Chapter 718: New Potential Allies (End)
"Necessary," Thalatha answered.
He nodded once. If mercy breaks the line, it isn’t mercy. It’s vanity.
Rodion stacked the safeties below like tools laid in order on a cloth. Each had a place.
Rodion’s counter-rot to keep the raise clean of rot—small, precise, injected like a spice.
Lich librarians holding a steady work-pulse so the Choir doesn’t wobble—crowns dim but exact, timing like a metronome a teacher trusts.
Skeletons as visible peacekeepers at brood mouths, shields down and blades reversed—saying we are here, but we are not hunting.
"Blades reversed," Thalatha repeated. "Yes. Put the pretty side forward. And the backs turned."
"Backs turned," Mikhailis echoed. "I like the lesson in that."
She stood with her arms folded, thinking. Her eyes moved from step to step. She checked the joints. She pushed lightly on each hinge.
"Where do we put failure?" she asked finally.
Rodion highlighted exit doors on every frame.
<If trance slips: re-veil and re-state mantra. If workers panic: drop warm stones at triage points and distribute food in lines of three—panic hates order. If Echo-Deacon twitches: freeze all rhythm; insert micro-pauses; cancel oath until the twitch pass. If regent aura overpowers: veil dims; Hypnoveil takes the front for one minute; we let the room breathe.>
Mikhailis exhaled slowly. "Good."
Thalatha’s gaze returned to the model of the bone spiral the grave-workers had made. The small pattern felt stubborn and peaceful at the same time. She could see the years in it.
"Is this ruling," she asked, voice even, "or caretaking?"
He followed her eyes to the tiny spiral and felt a soft ache in his chest. He remembered a winter in the capital, freezing his fingers to save paper. He remembered Lira scolding him with vinegar and elegance in the same hand. He remembered standing too close to a throne and hating how warm it was.
"Caretaking until they can breathe," he said. "If they can breathe, we step back."
The words landed between them without noise. He meant them.
She watched him for a breath longer, measuring if he knew what he was promising. Then her shoulders lowered by a small, real amount.
She gave a small nod. "Then we try to make them breathe."
Phase five slid over them like a breath: coronation and pacification. The Hypnoveil would carry a scent of regency, calm and plain. The Necrolord would make a short oath with bone taps that matched local rites. No long speeches. Immediate gifts—warm stones staged in regular intervals, food shared first with nurses, clear shifts posted where anybody could read them.
Guard posture was small but famous: skeleton pairs visible, backs turned. It said, We trust you to be decent; we are still here if not.
Phase six mapped the connections. Grave-workers to Slimeweave for food and seals. Patrol skirmishers to Scurabons for route discipline. Choir wardens to lich librarians for timing. Court and morale to Hypnoveils for ritual maintenance. Runner lines would mark safe ribs with a humble dot and bad lips with a tiny X where the Deacon enjoyed tapping. The egress benefit glowed at the corner: mapping speed up by a third or more without adding noise.
Phase seven kept doctrine simple: add around four hundred new allied units under regency, not as hammers but as hands. Many small hands, one quiet line. Skeletons and exemplars would make the wall if war came; the ants would feed the wall and keep its feet from slipping.
Rodion brought up a risk table, and the humor left the slot for a moment. Echo-Deacon response if it heard repetition. Mitigation: micro-pauses, false hiccups, route variety. Photoperiod shrink meant never starting phase three if the clock was thin. Hive backlash meant a respect metric below 0.72 would abort coronation; they would reframe as protectorate with the undead Queen only as symbol and a nurses’ council as custodians. Red lines appeared in Thalatha’s handwriting: no corpse puppetry of the living; food before orders; abdication vote if feasible. A big red circle marked Rodion’s stop-all tap. Anyone could hit it once.
They rehearsed, not once, but until the warm band in their palms arrived on the second beat. Rodion projected bone-lattice corridors on the stone and painted tap-cadence overlays so clean even a tired soldier could follow. Twice they failed on purpose so they could feel the abort in their knees and not panic. The third time felt like someone finishing a good knot.
Thalatha watched the team miss, reset, get better without sulking. Something in her chest that always braced for disappointment loosened. This was the kind of army she trusted: the kind that cleaned its own feet before entering a room.
Rodion poured again.
Thalatha took one more light kiss like a signature at the bottom of a form. Mikhailis leaned in, received it, and tapped the Anchor once—later—then nodded to the board.
"We go slow," she signed with two fingers. "If the room gets proud, we turn it humble."
The operation moved like a documentary—no drum, only pages turning.
A gift cone went down at the boundary. The placing team stepped back exactly two body-lengths and let their eyes find the floor instead of the brood mouths. Workers arrived in a small procession, paused, and began to spiral the cone with careful legs. Resin keys clicked softly against stone, then rolled to a place where any guest could find them without damage.
Veil theater softened the approach to the first court. Nothing flashy. Just less fear in the edges. Nurses read the neutral letter, feelers tasting the grammar. The message was simple; that was its strength.
The Queen arrived like a law, stepped, turned, and the parley wobbled. Pride moved through the court like wind through thin doors. Not a fight. A refusal to be hurried.
The watch ticked in the corner. The window was narrow. Thalatha felt the old urge to push. She breathed instead. Mikhailis did not try to impress anyone. He kept his hands where everyone could see them. Do not treat a kitchen like a theater. Treat it like a kitchen.
Plan B triggered after a small sign that only nurses would notice: the Queen’s third feeler flicked twice over a safe stone—old code for no, never. The Hypnoveil lowered a window so gentle it felt like a sigh. The Riftborne Necrolord stepped through absence and did her work in one motion the map did not bother to draw. No gore. Just a switch.
Rodion counted to three and pushed counter-rot. The raise was clean, bone-light humming like a tuned string. The Hypnoveil’s trance folded over the first breaths. The resurrected Queen stood as witness, not commander, her old scent intact enough to calm tradition while the regent’s line settled into the room.
Nurses did not panic. They folded in, like professionals who had seen too many crises learn to place the next bowl before crying.
Skeletons kept their backs turned. It mattered. The court watched soldiers choose not to look, and the room believed it could be safe.
The Regent Necrolord tapped bone eight times against stone, an oath that matched the local rite note for note. The Hypnoveil carried a calm scent that said now we rest and speak. Warm stones arrived. Food got shared with nurses first. Shifts were posted—clear, fair. A small worker who had never seen a map before stood on her back legs and read her own name.
Runners slipped into corridors with Scurabons at their sides and began to mark safe ribs. One of them moved a little pebble that had tried to trip them every time for two days. It didn’t try again. It was a small miracle, but the kind you could stack.
The court didn’t cheer. They exhaled. Sometimes that is better.
Back at the slot, the heat ring glowed patient. The new runners curled near it like punctuation marks after a good sentence. Everyone looked a little taller, even the skeletons who technically could not.
Thalatha sat on the ledge and took the cup Rodion offered. She watched the steam and the quiet traffic at the mouth of the slot where nobody bumped anybody else.
"I didn’t expect to do nothing and still feel this engaged," she said.
Mikhailis’s mouth did that sideways thing, half a joke and half a truth. "Command is also choosing which good work to watch," he said. "If we watch the right part, fewer knives try to introduce themselves."
She let herself smile. "Fine. Next time I’ll watch the part with fewer knives."
Rodion flashed a new panel on the stone. Three faint paths up glowed like thin threads under water.
<New scent-map posted. Three potential egress routes discovered. Margins improving by thirty-eight percent. Also, your tea is getting cold.>
Mikhailis raised his cup in a salute to the small gods of clean plans. Later, we can be dramatic. Today we get out.
He drank. Thalatha did too. The slot hummed, and for the first time in days, no one felt rushed by the light.