Chapter 67: Root Speaker’s Warning
Demeterra reviewed the numbers twice. Then a third time.
Three percent. Northern border FP contribution had dropped three percent in two months.
It was not a large number. In the context of her total FP economy — twelve thousand believers, six vassal gods, four active territories — three percent from one border region was the equivalent of a rounding error. The kind of fluctuation that could be attributed to seasonal shifts, harvest cycles, or simple statistical noise. Most gods at her rank wouldn’t have noticed it. Most gods didn’t monitor individual border contributions with the granularity that Demeterra did.
Demeterra was not most gods.
She’d built her domain over three centuries on the principle that small numbers became large numbers if you ignored them long enough. A three-percent decline in one region meant sixty fewer FP per day. Sixty FP per day for a year was twenty-two thousand FP — enough to bless an army, enough to fund a siege, enough to matter. She hadn’t survived this long by dismissing things that mattered.
She cross-referenced. Shrine attendance data from the Root Speakers: down four percent across three border villages. Grain offerings at shrines: down twelve percent — sharper than the FP drop, which meant some believers were reducing their contributions faster than their faith was declining. A leading indicator.
Trade patterns. This was harder to quantify. The Root Speakers monitored movement across Demeterra’s borders — travelers entering and leaving, cart traffic, seasonal migration. For the past eight weeks, northbound traffic had increased by twenty percent. Not dramatically. Not the kind of surge that suggested an exodus. But consistent — a steady trickle of travelers, mostly traders, moving north and returning with goods that the Root Speakers couldn’t classify.
The goods were the problem. Demeterra’s Root Speakers reported iron tools appearing in three border villages — tools made of an alloy that didn’t match any known production source in her territory. Darker metal, impossibly sharp edges, lighter than standard iron. The tools had no maker’s mark. No origin label. They appeared in village markets alongside standard goods and were traded at prices that undercut local smiths.
A disruption. Small. Deliberate. Untraceable.
She probed for foreign divine signatures along the border. Nothing. Whatever was happening in her northern villages was not being done by a god. There was no rival blessing in the soil, no competing divine presence in the air. Her domain remained uncontested in the spiritual sense.
Which meant the disruption was mortal. Trade goods. Cultural influence. The kind of soft power that didn’t register on divine sensors because it wasn’t divine.
Clever, she thought. And immediately: Who?
***
The answer should have been obvious. The Grand Ordinator sat two hundred kilometers north of the affected region. His civilization was known to produce advanced metalwork. He had a reputation — built in the four months since the Thorn Scouts’ report — for rapid, system-driven growth.
But Demeterra did not deal in obvious answers. Obvious answers were often wrong. Other gods operated in the region — smaller, weaker, but present. A Rank 1 fire deity in the western foothills. A Rank 2 trade god in the river valleys east of the grasslands. Either could be responsible for the tools. Either could be trying to establish trade influence in her border regions.
She dispatched intelligence. Not Thorn Scouts this time — overqualified for the task. Instead, she activated the civilian intelligence layer. Root Speakers embedded in border villages — Frogmen who lived as farmers, potters, and woodcutters but whose primary function was observation. They received updates through the root network that connected every shrine in every village to Demeterra’s central awareness. Their reports were granular: who bought what, who said what, who prayed and who didn’t.
The reports came back within a week.
Three villages affected. The tools came from a trader — human male, middle-aged, traveled alone with a supply cart, visited each village once per month. The trader did not preach. Did not mention a god. Did not distribute religious materials. He sold tools, bought grain, and had a conversational manner that left people remembering him fondly without remembering exactly why.
The Root Speakers couldn’t identify the trader’s origin. He claimed to be from "up north," which could mean anything. He paid in iron coins — small, stamped, denominated by weight. Coins. Not barter goods. Coins.
Demeterra had never introduced coinage in her territory. Her economy ran on barter backed by divine blessing — the goddess controlled crop yields, so the goddess implicitly controlled economic value. A farmer who prayed received good harvests; a farmer who didn’t prayer received average harvests. The differential created a natural incentive structure that didn’t require currency.
The appearance of coins in her border villages was not an economic event. It was a cultural one. Coins implied a system. A system implied an institution behind the system. An institution implied a god who built institutions rather than ecosystems.
The Grand Ordinator.
She still couldn’t prove it. The trader carried no divine signature. The coins bore no religious symbol that her Root Speakers had identified — though the reports mentioned a marking on one side that the Speakers described as "a wheel with a flame." A wheel with a flame. She filed that.
***
"Countermeasures," Demeterra said.
She didn’t address anyone directly. The Root Speaker network carried her intent outward — to Gorvahn in the eastern wetlands, to her intelligence handlers along the border, to the field administrators who managed the day-to-day function of her northern provinces.
Three measures. Immediate.
First: increase missionary activity. The Rootist faith structure in border villages had been neglected — not deliberately, but as a consequence of resource reallocation during the Vyreth war. Shrine attendance was down because shrine maintenance was down. The field priests who conducted seasonal blessing ceremonies had been pulled south for military chaplain duties and not yet replaced. Replace them. Send fresh priests. Rebuild the routine.
Second: blessed seed distribution. The Growth domain’s most tangible benefit: seeds that germinated faster, grew taller, and produced higher yields than unblessed alternatives. Demeterra authorized a batch of enhanced grain seed for the three affected border villages — enough to boost next season’s harvest by thirty percent. The improvement would be visible. The faithful would see their fields outperform their neighbors’. The message: the goddess provides. Still. Always.
Third: surveillance. Dispatch Mossara — Rank 2, Fishfolk, the smallest and most discreet of her vassal gods — to increase river-based monitoring of northern approaches. Mossara’s Fishfolk operatives could navigate the river systems that connected Demeterra’s northern border to the grasslands without detection. Their job: find the trader. Follow the trader. Identify the trader’s origin.
The orders went out. Root Speaker to Root Speaker, through the soil, along the vast invisible network that connected every corner of Demeterra’s territory. Within hours, the machinery of response was in motion.
Demeterra withdrew her attention from the border and returned to the larger strategic picture. The Verdant Legion was at seventy percent strength. Four months to full capacity — the same timeline she’d projected after the Vyreth war. The FP reserves were rebuilding steadily. Her vassals were compliant. The territory was stable.
Three percent. A small number. But small numbers grew, and Demeterra had seen small numbers consume empires before. She’d been one of the small numbers once — a Rank 1 nobody who’d planted seeds in unclaimed soil and watched them become a civilization.
She knew the pattern. She’d invented it.
If this is the Grand Ordinator, he’s smarter than I expected. Not because the strategy is complex — it’s elementary. Trade influence. Cultural seeping. Slow-drip conversion without force.
The reason it’s smart is that he’s not doing it with blessings. He’s doing it with tools. You can detect a blessing. You can trace divine power. You can’t trace a plowshare.
I need to know more. Three months. When the Legion is at full strength and my reserves are restored, I’ll deal with this properly.
But I won’t wait three months to start watching.