The supply column that Durnok needed to survive Day 30 was destroyed at 14:00 on Day 29.

The cavalry had nothing to do with it this time. A force that the Accord’s rear-area security had not anticipated destroyed the column: fishfolk. Four thousand fishfolk militia — the Tidewatch garrison, freed when Sylvaen withdrew her naval siege — had marched inland for five days and arrived at the river crossing that served as the Accord’s primary supply route with the quiet determination of people who had spent three weeks defending their homes and who now intended to make certain that the army which had threatened those homes could not be fed.

The fishfolk were not soldiers in the conventional sense. They were militia — fishermen and dock workers and shipwrights who had been trained in basic combat and formation discipline, equipped with the pikes and crossbows that the kingdom’s militia doctrine prescribed, and led by officers who had been promoted from civilian life based on competence rather than birth. They did not march in formation with the precision of the King’s Shield Regiment. They did not execute tactical maneuvers with the practiced fluidity of the Crucible Guard.

What they did was block a river crossing.

The crossing was a stone bridge — old, well-built, wide enough for two wagons side by side. It was the chokepoint in the Accord’s supply line, the only crossing within thirty kilometers that could support the weight of loaded supply wagons. Every pound of food, every arrow, every replacement sword and shield that reached Durnok’s front had to cross this bridge.

The fishfolk arrived at the bridge at dawn. By midday, they had fortified both ends. By 14:00, the first Accord supply column — 180 wagons escorted by 200 Rootist guards — arrived to find the crossing blocked by four thousand armed civilians who had arranged themselves behind improvised barricades with the professional calm of people who understood that defending a fixed position against a numerically inferior force was fundamentally a geometry problem, and fishfolk understood geometry because nets and tides and currents were geometry.

The supply column turned back. The second column, arriving two hours later, turned back. The third column didn’t arrive — its escorts, hearing reports of the crossing’s closure, diverted to a ford fifteen kilometers upstream that was too shallow for loaded wagons and that required unloading, carrying supplies across by hand, and reloading on the far side.

The ford operation moved approximately one-tenth of the supplies that the bridge had handled.

Durnok’s army — 18,000 soldiers, each consuming approximately two kilograms of food per day — required 36,000 kilograms of provisions daily. The ford supplied approximately 3,600 kilograms. The deficit was 32,400 kilograms per day.

An army could fight hungry for approximately three days before the caloric deficit began degrading combat performance. After five days, the degradation became severe — reaction times slowing, decision-making compromised, physical endurance reduced by 30-40%.

The bridge was the war.

***

At 16:00, Gorvahn reached his decision.

The Mire Lord had been operating independently for eight days — since Harsk’s strike severed the root-network relay, cutting his connection to Demeterra’s divine communication infrastructure. Eight days of making command decisions based on his own assessment of the situation, without the Rootmother’s strategic oversight, without the intelligence that her network provided, without the divine endorsement that made each order something more than one god’s opinion.

Eight days had been enough.

Gorvahn’s assessment was systematic. He catalogued the facts the way an accountant catalogued debts — dispassionately, completely, withholding judgment until the total was confirmed:

The Accord had lost two members (Sylvaen, Kreth). The remaining coalition controlled no strategic advantage on any front. The supply infrastructure was one destroyed bridge away from collapse. The kingdom’s military — equipped with Kreth’s intelligence, reinforced by the freed Tidewatch garrison, and supported by a god whose FP generation exceeded the entire coalition’s — was transitioning from defensive to offensive operations.

And Durnok was going to get them all killed.

The Crushist war-god’s response to the counter-offensive was precisely what any competent commander would have predicted: escalation. Durnok redeployed forces to the breach. Durnok ordered a renewed assault on the secondary line. Durnok demanded that Gorvahn advance through the eastern corridor to threaten the kingdom’s flank while the main assault broke the center.

The orders assumed that the problem was insufficient aggression. The problem was strategic insolvency.

Gorvahn opened a Divine Communion — not with Demeterra (the relay was gone), and not with Durnok (who would not listen). With Thalveris. The Fortress God. The silent member of the coalition who had contributed 4,000 engineers and who had said nothing in the last three Divine Communions because Thalveris understood the same arithmetic that Gorvahn understood and had reached the same conclusion.

"Tomorrow is Day 30."

"Yes." Thalveris’s communication was sparse. The Fortress God was not given to lengthy strategic discussions. He built things. He assessed structural integrity. He recognized when something could no longer bear weight.

"The Accord cannot bear weight."

"No."

"I will not advance tomorrow. My forces will hold position and prepare for orderly withdrawal. If Durnok orders you to advance, I recommend you do the same."

Thalveris considered. The silence in the communion carried the weight of a god who had existed for 310 years and who had joined the Accord because Demeterra promised him territory on which to build and who was now contemplating the structural failure of the alliance itself.

"My engineers will withdraw tonight. I have no combat forces. If the Accord dissolves, I have nothing to defend myself with."

"Then withdraw quickly."

The communion closed. Gorvahn turned his attention to his army — 12,000 soldiers, well-supplied, well-led, intact because the Mire Lord had fought a defensive campaign while Durnok burned through soldiers like forge fuel. The eastern corridor was secure. The withdrawal route was planned. The logistics were arranged.

When the moment came — and it was coming, tomorrow or the day after — Gorvahn’s army would leave. They would march south in good order, with their weapons and their supplies and their discipline intact, because Gorvahn was a professional and professionals did not panic.

He would offer his surrender to the Iron Sovereign on his own terms, or he would march home. Either way, the war was over.

***

At midnight, Day 29 became Day 30.

Across the kingdom, in temples and barracks and farmhouses and the trenches of the secondary line, the soldiers and citizens and believers felt the transition without acknowledging it. Day 30 was not special to them — it was another day of war, another rotation of sentries and supply runs and the grinding maintenance of a civilization under siege.

To the gods, Day 30 was a boundary.

Demeterra had built her operational plan around a thirty-day window. Thirty days of offensive operations. Thirty days of supply capacity. Thirty days before the calendar turned from "offensive" to "endurance" and from "endurance" to "collapse." The number had been calculated before the war — based on supply reserves, FP budgets, seasonal weather patterns, and the fundamental logistics of moving 80,000 soldiers across hostile territory and keeping them alive while they fought.

The window was closed.

In her territory — the southern farmlands, the Root Cradles, the temples where her farmers prayed for harvests and safety — Demeterra felt the day change and knew what it meant. The arithmetic that had governed every decision since the war’s inception now produced a single output:

Withdraw or die.

She could not withdraw. Withdrawal was the rational choice — the choice that preserved her remaining 400,000 believers, her territory, her divine existence. But withdrawal meant that the Iron Sovereign won. And if the Iron Sovereign won, his growth rate — already the fastest on the continent — would accelerate. Her defeated coalition’s believers would be absorbed. His rank would rise. Within a generation, he would be Rank 8, and at Rank 8, the power differential would be insurmountable.

Withdrawal was not survival. Withdrawal was slow death.

Push forward. Break the secondary line. Reach the kingdom’s heartland. Destroy the faith infrastructure. Kill the temples. Kill the belief that sustains him.

The thought was desperate. Demeterra recognized desperation when she felt it — she had been a goddess for 253 years and had experienced desperation seven times, each time during a war that she had eventually won through patience, strategy, and the agricultural patience that was the Growth domain’s deepest gift: the understanding that seeds planted today became harvests that fed armies tomorrow.

But there were no tomorrows left in the operational plan. Day 30 was today. Tomorrow was Day 31, and Day 31 was not in the plan because the plan had never anticipated that a Rank 7 god would deploy three Heroes, interdict supply lines, launch counter-offensives, and systematically dismantle a seven-god coalition while maintaining defensive operations on three fronts simultaneously.

The Iron Sovereign was not supposed to be this good. The game — and Demeterra did not think in terms of games, but if she had, this is what she would have thought — was not supposed to work this way. Older gods were supposed to defeat younger gods. Larger coalitions were supposed to overwhelm smaller defenders. The system’s mathematics favored numbers, and the Accord had the numbers.

The numbers were not enough.