It was Sango who first described the Temple of the Eastern Quill.
"Imagine a library that thinks it's a god."
Perched on the ridge of Mount Orun, the Quill Temple had chronicled every bloodline, omen, and divine birth since the rise of the Lupine Dynasty. It was sacred. Sealed. Untouchable.
Which made it perfect.
Elara stood before her new operatives: five scribes, all recruited over weeks from the forgotten lineages. Families whose claims to the moonblood had been erased. Not by death — but by the ink of the Eastern Quill.
"We will not destroy the temple," Elara told them.
"We will make it forget."
One nodded slowly. "You want us to alter the records?"
"No. Not all. Just one."
She held up a parchment scroll. The child Myra had unveiled — "Heir of Lycaena" — had no true name in any record, but the Temple scribes had invented one, claiming to have unearthed it in hidden archives.
Elara knew those archives were forgeries.
She had proof.
She now intended to turn the lie against itself.
"The mouth that invents a story forgets it cannot un-eat the words."
The plan was precise.
Adisa and Zela would intercept and swap the patrol schedules for the temple wardens.
Sango and the recruited scribes would enter disguised as visiting historians from the Western Flame Sect.
Elara would remain behind. She wasn't just leading the mission.
She was writing the new page.
At midnight, the plan began.
A false fog rolled in — conjured by one of the defected temple girls using cloudvine resin.
The guards blinked through the smoke, coughing.
The doors of the scriptorium creaked open.
Inside, endless scrolls whispered in their sleep.
Sango nodded to his team.
They moved swiftly — not to remove, but to edit.
The scribes replaced the original prophecy scroll with a counterfeit. It looked identical. Smelled of the same ink. Stamped with the same wax.
But the content?
It now claimed:
"The heir born of Lycaena's blood shall be marked by blindness in one eye and the wolf's call at birth."
The boy Myra presented had no such marks.
And when this truth reached the nobles?
Doubt would bloom like fungus in wet grain.
Meanwhile, Adisa set a second fire, metaphorical this time.
She left a coded letter under the temple elder's table — written in the original Quill tongue — suggesting that another scribe had bribed his way into naming the heir.
Not to expose him.
But to start suspicion.
"If the wall begins to crack, the termites are never far behind."
At dawn, the temple bells rang as usual.
But already, a ripple had started through the nobility.
A minor house publicly questioned the child's legitimacy.
Another paused its pledge of grain support to Myra.
And in the temple? A high-ranking elder was suspended over "errors in preservation protocol."
Elara watched it unfold from the northern towers.
The lie had been cracked.
Not shattered.
That would come later.
Back in her war chamber, Elara sat with Caelum's sealed letter in hand. It had arrived during the night, untouched.
Inside, only five words:
"I cannot hold both worlds."
She read it three times.
Then whispered, "Then choose one."
Later that evening, Myra stormed into the Whisper Hall, dragging a terrified temple scribe behind her.
He stuttered, "I swear—I copied the scroll exactly!"
Myra's voice was quiet.
Too quiet.
"And yet, the version that now circulates across the noble houses has no mention of our boy's name."
The scribe fell to his knees.
"Someone... someone has forged the record."
Myra crouched beside him.
"Do you know what ink tastes like when it's burned into your tongue?"
He began to weep.
"The story that turns against its teller is more dangerous than the sword at their throat."
Zela found Elara alone in the observatory.
"The nobles are talking," she said. "Some of them are already delaying their coronation travel plans."
Elara didn't smile.
Victory wasn't joy.
It was momentum.
And now, she had it.
"Ready the next scroll," Elara said.
Sango raised an eyebrow. "Another prophecy?"
"No," she replied.
"A royal confession."