Lord Jarves received his daughter in his private study rather than the formal receiving room just as he had the last time they spoke.
Lyra easily noticed that it was deliberate. Everything her father did was carefully measured and planned. The choice of room was a message in itself. This conversation wasn't going to be one he wanted recorded or overheard by anyone regardless if it was their own private home. She sat in the chair across from his desk and waited while he finished going over the document in front of him, giving her the same focused patience she'd spent her whole childhood trying to learn from him.
He eventually turned to look at her, seeming older than when she'd left. Not dramatically or even physically but instead the type of age that comes from carrying something you can't share with anyone.
"Your report was quite thorough," he said without looking up.
"I tried to be accurate while keeping my report as informed as I could."
"You managed to accomplish that with your report." He began as he sat down his pen. "But that is not the same as thorough in this context." He looked at her now and she saw it immediately, the thing she'd been dreading finding ever since she crossed back into the capital. Not anger but resignation. "Valen's already spoken to the emperor. The scout who was part of your party returned and gave his own report that went through all the channels. Upon your return I had heard that the expeditionary force will begin assembling next week."
Lyra kept her hands still in her lap. "I thought my report—"
"Your report simply confirmed the value of what's there." Her father's voice was gentle in the way it only ever was when he was about to tell her something that would hurt. "That was its primary effect regardless of how you framed it and only further solidified the resolve and validity of the scout's report." He stood and moved to the window, looking down at the various buildings scattered across the capital. "What did you think would happen, Lyra? You described a settlement producing medical supplies, alcohol of unusual quality and the possibility of structural materials that grow themselves, all in unclaimed territory with no political protection and no military force." He paused. "You gave them a shopping list."
The words landed quietly.
"He deserves to be left alone," she said. She heard how it sounded even as she said it.
"Yes." Her father turned from the window. "He probably does but that is why you should have edited your reports and downplayed his value and the true nature of that place. Your report all but confirmed he had taken a piece of broken land and built something extraordinary, all in a place whose only interest for any of the empires was as a strategic buffer zone against the demon lands and no real use or purpose beyond that." He returned to his desk and sat down heavily, letting out a tired sigh. "The emperor doesn't see a person, Daughter. He sees a resource and a position that would be advantageous to himself and his powerbase. The Barrens under Imperial influence changes the entire balance of power and gives our own empire a better and stronger position, an ever so slight edge over the others." He picked up his pen, not to write but to hold between his fingers, a habit she knew he had formed as a means to gather his thoughts. "I warned you before you left that this assignment was complicated and I see I should have been more specific and told you clearly to edit your reports, to filter them."
"What will happen if he refuses them?"
Her father looked at her steadily with a small frown. "You know what will happen."
"He won't bend though," Lyra said. "I was sure my report made that fact clear. He's not someone who'll be impressed by a show of force or frightened into compliance. The knight tried a version of that and came back having been held in vines and lectured about manners." She paused, realizing she wouldn't be making any further progress on this matter, choosing to change the subject entirely.
"He was behind my brother's death. He even buried him, Father. Not out of respect, just because he thought it was the right thing to do." She heard how it sounded and kept going anyway. "He's not what Aldric's report no doubt made him out to be."
"I know." Her father's voice was quiet. "I read all of the reports including Jasper's. I also read Valen's summary that he had given to the emperor." He looked at her with an expression she hadn't seen from him often, something between sorrow and helplessness in a man who was almost never helpless. "I believe you and your report, about his character and potential, how he would be a better ally than enemy. I believe everything you wrote my dear daughter, but it changes nothing about what's already been set in motion."
Lyra looked at the desk between them. At the neat stacks of paper that represented the machinery of an empire that had been running long before either of them were born and would keep running long after.
"Can't you slow it down somehow?" she asked.
He weighed her words carefully before giving an imperceptible nod. "Only slightly. I have enough influence to affect the composition of the force and possibly who leads it if I pull enough strings." He told her before pausing. "But hardly enough to stop it or even consider trying to change the emperor's mind on this." He leaned forward, his voice growing softer. "Listen to me carefully. What I'm about to tell you I'm telling you as your father, not as a lord of this empire and I hope you can understand the difference."
She nodded slowly, somewhat worried and afraid.
"Don't go back there ahead of them. Whatever you're thinking about doing, don't. If you're seen as having compromised this operation before it starts, Valen will use it against you and our family and I won't be able to protect any of us from what would come after." His eyes held hers. "He's survived this long by being smarter than what's been sent at him. Trust that. Especially if he has survived increasing waves of beasts that you and your party that had a pair of hero's barely managed against."
Lyra was quiet for a long moment.
"You believe he will know they're coming?" she said finally with a furrowed brow. "Yes, and if your report is to be believed he will know they're coming long before they even get close, adapting to what he feels coming."
Something shifted in her father's expression that might have been relief. "Being able to do so will mean he will have time to make his own preparations if he hasn't begun doing so already." He sat back, eyes locking firmly onto her. "As do you."
A distance away, in a building in the inner area of the empire near the military leaders' district, Elara was in the middle of explaining to two other heroes why she thought the Empire was about to make a very large mistake but it wasn't going well.
"You spent three weeks in a wasteland and came back talking about a man who grows plants," said Rowan, the one they'd started calling the sword saint because he'd leaned into it hard. He was seventeen and extremely confident about absolutely everything. "I'm not sure why that requires a meeting."
"Because Rina and I were actually there," Elara said, keeping her patience. "And what we saw was not a man who grows plants you idiot! It was a fully functioning defensive system built by one person over a year that seems to be managing to hold off organized dungeon waves every single night, a wave we barely managed to stand against." She looked around the small room at the four other summoned faces watching her with varying levels of skepticism. "The Empire is planning on sending a force to take control of him. I'm telling you that's not going to go the way Valen seems to think it will."
"So you think he's someone rather powerful," said Cass, a girl who'd been given a healing class and spent most of her time being quietly furious about it. "The Empire has powerful people of its own though. I mean that's the whole point of it being recognized as an empire ya know."
She ignored that remark as best she could, ready to talk further. "He offered us a place there," Rina said from the corner before she could. She'd been quiet until now, looking at their reactions and attitude. "When we were staying at the village. He just offered it to us, no conditions beyond pulling your weight like everyone else, no debts, no catch and no other expectations."
The room shifted slightly.
"He doesn't know us though so why would he offer something like that to us?" Rowan asked skeptically.
"He knew Elara and I were summoned within about thirty seconds of meeting us," Rina said plainly. "But he didn't seem to know what that meant for us here, the politics of it, what we'd been used for till we explained it to her. When he found it out, he seemed a bit angry about it and then offered for us to stay." She paused. "I've been thinking about it since we got back."
Elara looked at her. They hadn't talked about this directly, not in so many words, but she'd been thinking about it too. Every day since the capital's walls had closed back around them, she'd been thinking about the village, about the mist and the singing flowers and the way the man who built it had spoken about his fallen with grief rather than glory. Taking pride in what he had built but at the same time not flaunting it.
"We can't go now though," she said quietly. "Not with the force assembling. It would look like desertion and they'd go after the others to make an example of them or make things far harder for them as a punishment for our actions." She looked around the room. "But I want everyone here to understand what our side is being sent against and why I think we should be paying very close attention to how it ends."
"And if it ends badly for the Empire?" Cass asked with little real interest.
Elara thought about what the dungeon had felt like from a distance. About the thing she could feel growing in it that wasn't just a dungeon anymore and shivered.
"It doesn't really matter. If we win, we will need to deal with the ancient dungeon and whatever is within it, and if we don't win, we end up weakening him and ourselves giving it an opening and opportunity," she said. "He's someone who's been fighting what's actually down there since before any of us arrived and this will give it an opening and create untold problems for us regardless of the outcome."
The room was quiet for a moment at that, seemingly considering her words with a few such as Rowan disregarding it entirely.
Outside the window the rest of the capital went about its business, unaware and unhurried, believing in the stale and worn tone it had fallen into for years upon years.