The skeletal finger, surprisingly delicate, tapped the unfurled parchment. Bogumil’s hollow gaze shifted from the charcoal sketch of Tevis’s placid face to the man himself, then to Oksia, whose hand had instinctively gripped the hilt of her curved blade. The air, already heavy with the Gloommires’ peculiar scent of damp earth and forgotten things, now crackled with Oksia’s barely suppressed fury. “A… visitor, then?” Tevis asked, scratching idly at his ear. “Did you bring pie? My peach tree isn’t quite ready, but the berries are coming along nicely. Oksia, would you mind getting our guest a cup of water? It’s a long walk from… wherever.” He gestured vaguely toward the swirling mist. Oksia drew her steel an inch from its scabbard. “My Lord, this creature bears an imperial decree. It did not come for pleasantries.” Her glare pinned the gaunt visitor, watching the yellow linen flap against his ribs. The ruling court’s reach was long, but she had not expected scouts to probe this mire so quickly. Bogumil offered a dry, rattling chuckle. “Indeed, Princess. No pie. Only… tidings. Dire tidings, one might say.” He leaned on a gnarled staff that seemed to have grown from the swamp itself. “The surveyors come. From the capital, Vylos. They seek a… deep resonance. An ancient power, they call it. One that rests… beneath your very boots, Bumpkin.” His hollow eyes seemed to bore into the rich soil of Tevis’s farm. Tevis blinked. “Surveyors? Oh, for the blight of the Rotting Heart. Not the imperial kind, are they? Last time, they trampled all my autumn turnip sprouts. Said they were measuring ley lines. Ley lines, my foot. I’m just trying to grow some decent vegetables here.” He glanced at his neat rows of young radish shoots, a faint frown creasing his brow. “And what’s this about an ancient power? Is that a new kind of pest? I’ve dealt with the Skittering Ghouls, the Gloom-Worms, even that colossal Swamp-Serpent. I can handle it.” Bogumil’s grin widened, a silent, macabre affair. “Not a pest, no. More of a… core. The very heart of this dying land, some say. The court believes its awakening will grant them dominion over Zemora. They intend to prod it, to stir it, to harness its raw essence for their grand designs.” He paused, letting the words hang, watching Tevis for a flicker of recognition, a spark of the power he knew lay dormant. “And they care little for your turnip sprouts, farmer. Or your radishes. They will carve this land to its core.” The Slumbering Calamity. Every child in the capital grew up hearing whispered nursery rhymes about it: an unmaking force sealed beneath the peat by forgotten blood-bargains. The High Chancellor's desperation had reached its crest. They intended to tear up this patch of loam, his private retreat, to dredge it out. Her fingers clamped onto her scabbard until the leather creaked. No iron-shod company would step past her alive. Tevis, however, just sighed. “Trampling radishes. Unbelievable. Well, if they’re going to be that inconsiderate, I suppose I’ll need to put up a better deterrent than a scarecrow.” He walked over to a stack of freshly cut timber near the mud hut. “A deep ditch, perhaps. Or a wide moat. Something to make them think twice about just marching right over my plantings. Don’t want them getting to the cabbage patch either. That’s coming along beautifully.” Bogumil tilted his bare skull. A moat? The bumpkin planned to dig a trench against an invading army and a waking godhead? Such offhand contempt for mortal armies betrayed far more authority than any celestial thunder. “A moat,” the hermit rasped, bone clacking on bone. “An ambitious project, Bumpkin. One requiring considerable… sweat.” “Oh, I don’t mind turning dirt,” Tevis said cheerfully, grabbing a heavy spade. He strode to the boundary where his tilled furrows ended and the wild reeds began. “Good for the back.” With an exaggerated grunt, he rammed the spade downward. The steel edge struck solid resistance with a dry bell-chime, shuddering all the way up his wooden haft. A pale, cold glow seeped through the displaced turf. Oksia dropped back half a pace, lips moving without sound. This was not the gentle warmth of his cabin chimney; the sod beneath her boots shuddered to an elder rhythm. Tevis frowned. “Hmm. Packed harder than usual.” He leaned his weight onto the iron step of the blade. The turf groaned, a subterranean snap echoing through the swamp mud. Cerulean light flared between tearing roots, revealing not river-granite, but an endless pane of seamless, polished obsidian. With another tug, Tevis levered a ten-foot slab of bedrock upright, shedding black muck like rain. It stood twice his height, etched from base to peak in glyphs that twisted against the eye like coiled nebulae, spilling brilliant azure sparks into the weeds. Oksia dropped to her knees, clutching her head. The runes seared into her mind, an influx of raw, untamed knowledge. Her vision blurred, tears of blood tracing paths down her cheeks, but she could not look away. It was the elder tongue of origins, the architecture of Zemora etched directly into stone. The spiraling marks detailed world-foundations, dormant pacts, and the architecture of ruin, searing into her retinas with unbearable clarity. Bogumil stood frozen, dry vertebrae clicking. The true core of the world, pried from the muck with rusty farm iron. The glyphs belonged to the dawn of the cosmos, the pristine language of the world-shapers. Here was the weapon to reduce Vylos to ashes, pulled up like a fat turnip. He leaned closer, scarcely breathing, as Tevis tilted his head. “Oh, for the love of… this thing is covered in my handwriting,” Tevis grumbled, dragging a calloused thumb across the blazing azure characters. “And it’s a pantry list. Seriously? I must have dropped this slab ages ago. Let’s see…” He squinted at the radiant geometries. “Yep. ‘Milk, eggs, flour, sugar, butter, baking soda, vanilla extract, chocolate chips’… Huh. I was going to make cookies.” He scratched his stubble. “No wonder the pantry ran dry that week.” Oksia’s head snapped up, the blood still streaming from her eyes, her face a mask of utter bewilderment, adoration, and burgeoning terror. Milk? Eggs? Cookies? Her god, the Creator, had inscribed the very foundations of the cosmos with… domestic instructions? The revelation defied sanity: the cosmic framework of existence itself was a list of kitchen provisions. The tablet, as if sensing Tevis’s forgotten intention, gave a soft *click*. The cerulean light flared, blindingly bright, and then pulsed outward. The swirling, spectral fog that had perpetually clung to the Gloommires began to thin, to dissipate, to *drain* away as if pulled by an invisible vacuum. The cursed, suffocating blanket of mist peeled back, revealing the vast, desolate landscape beyond Tevis’s farm. The world, for the first time in centuries, was laid bare. And in the newly revealed, impossibly distant sky, a massive, glowing Imperial war-barge, bristling with magical siege weapons and powered by harnessed arcane energies, descended from the heavens. Its trajectory was unmistakable. It was heading directly for Tevis’s cabbage patch.

Grocery Lists and Ancient Obelisks