Albion was, for lack of a better way of putting it, a terrible knockoff version of what would happen if you were to take medieval France and England and fuse them together into an unholy mockery of the two. With the basic trappings of medieval England and France being mashed together, was it any wonder that the nation was almost always on the brink of civil war?

North Albion was more like the stereotypical British Isles, with it having bad teeth for days and a differing view on the way the state religion should be practiced compared to the more France-like South Albion. What united them was their use of massed groups of archers and their general attitude of both fear and distrust for their closest neighbors, the Teutonia Knightly Junta, which was loosely based on the Holy Roman Empire, Prussia and of course the old German Empire, complete with the average peasant levee wearing a poor man’s pickelhaube.

Rusk, to the far east, was nothing more than a poor mimic of Muscovy and Novgorod, with just a bit of the Soviet Union thrown in to make the nation the only one ruled not by a noble, but by a council of workers who ultimately ended up electing their leader after the death of the one before him who would inevitably become just another king, even though he went without a crown. Ititlis was a poor attempt at making Rome, but with medieval technology and that was about it for what I had made all those years ago. They had, in Kain's absence, taken on a life of their own, but the fact of the matter was that they still were very much similar to what he had made. Thinking back on it, he was surprised that they even managed to stay afloat. The crazy designs of a middle school student were almost certainly destined to be nothing more than failed states, but to see them last so long was inspiring. Unfortunately for them, that was where his admiration for them ended.

Albion was supposed to be the most isolated of the four nations, connected to the rest of the continent by a land bridge and bordered on all other sides by water or the Gallows Forest to the southwest. If Kain chose to go pure north from Necrograd, he would reach the massive inland sea created by Alistaira when she used Second Sun, which had begun to be called the ‘Sunrise Sea’. He could go to the east, but that would lead to the mountains and plains that made up Ititlis, and their military was, while definitely weaker than before, certainly superior to the nation of Albion which had very recently suffered the wrath of the ‘Arch Heretic’ Alistaira Crowley.

With so much of the land blown away by the pure force she had unleashed, there was immense devastation even outside of the blast radius. Hence, even though what territory remained was certainly nothing to scoff at, being roughly equivalent in size to Teutonia or Ititlis, the amount of land lost due to the massive kaboom that had occurred there left the nation scrambling to pick up the pieces.

It was a perfect storm of residual confusion, terrible communication/ supply lines, and a foe who was ready to rush in to capitalize on the misfortune of others. It was time for a wake-up call, it was time for the Luminas Confederacy to get a bruise. Whether or not anyone would realize what was about to happen had occurred afterward was unknown. Albion was not in the best spot, and at the current moment the potential for civil war to happen was near 100%, all that was need was a little extra push, and then Northern Albion would gladly let its southern half flounder and drown on their own. Once the inevitable civil war began, the two halves would never come back together again, and the feeling the two sides had for each other would only grow in the echo chambers that would exist in the two former halves of a whole.

According to Alistaira, the nationalistic sentiments were at a fever pitch, and there could not be a better time to drive a wedge between the two halves so great that both North and South would gladly let the other be erased. A few lightning attacks into the lower parts of South Albion, a bit of misinformation and propaganda via contacts that the secret societies had and a bit of falsified incriminating evidence would be more than enough to spark a war that would divide the once Barely-United Kingdom for good.

Albion’s days were numbered.

…

It had been three long months of growth and expansion as the undead Kain had summoned had cut down a great number of the trees surrounding my city. This gave the fledgling nation some breathing room, and Kain had already spent another month’s worth of mana to build the Haunted Graveyard. After the last building was built, the rest of the mana was spent expanding my military and using the now sizable number of undead constructs at his disposal to forcibly expand the city beyond what currently existed. Repairs had stopped and were, unfortunately, not yet complete.

Large portions of the city were still in relative ruin and the walls were still in terrible shape. Hence, Kain's undead had taken up the job of building makeshift housing out of the trees from the Gallows Woods which had been slowly pushed back by an untiring tide of skeletal lumberjacks armed with the axes made by the resident blacksmiths. This was temporary, and once enough immediate room had been secured, Kain would turn his now sizable force on the nation of Albion, which was in the earliest days of its civil war.

Alistaira’s contacts had worked quite fast indeed, and the fruits of their efforts lay in the almost daily skirmishes that took place in both Northern and Southern Albion between those who supported the Northern King, the Southern King, and those who wanted to secede from the other. It was basically even more of a chaotic clusterfuck of divisions and anger than had been anticipated. There were three main views that each had their own forces and while King John was based in the north and King François was based in the south, the forces that wanted northern or southern self-rule were pretty much everywhere and were causing far more chaos and carnage than the two legitimate kings. While the two Kings’ armies were more moderate and initially felt that the nation should stay together, the partisans who fought for northern and southern independence were making both sides look bad and were even attacking those in their favored region who didn’t directly support the independence movement.

Hence, there were, for a time, not two forces fighting this war, but three, and the general lack of care for each other was growing with every passing week. It would only be a matter of time before the more violent and independence-minded voices grew too loud and too numerous to ignore, and from what Alistaira’s contacts had said it looked like a full-blown secession war was the likely way things were going to turn out.

Both sides were going to demand land that the other wanted, and the fact that neither of them would back down meant that the eventual dispute over the borders between the two new states was going to be the main impetus that would drive the war. If the two fledgling nations were alone, they would certainly have been able to settle their dispute without one of them being obliterated.

But they were not alone.

To the south of both of them, a hungry predator watched its prey weaken itself. The hunt would begin, and the self-harm that had been dealt to both of the targets of the ravenous predator would make the demise of the prey that much easier and that much more ironic. There were battlefields littered with the unblessed dead that could be raised into unlife. There were villages that had sent every son and father away to fight their own countrymen and thus were not at home to defend it. While the two infant nations smacked themselves around, they would be devoured in their cribs by a monster that would use them to sharpen its fangs and shake off the rust it had accumulated in the ages it had slept.

The Darksol Empire was moving its forces through the Gallows Woods. In only a matter of days, the infant nation of Francus would feel the power of the risen Abominable King, and more likely than not the northern nation of Anglond would stand idly by and let their former countrymen fall to the encroaching and unrelenting tide of undeath.

A storm was coming.