The dark lord spent his days shoveling ash and mixing his compost. He let his skeletons help from time to time but mostly to keep them active and functional. He knew better than most that skeletal workers would stiffen up or even crack if they didn't get enough movement. Today, though, seemed like a day where they could really help. The morning ash storm wasn't letting up. It was coming in harder now, like a blizzard.

  Malachar spat out a mouthful of ash and rubbed it out of his eyes. Once clear from the powdery debris, he saw the gravebind's flowers begin to twitch unnaturally, like they were all having a seizure. And when he threw his cloak over his face to take a deep breath, he smelled that the air had a sharp quality. Like something was burning.

  As though summoned by his will, flames swept across the horizon with unnatural speed. The compost pile, the nourishing mass he had carefully tended to, was the first to catch, belching out a black smoke before becoming engulfed with fire. Immediately afterward, the gravebind caught, its long, dry vines igniting with a burning blaze that looked like a hellish network of veins along a fiery body. The young terro sprouts went up in smoke like kindling on an already blazing fire.

  The dark lord ran to his outpost, which was made of stone and couldn't catch on fire. As Malachar watched his field burn, he cast a minor frost incantation, expecting it to be sufficient. But a gust of ashy wind blew the spell away and reduced it to nothing more than a weak cough. He climbed onto the roof of his home and held out his hands, using his substantial power to command the fire to simply stop.

  He was ignored. The fire continued to devour his field like a hungry wolf at a freshly killed deer. Malachar tried spell after spell to thwart the blaze but nothing worked. He thought about summoning a blood storm or rip open a portal to the Drowned Realm and douse the field.

  He also thought about abandoning this foolish mortal hobby. After all, he was meant to march on Everdawn and beyond. He was meant to strive and slay. He wasn't meant to grow and nurture.

  And yet, he did none of these things. This situation could not be controlled. It could not be dominated. It would only be endured, so he stood and watched as all his hard work was destroyed again.

  “The Ashlands burn,” he said to himself. Flames flickered in his eyes. “I have burned kingdoms for less. So if this land wishes to burn, let it burn.”

  The dark lord spent the night on the roof with his team of skeletons, feeling that the inside of his outpost was far too hot to be comfortable. He didn't sleep as the fire crackled and consumed his farm. When dawn came, the blaze had finally burned itself out. He climbed down and surveyed his field. Everything he saw was gone. The ground was just charred earth, the gravebind reduced to wispy black threads, his terro burned as if it hadn't even been there. The air smelled bitter and metallic, similar to the aftermath of battle. A familiar smell though one in which he found no pleasure in this time.

  His heavy boots sank into deep warm layers of ash. His bone fence was reduced to only a few posts left standing, all cracked and seared. Not a single scarecrow stood, having been burned like so much kindling. The side of his outpost was covered in a dark layer of soot and char, making it look even older and devoid of life. But he looked up at the roof of his outpost and saw his team of six skeletons. They looked down at him, wistfully, he thought, and he sighed.

  He walked what had once been his field, shuffling through the blackened ruin and kicking up clouds of ruin. But as he walked, he noticed something tiny was splitting the perfect ash crust. A single red-black sprout poked out of the light powder. Its surface looked like cooled magma. Veins of ember light pulsed gently under its surface.

  It had to be a weed. He went to pull it up but immediately felt its warmth. Not the destructive inferno of the red wind, but the gentle warmth of a hearth. He brushed aside the ash around the plant and saw that the soil looked richer, darker. He stood to his full height, dusting off his knees, and saw there were dozens, no, hundreds of the tiny new plants.

  “Very well,” he said. “We begin again.”

  ****

  Cinderbean, Malachar read in a dusty old tome he hadn't leafed through in centuries. He had pulled it from his necrotic shadow realm a few days before the all-consuming conflagration but immediately set it on a shelf. He had much work to do and he couldn't waste time reading. But now, he could use all the help he could get.

  Cinderbean, he continued. Dormant in sterile ash. Requires full burn to germinate.

  Who had written this grimoire? It surely hadn't been him. Perhaps an advisor had penned his observations about life in the Ashlands. And he could imagine himself dismissing the work because he never stayed very long in his own realm. He always had things to do and kingdoms to smash.

  But, as he flipped through the pages of the grimoire, he realized there was so much more to the seemingly desolate land and the natural life within it than he had ever imagined. The fire yesterday was not destruction. It was succession. The gravebind held the soil and kept it from blowing away. The ash compost fed the cinderbeans and the burn transformed it. Malachar's failure created conditions for something better. He didn't conquer the Ashlands. He participated in its natural cycle.

  He snapped the book closed and looked at his field in a new light. The smoky red and black beans pulsed with an inner light but they would require work to maintain, to protect, to grow. But he, at least, had some help. His six skeletons stood at the ready and it was then that he noticed the damage they had incurred during the red wind storm.

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  One had a cracked femur. Another had a deep fracture in its skull. Another skeleton's elbow wasn't hinging correctly and flopped at its side. And another was missing entire ribs. The Ash King examined them further, realizing that much of the damage couldn't have been caused just from the immense fire yesterday. It had happened over the days and days of ceaseless toil on his farm.

  He sighed and prepared to dismiss the necromantic energy that kept them animated. It would be nothing for him to destroy them and summon fresh new skeletons in this land of bones but something stopped him.

  They helped me with this insane experiment, he thought as he began erecting a worktable long enough for a skeleton to lie upon. He reached into his necromantic shadow realm and found appropriate tools for him to repair his workers: a bone saw, a small hand-cranked augur, some wire, glue, brushes of various sizes, and a tiny drill for more delicate work.

  “You'll be first,” he said to the skeleton with the fractured skull. It hopped up on the worktable and lay down. If it had any trepidation, it didn't show it. Malachar was thankful for that. He knew skeletons didn't feel pain but there was much he clearly didn't understand. He would want to be careful. So he carefully worked a piece of an old gorget and fitted it to fit the missing bone flap as best as he could. Still, the edges didn't quite line up and he disliked the look of it.

  Rooting around in his shadow realm, he found equipment to melt metal. “This is going to take longer than I thought,” he murmured to himself. But even though the job was more difficult than he had anticipated, he kept at it. He smelted down the gorget into a mold but found there wasn't enough metal to cover the region. Melting silver coins, he designed a way to fix the piece in place. And after he was done, the skeleton looked, not good as new, but better.

  “After all that work, I may as well name you,” he said and shook his head. Was he getting sentimental? Over a skeleton? How many of them had he sent to their destruction during his countless assaults on Everdawn? And yet...

  “I will call you Mustaine because I don't have much time to figure out something more clever than that,” Malachar said. He turned to the second-worst damaged of his skeletons. “Come on, then. Your arm should be easier than Mustaine’s repair.”

  He spent the rest of the day carefully repairing the skeletons. The skeleton with the busted elbow, he replaced the whole damn thing with a troll’s arm he had lying around. He named that one Iommi. The skeleton with the missing ribs he fixed by replacing them with some old dragonstone daggers. He called that skeleton Ronnie James. And the rest of the mostly-functional skeletons he named Halford, Hetfield, and Dickinson because he was tired and couldn’t come up with anything better.

  But when he went to bed, he did so with a happy heart. Malachar, Ash King, Ender of Days had built himself an elite team of agricultural warriors the likes of which no one had ever seen before. Stifling a yawn, he looked out the window of his outpost and saw that the normally wispy clouds were starting to look thick and menacing on the horizon. The setting sun illuminated the underside of the billowing shapes and seared them with a dying blaze the color of blood and fire. Malachar would have thought it looked beautiful but he had had enough of blood and fire from the heavens.

  “You can stay in here with me until I find you a proper shelter. I don't know if it will produce natural rain or more blood rain, but I don't want all my work to be undone,” he said to the skeletons. To his surprise, they all turned to him and nodded eagerly. Why? He hadn't given them an order. He was just talking to keep his thoughts straight.

  The dark lord sighed as he prepared himself another meal of field rations. Then, with nothing else to do, he went to bed. He willed himself to sleep but thoughts raced through his mind. After naming his skeletons, he thought it was time to finally name his farm. Malachar tossed and turned, mulling over what would be the perfect, most powerful name for his fields. Bloodrot Farm? No, too similar to Bloodrot Keep. He didn't want to invoke the idea that he was the prophesied ender of days. Everpain Orchard? That wasn't right. He didn't have a single tree on his farm. Shadowglade Estate? He shook his head. That sounded more like the name for a wealthy nobleman's house, not where anything was grown.

  Then it hit him like a thunderbolt.

  He said the perfect name out loud in the darkness. “Yes. That will be enough to frighten off any foolish raider. Or an overzealous hero. Yes, that's glorious. So shall it be.”

  When Malachar heard the first rolls of thunder, he felt it was fitting. Like the storm itself was heralding the birth of his farm and of his intent. He held out his hand, feeling the gentle drops of rain patter on his fingers and drew it back for examination. Water. It was only raining water, not blood. He hoped the rain would nourish his crop of cinderbeans instead of snuffing out their fiery life. He leafed through the helpful grimoire that had given him a hint about the cinderbeans in the first place, but it said nothing about the crop having a weakness to rain.

  However, he did find a passage that described the flavor as “smoky, nutty, and filling” and that it was excellent roasted or ground into paste and later fried. He was also pleased to read that it kept for years after being dried. His stomach rumbled at the thought of all the good things he could make once it was time to harvest the crop born of cataclysm. The grimoire told him it would take three to four months before he could harvest.

  Three to four months? He almost laughed. He could wait a few paltry months. Malachar was nothing if not patient. He had launched sieges that lasted for years before the castle finally succumbed to starvation and cannibalism. To him, waiting was a fine art, one he had mastered a long time ago.

  As he returned to bed, he would just have to hope for the best. He lay in his bed, trying to will his thoughts to stop whirling and settle down. He was both exhilarated by the thought of his cinderbeans growing strong from the rain, of making his farm's sign, of building a new fence from the many, many bones that still lay around the farm, and of perhaps going into battle with pathetic mortals who dared to trample his crops. He was nodding off when he heard the chant as if from many voices.

  Ash take the sun, ash take the stars

  Let all crowns break before the Black Throne

  We are Yours until the world remembers to die.

  Malachar leaped out of bed and ran out into the pouring rain. His cinderbean plants still stood, holding up their little leaves and beans to drink in the gift of water. But he didn't see any interlopers, anyone who would dare risk the dark lord's displeasure. But he had no time to waste, rain or shine. The Ash King reached deep inside, feeling for the old power and then, once stirred, he felt for the legions of bones scattered around his land. His will pulled them from the dampening ground and arranged them around his acre. Some were jagged and broken, some stained from the struggles of eons-past, but all were tall and strong. And as they assembled themselves around his farm, he knew it would hold for ages and ages.

  Soaking wet and exhausted from his day's work, he still had one thing left to do. On a slab of obsidian, he used his command of fire to etch in the words of his farm. In heavy gothic font, it read out to the world:

  DOOMHARVEST FARM