Talressses had climbed higher than the Sestros faithful would ever guess. Through the long middle centuries of the Seventh Dawn his persuasion-cult ran across scattered communities of the west, and he kept it by an old arrangement with Mjulya, the daemoness of good will, whose worship overlapped his own and lent his name a respectability he had not entirely earned. Then he looked at the followers of Bylzar, the god of continuity and gold, and saw what any ambitious daemon sees in a rival's congregation: a fat, settled base of merchants and bankers and trade-house clerks, praying like clockwork, ripe for the taking.
He misjudged them completely. A daemon lives on prayer, and prayer can be moved, but the people who pray to continuity pray above all that nothing change. They are the hardest worshippers in the world to turn, because turning is the very thing their god exists to refuse. Talressses did not see this. He saw a fund and reached for it.
He worked the method that had always served him. Foretell a small wonder, deliver it, peel off the impressed. But every wonder he worked was a withdrawal from his own reserve, paid out to dazzle men who watched, nodded, and went home to Bylzar. He spent and spent. He bought almost no one. The reserve that had taken centuries to build began to fall, and nothing he conjured slowed it.
Then Mjulya, who had stood beside him the whole climb, saw the move for what it was and took her followers' goodwill out from under him. She did it once and was done with it. Whatever standing her worship had lent his name went with her, and the prayer that had carried him thinned to nothing inside a season. His reserve was already gutted by the gambit, and now there was no inflow to refill it. Talressses slid toward the floor every daemon fears, the line below which a god is simply forgotten.
He had never been so near it. A being spoken of in a hundred mouths found himself spoken of in a handful, and then in fewer. The prayers came in like a cold draft under a door, too thin to warm anything. For a daemon whose whole art was making mortals believe he was more than he was, no humiliation could match it. The deceiver had been out-deceived by his own ambition, and he was kept alive only by the few who had not yet finished forgetting him.
You cannot sell a man on change when the only thing he prays for is that nothing change. — a counting-house adage of the Bylzar trade-houses
What he did next is the whole of Sestros. He went looking for a people he would never have to share, found the Shailin halflings living a step out of their own time, and set about building a faith he could own to the root. The Spoken Throne, the contented kingdom, the manufactured prophecies, all of it grows from this one failure. Talressses is not trying to become again what he was. He is trying to take back what the Overreach cost him, and he means to do it from a base no rival daemon can reach. The cruelty of it, which he cannot see, is that the people he chose for being unreachable are also too content to pray him back to strength.