The Veiled Star did not answer confusion with silence.
It answered with history.
Kael felt it as a pressure behind his thoughts—not a command, not pain, but a reminder. Images surfaced unbidden: cities before Virell, names he had never learned, rulers who had made choices much like his… and then faltered.
"They all reached this point," Aurelian said later, when Kael described the visions. Her voice carried a grief older than the city. "The moment when restraint feels like weakness."
Michael sat on the table's edge, arms folded. "And that's where the system usually wins. It reframes humility as failure."
Seris listened in silence. When Kael finished, she spoke quietly. "You're not them."
"No," Kael agreed. "But I'm standing where they stood."
That night, a delegation arrived from the north—not from Saint Varric, but from one of the towns his host had passed through. Farmers, millers, a single exhausted magistrate.
"He didn't burn us," the magistrate said. "He didn't bless us either. He took our grain and told us it was faith."
Seris's jaw tightened. "That's extortion."
"Yes," the man said. "But wrapped in certainty."
Kael closed his eyes briefly. He could feel the pull—how easy it would be to march north, to demonstrate the difference between force and choice.
Michael watched him carefully. "This is where the system expects you to escalate."
Kael opened his eyes. "Then we won't."
He turned to the delegation. "What do you want?"
The magistrate hesitated. "To not be alone."
Kael nodded. "You aren't."
He issued orders—not for troops, but for caravans. Grain from Virell's reserves. Scribes to document, healers to travel openly with seals of neutrality. Witnesses instead of warriors.
Seris stared at him after the delegation left. "You're spending political capital."
"I know," Kael said.
"You may not get it back."
Kael smiled faintly. "Then it was never mine."
Days passed. Reports came in—not of decisive victories, but of quiet shifts. Towns along Varric's route began refusing grain seizures—not violently, but collectively. He could punish one village. Not ten.
On the coast, the silver-voiced woman disbanded her inner circle and vanished. No prophecy. No last miracle. Just absence.
Michael read the final report twice, then laughed softly. "That's it," he said. "She opted out."
Aurelian looked skyward. "The Star never planned for that."
Kael felt the warmth within him change again—not shrinking, not growing, but lightening. For the first time, it felt optional.
That realization frightened him more than any threat so far.
"What happens," Kael asked quietly, "when I don't need it anymore?"
Michael met his gaze. "Then it stops owning you."
Outside, the bells rang once more—not in warning, not in summons.
In celebration of a festival that had existed long before conquerors, systems, or stars.
Kael listened to the sound and understood the final truth beginning to form:
The greatest conquest was not land, or power, or even fate—
—but leaving something unclaimed, and letting the world decide what to do with the space.