Which we don't know that he's going to do, and even if he is, we can hardly oppose it by throwing in the towel and going off to play a different game altogether, leaving Anys Syn to have her way with both the Realm and the people we care about within it.
So you admit the Elders are cynical, and unlikely to accept her ruse unquestioningly, even if they are playing along for now to see how the dice fall? If she kills them now, what happens? The Realm falls, period. Flame doesn't have the power to unify or provide central authority, and is just one man without a decade or more to breed and train an army. She can easily sell the various Elders on the value of Flame's bloodline without needing to kill them all and place Flame on the throne.
An essence nine Solaroid has a pretty good chance of taking control over it.
Versus plan 'overrun the Realm with Elder Lunars'?
And you're assuming the River Province plan will go off without a hitch, despite it destroying the Ulyssian identity (thus invalidating all our hard work preserving it) and indebting us to the Infernals (surely no repercussions there, right?). To top it all off, we have basically no idea what the situation over there looks like, other than 'Lunars/Deathlord duking it out'. Luseng offers us basically the same thing: a prosperous region threatened by a Deathlord/other assorted issues. It also comes with the added bonus of us not having to deal with the existing nations because we're endowed with authority to rule. You say the Mask needs to die, but the Lunars are already taking care of that. He died just fine in the Odyssey.
Cute. The Immaculates don't have the numbers or power to rule openly, and you know it. If she launches a coup against the Great Houses using them, she may win, but she'll leave the Realm open for one of its other innumerable enemies in the process. She is not stupid; a civil war (which is what your notion of her plans would entail) does not favor her. The Hesiesh ruse would've been less effective in the event of open conflict, remember?
One could say this whole ruse will leave the Realm open to her enemies, considering she's aiming to somehow shut Zao out and also kill us.
Yeah, but assassinating the Elders, who are at the very least playing along with her gambit for now, crosses the line from recklessness into madness. It destroys her own powerbase and would provoke a civil war. It's self-defeating, completely negating the benefits of temporarily unifying the Realm.
If I thought we planned to offload Ambition I'd use it on the Storm Armor, but that's always going to be a hard sell, so...
Even if we got the gang together to gank her, we'd have worse than even odds of succeeding.
Hmm, I think any victory in Luseng will require turning the three armies against each other; an Odyssian feat if there ever was one, a deed epic in scope. The Gardener is subject to the Terror of Odyssial, the Fair Folk fear the Samapta, and Ragmar is stated to be treacherous; there's potential there. Dealing with the Confederation means actually dealing with them, negotiating (not Ulyssian's strong suit) with the Lunars who are opposing the Mask and the remnants of the various powers in that part of the world, as opposed to the Satrapy's armies throwing themselves at our feet in the desperate hope that we can save them from certain doom. We'd have to do as Ragmar is doing with the Fair Folk and the Gardener and compromise for a chance at a slice of the pie.
In fairness, the Seven Against Thorns were victorious because they were lead by Lealope the Invincible. Here, Lea's a different entity, and is occupied elsewhere, so the driving force behind the Seven is probably not present.
There are still presumably a bunch of Lunar Emperors kicking over the Mask's sandcastles; the situation there is hardly so dire that it requires our immediate attention. Luseng is utterly fucked if we don't step in.
