The Infiltration of the Warring Kingdom
Recovered text from the Silent Fulcrum's Argent Archive. Classification: Tiferet.
Archivist's Foreword: Most histories of the War of the Shifting Throne focus on the grand, visible conflict of the Severance Front. They speak of armies and champions. The true war, however, was fought in shadow, on a front that had no territory and whose soldiers were but a handful. This document is one of the few surviving accounts of the Shadow Front, detailing the Hidden Dagger's desperate gambit: a direct infiltration into a Qliphothic realm to destroy the "anti-throne" that was murdering magic itself.
Phase 1: The Silent Diagnosis
The Great Silence was a problem beyond the scope of armies. While the Concord and Garden clashed on the Glass Plains, the Way of the Middle Pillar sought the cause. Their diagnosis, delivered by a cell led by the legendary Anya of the Still Center, was terrifying. The silence was not an absence, but a canceling force. A Qliphothic "superweapon" had been created, a conceptual anchor in the realm of Thaumiel, the Twins of God. This "anti-throne" was projecting a perfect, mirrored opposition to Keter, dividing its unity and strangling the flow of magic into the world.
The problem could not be solved with force. A conventional attack on a Qliphothic realm was impossible. Anya's cell determined that the anti-throne could not be destroyed; it had to be un-made. This required a specialist of a rare and heretical art. It required a Scalpel who could deconstruct reality itself.
Phase 2: The Heretic's Contract
The Hidden Dagger's 'Ghost', the master infiltrator known only as The Chameleon, was dispatched to Nexus. Their target was not a political figure, but a reclusive and amoral heretic known as Scribe Argent, one of the few living masters of the Arcanum of The Magician. Argent was a Reality-Scribe who treated the world as a flawed text to be edited.
The bargain was struck not for gold or loyalty, but for knowledge. In exchange for their service, Argent demanded a single, uncensored folio from the Silent Fulcrum's forbidden library on the nature of Da'at. With great reluctance, the contract was sealed. Argent would serve as the cell's Scalpel.
Phase 3: The Descent
The Thaumiel realm cannot be entered by physical means. It is a wound in the concept of unity, and can only be accessed through a similar wound in the world. The Chameleon, using their mastery of Yesod, located such a place: a valley on the Severance Front that had been fought over for so long, its identity was split between Concord and Garden, a place of two names and two histories.
Here, the cell made their descent. The world dissolved, not into darkness, but into a paradox. The realm of Thaumiel was a place of perfect, eternal conflict. The sky was split down the middle, one half a searing, heatless white, the other an absolute, depthless black. Below, two armies of shadow and light fought a pointless, unending war on a plain of fractured ice, led by two silent, warring kings on opposing thrones. The very air was a psychic wedge, seeking to divide the cell, to turn their thoughts against one another.
It was only Anya's Tiferet aura, a constant, gentle hum of harmony, that held their minds together against the realm's incessant pull toward strife.
Phase 4: The Un-Making
The Chameleon created illusions of allegiance, allowing the cell to pass through the warring armies as ghosts, their presence disguised as soldiers of both and neither side. They moved through a landscape of pure conflict toward the source of the Great Silence.
The anti-throne was not a physical object. It was a construct of frozen, conceptual violence—the idea of division given form. It was a throne of shattered swords and broken crowns, from which emanated the perfect, silent discord that was nullifying Keter.
This was Argent's moment. While Anya maintained the harmonizing ward and the Chameleon cloaked their presence, the Reality-Scribe began their work. They initiated their cycle, The First Word. They did not attack the throne with energy. They began to systematically deconstruct its identity, to "un-name" its core principles.
With gestures like a scribe striking lines from a scroll, Argent severed its connection to its own meaning. "This is not a Throne, but a pile of broken things." "This is not Division, but a lack of agreement." "This is not Power, but a memory of violence."
The anti-throne began to unravel. Its form flickered. The shriek of psychic noise it emitted began to soften into a confused whisper. With a final, silent gesture, Argent named it for what it truly was: "You are nothing."
.](/build-wiki/static/unnaming_ritual.svg)
The construct dissolved into fine, grey dust, which was then scattered by the unending winds of the realm. The nullifying pressure on reality ceased.
Phase 5: The Fractured Throne
The cell escaped as the realm convulsed, the two warring kings momentarily stunned by the loss of their central purpose. Back in the physical world, magic did not return at once. The Great Silence was over, but the wound inflicted on Keter was too deep to heal perfectly. The flow resumed, but it was fractured, splitting into three distinct streams that aligned with the great philosophies that had defined the war. The age of unity was over, replaced by the age of the three separate truths.
Scribe Argent was paid their price, but the act of un-making a concept of such magnitude left a permanent scar on their soul. It is said that to this day, there are certain concepts—such as "royalty," "unity," and "throne"—that they are conceptually incapable of perceiving, as if those words had been permanently erased from their dictionary.