Morglith died on Day 204.

The god of Stone and Decay had been fighting alone for 173 days — since Day 31, when the Accord collapsed and every other coalition member withdrew, surrendered, or died. One hundred and seventy-three days of contesting mountain passes against a northern garrison that outnumbered his remaining forces three to one, with FP reserves that declined daily, in conditions that his soldiers’ bodies increasingly could not sustain.

He had known since Day 30. Every calculation he performed — and Morglith performed calculations constantly, the arithmetic of survival that was the only math that mattered — told him the same thing: the war was unwinnable, the defense was unsustainable, the end was approaching with the steady inevitability of a glacier advancing on a valley.

He stayed anyway.

Not because the arithmetic permitted it. Because ninety years ago, Demeterra had included a god of Stone and Decay from a frozen peak in a coalition that gave his existence purpose. Because ninety years of alliance had made him part of something larger than a god sitting on a mountain watching stone crumble. Because loyalty was the one thing that the arithmetic could not quantify and that Morglith valued more than anything the arithmetic could measure.

By Day 204, his forces had been reduced to 1,100 soldiers — from the original 8,000. Most of the losses came from desertion and withdrawal rather than combat casualties — Blightkin warriors who saw no purpose in defending passes for a coalition that no longer existed and who walked home to their families in the Blight Wastes with their weapons slung and their war-honor intact.

Morglith did not stop them. A god who had chosen loyalty could not demand it from his followers. The choice had to be free or it was not loyalty. It was slavery.

The 1,100 who remained were the faithful. The wolves who stayed with the pack because the pack was where they belonged. They held three passes in the Frostmarch — narrow defiles through the mountains that connected Morglith’s territory to the kingdom’s northern provinces. Each pass was defended by 350 soldiers in positions that 200 years of fortification work had made nearly impregnable.

Nearly.

***

Zephyr deployed Harsk.

The decision was clinical — a Rank 5 god with depleted FP and 1,100 soldiers did not warrant Krug’s offensive power or Nissa’s defensive barrier. It warranted the Ghost — the precise, surgical instrument that could resolve the situation without the collateral damage that a conventional assault would produce.

Harsk materialized in the Frostmarch at midnight. The cold hit him immediately — the Frostmarch’s natural environment, even without Morglith’s active manipulation of the Stone domain’s thermal-sink properties, maintained a temperature gradient across the region that dropped the ambient temperature to minus thirty degrees. Beast-domain Heroes were thermal adaptive — Harsk’s physiology adjusted within seconds, his skin thickening, his circulation redirecting to protect the core — but the cold was a reminder that he was operating in hostile territory, and that the god who occupied it was still alive.

The mission was not assassination. Zephyr’s orders were specific:

[MISSION PARAMETERS — HARSK FENWARD]

[Target: Morglith, God of Stone and Decay, Rank 5]

[Objective: Communicate. Not kill.]

[Message: "The war is over. Your allies are dead or surrendered. Your coalition does not exist. The Sovereign offers vassalization on the same terms as Gorvahn: territorial governance, FP tithe, military cooperation. Or you may die on this mountain. Choose."]

[Rules of Engagement: Do not initiate combat. Self-defense only.]

Harsk carried the message through Morglith’s territory — through the frozen passes, past the diminished sentry positions, into the core of the god’s domain where the stone was grey and crumbling and the wind carried voices that might have been the mountain’s own. The pass fortifications were impressive even in decay. Two hundred years of Stone-domain engineering had turned natural rock formations into interlocking defensive positions — walls that grew from the cliff face itself, gates carved from single boulders, murder-holes that were not cut but grown from the geological strata. Most of the positions were empty now. The soldiers who had manned them were gone — home, or dead, or sitting in the camps behind the kingdom’s lines waiting for the processing interviews that would decide their future.

He found Morglith at the summit of the highest peak in the Frostmarch — a point of decaying rock and grey stone where the god’s divine presence was strongest. Not because gods needed to stand on high ground. Because Morglith was looking south, watching the distant glow of the kingdom’s northern garrison fires, and waiting for the thing that his arithmetic had told him was coming.

"I have a message," Harsk said. His voice carried through the wind because Beast-domain vocal enhancement compensated for environmental noise. "From the Sovereign."

Morglith’s response was not immediate. The god’s presence filled the summit — heavy, old, the accumulated weight of 412 years compressed into a point of divine awareness that Harsk, despite being a Hero-class combatant, recognized as formidable.

"I know what the message is."

"Then you know the terms."

"I know the terms." A pause. The wind shifted. "How did Demeterra die?"

Harsk had not expected the question. He answered anyway. "FP depletion. Day 187. Her believers converted. She faded."

"Did she fight?"

"She grew a harvest — the largest in continental history. She fed her people. Then she faded."

The silence on the mountain lasted for minutes, not seconds. The stone beneath them groaned, as if the god’s domain was responding to something that its master felt. Hairline fractures spread across the summit rock. The air grew colder — altitude and grief and the mountain itself contracting, the fundamental physics of the environment acknowledging something that the wind could not carry and the stone could not speak.

"Tell your Sovereign," Morglith said, "that Stone does not kneel."

Harsk assessed the statement. It was not bluster. It was not defiance for the sake of appearance. It was the final position of a god who had chosen loyalty over survival and who would not abandon that choice now — not when every other member of the coalition had abandoned theirs.

"Then I am sorry," Harsk said. And meant it. The Ghost was a weapon. Weapons did not need to apologize. But Harsk had been a person before he was a weapon, and the person recognized what the weapon could not: that the god’s loyalty was admirable, and that admirable things should be acknowledged before they were destroyed.

***

Morglith Descended at dawn on Day 204.

The manifestation was not combat-oriented. The god’s remaining FP — 22,000, barely sufficient for 18 seconds of physical form — produced a manifestation that was six feet tall, gaunt, grey-skinned with crumbling stone formations along the jaw and shoulders, the last fragment of a divine consciousness expressing itself in the only way left.

He did not fight.

He stood on the summit of his tallest peak and looked at his territory — the frozen mountains, the snow-covered valleys, the passes where his soldiers had fought and died and held with the stubbornness that only mountain-born warriors possessed. He looked at the sky, white and endless and cold. He looked south, toward the kingdom of the god who had won.

Eighteen seconds.

In those eighteen seconds, every mountain pass in Morglith’s territory collapsed. The Stone domain’s final expenditure unmade the structural integrity of every cliff face, every bridge of rock, every narrow defile that an army could march through. The Decay domain accelerated the process — centuries of erosion compressed into eighteen seconds, granite crumbling to gravel, approach roads disintegrating into impassable rubble. It was a gesture, not a weapon. The god of Stone and Decay’s final act was the same as the Growth goddess’s final act: a gift. The structural devastation that Morglith imposed on the Frostmarch’s passes would take approximately two years to clear — two years during which the approaches would be impassable to military operations and that would give his 1,100 remaining soldiers time to go home, gather their families, and decide their future without the pressure of an invading army at their border.

Demeterra fed her people. Morglith gave his people time.

The system registered the death.

[DIVINE EVENT — GOD DEATH]

[Morglith the Last Loyalist has died.]

[Cause: FP exhaustion during Descent. Physical form destroyed while in corporeal state.]

[Duration of Existence: 412 years]

[Peak Rank: 5]

[Peak Believers: 68,000]

[Final Believers: 11,400]

[Status: PERMANENT.]

[Territorial Effect: Structural collapse imposed on all Frostmarch passes via Stone and Decay domain expenditure. Duration: approximately 2 years before paths can be cleared. Territory transfer delayed until access routes are restored.]

Morglith died the way he lived: quietly, stubbornly, on a mountain that nobody else wanted.

His soldiers — the 1,100 who had stayed — buried their weapons in the permafrost and walked home.