CHAPTER 298: CHAPTER 297-TOUGH STUFF.

The silence in the room was soon broken down by Lyx as she asked.

"What are your plans after this?"

A simple yet delicate question, the voice of hers making it such that even the hardest of men would melt to that little touch of hers, yet even then, Azrail kept his head clean and straight, as he replied back with an even tone.

"Nothing special, I have my own plans"

It was simple and direct, to which Lyx, not being discouraged, asked back with a light tone.

"Do you want to share your contact info? We might be able to keep ourselves in contact in case you need anything more in the future"

Azrail nodded his head at her words as he replied.

"Sure, here is my contact info"

With that, using the system, Azrail easily passed on his contact info to Lyx, who accepted it. A small exchange later, the two of them focused on the drink, taking in the tastes, a few seconds after which Azrail spoke.

"Why don’t you give me a little breakdown of everything?"

To which Lyx paused for a moment, after which she replied.

"Sure"

Saying so, she placed her cup on the ground after which she started to speak.

"The structure of our part, as you know it, is broken down into even more parts of factions, each ruled by the elders, each elder having their own factions that have their own duties to complete. This grants them power and status"

Saying till here Lyx projected a display in front of Azrail, the scene flashing to show the order of people that had been decided.

Lyx’s hand hovered over the floating holo like she was petting a small beast — gentle, careful, and a little bored. The display in front of Azrail bloomed into a lattice of light and ink: levels, duties, privileges, seals, exceptions. It had the calm, cold logic of something built to be obeyed more than admired.

"The structure of our part," Lyx said, voice quiet and edged with honey, "is broken down so you can throw a stone at it and watch ten things shatter. You want the short, you want the long — which one?"

Azrail watched the lights flicker across the holo, the same bored half-smile playing on his lips. "Both," he said. "Start low, take me to the top. Make it clean."

Lyx chuckled once — a sound that could have meant fondness or warning — and then she spoke, and the holo reorganised itself into a tiered ladder that slid out toward them like a staircase in the dark.

===================

OBLIVION’S EMBRACE — STRUCTURAL LATTICE (OVERVIEW)

Lyx: "Think of it in two axes — Power (cultivation & domain affinity) and Mandate (what you’re allowed to touch). Ranks are the intersection. Lower ranks can do more things if they’re clever. Higher ranks can do the things themselves."

Tier 1 — The Hands (Operatives & Labour)

Role: logistics, low-level undertakings, watch-post duty, clearing wards, supply-chain of souls and artefacts.

Power & Privilege: tiny. They’re expendable; they’re protected by minor wards. They’re the eyes and feet of the faction.

Danger: high exposure, low immunity. You die cheaply here.

Tier 2 — The Sentinels (Specialists & Forms)

Role: formation sculptors, minor ritualists, formation blockers, soul-transport pilots, enforcers for local cells.

Power & Privilege:

can touch restricted sigils, can escort ’marked’ souls, carry out sanctioned kills at province-level.

Danger: they’re the first to be tested by rival pantheons — expendable still, but valuable.

Tier 3 — The Wardens (Officers & Keepers)

Role: keepers of small archives, formation masters for city wards, trainers for the Hands, minor adjudicators.

Power & Privilege: they can adjudicate fate on lowly mortals, imprison lesser junk-souls, and hold limited freedoms to barter.

Danger: enough teeth to be feared by small sects; they become the faction’s local power-brokers.

Tier 4 — The Judicants (Command & Tribunal)

Role: issue verdicts, lead small missions against recalcitrant demigods, bind stray revenants, query the Undying Archive.

Power & Privilege: declare sentence, summon small legions of Gravebound, call for reparative rituals.

Danger: they are watched by Pantheon spies and sometimes called to answer for mass erasures.

Tier 5 — The Harbingers (Elder Lieutenants)

Role: lead regional operations, run sub-factions, negotiate with minor pantheons, keep secret vault keys.

Power & Privilege: access to one Seal of the Archive, command of a phalanx of Deathborne, authority to sign Nullification Contracts.

Danger: political knives; every Harbinger has both enemies outside and rivals inside.

Tier 6 — The Inner Circle / Circle of Eternal Judges (Elders)

Role: sit in the tribunal, author statutes of Unmaking, place fate-bans on entire bloodlines, and adjudicate the largest crimes against oblivion.

Power & Privilege:Absolute Erasure, clause-writing power (you craft the rules that bind lesser members), and near-immunity from recall.

Danger: famously, the Inner Circle eats one another’s reputations for breakfast; rivals can and will orchestrate your fall if the season is right.

Tier 7 — Thanatos (Grand Arbiter)

Cultivation equivalent:Primordial / Beyond. Not a man, not only a god — a law.

Role:

final arbiter, author of the Codex of Passing, keeper of the Oblivion Scythe (legend), and commander of the entire Obsidian Legion.

Power & Privilege: omnidirectional jurisdiction over souls, ability to write and change major treaties between pantheons, and the authority to tear at reality if balance requires it.

Danger: absolute — but also the most envied, hunted, and feared of all.

=====================

Lyx’s projected ladder snapped shut and reformed into another window — this one a rolling map of the faction’s mandates.

"Mandates are the legal cover," Lyx said. "Who can you kill, what archives can you read, what treaties can you ratify. They come stamped with seals — blood-seals, oath-seals, and the rare myth-seal that Thanatos keeps for himself. Break one, you vanish. Keep them, you climb."

Lyx flicked a finger, and a new diagram bloomed: a tree with branches labelled by function. Seraphel’s pillar — which she calls The Veil of Silence — is less a battalion and more a set of surgical instruments.

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THE PILLAR: SERAPHEL’S DOMAIN — ’THE VEIL OF SILENCE’

Core Mandate

Silent Audit & Correction: They locate imbalances, perform corrections that erase the memory of the imbalance (not just the cause), and replay history so the faction never remembers the error existed.

Divisions inside The Veil of Silence

The Memory-Weavers (Soul-Librarians)

Function: rewrite the ledger of passing. If a record is tampered, the Memory-Weavers stitch a replacement entry so no oracle, no seer, notices.

Power: can hide crimes, alter lineage-traces, and bury names from the Undying Archive.

Use: Seraphel uses them to erase her personal injuries from official logs, leaving no official trace of the betrayal.

The Quiet Hand (Surgical Executors)

Function: targeted removals — not bluster, surgical cuts. They execute with surgical denial: victims vanish and records show they never existed.

Power: possession of "soft-erasure" arts — you can remove people and make the world forget them slowly, mind by mind.

Use: to dismantle Thanatos’ enemies network cell-by-cell without triggering full fury.

The Veilbound (Illusion & Omen-Crafters)

Function: fabricate prophecies, fake omens, and feed false divinations into the seer-net to manipulate decision-makers.

Power: write convincing false-futures that even lesser seers cannot see through.

Use: to set up Thanatos’ lieutenants for disgrace by "foretelling" events that force them into ridiculous choices.

The Orrery Wardens (Seam-Guardians)

Function: guard small breaches in the flow of souls — detect forced siphons, find clandestine rituals, and plug them.

Power: can sense a stolen essence up to three layers of veil away.

Use: watching for the very kind of ritual the faction can use to grow.

The Pale Chorus (Ritualists & Chorus of Unmaking)

Function: perform rites that can nudge fate without direct confrontation — a chorus that frays a god’s influence by adulterating the rhythm of his music and voice.

Power: weaker direct damage, but high systemic damage — they injure the institution, not the body.

Use: undoing an elder’s legitimacy among peers by slowly undermining the rituals that grant him authority.

The Relic Vault (Custodians of the Lost Implements)

Function: hold the fragments, shards, and tools that can rewrite power (shards of the Oblivion Scythe, thread-fragments of old Seals).

Power: artifacts that can sever or bind legacies.

Use: bargaining chips for Seraphel — one well-timed reveal, and a Harbinger’s name is ash.

======================

Lyx let the holo breathe. "That’s the anatomy. Now the politics," she said.

======================

POLITICS OF THE PILLAR (short)

Secrecy: The Veil is built on forgetting. Its members are rewarded in kind — access to hidden knowledge, immunity for past transgressions, and shadow-keys to the Archive.

Recruitment: Seraphel picks people who’ve already been cut — those who suffered under the old order. Guilt equals loyalty here.

Power play: The Veil never confronts openly. It compresses — makes people doubt their memories, poisons trust, turns allies into liabilities. The aim is not brute force. It’s to take the floor out from under him.

========================

Lyx looked at Azrail like she’d handed him a live fuse.

"You asked for the breakdown," she said, soft, "you got the anatomy and the instruments. Now, ask what you want from it."

Azrail’s fingers brushed the holo and the Veil’s branches shimmered. He knew the math by now: knowledge + timing + privilege = leverage. Seraphel’s faction gave him proximity to the Archive, the power to hide a move, and the tools to make a god look mad. That was currency.

"Who watches the Watchers?" Azrail asked, eyes never leaving Lyx.

Lyx replied.

"No one. That’s the point. The Requiem’s ladder is long. The Veil picks the rungs that swing. master’s people are quiet but they pull hard strings. They wear the masks while the rest dance."

A beat passed. The holo folded, the wine cooled, and the chamber’s pressure eased. Lyx finished, casually, as if laying out a street map rather than a minefield.

"One last thing," she said, voice slow. "Power in Oblivion’s Embrace isn’t just cultivation. It’s paperwork. A sanctioned signature, a faded seal, a forgotten ledger — those matter. Master knows how to rewrite the forms. If you want to move through the All-Realm with no taxes and a clean trail, you learn to forge the right papers. If you want to move a god’s fate, you learn to edit the ledger that names him."