The gargantuan war-barge, an armored leviathan of polished obsidium and humming runic lattices, cast a shadow that swallowed Tevis’s entire farm. Its descent was agonizingly slow, deliberate, a pronouncement of doom. From its underside, a forest of shimmering ruby lances began to extend, each one crackling with restrained destructive energy. The air vibrated, a deep, resonant thrum that rattled the very stones of Tevis’s cozy mud hut. Oksia, her blood-encrusted armor still smelling of a thousand desperate battles, stumbled forward, her hand instinctively going to the hilt of her *Ash-Drinker* blade. Her gaze, usually steady with devotion, narrowed. This was it. The Vyraki realm, come to claim its due. And her god, her gentle, oblivious Creator, was merely concerned with his radishes. Bogumil, from the edge of the cabbage patch where he had been 'inspecting' the newly turned soil, merely tilted his skeletal head, a faint, almost imperceptible smile playing on his withered, bone-dry lips. The throne's vanguard had arrived. Excellent. On the war-barge’s command deck, high above the Gloommires, General Volkov, a man whose lineage predated the current dynasty, scoffed. “A mud hovel,” he sneered, his voice amplified by a series of glowing resonating crystals, “and a peasant’s garden. Our intelligence was gravely flawed. This cannot be the nexus.” He was clad in armor of woven shadow-silk and polished brass, his jaw set in aristocratic disdain. Beside him, a junior arcanist, sweat beading on his brow, stammered, “But, General, the power readings are… unprecedented. The fog itself has been expelled. Our instruments are screaming.” “Nonsense,” Volkov snapped, gesturing with a dismissive wave towards the clearing below. “It’s a localized anomaly, likely some backwoods hedge-mage’s pathetic attempt at a ward. Prepare the *Gloom-Purge* batteries. A focused blast, three paces from that crude timber pier. Let’s encourage our ‘anomaly’ to reveal itself.” He paused, a cruel smirk twisting his lips. “And leave the pier intact. We might need the wood for the pyre. The peasant who built this monstrosity will burn with it.” The arcanists saluted, their faces pale with a mixture of fear and dread, and the ruby lances below the barge flared with ominous power. Tevis, who had been admiring the rich, dark soil of his radish bed, looked up. His brow furrowed, not in fear, but in mild irritation. “Oh, dear,” he murmured. “Are they going to land right on my sprouts? That’s hardly neighborly.” Oksia didn’t hear him. The air shrieked as the *Gloom-Purge* batteries unleashed their lethal yield. Three blinding scarlet bolts of pure, condensed magic, each thick as a primeval oak, streaked downwards. They didn't hit the land. They slammed directly into Tevis’s beloved, hand-carved wooden dock, the one he’d spent a blissful afternoon building just yesterday. Wood exploded in a shower of superheated splinters and a burst of infernal flame. The timber dock disintegrated into ash and smoke, leaving only a smoldering, steaming crater at the edge of his pristine pond. Oksia’s vision turned scarlet. Her god’s peace. His simple, perfect joy. *They had dared.* Her hand flew to her sword, *Ash-Drinker* hissing as it cleared its scabbard. Its centuries-old blackened steel gleamed, reflecting the fire that consumed the dock. Her grip tightened along the wire-wrapped grip. No. Not on her watch. Not while she still drew breath. She would stand before them, a single shield against the might of the realm, and she would carve a path through their spellcraft with her own flesh if she had to. This was her purpose. Her devotion. Her love. She braced herself, ready to leap, to charge, to die gloriously in a blinding flash of defiant steel. Tevis sighed. A long, put-upon sigh. He stared at the smoldering ruins of his dock, the carefully planed planks, the smooth, aged timber now nothing but cinders. “My favorite angling spot,” he mumbled, his voice a low, mournful rumble. “I just finished carving that little fish emblem onto the railing yesterday. The sunfish always bit best from that very spot.” He glanced at the hovering war-barge, his placid gaze settling cold. “Such a waste of good wood.” He knelt by the edge of his newly dug moat, the same moat that had yielded the cosmic grocery list. His hand dipped into the dark, viscous swamp mud, which now, thanks to the tablet’s activation, glowed with a faint, reassuring warmth. It pulsed with a soft, cerulean light, entirely unlike the battery's violent scarlet. He scooped up a generous handful, the mud squelching pleasantly between his fingers. He stood, his expression utterly serene, and with a casual, almost lazy flick of his wrist, he tossed the glowing mud towards the burning ruins of his pier. The mud, instead of falling to extinguish the fire, *flew*. It didn’t arc. It didn’t sail. It *traveled*, a coherent, luminous globule of pure, unassuming earth, directly towards the Imperial war-barge, gathering speed and intensity. It struck the war-barge not at the base, but precisely at the point where the *Gloom-Purge* tubes were mounted. There was no explosion. No fiery detonation. Instead, a silent, blinding flash of cerulean light erupted, so pure, so impossibly bright, that it seemed to absorb all other colors. Half of the massive war-barge, the entire starboard side including all its siege weaponry and the arcanist chambers, ceased to be. It didn't explode. It didn't break apart. It *evaporated*. One moment, there was a gleaming, state-of-the-art sovereign war-barge, bristling with death. The next, half of it was gone, vanished into thin air, leaving a perfect, clean-edged void in its place. The remaining half, ripped apart by the sudden, impossible loss of its other half, screamed in protest. Arcane engines shrieked, structural integrity failed, and the once-proud vessel began to tumble, spiraling towards the earth in a chaotic, uncontrolled descent. General Volkov, standing on the command deck of the now-severed bow section, was thrown violently to the side. His arrogant face was twisted into a mask of pure, unadulterated terror. “What in the—!” he screamed, his voice swallowed by the roaring wind and the rending metal. He clutched at a railing, his perfectly manicured hands slipping on the polished obsidium as the deck tilted sharply. He lost his grip, tumbling over the edge, a tiny, flailing figure against the backdrop of the plummeting wreckage. His screams grew faint, echoing as he fell, a proud aristocrat destined for the ignoble embrace of the Gloommires’ muck. Oksia stood frozen, her sword still drawn, her eyes wide with a fresh wave of awe and terror. She had prepared for a glorious, bloody battle, a struggle against overwhelming odds. Her god had casually erased half an enemy war machine with a handful of mud. It was beyond comprehension. Beyond even her most fervent prayers. He hadn't fought. He had merely tidied. Bogumil, who had watched the entire spectacle from the relative safety of the cabbage patch, cackled, a dry, rattling sound that was barely audible above the screech of collapsing metal. “Foolish mortals,” he rasped, his skeletal fingers twitching. He began to move, a swift, surprisingly agile blur across the marshland. The plummeting wreckage, with its precious, complex runic components, was a gift. The court’s ignorance was his greatest ally. He would collect his new toys. The remaining half of the war-barge, a colossal mass of twisted metal and shattered glyphic circuits, struck the marshland with a deafening, earth-shattering *CRACK*. The impact sent a massive shockwave across the Gloommires, churning the bog into a frothing, muddy tide. Tevis’s farm, protected by some unseen force, merely vibrated gently. But the earth beneath the crash site, already destabilized by the tablet’s draining of the fog, couldn’t withstand the force. The ground tore open, a ragged, gaping maw appearing in the mud and twisted wreckage. From the depths of that newly formed chasm, an impossible, cyclopean eye, a fathomless void of purple and black, slowly, inexorably, began to open, pulsating with a primordial, silent dread.

Evaporating the Aristocracy