fall back to secondary positions!" Master Dren roared. "Tighten the defense! They're regrouping!"
We fought for another hour. We weren't winning. We were surviving. There's a difference.
As the sun set, they just... left. They withdrew, moving with the same coordination they'd used to attack. It was a tactical decision.
We didn't pursue. We were too exhausted, too damaged. Chasing them into that corrupted wasteland would have been suicide.
Easthollow lost seventeen defenders. Our relief team lost four. Twelve more of ours were seriously wounded. The void creatures withdrew with no apparent casualties.
In the makeshift medical tent, Miren was carefully resetting Kaela's dislocated shoulder. She was pale but glaring at the tent wall, refusing to make a sound. Lysara and I sat with her.
"They knew you were coming," Lysara said quietly to Master Dren, who was leaning against the tent post. "They prepared for us."
"How?" one of the settlement elders asked. "Unless—"
"An informant," I said, the pieces clicking. "Or the cult is linked to them somehow."
"They showed clear tactical awareness," Lysara continued, already pulling out her notes, her researcher's habit kicking in. "They ID'd Ren as the primary threat. They used diversionary tactics. They coordinated their retreat when they realized they couldn't win quickly."
"What does that mean?" Kaela grunted, wincing as Miren finished.
"It means we're not fighting random corruption anymore," Dren said. His voice was heavier than I'd ever heard it. "We're fighting an organized, intelligent enemy. This war just escalated."
He sat down on a crate, looking every one of his sixty years. "We won today. Barely. And only because they *chose* to withdraw. If they'd committed, we would have been slaughtered."
The words settled over us like a burial shroud.
Lysara's voice was small. "We're not strong enough. Even with all our training... we're not strong enough."
"No," Master Dren agreed quietly. "You're not."
Later, we found a quiet spot on the damaged wall. The corrupted forest was a dark stain under the stars. They were out there. Regrouping. Waiting.
The bond between us felt fragile, like it might snap under the weight of what we'd just learned.
"We can't win," Kaela said. It wasn't despair. It was just a fact. "That was seven. The cult has more. The void has hundreds."
"Not hundreds," Lysara said, her voice clinical. She was retreating into analysis to cope. "But more than we can handle. We need continental coordination. We need the other convergence-marked. We need strategies we don't have."
"That's all theory," I said. "In reality, we're facing an enemy we can't beat."
"Yes," Lysara acknowledged. "Unless we change the fundamentals. Unless we find out what the void *wants*. Or... unless we accept that we might not survive this. We might just be buying time for whoever comes next."
It was the most honest, and most terrifying, thing any of us had ever said.
Kaela reached out, taking my hand and Lysara's. "Then we buy time. We survive. We find the others. We build the network. And we figure it out."
"What if we're defeated before we get the chance?" I asked.
"Then at least we fought," Kaela said, her grip tightening. "At least we tried."
We sat there under the stars, three kids who had just learned, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we weren't powerful enough to save the world.
Somehow, it felt like the beginning of wisdom, not the end of hope.
The void was out there, it was smart, and it was waiting. We had so much to do. And no guarantee we'd live long enough to do it.
But we were going to try anyway.