Veridia stared into the campfire, its flames dancing in her pupils, a hungry, living thing that promised warmth but offered no sustenance. The constant, low-grade thrum of the Sieve was a familiar ache behind her ribs, but now it was accompanied by a new, maddening irritation—a faint, psychic hum, like a discordant note held indefinitely. It was the feeling of her sister's life force, a chain of shared sensation linking her to the miserable creature across the fire. Every flicker of anger, every pang of hunger Seraphine felt was a faint, sour echo in her own mind.
Seraphine, tangible and simmering with a fury that had curdled into quiet resentment, scraped a goblin-made dagger against a whetstone. The sound was a rhythmic, furious *shink, shink, shink* that set Veridia's teeth on edge. Stripped of her ethereal glamour and the constant validation of the Network, Seraphine was forced to contend with the grit of the mortal world. The weight of the dagger was an insult to a hand that had never held anything heavier than a wine flute. The mortal air, thick with moisture and the scent of decay, felt like a suffocating blanket. The silence between them wasn't peaceful; it was a cold war, a cage of mutual misery they were both trapped in.
"Another pathetic little Boon might get us a hot meal," Seraphine finally said, her voice raw, stripped of its usual honeyed poison. She didn't look up from her work. "But it won't solve our current… codependency issue."
"Another small-scale spectacle is pointless," Veridia shot back, her gaze still locked on the fire. It was the first time either of them had verbally acknowledged the shared, intolerable truth. The Encounter-to-Boon cycle was a broken machine. Their prison was each other, and it would take more than a spectral blade or a whisper of passage to break these chains.
Veridia's eyes lifted from the flames, scanning the oppressive darkness of the forest that surrounded their small pool of light. Every shadow could hold a threat, but one shadow felt longer than the rest. "He's still out there," she murmured, the thought a cold stone in her gut. "The Vowed."
Seraphine scoffed, a sound laced with her old, practiced disdain. "Castian is a boring subplot. A monster-of-the-week with a tragic backstory and a single personality trait." But her hands paused for a fraction of a second, the scraping of steel faltering. The point had landed. They were vulnerable, tethered together like two fighting dogs on a single leash. Hiding in the woods was not a strategy; it was a slow, shared death sentence. They couldn't afford to be hunted. They had to change the entire game.
A manic gleam entered Seraphine's eyes as she set the dagger aside. She fell back on her core skill, her entire posture shifting from that of a miserable exile to a producer on the verge of a breakthrough. "The Patrons have grown accustomed to a certain level of spectacle," she began, her voice regaining its smooth, analytical purr. "To get a Boon of the magnitude we need—something legendary, something that can *edit reality*—we can't just stage another good encounter. We can't just top last season."
She leaned forward, her face illuminated by the firelight, alive with a terrible creativity. "We have to produce a season finale. A season finale for the entire world."
Veridia almost laughed at the sheer arrogance of it, the absurdity of a production meeting held in the middle of a filthy forest. But her mind, cold and tactical, was already turning the idea over, seeing the shape of the strategy beneath the ridiculous jargon. Her sister spoke of ratings and narrative arcs; Veridia saw weapons and campaigns. She took the abstract pitch and gave it teeth.
"We can't just fight a bigger monster," Veridia said, her voice a low counterpoint to her sister's excitement. "That's a brute's solution, and the Patrons have seen it a dozen times. We need to create a *threat*. A threat so significant, so absolute, that our victory seems like the only alternative to universal annihilation." She paused, letting the weight of the concept settle between them. "We don't *find* a threat, Seraphine. We manufacture one."
The moment hung in the air, charged and silent. Then, Seraphine's lips parted, a slow, dawning smile spreading across her face. She saw it. The sheer, magnificent, spiteful genius of it. It was a narrative of unparalleled scale.
"An apocalypse," she whispered, the words a reverent hiss. Her eyes were wide, gleaming with the thrill of the ultimate production. "A world-ending crisis, starring the two souls brave enough to stop it. The ratings… the ratings would be cosmic. The investment from Patrons would be unprecedented."
Veridia added the final, cynical layer, her own voice laced with venomous certainty. "And they will shower us with Boons, not out of admiration, but out of self-interest. They'll do anything to ensure their favorite show doesn't get cancelled by the end of the world."
For the first time, they looked at each other not as sisters, not as rivals, but as collaborators in a symphony of glorious, world-burning spite.
They unfurled a scavenged map onto the packed earth between them, its surface stained with mud and old blood. Seraphine's finger hovered over the chaotic territories of the Slag Crown before dismissing them with a wave. "The Dead Air Collective is out. Too chaotic. There's no narrative cohesion, it's just a mob of beasts led by pragmatists. You can't write a script for a forest fire."
Veridia nodded in agreement, tracing the jagged mountain peaks. "And they're too opportunistic. Kherzog would try to capture us, bargain with us. It would ruin the spectacle and bog us down in tedious negotiations." She looked at her sister. "We need an enemy who is organized, powerful, and ideologically rigid. An enemy who will play their part perfectly without even knowing they've been cast."
Her finger slid across the map, leaving a faint trail in the grime, until it came to rest on the sprawling, orderly territory of the Silver Coalition. A cold, predatory interest sparked in her eyes. She remembered the intel she had gathered, the whispers of the man who ruled this kingdom of men—a fanatic obsessed with purity, order, and a deep, unshakeable hatred of all demonkind.
"King Theron Ironhand," she said, the name tasting like a weapon.
Seraphine leaned over the map, her gaze following Veridia's. A slow, cruel smile spread across her face as she grasped the beautiful, terrible logic of the choice.
"Oh, he's perfect," she purred, the sound a low, vicious thing. "He has the armies, the fanaticism, the unshakeable belief in his own righteousness. He's the perfect villain for our story because he'll never believe he is one. He'll see our manipulations as proof of his own crusade."
Veridia looked up from the map, her eyes glinting in the firelight, reflecting the flames like two burning embers.
"He has spent his life building a fortress against chaos," she said, her voice a whisper of pure venom. "It's time we taught him the entertainment value of watching it burn."