Chapter 5: The Emperor Takes Notice
Personal System Calendar: Year 00014, Day 1-28, Month I: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6858, 1st to 28th day of the 1st Month
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The Emperor's Gaze
What the Cabal believed was true enough on its face. The Emperor didn't particularly care about what is currently happening in Arwen. But his gaze had still turned in that general direction, not toward Arwen itself, but toward the Imperial Protectorate sitting near it. His eyes and ears had been watching and listening to everything happening around Maya Village for some time now.
They didn't miss much, whether it was something major or something small. There were layers to it. The garrison stationed at the village reported in through their usual channels. The Anino moved through on their own. And the more visible arm of it, Imperial Intelligence, had its own reports filtering up as well.
All of them were now watching Maya Village, and all of them had begun reporting on the same thing. The refugee situation spilling out of Arwen's civil war.
"Sir, the situation in Arwen seems far worse than what we expected," Director Thrace said. "Do you want me to take a closer look at it?"
"Indeed," the Emperor said. "Though I have no interest in that boy's foolishness, which is what led the sovereignty to this point in the first place. I think we should keep an eye on it, especially given the situation near (Maya) the Village. If this goes the way it looks like it's going, I don't think the village would be able to handle the consequences of that kind of migration. Not at this stage of their growth. Their economy would suffer badly."
The Emperor referred to the King of Arwen as a mere child, which, in fairness, was true for someone like him. Ten thousand years gave a person a certain perspective on what counted as young.
"Very well, your majesty. I'll send agents toward Arwen and see what their king is doing." Thrace bowed and left the throne room.
Emperor Janus then turned to Grand Advisor Solomon.
"Solomon, send word to the garrison commander. Tell him to inform Maya Village's leadership that if they require the Empire's aid, they need only ask."
Solomon bowed. "Yes, your majesty. A wise decision. I would have suggested it myself, had your foresight not already been pointed in that direction."
"You flatter me, Solomon. This much is child's play, even for someone like you. If you'd put your mind to it, you'd have come up with something far more complicated than I could think of."
Solomon chuckled at that, bowed once more, and took his leave. He would write the letter to the garrison commander himself, before the day was out.
Emperor Janus stood and walked toward the balcony windows, looking out over whatever lay beyond them. His gaze was sharp, carrying the weight of thoughts that no ordinary person could follow. Perhaps the Grand Advisor could, on his better days. Perhaps not even him.
He stood there for a long moment before speaking again.
"Go to Arwen. See what lies beneath this civil war. There's something else at play underneath all of it. I can sense it."
The shadows beneath him stirred, shifted, and then settled again. The Emperor's personal intelligence unit, the Anino, had begun to move.
What they would find in the central continent would either confirm a conspiracy or lead them on a chase after nothing at all. The real question was whether the Cabal was prepared enough to throw them off the scent, or whether they would be found before their plan could come to fruition.
It was only a matter of time. Time had a way of bringing hidden things into the light eventually, no matter how carefully they were buried. But would the Empire actually be able to follow the trail and stop them in time? Or would the catastrophe that the Cabal had been building toward run its course regardless?
The first month of the year had only just begun, and already it seemed to be heading in a very wrong direction.
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The Cracks are Spreading Even Further
Arwen wasn't the only kingdom feeling the pressure. Other non-imperial kingdoms nearby were beginning to show the same kind of strain.
People's voices were rising. Anger that had been kept quiet for years was starting to find its way into the open, and it didn't take much imagination to guess where the inspiration was coming from. Arwen's collapse had become a kind of warning to every monarch and noble house watching it happen, and most of them were scrambling to make sure they didn't end up in the same position.
Some kingdoms tried to calm things down. Others, the harder-lined ones, went the opposite direction, cracking down on anything that looked even slightly like organizing before it could become a real movement. That approach tended to backfire. Every crackdown, every unjust arrest, every public example made of someone who'd said the wrong thing in the wrong tavern, only added fuel to people who had already had more than enough of being treated like something less than human by the people ruling over them.
And underneath all of it, the Cabal's agents were doing exactly what they did best.
They knew which words to say, and to whom, and when. It was as if they existed in every shadow of every city at once, though of course they didn't do the actual work themselves. They never did. They found other people to do it for them, people who had no idea they were being used, and let those people carry the risk while the Cabal's agents stayed invisible. If someone got caught, it was never one of them. It was always someone else, someone who had been nudged in just the right direction at just the right time and never even realized it.
Part of how they managed this came down to the masks that they wore. The masks weren't just symbols of rank within the Cabal. They carried a property that let the wearer's face shift and blur in the memories of anyone who saw them, so that even someone who had spoken with a Cabal agent directly couldn't quite recall what they looked like afterward. Some agents went further, using mind-altering magic to actively reshape how they appeared to others. Even if someone tried to pry into the minds of the people being manipulated, there would be nothing useful to find. No face, no name, nothing that could be traced back to whoever had been pulling the strings.
And of course, they were patient about it. Some of these relationships had been built over years, sometimes with people who thought of the Cabal agent as a friend, or in some cases even family. None of that mattered to the Cabal. Those relationships were never real to begin with. They were fronts, built carefully and maintained for exactly the moment they were needed.
Arwen was only the first domino. The next country that is likely to fall into the same kind of unrest sat on the other side of the Great Mountain Ridges of Arkanus, in the central-east. A country called Rolin (Region 17).
Rolin shares its northern border with another country called Glorie (Region 15), in which Rolin is sitting directly south of it. Both were central kingdoms, just like Arwen and Ogind, though they are smaller. And because of where they sat, both of them also had neighbors that also had controlled access through the central plains, the points where the northern kingdoms met with the south. But their neighbors had something that they didn't have greater access to, the main waterway, the Central-Eastern Great River. Rolin's neighbor to its east that ran along the Great Central-Eastern River was the kingdom called Marbol (Region 18). Glorie's equivalent neighbor which is also to its east was called Himeni (Region 16). Both Marbol and Himeni effectively controlled the river crossings that people used to move heavier loads between the northern and southern halves of the continent.
For now, the focus belonged to Rolin. It was the country from which Veera Richmond's had come from, and like Arwen, whispers of rebellion were beginning to circulate there too, in a pattern that looked uncomfortably familiar.
The Rolin Royal Family had a long history of crushing those whispers long before they could grow into something substantial, that could damage their carefully curtailed image. They'd done it for generations, and they'd done it during the Beast Dominion Wars as well, burying any news that suggested the kingdom had struggled against the beast incursions. Instead, they put out their own version of events, one where Rolin had handled everything efficiently and came out looking strong, even when the actual cost had been far higher than anyone outside the palace ever learned. They took credit for victories that had cost other people their lives, and made sure those people were never in a position to say otherwise.
For a long time, it worked. Rolin's reputation stayed intact. A small kingdom that could supposedly stand up to the legendary beasts of the great forest bordering it, strong enough to be respected by its larger neighbors.
But that reputation had always been built on lies, and lies like that don't hold forever. People who had survived the Royal Family's attempts to silence them, attempts that hadn't always succeeded, were starting to speak. Word was spreading among ordinary people who had spent their whole lives being told one version of history while living through a very different one. The Royal Family could no longer keep it contained. They tried the same tactics they'd always used, threats, blackmail, legal action against anyone who spoke against the crown, even outright death threats delivered through people who supposedly had no connection to the palace at all.
But all it did was add more fuel to a fire that had been building for a very long time. Like water in a pot that had been sitting over heat for far too long, getting closer to boiling with every passing day.
Rolin was going to fall eventually. It was only a matter of when.
The Empire's spies, watching from the shadows, had started noticing a pattern between what was happening in Arwen and what was building in Rolin. Something connected the two, though there was nothing solid enough yet to point at directly. Just a trail that seemed to lead everywhere and nowhere at once.
Was this simply a coincidence of what happened when years of oppression finally caught up with the people who'd enforced it? Or was something else driving all of it?
Either way, the Empire's intelligence operations had now expanded. Surveillance increased not just around Arwen and Maya Village, but outward, toward the other non-imperial kingdoms and even into some imperial-affiliated cities. They paid particular attention to people who had stayed quiet for a long time but might have voiced frustration at some point, however small. Whether there was an actual conspiracy behind all of this or not, something about the pattern had stopped looking like a coincidence.
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Juan's New Recruits
Meanwhile, back in Maya Village, one of the Thirteen Stooges sat in a room going through reports he'd gathered, trying to work out what it all meant.
It was Juan. By now he had three others working with him, kids he'd personally trained, none of them older than fifteen. Young by most standards, but more than willing to help. What made it interesting was how he'd found them. He hadn't. They'd found him.
Juan had spent years being the kind of person that nobody would be able to notice. He moved through the village constantly, writing in his notepad, sitting in taverns, feeding birds on a bench, and to most people he simply didn't register as anything worth a second look. He was good at that. It was, in a sense, his entire skill set.
So it caught him off guard when three kids walked right up to him one day and started asking questions.
There was Pipi, a twelve-year-old human girl. Bingi, a fourteen-year-old beastfolk boy. And Buta, a thirteen-year-old human boy. The three of them had apparently been watching Juan for a while, the way you'd watch something strange that didn't quite fit anywhere but also didn't seem dangerous. A weird wandering presence that showed up everywhere and did nothing in particular.
When they finally approached him, Juan actually looked around first, checking if they were talking to someone else. He pointed at himself with a confused expression.
"Yes, you, mister. Is there anyone else here but you?" Pipi asked, sounding a little insulted that he'd even questioned it.
"Oh. Hahaha, that's a surprise. Most people don't notice me at all," Juan said, laughing awkwardly.
"So what do I owe the pleasure of you three?"
The three of them looked at each other, nodded, and then proceeded to bombard him with questions all at once. Juan nearly lost his hearing trying to keep up. But the core of it boiled down to one thing: why did he always look like he didn't belong, no matter where he was?
It was a good question. A surprisingly good one. It meant they'd been watching him closely enough to notice something most people never would. And that got Juan thinking. If these kids could spot him, despite everything he did to avoid being spotted, then maybe the eyes he sometimes felt on him weren't always Imperial Intelligence. Maybe some of them had been these three the whole time.
He kept his reaction calm. No reason to let them know he'd even considered the possibility of being watched. But the idea stuck with him. People who could observe others the same way he did, people who didn't register in anyone's awareness unless they wanted to.
August had given Juan the groundwork to become the village's first real intelligence operative, but up until now it had only ever been Juan. One person, doing what he could. He hadn't expected to ever need help. And here it was, walking up to him on a bench.
He decided to test them. He gave the three of them a simple assignment. Blend into the crowd for a day and bring back something useful, something out of the ordinary, anything that stood out. He told them he'd judge their results and decide from there.
To three kids who'd just been told they might get to help with something secretive and important, that was more than enough. In their heads, this was the start of becoming actual spies, helping the village in ways nobody else got to. For Juan, it was something else entirely. A convenient excuse to finally have people working with him instead of just him working alone.
They passed the test. More than passed it, honestly. Juan saw real potential in all three of them and gave them the job for real after that.
Now the four of them had a room of their own in one of the village's buildings, given to them personally by August for their work. None of their names appeared in any official record. Everything about them was kept quiet, and each of them used an alias to keep their personal lives separate from whatever this was turning into.
Pipi, Bingi, and Buta still went to school, so most of their work happened after hours or whenever they had free time. That meant Juan still did most of the legwork himself, walking the village the way he always had. But he didn't mind. It was a small price to pay for finally having a team of his own.
They hadn't settled on a name for the group yet. For now they were just the four of them, working quietly, figuring it out as they went. A name would come eventually. There was no rush.
After their first proper week of work, Juan made his way to the Finn household to report his thoughts on the situation unfolding in the south.
"Well, boss," he said, "all I can say is this rebellion doesn't feel like a normal one. There's something more to it, though I can't say exactly what. Take it for what it's worth, just my gut feeling, nothing solid behind it yet."
August nodded, taking it in without dismissing it.
"Even a feeling like that is useful when we're dealing with whatever comes out of this afterward. I'll keep it in mind. Let me know if you hear anything more."
Juan stayed for a meal before heading back to his own place, already thinking about where to look next.