>>5547813>>5547736>>5547139>>5546996>>5546971>>5546940>>5546747>>5546742>>5546733You cast the Dragonblood from your mind. It is no difficult task: he is just some unknown Infiltrator, after all. Instead, you request an audience with the Chaplain. This, too, proves no tremendous undertaking: he might be ambivalent to you, but as his technical ‘subordinate’ and a creation of his base, your unexpected dominance of the council with his fellow Serpent priests has brought him status and acclaim by proxy.
Like father, like daughter, you suppose.
“You would discuss this strategy of yours, then, Dragonborn?” he replies. “Wise of you, Young One. You have a tremendous power in you—we all witnessed as much—but you are still inexperienced. You have never led a campaign before.”
“Nor have you,” the Novice Fleshweaver chimes in with malicious mirth tinting her tone.
This draws the umbrage of her sire, but you quickly resolve the conflict and recquire his favour thus:
“Sseztlussth, you are dismissed.”
This draws sputtering outrage from your chosen female, though it quickly turns to a furious and embarrassed silence. The Chaplain watches you thus disarm his daughter with her True Name in a silence equal parts amused and confused. She storms off, and after a moment, her father—the male who raised you, if anyone truly did—beckons you after him, to join him in the room which is his confessional chamber and holy office.
“I am still not certain I understand how you plan is even meant to work,” your Chaplain admits. “The humans to the south may be ingratiated to us at their highest levels, but they will still take time to move to war in any great number. They are not so politically unified as the Paladin king’s troupe of baboons. We have ensured that they stay that way—easier to subvert and manipulate, turn against one another or lead in different direction. Better for our eventual conquest.”
“From what I understood of my briefings and readings,” you reply, “we have repeatedly implicated ‘Southern Demonists’ in terrorist activities against the Paladin King’s realm.”
“A task made easier by the overwhelmingly southern human heritage of our Degenerates,” the Serpent priest readily acknowledges.
“So we need not convince the South to strike at the North,” you reply. “We can instead convince the NORTH of imminent danger from the SOUTH. We can reveal only a titillating implication of our Southerly subversions, and thus lead the Green Knight and his paladin backers on a crusade against the South, even as we leak and exaggerate their fears and hatreds to the Southern realms. The South will naturally grow wary and begin to rally against the North in turn, stoking hostilities until…”
“…War,” the Chaplain finishes, looking impressed.
“Yes.”
