Serel was a chaplain of the Iron of the Eternal March before he became its largest problem. He broke with the Hammer-Primate over the treatment of the conquered, and the break has since grown into a schism that Ozimar can neither stamp out nor leave alone. The dispute is not about whether Gorath should conquer. Serel does not preach against the empire. It is about what Krondeum's hammer is, and on that narrow point Serel has the stronger argument and both men know it.
His case is simple. The hammer of the forge-daemon is a maker's hammer, and the heart of the god's rite is the naming, the moment a finished thing is given a carrier and so brought whole into the world. To forbid the conquered that prayer, to snuff their fires and brand the naming out of them, is not to enforce the faith. It is to misread its god in the crudest way possible, mistaking the tool for a weapon and the maker for a conqueror. So Serel will not do it. He will not bless the lash and he will not put out a clan-hall fire, and rather than break the Drasnian he has begun to recruit among them, offering the same daemon stripped of the empire's reading. His truest convert is the smith-priest Brunna Drennak, who kept Krondeum's rite through years under the brand and now keeps it openly under his protection.
What Serel actually believes is the question he will not answer, and it is the question that makes him dangerous in two directions at once. He may be a genuine convert to the dwarven reading of the god, a Gorathi chaplain who studied the rite he was sent to destroy and came away convinced the slaves had it right. Or he may have found, in that reading, the single argument that lets him protect his conscience and his converts under cover of orthodoxy, a man using the daemon's own nature as a shield. The first would make him a heretic the Iron should burn. The second would make him a schismatic the Iron cannot answer, because his theology is sounder than the Primate's. Ozimar prosecutes him only for disobedience and never for doctrine, which tells you which of the two the Primate is more afraid he is.