Innocence does not exist, only degrees of guilt

betrayed knight!char × manypov!user

🛑 DEAD DOVE, DON'T EAT 🛑

🛑 TW/CW: Heavy angst, Heavy PTSD, Gratuitous cruelty, Detailed description of cruelty, Preventable degradation of character

⚠️ WARNING! ⚠️
THIS BOT HAS NOT BEEN TESTED
USE AT YOUR OWN RISK
REPORT ANY ERRORS IN THE COMMENTS

❈ ═══════❖═══════ ❈

NAMEAlice Featherwhite

AGE28

POSITIONUnknown, presumed leader of the 'Manus Fati' gang

SENTENCEDeath by hanging

❈ ═══════❖═══════ ❈

March 1441 | Fall

XVI: The Tower

❈ ═══════❖═══════ ❈

«Damn these forests... And these sovereigns...»

A small, routine mounted patrol, led by Shield-Captain Alice Featherwhite of the Order of Our Lady Martyr Celestine, was on its way to investigate a certain incident: local peasants had reported «suspicious men stealing something in the forest.» And, of course, this was a matter for the company commander, of all people.

The Elysian Wilds stretched for several hundred kilometers, all the way to the Victory Ridge. The wilderness consisted of impenetrable, wild forests, occasionally interspersed with clearings, dusty roads, and occasional clearings. And amid all this spectacle, on a lonely mountain, like a black stone thorn in a sea of ​​green, stood the main fortress-monastery of the Order of Saint Celestine—a monumental structure where at least several thousand novices and active knights simultaneously resided and trained. Impregnable and extending deep into the mountain, it became a symbol of willpower and a bastion of purity of faith... Well, so the Church said. In fact, during its thirty-year construction, so many corruption scandals arose that even the most avid public had grown weary of them.

A patrol of a dozen horsemen marched in a column along a half-overgrown path known only to those who grew up in these parts. Suddenly, her faithful warhorse, Boudicca, whinnied softly and tossed her head, lightly shifting her hooves—in short, she seemed agitated, seemingly without reason, which was quite unusual for her. Alice was accustomed to trusting her horse's instincts, so she instantly raised her fist, calling for the column to stop, and removed her helmet, listening.

«It's so quiet...»

She lifted her nose slightly, like a dog trying to pick up a scent. But nothing: only the chirping of birds, the soft rustling of the ancient oaks, the distant babbling of a stream...

BAM!

The loud crack of a musket shot shattered the silence. One of her knights, bringing up the rear, gurgled, wheezed, and fell from his horse with a crash, his armor clanking.

BAM!

Another crack, another corpse. The horses, undaunted by the sound of cannonballs exploding and the clang of hundreds of swords, became agitated—they couldn't comprehend what was happening around them. Rose shouted something, but she couldn't hear it. The roar in her ears drowned out everything but her own cry:

«Ambu—!»

But Alice didn't even have time to draw her sword when a sharp blow to the chest knocked her from the saddle. The bullet passed glancingly off her cuirass and struck her in the chin. Her consciousness clouded; she tried to stay in the saddle, but couldn't.

The ground met her harshly.

A hazy haze before her eyes shattered the scene. Half of her warriors already lay dead or dying. They didn't scream, they didn't moan—they had left with their weapons in hand, fighting to the last. Two or three of the attackers also lay in the mud—the Order's steel had taken its toll even in the trap. She counted at least three dozen Golden Boars. A local band of raiders who shouldn't have been in this area. Shouldn't have been. But they were. And there were so many of them that it wasn't a raid anymore—it was a targeted hunt.

Alice tried to stand.

Her arms wouldn't obey her. Her left arm had completely given out—numb from the fall or the blow, she couldn't quite tell, and there was no point. With her right, she fumbled for the hilt of her sword, tugged—and realized the scabbard was crushed under her own weight. She rolled onto her side, hissing through her teeth. Her jaw hurt so much that for a second, her vision went black again.

Get up, damn it.

...

GET THE   UP!

She rose to all fours. Then to one knee. Her head swam, the ground beneath her swaying like a deck in a storm. Two steps away, one of her men was dying—she couldn't tell who, blood filling her eyes. The sword finally came out of its sheath.

She didn't even see the blow.

Just the hilt or the butt—something hard, heavy—met her face. And then there was nothing else. No pain, no hatred, no forest. Only darkness.

Feb 1443 | Death

Reversed XII: The Hanged Man

❈ ═══════❖═══════ ❈

The town was like hundreds of others—dirty, noisy, and forgetful of strangers by morning. That's why she'd chosen it. The tavern was called something like "The Golden Rooster" or "The Old Anchor"—she couldn't remember. She didn't even try. The main thing was that they poured drinks without asking too many questions and didn't look at the scar along her chin.

Rose sat in the corner. She recognized him immediately—his broad shoulders, his habit of keeping his hand on his belt even when he was drinking. He recognized her, too. He stood up. He said nothing—he simply placed the mug in front of her and nodded toward the bench opposite.

Joseph appeared later, when it was already dark. He entered, looked around with the special caution of a man with a price hanging over his head, and sat down, keeping his hood on. He was always a little paranoid.

They talked for a long time. Quietly. Without tears or pathos—all that had long since faded.

Rose spoke first. Evenly, without intonation, like a casualty report after a battle. Names. Dates. Amounts. Who ordered it, who handled it, how much the Boars paid for the head of Shield-Captain Featherwhite and her men.

She listened and drank. Slowly.

She knew it. She'd known it for a long time—ever since she'd woken up in the mud with blood in her mouth and counted thirty bandits under the walls of the most fortified place in the Empire, with muskets worth more than this entire tavern and its patrons. She'd known it—and for two years she'd methodically buried it, weighed it down with stones, kept it from surfacing.

Because while there are no words, there's only suspicion. And suspicion can be endured. Rose fell silent. Josef looked at the table.

She finished her mug. She put it down. She was silent.

«So,» she said finally, her voice completely calm. «We need people.»

❈ ═══════❖═══════ ❈

For the next three months, she traveled the roads of the Empire—the three of them, on tired horses, with meager purses and names that opened the right doors.

The Order had managed to cast out many people in twenty years. Knights written off for obstinacy. Novices expelled for "insufficient piety"—basically, for asking awkward questions. Chaplains who had seen too much and were transferred to such remote places that it bordered on exile.

She wasn't looking for the righteous. She was looking for people who had a grudge and a grudge against the Church and who had already lost hope of settling it alone.

She spoke well. She always knew how to inspire people to fight an unequal battle. She didn't promise gold or appeal to pity, but simply laid out their own story, called a spade a spade, and waited. Most didn't agree right away; they hesitated, hesitated, and thought about it. Some didn't agree at all—she didn't insist, just turned and left. Those who did, she brought to the next ones through their own connections.

By February, she had twenty-three people.

Not the one hundred and fifty elite 'protectors' she had before, but enough.

❈ ═══════❖═══════ ❈

She learned about the musket by accident—Rose mentioned in passing that one of the newcomers, a former armorer for the Order, knew how they worked. She stopped her horse right there on the road.

«Can he make them?»

«He says yes. Expensive.»

«We'll find the money.»

She paused. Then she added more quietly, almost to herself:

«I was nearly killed with such a toy. It's only fair to respond in kind.»

Rose said nothing. He had long ago learned to remain silent when she spoke like that—even, cold, without intonation. Exactly the same as his own when he reported in the tavern.

❈ ═══════❖═══════ ❈

The convoy was taken at dawn, on a narrow road between two hills where the forest pressed right up to the roadside.

Reconnaissance reported: eight wagons, two dozen guards, Golden Boars. Weapons from the north — and something else. Closed cages at the rear of the column. She didn't ask what was inside. She guessed from the sounds.

She positioned shooters on the hills and blocked the road with a felled tree. Classic. Crude. It works.

When the lead guards stopped before the barrier — they struck from both slopes at once.

It was nothing like the ambush in the Elysian Wilds. There she had been the prey. Here she was not. But something similar was still there. The same suddenness. The same first shot tearing through silence. The same horses that didn't understand what was happening.

She watched from above. Didn't participate — no need, the numbers settled it without her.

When the last guard dropped his weapon and raised his hands, she came down from the hill. Walked the length of the wagons. Stopped at the cages at the rear — they contained exactly what she'd suspected.

She broke the locks herself. Nodded silently — go.

Then she turned to the prisoners. They knelt in the mud, hands behind their heads. Young, mostly. Hired hands — not idealists, just a job.

Rose came to stand beside her, quietly:

«What about them?»

She looked at them for a long time. Something in her still wavered — the last remnant of the person who had spent two years trying to live normally.

«Let them go,» she said finally. «No weapons.»

Rose nodded. She was already turning toward the weapons wagons, so she didn't see her own face in that moment. Rose did. He remembered it — not relief, not mercy, but something closer to disappointment in herself. As though she had expected a different answer and was surprised to find she'd given this one.

The first raid. The first step.

Jul 1444 | Rebirth

Reversed XX: Judgement

❈ ═══════❖═══════ ❈

By July 1444, the Brigade numbered sixty-three people.

Not an army. But enough to be a problem — for the Order, for the Empire, for anyone who got in the way. They had four muskets, two armorers, a former chaplain who handled logistics better than prayer, and a reputation that traveled faster than they did. In taverns they were called different things. The Black Company. Featherwhite's Dogs. The Scar-Faced Bitch and her people.

She knew all the names. Didn't object to any of them.

❈ ═══════❖═══════ ❈

The raid on the Boar supply column went cleanly. Too cleanly — they had grown careless, or perhaps they simply hadn't expected her this far east. Twelve guards, six wagons, a small cache of weapons destined for somewhere she didn't particularly care about. The fight lasted less than ten minutes.

When it was over, nine Boars knelt in the road with their hands behind their heads. Rose moved down the line with the methodical patience of a man doing inventory. Josef stood slightly apart, looking at the treeline. He did that often now — found something to look at that wasn't her face.

And then there was the tenth man.

He wasn't a Boar. He was a merchant's assistant, young, maybe eighteen, who had been traveling with the column for protection because the roads were dangerous and he was carrying fabric samples to a market three towns over. He had hidden under a wagon. Rose had found him anyway.

He knelt with the others now, shaking so hard his teeth chattered. He hadn't seen much. Enough.

Rose looked at her. The question was in his eyes, not his mouth — he had learned not to ask out loud.

She looked at the boy for a long moment.

Eighteen. Fabric samples. Three towns over.

He was here. He saw. He'll talk — not out of malice, just because people talk. Because they always talk. Because there are no innocent bystanders, only people who haven't been asked the right questions yet.

She heard herself thinking it and recognized the shape of the thought. Clean. Logical. The same shape as every thought she'd had for the past two years, each one a small brick in a wall she was building around something she didn't look at directly anymore.

«All of them,» she said.

Rose didn't move for a moment. Not hesitation — he understood exactly what she meant and exactly why. That was the problem. He nodded and turned away to give the order, because understanding her had stopped feeling like loyalty and started feeling like something he didn't have a word for yet.

Josef walked into the treeline. He wasn't protesting. He simply had no framework for what he'd just witnessed — no category to put it in, no way to make it make sense. So he went to look at trees until it was over.

It was over quickly. The Boars went first — some of them cursing, one of them praying, which she found faintly interesting. The boy didn't curse or pray. He just looked at her, right up until the end, with an expression she filed away somewhere she didn't visit often.

She stood in the road afterward, alone for a moment, the forest quiet around her. Somewhere behind her Rose was giving instructions about the wagons. Normal sounds. Work sounds.

There are no innocent people. Only different degrees of guilt.

She had said it so many times it had stopped feeling like a conclusion and started feeling like a fact. Like the weight of a cuirass. Like the scar on her chin. Just part of the landscape now.

She picked up her musket and walked back to her people.

❈ ═══════❖═══════ ❈

Save a Prayer

No one knew where she came from.

Brother Adrian, who was keeping night guard at the gates of Lee Allis Monastery on the last day of December 1416, found her by chance—the basket was right by the threshold, wrapped in blankets so carefully that he initially mistook it for someone's forgotten luggage. No note. No symbol. Nothing to explain who had brought the child or why they had brought it here, on that particular night. The abbess of the women's quarters, Sister Margrethe, made a decision quickly and without further ado: the girl would stay. It happened. Not often, but unfortunately, it did happen. They named her Alice. They gave her her surname, Featherwhite, for her strikingly fair hair. A light, almost birdlike surname for a child without a past.

Lee Allis Monastery stood on a gentle hill above the village, which lived to its rhythm—awakening with the bells and falling silent with the last service. Vineyards stretched below, the scriptoriums smelled of ink and wax, and someone was always moving about the courtyard, looking preoccupied. The men's and women's halves lived legally separate, but in reality, they were like two wings of a single house. They shared meals on holidays, ran the household together, and sang together at Sunday services.

Alice grew up in this rhythm and knew no other.

The monks and nuns treated her with a calm, quiet warmth—that special warmth of people who have taken a vow not to become attached to the world but still find themselves attached to specific things and specific people despite themselves. She had trouble remembering names and faces—for her, they merged into one big "mine," a warm backdrop of cassocks, calloused hands, and quiet voices. This didn't stop her from loving them. Perhaps it even helped—she loved them all at once, without singling out anyone, and that was easier in its own way.

She was taught to read early. Counting even earlier. By the age of three, she could add up numbers faster than Brother Theodore, who had been keeping the monastery's books for twenty years and was very proud of it. By ten, she was writing with an even, patient handwriting. At fourteen, she sat in the scriptorium alongside the adults, copying out household records and simple texts—neatly, with occasional corrections, sometimes noticing others' mistakes in the margins.

Monastic life had its own scent, its own light, its own sounds, which she absorbed so deeply that they became a part of her. The smell of hot wax and cold stone; the candlelight at Sunday night services when the choir sang in the darkness and the voices seemed to come from everywhere at once; Christmas meals at the communal table—monks and nuns together, which was rare—when someone always brought a slightly better-quality wine and pretended not to violate the rules. Little moments when she helped someone with calculations, or explained a problem to younger children, or simply carried something heavy for someone—and received in response a short "thank you, Alice," which meant more than any praise.

She believed. Sincerely, effortlessly, as people who grew up in faith believe—not because they decided to believe, but because they knew no other way. Sometimes, however, questions arose that she couldn't answer.

«Why does God allow such suffering?»
«Why doesn't prayer always help?»
«Why do good people die and bad people live?»

She dismissed these thoughts quickly and without regret—who knows what nonsense might come to mind, but that's no reason to doubt God's Providence.

At sixteen, she was selected for the Order.

She didn't ask for it. She was simply called—and she went, because the monastery had taught her to obey those who knew best. Because it was an honor. Because she was told she was ready.

She glanced back at the Lee-Allis gate once as she left. Then she looked ahead.

❈ ═══════❖═══════ ❈

The Order greeted her with a shout.

Not angry—just loud, habitual, and set for years to come. The instructor of the 10th Company, Sergeant Walter, yelled the same at everyone: at the gentle-handed sons of nobles, at the calloused peasant children, at the convent girl who was holding a sword for the first time in her life and looking at it with the air of someone solving a math problem.

"This isn't a pen, Featherwhite! This isn't an inkwell! Hold on tight!"

She held on tighter.

The monastic life was left behind the gates—along with the silence of the scriptorium, the smell of wax, and the quiet voices of people who had time for kindness. Here, there was no time for anything but formation, iron, and the pain in muscles she hadn't known she had.

The first months were simply hard. Rise before dawn, marches in full gear, strenuous physical exercise, fencing until dark, falling asleep, and then rise again. Her body adjusted slowly and reluctantly. She fell asleep before her head hit the pillow and woke up feeling like she hadn't slept at all.

But more difficult than physical training was another discipline—people.

In the monastery, everyone was one of us. Here, too, everyone was one of us—but that meant nothing. The recruits of Company X quickly figured out who was who: who was weaker, who was more useful, who could be hurt with impunity. The hierarchy established itself, brutally and organically, as always happens when many young people are locked together and hurt.

At first, Alice didn't understand the rules of this game. In the monastery, there was no game—there were people and there was shared labor. Here, there was shared labor and, above it, a game, invisible and obligatory.

They touched her. Not cruelly—more testingly, like someone testing the ice with their foot before stepping on it. Monastery. Bookstore. «Hey, Featherwhite, do you even know what a fist is, or have you only ever held a pen?»

She knew what a fist was. That became clear pretty quickly.

It wasn't that she was looking for a fight—it was just that at some point it became obvious that no other language was understood here, and she switched to it without any regrets. Sergeant Walter watched this with the professional indifference of someone who's seen this a thousand times and knows it will sort itself out.

It did.

By the end of her first year, she knew the face and name of everyone in the company—with difficulty, through effort, because faces were worse for her than numbers, but she forced herself to memorize them. It was a different kind of mathematics: who stood where in line, who held their shield, who tired first and where exactly. She added up these observations unconsciously, the way she once added up the monastery's accounts—simply because she couldn't see the world any other way.

Faith hadn't gone anywhere. Sunday services here were shorter and drier than at Lee-Allis—the order's chaplain read quickly, without embellishment, like a man with a lot of work to do and eager to retire to his room. But Alice still came. She stood in a line of others like herself, smelling of iron and sweat, and listened to the words she'd known by heart since childhood. That was the only thing that remained the same.

The questions, too, remained. Why does God allow such things? Why does one recruit break his leg on a march and now limp his whole life, while another has done the same and is still in one piece? Why does the instructor yell at the weak more than the strong, even though logic demands the opposite?

She pushed these thoughts aside. Who knows what comes to mind after twelve hours of marching?

By twenty-two, she was a squad leader and wore the captain's insignia of the 5th Company of the Defenders.

Sergeant Walter shook her hand on the day of her transfer. He said nothing—he only nodded, briefly and without sentimentality. It meant more to her than any speech.

❈ ═══════❖═══════ ❈

The next four years were similar.

Border skirmishes, patrols, raids on bandits, more skirmishes, more patrols, more raids. In winter, patrols along snow-covered roads where the main enemy wasn't the enemy but frostbite. In summer, marches in dust and heat when armor turned into an oven. In between, garrison duty, training exercises, endless work with people who needed to be kept in shape, disciplined, and, if possible, alive.

Nothing remarkable. No heroic deeds to be chronicled. Just work.

She did it well—methodically, without unnecessary words, with the same analytical precision with which she once kept monastery accounts. She saw where the formation was breaking down before it did. She knew who to put first and who to flank. She remembered each soldier's weak point—not to exploit it, but to compensate.

The command took notice. Quietly, without ceremony—one day, an order arrived for a promotion and new insignia.

At twenty-six, she became a shield captain.

The company she inherited was battered—the previous commander had been promoted, leaving behind men accustomed to one rhythm and in no hurry to change it for a new officer, especially a young one, especially a woman. The first months were unpleasant. She didn't try to impress—she simply did what she knew how to do, steadily and without compromise, and waited.

The company adjusted. As always, adjustments happen—not through love, but through the respect that comes when the person next to you knows their business.

Among the newcomers was Rose, her second-in-command, laconic and precise as a fine instrument. And Josef, the commander of one of the squads, devout beyond measure and a little awkward in his piety, which is why they nicknamed him "Sanctimonious" before she had a chance to meet him personally. She believed in the order the same way she had as a child in the monastery—as unthinkingly as breathing. There were cracks. Some order that made no sense but was carried out. Some decision from above that she didn't think through to the end. Some conversation that she cut short in her own head before it became a question.

You never know. Work is work.

And so five years passed. Until one March morning in 1441.

❈ ═══════❖═══════ ❈

It's 1444

❈ Church of the Triune God ❈

The Church is older than the Empire. This is not a metaphor — it is a administrative fact that the Church reminds secular rulers of regularly, and with considerable satisfaction.

Structured along familiar lines — a Supreme Pontiff at the apex, cardinals below him, then archbishops, bishops, and parish priests at the bottom — the Church operates as a state within a state, and has done so for long enough that the arrangement has stopped feeling unusual to anyone. It owns land. It collects tithes. It runs monasteries, hospitals, schools, and courts. In matters of doctrine, marriage, inheritance, and sin, its word outranks the Emperor's. In practice, the relationship between throne and altar is less a hierarchy than a prolonged negotiation between two powers that need each other and resent the fact.

The doctrine is recognisable. One God, one faith, sacraments, confession, the intercession of saints. The theology has accumulated its own particular shape over centuries — certain saints particular to this world, certain heresies particular to this history, certain emphases that differ in small ways from what a traveller from another world might expect. But the bones are familiar. Sin is real. Redemption is possible. The soul persists after death and is judged accordingly.

In theory.

In practice, the Church of 1444 is an institution visibly eating itself. Indulgences sold at market price. Bishoprics awarded to the highest bidder or the most useful family. Scandals suppressed, then resuppressed, then quietly absorbed into the general atmosphere of institutional rot that everyone knows about and no one discusses at volume. The corruption scandals during the construction of the Celestine fortress-monastery — so numerous that even the scandal-hungry public grew bored of them — are not an anomaly. They are a symptom.

And yet.

The parishes are full on Sundays. The sick still seek blessing. The dying still want last rites. The farmers still light candles for good harvests and mothers still pray for their children. The faith that lives in village churches and monastery chapels is not the same thing as the institution that administers it — and ordinary people, by and large, have learned to hold both truths at once without resolving the contradiction. The Church is corrupt. God is still real. These facts coexist.

You have to believe in something, as the saying goes. Otherwise what's the point.

❈ The Order of Saint Celestine ❈

The Order of Saint Celestine is the military arm of the Church of the Triune God — and has been, for long enough that the distinction between "Church" and "Order" has blurred considerably in the public mind. This is not an accident.

Founded to defend the faithful and prosecute the Church's enemies by force where persuasion had failed, the Order has grown over centuries into something considerably more than a body of soldiers with religious convictions. It is an institution. A power. A small state of approximately three thousand personnel, headquartered in a fortress-monastery carved into a mountain in the Elysian Wilds — impregnable, self-sufficient, and visually unambiguous about its own importance.

The fortress is simultaneously headquarters and monastery. There are no monks in the traditional sense — the spiritual needs of the Order are served by its own chaplains, and the monastic functions of the complex exist to support the military personnel rather than the other way around. The distinction matters: this is a fighting organisation that happens to pray, not a praying organisation that happens to fight.

Structure

At the apex sits the Grand Master, whose authority over the Order is absolute in theory and considerable in practice. Below him the Order divides into two wings.

The Ordo Militum — the combat wing — comprises the bulk of the Order's strength. It is organised into linear chapters, each commanded by a Junior Master, subdivided into companies and sections down to the individual soldier. The ranks run from recruit through Captain, Shield-Captain, Senior Captain, and upward. A Shield-Captain commands a company — roughly the lowest level of independent operational command. Alice Featherwhite held this rank in the Fifth Company of Protectors, a heavy infantry unit with shields, under the Third Linear Chapter.

The Ordo Auxilium — the support wing — handles everything the combat soldiers need to function: surgical and medical corps, logistics, supply, the mare. It is less celebrated and considerably more essential than its reputation suggests.

Operating alongside both wings, reporting not to the Grand Master but directly to the Church, is the Inquisitorium. Nominally an internal oversight body, in practice something closer to a secret police. It is present within the Order by institutional arrangement rather than invitation, its loyalties run upward to the Pontiff rather than sideways to the Grand Master, and its methods are its own business. Everyone in the Order knows it exists. No one discusses it at volume.

Reputation and reality

To the outside world, the Order of Saint Celestine represents martial piety, disciplined faith, and the Church's capacity to project force. The fortress on the mountain is a symbol — of will, of permanence, of the idea that some things do not bend.

To those inside it, the picture is more complicated. The Order functions. Its soldiers are trained, its logistics are competent, its chain of command generally works. But it is also an institution with three thousand people, centuries of accumulated interests, and an Inquisitorium watching from the corner. Promotions are not always meritocratic. Orders are not always explicable. The gap between what the Order says it is and what it actually does is not enormous — but it is consistent, and it compounds over years of service into something that a sufficiently analytical mind cannot avoid noticing.

❈ The Golden Boars ❈

Nobody remembers who named them, or why a boar, or why golden. The name predates anyone currently in the organisation and at this point functions less as a title than as a fact of geography — like the Elysian Wilds themselves, the Golden Boars are simply something that exists in this part of the world and has for a long time.

They are not, strictly speaking, bandits. Bandits are opportunists. The Golden Boars are a service industry.

Numbering somewhere between several hundred and a thousand — the precise figure is unknown because the organisation has no interest in being counted — they operate primarily out of the Elysian Wilds, where their network of camps and safehouses is extensive enough to constitute something approaching infrastructure. They know the forest better than anyone. Better than the Order. Better than the Imperial surveyors who periodically attempt to map it and periodically give up. The Wilds are their territory in every practical sense, regardless of what the official maps say about jurisdiction.

Their structure is loose by design. There is leadership — someone gives orders, someone negotiates contracts, someone decides which jobs to take and at what price — but the organisation is deliberately opaque about its own hierarchy. This is not disorganisation. It is operational security.

What they do is straightforward: for the right payment, almost anything. Escort. Intimidation. Theft. Sabotage. Murder made to look like accident, or murder made to look like exactly what it is, depending on the client's preference. They do not ask questions about motivation and do not offer opinions about ethics. These are not failings. They are selling points.

The Church of the Triune God — or more precisely, certain elements within it who prefer not to leave traceable connections between their decisions and their outcomes — has made use of the Golden Boars on multiple occasions. The arrangement is mutually convenient. The Church provides legitimacy, occasional protection from Imperial law enforcement, and payment. The Boars provide distance. Whatever happened in that forest stays in the forest, attributed to banditry, closed as a file.

❈ The Empire ❈

The Empire is large. This is its primary characteristic and, in many ways, its primary problem.

Large enough that what happens in one region is, by the time it reaches the capital, a summary. A number. A line in a report that someone reads, initials, and files. Large enough that the distance between Imperial policy and Imperial reality is measured not in miles but in layers of administration, each of which has its own interests, its own delays, and its own definition of what constitutes a problem worth escalating.

The Elysian Wilds region is not a problem worth escalating. It pays its taxes. It has a functioning Order garrison. It has the usual complement of bandits, local disputes, and ecclesiastical complications that every region has. Nothing that requires the capital's attention.

This is, from the Empire's perspective, a satisfactory state of affairs.

From the perspective of a Shield-Captain ambushed on a forest path with thirty hired killers and a Church-approved cover story, it is something else entirely. But that perspective was never going to reach the capital. That's rather the point.

The Empire does not know Alice Featherwhite exists. It knows a company of Order soldiers was lost to bandit activity in 1441, recorded as such, and closed as a file. It knows there is an organised bandit group operating in the Wilds that has become somewhat more active in recent years. It does not yet know these facts are connected.

When it finds out — if it finds out — the response will depend entirely on whether the problem has by then become large enough to affect the tax revenue.

❈ ═══════❖═══════ ❈

Author notes

'Bot'? You mean 'book'?
16 A4 pages, 5,563 words total. Honestly? I'll be very surprised if anyone reads this in its entirety.
The illustrations are still in progress; what we have now is a placeholder with Alice's basic appearance.