Part Eighty-Six — What the People Heard

Pieced together later, same as everything else about how the wider kingdom actually came to see us.

　The truth, as Seraphiel had promised, reached Selwyn's desk accurately — a genuinely dangerous encounter, one knight nearly killed outright over a moment of misplaced pride, prevented only by the intervention of a second, unexpected figure among the anomaly's own allies. A territory hidden rather than invaded, four knights returned alive but visibly shaken.

　A careful, honest report, exactly as instructed — and considerably more unsettling than anyone in the Church hierarchy had hoped to hear.

　The truth, unfortunately, was never the version that actually reached the wider kingdom.

Word travels.

It just doesn't always travel honestly.

　It started, as these things often do, with a tavern conversation nobody important enough to be believed — a guard who'd escorted supplies to the knights' staging point, mentioning offhand to a friend that "something in those mountains" had killed two full units of Church knights over the years.

　The friend mentioned it to someone else.

　By the third retelling, "something" had become a monster.

　By the fifth, the monster had a rough shape — enormous, merciless, guarding a fortune in stolen Church relics.

　By the time the story reached Ashford's capital, it barely resembled anything that had actually happened.

　"A beast in the mountains, devouring Holy Knights whole," one merchant told another, in a market square considerably closer to the palace than to Horizoncrest. "The Church's finest, gone without a trace. If it can kill knights that easily, what happens when it decides the rest of us are worth eating too?"

Nobody involved in any of this actually died the way these stories describe.

Doesn't stop the stories from spreading anyway.

　Lord Reventh Cassmoor — a minor noble with considerably more ambition than his actual holdings warranted — saw the growing rumor for exactly what it was worth to a man in his position:

　Opportunity, dressed up as public concern.

　"The Church claims to serve justice for the people," he said, at a gathering of similarly ambitious minor nobility, "and yet a monster sits unaddressed in our own kingdom's borders, having already claimed Church lives without consequence. What message does that silence send to the common folk who trust that same Church to protect them?"

He doesn't actually care about the common folk.

He cares about being the man who forced the Church's hand, and the political capital that comes with it.

　The sentiment spread through noble circles with the same efficiency the original rumor had spread through taverns — amplified, in this case, by people who understood precisely how to turn a vague public fear into deliberate political pressure.

　Selwyn felt the pressure building within weeks, delivered through increasingly pointed inquiries from Church superiors who'd never once, in her decades of service, questioned her methodical approach before.

　"The public grows uneasy," one senior cleric told her, not unkindly, but with clear concern nonetheless. "Whatever caution you've maintained, High Priestess, it's beginning to look, from the outside, considerably more like inaction than wisdom."

　"Two units lost does not justify a third loss through hasty action," Selwyn said, holding to the same careful reasoning that had guided her from the beginning. "I have a scholar investigating the barrier's actual nature. I have knights who returned safely with genuine information. Acting rashly now would undo months of careful groundwork."

　"Groundwork the public cannot see," the cleric said, gentle but firm. "And an institution built on the promise of justice and protection cannot afford to be seen doing nothing, however wise that nothing actually is."

She's cornered.

Not by the actual threat — by the shape a rumor took, once it left honest hands and passed through enough mouths that wanted something different from what actually happened.

　Selwyn sat with that pressure a long while, alone, the same careful ledger of lost names open before her that had guided every decision since this whole investigation began.

　"I will not act rashly," she said, finally, mostly to herself, in the quiet of her own chamber.

　"But I no longer have the luxury of acting only when I'm fully ready, either."

　She began drafting a formal report to the wider Church hierarchy that evening — one that would, however reluctantly, begin the process neither patience nor careful research had ultimately been permitted to finish on its own terms.

Whatever happens next, it's not going to be because the actual threat demanded it.

It's going to be because a story, twisted enough times, eventually became more dangerous than the truth it replaced.