"I won't write it," Brother Thomas stammered, his quill hovering above the thick leather-bound ledger like a wounded bird. "The central cathedral audits are conducted in sacred ink blessed by the High Prelate. This, this is just sheep tallow and crushed elderberries!"Hafiz leaned across the scarred wooden desk, his face inches from the trembling zealot's nose. "It’s organic, it doesn't smear when the humidity spikes, and it costs three coppers less per ream. Start writing, Thomas, or I'll reassign you to the compost-turning crew."Thomas shuddered violently, his ink-stained fingers clutching the quill as if it were a holy relic slipping from a dying grasp. "You have no respect for canonical record-keeping. The inventory columns must align with the liturgical calendar!""The only calendar that matters around here is the harvest cycle," Hafiz snapped, snatching a dried apple slice from a nearby bowl and tossing it into his mouth. "Now, what's our current reserve on drought-resistant ba

"Lift!" Kael roared, his massive shoulders straining beneath a water-logged timber as glacial runoff surged into the newly hacked trench. "If you drop that brace, I'll feed you to the shadow-imps!""Shut up and hold the line, General!" Hafiz shouted back, covered head-to-toe in gray silt as he heaved a heavy wooden bucket into the churning current. "Nobody's dropping anything!"The air above the north plateau shimmered with a punishing, unseasonal heat, baking the open fields into a cracked mosaic. Yet down in the deep irrigation ditches, the temperature was a suffocating soup of freezing glacier water and thick, viscous mud.Ten paces away, Brother Thomas, the once-zealous church saboteur turned head granary clerk, stumbled backward under the weight of a brimming oak pail, his expensive velvet robes utterly ruined and plastered to his shivering frame."I am a man of the cloth!" Thomas wheezed, gasping for air as he passed the heavy bucket to a towering, four-armed demon warrior whose

"A merchant caravan?" Velina asked, her violet eyes narrowing as she stared down at the grease-stained manifest resting on the war room table. "Coming through the eastern blockade without the church's authorization?""Not just through it, Your Shadowy Terror," Hafiz grinned, leaning back against the heavy oak sideboard with a freshly peeled apple in hand. "They practically bribed their way past the paladin checkpoints using our own reputation. Apparently, word gets around when you bake bread that makes religious zealots weep."Kael crossed his massive arms, his red eyes fixed on the heavy wooden doors of the chamber. "Merchants do not risk the Inquisition's wrath out of kindness, Hafiz. What do they want in exchange for bypassing the border patrols?""Everything we’ve got," a sharp, wheezing voice answered from the doorway.Brother Thomas hurried into the room, clutching a stack of freshly inked ledgers so tightly his knuckles had turned white. He dropped the heavy books onto the tabl