Dear Diary, today I secret thoughts that amount of heresy to you, secured only because none in the wyld may find something so keen to my nature, not without finding and counting the stars first, then determining which one is the third-before-last one.
My lord prince, my liege, is a weak buffoon, buoyed by his subordinates, lifted by our collective efforts, but without much to contribute, for all his vaunted 'strategy', there is no skill at logistics that he brings, and little tempered experience. Even the most fearsome foes of the court I dispatched for him, or his predecessors.
But there is a wind of change at the court, someone whose intrinsic call to the virtue of valour is absolute, and whose integrity much higher. They call him The Constable, and he has come from the Wyld, avoiding the usual traps, like the hannya, the collector wood, the land of night and Ketu's dreamfields.
He has spoken much, and at length, of the Prince's weakness, and we now have a plan... It all starts with me creating a new identity, as a weaker Raksha. I shall call her Pageantry of Rhiannon, the star of stars, fitting that I be called by the name of a bright star linked to influence and power.
That persona is to capture a new pawn, a foolish, weak human. The constable has already chosen him, I am to groom him in seeing through illusions. And his village is going to go along, sending us a tribute of souls, starting with him, in exchange for us not exterminating them, we are to seal the deal by pretending to ally with them, and my persona is to marry this human, who will come with us, willingly. I tried to argue with the constable that this was much too complicated, that it was wasteful to not just take them all. But then he said: 'but that's why Japhtia will go with it, he's into more and more complex plans lately, wasteful ones...'
He doesn't know I have trained this human in the arts of Ketu, teaching him to slay our kind through their dreams of legend. Through their deepest fondest wishes are they vulnerable. Just like Balor was caught unaware, by the sun's closest associate.
And he was proven right, about Balor's complexity addiction, anyways. My thrall executed him near Ketu and all is well. And that's when the second part of his plan came into effect, we trialed the prince, and we are now in control of the court! And the third phase, now, we take care of loose ends, like that foolish mortal...
— Diary of Sapphire-Rose of Dusk's Countless Imagined Stars in Bloom, Year of Cycloned Nothings.
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