KINGDOM OF THE STONE -- a Wattpad featured novel

Chapter Twenty Four

Karux forced himself to relax and allowed his awareness to shift into the world of schemas.  Immediately a storm of patterns appeared before him spiraling inward into a black maelstrom.  Each of the streaming patterns was anchored in the head of a sleeper.  Sitting at the center of the maelstrom, in the same lumpy shape of the stone, was an infinite black void from which Karux sensed a familiar evil presence as if some vast alien intelligence peered out at him through a hole in reality itself.  Then he heard the laughter.

Lurching backwards, Karux blinked himself back to the world of light and shadows.  "We've got to get out of here!  That thing is evil.  It should be destroyed."

"What?" the saggy elder yelped.

"That stone is a tool of the N'kroi!  It is destroying these people."

Jomel stepped toward the stone then hesitated as all the sleepers eyes opened at once.  They sat up, rubbing their eyes and stretched.

"I had a bad dream," one of them said.

"Yeah, some evil people came and tried to take us from our home," another one added.

The sleeper's eyes focused on Karux and his companions with a strange intensity.

"And they were in it!" one of the sleepers said, frowning. 

Their faces began to harden with anger.

Karux backed up, bumping into Arnion.  The four stepped back out of the shelter as the whole village rose up.

Once out in the sunlight the villagers looked around, blinking, as if forgetting what they had gotten up to do, and began stumbling off toward their homes.

"Listen, we came to help you," Arnion said, catching the white-haired elder by the arm.  "We came to show you how to grow more crops in a shorter amount of time."

"That's nice, but we're just fine."  The old man patted Arnion's hand and wandering off.

"Don't bother," Karux said.  "They are completely under the stone's control.  Even if they weren't, I don't think they'd be willing to help us fight.  They've all decided on a simpler, easier and more peaceful future."

"Yes."  Odo turned and spat in disgust.  "I guess death is pretty easy."

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"I don't suppose you could have used your arts to destroy that stone?"  Jomel suggested as they trudged down the narrow track between empty fields that were slowly turning into grasslands. 

The lazy susurration of insects rose and fell around them, their normality seeming out of place next to the frightening strangeness behind them.  Though the day had grown warm as the sun climbed in the clear summer sky, Karux shivered at the reminder, feeling as if he were emerging from under a dark cloud.  "If it had only been a normal stone, I'm sure I could have taken it apart, but that thing...."  An image of that dark and hungry maelstrom leaped into his mind.  He remembered feeling a supernatural pull towards the black Void at its heart.  It reminded him of the time he and Theris had leaped into a rain-swollen creek and been swept away.  The strength-sapping pull of the current on his arms and legs, the desperate race to shore before his own weakness dragged him down; the maelstrom had evoked all these things.  "...It was too strong.  I have never felt such power."

After an hour of sweaty walking, Odo pointed at a collection of buildings at the top of a low rise.  "That is Korion-Crusomosc."

"What is that smell?" Arnion asked.