The news of the utter annihilation of General Kael's legion and the five hundred men of his garrison did not arrive in Argent via a messenger. It arrived as a profound, unnerving silence. A thousand men, a state-of-the-art forward base, and all communication simply… ceased.
Archon Titus stood before the great map in his strategium. The charcoal stain of the Blackwood seemed to mock him, a void on his map that had just swallowed another sizable chunk of his power. Praetor Kaelen stood beside him, his thin face for once devoid of any clever analysis, replaced by a grim pallor. Lord Valerius, who had been forcibly retired to his estates, had been summoned again. His presence was becoming a ritual of failure.
A scout, one of the few who had gotten close enough to the ruins of Sunstone before being chased off by a renewed, terrifying bestial aggression, had delivered a fragmented, terrified report. It spoke of a circle of earth fused into glass and a forest that seemed… larger. More aggressive. The very trees at its edge seemed to be twisting into more menacing shapes.
"He didn't just defeat them," Kaelen whispered, his voice dry as dust. "He erased them. Our scouts report no bodies, no equipment, nothing. It's as if they never existed."
Titus's rage, which had been a simmering coal, finally erupted. He swept his arm across the obsidian table, sending the precisely carved markers of his armies scattering across the floor.
"MENACE!" he roared, his voice echoing in the stone chamber. "This is not a territorial dispute! This is a blight upon the very concept of civilization! He melts our towers! He consumes our steel! He swallows legions whole! What manner of man, what manner of demon, does this?"
"One who has been pushed too far," Lord Valerius muttered grimly from the corner, his words barely audible.
Titus whirled on him. "Speak plainly, Valerius, or not at all."
Valerius stepped forward, his old fear now replaced by the weary clarity of a man who has faced a force of nature and survived. "We sacked Sunstone. Kael confirmed it. We salted their earth. We celebrated the death of a god, and now we are shocked when that god's retribution is biblical in its fury? We didn't just poke the nest. We burned it to the ground. Now the swarm is coming for us."
Titus paced, his heavy footsteps a thunderous counterpoint to his racing mind. "This is beyond the capacity of the Hegemony alone. The Arclight Initiative is a smoldering ruin. The Order of Sol is a laughingstock, their High Templar vanished, presumed consumed, his second-in-command spouting prophecies of a forbidden forest. We have exhausted our options."
"Not all of them," Kaelen interjected, his composure slowly returning. "There are other powers in the world."
Titus seized on the idea. "Yes. A global threat requires a global response. Send emissaries. To the Free Cities of the South. To the Merchant Guilds of the coast. To the Titan-Lords of the Eastern Mountains. Offer them anything. Gold, trade concessions, territory. Frame this Ashen King as a threat to all civilization. An unnatural plague that, if not checked now, will eventually consume the entire continent."
The Archon's will was absolute. Within a week, Hegemony emissaries were dispatched to every major power on the map. Their message was one of dire, urgent warning.
The response was a symphony of polite, self-serving refusal.
The Merchant Guilds, ever pragmatic, saw only risk. Why waste good men and ships fighting a forest demon a thousand miles from their coastal enclaves? Their formal reply expressed "deep concern" but offered no military aid. Privately, they saw a weakened Hegemony as an opportunity for more favorable trade deals.
The Titan-Lords of the East, reclusive giants who ruled from their mountain keeps, sent back a single, massive stone tablet with two words carved into it: NOT OURS. The Blackwood was a problem for the small folk of the flatlands.
The Free Cities of the South were the most insulting. Their council, now subtly influenced by an enigmatic advisor known only as Aegis, debated the Hegemony's request openly. They concluded that the "Ashen Kingdom" had only ever acted defensively. They noted that the Hegemony had been the aggressor in every conflict. Their response was a delicately worded accusation: This was a Hegemony problem of the Hegemony's own making. They offered their "diplomatic services" to mediate the dispute, a thinly veiled offer to profit from their rival's disastrous foreign policy.
The emissaries returned to Argent with empty hands and excuses. The kingdoms of the world were not afraid of the Ashen King. They were afraid of losing their own men and resources in the Hegemony's war. They were content to watch from a safe distance as the two powers bled each other white.
Only one group answered the call.
A heavily guarded convoy arrived in Argent from the east. It did not carry soldiers or merchants. It carried priests. The Luminant Theocracy, shamed and broken by the failure of their first crusade, had seen the annihilation of Kael's legion as both a terrifying confirmation of the entity's power and a second chance at redemption.
This was not a delegation led by a zealous Templar. It was led by the Grand Pontifex himself, an ancient, wizened man whose eyes burned with a fire that had long ago consumed all doubt. He did not come to Archon Titus as a petitioner. He came as an equal.
"We were fools," the Pontifex stated in the strategium, his voice frail but resonant with absolute authority. "We sent warriors of the Sun to fight a creature of the deep shadow. It was like trying to put out a fire with oil."
Titus gritted his teeth. "So you come to offer your apologies?"
"I come to offer a new strategy," the Pontifex corrected. "We have consulted our oldest texts, our most sacred prophecies. An entity that commands death, earth, and shadow, but refrains from mindless slaughter… an entity that can wield the semblance of life-giving energy… this is not a simple demon. It is what the pre-lapsarian scriptures call a 'Terra-Geist'—a spirit of the world itself, awakened and given consciousness. An immune response from the planet against a perceived infection." He gestured vaguely at the Hegemony's sprawling industrial might on the map. "Us."
Titus felt a chill run down his spine. The priest's diagnosis sounded terrifyingly close to what Valerius had warned.
"It cannot be killed with steel or faith alone," the Pontifex continued. "But it has a weakness. It is bound to its domain. It is one with the land. To destroy the king, you must destroy his kingdom. Utterly. We failed because we tried to send men into his heartland. This time, we will not send men."
He unrolled an ancient, crumbling scroll onto the table. It was covered in complex, glowing sigils.
"The Theocracy will enact the Rite of Consecrated Fire. A ritual of unimaginable power and cost. We will gather every High Priest, every sacred relic, every ounce of faith from our half of the continent. And we will pour it into a single, great working. We will not attack the forest. We will unmake it. We will create a wall of holy fire, a fire that burns not just wood, but soil, rock, and the very magic that infuses them. We will burn the Blackwood from the map and create a permanent, sterile wasteland where nothing can ever grow again. We will kill the god by starving it of its own divine body."
Archon Titus stared at the scroll. This was a scorched-earth policy on a biblical scale. It was a weapon of mass destruction.
"And your price?" Titus asked, his voice low.
"No price," the Pontifex said, his eyes gleaming with fanaticism. "The chance to cleanse such an ultimate heresy is its own reward. We ask only for your legions to guard our borders while the rite is performed, to ensure this... being... does not send its horrors into our lands while our power is focused."
It was a pact forged in shared desperation. Two mighty empires, their conventional power useless, turning to their most extreme and terrible final options. The Hegemony would stand guard while the Theocracy prepared to unleash a holocaust of holy fire, intent on murdering a forest to kill the single, silent king who ruled it. The world had refused to help. So the two old rivals would hold hands, and set the world on fire together.