Afternoon, First of One, Harvest, 236 CR

“You two, out,” Meredith snapped over the sound of my inappropriate, uncontrolled mirth. “Sophie stays.”

“Dear—”

“Captain—”

“Out.” Meredith cut off James and Kelly with a single growled word, and for all that it didn’t reverberate with intent or crush anyone with its weight, they were gone in seconds flat.

That didn’t help me stop giggling. Neither did the way that Meredith hopped up on the edge of James’s desk and waited, looking totally heedless of the mess she’d made of the carefully-arranged contents.

“I’m sorry,” I managed. Apologizing, getting those words out, helped me get a grip, and looking at the severity of the Captain’s face and demeanor helped more. “It’s just… that’s the most James thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Pretty up there, yeah.”

I glanced up at her tone, almost losing myself to another fit of giggles. Captain Meredith Morei, I thought to myself distantly, is smiling fondly. Unmistakably.

“So, uh.” I ran my hands through the moderate disaster of my hair, marshaling some questions to stave off the laughter. “I have a bunch of questions.”

“Vois is a moving village, they’re roaming folk, basically mercenaries; Vois-in-Dappled-Shade is when they’re in the Forest. A half-step divinity is usually when someone’s lost the breadth but didn’t pick up the depth.” Meredith closed her eyes, huffing a breath out. When she spoke again, her face was stony and her voice cold. “Nameless ripped everything out of itself other than one purpose, and nobody knows what that purpose is—it doesn’t know, either. It’s got the power of a full God, but there’s not enough there to make the transition.”

“That… doesn’t sound like a fun time.” Even the least of the Gods I’d witnessed in Kibosh, the incredibly chill Zuqeh—the witnessed seal—was a power that warped the world around them. “Why here?”

“Nobody really knows,” she answered bluntly. “The auguries, all the divinations, every forward-looking Skill, everything’s going fucking wild. Nothing gives the same answer twice, nothing gives the same answer as anything else. The median’s something like four existential threats to Alqar next fortnight, with two of ‘em right around here.”

She forestalled my next question by flicking a piece of paper at me, which I caught reflexively. It was a map of Kibosh and its surroundings, with successively larger ellipses of different colors and hash markings. One of the focuses of the ellipse was Kibosh, and the other wasn’t labeled, but…

“It’s a fucking circus in there, girl.” Meredith’s finger traced the symbol for a trail—passable, but unimproved—from Kibosh to the point that had to be Vois. “The trail’s open and all the shit, the bramble-trees, the critters, the animals, the spirits that aren’t people yet, maybe nine in ten let people pass. The other one in ten? They go for the throat, doesn’t matter who, anyone who isn’t Forest-folk, including the roam-kin of Vois.

“Vois is fortifying around a hole in the ground, the Forest’s pulling everything out of the north shore, and some of the big names are heading west to Highcliff; everything’s weird as fuck. So Writ called for backup from Payazh, the fuckers—Writ and Payazh both.”

“You, uh.” I kept my eyes on Meredith’s face, studying her. “You don’t look like someone who’s as worried as I’d expect about four existential threats in a fortnight, especially what with the whole responsible for the safety and security of the village thing that your job comes with.”

“Godshards in the void, girl.” The Captain slid off the desk, sending a cascade of papers down and catching—without looking, or seeming to notice—an inkwell as she did so. She paced over to her desk, putting the pyramidal container in a worn spot in the center. She paused there, shaking her head, and when she turned back to me, she was smiling. “I wish it were real.”

“It’s not—” I cut myself off. “Captain Morei, what the fuck is going on?”

“The deepwyrm, I think that one’s no joke.” She sat down, leaning back in her chair and staring up at the ceiling. “There’s too much corroboration. Koshe’s got no reason to be fooled by any bullshit that might be happening, and they’re evacuating under Vois, which means something big is happening. And we know deepwyrms—I’d rather fight Nameless than one of those fuckers. Even if the rest are trickster games, that one’s real.”

“Even if—Trickster games,” I murmured to myself, “not lowercase trickster games. My Gods are doing this?”

“See, that’s Veil thinking right there. Something weird as shit happens, oh look at that, it’s probably Nadash’s fault.”

I looked up at her blade-thin smile, narrowing my eyes. “You aren’t saying it’s not.”

“Something’s shifting in the Forest,” she allowed, “that’s true enough. It’s maybe drawing the wyrm up, not that I know enough about the ecology they get down there to say why or how. But I think it’s a change that’s been building for a while, maybe already caught on the tinder.”

“You’re losing me there,” I admitted. “You’re saying that whatever’s going on in the Forest was already going to happen, maybe already happening, but why? And what is it, if it’s not real?”

“Everyone’s thinking that the Remnants are in it to the bitter end, holding out while we grind them out mile by mile. Same time, there’s this attitude that, well, the Remnants being who they are, no point in questioning the grind, right? Gotta end it properly, that’s not just Shem’s whole point, it’s the point of every nation on Alqar, even if most of ‘em only do lip service.”

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Yeah, I’ve—”

“—been wondering what the fuck, probably? Especially now that you know there’s people in there, cities in there?”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “Pretty much.”

“Five Remnants.” Meredith looked at me until I raised my eyebrow at her, cocking my head in a gesture for her to go on. Visibly enjoying herself, she counted them off on her fingers as she named them, smirking at my impatience. “Apollôn Karneios. Athena Axiopoinos. Both got their avatars killed; both of ‘em fading, not enough power to manifest a consciousness. Dead, even if they’re not gone yet.

“Hestia Potheinotáti, she never made an aggressive move and still isn’t; burn your army to cinders when you breach the walls, sure, but I don’t blame her. She and Hades Agesander, they’re waiting out the changing of the seasons till Festival come, if you get what I mean.”

“I don’t,” I grumbled. “Nobody’s told me much about the different seasons, nobody’s bothered explaining to me much at all about the horology and metrology of Shem. But they’re biding their time until it’s time for whatever, I guess?”

“Artemis Hêgemonê.” She smirked at me, waggling her thumb. “Sleeping for a thousand years, give or take a few dozen, nobody actually knows exactly. Forest’s her demesne, but what’s gonna happen when she wakes up?”

“I’m guessing everyone thinks it’ll be, like, a total war of annihilation, but hold up, what do you mean, nobody actually knows? Can’t you, like, ask one of the Gods who’s been around all that time?”

“Sure, or Stick-In-The-Ass down south, or little miss Definitely Not A Queen in the mountains.” She shrugged at my baffled look, smirking a little wider. “Praetor and Najjara, whatever. Thing is, they don’t know either. Nothing adds up; every few centuries, there’s some fuckup in everyone’s tabulations and it never agrees.”

“What.”

“See, every time it happens, we could rip our hair out and get nowhere doing it, like the books say happened the first time. Gods, Immortals who lived through it all, evidence ripped out of the ground, wish I’d been there for it—everything gave different time spans. So now we just throw our hands up and say well, today’s Current Reckoning Year One.”

I buried my face in my hands, fingers curling to grip at the front of my skull. It was somehow the least and most absurd thing I’d heard that day, and I had absolutely no desire to grapple with it, no matter how much my brain was making metaphorical screeching noises about it.

“Captain Morei,” I said tightly, face still in my hands, “leaving aside the fucking calendrical heresy, just what in the name of the Most Holy, Blessed Be His Name, is going on?”

“Sophie.” There was an unusual gentleness in her voice—none of the humor, none of the acerbic savagery I’d grown used to. “What happens if we win?”

My mouth opened, then shut. A loss of social cohesion, I thought to myself, because there’s no external enemy. No more resources to extract, but more usable land. Less violence, but less growth. A juicier target for invasion. Economic disruption from more overseas trade? “A lot of things,” I said softly, head spinning. “Everything I’ve seen says that Shem’s, like, national mythos is structured around the Forest, around the old war and the slow genocide.”

“The only shit we trade that nobody else can,” she said, “is what we pull out of the Forest—and, more than that, what we make out of it. And nothing else you’re saying is wrong, and I can see the runes coalescing in your pretty little head. So, Sophie. What do you think is going on?”

It was a fascinating train of thought, where she was leading me to. “There’s a bunch of trade with the Forest, isn’t there? I know the Delve teams take runs through there, and Hitz has whole categories of Forest-herb this, Forest-wood that, ground Forest-beetle the other thing.”

“All in the small print.” Meredith’s eyes focused, and suddenly the Captain of the Guard for the Village of Kibosh was locking her gaze onto me. “You need to understand that. People pass the border on both sides, people trade. It’s not a matter of common knowledge, but that doesn’t make it against the law; it’s just a question that most don’t think to ask.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I managed.

“Trade, fighting, harvesting, these aren’t a matter of policy, not unless there’s a big imbalance. Understood?” I nodded, and she eased off a little bit on the presence, almost like she was wrapping herself in the trappings of mortality. “Good,” she said, leaning back into her chair. “I get away with a fucking lot of bullshit, but even me being on the Theurgist’s Path doesn’t mean I get to shift the Path of Shem.”

“Because you’re immortal,” I ventured hesitantly, “and Shem’s direction is dictated by mortals?”

“You’re a clever girl, Sophie.” She smiled at me, her usual razor smile that didn’t touch her eyes. “Now. Your answer?”

“You’d lose a resource domain that nobody else has access to,” I said slowly. “It’s also, correct me if I’m wrong, a source of System-granted power, right? And not just because there’s more stuff to fight, but also because only Shem harvests from the Forest, only Shem makes stuff from Forest ingredients. And the social side of things, the mission—in a hundred, two hundred years, when the Third Tier people are dead of old age, what stops Sudh from invading again?”

“Say it,” Meredith said. She was grinning, an absolutely disquieting grin that twisted her face with a vicious hunger. “You’ve already figured it out, I can tell. Come on, outsider—tell me why it’s not real, why I don’t have a bounty of legends to burnish myself on.”

There wasn’t any sort of supernatural pressure in her gaze. There was just the weight of expectation, the certainty that of course I was smart enough, clever enough to figure this one out. It fell on my shoulders like something old, something familiar—like a prayer shawl, twined and knotted, but heavier for the memories it evoked.

I’d never hated it, but I’d never craved it—never craved the recognition and the approval—like I was craving it from Meredith.

“Whatever’s happening,” I said with quiet confidence, “the status quo is ending. Maybe Artemis is waking up, maybe she’s leaving, maybe she’ll ride to war; but whichever way it winds up happening, the status quo is gone. And that’s the existential threat, isn’t it? Not Artemis waking up or Hades riding to war, not an invasion or subversion.

“The prophecies and oracles and divinations, they’re not giving noise or nonsense. They’re stepping on each other’s predictions because every time you look, you change the future. And the future is that every fracture point of the status quo is an existential threat, so every time you change your plans to not fracture it there, you fracture it somewhere else.

“But none of them give zero, because every path they’re choosing ends with Shem victorious—but with the Forest dead, inexorably, Shem dies too.”