Zephyr counted.
He counted the way he always counted — completely, simultaneously, with the divine processing capacity that turned the kingdom's complexity into comprehensible data. The counting was not metaphorical. The counting was *literal*: every variable, every input, every output, every connection between every system he had built over two hundred and fifty-one years, assessed and catalogued in a continuous internal audit that only a god with nine domains could perform.
[SOVEREIGN INTERNAL AUDIT — 251 AF — THIRD QUARTER]
The kingdom was a machine. He had always known it was a machine — from the first day, when twenty-four Lizardmen had prayed and he'd felt the FP land in his reserve like coins dropping into a vault, he had understood that this world's divine system was mechanical, gameable, optimizable. The machine metaphor wasn't a metaphor. It was a description. And descriptions, unlike metaphors, required maintenance.
