Chapter 61: Quiet Borders
The scouts were gone. Zephyr had tracked their retreat through the grasslands — three signatures moving south in loose formation, the Frogman surface-runner leading, the other two underground. They’d crossed out of his sensory range by midday. By evening, they were someone else’s problem.
Now began the window.
He convened the inner council in the Chapel’s war room — the back chamber behind the altar where maps were pinned to the walls and a wooden table held carved territorial markers. It was not an impressive room. No banners, no ceremony. Just stone walls, firelight, and the people who made decisions.
Krug stood at the head of the table, arms folded. Harsk — the converted Human officer who’d joined during the Vyreth refugee wave — sat on the bench to his left, his posture formal even when there was no one to impress. Gorren, the minotaur captain of the Ironhold garrison, took up most of the opposite bench. He had to duck his horns whenever he shifted position. All three spoke Common — the trade language that most races in the region shared, though each with their own accent. Gorren’s was the thickest. Minotaurs had their own guttural tongue, but the Grand Ordinator had mandated Common for all operational communication six months ago. Gorren had learned it through sheer stubbornness.
Through the bond, Zephyr spoke to Krug. Krug relayed to the room.
"The scouts saw Ashenveil," Krug said. "All of it. The Chapel, the streets, the forges, the patrols. They tried to reach Ironhold but were turned away at the perimeter."
"What did they see at Ironhold?" Gorren rumbled.
"Four soldiers. Your patrol intercepted them cleanly."
Gorren grunted. "They’ll report four minotaurs in formation. They’ll estimate a garrison of two hundred. Maybe three."
"We want them to estimate three hundred," Krug said. "The real number stays in this room."
Harsk leaned forward. "What about the forge smoke? We run three furnaces day and night. Anyone who’s managed supply logistics will calculate production capacity from that."
"We reduce to two during observation periods," Krug said. Through the bond, Zephyr had already given the instruction. "When we know their scouts are watching, we bank one forge. When they leave, it goes back online."
Harsk nodded. The man understood deception at an institutional level — he’d served in Demeterra’s border garrison before the Vyreth war broke his faith. He knew how the Rootmother’s intelligence apparatus worked because he’d been part of it.
"She’ll send real spies next time," Harsk said. "Not scouts. Infiltrators. People who can pass as traders or refugees and live inside our settlements for months."
"We know," Krug said. "That’s why the next phase isn’t defense."
He pulled the cloth from the map table. The regional chart — hand-drawn by the Knowledge domain’s cartography blessing, accurate to within a hundred meters — showed the territory from Ashenveil to Ironhold, the marshes to the east, the grasslands to the south, and beyond that, the blank space where Demeterra’s domain began.
But that wasn’t where Krug was pointing.
He pointed north. And west. And northeast. Six marks on the map, each annotated in Harsk’s neat script.
"Settlements," Krug said. "Six of them. No god. No protection. Some worship dead gods whose names they barely remember. Others worship nothing at all."
The room was quiet.
"Thornfield," Krug read from the notes. "Human farming village. Two hundred. Failed harvest last season. Their well is drying up."
"Millhaven," he continued. "Hundred and fifty. Humans. River traders. They sell grain downriver and buy nothing because no one sells anything worth buying."
"Greymoss." His finger moved northeast. "Beastmen. A hundred and eighty. Warriors, mostly. Their old god was a Rank 1 who dissolved before most of them were born. They trust nothing from outside."
Three more marks. Each one a pocket of people living without divine support in the gaps between territories that active gods hadn’t bothered to claim.
Gorren studied the map. "You want to take them."
"Not take. Convert." Krug’s voice carried the distinction carefully. "We offer what we have. Tools. Healing. Structure. We let them see what a god who responds to prayer looks like. Those who choose to follow, follow. Those who don’t, we trade with until they change their minds."
"And the ones who never change their minds?"
"We trade with them forever. A trading partner is still useful."
Harsk tapped the map at Thornfield. "This one first. Closest, most desperate. The healing alone will convert half of them inside a week."
Krug looked toward the altar. Through the bond, he received confirmation.
"Thornfield first. We move when we’re certain the scouts have reported and Demeterra has filed us away. Three weeks. Maybe four."
The meeting ended without ceremony. Gorren ducked through the doorway. Harsk lingered, studying the map with the particular concentration of a man who’d switched sides once and understood what it cost.
***
Nix prepared the caravan.
She was a Kobold — one of the original seven who’d arrived at Ashenveil half-starved and bleeding from a creature attack that had killed three of their group. That was a year ago. She’d been assigned to logistics after demonstrating an ability to count faster than anyone else in the settlement and an obsessive attention to detail that bordered on pathological.
Now she managed supply distribution for Ashenveil’s eastern quarter, kept inventory records in a ledger she’d built herself from scraped hide, and organized the first trade caravan to a settlement that had never heard of the Grand Ordinator. She’d also been one of the first to adopt the new currency — Iron Marks, small stamped coins pressed in the forge district, each one bearing the Cog-and-Flame on one face and a weight denomination on the other. Before the Marks, Ashenveil had run on barter. Grain for labor. Tools for meat. It worked at fifty people. At two thousand, it didn’t. The Voice had instructed Krug to standardize trade three months ago, and Nix had taken to the system like she’d been waiting for it her entire life. Numbers were clean. Barter was messy.
The caravan was small by design. Two carts. Eight people — four guards, one priest, one trader (Harsk), Nix herself for logistics, and a driver. The carts held stonesteel tools: plowshares, hoe heads, axe blades, and a set of carpentry chisels so precisely forged that Nix had asked the smith to make a second set for her own workshop.
She also packed food. Dried meat, grain cakes, salt. Enough for ten days. And a pouch of Iron Marks — not to spend, but to show. If Thornfield was going to join their trade network, they’d need to understand how Ashenveil counted value.
"The tools are gifts," she told the loading crew. A pair of Lizardman laborers hoisted a crate onto the second cart. "Not trade goods. Gifts. We give them freely and we don’t mention price."
"And if they ask the price?" one of the Lizardmen asked.
"We tell them the truth. That the god we follow provides for those who believe. That these tools were made in his forges. That they will not break." She paused. "We don’t push. If they want more, they’ll ask."
It was a simple strategy and she liked it for that. Nix didn’t trust complicated plans. Complicated plans had too many places where things could go wrong, and she’d spent too much of her short life watching things go wrong in every possible direction. Simple was better. Simple was: bring something good, give it away, wait.
Father Edrik — the Human priest assigned to the caravan — helped her secure the last crate. He was middle-aged, balding, with the kind of calm that came from genuine conviction rather than practiced composure. He’d been Devout for six months before something shifted in him, some private moment that he never discussed, and he’d woken up one morning as a Fanatic. No announcement. No dramatic conversion. He just started praying longer and meaning it more and doing things with a certainty that hadn’t been there before.
"The elder’s daughter," Edrik said. "Harsk’s report says she has a badly healed fracture. Left arm. Six weeks old."
Nix checked her ledger. "That matches. The village healer set it wrong. The bone grew back crooked."
"I can fix that."
"I know."
"It will hurt. Re-breaking and resetting with healing is not gentle."
"I know that too." Nix closed her ledger. "Will it work?"
Edrik touched the iron cog he wore on a cord around his neck — the symbol of the Forge, the small personal token that every ordained member of the Crucible carried. "If the god wills it."
He didn’t say it with false humility. He said it as a fact. The god either would or wouldn’t. Edrik’s job was to ask and then do the work.
The caravan departed at dawn.
***
Zephyr watched the caravan’s departure from above — the tiny line of carts moving northwest through the marshland trail toward grassland. Eight believers leaving his territory’s protection for the first time on a mission that had nothing to do with war.
He ran the math while they traveled.
The status window updated in the corner of his perception:
[STATUS — TERRITORY OVERVIEW]
[Believers: 2,100]
[FP Generation: 2,800/day]
[FP Reserves: 41,000 / 80,000 (Rank 4 threshold)]
[Daily FP Expenditure: ~900 (blessings, construction, territorial upkeep)]
[Net Daily FP: ~1,900]
[Estimated Time to Rank 4: 5–6 months (current growth)]
Realistic timeline at current burn rate with expected growth: five to six months.
The NPC settlements changed that math. Thornfield’s two hundred humans, once converted to Casual tier, added 200 FP per day. Millhaven’s one hundred and fifty added another 150. Greymoss’s Beastmen — a hundred and eighty, though likely fewer would convert quickly — might add another 100 initially. That was 450 additional FP per day, pushing net daily to 2,350.
But the real value wasn’t raw FP. It was the acceleration curve. New believers started at Casual (1 FP/day each), but over time — weeks to months — some would shift to Devout (10 FP/day). And the Devout-to-Fanatic jump was organic. He couldn’t force it. Couldn’t manufacture it. A Fanatic emerged when a believer decided, privately and permanently, that there was nothing above this god. That kind of conviction was earned through experience — through prayers answered, through tools that didn’t break, through a sick child healed when nothing else could heal her.
The conversion funnel, he thought. *Casual at the top. Fanatic at the bottom. I don’t control the filter — they do. But I control the inputs. The more I give, the more they see, the faster some of them make the decision on their own.*
It was the same mechanic he’d optimized in Theos Online. Different currency, same principle. Acquisition → retention → escalation. Marketing theory applied to theology.
He turned his attention back to the caravan. They’d cleared the marshland and were entering the grasslands. Two hours to Thornfield.
Father Edrik. First caravan. First contact. If this works, we repeat it five more times. If it doesn’t — if Thornfield rejects us — we pivot to trade dependency.
But it would work. Zephyr had read enough history — real history, game history, and this world’s own fragmented records — to know what happened when a god offered miracles to people who’d been praying to empty air.
They didn’t say no. They wept.