Chapter 39: The Septon's Gambit
Fifteen years. A decade and a half had passed since the Field of Fire, a battle that had become a foundational myth in the burgeoning Targaryen dynasty's history, and a grim strategic lesson for the rulers of the Golden Dragon Theocracy. In that time, the world had settled into a new, uneasy equilibrium. Aegon the Conqueror, now Aegon Targaryen, the First of His Name, King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, and Protector of the Realm, had forged his Iron Throne from the swords of his conquered enemies. His rule, with the notable exception of the defiant and unconquered Dorne, was absolute.
In the east, the Theocracy had used those fifteen years to perfect its own civilization. The long peace, guaranteed by the silent threat of the dragons in their aeries and the bloody stalemate they had engineered for their rivals, had allowed their society to mature. The Golden Covenant was no longer a new ideology; it was the unquestioned foundation of their world. Their cities were clean, their people educated, their legions disciplined, and their treasury overflowing. They were a quiet, prosperous, and deeply formidable empire.
And they were the secret patrons of a grinding, low-level insurgency that kept the new Targaryen kingdom bleeding. Operation Dragon's Shadow had shifted from a grand strategy to a long, patient, and soul-wearying administrative task. Lyra's agents funneled untraceable funds to disgruntled lords in the Westerlands. Hesh's artisans produced small quantities of superior arrowheads and chainmail that would find their way into the hands of Reachman rebels. Elara's "Quiet Sisters" in Dorne continued their work, making the Dornish resistance a thorn in Aegon's side that refused to be removed.
The council, the five immortal prophets, met regularly in their war room to review the results of their shadow war. The reports were, for Kaelen, increasingly disheartening.
"The rebellion in the hills west of the Goldroad has been crushed," Lyra stated, her voice devoid of emotion as she moved a marker from the map of Westeros. "Lord Tarbeck, whose family we have been funding for five years, was captured and executed. His lands were given to a Targaryen loyalist."
"They are learning," Jorah grunted, studying the map. "Aegon's commanders are no longer the arrogant fools who marched into the fire. They are becoming seasoned veterans. They are adapting."
"It's more than that," Elara said, her face troubled. "The smallfolk are turning against the rebels. Our agents report that the people are tired of the strife. They see the rebels not as liberators, but as bandits who disrupt the peace and bring the king's wrath down upon them."
She was right. Their strategy of keeping the wounds of conquest festering was failing. They had expected the hatred for the Targaryens to grow, to blossom into open, widespread revolt. But it was not. A new and unforeseen force was at play, an ideological counter-agent that was healing the very wounds they were trying to keep open.
The full picture was presented by Lyra at their next meeting. Her lead agent in Westeros had sent a comprehensive analysis, one that had taken him a year to compile.
"We have been fighting the wrong war," Lyra began, her voice grim. "We have focused on Aegon's armies and his lords. We have ignored his most powerful weapon: his gods."
She explained. Aegon, in a move of political genius, had not tried to impose the old gods of Valyria on the people of Westeros. Instead, he had embraced theirs. He had publicly converted to the Faith of the Seven. He had been anointed by the High Septon in the Starry Sept of Oldtown, legitimizing his rule in the eyes of gods and men. He was building a great sept, the Sept of Remembrance, on the site of his first landing, to honor the dead of his wars.
"The Faith is preaching a gospel of unity and forgiveness," Lyra concluded. "They are telling the smallfolk that the wars are over, that the Seven Kingdoms are now one under the sight of the gods, protected by the anointed king. They are framing obedience to the Iron Throne as a sacred duty. Every septon in every village is a propaganda agent for the Targaryen dynasty. We have been trying to stoke the embers of rebellion, while the High Septon has been dousing the entire continent in holy water."
The revelation struck the council with the force of a physical blow. They, a theocracy whose power was derived from the union of church and state, had been completely outmaneuvered on the religious front by a secular king.
"It's absurd," Jorah scoffed. "A god with seven faces? What fool believes such nonsense?"
"Billions of them, Jorah," Elara said softly. "Faith does not need to be logical. It needs to be comforting. The people of Westeros are weary of war. The Faith offers them peace, forgiveness, and a place in a divine order. We offer them… continued, bloody resistance. Which would you choose?"
Elara's question was a dagger in Kaelen's heart. He felt the full moral weight of their strategy. Were they now the villains in this story? Were they the dark, foreign power seeking to undermine a peace that was, against all odds, beginning to take root? He was lost. The god's long-term vision seemed to be failing, crashing against the unexpected resilience of a foreign faith.
That night, his communion with his god was not a request for a plan, but a plea for understanding. We are failing, he sent into the divine silence. Our whispers of rebellion are being drowned out by their songs of forgiveness. How do we fight a faith?
The god's vision was a powerful clarification of the new battlefield. Kaelen saw the map of Westeros again, the lands scarred with the simmering, red embers of the rebellions they funded. Then, a gentle, silver rain began to fall from the sky. The rain did not extinguish the embers, but it dampened them, cooled them, causing them to hiss and smoke instead of burn. Then, a great, seven-pointed star of silver light shone down upon the land, and he saw the faces of the people turn away from the smoking embers on the ground, and up towards the comforting light in the sky.
The divine whisper redefined the nature of their war.
You have been fighting the king's sword, and you were successful. But now you fight the people's faith, and you are failing. A sword can only kill; a faith can heal. You cannot fight a healing balm with a poisoned dagger. To counter a faith, you must understand it, find its flaws, and offer a more compelling truth. You must fight their story with a better story.
"We must change our entire strategy," Kaelen announced to the council. "Our war is no longer military or economic. It is now ideological. We must stop trying to arm rebels and start trying to arm minds."
The new plan was called Operation Seven-Pointed Star. It was a strategy of breathtaking subtlety and patience, a war to be fought not in the hills and forests of Westeros, but in its libraries, its universities, and its septs.
Phase One was Research. The Lysaro Academy was given its most important task since the Great Work began. Septon Barthos was ordered to cease his Valyrian studies and focus the Academy's full resources on a single target: the Faith of the Seven. As a former Septon himself, Barthos was uniquely qualified. He was to conduct a complete theological and historical deconstruction of his former religion. He was to find every internal contradiction, every historical inaccuracy, every forgotten schism, every point of logical weakness. He was to create an arsenal of intellectual weapons.
Phase Two was Infiltration. The Theocracy would send new agents to Westeros. Not spies or soldiers, but "scholars," "philosophers," and "historians." These were the brightest graduates of the Covenant Corps, men and women trained by Lyra in deep cover identities and by Barthos in the art of theological debate. Their destination was Oldtown, the intellectual and spiritual heart of Westeros, home to both the Citadel of the Maesters and the Starry Sept.
Phase Three was Subversion. The mission of these agents was not to preach the word of the Golden Wyrm. It was to sow the seeds of doubt in the Faith of the Seven. They would integrate themselves into the city's intellectual circles. They would engage young maester-acolytes and reform-minded septons in Socratic debate. They would ask simple, corrosive questions.
"The Warrior is one of the Seven," a Theocracy agent might say in a tavern frequented by students of the Citadel. "Yet the High Septon preaches that war is a sin. How can a god be the embodiment of a sin? It is a logical contradiction."
"The Maiden represents purity and innocence," another agent might posit to a group of young lords. "Yet the dragons burned thousands of innocent smallfolk on the Field of Fire. Where was the Maiden's protection? If the gods are all-powerful, they are not all-good. If they are all-good, they are not all-powerful. Which is it?"
They would not offer answers. They would only ask questions. They would promote the core values of the Golden Covenant—logic, evidence, observable results—as a superior way of understanding the world, contrasting it with the "blind faith" demanded by the septons.
Phase Four was The Great Schism. This was the long game. Barthos's research uncovered a deep, ancient doctrinal dispute within the Faith, a heresy from a thousand years ago concerning the nature of the Seven—whether they were seven distinct gods, or seven faces of a single god. The orthodoxy had settled on the latter, but the debate had been fierce.
Hesh's forgers and scribes were put to work creating their most important forgery yet: a lost holy text, The Book of Questioning, supposedly written by a revered Septon from the age of the heresy. The book, crafted by Barthos with impeccable theological arguments, would not attack the Faith, but would compellingly argue for the "seven distinct gods" interpretation. The plan was to have this "ancient" text "discovered" in the archives of the Citadel, re-igniting the old, divisive argument from within the Faith's own intellectual centre.
The operation began. The agents were dispatched. The book was forged. They were no longer funding rebels with swords, but with ideas.
Months turned into a year. The initial reports were slow. Their agents were successfully embedding themselves in Oldtown. They were building reputations as thoughtful, if eccentric, foreign scholars.
The first breakthrough came from an agent named Myros, a brilliant young man who had engaged a group of senior acolytes at the Citadel in a debate. He had successfully cornered them on the logical paradoxes of the Seven. He reported that one of the acolytes, a sharp-minded boy from a minor noble house, had begun to secretly write a thesis questioning the established doctrine. The first seed of doubt had sprouted.
The second breakthrough was the discovery of The Book of Questioning. Their agent, posing as a dusty archivist, "found" the forged text deep within the Citadel's library. He presented it to a respected, reform-minded Maester. The Maester, stunned by the text's apparent antiquity and the power of its arguments, began circulating copies among his peers. The old heresy, dormant for a millennium, was reborn.
The climax of their new war was not a battle, but a single intelligence report from Lyra, delivered to the council a year after the operation began.
"It has begun," she said, a rare smile touching her lips. "The Starry Sept is in turmoil. The High Septon has condemned the 'heretical' new text. But a powerful faction of septons, led by a popular cleric in Lannisport, has embraced it, claiming it is a return to a 'purer, older' form of the Faith. In the Citadel, the archmaesters are furiously debating its legitimacy. They are fighting each other now. The great, unifying voice of the Faith has been fractured. It has been turned inward, consumed by its own contradictions."
The council looked at each other, a slow, profound understanding dawning. They had done it. They had found the flaw in their enemy's ideological armor and had struck it with a weapon he could not defend against: his own history.
Kaelen stood and walked to the map of Westeros. The silver web of the Faith, which had once seemed so strong and monolithic, now looked different to him. He could see the cracks forming, the lines of schism and doubt spreading from Oldtown.
He felt a sense of grim victory, but also a deep, chilling understanding of their own evolution. They had set out to free slaves. They had built a nation on principles of logic, community, and worth. And now, to protect that nation, they were engaging in the most cynical of arts: the weaponization of belief, the deliberate corruption of another people's soul for geopolitical gain. He thought of Elara's pained questions. Were they the villains in this story? He no longer knew. He only knew that they were winning.
The god, in his domain, felt the change. The silver web of light on his celestial map of Westeros began to fray, its light dimming as dark lines of internal conflict spread through it. And from those cracks, the faint, golden light of his own influence—the light of reason, of doubt, of a more pragmatic truth—began to seep in.
He was satisfied. His followers had learned the final, most important lesson of the Great Game. An army can be defeated with a better army. A kingdom can be defeated with a better strategy. But a faith, a story that lives in the hearts of millions, can only be defeated by a better, more compelling story. Or, failing that, by reminding its followers of the parts of their own story they would prefer to forget. The war for Westeros had become a war of the soul, a game of theology and philosophy. It was a game his shrewd, analytical, and utterly godless god was uniquely suited to win.