The next room Kartara led me to was a library. Shelves lined every wall, each full of neatly stacked books.

Striding down the center of the chamber, the huntmistress spread her arms and turned around in a slow circle. “This is the work of centuries, and contains every last morsel of information the brotherhood has gathered on the void—every report, every sighting, every encounter described in exacting detail, and—” she smiled self-deprecatingly—“and more than a few wild theories.”

I whistled softly as I took in the wealth of knowledge in the room. “Is it safe?”

Kartara blinked. “Safe?”

I nodded. While the library was covered by the same dampening field filling the rest of the castle, there were no added defenses that I could detect. “Is it… uhm, wise to leave such priceless knowledge unguarded like this. Wouldn’t it be better to store the books in a bank vault or—”

Kartara burst out into laughter. “Ah, Havick—that’s what we’re calling you, right?—don’t you understand? No one but the brotherhood is interested in the information in this room. We don’t hoard it. We’ve tried giving it away, many a time in fact, but the factions are simply not interested.”

“Oh,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

Kartara shook her head. “But it’s not for the books that I’ve brought you here.” Marching to an ornate table, she waved me over. “It’s this.”

Striding to her side, I glanced down at the table and the map prominently displayed on it. “What am I looking at?” I asked softly.

“The Nethersphere,” Kartara replied, “or as much of it as we’ve managed to map.”

My curiosity piqued, I inspected the map closely.

The parchment was peppered by small multicolored dots interconnected by thin lines. Leaning closer, I spotted a string of numbers beside each. The dots were sectors then.

But there were hundreds of dots.

I swallowed, imagining what that equated to in lives lost. “What do the colors mean?” I asked in a hushed tone.

“These circles—” Kartara’s hand swept across the map, pointing out the green ones—“are sectors still free of the nether but in which a rift has appeared at one time or another.”

I exhaled. At least a third of the dots were green. “Then there is still some hope of saving them,” I murmured.

Kartara shook her head. “You would think so, but no. Few sectors have the resources of Nexus, and once the void finds them, it’s only a matter of time before they fall.”

“Surely, the Powers don’t allow that,” I objected.

“I told you the Powers don’t care enough to intervene.”

“Self-interest alone would—”

“Self-interest only goes so far. The void’s incursions rarely touch the sectors held by the major Powers, and when they do, they are quickly squashed.” The hunt mistress gestured at the map again. “But these green circles… none of them are a sector owned by one of the big factions. So why would the Game’s elite bother helping?”

I wasn’t ready to let the matter go. “What about ordinary players? I would think many of them would leap at the chance of earning the Adjudicator’s favor. The Game rewards players for closing down rifts, after all.”

Kartara snorted delicately. “You’re right, players are all too keen to earn the Game’s rewards. But rift-diving is dangerous enough—and venturing into a nether sector to kill a seed is as far as most are willing to go. How many, though, do you think are willing to tackle a stygian Power, or even an elite, in the selfsame sector—knowing full well there is no safe zone?”

She paused, waiting for my response. But I stayed quiet, the answer was self-evident.

“Not many, let me tell you,” she went on. “And if you ask me, the risk of final death is likely the reason the Powers are themselves reluctant to enter the nether.” Her lips twisted sardonically. “Why risk immortality, after all, for the sake of a few proles?”

I grimaced. The huntmistress words were deeply disturbing, yet for all that, I could not refute them. Not bothering to argue the point further, I moved the conversation on. “What about the other dots?”

“The yellow circles are sectors in which the mists have seeped in but are yet unclaimed by the nether. Red represents those taken over by a young void tree. Black is the domain of a mature void tree. And as for the gray circles… they are the ones that despite our best efforts remain opaque to us.”

“Meaning?”

“We don’t know what manner of nether menace occupies them.”

I turned my attention back to the map. The gray and black dots were few and far between. “Then this is not a map of the Nethersphere but only of sectors threatened by it.” I glanced at the huntmistress. “You misspoke earlier.”

Her eyes glittered. “Did I?”

I nodded. “I have been to the nether as you must know.” I placed a finger on a black circle. “Judging by the sector welcome messages, it is only the ones claimed by mature trees that are fully of the Nethersphere.” My finger shifted to a red circle. “These can still be reclaimed.”

For a drawn-out moment, Kartara said nothing, and though I did not turn her way again, I could feel the weight of her gaze upon my neck.

“So, it is to try and reclaim a sector held by a young void tree that you’ve requested our help?” she asked finally.

“Yes,” I replied forthrightly, my gaze still on the map. Kesh should have already told her as much.

“Then it’s a fool’s errand you embark on.”

I turned about to face her. “I disagree.”

Unexpectedly, the huntmistress smiled. “How old are you… Havick?”

I blinked, thrown by the apparent non-sequitur. “Why do you ask?”

Kartara began walking away. “Oh, merely because it is only the young who are so foolishly optimistic.”

I glared at her receding back. “That’s not what—”

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“The tour is not yet done,” she said, cutting me off. “Keep up now.”

My frustration mounting, I chased after the huntmistress.

✵ ✵ ✵

I barely paid the next set of passages we ventured through any heed. Instead, my thoughts turned inwards, I found myself questioning the wisdom of my current course.

Had it been a mistake to seek out the brotherhood?

While the huntmistress herself and everything she’d shown me was undoubtedly impressive, and a testament of the brotherhood’s dedication to their cause, so far Kartara had expressed no interest in my mission or providing the help I’d requested from her people.

And I began to fear she had none.

Which begged the question: why had the huntmistress requested meeting me in the first place?

“We’re here.”

My musings coming to an abrupt end, I wrenched to a halt and looked around.

‘Here’ was an empty room of startling white with only a single decorative piece—a wall hanging in front of which the huntmistress had stopped.

“What’s this?” I asked, as she clearly intended me to.

“The lifecycle of a void tree.”

My interest sharpening, I gave the wall hanging my full attention.

It was a piece of intricately woven tapestry. At the top was a small black crystal—representing a stygian seed, I thought. Below the seed was a sapling, followed by six iterations of trees, each getting progressively bigger.

I swallowed. Five? That must mean—

Kartara’s hand snapped out, and moving down the tapestry, she named each representation. “Seed. Sapling. Young. Mature. Old. Elder. Ancient. And finally, at the center of the web, the void fathers.”

“Damnation,” I whispered. “And they’re all trees?”

The huntmistress hesitated fractionally. “We think so.”

I threw her a sharp look. “You think so?”

“No brotherhood member has ever set eyes on anything greater than an old tree.”

I frowned. “Then how do you know they exist?”

“From folklore and other bits of ancient histories we’ve managed to scavenge over the years.”

I threw her an incredulous look. “You trust such information?”

Kartara folded her arms behind her back—to hide the sudden nervous tic of her fingers, I thought. It was the first sign of discomfort I’d yet seen from the huntmistress, and I didn’t fail to mark it.

Or wonder as to its cause. But I had my suspicions about that.

“Not entirely,” Kartara admitted, oblivious to my observations and thoughts. “However, despite our best efforts we’ve not been able to verify or disprove their claims.”

“I see,” I said, letting the matter lie. It was not a tangent I wanted to pursue right now. “What else can you tell me about the void trees?”

“They’re sentient, uncannily smart, powerful psionics, but barely proficient mana casters.”

I pondered her words. “What about the seeds?”

“Stygian seeds are psionics, too. But their mental abilities hardly need to be feared.”

She was wrong about that, but sharing my own experience with the seeds in Draven’s Reach would be too revealing. “What about sentience?”

“What about it?”

“Are the seeds… uhm, sentient?”

The huntmistress frowned. “In some sense they are living creatures, if that’s what you mean, but if you’re asking are they self-aware…?” Trailing off, she looked at me questioningly.

I nodded mutely.

Her frown deepened. “Some in the brotherhood seem to believe so, but there has been no conclusive proof one way or another.” She shook her head. “Anyway, it’s a moot point.”

“Oh?”

“These days, it’s brotherhood policy to kill any seed or sapling that comes into our possession. We’ve suffered too many unexplained accidents in the past for us to do otherwise.”

“Ah, that’s good.”

My words earned me a strange look, but with a shrug, the huntmistress, dismissed the matter and moved on, “Void trees and nether sectors are inextricably linked. Wherever you find a sector lost to the nether, you will find a void tree.”

“Because the trees are the ones creating the mists filling them?” I ventured.

Kartara nodded. “So, we believe. As far as the brotherhood has been able to ascertain, void trees have only two purposes: producing nether and creating rifts.”

“Which in turn serves to expand the Nethersphere,” I observed.

“Exactly. That’s the void’s ultimate goal: to consume everything in its path.”

I pursed my lips. “So, why aren’t you trying to stop it? That’s your mission, isn’t it?”

“Oh, we are. And it is. The brotherhood works tirelessly to close every rift we find—stopping the rot before it spreads.” She shook her head. “But what we can’t do, what we have never been able to do, is reverse the void’s corruption.”

I chewed over her words for a moment. “You’re saying the brotherhood has never defeated a mature tree.”

She laughed hollowly. “I’m saying more than that. Once the void’s hold is so entrenched that the safe zone itself disappears, we consider it lost.” She held my gaze. “No matter what the Adjudicator may say on the matter.”

“But—”

Raising a hand, Kartara stopped me. “Havick,” she said, almost wearily, “despite centuries of trying, no brotherhood force has ever managed to destroy a young tree. And if you let me finish, I will explain why.”

Despite an almost compulsive urge to contradict the huntmistress, I sat back on my heels and schooled myself to patience. “Go on.”

“Thank you.” Kartara pointed to the chart in the wall hanging again. “By now, you likely know that the seeds can open rifts into a Kingdom sector. Such rifts start relatively small though and only grant passage to stygian creatures of tier four and below. However, as the seed grows, so too does the size of the rift, and by the time the seed sprouts into a sapling, its ley line is stable enough for the sapling itself to pass through.”

I rubbed my chin, thoughtfully. The sapling I’d encountered in Draven’s Reach had been rank twenty. “Following that logic, by that stage the rift must be… tier five?”

“Correct. So not only can the sapling pass through, so, too, can other stygian elites.”

“I see. Go on.”

“Once on the other side—in virgin territory, so to speak—the sapling begins producing nether mist in earnest. It still can’t survive without the help of its parent though, so the rift remains open. But day by day, the mist around the sapling grows, as does the nest of stygians protecting it and the rift itself.” Kartara’s finger stabbed down on the representation of the sapling in the tapestry. “This is our last chance of stopping the void.”

I was fairly certain I knew where she was going with this, nevertheless, I indulged her. “Why?”

“Because if we do not, if we allow the nether’s touch to spread to every corner of the sector, the sapling grows into a young tree—and becomes a stygian Power. That, however, is not the worst of it. The rift itself stabilizes further, allowing other stygian Powers to enter.”

“Like overlords and harbingers,” I murmured.

Kartara’s gaze grew piercing. “Quite. Under those conditions, it’s only a matter of time before all remaining life in the sector is expunged and the safe zone itself destroyed.” She paused. “You understand now what I’m getting at?”

“I do, but—” I inhaled deeply before going on—“technically, the young tree still cannot survive on its own. Correct? That’s why the rift remains open. The tree still requires sustenance—however it’s getting that—from its progenitor.”

Kartara’s lips thinned unhappily, but she didn’t refute my words. “That is true as far as it goes. Only once a tree transforms into a mature one, does it become self-sustaining. At that point, the mist’s concentration reaches critical mass, and the sector itself is pulled into the Nethersphere, negating the need for a rift anymore.”

I nodded. “So, before that happens, we must kill the tree, close the rift, and reclaim the sector.”

Kartara’s teeth ground together in frustration. “You still don’t seem to understand. What you describe is—”

“Impossible,” I interjected. “Or so you believe. I get it.” I paused. “But I believe otherwise.”

The huntmistress sighed. “Then we have nothing more to discuss.” Turning around, she began walking away.