On Day 25, the Green Accord’s supply system began to die.

The death was not dramatic. It was the quiet failure of logistics — the unglamorous machinery that converted food, ammunition, medical supplies, and replacement equipment from storage depots in the rear into delivered resources at the front. Armies fought on courage and training and the quality of their weapons. Armies *survived* on supply chains.

The kingdom’s cavalry struck the first major supply column at dawn. Two hundred riders — light cavalry from the House Kraelvane stables, mounted on plains-bred horses that combined endurance with the low-profile agility that made them ideal for raiding operations — intercepted a 400-wagon supply convoy fourteen kilometers behind the Accord’s forward perimeter.

The convoy was guarded. Sixty Rootist warriors — Demeterra’s vassal troops, soldiers drawn from the Growth domain’s agricultural territories. The guard was competent. The terrain was not — the road between the Accord’s main supply depot and the forward positions passed through a narrow valley where the forest pressed close to the track and where a cavalry charge from the tree line could reach the wagons before the guard could form a defensive line.

The attack lasted eleven minutes.

The cavalry didn’t fight the guard. They fought the supplies. Riders swept through the convoy in paired columns, each pair targeting a specific section of the wagon train. They didn’t stop to engage — passing attacks at full gallop, fire-arrows into grain wagons, blades through rope lashings that held ammunition crates to flatbeds, the contained chaos of a force that understood its mission was destruction, not combat.

Two hundred and twelve wagons destroyed or damaged. Sixty-eight intact — the rear section, where the guard had consolidated and formed a defensive perimeter that the cavalry couldn’t breach without accepting casualties they didn’t need to accept. The cavalry withdrew south, toward a series of pre-positioned rally points that the kingdom’s intelligence service had established during the first week of the war.

The Accord’s forward forces, already stretched by twenty-five days of continuous operations, were expecting six days of food. They received two.

***

Demeterra felt the supply disruption through her domain infrastructure the way a body felt a cut — not through the pain itself, but through the cascade of secondary effects that a wound produced. Blood loss. Inflammation. The body’s systems diverting resources from function to repair.

Her Growth domain sensed the destroyed grain wagons — 40,000 kilograms of cultivated wheat, grown in her agricultural territories, harvested by her believers, transported across 200 kilometers of contested terrain, and burned in eleven minutes by two hundred riders who understood that feeding an army was harder than fighting one.

The strategic position had deteriorated beyond the recovery point.

[DEMETERRA — STRATEGIC ASSESSMENT, DAY 25]

[Coalition Status: 5 gods (Sylvaen withdrawn Day 23)]

[Ground Forces: ~58,000 effective (from ~80,000 pre-war)]

[FP Reserves: ~1,100,000 (down from 1,800,000 pre-war)]

[Daily FP Generation: ~1,600,000 (from 400,000 believers)]

[Supply Status: CRITICAL — forward forces at 48-hour provisions. Resupply capacity degraded by 53% due to cavalry interdiction.]

[FP Reserves Note: Decline from ~1.35 million (Day 19) reflects six days of sustained divine communication relay, Growth-domain terrain maintenance, and root-network operational overhead — approximately 250,000 FP beyond daily generation.]

[Operational Window: 5 DAYS REMAINING of original 30-day timeline]

Five days. The operational window — the period during which the Accord’s aggregate force could maintain offensive combat operations without supply-chain collapse — had been thirty days at the war’s inception. Weather, logistics, FP expenditure, and the fundamental mathematics of keeping 80,000 soldiers fed and armed in hostile territory set the limit. Beyond thirty days, the Accord’s armies would begin consuming their reserves, and an army consuming its reserves was an army on a clock.

The clock was running out.

Demeterra opened an emergency Divine Communion. Not the full-coalition format — Sylvaen gone, and the communions were becoming smaller and quieter with each passing day. This was a command communion: Demeterra, Gorvahn, Durnok.

The essential three. The fighters. The gods who had committed their forces to the central front and who could not withdraw without abandoning the war’s objective entirely.

"Phase Three acceleration," Demeterra communicated. Her presence in the communion was leaner than it had been on Day 1 — the Descent had cost her more than FP. It had cost her the reserve of divine authority that made other gods listen without question. A goddess who had spent her strongest weapon and achieved an incomplete result was a goddess whose strategic judgment could be questioned.

"Define acceleration," Gorvahn responded. The Mire Lord’s communication carried the careful neutrality of a commander who had seen the supply report and calculated the same timeline that Demeterra had calculated.

"Full offensive into the kingdom’s interior. All available forces through the gap. The secondary defensive lines must be breached within seventy-two hours."

A pause.

Durnok — whose Crushist theology demanded forward action and whose patience with delay had been eroding for twenty-five days — responded immediately. "Finally. My forces have been waiting for authorization since Day 20. We attack at dawn."

Gorvahn did not respond immediately. The pause extended to six seconds — a long time in divine communion, where thoughts traveled at the speed of divine processing and where silence indicated deliberation rather than agreement.

"The Iron Sovereign’s Heroes are uncommitted," Gorvahn said.

"He deployed one," Durnok countered. "It withdrew. The gap is open."

"One Hero deployed. Two remain in reserve. The deployment of one Hero was a response to the Ashwall’s destruction — a proportional response using his second-strongest asset. Accelerating our offensive will provoke a proportional escalation from him. He has two Heroes he has not used. What does his escalation look like?"

The question hung in the communion. Demeterra felt it — the shape of Gorvahn’s doubt, the precise strategic reasoning that made the Mire Lord the most dangerous mind in her coalition.

"Gorvahn." Demeterra’s communication carried the weight of a goddess who had spent 253 years building a civilization and who was watching it threatened by a rival who had achieved in 251 years what had taken her five times as long. "We have five days. If we do not breach the interior defenses in five days, we lose the operational window. If we lose the window, we withdraw. If we withdraw, the Iron Sovereign consolidates, absorbs our losses, and becomes Rank 8 within a generation. At Rank 8, he is beyond our capability to challenge. Ever."

"I am aware of the timeline."

"Then you are aware that inaction is not a neutral choice. Inaction is choosing to lose slowly instead of risking everything for the chance to win."

Gorvahn’s presence in the communion shifted — not agreement, but acquiescence. The difference between a commander who believed in the plan and a commander who recognized that the only remaining options were bad ones.

"My forces will advance through the eastern corridor. Dawn, Day 26. But I want the record to show that I recommended withdrawal on Day 20, and that the decision to continue was not mine."

Demeterra noted the statement. It was the kind of thing a competent commander said when they expected the operation to fail and wanted to survive the aftermath. Political armor. The shield of documented dissent.

She didn’t blame him. She’d have done the same.

***

In the hours after the communion, Demeterra turned her attention inward — to the territory behind the army, to the farms and villages and towns that generated the faith sustaining her existence.

Her believers were afraid.

She could feel it — not as emotion, not as the layered human experience of fear that changed behavior and shaped decisions. She felt it as a statistical shift: faith generation from her agricultural territories had dropped 4% over the last week. A tremor, not a collapse. But tremors preceded structural failure if the pressure continued.

Her believers were farmers. They grew wheat and corn and barley and the root vegetables that formed the foundation of every civilization the Growth domain had ever built. They plowed the soil and planted the seeds and prayed to Demeterra for rain and sun and the right combination of warmth and moisture that turned seeds into food. They were not soldiers. They had not chosen this war. They had woken up one morning to learn that their goddess — the divine presence that blessed their crops and filled their granaries and kept the frost from killing their winter stores — had taken their sons and fathers and brothers and marched them north to fight a god they’d never heard of.

The sons and fathers and brothers were not coming home at the expected rate. The wounded were returning — steady streams of men who had fought against a wall that refused to break and who bore injuries that the local healers could treat but not cure. The dead were not returning at all. Their absence was accumulating in the empty chairs at dinner tables, in the unplowed fields where workers should have been, in the quiet that filled houses where there used to be noise.

Fear was rational. Their goddess was spending their future on a war that did not seem to be ending.

Demeterra withdrew her awareness from the front and expanded it across her home territory — the farmland, the villages, the temples where her priests conducted the daily rituals that sustained faith generation. She looked at what she had built over 253 years. The fields. The granaries. The irrigation channels that her Growth domain maintained. The root-network that connected every settlement to her divine consciousness. The civilization that did not wage war. That had never been built for war. That existed because a young goddess had found a farming village and taught them to grow things.

Five days.

In five days, either the Green Accord’s armies broke through the kingdom’s interior defenses and cut the Iron Sovereign’s civilization apart — or the operational window closed, and the Accord withdrew, and the strongest god on the continent added "survived a seven-god coalition" to the list of capabilities that made him impossible to contain.

Demeterra looked at her fields. She looked at her believers. She looked at the war she had started and the clock she could not stop.

She felt very old.