The Game Where I Was Rank One Became Reality

Chapter 273: What Lies Beyond the Strait

Rael found the pamphlet in the latrine.

There was no shaft of light illuminating ancient text, no wise mentor handing down forbidden knowledge, no moment designed by narrative to feel significant. A pamphlet, folded twice, left on the bench in the garrison latrine by someone who had presumably been reading it during a private moment and had then forgotten it in the way that soldiers forgot things: completely, immediately, and because something louder had happened outside.

Rael picked it up because it was going to get wet.

He was twenty-four, from Millhaven — a town far enough north of Ashenveil that the Korthane embassy had been a rumor and the Morreth war had been a story grandmothers told to scare children into eating vegetables. He’d enlisted because the garrison offered a meal contract better than anything Millhaven’s fishing docks provided, and because his father had said, in the blunt way of a man who measured the world by what he could see from his own dock, that a uniform was worth more than a net in a world where wars happened.

He hadn’t seen a war yet. He’d seen drills, and the inside of a barracks, and more tunnel-combat diagrams than he’d previously believed could exist, and once — once — he’d been allowed to fire a training fire-tube on the range outside Ironhold, which had bruised his shoulder and made his ears ring for two days and had, in the privacy of his own skull, been the single most exciting moment of his life.

The pamphlet was twelve pages. Cotton-rag paper, cinnaite ink, the same press-uniform lettering that Rael had seen on the catechism copies the Crucible distributed during Ordinsday services. But this wasn’t doctrine. The header read:

ON THE NATURE AND EXTENT OF THE KORTHANE HEGEMONY

Prepared by the Office of the Grand Ordinator for the education of Dominion military personnel

Distribution: Garrison libraries, officer reading rooms, approved field stations

Rael sat on the bench. The latrine was empty. He read.

The pamphlet was written in the careful, deliberate prose of someone who had been instructed to inform without alarming, which had the predictable effect of being more alarming than any alarm could have been.

It began with geography. The Korthane Hegemony occupied the eastern continent — a landmass connected to Aerthys by the Strait of Embers, a narrow channel that Captain Rellis Wavecrest had crossed in a three-month voyage roughly ninety years ago. The continent was mountainous in the interior, temperate along the coasts, with ancient river valleys supporting densely settled populations. Multiple major gods operated within the Hegemony’s structure, organized under the supreme authority of a deity referred to as the Arbiter.

Rael had heard the name. Everyone had heard the name, in the way that everyone in a fishing village has heard of the ocean — abstractly, as a fact about the world that doesn’t touch your daily life.

The pamphlet touched his daily life.

The Arbiter’s Hegemony encompasses an estimated population of approximately 50,000,000 believers.

Rael read the number. Read it again. His lips moved — not because he was illiterate, but because some numbers required the mouth to participate in their comprehension, the way some weights required both hands.

Fifty million.

The Sovereign Dominion had roughly three million. The number was printed on the garrison’s quarterly bulletin, displayed in the mess hall beneath the Cog-and-Flame banner: believers of the Iron Sovereign, serving the Design. Rael had walked past it every morning for eight months. Three million had felt large. Three million had felt like a nation, a real nation, a power that built fire-tubes and printed books and put soldiers underground to fight things that burned.

Fifty million was not a nation. Fifty million was an inevitability wearing a diplomatic title.

He kept reading.

The pamphlet was careful. It noted the trade terms — a 7% adjustment in exchange for "cultural and scholarly exchange," which sounded reasonable until Rael read the next paragraph and learned that the cultural exchange had placed Korthane scholars inside Dominion academies. Inside. Learning how things worked. Watching what the Dominion built. And sending, presumably, reports back across the Strait.

The pamphlet did not say this. The pamphlet said exchange of knowledge for mutual benefit. But Rael was a fisherman’s son, and fishermen understood nets in a way that pamphlets did not.

He read about the Arbiter’s domains: Law, Commerce, Order, Bio, Architecture. Five domains with a combined infrastructure that had been developing for over two thousand years. The Dominion’s god had been operating for three hundred. The mathematics of this was not explored in the pamphlet. It didn’t need to be. Rael could do subtraction.

He read about Korthane’s military capacity. The pamphlet did not provide numbers. It described the Hegemony’s naval presence as "extensive" and its land forces as "organized under a centralized divine command structure." The words extensive and organized sat in the text the way stones sat in a field — heavy, deliberate, placed there by someone who wanted you to trip on them.

He reached the final page.

The Dominion’s relationship with the Korthane Hegemony is one of mutual commerce and cautious diplomacy. The Office of the Grand Ordinator maintains ongoing communication with Korthane representatives to ensure the continuation of favorable trade conditions and the protection of Dominion sovereignty.

Rael closed the pamphlet. Opened it again. Turned to the page with the number. Fifty million.

His bunkmate Ossin was cleaning his boots when Rael came back to the barracks. Ossin was from somewhere near Ashenveil — close enough that he’d actually seen the Korthane delegates arrive, or claimed he had, which amounted to the same thing in a barracks where credibility was established by proximity to events you couldn’t verify.

"Ossin."

"Mm."

Rael held up the pamphlet. "Have you read this?"

Ossin glanced at it. "The Korthane brief? Yeah. Sergeant had copies in the reading room last month."

"Fifty million."

"Yeah."

"That’s — " Rael sat on his bunk. The springs protested with the resignation of military furniture everywhere. "That’s almost seventeen times our population."

"Sixteen-point-something." Ossin didn’t look up from his boot. "Depends on the latest count."

"If they have fifty million believers — fifty million — and a god who’s been around for two thousand years, and a navy, and a — " He stopped. The question assembled itself in his chest before his mouth was ready for it, the way a wave assembled itself before it broke. "Why haven’t they attacked?"

Ossin’s hands stopped moving. He looked at the boot in his lap. Then at Rael. Then at the pamphlet.

"I don’t know," he said.

The barracks was quiet. Somewhere outside, the evening patrol was forming up — the sound of boots and equipment and the low, functional murmur of soldiers who had been trained to move in coordination and hadn’t yet learned what coordination was for.

"Maybe they’re waiting," Ossin said.

"For what?"

Ossin picked up his boot again. Resumed cleaning. His hands were steady, his face was neutral, and his voice — when he finally spoke — had the quality of a man testing the weight of something he wasn’t sure he wanted to carry.

"Maybe that’s the wrong question."

Rael read the pamphlet again that night, after lights-out, using the dim glow of the whisper-quartz relay mounted above the barracks door. The light was amber — the same amber as the temple candles, the same amber as the divine aura Rael had felt once during a Blessing of Endurance at his enlistment ceremony.

He read the number. Fifty million.

He read the trade terms. Seven percent.

He read the careful, measured words about mutual commerce and cautious diplomacy and favorable trade conditions, and he thought about his father’s fishing nets, and about what happened when a bigger boat appeared in your fishing grounds and offered you a partnership that you couldn’t refuse because the alternative was discovering what extensive naval presence meant in practical terms.

He folded the pamphlet. Put it in his footlocker, between his spare uniform shirt and the letter from his mother that he’d received three weeks ago and hadn’t answered yet.

The pamphlet was supposed to be returned to the reading room. He knew this. The distribution stamp on the back said Garrison Library — Return After Reading, and Rael understood regulations and respected the garrison’s rules and had never once been disciplined for failing to follow procedure.

He kept it anyway.

Some things, once you know them, belong to you whether or not they were supposed to.

He lay back on the bunk. The springs held their complaint. The ceiling above him was wooden planks — garrison standard, the same ceiling every enlisted soldier in the Dominion slept under, built to a specification that someone had designed and someone had approved and someone had constructed without once asking whether the person sleeping beneath it understood what they were sleeping in service of.

Three million against fifty million. He didn’t know the tactics, the strategy, the diplomatic calculus that the officers discussed in briefing rooms he’d never enter. He knew a number. He knew what the number meant, the way a fisherman’s son knew what a storm on the horizon meant — not through analysis, but through the bone-deep literacy of a person who had grown up measuring himself against things larger than himself.

The amber glow of the quartz relay pulsed once — a routine signal, the garrison’s nightly heartbeat. Rael watched it. Closed his eyes.

The number followed him into sleep.