"What do you mean by that?" Idom asked, bewildered. Was Zigeyr also a follower of Yani?
"I am not a follower." Zigeyr's voice was soft, but every syllable carried an edge. "I am the Guardian of the Yani religion."
Idom went still. "…" He had expected many things, but not this. "There's nothing about you in our sacred texts."
"Of course not." Zigeyr's dark eyes bore down on him. "I do not want to be in any scripture. Your founder made a bargain — clever man. He traded me protection in exchange for worship. I agreed to guard Yani religion for fifty thousand years; in return, your people would call me one of their gods. Many incidents recorded in your canon are linked to me. I simply remain unnamed."
Idom's brow creased. "Our founder… he was a god?" The question trembled with disbelief. "Is he still alive?"
Zigeyr's amusement flickered into annoyance, but he answered, "He was a god — small, cunning. No, he is not alive in the way you mean. He left a contract. That contract binds me."
"All right — enough about your myths." Zigeyr rose, impatient. "Back to your country. Three states have fallen. The objective is simple: take them back, then wipe the rebels out."
Idom inhaled and began to outline a plan, voice steadying as a leader at work. "First we will mobilize the army—"
Zigeyr cut him off. "Hold. What are you saying? What plans?" His patience thinned into irritation.
Idom blinked. "Aren't we supposed to plan how to retake the states? To defeat the Malsic insurgents?"
Zigeyr smiled — not kindly. "You've misunderstood. It's not we, Prime Minister. It's me. If I depend on your armies, it will take months, years, perhaps decades. I do not do decades."
Idom flinched at the tone — humiliation rose in him. "So how long will it take, then?"
Zigeyr laughed lowly. "You've thought of me as a small god. Child, I am among the strongest in the universe. From the moment I stepped on your soil I saw your whole country and every rebel outpost." He spread his hands as if the map lay between them. "I've already sent my subordinates. They will purge every base. It won't take them more than an hour. You only need to sit and obey."
Idom's eyes widened. He had underestimated divine power; he had imagined miracles in parables, not a god sweeping across the land like a storm. He bowed his chin, forcing his authority back into place. "May I… see it?"
"Of course." Zigeyr snapped his fingers.
Screens flickered into being above the desk — translucent panels hovering in the air, each one a window onto a different rebel encampment. Grainy live feeds showed ramshackle bunkers, scattered weapons, and men at watch. At first the footage was ordinary: guards pacing, sentries murmuring into radios.
Then something streaked across the sky in each frame — tiny, blazing dots descending at impossible speed. The cameras tracked them; the men on the ground tracked them. A ripple of alarm ran through the rebels' ranks.
"What are those?" a sentry shouted on one feed."Monsters!" another voice cried on a different panel."Run!" someone screamed.
Panic should have set them in motion, but terror froze them instead. Their bodies betrayed them; their legs would not carry them away. The sky dots closed the distance and resolved into shapes — not animals and not machines, but hordes of humanoid figures moving with jerking, unnatural grace. Faces where faces should be were absent or smoothed into featureless planes; limbs were too long, joints bent wrong. They descended like a falling plague.
On the screens, the rebels' bravado collapsed. Men dropped their rifles, hands clawing at air as the first of the things touched down among them. Screams swallowed radios. The feeds filled with chaos and then silence, the kind of silence that follows total annihilation.
Zigeyr watched without moving. "They are not human," he said simply. "They obey me."
Idom stared at the hovering projections, every plan he'd been forming disintegrating into a single terrible image. The hour that Zigeyr promised was already unfolding in plain sight — and in that instant the prime minister understood that he had little more than a seat on a stage where a god was writing the script.