Chapter 126: Dreamer’s Fields
The Shimmerfields lied to you beautifully.
That was the province’s defining quality — not its agriculture, not its military contribution, not its economic output. The Shimmerfields was the kingdom’s most beautiful province because Cassiriel, the goddess of Dream and Illusion, made it beautiful. The light was different here. The colors were different. The sky wasn’t just blue — it was the blue that existed in memory, the idealized blue that you remembered from the best day of your life, enhanced by illusion domain effects that operated on perception like a filter over a lens.
The fields themselves were golden. Wheat, barley, oats — the Shimmerfields was the kingdom’s breadbasket, its agricultural heartland, the province that produced forty percent of the kingdom’s total grain output. The crops grew in soil that Cassiriel’s secondary domain — Growth, shared with Seylith — enriched, and the enrichment manifested not as scientific efficiency but as beauty. The wheat didn’t just grow. It *shimmered*. The barley caught light at angles that made every field look like a painting. The harvest was both agricultural and aesthetic — you gathered food and you gathered wonder.
Ryn didn’t trust it.
"Smart," Lysa said, watching him squint at a field that was, by any objective measure, the most beautiful landscape he’d ever seen. "Most people walk into the Shimmerfields and lose their analytical capacity within the first hour. The beauty overwhelms critical thinking. That’s by design."
"By Cassiriel’s design?"
"By the Kingdom’s design. The Shimmerfields’ primary function, officially, is agriculture. Its secondary function, unofficially, is propaganda production."
***
Glamhall — the Shimmerfields’ capital — was a festival city.
Not a city that held festivals. A city that was a festival. The streets were decorated permanently — streamers, banners, colored lamps that ran on illusion-domain light and never burned out. Music played from public squares where Revist performers — Cassiriel’s priesthood — maintained a constant rotation of entertainment: theater, music, dance, acrobatic displays, puppet shows for children, philosophical debates staged as dramatic performances for adults.
The population of Glamhall was sixty thousand. On any given day, approximately three thousand of those people were engaged in some form of performance, entertainment, or festival preparation. Five percent of the city’s population, employed full-time in the production of joy.
And at dusk, the Dreamsong Moth appeared.
Cassiriel’s divine creature. It materialized in the violet hour between sunset and dark — an entity the size of a sailing ship, its wings translucent, carrying patterns that shifted like living paintings: scenes from the kingdom’s mythology, landscapes that didn’t exist, faces of people who might have been real or might have been dreamed. The Moth drifted over Glamhall in slow, sweeping arcs, its wings catching the last light and refracting it into colors that didn’t have names in common speech.
The city looked up. Every evening. Without exception. The Moth’s passage was Glamhall’s sunset prayer — not spoken, not sung, but *witnessed*. The creature’s flight was the story, and watching it was the worship.
"Beautiful, isn’t it?" Thresh said. He was, for once, not analyzing. Just watching. Even the Myrvalis intelligence training couldn’t entirely immunize against the Dreamsong Moth’s effect. "It’s Cassiriel’s narrative engine. The Moth’s wings show what Cassiriel wants the city to see — the stories, the emotions, the particular version of reality that the Dream domain generates. What you’re feeling right now — the wonder, the warmth, the sense that everything is beautiful and meaningful? That’s not natural. That’s the Moth."
"The festival economy," Thresh said, walking through a market square where a theatrical troupe was performing an adaptation of the Creation Myth — the version where Krug lights the first forge, condensed into a fifteen-minute drama with costumes, music, and illusion-domain special effects that made the audience gasp. "The Shimmerfields exports three things: grain, stories, and morale. The grain feeds the kingdom. The stories shape how the kingdom thinks about itself. The morale keeps a population of a million people emotionally connected to a god most of them have never directly experienced."
"Propaganda."
"Public communication. Propaganda is the word critics use. The Sovereign calls it ’narrative infrastructure.’" Thresh paused. "The distinction is whether you believe the stories are true. Every story the Shimmerfields tells about the kingdom — the founding myth, the Hero legends, the Sovereign’s victories, the kingdom’s prosperity — is factually accurate. The Creation Myth happened. Krug did light the forge. The Sovereign did build the kingdom from nothing. The kingdom is prosperous."
"So it’s not propaganda?"
"It’s curated truth. The Shimmerfields tells the true stories that make the kingdom look good. It doesn’t tell the true stories that make the kingdom look complicated. The labor dispute in Shaft Four — did you see a theatrical production about mining conditions in the Ironfields?"
"No."
"You won’t. The Shimmerfields tells the story of the forge, not the story of the forge worker’s hands."
***
The Revist temple in Glamhall was a theater.
Not a temple that resembled a theater — a theater that served as a temple. The worship space was an auditorium: tiered seating, a stage, lighting rigs powered by illusion-domain crystals. The services were performances — liturgical drama, sacred dance, ritual storytelling. The congregation didn’t sit in pews and pray. They sat in seats and *experienced*. The divine presence wasn’t in the air or the stone — it was in the narrative. Cassiriel manifested through story, and her temple was the place where stories were told.
"Revisionism," the temple guide explained. She was a Revist priestess — young, charismatic, wearing the multicolored vestments of Cassiriel’s priesthood and possessing the particular theatrical presence of someone who had been trained to hold a room’s attention as a professional skill. "The theological framework holds that reality is a story told by the divine. The god tells the story. The believers live inside it. The priest’s role is not to explain doctrine — it’s to make the story vivid enough that people want to live in it."
"And if the story differs from reality?"
Her smile was warm and didn’t answer the question. "The story is reality. What you experience is what’s real. If the Shimmerfields shows you a kingdom of prosperity and beauty and divine grace — and you experience that prosperity and beauty and grace — then the story is true, because you lived it."
"And the parts you don’t show?"
"Every story has editing. Every narrative has selection. The Shimmerfields selects for the story that produces the best version of the kingdom — the version that inspires people, that makes them proud, that connects them to something larger than their individual lives." She paused. "You’re thinking of the word ’manipulation.’ Most Academy visitors do. Consider instead: ’architecture.’ The Sovereign builds physical infrastructure — roads, walls, forges. The Shimmerfields builds emotional infrastructure — the stories that make a million people feel like they belong to the same civilization."
Emotional infrastructure.
The same logic as the Grand Cathedral’s engineering — design the experience, shape the emotion, produce the outcome. The Cathedral did it with stone and divine warmth. The Shimmerfields did it with stories and beauty.
The effect was the same. You walked in doubting. You walked out belonging.
The question was whether belonging earned through architecture was genuine or constructed. And the answer — Ryn was beginning to realize, after six months of watching the kingdom’s machinery operate — was both. The belonging was real because the experience was real. The experience was constructed because the system was constructed. And the system was constructed because a god who thought like a game designer had understood, two hundred and fifty-one years ago, that civilization ran on stories, and the civilisation that controlled its stories controlled its citizens’ hearts.
Outside, the Dreamsong Moth completed its final arc of the evening. Its wings dimmed — the patterns fading from mythology to abstract color to simple light to darkness. The creature dissolved into the night sky like a thought forgotten mid-sentence, leaving behind only the memory that something beautiful had been there.
That was Cassiriel’s theology in one image. The beauty was temporary. The memory was permanent. And the memory shaped what you believed tomorrow.
Not through force. Through narrative. The gentlest, most effective form of power.