This matter had all begun with the corruption of King Magogo. It was an excellent ploy, at once undermining any faith in the Great Beasts and causing havoc only the most powerful of agents could have fought. Ideally, the natives of Gabon should have called for powerful Hunters to take care of the problem, seen them fail, and then made a call for Sages to deal with the problem. Sage Ojibwae had long been suspected of double-dealing with the Black Curia, and manifestly incapable of dealing with an inland problem while having to defend his flyspeck of a capital city...

The Wolverine Hunters from Michigan had come in and dealt with King Magogo. Many details of that fight were unclear, but the small city of Franceville had actually not fallen to the Honey Badger King, and indeed was barely threatened at all, despite being attacked by monstrous amounts of Undead Beasts slaughtered and re-Animated by the Ruling Beast.

But the Wolverine Hunters had triumphed over their preferred enemies once again, further adding to their reputations and the luster of their name. Sergio smirked at such an ephemeral title. Killing Beasts was not like fighting men, and their names only meant a foolish muleheadedness and stubborn tenacity that would hardly avail them before the pure power of the Inquisition if it was unleashed upon them.

There were very disquieting other reports, however.

The rise of the Church of Heaven in Gabon after the coming of the outlanders was extremely suspicious, another Coralost Community established now in Africa and embraced wholeheartedly by the natives. Two whole provinces of Gabon had basically been abandoned in the wake of King Magogo, but this Archmage Obai had somehow managed to welcome all those who had fled, plan out where to put them, get them all to start working, and turned a horrible refugee situation into a rebounding and thriving community!

It was an admirable achievement, only made the more ominous by plowing under the last Church of Light in that city.

There were rumors that there was now an active Death Zone in the east of Gabon, too, and the natives were aggressively fighting it... with the help of local Beasts! Investigating had been nigh-impossible without the services of a Sage, as the east seemed to be swarming with clusters of Ruling Beasts assembled to confront something, and none of the scouts or spies dared to get close enough to confirm what. The very jungles seemed to be crawling with Beasts ready to kill unwanted intruders after the frontier communities had fled, actively looking for Humans who didn’t belong there.

Coralost had jumped across the Atlantic into yet another fringe community, and brought their new religion with them. The influence of it was spreading like little inkblots around the world, and where it came, it was embraced with a rare fervor, especially in this day and age where revelations from that young woman had shaken the foundations of the Church itself, and more people outside of Europe left the Church in droves every day.

Now, there were signs the Church of Heaven was getting organized.

It was a death-knell for the nascent movement; the job of the Inquisition was to take such blasphemy and heresy down hard and fast. They would investigate and find out all the rotten secrets of the new movement, even if they had to make them up themselves. Continuous defamation would blunt its spread, continuous assaults sap its strength and the belief of those who thought to depend on it, and then it would die unmourned, its weakness its own proof of falseness and lack of divine favor, falling under its own self-righteousness and pious beliefs.

But the rumors from the Inquisition’s sources were that the Kabbal were now involved in this, and indeed, the ones responsible for starting to truly organize the various branches of the Church. The schism between the Church and the Kabbal was long and well-developed, the twelve tribes continually refusing to yield to the Son of Light and the Final Prophet’s teachings, which had expanded the beliefs of the Light beyond them to ALL the Human Tribe, united against the Dark and the Beasts who were aligned against them.

That Rift had exploded into many theological and political differences, especially with the Kabbal being responsible for the ultimate death of the Son of Light. The Kabbal simply failed to accept that the Son of Light was the promised Messiah, merely a deluded Prophet whose message had departed from his forebears at best, and a dangerous heretic at the worst.

It was believed by many in the Synod that the Dark Curia’s forebears had been responsible for that, creating the first schism in the followers of the Light. It had been followed by Ilah, another of the Lords of Light, starting his own movement in the Middle East, sweeping up disjointed tribes with his own Prophet especially for them. Naturally both Kabbals and Syndics had denied the ‘truth’ of his message, but the Ilahmic faith had erupted across the world with its clear rules and messages that catered to those in power, and now it stood as an equal with the Dharmic religion of India and disjointed philosophies of China, at the very least. Other Lords of Light were suspected to be behind those movements as well, given how rules-oriented both were, striving to cover all of the many thought processes and aspects of daily living in subservience to their view of the world.

This Church of Heaven was far from their equal, but unlike them, it was moving into a vacuum of belief and putting its fist and its money where its mouth was. The broad, low power it offered was extremely enticing to even the most selfish person, as couldn’t they then use it as a springboard to greater power for themselves, just getting past the initial hurdles of survival?

The doctrines, ethos, and creeds of the Church read like a child’s happy world of naivety and sugar-coated dreams, mixed in with strategic pragmatic sayings and pithy common sense stuff somehow organized to cast shade on many established religions and how strictly they handled doctrine. There were ‘core beliefs’ to the Church of Heaven, of course, as any religion needed them, but they didn’t tend to consider the form of the Rituals to be as important as the faith and belief behind them, and such could vary depending on the area and nature and past of the peoples concerned.

It was weirdly alluring despite its infantile simplicity, but then Sergio supposed it had to be, considering both its youth and who it was appealing to. Still, to follow this creed was to be damned, so killing it while it was still fumbling about in the world was the best choice for all concerned.

Ding!

---

Ting!

Sama withdrew Tremble from under the chin of the co-pilot, neither he nor the pilot realizing they were dead until they were.

No blood clung to the short Blade in her left hand, currently Ruby-red and edged in crystalline Gold. She cut with flicks of her hand, and the two men’s harnesses were sliced through like soft cheese.

Solid Blues, fully aware of what their passengers did, and only caring to serve, not to question, it made no difference to them.

No blood clung to Tremble as Sama released her to float in the air, grabbed the two fresh corpses, and hauled them out of their chairs.

The cabin was still and silent. The crimson lines through the necks of the Inquisition team, and the backs of their chairs having fallen out as she cut through them, taking the heads of the dead men with them to roll around on the floor, were kind of surreal, but happily the instant coagulant had stopped blood from spraying all over the place.

The heads, including those of the pilots, went into her Portable Hole for questioning, while the bodies were already Burning away, starting with their neck stumps. Soul-bound Armors and Shields were manifesting and dropping to the carpet, and she scooped those up and dumped them into the Hole, too.

Being efficient, she also sent their baggage into the Hole, to be gone through later, and gathered up their files to be reviewed, analyzed, and the sources of the information identified.

The automatic pilot was still working fine as she strolled back to the front, Tremble floating alongside her. She stepped into the pilot’s chair, a bit on the tall side for it, scanned the array of instrumentation in front of her, disengaged the auto-pilot, and began slowly turning the jet with one casual hand as she reprogrammed the auto-pilot on a new course with the other.

She’d rarely been allowed to fly military-grade aircraft, but the fun thing about lots of Ranks in the Piloting Skill was that all the controls, dials, and stuff were very transparent to her, regardless of the language or style or format involved.

Also, Fae had put together an AMAZING flight simulator in one of the side buildings at the main Coralost Compound during her spare time, complete with customizable dashboards and Air Magic. It could emulate any known flying machine, from hang gliders to the most recent jets or helicopters. People were always using the thing, and she was plenty sure that even downgraded versions of it would sell for millions to both professional piloting schools military and civilian, and to serious hobbyists or gamers wanting the thrill of piloting without ever leaving the ground... or burning tons of fuel and needing millions-dollar machines to practice in.

Their course changed, then programmed in, and she didn’t even bother to leave the seat. She reached out to grasp Tremble, and there was a pop the pressure compensators in the cabin whined for a moment to rectify as she was abruptly gone from the plane.

--------

The flight was technically unnumbered, only marked as a Church flight for those air traffic controllers who picked it and its indicator up. Then it lost a lot of altitude suddenly as it was seen veering sharply towards the Sahara, and there was no response to the urgent calls to see if they needed help.

Helpless trackers saw it fly directly into Libya and the Sahara beyond, far below anything resembling a safe level.

It was about two hundred miles in when something solid went from the surface of the sands to a mile up in about a second, batting the plane out of the air like a passing moth. Its radio emitter was snuffed out, and even the rubble was sucked into the solid wall of sand and vanished from all view, probably compressed to the size of a large rock and shoved deep underground.

Needless to say, there was no analysis of a flight recorder or crash site going to happen.

A half-Sage, two Archmages, and three Mages of the Inquisitorial Arm of the Church of Light were removed from the board, the names of the pilots and stewardess aboard just afterthoughts to yet another loss, but what could they do? Go bother the High Beast Emperor of the Sahara?

Another unfortunate day of losses for the Church of Light and the Synod. The Inquisitorial operatives and spies who vanished over the course of the next few months, including some of the most effective and talented members of the Church, were never directly tied to the loss of the plane. In the end, it became a toss-up between the actions of some Beast Emperor opportunistically taking control of the plane and sending it after the Sand Emperor, or the start of a string of targeted assassination attempts by some unknown party.

But as Sama found, offing some of those people who really deserved to die led to other people who really deserved to die. She got to stay pretty damn busy, finally realizing why Void Brothers on other worlds supposedly looked so grim all the time. She was killing pretty much constantly, and there was always more to do, although it was the White Necromancers who were learning the names and faces of the targets via the dead, as opposed to the Land pointing fingers...

------

There were no Humans alive who had seen the Sand Emperor and lived. Supposedly, even attempting to contact Him was a very swift way to earn His ire, and it was entirely possible that the Synod’s intermittent but repeated attempts to do so had instead wrought a devastating vengeance for such effrontery that was only now coming to a slow boil.

I stared at the Curse of the Sahara laying over the growing sands of Sand Emperor’s domain, and shook my head.

Yeah, it was just as complex as what Ice Emperor had done, only far more aggressive. The magic here was driving the slow expansion of the desert, an inevitability behind it that put The Great Flood to shame. It had made a domain every bit as dangerous as Antarctica, only centered on Earth and Fire instead of Ice!