ear 915 — Three Years After the Proclamation
Iapetus, Called to War Council
The tensions had been building gradually for three years. The Titans had continued their internal genocide, purging communities that resisted the framework or that challenged the god-king authority. The Covenant had continued its opposition, but it was clear that opposition alone would not prevent the Titans from consolidating power.
Asmodeus had been present throughout, in the dimensional spaces between worlds, offering counsel and encouragement and the specific mind games that had been corroding Iapetus's doubt for decades.
"You are ready," Asmodeus said, in the conversation that happened in the year 915. "You have accumulated enough power. The Titans under your command are numerous enough. The spell has spread widely enough that you have communities throughout the supernatural world who depend on your continued strength. You are no longer a challenger to the old order. You are the new order."
"The Covenant is preparing for war," Iapetus said. "Kronos has been moving pieces. The dragon Directorate has formally aligned with the Covenant. Multiple moroi courts have committed resources to prepare for conflict."
"Which is precisely what you want," Asmodeus said. "Open conflict will accelerate the transition. The communities that have been uncertain will be forced to choose. The communities that choose the Titans will be committed fully by the cost of supporting you in war. The communities that choose the Covenant will discover that their choice is insufficient to prevent their own elimination."
"You are suggesting we use the threat of war to consolidate power," Iapetus said.
"I am suggesting you use the reality of war to consolidate power," Asmodeus said. "The threat has been made clear in Kronos's proclamation. The Covenant has declared its boundaries. Now you must respond by declaring your own boundaries and making clear that those boundaries are absolute."
What emerged from the war council in the year 915 was the Titan Ultimatum: all neutral factions had exactly one year to declare their allegiance. Communities that did not align explicitly with the Titans by the year 916 would be treated as enemies. There would be no middle ground. There would be no neutrality. There would be no possibility of existing outside the Titan framework without facing the specific consequences of that existence.
The proclamation of the ultimatum was delivered simultaneously to all communities that had been maintaining a position of neutrality. The message was simple and absolute: choose or be destroyed.
"They are forcing the issue," Coeus said, reading the ultimatum that would be sent out. "Kronos has been attempting to maintain the possibility of coexistence. Now we are declaring that coexistence is impossible."
"Precisely," Crius said. "The communities have had three years to make a decision. Now they must decide. The fence-sitting ends."
What happened immediately after the ultimatum was delivered was that Asmodeus gave them the thing they had been building toward for decades: he opened the dimensional barriers enough to permit the passage of lesser demons from the demon realm.
Three legions. Nine thousand beings of pure malevolence, each one capable of destruction that no mortal community could withstand, each one willing to serve the Titans in exchange for the freedom to consume and destroy.
"This is the power I have been offering," Asmodeus said, when the first legion emerged into the world. "This is what becomes possible when you accept that strength is the only real principle, that dominion is the only real goal, that elimination of the resistant is not just permissible but necessary."
The internal purges that the Titans authorized in the year 915 were genocide on a scale that exceeded even the systematic elimination of the crossbreeds and pixies. What the Titans ordered was the elimination of all weakness within their own territories: all communities that questioned the framework, all individuals who showed resistance to the god-king authority, all beings who were deemed insufficient in power or in commitment.
The dragons that had aligned with the Titans were ordered to use the life-force draining spell on their own populations, extracting Quintessence from the weak and integrating it into their own structures. The moroi that had integrated into the Titan system were ordered to identify and eliminate dissenters. The human communities that had chosen Titan protection were ordered to purge their own weak and resistant members.
It was a specific kind of horror: the Titans were not just eliminating those who opposed them from without. They were forcing communities to eliminate opposition from within, to transform their own people into victims and their own perpetrators.
"We are separating the wheat from the chaff," one of the Titan-aligned dragon leaders said, justifying the purge to the community being purged. "We are removing those who cannot understand the necessity of the new order. Those who remain will be stronger for the elimination."
What remained was not a stronger community. What remained was a community that had been forced to commit genocide against its own members, that understood implicitly that the only way to survive in the Titan order was to abandon any commitment to community protection or individual value.
By the year 916, the Titan territories had undergone a specific kind of transformation. They were more unified than they had ever been, but they were unified through the systematic elimination of all internal opposition. They were more powerful than they had ever been, but that power was built on the corpses of those deemed weak. They were more absolutely committed to the god-king framework, but that commitment was maintained through the constant threat of elimination for any who questioned it.
"We have become what I offered to make you," Asmodeus said, in the final conversation with Iapetus before the war began in earnest. "We have become a system where strength is the only principle, where elimination of opposition is the only response to resistance, where the only path to survival is absolute commitment to the order. You have reached my level of power. You have reached my level of understanding. Now you must be prepared for what comes next."
"What comes next?" Iapetus asked.
"War," Asmodeus said. "Full, total, absolute war with everything that opposes the order you have built. The Covenant will fight. They will bring their allies. They will attempt to prevent the inevitable. But the inevitable is that you will prevail, because you are willing to do what Kronos was never willing to do: eliminate opposition absolutely, without mercy, without question, without any remaining commitment to the autonomy that would limit your power."