Cornelia Arde was never a reasonable woman.
A bully with anger issues came closer. More often than not she was petty, vengeful, and vindictive, and only in her later years had she learned to coat those qualities in enough sweetness that people could swallow them. The sugar was genuine enough but the spice underneath had never changed.
So how could such a woman tolerate being pushed around by monsters for two centuries?
She could not. She had never been able to.
It had not taken long after taking post for her patience to snap entirely. She wanted to burn every last Narkal to the ground; the desire was clean and simple and very easy to understand. The problem was equally simple. Individual power, however overwhelming, meant nothing against a race measured in hundreds of billions. The only path to actually removing those creatures was a unified march; every human soldier, every domain, moving as one toward the same objective.
That required the Council's blessing, or the agreement of every Sin Lord.
The Council was a fool's errand. She went to her fellow Sin Lords instead.
She had been certain they'd understand. Beings of such pride and power; how could they have endured this long without the same fury building in their chests? They must have their own plans, she had thought. They must be waiting for someone to say it first.
When she brought up the proposal, they agreed immediately.
Cornelia had been happy for exactly as long as it took to see the reinforcements arrive.
Not a single Sin Lord appeared in person. What she received was a ragtag collection of the elderly, the disabled, and the criminal; men with charges too disgusting to ignore but not enough to merit execution, scraped from the bottom of every domain and handed to her with polite smiles. The most able among them were scum. The rest were barely able.
She understood then what that immediate agreement had actually meant.
They had not sympathized with her position at the front. They had seen an opportunity to have someone enthusiastic take out their trash, and they had smiled and handed her the bag. The pity in their eyes during the vote had not been for her burden. It had been for her naivety.
Full of resentment, stubbornness, and spite, she took their discards and marched into the devastated Pride Domain anyway.
Three months later, she came back with a hundred men where a million had set out.
It was the most humiliated she had ever felt in her life. It was also, in its way, clarifying.
Her fellow Sin Lords did not share her vision; they could not. They knew the facts from a distance, and distance made everything abstract. They had never lived at this wall, never watched it crack, never counted the bodies every morning. Out of sight meant out of urgency, and what was not urgent was, in the end, not their problem.
Counterattacking the Narkals was a thankless undertaking. It cost men, resources, and political capital. It weakened whoever led it. For what? A world free of Narkals was a concept so foreign to the current generation that it barely registered as imaginable; the creatures were as much a fixture of life as weather. The Bloodwall held, as it always had. The domains continued, as they always had. Why disturb anything?
Cornelia had come close to despair when she finally understood how completely ordinary people had made their peace with it. The idea of counterattacking became something she stopped raising; it turned into a kind of private wound she did not touch in public.
But it never went out. It sat deep within her, patiently waiting.
And that sometimes let her imagine someone who held the same belief; someone who saw the status quo as the slow suffocation that it was, and who had both the drive and the means to do something about it.
Then this man had walked through her door.
The man who kept the Saintess at his side, who had the genius inventor as his woman, who bore the Kingmaker's direct instruction in his bones. The man who carried the Lord of Lust's inexplicable goodwill. And behind him, the woman with the most beguiling, coaxing, honeyed silver tongue Cornelia had ever encountered.
And he had stood in her office and screamed at her and questioned her courage, in a voice eerily close to the one she had used before the assembled Sin Lords two centuries ago.
'It's just so... so good... ah, I just want to eat you, Ashen. Hehe...'
"Hey. Are you listening?"
"Hm? Yes." Her expression remained perfectly placid; the sort of face that made suspecting wild internal thoughts an impossible conclusion.
"So, as I was saying, you have far more information about how this goes than I do. I'd like to know the scale of what we're dealing with."
"Hmm."
Cornelia uncrossed her legs, switched them, let one heel dangle in the air. She pressed a finger to her chin and considered.
"We need the Council's permission first. Outwardly, the human side is unified; every soldier belongs to the race, not to any individual domain. If you want to stake their lives on an offensive campaign, you have to have some form of sanction."
She smiled, faintly rueful.
"But that road is a thorny one I wouldn't wish on my enemies, let alone my closest ally."
"So what do you propose?"
"Convince the Sin Lords. With their votes, they can veto any Council decision outright and bypass the whole apparatus. That's the cleaner path." She paused. "The real challenge is getting them to take you seriously, because if you don't, they'll play you exactly as they played me. I'm speaking from experience."
Ashen nodded slowly. "I understand. For that, I already have a plan."
"Oh?" She leaned forward. "What is it?"
"This."
Lucia, who had spent the last while contentedly watching her man negotiate with a Sin Lord as she sipped wine, felt a hand snake around her shoulder. Before she could register it, she was pulled into a firm embrace and turned to face the room like an exhibit.
"All we have to do is support her and leave the talking to my dear partner here." Ashen's grin was wickedly satisfied as he presented the thoroughly caught-off-guard Lucia to the other two women. "Then we sit back and enjoy the show. Hehe."
"..."
"..."