The aftermath of the Summit was not unity. It was chaos.
In Amaravati, protests erupted. Not against the Asuras — against the government. Citizens who'd spent their lives trusting the Hall of Remembrance discovered they'd been trusting a lie. The fury was directed not outward but upward — at the institution that had maintained the deception, at the priests who'd sanctified it, at the scholars who'd polished it until it shone like truth.
In the border towns, the reaction was mixed. Some communities welcomed the revelation — they'd always suspected, always doubted, always felt that the official history was too clean to be real. Others rejected it entirely. Three hundred years of belief doesn't dissolve in an afternoon. For some, the Asura texts were still propaganda, the Summit was a manipulation, and the truth was whatever they'd been taught as children.
In the Deva military, the reaction was seismic. Soldiers who'd built their identities on the righteous defeat of the Asura menace discovered that the menace was a fabrication and the defeat was a conquest. Some adapted. Many didn't. Unit cohesion frayed. Desertions increased.
Indra, to his credit, held. He addressed the Realms through the mantric relay system — a calm, measured speech in which he acknowledged the True Record, expressed "profound regret" for the historical distortion, and outlined a programme of reform. A truth commission. An education overhaul. The formal recognition of the Asura Remnant as a sovereign entity with territorial rights.
It was, by any political standard, an extraordinary concession. A king voluntarily dismantling the myth that justified his crown.
Not everyone was satisfied. Shukra, predictably, declared the reforms insufficient. "They acknowledge us but they keep the throne. They admit the conquest but they keep the territory. This isn't justice — it's rebranding."
He wasn't entirely wrong. The structural inequalities of three hundred years wouldn't be resolved by a speech and a commission. Land that had been Asura was still Deva-administered. Resources that had been extracted from Asura territory still fuelled the Deva economy. The Remnant's five thousand people were a fraction of what the Asura population had been; the rest had been killed, assimilated, or erased.
