Chapter 64: Roots and Rumor
The farmer’s name was Delen, and his crops were dying.
Not dramatically — not withering overnight or burning in the field. Dying slowly, the way things died when the force sustaining them withdrew by degrees. The wheat grew shorter this season. The grain heads were thinner. The soil, which had been rich and dark for as long as Delen could remember, had turned pale along the edges of his field — gray-brown, like the earth was tired.
He’d farmed this land for twenty-two years. His father had farmed it before him. The Rootmother’s blessings had always been there, woven into the soil like invisible roots — the feeling of warmth when you dug your hands into the earth in spring, the sense that the land *wanted* to grow. Delen had never questioned it the way he’d never questioned rain. It was simply how the world worked. You planted. You prayed at the village shrine. The crops grew.
This year, the blessing felt thin.
The shrine was a modest structure at the crossroads — a carved wooden post with Demeterra’s symbol (a spiral of intertwined roots) and a stone basin where farmers left grain offerings every harvest. Delen prayed there every morning, kneeling in the packed earth, speaking the words his father had taught him. The words hadn’t changed in generations. The feeling behind them had.
He didn’t know what the Vyreth war was. None of them did. The farmers in Demeterra’s border villages knew their goddess was powerful, knew she controlled growth, knew that praying at the shrine kept the soil rich and the harvests regular. They didn’t know that she’d spent sixty percent of her FP reserves fighting a fire god four hundred kilometers to the south. They didn’t know that the blessings keeping their fields productive had been quietly scaled back to conserve divine resources during wartime. They only knew that this season, the wheat was shorter.
Delen mentioned it to no one. Complaining about the goddess’s blessings was not something a person did, not even in private. The blessings came or they didn’t. You accepted.
But the trader from the north — the one who’d passed through last week with a cart of metal tools and a quiet manner — had said something that stuck.
"Where I come from," the trader had said, unloading a stonesteel hoe head at the village market square, "the god answers when you ask."
Delen had assumed it was a sales pitch. Traders said things. But the hoe head was real. He’d held it. The weight was wrong — too light for its size, as if the metal was denser than iron but distributed differently. The edge was sharper than anything the village smith could produce. And when Delen had tested it on the hard clay patch behind the market where nothing good grew, it had cut through like the soil wasn’t there.
The trader hadn’t asked for payment. He’d left three hoe heads, a plowshare, and a set of carpentry nails, and he’d said, "If you want more, come north. A settlement called Ashenveil. Ask for Harsk."
People talked about it. Not loudly. Not at the shrine. In kitchens, at the well, in the long evenings when the fieldwork was done and the silence allowed honesty. A god who answers. Tools that don’t break. A settlement to the north where five races live together and every person has enough.
Delen didn’t believe most of it. Trade talk was trade talk. But the hoe head was real, and his crops were dying, and the goddess felt further away this year than she had last year.
He kept the hoe head under his bed. He didn’t tell his wife why.
***
Four hundred kilometers north, Zephyr reviewed the infiltration map.
The Kobold agent Skrit had been his first choice — not because Skrit was the best spy in Ashenveil, but because Skrit was the least noticeable. Small. Quiet. Forgettable. A Kobold traveling alone through farmland attracted curiosity but not suspicion. Kobolds were everywhere in the borderlands — scavengers, tinkers, seasonal laborers. A lone Kobold with a patched travel pack and a story about looking for work could walk into most villages without anyone remembering his face the next morning.
The problem was the divine bond.
Zephyr’s divine sense stopped at his territory’s edge. The moment a believer crossed that boundary, the bond went dark. Not severed — the faith connection persisted, a faint warmth that both god and believer could feel — but all communication, all blessing support, all surveillance was gone. A believer in enemy territory was a believer alone.
Demeterra’s territory would compound the problem. Her Growth domain saturated the soil, the air, the water within her borders. A believer of another god entering that space would feel it — the press of a foreign divine presence, subtle but unmistakable if you knew what to look for. Skrit would need to suppress any outward sign of his faith. No prayer. No Ordinist posture. No mention of the Grand Ordinator, the Forge, or anything that could identify him as belonging to a different god.
He would be a refugee. A wandering Kobold looking for work. He would count soldiers and map settlements and identify which of Demeterra’s border believers were wavering — and then he’d come home.
If he could.
Skrit.
The Kobold stood in the Chapel, alone. Evening. The gold flame burned low. He’d been given his instructions through Krug two days ago and had spent the time since preparing — memorizing his cover story, stripping his belongings of anything marked with the Cog-and-Flame, practicing the Rootist prayer posture (both knees, hands flat on the earth, head bowed) until it looked natural.
Through the bond, Zephyr spoke.
You understand what I’m asking.
Skrit’s jaw tightened. He was afraid. Zephyr could feel it through the bond — the tight, cold knot of fear in a believer’s chest, the same feeling he’d detected in Krug during the first dungeon raid nearly a year ago.
"I understand."
When you cross the border, the bond goes quiet. You won’t hear me. You won’t feel the blessing. You’ll feel her instead — the Rotting Grain’s domain in the soil. It will feel wrong. Your body will know it’s not me. Ignore it. Act normal. Pray at her shrines if you need to blend in. I won’t hold it against you.
Skrit nodded. His hand drifted to his chest, where the iron cog normally hung. It was gone — he’d left it with Nix for safekeeping. Without it, his neck felt bare.
Count everything. Map what you can. The military installations, the settlement sizes, the shrine locations. Note which villages seem loyal and which seem tired. Find the cracks in her foundation. Don’t try to convert anyone — that’s not your job. Just look.
"How long?"
Three months. If you’re not back in four, I’ll assume you’ve been caught.
"And then?"
Silence. Through the bond, Skrit felt the answer he already knew. No rescue. No divine intervention. A spy caught in enemy territory was a spy lost. The Grand Ordinator would mourn him efficiently and replace him practically.
Come home alive, Skrit. That’s the last instruction. Everything else is secondary.
Skrit knelt. Right knee. Left fist over heart. He spoke the Iron Devotion — quietly, alone in the Chapel, the gold flame flickering in the draft from the half-open door.
By iron and fire, I stand before the Design. My hands are the hammer. My will is the forge. I am shaped and I shape in return. Order above. Order within. Until the last flame dies, I am Yours.
Then he stood, adjusted his travel pack, and walked out into the evening.
***
He crossed the border at dawn.
The transition was physical. One moment, the faint warmth of the Grand Ordinator’s territory lay behind him — the subtle, constant hum of divine presence that every believer in Ashenveil felt but rarely noticed. The next step, it was gone. Like walking out of a warm building into winter air. Not painful. Just... absent.
Skrit kept walking.
The grasslands gave way to farmland within an hour. He could see it before he reached it — the way the terrain changed. Wild grass became cultivated fields. The soil shifted from pale clay to rich, dark earth. The air itself felt different — heavier, moister, carrying a sweet-green scent that reminded him of freshly cut stalks.
Demeterra’s domain.
He felt it in his feet first. A warmth rising through the ground — not the Ordinator’s warmth (precise, metallic, structured) but something organic. Something that pulsed, slowly, like a heartbeat. The soil was alive. Not metaphorically. The divine presence in the ground was so thick that Skrit could feel the root systems beneath his feet, vast invisible networks connecting field to field, village to village, spreading across the territory like veins through a body.
It was warm. It was abundant. It was wrong.
Not wrong in a way he could explain. The warmth was genuine. The abundance was real. But it wasn’t his. His body recognized the divine presence as foreign — like drinking clean water from a well that belonged to someone else. Nourishing, but borrowed. Every step he took into Demeterra’s territory, the wrongness deepened by a fraction.
He’d been warned about this. The god had told him it would feel like this. He suppressed the discomfort, schooled his face into the blank neutrality of a traveler with no opinions, and followed the road toward the nearest village.
The Rootist farming hamlet appeared around a bend in the road — a cluster of thatch-roofed buildings arranged around a central shrine. The shrine was a carved wooden post with the spiral-root symbol of Demeterra, surrounded by a stone basin overflowing with grain offerings. The fields around the village were heavy with wheat — tall, golden, healthy.
But not as healthy as the fields deeper into Demeterra’s territory would be, Skrit guessed. This was border land. The blessings were thinner here. The wheat was tall, but not *as* tall as it should be. He filed the observation.
A human woman at the village well looked up as he approached. Her expression was the standard border-village reaction to a lone Kobold: mild curiosity, faint suspicion, and the quick evaluation of whether this stranger was worth the trouble of addressing.
"Looking for work," Skrit said in Common. His accent was deliberately rough — the broken syntax of a Kobold who’d learned the trade language from necessity rather than education. "Field work. Harvest coming. Can dig. Can carry."
The woman studied him. "We don’t need diggers."
"Can fix things. Hinges, wheels, harness straps." This was true — all Ashenveil Kobolds received basic tool-maintenance training as part of their civilian education. Another system the Ordinator had implemented that no one questioned because it worked.
She pointed down the road. "Talk to Jossen at the grain house. He always needs hands before harvest."
Skrit nodded. Filed the woman’s name. Filed the settlement layout — twelve buildings, one shrine, forty to fifty inhabitants based on the number of smoke columns. Filed the grain offerings at the shrine — generous, which meant the village was still productive enough to tithe food to their goddess. Filed the wheat quality — good, but declining.
He walked toward the grain house, and the warmth of Demeterra’s soil pressed against the soles of his feet with every step, and the wrongness grew.