Chapter 447
After checking with my two companions, I learned that the ants were fairly non-responsive to any of the sneaky attempts that’d been made in an attempt to sway their opinions of us.
“The way their feelings function is different from ours.” Sybil explained. “I wasn’t able to change the way that they felt or perceived at all. Maybe it was stubbornness, maybe it was something else entirely, but the royals remain heavily resistant, as before, while the youngmother seemed entirely immune. There’s no telling if the reason for that is due to her physiology or due to protections, there was no tell. Perhaps I could learn more, but I didn’t dare to use too heavy of a hand.”
“Have you ever dared to use ‘a heavy hand’?“ I asked. “So far as I’ve seen, you’ve only ever attempted to be subtle with this.”
“You have seen me use a larger portion of my strengths, that is not true. It is an action of desperation, though. Regardless, I feel that revealing the entirety of my capacity, especially while we are still such a fledgling nation, is a mistake of the highest degree. To me, it is most terrifying to be confronted with the possibility of my mind being usurped from me. I suspect that there are many who will share my sentiment, and if they do, upon learning of my existence, there will be a crusade to ensure that, not only are we as a country destroyed, but that I specifically am eradicated or enslaved. As such, I refrain from using any significant portion of my magical potency.”
I flared my frills, agreeing with the sentiment. If I knew I had Sybil going against me, and not just for her intelligence, I would put all of my effort into ensuring that she was dead sooner rather than later. If the Misti Hawar understood that we had many more tools than they expected to turn their followers against them, the Nyust’Taa wouldn’t have given us so much time to continue to gather and strengthen ourselves. Every day, I was more grateful for the foolish leader’s pride and her attempts at seeing the long picture. She thought that her Principality would be able to use us as a whetstone for the blade she wielded, but we were working to ensure we would instead be a stone that found the chip in her knife and shattered it.
“Do you have anything to add, Joral?” I turned my attention to the Kou’Tal, who clacked his teeth in denial.
“What little success I felt was more of a feeling of allyship than subordination, obedience, or anything like that. Considering what their original goal was regarding us, I can’t say that Sybil and I did affected anything more than to get a read on their intentions as they were entering into negotiation. I’m sorry, Zaaktif.“
I flicked my tail dismissively as I turned and gestured for them to follow me. The movement made the open chested robe I wore flap in the wind, and the movement and sound graded on me. For years, I’d accustomed myself to living as a keelish, and they lived naked. Now, as a Zaaktif attempt attempting to legitimize the Empire of the Saharliard, I needed to take advantage of every trapping of civilization that I could to prove to the bystander that our violence was a tradition, our bloodthirst was a religion, and our personhood was a given. Our only hope for that in the long term was that we’d seen that there were other countries made of violent, nearly warmongering people. With that in mind, so long as we could get the acknowledgment of enough other civilizations, we could leverage that perception against our enemies.
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