What Little Remains Of Terpsichore Ironheart

"That's two fucking high priests of mine this brat has killed!" Fingers yelled. "What's it gonna take for you to do something about this asshole?!"

Hano didn't respond for a few heartbeats, letting his unimpressed stare do the talking, before he picked up his mug and took a calm sip of coffee, before setting it back down on his desk.

"Catherine Ironheart didn't kill your high priests," Hano said, finally. "Rather, your high priests picked a fight with her and got themselves killed as a predictable result. This is, incidentally, why the smarter gods encourage their cults to not pick fights in the first place."

"Some fights are worth picking," Fingers said. "What about those Demon Kings Ironheart's killed? We know Magnus rejected them- Ironheart's no priest, and now they're a godling with the mantles of Usurpation and Revenge. Do I need to explain to you just how bad that would be for... for everything we've built over the last few centuries?"

"Before we address the things I know and which you don't, I'd actually like to talk about the Prince of Revenge," Hano said. "Do you remember how the Demon Prince of Revenge and her retinue got onto the mortal plane? Do you remember how it was your high priestess who did that, with no real plan for what to do about them after the fact, just the assumption that it would be someone else's problem?"

Fingers gritted his teeth, but said nothing.

"So let's simmer the fuck down, alright?" Hano said. "Because you do not have the moral high ground here, Fingers. If our working relationship was even a hair worse, I would be mopping the pavement of Hikaano Square with your face. Now... As it so happens, I did assign one of my Paladins to assassinate Sir Ironheart, in the aftermath of the Paimon episode. That didn't work out, but as time passed, I learned a few key details that you might've noticed as well. First and foremost... Ever notice how, after killing Paimon, Joseph just continued on to Mount Fate, attending the University and joining the Adventurer's Guild? And then, barely two months into Catherine's career with the Guild, she took a mission for the Admiralty and destroyed a fleet of sky pirates?"

"...That's it?" Fingers hissed. "That's it?! That is your excuse? That this goddamn knife-eared freak is fucking USEFUL?! Have you lost your goddamn mind?! Have you somehow managed to forget how usurpation works?! Of course it's useful, of course that freak is playing nice! Right up until your guard is down and it can stab you in the back and go through your pockets!"

"If she kills you first, it'll still be a win," Hano said dryly. "At any rate, I'm done entertaining this temper tantrum. I personally prefer having Catherine alive- not enough to protect her, but if you want to avenge your darling Tenpennies, you'll have to do it yourself. Dismissed."

Fingers grit his teeth, before disappearing.

He reappeared behind Hano, with one hand wrapped in the half-elf's dirty-blonde hair and the other holding a dagger to Hano's throat.

"I don't think you quite understand your position in this pantheon, little man," Fingers said. "The Guilds of Thieves, Mages, and Fighters make up the Holy Trinity, the mightiest of all Hikaano institutions, whose gods lead this pantheon. I outrank you, boot boy, and when I talk, you fucking listen."

Hano calmly picked up his mug of coffee again, before smashing it into Fingers' face, sending the thief stumbling back, shards of ceramic tinkling off his face.

"You can dictate to me like that when you can actually do something to hurt me," Hano said, as he stood up and calmly and systematically broke the thief's elbows, one at a time. "As it stands, you are just a conniving little shit with eyes bigger than his stomach, and I am a soldier."

Not for the first time, he was very happy with Catherine carving out the Idea of "what's a Thief to a Knight?" Otherwise, any fight he had with Fingers would be a lot riskier; now, however, it was written in the stars that, when it came to an actual fight, Hano would kick Fingers' ass up and down the street. Like he was doing now, grabbing Fingers by the neck, lifting him up, and slamming him against the back wall of Hano's office.

"And if you come in here and pull this shit again, I will give you an object lesson in why I'm not starting anything with Sir Ironheart," Hano said. "Because another thing I've learned is that she's a Cleric of The Father, the God of Time, Fatherhood, and Death. When she stabs a Living God and he dies, she has unquestionably wielded the Aspect of Death against them- this destroys the mantle entirely, bypassing the ordinary mechanisms of usurpation and reincarnation."

Fingers glared daggers at Hano, unable to say anything in response with the Paladin's hand around his throat.

"You're actually a rather interesting problem for me," Hano continued. "You're the solution to another problem of mine- that Catherine hates me for the War of the Roses, and is very unwilling to work with me. And as it so happens, Catherine, who hates you as well for what you've enabled the Tenpennies to do, as well as the general miasma of scorn that civilized people have for organized crime, is the solution to you. Do you understand how tempting it is? How much I want to simply break half the bones in your body, tie you up like a New Year's present, and drop you off on her doorstep so she can open you with a knife? She'd love that, Fingers. And she might even forgive me a little for some of that unpleasantness during the War- if I giftwrapped you for her to kill, I can't be that bad."

Hano sighed dramatically, before turning and throwing Fingers across the office, where he landed in front of the door.

"Lucky for you," Hano continued, "I have a vested interest in the status quo, and having you killed would shake the board too much for my liking. The consequences of your death are hard to predict, and not all of the possibilities are ones I like more than the current state of affairs. But I assure you, Fingers, that preference is very conditional. So. Don't push your luck."

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Fingers managed to stagger upright, and stalked out of the door, trying to preserve what little dignity he could in the process. Hano simply sighed, and cast a simple spell to restore his office- and his drink- to perfect order. Fingers genuinely had interrupted something, and Hano still had work to do.

Five minutes passed, during which time Hano returned to his paperwork. His subordinates were selected for loyalty, to be certain, but also for competency; a crony who was only good for licking his boots was good for nothing, and his Primogens were all perfectly competent people. Anything that made it past them and to his desk, therefore, was of such magnitude that it genuinely warranted his attention, and his final decision. Currently, the issue at hand was a petition from Primogen Thompson to relax the regulations around homosexuality.

Hano sighed quietly. Alas, he'd found himself forced to ally with the fucking Hikaano of all people, and as such, had to deal with their laws and customs- and homosexuality was still illegal within the Imperium. The enforcement of this law was quite lax, as it was mainly Paladins who enforced laws in the first place, and Hano himself thought this was a stupid law, but it was a law, and the Paladins didn't get to pick and choose which laws they followed, or else they'd stop being trusted to enforce them.

The clock struck half past eight, and Hano put away his paperwork, having stamped the petition with a veto. The door of his office opened, and the space shifted. What had been an ordinary office that could comfortably hold perhaps three or four people grew to become vastly larger, eclipsing many conference rooms. His desk, modestly-sized, big enough for a few stacks of paper and other odds and ends while still having space to work, shifted first into a long, rectangular table, before widening in the middle until it was a circle. All around the perimeter of the newly-enlarged table, simple chairs sprung into existence- chairs much like an officer might bring on campaign, constructed of thin supporting members and comfortable slings of sturdy canvas.

The Primogens, his Twelve Peers, filed in through the open door, taking their seats.

"Thompson," Hano began, as the elf-raised human man sat down. "I've reviewed your petition, and I'm afraid I have to reject it. I can't make that call unilaterally without grave consequences to the rest of our mission. You'll have to take it up with the Imperial Government, not me."

Thompson grimaced; he was not the only one in the room who preferred eating glass to dealing with that nest of vipers. For all that Hano technically gave him a path forward, everyone understood that it was a firm no.

The meeting proceeded apace from there; gathering all Twelve Peers for a single meeting only happened once a year, as Hano's ambitions did not permit idleness among his followers. On all other days of the year, his Primogens were busy, out in the world enacting his will. Pulling one of them here for a meeting was simple; coordinating schedules for two was much trickier. Coordinating a meeting of twelve Primogens required weeks of preparation to survive suspending all of their other business for a day.

"I passed along your message to Sir Ironheart," Alston said, during the third hour of the meeting. "To nobody's surprise, she still does not like you, and took the affair with Faith quite personally. She did not accept your apology with any amount of grace or good humor, sir."

"There's no good way to apologize for trying to have someone assassinated," Hano said, frowning. "Nonetheless, perfect is the enemy of good, and an awkward apology is, in this case, preferable to choosing utter inaction."

"Should we send her a gift basket or something?" Rogers asked. "I'm not being sarcastic, here- she's plenty entitled to be mad about that, and it's gonna take more than words to smooth things over. Talk is cheap, after all."

"She was disgusted by the notion that we approve of her behavior," Alston said. "If we appear to be trying to court her favor, she might burn down one of our offices with everyone trapped inside out of pure pique."

"No, that's not her style," Thompson said, shaking his head. "She'd just send us the severed head of the highest-ranking Paladin she could grab on short notice."

"Sir, with all due respect," Cartwright began, inauspiciously, "I could stand to be reminded why you need this bitch to like you so bad."

"What, the fact she killed Tenpenny and Paimon before even starting university isn't enough?" Hano asked.

"Tenpenny was an up-jumped thief, sir," Cartwright argued. "He got cocky and picked a straight fight with someone who turned out to be on par with a trained adventurer, rather than just an ordinary teenager. And Paimon... well, we've done the math. For a Demon King to cross the dimensional gap between Hell and here, they'd need to expend so much of their power in the process that they'd be nearly helpless when they first arrived. Ironheart's good, and she's lucky, but..."

"Catherine Ironheart took a single airship and a crew of landlubber greenhorns to fight a pirate fleet of sixty airships, including the largest airship ever lofted, which was equipped with full-sized Grigian naval cannons," Thompson said. "That was a fight she won. If Hano thinks we need her to not be mad at us, I'm inclined to agree. Even if she can't destroy the Paladin's Guild entirely, she can still give us a bloody nose if she puts her mind to it."

Cartwright grunted.

"Also," Hano added, "there is the simple fact that, while Catherine is a Death Priest, who can destroy a divine mantle completely... there's still the strong possibility she didn't. There's more to the power of a god than just raw energy, and when a god dies, that power usually goes somewhere."

"...Do you think you were right from the beginning, then?" Alston asked. "Do you think Catherine Ironheart really has taken the mantle of Paimon the Usurper?"

"A lot of things might have happened," Hano said. "One thing's for certain, she isn't a god yet. All she has so far is potential. There's a slim chance she will become the new God of Usurpation, but... Ultimately, gentlemen? I think that, sometime before the turn of the century, our pantheon will gain a new Living God. There is much that is still up in the air- we ultimately only have loose speculation about what her Aspect will be, to the point we cannot rule out the possibility she'll take Faith Jones' joke too far and actually become the God of Gay People who runs the Faggot's Guild."

"She said that?" Thompson whispered to himself under his breath.

"The only things that are certain are these," Hano continued. "One. As the daughter of both Napoleon Ironheart, the Green Devil who killed my son, and Ariel Rosewood, whose grandfather I killed, Catherine Ironheart currently believes me to be worse than Lucifer himself. And two..."

Hano sighed, thinking back to the days after the last Dark Crusade, and how he'd felt after being the one to slay Dark Lord Julius. How confusing it was, with all that raw divinity welling up inside him. How, in a fit of pique and for a lack of better options, Hano had thrown himself into a grand quest to rid the world of its draconic tyrants, assembling and then organizing followers along the way, until his nascent mantle as the Dragonslayer shifted to make him the God of Paladins.

He thought about Catherine Ironheart, already a talented murderer with a stark moral clarity only possible in the young and the insane, and what divinity must be doing to her, and what grand quest she was likely to embark on as she grew into her new mantle.

Hano sighed again.

"...Two, I would rather not be at odds with my new little sister."