The news of the disastrous "Pilgrimage of the Sky" swept through the secret channels of the Empire and beyond.
For King Xylos in Mordus, it was a qualified success. While the Heretics hadn't managed to disrupt the Librarian's peace with their noisy worship, the attempt had been gloriously chaotic. Most importantly, his spies had confirmed that the Aethelian Empire's most elite aerial unit had been fully mobilized to... swat a bunch of rickety cargo ships out of the sky.
"They used a royal executioner's blade to swat a fly," Xylos mused, a cruel smile on his face. "Their priorities are completely compromised. This 'Librarian' has turned their military into a paranoid neighborhood watch."
He had also received the most baffling report yet: a single pilgrim had gotten through. He had not been destroyed or ejected. He had been... kept.
"He crushes our armies," Xylos hissed to his Arch-Sorcerer, "but he adopts our stray fanatics. What is the strategy? Is he mocking us? Is he collecting... trophies? Strays from every faction to prove his superiority over them all?"
The logic was maddening, but it was the only thing that made sense. The Librarian wasn't just defending his territory. He was actively poaching the followers of his rivals to demonstrate his dominance. This wasn't a cold war. It was a cosmic game of recruitment.
For High Priest Vorlagos and the Heresy of the Devout, the rout was not a defeat. It was a divine test of their faith. And the news that Brother Tepin had made it through was not a fluke; it was a sign.
"Do you see?!" Vorlagos preached to his ragged, demoralized followers as they limped back from the mountains. "The Master did not desire an army of worshippers! An army is vulgar! Loud! He desires quality, not quantity! He filtered us! He shattered our grand vessels to find the one, pure, unwavering soul among us—the humble Tepin—and guided him home on the very wings of faith!"
It was a brilliant piece of post-hoc rationalization. They had not failed. They had successfully sent a champion.
"Our path is not to be a crashing wave," Vorlagos declared, a new, more insidious plan forming. "We must be a rising tide. A quiet, steady infiltration of the truth. The Emperor thinks he can contain a god with walls and soldiers. We will show him that true faith is a river that seeps through the cracks."
The Heresy's new strategy was born: they would go underground. They would stop trying to breach the quarantine by force. Instead, they would become a secret society, spreading the "Gospel of Lyno" throughout the Empire. They would publish pamphlets (anonymously, of course) detailing the "Sermon of the Thrown Turnip." They would whisper tales of the "Parable of the Grilled Cheese" in the ears of sympathetic nobles and disgruntled knights. They would build their congregation in secret, a silent, spiritual army that would one day rise up and demand recognition for their passive, snack-loving deity.
The demon-funded holy war was about to become a viral marketing campaign.
But the most significant interpretation of the failed pilgrimage happened in the Imperial Palace, where Inquisitor Caelia Vance delivered her official analysis to the Emperor.
"The events are consistent with my previous assessment," she stated, her voice as crisp as fresh parchment. "The Librarian—Subject Omega—is a master of passive-aggressive warfare."
The Emperor frowned. "Explain, Inquisitor."
"Observe the facts," Caelia said, laying out a map. "A rival faction, the Heretics, attempts to approach his position by air. They are not his primary rivals, merely an internal annoyance. Does he expend his own resources to deal with them? No."
She tapped a red marker on the map, representing the downed Heretic Armada. "He allows us to deal with them. He leaks just enough information about their flight path—or allows it to be seen—that our own quarantine forces intercept and neutralize the threat on his behalf. We have become the unwitting outer layer of his security apparatus, his unpaid bodyguards, spending our own blood and treasure to handle his minor inconveniences."
The logic was impeccable. The Emperor felt a fresh wave of cold fury at being so expertly manipulated.
"And what of the one who got through?" the High Treasurer asked. "This 'Tepin'?"
"That is the masterstroke," Caelia said, her grey eyes showing a glimmer of something that might have been professional admiration. "After we have done his dirty work for him, he allows a single, completely useless survivor to reach him. And he takes him in. It is a dual-purpose message."
"To the Heretics, it says 'Your faith is not in vain, one of you has reached me,' thus ensuring their continued existence as a thorn in our side."
"To us, it is a message of contempt. It says, 'Your perfect interception had a hole in it. Your defenses are flawed. I can pluck anyone I choose from the sky and you are powerless to stop me.' It is a calculated move to demoralize our forces and assert his dominance. He is like a homeowner who watches his neighbor's fence keep out a stray dog, then purposefully reaches over, picks up one of the dog's fleas, and places it in his own house just to prove that the fence is ultimately irrelevant to him."
The Parable of the Broken Fence, as it would be known in the secret annals of the Spymaster's office, was a devastating psychological blow.
The Emperor slammed his fist on the arm of his throne. "I am the Emperor of Aethelgard! I will not be the unpaid fence-watcher for a shadowy puppet-master in a bookstore!"
"Then you must act," Caelia said simply.
"How? Direct assault is suicide. Appeasement has failed. Containment is being turned against us. What is left?" the Emperor demanded, his voice echoing in the tense throne room.
Caelia Vance leaned forward slightly. Her voice was low, and her proposal was the most logical, rational, and dangerous thing she had ever conceived.
"We have been trying to understand the player," she said. "It is time to change the game. We cannot control him. We cannot defeat him. But perhaps... we can distract him."
She laid out a second map. This one showed not the Empire, but the demonic lands of Mordus.
"Subject Omega's two most overt displays of power were in response to demonic threats—the Golem sent by a lesser demon lord, and the Grokk sent by the King himself. This is a repeatable pattern. It is the only thing we know he reacts to with overwhelming, observable force. He may ignore our politics and our religions, but he does not seem to tolerate demonic incursions on his... 'territory.'"
Her plan was simple, elegant, and had the potential to plunge the entire world into war.
"We will engineer a crisis," the Inquisitor stated, her face grim. "We will discreetly leak intelligence to the Demon King. Fabricated intelligence. We will lead him to believe there is a great weakness along our southern border, a perfect opportunity for a massive invasion. We will lure his armies into our realm."
The Arch-Mage looked horrified. "You want to invite an army of demons into the Empire?!"
"Yes," Caelia confirmed, her eyes like chips of flint. "And we will strategically and covertly guide that invasion northward. Not at Oakhaven. But past it. We will create a massive, terrifying, continental-scale problem that the Librarian cannot ignore. We will force him to act. To deploy his true assets, to reveal his hand. We will stop playing his game of covert espionage and force him to play ours: open, cataclysmic warfare."
"We will give him a new toy to play with," she concluded, a chillingly blank expression on her face. "A bigger, louder, angrier dog. And while the Spider is busy dealing with the hell-hound we've sicced on his doorstep, we will, for the first time, have a chance to properly observe his true capabilities. And perhaps... find a weakness."
The Emperor looked at the map, then back at Caelia. Her plan was madness. It was like setting your own house on fire just to see if your mysterious neighbor had a bucket of water.
But it was also the only logical, proactive plan they had.
"Do it," the Emperor commanded, sealing the fate of his own nation.