"It looks like we've been discovered."
The one who spoke had no pupils. Eight arms lay folded across his lap, their pointed ends lined with rows of suckers. His head was smooth and bald, his face otherwise human enough, but those flat black eyes gave nothing away. He was of a race called the Octari.
The carriage rattled along the road at an unhurried pace.
"Of course they will. Or did you think acquiring riches would be a walk in the park, hsss." A snakekin answered without bothering to look up from the window. His scales caught the light in shifting greens, and when he spoke, his tongue flickered briefly between his teeth.
A foxkin woman with eight fluttering tails behind her nodded. "We already knew the shadow maid was stationed here. She must have been the one who noticed us first."
"Thaaat is not all thouuugh." An owl's head slowly rotated toward her. He was broad-shouldered for his species, with tawny feathers blending into the collar of his coat, and he spoke with unhurried cadence, like someone who found everything slightly beneath his pace. "Their seeeems to be some gadgetry beneath ussss as well. They captured our mana signaturessss just now."
A silence moved through the carriage. The road offered it no competition.
The Octari broke it first. "You don't have to worry. I have long looked at the branching futures. In every one of them, as long as we make no first move, we remain unharmed."
The faces around him didn't improve much.
This was the situation they had accepted when they agreed to come, but accepting a situation in principle and sitting inside it while foreign eyes tracked you from beneath the road were not quite the same experience.
Most of the people in this carriage had not felt the concept of danger as anything more than an abstraction for the better part of a century. The feeling took some adjusting to.
"Arguing at this point is pointless." The foxkin lady straightened. "We are already here. Let's go over the plan and our roles one final time instead of fretting."
A few grunted agreements. She began.
"The goal is the riches the oracle divined. The magnitude of what we stand to find would sustain the empire for decades… and we still don't know the exact form it takes."
"Which is a problem," the tigerkin said. He was built large enough to take an extra seat; his amber eyes scanned the treeline outside with restless attention.
"Do you doubt a divination from the Thalassai?"
He didn't answer. But the way His stripes shifted when he moved revealed enough. The name had an effect.
The Thalassai clan of Octari had practiced divination since before the empire's current era.
Their readings had averted disasters, identified fortunes, and guided marriages. When they joined the coalition, their accuracy had made them indispensable to the empire's inner workings. That reputation didn't get earned by being wrong.
So when they pointed at a region everyone considered dead earth and declared it a source of wealth, no one argued the conclusion. What had given people pause was the second part of the reading.
Handle this incorrectly, and doom follows.
Even the Thalassai's most loyal believers had needed a moment with that one. The empire had stood for millennia. One new territory, however interesting, shouldn't be capable of shaking it.
But the one at the helm had heard them out, and they had enough wisdom not to discard the warning of people who had served faithfully for so long.
Hence, the plan.
"First rule, and the most important," the octari spoke gravely, "never start hostilities. Do not try to act smart. And always hold your impulses. My clairvoyance isn't accurate enough to see the process of it if you ignore this rule, but the outcome is ironclad: our death."
Seeing that everyone took him seriously, he continued, "Since the direct approach is closed, we use soft tactics."
He looked to the foxkin lady, who continued without pause.
"We use the fact that this territory keeps no demi-human slaves as an opening. We propose collaboration. They are the human settlement closest to our empire, so we will offer dwarf labor services to help them build, in exchange for civilian access and eventual Narkal support if the creatures push through our shared border."
"—So we infiltrate with numbers to locate the wealth." The tigerkin's expression said he was confident this time.
"No."
His expression did not survive the word.
The oracle continued, "In every timeline I can see, the lord of this territory will be absent for approximately one year, beginning within the next few days."
The tigerkin opened his mouth.
"No," the oracle said, before a word came out.
"..."
"Our first rule does not have an exception clause for the lord's absence. It applies regardless." He scratched his bald head with one arm while three others adjusted his coat. "Where I was… yes. The lord leaves. During that time, Narkal activity will gradually increase in this region. By the year's end, a genuine threat will arrive."
"—And we don't help them before looting," the tigerkin said, reading the room this time.
"We help them," the oracle said, with the patience of someone who had been soothing children across multiple timelines and had made peace with it. "That was always the plan. We are not here to rob. We are here to make an impression and build a debt. When trust is established, they offer what they have willingly. That is considerably more efficient than theft, and considerably less likely to end with our corpses."
"And if they never offer?"
"Then we leave with an ally powerful enough to supposedly kill all of us." The snakekin glanced toward the corner of the carriage where the elf sat with her eyes closed. "Including her."
No one needed to look. Everyone was aware of her. The elf had said nothing since they departed, and her eyes had been closed for the entire journey, but the idea of her not listening was something no one in the carriage entertained. She was the carriage's true security measure, a level of power that only the Sin Lords exceeded by human accounting, and she had the self-possession of someone who had learned a long time ago that the most dangerous presence in any room was the quietest one.
"Cowardly plan," the tigerkin muttered.
The snakekin drew breath.
"Roles," the foxkin lady said, smoothly.
She went through them: the oracle maintaining his sight throughout; the owl handling counter-surveillance once they had lodging, and carefully investigating the nature of the threat the oracle had foreseen; the snakekin taking point in all negotiations; herself absorbing information and adapting strategy as needed; the tigerkin and the elf providing security against the unplanned.
The tigerkin received his assignment with a broad smile and a gaze that moved down the foxkin lady's figure with no particular subtlety.
She noted it and smiled back.
His enthusiasm wasn't unwanted, exactly. He was a bit slow and rather careless, but his appearance was to her taste, and getting on the good side of someone responsible for her personal safety had never struck her as a bad investment.
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The territory made an impression before they reached the gates.
The road approaching it was intact, which was more than could be said for most of the Wrath Domain. The fields on either side showed actual cultivation. The outer structures flourished with recent construction.
By the time the convoy passed through the main gate, the oracle had gone quiet, and nobody knew what was going through his mind.
A woman in a white maid's uniform waited for them at the gate. She said very little beyond what was necessary to guide them through, but they did not dare to underestimate her.
She was the one who had captured their presence before they even did hers, after all.
As they walked toward the center, the development of the territory continued to exceed expectations. The snakekin said nothing, but his tongue flickered occasionally. It was a habit when something caught his attention.
The mansion, when they reached it, was clearly a recent rebuild. The interior was clean and ordered and smelled faintly of new timber.
And in the reception room, seated on the sofa with three women arranged around him, was the lord of the territory.
The foxkin lady stopped for a beat.
The scene resisted comprehension at first glance.
The man himself… young, dark-haired, with eyes that held something she couldn't quite name; wouldn't have stood out on his own.
It was the combination.
Each of the three women was exceptional in her own right. And the way they positioned themselves around him seemed to elevate his presence, sharpening it into something far more striking.
'If this moment were ever captured in a painting, it would sell in the capital.'
She filed that thought away and followed the snakekin forward as he stepped into his role without preamble.
"Lord Hart." He inclined his head, carrying the precise amount of deference to be read as respect rather than submission. "We are grateful for your willingness to receive us. I will not waste your time with excess formality."
His name was Vael, though he hadn't offered it yet. He would, at the right moment.
"The honor is mine. Who would have thought that our small territory would ever catch the gaze of your great empire?" Ashen shook his head with a smile.
"The empire has watched the development of your territory with genuine interest," Vael gave a smile of his own, his voice warming at the edges. "Not with suspicion, I want to be clear. I would say Interest is more accurate. This region was considered unviable by most assessments, and you have made something of it that surprises people who thought they understood this land well."
Ashen listened. But he didn't interject. For now, he was content to hear and gather information from this surprise visit.
"We come with a proposition. The empire's nearest settlements are not so far from your borders. Narkal pressure is not a threat either of us can ignore indefinitely. We believe that a relationship built now, while the pressure is still manageable, would serve both parties considerably better than one attempted in crisis."
He laid it out cleanly: dwarf craft labor, infrastructure support, civilian settlement rights in exchange for eventual Narkal cooperation and open trade.
"Of course, this is purely a proposition. You do not have to feel pressured or take it as a demand." Vael added with sincere eyes.
"I see." Ashen nodded with an unreadable look. "So there's no tribute demands, or territorial claims. And certainly no strings attached beside the fact that we share the border's protection and open doors to each other's territories?"
"Yes! Exactly." Veal smiled widely and looked at him with an expectant look.
Is there a better deal than this?
C'mon, accept, already!
Ashen could almost hear the words from just his eager countenance.
"Well… if you put it that way, I would be a fool to reject such an opportunity." In the end, to Veal's relief and the party behind him, Ashen briefly nodded.
For the next hour, they decided to iron out the details immediately.
When a question arose about the labor terms, Ashen turned briefly to the pink-haired woman beside him, exchanged a few quiet words, and returned with a counterpoint that refined the arrangement without rejecting it. Vael responded, adjusted, and offered a revised framing.
It went on like this for a while, and Vael found himself genuinely enjoying it. Negotiating with someone who listened was always more interesting than talking at a wall.
By the time the terms had taken their final shape, they had arrived at something that neither side could find a reasonable objection to. Ashen glanced at the pink-haired woman one last time. She gave a minimal nod.
"Happy alliance," he said.
Vael inclined his head again, the satisfaction well-managed. "Yes, Lord, to a lasting partnership."
Then the lord's eyes moved across the room and settled on the foxkin lady.
"Before we conclude," he said, "I'd like to request a private conversation with you. If you're willing."
The foxkin lady's expression sharpened with automatic caution.
Something of that must have shown, because Ashen's tone adjusted, the ease of it doing the work a disclaimer would have made clumsy.
"Alice and I," he said, glancing at the dark-haired woman beside him, who raised an eyebrow, "have had a long fascination with your race. She in particular." He paused. "We'd like to learn more, if you'd allow it."
The foxkin lady looked at him. Then at Alice. Then back at him.
A beat passed while she assembled the picture being presented to her.
Ah. So it's like that.
She had not expected the lord and his mate to have that particular variety of interest, but she had encountered stranger preferences in far shorter acquaintance. The empire's capital had cured her of most surprises in that department.
Her lips curved into a faint, almost sultry smile.
"Of course," she replied.
Though inwardly…
'Well… that's unexpectedly kinky.'
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Alice IMG