The Alliance of the Unclaned Gods of Initik, Mii-Es, and Neyar

The Initik–Mii-Es–Neyar alliance is a coalition of clanless World Deities whose formation marks a shift from isolated survival to collective political resistance. Initik brings the proposal to Mii-Es and Neyar after witnessing the Core Worlds destroy entire planets as an expedient response to the crisis surrounding Cato. The alliance is deliberately cautious: its members seek communication, leverage, and protection without openly declaring themselves against the System or revealing the extent of their dealings with Cato.

Formation and Immediate Crisis

Initik begins considering an alliance after watching the Core Worlds move toward wholesale planetary destruction. He regards the policy as fundamentally different from ordinary wartime losses. Initik accepts that some individuals will die through the natural trials of their worlds, particularly when carelessness, stupidity, egotism, or aggression endanger others, but he rejects the deliberate sterilization of entire planets merely to deny them to an enemy. His surveillance of Cato’s station gives him no reason to believe that planetary destruction will meaningfully disrupt Cato’s coordination, especially if the System’s portal restrictions indicate that closing portals is already sufficient. The precedent of Sydea strengthens that conclusion.

Initik therefore looks for allies who might resist both Cato and the Core Worlds. He first identifies Neyar, a steady friend of centuries, and then Mii-Es, who has become unexpectedly friendly since the Cato crisis and plainly dislikes the major clans. Initik is careful not to reveal that he is considering cooperation with Cato, because he does not yet trust either deity with his innermost information. He sends messages through his Interface, receives replies within hours, and travels through System Space to meet Mii-Es before proceeding with her to Neyar’s domain.

Members and Political Purpose

The meeting brings together three deities with different positions and temperaments. Initik is the organizer and the most guarded participant. He has safeguarded his people for over a thousand years and remembers the arrival of the System during their distant stone-age past, when its words appeared to him while he was hunting and ended his people’s hunger and wandering. His loyalty to his people is therefore older than any present alliance, but his experience also makes him suspicious of centralized authority and unwilling to expose Uriva to unnecessary danger.

Mii-Es supplies theatrical confidence and an explicit critique of clan power. She arrives at Initik’s domain in full regalia, with silks, jewels, and ornamental armor covering her feathered form, then greets Neyar with conspicuous enthusiasm despite the crisis. Her manner is playful, but her political judgment is direct: the Elder Clans’ unilateral power to destroy worlds is a greater structural threat than Cato, because Cato can be confronted by individual deities while the Core’s rulers control the deepest levers of authority.

Neyar contributes historical perspective and institutional caution. His orange-grass valley has not changed, but he appears more stern than usual because his world’s distance from Cato offers no real safety. He tells the others that the Core Worlds have destroyed inhabited worlds before, but only rarely and usually when those worlds were barely populated. He can remember only two such cases, each involving a single world, and cannot identify the original political reasons. The current destruction therefore exceeds anything within his memory and confirms that the crisis is not ordinary Core politics.

The alliance’s immediate objective is not a coup. Initik describes it as an agreement and a channel of communication among deities who are not beholden to the Elder Clans. These gods are vulnerable not only to Cato but also to ambitious powers that might exploit the emergency to exceed their usual authority. The coalition is meant to prevent its members from facing those threats separately and to give them enough collective leverage to resist arbitrary planetary destruction.

Debate Over Cato and the Core

The three gods distinguish Cato from the deeper danger posed by the Core. Mii-Es compares Cato to a dungeon or event: an external problem that several deities can fight together. The Elder Clans, by contrast, hold a dagger at the backs of the clanless gods. Their authority can erase the worlds those gods govern, and the threatened deities cannot safely challenge that power alone.

Neyar agrees that leverage is necessary, but he insists that distrust must shape the coalition’s conduct. In their long lives, the gods have all been betrayed by party members or friends, so the alliance cannot be built on naïve confidence. He argues that a true threat cannot be confronted while the gods remain afraid of the Core. Mii-Es adds that dissent must be expressed subtly, because merely voicing opposition may be interpreted as siding with Cato.

Initik consequently advises vigilance rather than immediate confrontation. He presents the recent battle and Cato’s setback as reasons to believe that Cato will lack the forces or capacity for an immediate offensive. Privately, however, he recognizes a more disruptive possibility: if Cato keeps his promises, clanless gods may eventually accept what he offers. Initik still refuses to discount the System, yet he suspects that the coming upheaval may destroy many System gods and leave the existing order unable to survive in its present form.

Secrecy, Mutual Interests, and Limits

The alliance is compromised from the beginning by partial disclosure. Initik deliberately conceals his possible cooperation with Cato from Neyar and Mii-Es. He expects them to protect their own secrets, and he has no reason to assume that a formal coalition will produce complete trust. The meeting therefore establishes contact and a shared political concern without creating full strategic transparency.

Mii-Es and Initik later reveal that Cato has offered each of them something powerful enough to be difficult to refuse. Mii-Es has kept secret Cato’s suggestion that he could restore her race, knowing that disclosure would compromise her position. Initik admits that Cato made him an offer as well, recognizing that such bargains are probably Cato’s most potent weapon. Neither deity explains the terms of the agreement, so their common front remains dependent on overlapping interests rather than shared knowledge.

The same uncertainty surrounds the System’s hierarchy. Initik’s own experience demonstrates how deeply World Deities can be shaped by System dependence: entering a temple on Uriva soothed him after the terror of System-less existence, and meditation at the System crystal rewarded him with the Divine Insight Skill. Yet Cato’s conflict reveals that the powers available to Core Deities may differ radically from those available to ordinary World Deities. The coalition can discuss protection and leverage, but it does not possess a complete understanding of the authority it is trying to resist.

Narrative Significance

The Initik–Mii-Es–Neyar alliance is an early political response to the System’s loss of legitimacy. Its members do not yet reject the System in the manner of Cato, and Initik’s devotion remains genuine: he remembers the System as the force that ended his people’s hunger and gave their lives direction. Their coalition instead begins from a narrower realization that service to the System does not guarantee protection from the System’s rulers.

The alliance also transforms the conflict from a contest between Cato and the System into a crisis of governance. Cato claims that his grievance is with the System rather than its people, while Initik insists that the two cannot easily be separated because the System gives people purpose. The coalition occupies the unstable ground between those positions. Its members defend their peoples and worlds without immediately joining Cato, but they also recognize that the Core’s centralized power may be more dangerous than the outsider it condemns.

Its importance lies less in any immediate military action than in the political possibility it creates. The three gods move from private alarm to coordinated consultation, from isolated domains to a shared meeting, and from obedience to the consideration of collective leverage. Their caution, secrecy, and competing bargains prevent the alliance from becoming a simple revolutionary bloc, but those same limitations make it a credible response to a hierarchy in which even gods can be treated as expendable administrators of worlds marked for destruction.