Part One Hundred Seven — What the World Now Knew

　Word reached the neighboring Kingdom of Verath within the month, carried by merchants who'd fled Ashford's borders during the chaos and had no particular loyalty left to keep quiet about what they'd witnessed.

"An entire army," one such merchant told a Verathi border official, still visibly shaken by his own account. "Two thousand soldiers, six hundred mages, broken in a single day by a territory nobody even properly mapped until recently."

The story grows a little with every retelling, same as it always does.

Doesn't make the core of it any less true, though.

　The Kingdom of Myrath――the same kingdom whose careless spellwork testing had destroyed Borga's original home――received the news with considerably more unease than most, given how directly their own actions had contributed to Horizoncrest's population.

"If the dwarves we displaced are now under this anomaly's protection," one Myrathi noble reportedly said, "and that anomaly just demonstrated the capability to break an entire kingdom's army, perhaps antagonizing the mountain further was never a wise policy to begin with."

　The dwarven strongholds scattered across the continent took particular interest, word of Borga's people finding a genuine home reaching them through channels considerably faster and more reliable than ordinary rumor.

"They didn't just survive," one dwarven envoy reportedly told her own council, having personally traveled to confirm the reports. "They thrived. Proper forges, proper craft, genuine respect for what they actually bring to a community. That's not something most surface kingdoms have ever bothered offering us."

Good.

Let that story spread too.

Let people understand what Horizoncrest actually is, not just what it did to an army that came looking for a fight.

　Elven communities, scattered and diminished across various contested territories, received the news with something closer to cautious hope than fear――word of an entire displaced elven population finding not just refuge but genuine belonging spreading through networks that had, for generations, mostly carried news of loss instead.

　The Holy Church of Laodicea itself fractured, quietly, into competing factions over how to actually respond.

　Those who saw the defeat as confirmation that the anomaly needed to be destroyed at any cost.

　And those, growing in number as Sophia's eventual testimony began working its way through proper channels, who wondered whether the war itself had been built on considerably shakier foundations than anyone had first assumed.

Sophia hasn't left yet.

Still deciding when she's actually ready.

But word's already starting to move ahead of her, one way or another.

　King Alaric, for his part, retreated into a careful, watchful silence that his own court found increasingly difficult to interpret――no immediate call for a second mobilization, no formal acknowledgment of defeat either.

　Simply a king weighing something he clearly hadn't fully decided how to handle yet.

　I sat with all of this, piece by piece, as it filtered back to us over the following weeks――the world's reaction to a fight I'd genuinely never wanted, spreading in directions I couldn't fully control or predict.

I didn't ask for any of this.

Not the war.

Not the visibility.

Not whatever conversation is apparently happening in courts and dwarven strongholds and elven remnants across half the continent right now.

But it's happening anyway.

And I think, if I actually want any say in how the story ends up being told, I need to start paying attention to it properly, rather than just reacting to whatever eventually reaches me secondhand.

"You are considering something," Anti-Subconsciousness observed, brief, quieter than it used to be about such things.

Yeah.

I think it's time Horizoncrest started actually engaging with the wider world, instead of just waiting for the wider world to keep deciding things about us without our input.

Easier said than done, probably.

Still.

Worth trying.