Struggle. Retribution in the Twilight - стр. 10

The Empire deserves a far better patriarch than Nevroh. And than most of those who came before him. The Empire only deserves to live if it is healthy. And the only health it has is faith in the Black Stone. Which humans may well believe in as well. And the Prefect has shown that this is not only possible, but necessary to preserve the Empire.

Prefect

Gora was pleased with himself. It had been a long time since he had felt that he had calculated all the moves so correctly. And there were many. And an even greater number of variations of them. To persuade Cobra to leave a passage for Samoh and his punishing drill, which they would not fail to take advantage of. Let Guzokh pass through the underground pathways to allow him to subdue that storm. And, of course, to convince the Metropolitan of his total allegiance to the only true faith on Earth, the faith in the Black Stone.

And surprisingly, as time went on, he began to realize that he understood the language of the plagues. And of different plagues. Gora was more than sure that plagues are different like people, from different races, nations, and that he should not have understood them all at the same time. But no, that was exactly what was happening. And now it was not even a secret to him why the plagues themselves had no problem with it – they too spoke one, apparently, some unified plague language.

How far this would go was yet to be seen, but Guzoh was not opposed to extending the autonomy of the Mountain to neighboring factions if the people who would fall under his command also believed in the Black Stone.

For her part, Ananhr was not against it either, as long as the nominal subordination of the other factions' sectors was left to the JFC, and the Hivi would provide ground cover for those facilities.

This was a very successful mechanism for expanding the prefect's influence. It had been practiced first in the Diza sector, and then in the entire Donetsk-Makeevka grouping. From the point of view of the Empire's development, it should not have hindered anything, but it was obvious that such a situation would not suit either the High Priest Nevrokh or the Imperial administration represented by Bluh. But both problems were more than solvable.

Lately Gora had changed his attitude to the word "problem" in general. Now the word did not exist for him at all in its usual sense. Now he had only the words "issue" or "situation", which could be important, urgent, inconvenient, dangerous, paramount, critical, extraordinary. None of these are problems. They were tasks that needed and absolutely could be solved.