Chapter 18: Diplomatic Arrival
Day 76. The delegation arrived with the sunrise.
Runt saw them first.
He was perched in the crown of a dead ironwood — fifty feet up, wedged into the fork where the trunk split into two skeletal branches. His new eyes did the work. The Thermal Sight activated without conscious effort now, a week of practice turning the disorienting overlay into a second language he read as naturally as the first.
Thirty-two heat signatures. Moving in formation.
Not the loose, adaptive scatter of scouts. This was a column — four abreast, with flankers spread at twenty-meter intervals on each side. The flankers moved differently from the main body: faster, lower, zigzagging through the reed beds with the practiced efficiency of soldiers who had done this a thousand times.
At the center of the column, three signatures burned brighter than the rest. Not hotter — different. The heat had a texture to it that Runt’s new eyes couldn’t quite parse. It wasn’t the clean orange of biological warmth. It was gold-flecked. Stippled. As though the heat itself was being generated by something other than a living body.
Divine signatures. Priests.
And one of them — the largest, the one that walked at the exact center of the formation like a heart in a ribcage — was so bright that Runt had to blink the Thermal Sight away before it gave him a headache.
He dropped from the tree. The Ghost Step passive caught his fall, distributing the impact through his restructured tendons so that the landing was barely a whisper in the mud. He was running before his feet settled — weaving through the reeds, silent, invisible, fast.
The camp needed to know.
***
"Thirty-two," Krug repeated. He stood at the gate of the palisade, the Shepherd’s Stick in his right hand, the Handler’s mark warm on his left palm. "Armed?"
"All of them," Runt said. He was breathing too hard — the sprint from the perimeter had covered three hundred meters in under a minute, and even his upgraded body had limits. "Spears. Shields. Armor — not bone. Something harder. Greener."
"Shell-plate," Vark said. He’d materialized at Krug’s flank the moment Runt’s warning had reached the camp — the Ironscale Enforcer moving with the deliberate, grounded certainty of a creature that had been redesigned for exactly this kind of moment. "Giant river clams. The Frogmen farm them south of the marshlands. Each plate is thick as my thumb and curved to deflect blows."
Krug looked at him. "You know their equipment?"
"I know soldiers," Vark said. "Different species. Same profession."
Krug processed this. Behind him, the tribe was moving — not panicking, not yet, but the controlled urgency of people who had learned to respond to threats at speed. Mothers herded hatchlings toward the center of the camp. Workers dropped their tasks and moved toward the walls. The enforcers — seven now, the strongest adults Vark had been drilling for a week — took positions at the gate and the two elevated platforms they’d built at the palisade corners.
In the lake, the Hydra shifted. Krug felt it through the bond — a tightening, like a bowstring being drawn. The three heads rose from the water, gold eyes tracking south. Not aggressive. Alert. Waiting for his command.
Not yet, Krug thought, and the Hydra settled. A guardian on a leash made of trust.
"What do we do?" Grak’s voice. The old lizardman had pushed through the crowd to the gate, his face set in the rigid mask he wore when he was frightened and determined not to show it. "We fight?"
"We wait," Krug said.
"Wait for what? For them to—"
"We wait for the Voice."
Grak’s jaw clenched. But he didn’t argue. The memory of the binding — the gold light, the sound, the Hydra’s transformation — was less than two weeks old. The argument *you put your faith in a voice that hasn’t answered* didn’t work when the voice had answered with a miracle.
Krug closed his eyes. Reached inward, toward the place where the Voice lived.
The response came. Not words — a feeling. A steadiness. The sensation of a hand on his shoulder, pressing down gently: *stay*.
And then, beneath the reassurance, something else. Something small and sharp, like a nail being driven into soft wood.
A plan.
***
They came through the treeline like a procession at a funeral.
The soldiers first. Frogmen in formation — amphibious bipeds standing five feet at the shoulder, their skin a mottled green-grey that matched the swamp’s palette so perfectly that their outlines seemed to blur at the edges. Each wore a vest of shell-plate armor — overlapping discs of river-clam shell, polished to a dull sheen, laced together with gut-cord. Each carried a spear of black wood tipped with a barbed point that gleamed like wet obsidian.
They moved in silence. Not the silence of predators — the silence of discipline. Their webbed feet made no sound in the mud. Their breathing was synchronized: in through the nose, out through the gills that ribboned along their necks. They had been trained to move without disturbing the air.
Captain Brek led them. Young, by Frogman standards — his skin still bright, unmarked by the grey calcification that came with age. His armor was more elaborate than his soldiers’: the shell-plates edged with copper wire, the spear haft wrapped in dyed leather. His eyes were the flat, incurious amber of a career officer who had spent his entire life following orders and giving them, rarely in that order.
He looked at the lizardmen’s camp. At the toad-bone walls, the crude gate, the smoke rising from the golden hearth. His expression was the same one a city architect might level at a child’s sandcastle.
"This is what the report was about?" Brek said. Not to Gulk. Not to anyone. Just to the air, loud enough to carry.
Gulk walked beside the column but not in it. The scout captain had exchanged his field gear for a cleaner set — still practical, still worn, but with a formality that marked this as a diplomatic mission rather than a reconnaissance. His three-fingered hands were empty. No weapons. Not because he didn’t carry them, but because the weapons were hidden, as was correct for an intelligence operative in a diplomatic context.
He looked at the camp more carefully than Brek did. At the walls that hadn’t been there two weeks ago. At the drainage channels. At the elevated platforms with their clear sightlines over the approach roads.
*They’ve been building,* Gulk thought. *Not surviving. Building.*
Then the priests arrived, and everything else became scenery.
***
Sythara walked like the earth owed her rent.
She was old. Properly, deeply, geologically old — the kind of age that in Frogmen manifested not as weakness but as accumulation. Her skin was dark green, almost black, with the cracked, bark-like texture of a swamp oak that had been growing for a century. Moss covered her shoulders and the ridge of her spine — not parasitic, not dead, but alive, thriving, growing in tiny spirals that produced miniature white flowers when Demeterra’s blessing ran strong. The moss was a badge. A living tattoo. It said: *the goddess grows through me*.
She carried a staff. Not like Krug’s repurposed walking stick with its red gem — Sythara’s staff was a divine artifact in the truest sense. It was gold. Not gilded, not painted — solid gold, from base to tip, crowned with a wheat sheaf that somehow looked freshly harvested despite being metal. The air around it hummed with the warm, fecund energy of the Life domain — a soft vibration that smelled of cut grass and fresh soil and the sweet-rot undertone of compost.
Where she walked, the ground responded.
Not dramatically. Not the explosive growth of a fairy tale. But with each step, tiny green shoots pushed through the mud — blades of grass, tendrils of vine, the first curled fists of fern fronds reaching for light. A trail of reluctant spring followed her like a carpet, greening the brown swamp-muck in her wake.
The two junior priests flanked her. Younger, less decorated, carrying smaller staves. They deferred to her without being asked. When Sythara stopped, they stopped. When she moved, they moved. The hierarchy was not enforced — it was gravitational.
Sythara reached the camp gate. She stopped six feet from the palisade wall and looked up.
Krug looked down.
For a long moment, neither spoke. Two priests. Two faiths. Two gods, watching through their proxies’ eyes, taking measure.
Sythara spoke first. Her voice was warm. Maternally warm. The kind of warmth that a grandmother’s kitchen had — welcoming, enveloping, and subtly difficult to leave.
"You must be the one who touched the Hydra."
Krug’s grip tightened on the Shepherd’s Stick. The Handler’s mark pulsed once on his palm. In the lake behind him, the Hydra’s three heads turned, gold eyes fixing on the old Frogwoman with an intensity that was watchful rather than threatening.
"I am Krug," he said. "Priest of the Voice in the Fire. Acolyte of the Forge."
"So many titles for so young a faith." Sythara smiled. It was a kind smile. That was the danger of it. "I am Sythara. I speak for the Golden Mother. I carry her voice as you carry yours."
She paused. Looked past Krug, at the tribe clustered behind the walls. At the hatchlings peering through the bone-struts of the palisade with enormous, frightened eyes. At the enforcers with their toad-bone spears and their tense, ready postures.
"May I enter?" Sythara asked. "I have come with words, not weapons. My soldiers will remain outside."
Krug didn’t answer immediately. He reached inward.
The Voice pressed: yes.
Krug stepped aside. The gate opened.
Sythara walked through. The moss on her back rippled. Behind her, the mud sprouted.
***
The negotiation happened at the hearth.
Krug had arranged it deliberately — the golden fire at his back, the warmth of the Forge Hearth radiating outward like a statement of domain. The tribe stood at a respectful distance, close enough to hear, far enough to give the impression of privacy. Vark was three paces behind Krug’s right shoulder, his iron-grey scales catching the firelight, his new density making him look like a sculpture that had been given permission to breathe.
Sythara sat on the offered stone. Her junior priests stood behind her. She placed her staff across her knees — a mirror of Krug’s posture — and looked at the golden fire with an expression that Krug couldn’t read.
Interest? Recognition? Hunger?
"The Golden Mother has been watching your people," Sythara began. No preamble. No pleasantries. The warmth was still in her voice, but beneath it was the polished efficiency of a diplomat who had done this many times and did not waste words on those who couldn’t afford to waste time. "She watched you cross the desert. She watched you settle this basin. She watched you kill the Toad Lord — though *kill* isn’t quite right, is it? Your god killed it for you."
The correction was gentle. The implication was not. *Your god fights your battles. You are tools.*
Krug said nothing.
"The Golden Mother is not your enemy," Sythara continued. "She does not resent strength. She celebrates it. Growth is her domain — all growth, of all kinds. Civilizations. Armies. Gods." A pause. "Even small ones."
The fire crackled. The tribe was silent. Even Grak, who had positioned himself at the edge of the audience with his arms crossed and his jaw working, said nothing.
Sythara reached into the folds of her robe and produced a scroll.
It was gold. Not parchment dyed gold — actual golden material, flexible as silk, luminous as candlelight. The script on its surface was written in a language that Krug didn’t recognize but somehow understood: not the words themselves, but the *weight* of them. Each character carried divine authority. Each line was a binding, a chain disguised as calligraphy.
"The Vassal Pact," Sythara said. She unrolled it carefully, reverently, and held it out for Krug to see. "The Golden Mother offers your god — the Architect, yes? — a place within her court. Not as a servant. As a *protector*. Your people would remain here. Your territory would be recognized. Your god would continue to exist and to grow."
"And in return?" Krug asked.
"Acknowledgment," Sythara said. The word was soft. Simple. Like a feather placed on a scale. "The Architect recognizes the Golden Mother as the sovereign power of this region. A tithe of faith — forty parts in a hundred — flows to her court. And certain... creative freedoms are moderated."
"Moderated."
"The creation of divine creatures," Sythara said, glancing — not at Krug, but past him, at the lake, at the three-headed silhouette visible just below the surface. "The expansion of territory. The development of new domains. These are privileges that require... supervision."
Supervision. The word carried the weight of a collar.
Krug looked at the scroll. At the golden script. At the chains.
"And if we refuse?"
Sythara’s smile didn’t change. But her eyes did. The warmth cooled by one degree. One critical, deliberate degree.
"The Golden Mother is patient," she said. "She has waited centuries. She can wait longer. But all things that do not grow under her light..." She paused. Let the silence fill the space between them. "...eventually find themselves in her shade."
Submit or be overshadowed. Bend or be eclipsed.
Krug felt the Handler’s mark pulse. In the lake, the Hydra rumbled — low, subsonic, the kind of sound that vibrated in bone rather than air.
𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶
He looked at Sythara. At the scroll. At the soldiers visible through the gate, standing in their silent, disciplined formation.
"I need to consult my god," Krug said. "One day."
Sythara inclined her head. Not surprised. Not impatient.
"The Golden Mother is patient," she repeated. "She has waited centuries."
A beat.
"She can wait a day."