Chapter 1059: Puzzle and Battles
Two weeks after the emergency report arrived, the sun returned to the Western Region.
The Months of Demons ended without incident. No demonic beasts had harassed the walls. No roaring in the dark had preceded a wave of black-blooded shapes across the snowfields. The plains outside Neverwinter lay empty and flat under a brilliant cold sky, the deep snow refracting morning light like a mirror laid over the earth.
This was the most peaceful winter in remembered history, and most people did not know why.
Those who did could not quite celebrate.
The residents poured into the wilderness before the snow had fully melted, scooping double handfuls of it to take home and boil — a custom that was partly victory celebration and partly memorial, the distinction blurred by years of survival. The streets filled. The noise was genuine.
Only a very small number of people knew the shape of what was moving beneath the calm.
The Third Border City. Library Cave.
Roland received the answer he had expected.
“None of the documents mention this.” Celine leaned against a corner of the archive, surrounded by open volumes in a loose ring. The ancient books she’d been working through for the past two weeks were piled around her like fallen walls. Her tentacles — usually animated, always reaching — drooped flat against her body. “Not the Union’s records, not the literature of the underground civilization. The first reference we have to the Southernmost Region is from approximately 860 years ago. A travel note by an unknown witch. A few sentences confirming the Endless Cape was a desert.”
Roland had not seen Celine tired before. The senior witches almost never sat still. They navigated the archive by hanging from the dome on their main tentacles, their whiskers in constant motion. Now all of it had come down. She looked, from a certain angle, like a radish recently pulled from the earth.
“You should rest.”
“My body won’t allow it.” A short, bitter laugh. “What you’ve found is too disruptive. It’s a subversion of the Union — no, that’s not even the right frame. It’s disrupted the entire recorded history of humanity.” She paused. “We had to keep reading. We couldn’t stop, in case something was there that we had missed.”
This was also why Roland had expected the negative result. If something this significant had been discovered in the Union’s era, it would have left a trace — even secrets of this magnitude left administrative shadows, cross-references, the faint outlines of records that had been moved or restricted. Nothing. The civilization in the murals predated everything they had documentation for.
Which made the Mojin myths more credible than Roland had previously calculated. Their “Three Gods Emissary” stories. Their “Millennium War” — a war that in their oral tradition predated the first Battle of Divine Will. If the unknown civilization had existed before the first cycle of the Divine Will, the Mojins’ ancestors might have witnessed its last days.
“Your Majesty.” Celine’s voice settled. “I have to admit something. We’ve taken a genuine step forward today. And yet I feel more confused than I did before we started. As if something is missing.”
“That’s the usual experience,” Roland said. “The more you learn, the more clearly you see the edges of what you don’t know. At some point all the uncertainty consolidates into three problems.”
Pasha tilted her main tentacle with interest. “Which three?”
“Where am I, who am I hitting, and who is hitting me.”
A long silence.
“Your Majesty,” Pasha said carefully. “I think you may be trying to put us at ease.”
“The more accurate version is: who am I, where do I come from, and where am I going.” He coughed once. “The point stands — these are the right questions even when the answers won’t hold still.”
“Where I came from, where I am going…” Pasha murmured it again, slowly, as if testing its weight. “The perspective shift changes everything. From one angle it sounds trivially simple. From another, it resists every answer.”
“Ha.” El’s tentacle snapped upright. “Leave it to you to overcomplicate it. I’m El from Taquila, and I’m going back to Taquila. Done. You’ve both been looking at too many books.” A pause. “He tricked you.”
“This is why I envy you, occasionally,” said Celine with mild affection. “Simplicity can be its own form of happiness.”
Pasha laughed, shaking her main body slightly. “Thank you. That did help, a little.” She turned back to Roland. “Though I have to say — your composure surprised me. Not only did you show no alarm, but you were already thinking of us. As if the news itself hadn’t disturbed you.”
“In my experience, the world tends to contain more uncertainty than any single model of it.” Roland let the smile settle for a moment, then changed direction. “We’ve confirmed the existence of a previous Battle of Divine Will — an unknown cycle, predating the Union’s records, involving an unrecorded civilization. And we’ve confirmed that a relic of the gods appeared in their murals as an object of significance. This is information the entire coalition needs. The sooner it’s shared, the better decisions everyone can make.”
Pasha straightened. “As you wish, Your Majesty.”
The internal meeting convened in the castle’s main hall.
Top-secret classification. Every major force in the coalition sent a representative. Even the administrative ministers attended — Roland had decided that compartmentalization at this level would only generate the kind of confusion that slowed decisions.
When he finished laying out the discovery, the hall went quiet in the particular way that rooms go quiet when an audience is not collecting its thoughts but trying to rebuild its frame. He gave them ten minutes. The whispering rose and fell.
The implications were enormous. The Battle of Divine Will was not a singular catastrophe unique to humanity’s place in history. It was — apparently — a recurring condition. A “special” normality. And humanity’s version of it was not the first.
When the hall found its quiet again, Tilly stood.
“If there was an earlier Battle of Divine Will, where are the winners?” Her voice was steady and careful. “They are not the demons. Not the sea monsters. Not the underground civilization, not humanity. Where are they?”
The question had a quality Roland recognized: it was not a rhetorical gesture. Tilly genuinely wanted the framework that answered it, and she wasn’t going to pretend she had one.
He looked at Pasha.
Pasha stepped forward, her main tentacle inclining in a slight bow toward the assembled group. “There are two lines in the records of the underground civilization that may be relevant. Magic has made us extraordinary. And: mastery of magic was a step toward the divine. If we assume that all civilizations participating in a Battle of Divine Will had access to magic — and the evidence from the murals suggests the unknown civilization did — then perhaps the winning civilization raised the application of magic to a level we cannot perceive. And went somewhere we cannot follow.” She paused. “The celestial world, for want of a better term.”
It was speculation. Roland knew it was speculation, and he thought Pasha knew he knew. But speculation with a direction was better than the alternative.
Not knowing means nothingness.
A civilization powerful enough to win such a war, leaving no legible trace — no ruins past what could be identified with difficulty and luck, no survivors, no continuous record — made the mind fill in the worst. If winning did not reverse extinction, then what purpose did any of this serve? That question would hollow out the coalition if it sat unanswered.
“Celestial ascension” at least gave the goal a shape.
Edith raised her hand. “The murals would have been painted at least fourteen hundred years ago, then. And what humanity has been calling ‘the Battle of Divine Will’ would not technically be the first.”
“Changing the name would cause confusion,” Roland said. “I’ve tentatively called the earlier cycle a ‘lost battle.’ Whether it was the first — I don’t think the number matters. What matters is what we do next.”
Barov cleared his throat. “Your Majesty — the spring expedition. Previously scheduled—”
“Proceeds as planned.” No hesitation. “Unsolved mysteries do not change the necessity of the operation. If anything they reinforce it. We need to move forward — war may itself be the path that brings us closer to those answers. If we lose to the demons, there will be no path at all.”
He looked across the hall. The faces were varied — some shaken, some analytical, some very quiet. He spoke to all of them.
“This spring, the First Army moves out of Neverwinter and into the Fertile Plains. We push the demons out of their position at Taquila. This is not only a strategic necessity — it is the foundation for everything that comes after. The scope of what we’re fighting for is larger than it was yesterday.” He let that settle. “That makes it more important to win. Not less.”