The command chamber smelled of damp stone and ozone, a jarring fusion of Veridia's mortal fiefdom and the demonic technology that pulsed with faint, violet light within it. In the center of the room, a vast holographic display hummed, a web of political allegiances where the great houses of the Infernal Court were represented by shifting, luminous jewels. Between Veridia and Seraphine, the air shimmered with the faint, silver thread of the life-link that bound them, a constant, phantom itch beneath the skin.
Veridia's finger, tipped with a claw of polished obsidian, tapped the steady, deep crimson light of House Malakor. "His honor is a liability," she said, her voice a blade honed on old hatreds. "He believes this ancient trade pact is unbreakable because it is old. We will show him that 'old' just means 'brittle'."
Seraphine, now a tangible presence shackled to this mortal plane, paced before the map. The loss of her untouchable, illusory form had stripped away some of her smugness, replacing it with a restless, caged energy. "Brittle isn't enough. We need a hammer. Someone who despises tradition on a cellular level." Her own clawed finger darted out, illuminating a frantic, electric-blue node. "Prince Zael."
"He's an opportunistic parasite," Veridia mused, though a flicker of admiration touched her eyes. "But his ego is a weapon we can aim."
"Precisely," Seraphine agreed, a spark of their old, venomous dynamic returning. "All we have to do is convince him that Malakor's 'brittle' pact is a wall being built to contain *his* ambition."
The strategy began to form between them, a beautiful, intricate clockwork of cruelty. Veridia, with her deep knowledge of the old guard's ways, would forge the core of the lie. "We'll fabricate evidence that Malakor used a pre-Network soul-pact to sabotage one of Zael's first media ventures. A secret clause, enacted out of pure, condescending spite. It's exactly the kind of move Zael expects from him."
"Too direct," Seraphine countered instantly, her producer's mind taking over. "Zael's paranoid, but he's not stupid. A direct data-dump is clumsy. We need to curate the narrative. We leak it to a third party, someone ambitious and loud." She smirked. "Lyra Vexx, the gossip columnist. Her hunger for a scoop is almost as vulgar as Zael's hunger for a throne. We'll give her the poison, and she'll gleefully sharpen it into a dagger for us."
A moment of silent, mutual understanding passed between them. The rivalry still burned, a cold fire in the space their bond occupied, but it was now overshadowed by a shared, terrifying competence.
"One whispers of profit," Seraphine said, her voice a silken promise of chaos.
"The other screams of insult," Veridia finished, a cruel smile touching her lips. "They will tear each other apart."
***
The plan unfolded across realms, a multi-pronged assault managed from their stone-and-light command center. Holographic feeds bloomed in the air, showing their agents moving like ghosts through the systems of the powerful.
Veridia focused on a feed from a bustling Aethelgard marketplace, the air thick with the smell of roasted meat and unwashed bodies. Grolnok, the goblin chieftain now bound to her service by a pact of his own, scurried through the crowd. He was a miserable creature, but a useful one. His movements were furtive as he slipped a small, fabricated relic—a "memory shard" humming with a false history she had personally encoded—into the satchel of a known informant on Zael's payroll. It was a crude, physical anchor for their digital lie, a touch of Scablands grit to make the high-tech deception feel real.
Simultaneously, Seraphine, her fingers flying across a console with a precision that betrayed her frustration at being solid, navigated the labyrinthine archives of the Network. With surgical skill, she accessed the millennia-old testimony of a minor functionary who had been present at the original pact's signing. She didn't erase his words; she twisted them. A pause was lengthened to sound like hesitation. The inflection of a key phrase was subtly altered. A statement was cut from its original context and pasted into a new one, until the demon's long-forgotten, truthful account became a damning indictment of Malakor's treachery.
The results were immediate and spectacular. One feed showed Prince Zael in his chrome spire. He held the informant's memory shard, its false history playing out before him. The data aligned perfectly with the twisted archival testimony Lyra Vexx was now screaming about on her broadcast. It was the quiet, condescending dismissal that had defined his own public execution at Malakor's hands, years ago. His pride and ambition, a raging inferno within him, consumed his caution. He publicly demanded a full inquiry at the upcoming Grand Summit of Houses, his voice ringing with a righteousness he had never before possessed.
Another feed showed Lord Malakor in his ancestral hall. He was not shouting. He was utterly, terrifyingly still, radiating a cold fury that seemed to warp the very air around him. He had been blindsided, his honor publicly questioned on the trashiest of broadcasts. He accepted the challenge. The trap was set. The beasts were now circling each other, each convinced of their own righteous path to the slaughter.
***
In the command chamber, a new display dominated the central space: a stark, crimson countdown to the Grand Summit. Their pieces were in motion, the board set for a war that would tear the old guard apart. Seraphine, her face a mask of concentration, ran a final probability analysis. A complex web of variables resolved itself on the screen, the data coalescing into a single, triumphant number.
"Ninety-eight percent," she announced, a flicker of genuine admiration in her voice. "The simulation confirms it. Public sentiment, Zael's aggression, Malakor's predictable pride… it all leads to his political ruin."
A rare, thin smile touched Veridia's lips. It was the smile of an architect admiring the blueprints of a beautiful, perfect demolition.
But Seraphine's expression suddenly froze. Her body went rigid. "Wait." She tapped a command, and the simulation re-ran, isolating the defiant two percent. A single, improbable path to failure bloomed on the screen, a scenario so simple it was terrifying.
"What is it?" Veridia snapped, her satisfaction evaporating into ice.
"The original pact," Seraphine breathed, her voice tight with disbelief. The simulation showed Malakor, cornered and desperate, producing not a data-file, but a physical scroll. Its ancient, irrefutable magic flared with the light of a First Law, instantly exposing the memory shard as a forgery and the archival testimony as a digital ghost. Their entire scheme would not just fail; it would collapse, exposing them as liars and manipulators before the entire Court.
A tense, cold silence filled the room. The life-link between them felt like a chain of ice.
"Where," Veridia asked, her voice dangerously quiet, "is the original pact stored?"
Seraphine's fingers flew across the console. A final schematic filled the main display, a blueprint of impossible defenses, ancient wards, and metaphysical locks. It was the deep vault of House Vex—their ancestral home. The one place in the universe they were explicitly, on pain of metaphysical annihilation, forbidden from entering.
Veridia stared at the image of the home she had been cast out of, the place where her family had traded her life for political convenience. She was being forced to invade her own past to secure her future. Her face was a mask of cold fury and dawning, suffocating horror. The game had just become infinitely more personal.