Standing on the path from the road to his house, Allador quietly surveyed the new darkness that had formed overnight. Much like the previous one, it had seemingly grown up from the ground, creating a black pond-like space in the middle of their stockade. While the cattle was safe in the barn, there was nowhere for them to roam around in the sunlight, grazing on the grasses they preferred over the bundles of dried hay they were left with at this point.
Eriq stepped outside the door to the house, stopping suddenly when he saw what had become of their stockade. Hearing the door close behind him, Allador turned, seeing the look on Eriq’s face and imagining he knew just what he was thinking.
“I know, Eriq, this popped up last night, sometime after we went to bed.”
Allador’s voice broke the spell that overtook Eriq when first seeing the stockade.
“We only just moved the cattle into the barn a couple days ago. Had we delayed just a bit…”
Allador nodded his head, trying to push some of the concern he was feeling away from it, softening his tone. “Go and get Father, Eriq. I want him to see this right away. This will likely mean having to move up our town meeting.”
Eriq turned around and opened the door he had just walked through, heading back inside to find his father. Allador looked back at the stockade, the ground mirroring the same devastation that had engulfed their crop fields. Based on the emergence of this new patch of blight, Allador was forced to change his approach with the town leaders. Up until this point, in every town he visited, the blight emerged only in plots of land that were filled with life, either crops, livestock, trees; he had not seen a single place in which it had overtaken an open space, whether a road or, as in this case, an empty stockade. Their livestock had been in the barn for weeks, so there had not been anything alive in the stockade since. Allador was also concerned the stockade was much closer to their house, though he was not sure how much that might matter. That the blight spreads was not in question; the mechanism behind its appearance and subsequent migration is what had left everyone he spoke with to this point puzzled.
While he was waiting, Allador turned his attention to the dark forest, gazing into the darkness. Even though the sun was shining brightly, Allador could not see anything beyond the edge of the forest, as if there was an impenetrable veil of shadows draped over its entirety. He could feel the power emanating from the forest, trying to draw him in, perhaps like whatever drove the animals to land or crawl on the blackness in the fields. He was not exactly immune to the force; rather he was able to resist it, though unable to reason why.