Void

Void is a non-magical matter-erasing phenomenon on Aerb manifesting from particular crystals called void crystals. These crystals are the only source of the effect that is seen in Worth the Candle. Usage of the void effect is heavily restricted by the Empire of Common Cause because every use brings the Void Beast, a world-ending threat, closer to Aerb.

## Void crystals

Discovered sometime within the last 700 years, void crystals are small, purple crystals that are triggered into producing the void effect when they are charged with electricity. The void effect radiates outwards from the crystal, deleting matter within line-of-sight, with depth of penetration inversely proportional to the density of the matter. A spherically-expanding void effect also decreases in penetrating power as the distance from the source of the effect increases.

The void crystal can also be coaxed to emanate the void effect along a line, punching holes through objects without depleting the crystal. Curiously, the strength of the void effect does not seem to depend on the size of the crystal, at least for crystals less than one foot long. Nothing has been shown to resist the void effect - not even the apparently-inviolable stone of the Zorish Isles.

The effect of the void on other void crystals depends on the distance. If a void crystal is less than one foot away from another crystal that has been set off, the void crystal is simply consumed. At distances greater than one foot, the first void explosion sets off a second void explosion. That the cut-off distance is one foot may be related to the fact that void crystals under one foot in length all produce the same strength of void effect - it may be the case that the majority of a void crystal is destroyed by its own effect[*speculation*].

At some time between the discovery of void crystals and the present day, the Void Beast was discovered as a threat to all of Aerb. The characteristics and capabilities of the Void Beast are largely unknown, but usage of void tools and weaponry causes the entity to draw nearer to Aerb, which could result in all of Aerb being destroyed. Following the discovery of the Void Beast, an imperial ban was established - presumably by the Empire of Common Cause - on usage of void tools and weaponry. The establishment of the Risen Lands exclusion zone predates the imperial ban on the void effect, meaning that void crystals may be scavenged from tools and spare parts left behind in the exclusion zone. Amaryllis takes advantage of these circumstances to build a void tunneler when she is dropped into the Risen Lands. Solely Responsible

## Void weaponry

Weapons using the void effect are range-limited to 500 feet, but there are specific applications in which they excel, due to the profusion of things in Aerb which will not be hurt or damaged by mundane gunfire.

The void effect is non-magical, and therefore cannot be warded against. However, this means that revision magic is wholly effective at undoing the damage done by void weapons. A gold mage, on the other hand, has no defense against the void effect except for their offensive ability. The void effect is one of the few ways to bypass the defenses of a still mage.

### Void tunneler

Amaryllis builds a handgun that uses the void effect out of spare parts in the Risen Lands Solely Responsible. This gun emanates the void effect along a straight line and can be fired about once every four seconds. The improvised weapon consists of a squeeze-handle on a rubber grip attached to a palm-sized box with a hole in the end.

### Void rifle

After Amaryllis gives Juniper her void tunneler, she builds the larger void rifle. Juniper and his party carry void rifles throughout their whole adventure. This gun emanates the void effect along a straight line and can be fired about once every six seconds.

### Void grenade

A void crystal with an attached mechanism to discharge electricity into it. This is perhaps the simplest void weapon that can be made. Used on many occasions by the Color Riot and Amaryllis in the Risen Lands.

### Helicopter-mounted void cannon

Larkspur Prentiss, in flagrant violation of imperial law, brings these weapons along on his convoy of helicopters when he is pursuing the party with the help of Doris Finch's probability magic.

### Void arrow

An invention from the collaboration of Fenn and Amaryllis that they had been keeping from Juniper - until the time came to reveal it - on the basis of narrative success Aggressive Negotiations. The arrow is intended to be shot from Fenn's artillery bow, which has the capability of producing up to 2048 copies of the arrow. The void arrow is thus far the most powerful void weapon that the party has had first-hand experience of.

## Void Beast

The Void Beast is an entity of unknown capability that is drawn towards manifestations of the void effect. It is unclear where the entity resides with respect to the greater cosmology of Aerb, but it appears to be able to reach at least Aerb and the elemental planes.

The discovery of the Void Beast was the reason for imperial ban on void tools. This ban had been successful in lessening the danger that the Void Beast poses to Aerb, as the entity is further away in the present day than it was at the time of its discovery. However, as per a notification that Juniper gets from the game layer, the Void Beast has recently begun approaching Aerb again, and more drastic action will be necessary to forestall its approach.

### Doomed Timeline

In the doomed alternate timeline detailed in Chapter 131, A Cypress Waits, alternate-Amaryllis puts into action preventative measures of detonating stockpiles of void crystals within various elemental planes to stall the Void Beast. Nevertheless, the Void Beast was eventually responsible for the destruction of Aerb about 100 years after the present day. This particular measure had been known to the people of Aerb for as long as the Void Beast itself had been known.

## References

1. ↑ The current history of the Athenaeum of Sound and Silence began in 143 BE, when a cabal of still mages seized control of the Li’o’te Temple from the Independent Province of Hong-shin. The area immediately around the temple, a moderately sized city that largely existed in support of temple activities, was declared a fully independent city-state following the ousting of the city’s mayor. The city was renamed as Li’o, a name it’s held since then. Strict control over the creation and training of still mages made the city-state into a fearsome local power, especially in an era where void weapons were virtually unknown.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 142: "Sound and Silence"
2. ↑ Amaryllis had mined the hallway with small purple crystals like the one that exploded in the shire-reeve’s office.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 6: "Cold Comfort"
3. ↑ All you really needed to make a void crystal explode was a sufficiently powerful electric charge, which would cause it to radiate void out in all directions, eliminating matter from existence.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 60: "Aggressive Negotiations"
4. ↑ “The void will penetrate in all directions, so you’re going to have to make sure that there’s something between us and the detonation. It’ll go through about six inches of flesh and bone, half an inch of steel, or five hundred feet of air. Got it?”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 6: "Cold Comfort"
5. ↑ “No,” said Amaryllis, “Void propagation is constrained by the inverse square law, it’ll eat through the same amount of mass at any distance, but for the projective form, that means if you conceptualize an inch-thick sphere around a projection at distance x which completely captures the void projection, then an inch-thick sphere at distance two x will only go through one fourth of an inch.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 60: "Aggressive Negotiations"
6. ↑ His eyes snapped open, both of them glowing with a red light. I pulled the trigger almost immediately, which opened up a dime-sized hole in his head, but I realized almost immediately afterward that these zombies didn’t care about their heads at all.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 3: "Solely Responsible"
7. ↑ “For projection, it’s usually given as a half-inch steel or other sufficiently dense metal at five feet from the center of the void projection, regardless of crystal size, so long as it’s under one foot,” Amaryllis nodded. “I told you that I already did the math.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 60: "Aggressive Negotiations"
8. ↑ The five main Zorish Isles stuck up from the Bryllyg Sea. To say that they weren’t natural would be a severe understatement; each was the tip of an enormous finger sticking up from the perpetually cold, dark water. When I’d drawn them up, they had been inviolable, stone so hard that not even diamond could scratch it, ancient things that suggested an entity of supreme power, dead and buried beneath the waves. I’d come up with them when I was sitting in a bathtub, sticking my fingertips up from the water just enough to have them be exposed to the air. But very few things I’d created survived contact with Aerb, and the Zorish Isles had been at least partially excavated using voidtools before the imperial ban. None of that was visible from a distance; instead, it was greenery, most of it cultivated, and cities built into the side of the isles, largely confined to the whorls of the fingerprints to maximize arable land on top.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 57: "Place Your Figs"
9. ↑ “If they’re further than a foot away from each other, there’s a cascade,” said Amaryllis. “Less than a foot, and the void effect just consumes the crystal with no effect.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 60: "Aggressive Negotiations"
10. ↑ “Void tunneler,” I said.

Poul winced and Becca sucked air through her teeth.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” said Poul. “The Exclusion Zone predates the Imperial ban.” A forced smile crossed his face. “That confirms you as a dangerous guy then. Did you build it?”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 5: "Goraion"
11. ↑ Effective range on a void weapon was five hundred feet, if you wanted to actually do any damage with them, and I had to hope that meant we would be able to out-maneuver them somehow.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 50: "Copse and Robbers"
12. ↑ “Can I say that unicorns are fucking dangerous?” asked Fenn. She had her arms crossed over her chest. “We just fought and killed a gold mage, something we only managed to do because we had,” she glanced at me, “A very lucky combination of circumstance and coincidence, one which I don’t really want to rely on again. We had basically no way to hurt Aumann beside the void rifle, and we had no way to permanently kill his revision mage besides Mary’s sword.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 35: "Friendship is Magic"
13. ↑ “There are things that a handgun won’t work on. The majority of entad armor will stop a small-caliber round, and a minority will stop larger calibers. There are also a wide variety of mages who are immune or resistant to gunfire, including pseudo-mages like the bladebound. There are species who will shrug off a bullet and monsters who will only gain power from them. Wards will also stop bullets dead in their tracks, if your target is bunkered down. It’s by no means a perfect solution, but it’s the first one you should reach for.”

[Magus Oberlin] reached into the desk and pulled out a second handgun, this one of a slightly different make. He set it down next to the other handgun. “This is a void gun,” he said. “It’s considerably more difficult for potential targets to deal with, and is brutally effective at making holes in things. It’s also banned for personal use by the Third Empire, with no exceptions.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 145: "Freshman"
14. ↑ Grak began work on breaking the wards, while Fenn began probing at the wards using her fingers. I wasn’t quite sure why she was doing that, because she knew as well as I did that an absolute ward against velocity meant that you couldn’t do things like poke the finger of a glove across, because it would stop any and all movement at its border. A void rifle could get past it, because the void went through things without any velocity (bullshit, if you asked me, but the void was also “not magic”), and light was apparently not included as a thing that had velocity (because otherwise the room would have been completely dark), but there was very little else that would get past it.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 33: "Tenth"
15. ↑ “No, gold mages don’t have a defense against the void, that’s true, not unless you count flinging a coin at your forehead before you can get a shot off,” said Fenn. “But the second bit of bad news is that they have a revision mage with them. He’s penny-ante, from the way he’s being treated, but I’m pretty sure he’s got the power to patch up holes faster than you can make them, at least if we’re talking about the rifle.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 23: "Siege"
16. ↑ To kill a still mage required overwhelming force, void weaponry, chemical or biological attacks, or the right kind of magic. All those were in short supply.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 102: "The Adventures of Valencia the Red"
17. ↑ I learned something useful, which was that the void tunneler took four seconds to cycle. I had been careful with it, not wanting to push it too hard for fear of it irrecoverably breaking, and had elected not to do tests with it for that reason. Here, though, I had some ability to control the circumstances of this fight. More of the zombies had turned toward me as my pistol kept making its little sound, but the windows to the clothing shop weren’t floor-to-ceiling and the zombies would have to negotiate a wall to get to me.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 5: "Goraion"
18. ↑ I looked down at the gun in my hand. The boxy part had roughly the proportions of a deck of playing cards, but slightly bigger and set on edge. A rubber grip with a trigger was attached to it; it wasn’t a normal trigger you’d pull with your finger, but instead the kind of thing you’d find on a spray bottle, where the trigger extended down the length of the handle and was squeezed with all the fingers of the hand. I looked at the hole in the boxy part, but couldn’t see inside. There was no obvious mechanism for feeding ammo into it.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 3: "Solely Responsible"
19. ↑ Cypress greeted me about the same way that she had when we’d first met; she had a new gun, a rifle this time, which she pointed straight at me.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 5: "Goraion"
20. ↑ Void Rifle: Uses void effect to put holes through things. Can fire a maximum of once every six seconds. The void effect travels through half an inch of steel, six inches of flesh, or five hundred feet of air.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 138: "Stats for Nerds II"
21. ↑ Baiting them out seemed like my only option, but before I could do that, someone threw a small purple crystal into the room.

It was connected to a small, dime-sized battery with some wires and what looked like chewing gum. It landed right next to the body. I ducked behind the filing cabinet on instinct, before the thought grenade even had the time to go through my head, I think processing it more by the way it had been thrown than what it looked like.

The explosion was small and subdued, but the effects were immediate as things started falling down around me. The carpet and floorboards were missing near the center of the room, and a quick glance at the body showed only a thin wet strip of it left. The far wall of the office was mostly gone, not blown away but simply vanished with no debris. Without giving myself time to think, I darted forward out of the hole the grenade had made, feeling a cold wet sting on my shoulder as I did so, looking around wildly to see whether there were any threats in sight.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 4: "Reaver"
22. ↑ Amaryllis had mined the hallway with small purple crystals like the one that exploded in the shire-reeve’s office. They all had wires attached to them, which led into the garage and to an assembly I hadn’t noticed on the other side of car doors she’d been using for cover. At a guess, all she had to do was press her foot down and anything in the hallway would have been utterly destroyed.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 6: "Cold Comfort"
23. ↑ “Shit,” said Fenn. She raised her hand as I saw movement within the belly of the helicopter, and with her other hand she pulled me down behind a thick metal wall that appeared from her glove. “You know,” she said, as a sound of thunkthunkthunkthunk started up from the helicopter, “Here I was, thinking that maybe we’d be able to make this a half day.” She was giving me a manic smile. “Mounted automatic void rifle, probably,” she said with a nod in the direction of fire.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 50: "Copse and Robbers"
24. ↑ “No,” said Grak. “I think I’ve prepared against most reasonable vectors of attack.” He sniffed and looked at the women. “Void weapons are not magic. They would be a problem.” So naturally, if Larkspur knew for certain that we had a warder, or maybe just guessed based on whatever evidence he’d gathered, that would be one of the primary weapons he brought, and it wouldn’t matter whether there was an imperial ban, since he’d already shown himself willing to violate those.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 50: "Copse and Robbers"
25. ↑ The explosion -- projection, I’m sure Amaryllis would have corrected me -- had happened at the far end of the room, a cascade of void that had, for a start, removed all the air from the room. The railings on the upper levels were gone, along with a significant portion of the upper levels themselves. Pieces of building were raining down from where supports had been removed or weakened. The brass Colossus was completely gone. The floor was missing too, scoured down at least a few feet by the void cascade, and though I couldn’t see the ceiling from my vantage point in the hallway, I had no doubt that was gone too.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 60: "Aggressive Negotiations"
26. ↑ I don’t know how much longer the world has left either. Our policy of Void Beast redirection has come to a head much sooner than thought. Sixteen of the elemental planes are completely gone, impacting all manner of magic, and two of those happened in the past year.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 131: "A Cypress Waits"
27. ↑ “With the threat of infernals taken off the tables, the picture isn’t so bleak,” said Heshnel. “You know the threats by name, at least. The Void Beast might be mollified, if we can figure out why it’s moving towards us again, and it’s a threat that’s known to the people of Aerb. Moreover, it’s a far-off threat, a century at current rates, which is more than it was when the imperial ban was implemented.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 114: "The Meeting of Minds"
28. ↑ Quest Accepted: Tragedy of the Commons - Following the discovery of the Void Beast, void weapons and tools were made illegal under international law, usable only with expensive permits or in situations that called for it. For a time, this was sufficient. Now the Void Beast stirs once again, and imperial regulatory schemes won’t be enough.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 125: "The Remnants of the Past"
29. ↑ And of all the potential threats, that left the Void Beast. Because regulatory schemes weren’t enough, the solution had been simple; divert the Beast’s extradimensional course somewhere else. The vast stockpiles of void crystals that had been a byproduct of the imperial ban had been taken to the elemental planes and detonated in such a way as to call the Void Beast there, instead of to Aerb. It was a stopgap solution, but it was one that bought Aerb another hundred years.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 132: "Uskine Nervedah"
30. ↑ It was the Void Beast that got them in the end. People blamed the diversionary plan, naturally, insisting that harsh regulations would have worked, but it was all somewhat moot by the time the end came.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 132: "Uskine Nervedah"
31. ↑ “It’s a series of stopgap measures and incomplete solutions, some of which likely aren’t going to be viable in the real,” said Raven. “Some kind of massive bomb, bigger than a nuclear weapon? That’s going to be excluded, with certainty. They didn’t actually solve the Void Beast problem, they just delayed it, in a way that’s been known to us for as long as we’ve known about the Void Beast.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 132: "Uskine Nervedah"