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PROLOGUE

The First Reapers were not men of the sword. They were of the sickle and scythe. The fields they toiled in were not those of conflict. They were of stalk and grain. The change came over those omened farmers when the ylfs spilled from the northwoods with their bows drawn and vengeance in their moonsick hearts. The sylvan folk had good reason to hate. Their boreal wilds had been wracked and savaged by the encroaching settlements of mankind. The humans' numbers had swollen with each knot of the moons. They bred like ngeti in perpetual heat. The cities of men went overfilled, walled floodbasins of filth and misery and want. Their citizens persecuted one another for their odd and multifarious beliefs. These things drove the humans most intrepid and desperate to seek new untamed lands to seed. Tree after tree fell as the Nation's diaspora cleared away the hallowed and ancient forests to make way for boundless cultivation and consumption. The human settlers repurposed those razed deadenings into farmland and built houses and barns and silos from the cleaved timber. In the eyes of the wood people this may as well have been their own sawn bone. They lashed back in turn—but far outnumbered by the lust-plagued humans, the ylfs could not face them full on. Deep at night they went, raiding the villages on the forest fringe. Their eyes cut through darkness, their nimble steps went unheard. The ylfish stalkers plucked the humans from the fields as the sharecroppers did their own feycorn and rhey.

The Nation frontiersmen threw themselves against the ylfish resistance in far greater measure. They'd poured sweat into that land, birthed their children there, buried their forebears there. Its soil made holier by their plows. This was their home, more than any metropolis. The spirits of those staunch agrarians shifted like the winds of a woeful storm. The humans beat their tools and plows into weapons and drove hard into the old thicks. A blood-harvest was reaped by both sides but in the end the Nation folk prevailed. The surviving woodkin were forced to retreat and claim some new sanctuary deeper in the wickeds where they could lick their wounds and plot dark retributions.

For many seasons the crops grown in those sanctified fields would be enriched by the blood of the fallen. Legends of the farmers who stood their ground against the ferals came to be widely known across the homeland. Their bravery and sacrifice captured the hearts and spirits of their fellow countrymen. And so, many seasons later when the Nation's leaders assembled elite companies within their modernized army for blackest intent, they honored those tillers-turned-fighters in the naming. They were called 'Reapers.'

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