“Is that what’s going to happen to me? Are my arms and legs going to be like that?”
Devon blinked. It took him a moment to realize where the noise was coming from. The boy. His test subject. “No,” he said. Immediately, he regretted his words. If, as he had all but confirmed with Eva, the transformation was at least partially mental, he shouldn’t be coloring its expectations with absolutes. He probably shouldn’t be speaking to it at all, but he had already broken that rule. “Or rather, probably not.
“But who knows. Demons come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and… materials.”
— — —
Brakket City wasn’t the sort of place that normally drew much attention. It was hardly qualified for its name. Brakket Town was even too big. Located in the middle of nowhere Montana with a population rivaling the most rural of farming communities, it had but one attraction to entice people to visit. Brakket Magical Academy. Brakket Academy or simply Brakket for short.
For the school was the city.
Though given a scholarship that covered many necessities of school life, the students also brought in outside funds. Some things simply weren’t covered by the school. The students acted as a lifeline. Their outside money didn’t allow the city to thrive, it wasn’t enough for that, but it gave the city an intravenous drip while the school administrators worked out a proper revitalization plan.
That plan had probably almost succeeded. With the publicity Brakket had received from the tournament between magical schools, they could have avoided scholarships the following year. Tourism would have grown. Especially from mundane humans expecting to see something supernatural.
Eva leaned back, sitting on a chair in the middle of her domain at the center of Brakket City. A very abandoned city. With the ‘attacks’ and twelve deaths, including four mundane humans, people were giving the city a wide berth. It probably wouldn’t last. Anderson didn’t seem the type to give up. Not with how much he had invested into the school in the first place.
However, the city was silent for the moment.
A silence Eva enjoyed.
There were no necromancers kidnapping, dissecting, and torturing her. No nuns patrolled the streets, looking like they wanted to take her out behind a barn and put her out of her misery. Zombie-like demons weren’t chasing after her and absurdly powerful demons weren’t making everyone’s lives miserable. Demon hunters stayed away, too afraid to enter after so many of their kind had met their end within the city limits. The tournament—a surprisingly less annoying event when stacked up with everything else that had happened—was still going on, just not around Brakket.
Of course, the Powers that be were leaving the city alone as well.
Eva was surprised about that last one. She kept expecting Void to whisper something to her. Maybe promises of power, maybe offhanded insults. Maybe just a quick question about how her day was going.
Her mind remained utterly silent to outside influences.
So Eva leaned back in her chair and stared at the stars with a tall obelisk glowing bright red at her back. She could live out at the prison. Devon and Catherine were both there. But she didn’t really want to. Devon wasn’t a good conversationalist. In fact, with how he had simply walked away from her after her final treatment, she figured that he would be far less willing to entertain her than ever before. Catherine might be more willing to talk, but it would probably revolve around rituals or games.
Eva still didn’t understand the latter and she had been involved with quite enough rituals for a few lifetimes. If Catherine needed help, she would be willing, otherwise Eva intended to stay far away from that branch of magic.
Without any company she wanted at the prison, there was no reason to stay. Her domain could provide anything she wanted at a thought. So long as it was on Earth, she would abuse it to the maximum extent possible.
In order to further that abuse, Eva had started pouring magic into the obelisk once again. She doubted that there would be another sudden explosion of Hell merging with Earth. In pouring magic into the obelisk, she could feel her domain slowly expanding. Her island along with it.
It served two purposes. First, it let her control her surroundings farther out. Eva held no doubts that the current peace would last only as long as other people let it. If she controlled the entire city, it wouldn’t matter how many demon hunters got brave enough to show up or how many necromancers decided that her eyes would make great reagents. Once they stepped on her domain, she would be free to deal with them as she saw fit.
Secondly, Eva could entirely revitalize Brakket City on her own. Obviously, Brakket wasn’t the most ideal of locations for her to attach her domain. She would have preferred Florida, some larger city with plenty of distractions. Until she figured out how to move it, Brakket would have to work. She would make it work. People would be free to live anywhere within her domain. She could build buildings, create food, and so on and so forth. Eva might be a little sneaky about it; food appearing on people’s tables might freak them out. It wouldn’t be much trouble to create a store that endlessly resupplied itself with a variety of products—clothing, food, tools, and anything else she could think of—managed by a construct of her design. She wouldn’t even need it to be permanent. Just something to get people back into town. From there, she could hire real people.
The peace wouldn’t last. Nothing could remain copacetic indefinitely. Eva was counting on it not lasting. She needed bloodstones until her heart healed and for that, she needed people. While she could leave and head to Chicago, Detroit, or anywhere else she was likely to find valid targets for bloodstone creation, she was hesitant to leave.
Arachne would be back. One day, Arachne would be back. The first place she would check for Eva would be in her domain.
Until then, Eva lay back in her chair and counted the stars. She could wait. Arachne would be back. She would wait right here.
END
Vacant Throne, a new story! Young woman involved in a robbery-gone-wrong ends up meeting an angel and finds herself trapped in a world of magic and monsters.
Author’s Notes 010
Well, here we are. Two and a halfish years. Somewhere around a million words (I haven’t actually added them all up at the time of writing this).
Thanks everyone for reading.
Void Domain has ended.
Honestly, I don’t know what to say. I’ve done nine of these Author’s Note segments. This one feels a bit different though. Probably because there isn’t a ‘tune in next time, same bat time, same bat channel’ feeling anymore. People who read these author’s notes are probably aware that I write several chapters ahead of the currently posted chapter. As such, I’ve actually been done with Void Domain for two to threeish weeks before you’re all reading this.
Let me tell you, it’s an absolutely eerie feeling waking up in the morning and not having Void Domain to write.
Anyway, I suppose we could start out looking at Book 10 in particular.
The ritual occupied almost the entirety of the book, minus a few chapters right at the start and at the end. I worried a ton over focusing so much on the ritual, but it was a huge part of the overarching plot that’s been hanging over the everyone’s shoulders for several books now. I think it turned out quite well though. There was a lot of standing around and talking, but I think it was an interesting sort of talking. Though the few fight scenes, mostly those with Gertrude, were good as well.
Of course, I might be biased.
The ending… Oh boy, I had a fairly concrete idea of how I wanted the series to end ever since I started writing. When I finally got to the last six or so chapters, I was stressing out quite a bit. Enough so that I actually dropped both of my fanfics (which I’ll talk about later) to focus on Void Domain. Fun fact: I scrapped more words in the last ten chapters than I had over the entire rest of the series.