For a week, Elias did nothing but watch. His kingdom had been invaded by a concept—Progress—and its high priest was the merchant, Silas Marwood.
Through Wraith Walk and the Corvid-Mind, Elias observed Marwood's masterful campaign. The merchant did not push or threaten. He charmed. He opened one of his chests and gifted the village children small, brightly colored boiled sweets, a confection they had never experienced. The delight on their faces was a potent poison. He demonstrated a Hegemony steel axe, felling a tree in half the time it took a village hunter with a flint axe. The men watched with undisguised envy. He showed the women bolts of soft, dyed cloth, a luxury beyond their wildest dreams compared to their rough-spun wool and cured hides.
Marwood was not selling goods; he was selling a vision of an easier life. And against the harsh reality of their existence, it was an irresistible lure.
Jorn, the chieftain, remained resistant, his loyalty to their old ways and his fear of their dark protector acting as an anchor. But Elias could sense the tide of public opinion turning. He could hear it in the whispers his ravens gathered. "The merchant's salt would preserve our meat through the winter…" "Imagine a steel needle that doesn't break…" "Jorn is old. He fears change…"
The most painful observation was Elara. Through the Soul Anchor, he felt her fascination. Silas Marwood, recognizing her unique status as the Warden-Touched, paid her special attention. He gave her a small, leather-bound book with blank pages and a piece of charcoal for writing. For Elara, who had an insatiable curiosity, it was a treasure beyond price. Elias felt the spike of her joy through the anchor, a sensation that was both wonderful and agonizing. Marwood was using her, the symbol of the Blackwood's spirit, to sanction his intrusion.
Elias understood he couldn't fight Progress head-on. To forbid it would make him a tyrant and Marwood a martyr. He had to discredit the priest, not the religion. He needed to prove that Marwood's "progress" was, in fact, a poison. He needed to let the villagers see the greed behind the smile for themselves.
His plan began with the subtlest of manipulations. He started with the hunters. Using his Wraith Walk, he would observe the hunting parties. When they were tracking a deer, Elias would subtly guide it away from their path. When they checked their traps, he would have already scared the game away. His interference was invisible, a ghost of bad luck. After a few days, the hunters started returning with less and less meat. Their flint axes seemed heavier, their hunts longer.
Simultaneously, Silas Marwood's offerings seemed ever more tempting. His gifts of salted meat and preserved rations went from being a luxury to a necessity. He was creating a famine, and Marwood was providing the bread. The pressure on Jorn to accept the Hegemony's charter mounted.
But this was only the first part of the plan. Now he needed to introduce the venom.
Silas Marwood had hired two village men, eager for a taste of Hegemony coin, to guard his trade goods at night. Elias focused on one of them, a man named Fendrel, whose life signature pulsed with a faint but persistent greed.
Late one night, Elias used Soul Whisper, weaving a complex dream into Fendrel's sleeping mind. He didn't show the man monsters or spirits. He showed him gold. Piles of it. He showed him the admiration of the other villagers, the best cuts of meat, the finest clothes. And in the dream, the source of this wealth was a small, locked chest that Silas Marwood kept under his own cot. The dream imbued the chest with an aura of immense, life-altering value.
Fendrel awoke in a cold sweat, his heart pounding, the dream's desire clinging to him like a physical sensation.
Elias spent the next two days reinforcing the obsession. Through whispers on the wind that only Fendrel seemed to hear (the key is in his boot…) and glimpses of imagined riches caught out of the corner of his eye, he nurtured the seed of greed he had planted.
On the third night, Fendrel cracked. While his partner slept, he stole the key from the sleeping merchant's boot, silently unlocked the small chest, and looked inside.
It contained no gold. Only a small, leather-bound ledger and several official-looking documents bearing the seal of the Iron Hegemony. Disappointed but desperate, Fendrel took the ledger, hoping it held some secret to wealth, and slipped back out into the night.
This was what Elias had been waiting for. The next morning, Marwood awoke and immediately knew his personal ledger was missing. His easy smile vanished, replaced by a mask of cold fury. He dragged Fendrel and the other guard before Jorn and the assembled village.
"There is a thief among you!" Marwood's voice, once so charming, was now sharp and accusatory. "My personal ledger, containing sensitive Hegemony trade routes and pricing information, has been stolen! This is an act of aggression! A violation of the trust I placed in this village!"
Fendrel, of course, denied everything, but his fear was a palpable stink. The villagers looked at each other with suspicion. The easy camaraderie of Sunstone was beginning to curdle.
"Until the ledger is returned," Marwood declared, his voice ringing through the silent clearing, "there will be no more gifts. The axe is forfeit. The food is mine. You will see what life is like without the Hegemony's generosity."
He was trying to turn the village against the unknown thief, to use social pressure to recover his book. But Elias was already a step ahead.
That evening, Elias used Wraith Walk to find Fendrel, who had hidden the ledger under a loose floorboard in his hut. Elias couldn't touch it. But he could influence others. He found Elara, who was practicing writing in her own book near the central fire. He sent a single, gentle whisper into her mind, a simple, friendly image: a picture of Fendrel looking worriedly at a specific floorboard in his hut.
Elara frowned, the image feeling like a sudden, strange daydream. But her curiosity, and her subconscious connection to the Warden's will, was strong. Making an excuse, she walked casually past Fendrel's hut and, through a gap in the wall, saw the man nervously checking the exact floorboard from her vision.
The pieces clicked together in her clever mind.
She did not confront him. She was wiser than that. She went straight to Jorn and told the old chieftain what she had "seen."
Jorn, armed with this knowledge, confronted Fendrel in private. The man broke down instantly, confessed, and produced the ledger.
But Jorn did not return it to Marwood. He sat by the fire that night and had Elara, one of the few who could read and write passably, go through the book with him.
The contents were devastating. It was not a trade ledger. It was a resource assessment. "...soil composition suitable for large-scale cash crop farming (requires displacement of local population)... dense old-growth forest (high value timber)... tribal population docile and easily manipulated, prime for indenture or conscription after economic dependence is achieved... the Warden 'spirit' is likely a local hermit or shaman, can be eliminated with a small, professional force once a foothold is established..." It laid bare the entire, cynical, predatory strategy of the Iron Hegemony.
The next morning, Jorn, with the silent backing of the entire village, approached Silas Marwood. He threw the ledger at the merchant's feet.
"We have seen the heart of your 'progress,' merchant," Jorn said, his voice cold as a winter stone. "It is a black and greedy heart. Take your trinkets and your poison smiles and leave this place. The people of Sunstone are not for sale."
Silas Marwood's face turned pale, then red with fury. He had been outmaneuvered, exposed. The barometer of his greed had shattered. He packed his remaining goods, his eyes promising retribution, and left the village under the stony, silent glares of the people he had tried to colonize.
Elias had won. He had manipulated events from the shadows, turning the merchant's own greed against him, and had used the villagers' own intelligence to let them discover the truth for themselves. He had not acted the tyrant; he had acted the catalyst.
But as he watched Marwood retreat back into the forest, a new, cold reality settled in. Silas Marwood was not just a merchant. He was the harbinger of a nation. The Iron Hegemony would not take this insult lightly. They now had a reason to send more than a small squad. They would come with an army.
He had won the battle for the soul of Sunstone. But in doing so, he had all but guaranteed a war for its very existence.