The field was bck, but it was dotted with tiny ember-glows like fallen stars. Machar sat on a barrel and warmed his hands over a cinderbean bush. They were coming up nicely but they weren't anywhere close to being harvested. The terro growing in pockets among the bushes also weren't ready. The dark lord knew he could summon blood rain to accelerate their growth, but it had made the ugly tubers bloated and rotten a day after being pulled from the earth. He wasn't about to ruin his entire crop just for one meal.

  He sighed. He would have to endure another meal of field rations. He began the familiar incantation that would deliver foodstuffs that were just nourishing enough to ward off starvation. Once the dry bars, rock-hard bread, and mummified meat strips appeared before him, he took them with great reluctance. And as he chewed, he thought it all tasted like chalk, disappointment, and old, useless vows. The Ash King used to feed entire armies the stuff. Now the field rations just felt like a punishment.

  But a dark lord shouldn't have to forage in his own damn kingdom just to eat, he thought.

  The bnd hardtack and tasteless concrete food bars sat on the rock as if reminding him it was always an option.

  “I'm not doing this again,” he murmured to himself. “There must be something else I can eat around here.”

  He looked at his recently immoted field and the pnts that had only sprouted once everything burned to ashes. But there was more to the Ashnds than just his field. He should know. Machar didn't create the nd, but he shaped it into the savage kingdom of death it was today.

  He knew to the north was a vast forest of eternally charred trees known as the Forest of His First Burning. Machar's face felt hot as he remembered the st time he let his cult name something. For the longest time, his fanatics would perform ritual immotions around every tree in an attempt to make the forest worthy of him. He had always hated the name and doubted anything lived there.

  Beyond the forest was the frozen wastes of...what was it again? He rubbed his chin as he tried to remember. Oh, yes. He had named it the Sacred White Hunger where he had formed vast fortresses from the ice that starved for the warmth of the living. They grew and moved gradually every year. But had he really named it that? That name wouldn't fit very easily on a map. The fortresses had been amazing, though. Very terrifying. And completely unused. No armies tried to invade because it was just too damn cold all the way up there.

  To the southwest was the arid desert of the Cauterized Sea. The fierce wind there would fillet a man's skin off in less than five minutes. The Ash King remembered he had created a summoning circle in a rolling green expanse of fertile nd, burning the soil there into powder. The dragon he had summoned had been worth it, though. But had it? Machar had to put the beautiful monster down a century ter, the poor thing.

  Directly south was the Saltrot Fen, the brackish marshes where hideous creatures lurked under the bck waters waiting to pull anyone into the slimy depths. Machar had always liked the region's ability to generate undead abominations all on its own. He had pnned to form a naval fleet capable of attacking coastal kingdoms, but he had always been killed by a hero before he got around to doing that.

  And to the northwest was a volcanic mountain range which was where the constant ash storms came from. Named by those who worshiped and feared him, it was called the Crucible of Bone and Machar was very proud of the region. His best demons came from there. But now? Now there wasn't much else to say about it.

  Yes, these regions were all very dangerous. All very deadly. But what could possibly grow in any of them that he could eat? Nothing possibly edible could survive in any of them. But he had to try. So as he summoned his bck, spiky armor from the empty void, he prepared himself for a fight. Because this was the Ashnds. Everything worth having required a fight, a bloody struggle in which only one could survive.

  “Tend the cinderbeans,” Machar ordered his team of skeletons. “I'm going to find something to eat.”

  He summoned his fiery hellsteed and rode south. He would try his luck with the marshes. Living things grew there, technically. But whether or not he could eat them remained to be seen. The leagues passed under his horse's fming hooves, and soon enough, the nd turned from cracked, ft, yellow earth to spongy bck, sickly green, and morbidly white, like a deep wound that had gone septic.

  Machar dismounted, his heavy boots sinking into the wet ground. He dismissed the demonic horse and began his trek into the dark, twisted trees that somehow grew out of the diseased water. He used his magic to create a field of malevolence around himself, encouraging any hungry fauna to keep well enough away. When he saw the dark fifteen-foot shape that he had thought at first was a log slide into the depthless pool, he knew the spell had been a good idea.

  The dark lord found hope after an hour of foraging. He was no great expert on native wildlife, but he knew thornvine when he saw it. The iron vines wrapped around the exposed roots of the colossal mangrove trees as if they were trying to strangle the life from the swamp giants. And he knew the thornvine grew berries. They were hard and small, but they were tart and paired well with soot-kale. Normally, the parchment-like fronds were waxy and bitter, but with the berries, they became a bit more edible. A bit.

  He held up his gauntleted hand and grasped the thornvine, willing the pnt to produce the berries that he needed. It twisted and writhed under his hand, but eventually it obeyed and grew the hard little berries he wanted. Machar plucked them, eager to taste something other than the bnd field rations he had been sustaining himself on.

  He immediately spat them out. The berries didn't just taste bad. They turned to rot in his mouth. He dismissed his aura of menace to make sure the dark magic wasn't causing the reaction, but no. The spell wasn't what was causing the rotten fvor. The berries simply weren't good to eat. Not after being forced to yield them, at least.

  The armored man approached a tree that hadn't been submerged by the hungry marsh's water. He smacked away the drooping branches of the willow and found what he was looking for: a ft patch of ground. He pressed his armored palms against the damp soil and willed mushrooms to sprout in a circle around its trunk. They eagerly popped out of the ground as if in a hurry to please him. Smirking, he pulled them from the wet dirt, but as soon as he touched them, they crumbled to ash.

  “I am not invading you. Stop being difficult,” he said. He wasn't just speaking to the tree but to the surrounding area. But, of course, he didn't get a response. Why would he? Land didn't speak. Land, like tools, shouldn't have an opinion. Or feelings.

  Tired. He was suddenly, profoundly, incredibly tired. He sank to the marshy ground and leaned against the willow's trunk. He pulled off his gruesome gauntlets and cast them aside, not dismissing them just in case, but just letting his hands have more feeling. He pressed them against the squishy soil and reluctantly conjured the hated field rations.

  The hard, tasteless stuff that could barely be called food was gone in a moment. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, keeping his ears alert for the tell-tale sound of the clumsy undead. But as soon as he rested, he felt a tickle on his fingers and he opened his eyes to observe what dared to bother him. A spell of destruction was already forming on his lips.

  But the offender was only a tiny little cricket that had crawled on his hand and was greedily munching away on the crumbs of his dry rations. Machar couldn't help but smile. And, as the wind shifted, he noticed the marsh bubbling and burbling as it pped against the nearby shore. He stood and walked over to the fetid water, curious to see what was causing the movement.

  A heat vent! There was an actual heat vent in the marsh causing water to warm and emit bubbles in the thick, soupy goop. Now that the top yer of scum had been disturbed, Machar could see some kind of mollusk half-buried in the sand. And now that he saw the first one, he could see there were dozens of the shelled creatures just under the water. Not thinking about how foul the water was, he pulled the cockles from the sand. The dark lord didn't stop until he had two dozen of the mussels. He set them in a bag and sent it to his necrotic shadow realm so he wouldn't have to carry a wet bag of slimy creatures the whole trip home.

  But as soon as he put his bag away, he saw a bunch of soot-kale growing just beyond the willow tree. Eagerly, he plucked up enough handfuls to make it worth his time. Or his sad. He had never been so excited about a simple sad in his long, long life.

  A raspy croak drew his attention to the branch of a nearby tree. A skeletal crow peered at him with one beady eye and then the other. It cleaned its ragged bck feathers and then dropped a hard little something that ccked on a nearby rock. Machar picked it up. The thing looked like some kind of walnut and the fall had broken its shell.

  “Is this for me?” Machar asked.

  The crow replied with a critical snapping of its long bill and fpped off. The dark lord shrugged and ate the meat of the strange nut, fearing no poison. It was bitter and grainy, but it was food. Food that he didn't conjure using the same magic that he used to raise the dead or summon demons.

  Machar understood. When he ruled, he shaped the Ashnds into weapons with his wrath. But now, without conquest, they were simply a pce. And they adapted anyway. Life created its own systems beneath his theatrics of doom.

  He let out a ugh, a deep, relieved sound that felt like it was the first in a very long time. “You endured me,” he said as he set up his pot and cooking fire. He wanted to eat the mollusks there in the nd that grew them. With a steady hand, he prepared his soot-kale sad and even found some mushrooms to add to it. The cockles didn't take long to come to a boil, and once they were done, he found their meat was smoky, salty, and somehow sweet. He was able to season it with marsh salt, adding a whole depth of fvor to his meal. The stew he made was ugly but nourishing. And it was earned. In the fetid swamps of the Saltrot Fen, he had a feast that wasn't conjured or imposed. It tasted like something that grew without his permission. And that comforted him.

  Before he returned home to his farm, the dark lord gathered more mollusks, mushrooms, and soot-kale. He even found a tree that grew those bck nuts the crow had dropped for him. And, before he summoned his hellsteed, he resolved never to use the field ration spell ever again. He didn't have to live like that.

  Because, for the first time in a thousand years, the Ashnds fed him without being conquered.

  ****

  From Ashfarmer: This chapter was calmer than most of the others. I had fun writing about Machar's foraging field trip. I hope you liked it.