Chapter 75: The Rotting Grain Stirs
Recovery: eighty percent.
Demeterra reviewed the metrics with the precision of a general reading a damage report. Her military infrastructure — the Verdant Legion’s mortal backbone — had rebuilt faster than she’d projected. The Vyreth war had cost her twelve percent of her regular forces and forty percent of her FP reserves. Eleven months later, the reserves had replenished through the sustained faith of twelve thousand believers, and the army had reformed through the Root Cradle system’s ruthless efficiency.
The Verdant Legion stood at combat strength:
Frogman phalanxes: three thousand. The core. The anchor. Demeterra’s Frogmen were the finest infantry in the southern region — Growth-blessed for denser musculature, enhanced stamina, and accelerated wound recovery. Their phalanx formations could hold a line against cavalry charges and absorb attrition that would break lesser units. Gorvahn, her most loyal vassal, commanded them.
Human infantry: twenty-five hundred. Border garrison troops, pulled from the ring of fortified villages that defined Demeterra’s territorial perimeter. Less blessed than the Frogmen — Demeterra allocated divine resources based on strategic value, and humans were the holding force, not the killing force. But they were trained, equipped, and numerous.
Beastmen raiders: fifteen hundred. Skirmishers. Fast-attack units drawn from three vassal territories. Poorly disciplined by Frogman standards but devastating in flanking operations, night raids, and the kind of chaotic close-quarters fighting that disrupted enemy formations.
Minotaur siege units: one thousand. Under Durnok, the Rank 2 vassal god whose Earth domain specialized in fortification destruction. Durnok’s minotaurs carried iron battering rams, stone-breaking mauls, and the brutal patience of creatures bred for demolition. When Demeterra needed a wall broken, she sent Durnok.
And the Thornwyrm.
The divine creature rested in its cradle at Deepwell — a cleared depression in the earth surrounded by Growth-blessed vegetation that sustained it like a living terrarium. Fifty meters of serpentine mass, bark-armored, thorned, semi-intelligent, connected to its Frogman Warden Siltjaw through a command bond that had taken three years to establish. The Thornwyrm was Demeterra’s final argument. The thing she sent when strategy had done its work and all that remained was the physical act of destruction.
She hadn’t needed it against the Scorchling god. She might need it against whatever was happening on her northern border.
***
The data had been accumulating for months. Demeterra processed it now — not as individual reports but as a pattern. The way a cartographer sees terrain instead of individual trees.
Northern border FP loss: eight percent over six months. Not three percent. Eight. The rate had accelerated since her last review. The decline was concentrated in six border villages, all positioned along the trade route that connected her territory to the unclaimed grasslands north.
Shrine attendance in affected villages: down twelve to twenty percent. Variable by settlement, but consistently directional. The villages weren’t collapsing — they were *leaking*. Faith draining away in increments too small to trigger alarm but too persistent to dismiss.
Trade goods of unknown origin: present in all six affected villages. Iron tools, stamped currency, cooking implements. All made of an alloy that her analysts couldn’t replicate. The alloy’s composition was consistent — the same forge, the same production process, the same source.
Root Speaker reports: two hundred and forty-seven filed from border regions in the past four months. Of these, thirty-one specifically referenced northern trade goods, attendance decline, or unidentified religious activities. Thirty-one reports. Filed. Processed. Logged. Responded to in batches with form responses that addressed the symptoms without examining the disease.
Her bureaucracy had failed her. Not from malice — from scale. Twelve thousand believers across four territories generated thousands of reports per month. The Root Speaker network was excellent at collecting data and terrible at synthesizing it. Individual reports were addressed individually. The pattern — the aggregate, the trend, the shape of something deliberate emerging from the noise — required the kind of attention that only Demeterra herself could provide.
She hadn’t provided it. She’d been busy recovering from a war.
Three percent was noise, she thought. Eight percent is strategy. Someone is eating my border quietly enough that I almost didn’t notice.
Almost.
***
She deployed intelligence assets immediately.
Twelve human espionage agents — the best in her covert operations infrastructure. Not Root Speakers, who were embedded observers. Agents. Trained infiltrators capable of entering foreign territory, establishing cover identities, and conducting sustained intelligence operations. They deployed north along three axes: the primary trade route, the eastern river corridor, and the western grassland approach.
Their mission: locate the Grand Ordinator’s territory. Assess its military capability. Identify the mechanism of the trade-based faith disruption. Report within thirty days.
Simultaneously, she repositioned two vassal gods.
Gorvahn — the loyal one, the Frogman general, the anchor. She ordered him to redirect one-third of his border forces from the southern perimeter to the northern approaches. Not an attack posture. A readiness posture. The difference was subtle — garrison deployment versus field deployment, supply lines configured for defense versus supply lines configured for advance.
Seylith — the ambitious one. A Rank 2 Fishfolk goddess whose Water domain gave her control of the river systems that threaded through Demeterra’s territory. Seylith was intelligent, capable, and dangerously motivated. Demeterra had kept her as a vassal for sixty years by giving her enough territory to feel important and not enough independence to act on it. Now Demeterra needed that intelligence pointed at a problem.
"Monitor the northern river traffic," Demeterra instructed through communion. "Every boat. Every barge. Every piece of cargo moving north or south. I want manifests."
Seylith’s response was immediate and enthusiastic. Of course, Rootmother. Should I extend my monitoring to the tributaries?
"All of them."
The enthusiasm was concerning. Seylith didn’t do anything without calculating its personal advantage. Extended monitoring of the northern rivers gave her operational presence in a theater she’d never had access to — information, contacts, strategic awareness. Demeterra was giving Seylith tools, and Seylith was the kind of vassal who turned tools into leverage.
But the alternative was worse. The alternative was blindness.
When this is resolved, I’ll need to manage Seylith’s ambitions. But first, resolve this.
The orders propagated through her domain. Root Speakers carried them south. Vassal bonds carried them to Gorvahn and Seylith. The army’s logistics infrastructure — the quiet machinery of supply lines and garrison rotations — shifted weight from south to north, like a ship adjusting ballast.
Demeterra’s territory was the largest continuous divine domain in the southern region. Twelve thousand believers. Six vassals. Four territories. An army that could break small gods and had broken one six months ago.
But eight percent was eight percent. And whoever was behind it had managed to erode her border faith for half a year without triggering a single alarm.
That required competence. The kind of competence that concerned a god who’d built her empire on competence.