The advance of the Order of Sol was like a cauterizing brand on the forest. The air where they walked shimmered with holy energy, a hostile environment for any spirit or undead creature. Elias could feel their presence as a cleansing, painful pressure on the very edge of his domain, scrubbing the world of his influence.
He couldn't use Wraith Walk to scout them. His necro-steel golems, animated by death-energy, would be weakened and vulnerable in their presence. Standard fear tactics would be useless against men who welcomed martyrdom. The Hegemony's weapon was perfectly chosen.
But Kaelen the Spymaster had made one critical miscalculation. He had assumed the Ashen King was a creature of pure, simple undeath. Elias was not. He was a Geist-Binder, a Lord of the Wilder-Forge. He did not just command the dead. He commanded matter itself. And faith, as he was learning, was just another form of matter to be shaped.
He could not fight their holy fire with unholy shadow. So, he would fight their holy fire with a sanctified blight.
His plan began not in his forge, but in his garden. The hidden, magically-tended garden where he grew esoteric herbs. Fueled by the slow, steady trickle of Votive Essence from Sunstone, he began to cultivate a very specific type of fungus he had discovered deep in the Blackwood: the Ghost-Cap.
Ordinarily, the Ghost-Cap was a simple, pale mushroom. But his Lord of the Wilder-Forge ability allowed him to sense its true potential. When nourished with a specific blend of life-aspected energy (the prayers of Sunstone) and a catalyst of earth-aspected magic (his own Geist-Binder power), its properties changed. Its spores became potent, psychoactive agents. Not a poison, but a hallucinogen that preyed on a target's deepest convictions. A faith-drinker.
While his fungal crop grew, he set the stage. The Order of Sol was following a path that would lead them through a narrow, mist-choked valley. It was a natural bottleneck. He sent his Huscarl and other constructs there, not to fight, but to labor. They worked for days, subtly altering the landscape. They diverted streams to make the ground marshy and bog-like. They weakened the roots of ancient trees. They carved shallow, hidden channels in the earth. The valley became a carefully prepared deathtrap, its mechanisms hidden by the natural gloom.
On the eve of the Order's arrival at the valley, his Ghost-Caps were ready. He harvested them, their pale forms glowing faintly with the absorbed Votive Essence. He did not need to deliver them himself.
He commanded his Corvid-Mind. Hundreds of ravens descended upon his garden. Each took a single glowing cap in its beak. They were not mere birds anymore; they were a bomber squadron, each carrying a payload of weaponized spirituality.
As the Order of Sol, led by their zealous High Templar Theron, marched into the valley, the air grew thick with mist. The ground sucked at their boots. The ancient trees loomed like silent, disapproving gods.
"The shadow's taint is strong here," Theron declared, his voice ringing with righteous conviction. "Brothers! Let the Light of the Sun be your guide!" His templars raised their holy symbols, which glowed brightly, cutting through the gloom, but also casting long, dancing, distorted shadows.
And then, from the canopy above, the ravens released their cargo. Hundreds of Ghost-Caps rained down, not on the templars themselves, but into the hidden channels Elias's golems had carved. The soft fungi burst on impact, releasing clouds of near-invisible spores that were immediately wicked up by the thick, damp air of the valley.
The effect was not immediate. At first, there was nothing. But then, as the templars breathed in the spore-laden mist, their own faith began to betray them.
A young templar at the back of the column gasped, pointing a trembling finger. "Brother... your halo..." The man next to him seemed to be emitting a brilliant, divine light.
Another cried out, falling to his knees. The gnarled roots of a nearby tree now looked to him like the shimmering, golden steps to the solar sanctum.
High Templar Theron himself stopped, his eyes wide. In the shifting mists before him, he saw the blurry, incandescent form of a solar angel, its wings of fire spread wide, beckoning him forward.
The Ghost-Cap spores were not creating illusions from nothing. They were latching onto the templars' unshakable faith and amplifying it into cataclysmic, maddening hallucinations. They were seeing their own heaven, their own saints, their own divine rewards, laid out before them in the swampy valley. Their greatest strength—their zealotry—was now their greatest weakness.
Chaos erupted. Templars wandered off the path, chasing phantom saints into the bogs. They knelt before mossy rocks they believed were ancient prophets. They began arguing with each other, each one seeing a different, equally profound divine vision. Their perfect, unified column dissolved into a rabble of ecstatic madmen.
Theron, completely captivated by his angelic vision, strode forward, heedless of his men. "I am coming, herald!" he cried, his voice choked with joyous tears. "I am worthy!"
He walked directly into the tripwire Elias's golems had set.
The ancient, weakened tree groaned and crashed down, not on Theron, but directly in the path, separating him from the main body of his now-enraptured army.
Alone, and cut off, Theron saw his angelic vision flicker and dissolve, its divine light replaced by the hulking, monstrous form of Elias's iron-and-bone Huscarl, which had been waiting silently for its cue.
Before the High Templar could even react, Elias made his move. He didn't send his Huscarl to attack. From a half-mile away, hidden in a makeshift command post, he activated Corpse Marionette, seizing control of the Huscarl's body.
His avatar strode forward. It did not swing its mace-fists. It simply reached out and grabbed the stunned, disoriented High Templar, its grip like an iron cage. Then, it turned, dragging its captive, and began to march. Not to kill him, but to deliver him.
The destination was a place Elias had prepared: the great, weeping wound in the forest that was the site of the original Battle of the Sunstone Clearing. He marched the captured Templar into the center of that blighted field, an arena of his past victory, and forced him to his knees.
Then Elias, in his own body, emerged from the treeline. He walked toward the captured zealot, a dark king surveying a prisoner of war. The rest of the Order of Sol was still miles away, lost in their spore-induced raptures.
High Templar Theron looked up, his eyes finally clear of the hallucination, and saw the truth. The dark armor, the terrifying presence, the malevolent power. The arch-demon.
"Abomination," Theron spat, his faith returning as a bulwark of hate. "You use tricks and shadows! Face the light and be cleansed!"
Elias stopped before him. He did not feel anger. He did not feel hatred. He felt only a vast, weary certainty. He reached out and placed a hand on the Templar's head.
He didn't use Soul Whisper to show him fear. He didn't use necrotic energy to harm him. He used the warm, pure Votive Essence flowing into him from Sunstone's prayers. He pushed a wave of the life-aspected, holy-feeling energy into the Templar's mind.
And he gave the zealot the one thing he was not prepared for. The truth.
Not the whole truth. But a truth. He showed Theron visions of Sunstone. Of Elara as a lost child. Of the prowlers hunting her. He showed him the Gutter-Rot plague, the villagers dying. And he showed him his own hand, dark and terrible, intervening every time. Saving, healing, protecting. He showed him a monster performing acts of selfless good.
Theron convulsed, his mind reeling. These visions felt... holy. They resonated with the life-energy Elias was feeding him. Yet they depicted acts performed by the arch-demon before him. Good and Evil, Light and Dark, all crashing together in his mind in an irreconcilable paradox. It was an assault not on his body, but on the very foundation of his rigid, binary faith.
"What... what is this heresy?" Theron choked out, sweat beading on his forehead. "What are you?"
Elias withdrew his hand and looked down at the broken fanatic. His voice was cold, quiet, and carried the weight of years of lonely watchfulness.
"I am the King of this place. And your light has no jurisdiction here."
He had not defeated the Order of Sol with darkness. He had defeated them with their own light, twisted into a weapon of madness. And he had crushed their leader not with demonic power, but with a simple, devastating, undeniable truth: that the nature of good and evil was a far more complicated thing than his dogma had ever allowed him to imagine.