Tharos did not need armies to choose Halruun and Sereth Vale.
He needed arithmetic.
From his vantage—far above prayer, above ritual, above the crude immediacy of blood—nations were not peoples but pressures. Populations rose and fell like tides. Surplus youth created friction. Aging strength created fear. When those forces leaned toward one another long enough, war became not an event but a correction.
Halruun could not afford peace because peace had made it fertile.
Its fields were full, its trade routes open, its children numerous. Young men filled taverns and training yards with restless energy, speaking of glory with mouths that had never tasted famine. Officers slept with maps beside their beds, dreaming not of defense but of arrows pushing borders outward. Peace, to Halruun, felt like stagnation disguised as safety.
Sereth Vale could not afford peace because peace reminded it of time.
Its streets were orderly, its laws precise, its people disciplined to the point of severity. But the faces in its councils were older now. Veterans outnumbered recruits. Every census felt like a quiet accusation. Peace meant waiting—waiting to become irrelevant, waiting for younger neighbors to notice weakness.
Tharos did not invent these truths.
He arranged them.
He tilted Halruun toward confidence—not the foolish kind, but the quiet certainty that expansion was inevitable. No visions of burning cities. No commands etched in fire. Just dreams that lingered after waking: banners farther east, borders that felt right, victories that seemed like corrections rather than conquests.
Officers woke believing these ideas were their own.
In Sereth Vale, he did the opposite.
Dreams there were crowded, restless. Parents dreamed of sons marching east and never returning. Elders dreamed of maps shrinking, of treaties rewritten without their consent. Judges dreamed of laws ignored by neighbors who no longer feared consequence.
Fear did not paralyze Sereth Vale.
It disciplined it.
Neither side was lied to.
That was Tharos's art.
Truth, after all, is pliable. It bends under emphasis. When you choose which weight a mind carries into the morning, you choose the direction it walks.
Before hatred could flower, Tharos tended the soil.
War did not begin with swords.
It began with ledgers.
A merchant guild in Halruun found its ships delayed—not sunk, not seized, merely slowed. Storms arrived out of season, not violent enough to claim divine notice, just inconvenient enough to miss contracts by days. Grain arrived late. Prices rose.
In Sereth Vale, grain arrived on time—but iron did not. A mine collapsed, nothing dramatic, just enough to reduce output. The shortage forced rationing. Rationing bred rumor. Rumor bred accusation.
Taxes were adjusted in Halruun to stabilize markets. The reform failed by a narrow margin, splitting the council into factions that accused one another of sabotage. In Sereth Vale, a similar reform passed—but only barely—convincing half the population that their leaders were gambling with survival.
Tharos never touched a coin.
He touched probability.
Scarcity sharpened identity.
Identity demanded enemies.
By the time merchants began funding militias "for protection," the shape of war already existed. It only needed a narrative.
That was where memory came in.
Tharos leaned gently on the Moon of Memory—not enough to fracture it, not enough to draw the attention of greater gods. Just enough to reduce the friction of forgetting.
Old grievances resurfaced without announcement.
A Halruuni ballad once sung with irony—mocking Sereth Vale's rigid discipline—was remembered as a song of warning. Its lyrics were quoted in taverns, then in speeches. A line about "chains disguised as law" took on new weight.
In Sereth Vale, a massacre from three generations past was "rediscovered" by a young historian seeking patronage. He found records that had always existed but had been politely ignored. The details were dry. The implications were not.
Parents told children stories they had not heard since childhood.
Stories are memory's sharpest weapon.
They carry no footnotes.
They feel inherited.
Soon, conversations changed.
Halruuni traders began referring to Sereth Vale as "inevitable resistance." Sereth Vale's officials began speaking of Halruun's "pattern of encroachment." No one used the word war yet.
They did not need to.
Tharos watched it all with the patience of a god who understood that suffering scaled best when it was self-inflicted.
And yet—there was discomfort.
Not doubt.
Interference.
Kael.
Tharos had felt him enter Halruun like a stone dropped into still water. Not a rival god. Not a challenger. Something worse.
A variable that did not fit the equation.
Kael refused Halruun's incentives—coin, status, indulgence, absolution. Refusal was disruptive. It created comparison. Officers who had accepted began asking themselves why. Soldiers who had drowned fear in bodies and drink wondered what clarity felt like without intoxication.
Tharos corrected for it.
Subtle adjustments. A recruiter's words landing more cleanly elsewhere. A rumor spreading faster than Kael's refusals could counter it. The god did not need Kael silenced.
He needed him irrelevant.
But Kael moved on.
Toward Sereth Vale.
That import mattered.
Because gods like Tharos depended on asymmetry. They ruled by imbalance—one side hungry, the other afraid. Kael did not amplify either emotion cleanly. He disrupted both.
A man who would not fight, yet would not submit. Who refused worship, yet drew attention. Who acted without claiming authority.
That was dangerous.
Tharos adjusted again, reinforcing memory, sharpening fear, accelerating timelines. If war came fast enough, Kael would be drowned out by necessity. Once blood spilled, no one listened to refusal.
Gods did not fear morality.
They feared delays.
As Halruun's armies began to assemble and Sereth Vale's defenses tightened, Tharos extended his influence just enough to ensure the first clash would be ambiguous—no clear villain, no decisive victory.
A war neither side could quickly end.
Perfect.
And somewhere on the road between them, Kael walked under a sky that did not answer him, carrying the quiet pain of understanding that the greatest violence in the world was not done by blades—
—but by hands that never appeared at all.