The eve before Aisha’s return, Lucius sat down with Shiro and received the first version of the Cyclops.

Aillesterra is a rather unique place among the realms of men. It is the only place I know of, in all of history, where civil war did not seem to beget outward weakness. Primarily, this is because of the theocracy overseeing the numerous families. They enforce a policy that each of their fiefs must supply the majority of their soldiers to the general defense. This points their spears both against the creatures from beyond the map, in the old growth forest that even they cannot cleanse with the help of their goddess, as well as to the north against Drachenreach. Thus, for centuries they have held back their rivals.

And for centuries they have had some of the most dramatic civil wars one could imagine, where the death counts barely reach a few thousand and that’s with the wholesale slaughter of rival families, cousin upon cousin, brother upon brother. In 754 CC, one such cleansing was underway to secure the position of Holy Maiden. One family wanted it and another had been granted it by the emissary. The nuances of which I don’t plan to enter into greatly. What matters is that the chosen one was weaker and lost her house and family, but not her life.

The girl Reiko, not even an adult, had to flee to the north, but could not seek refuge with the defending garrison. While many thousands of knights protected the realm, many of which had grown up in her own fief, they were all honor sworn to ignore such squabbling between the nobility. They could not let her in, not without alerting the elders. If so commanded, they would arrest her for the peace of Aillesterra. This was their way.

But she did not seek refuge from the garrison, and so they had no reason to contact the elders. This was when she encountered the cyclops. A monstrous presence from across the world, they listened to the girl’s story half-drunk and drinking more. The first point of greatest contention among the many stories that Lucius heard was why Reiko went to the Cyclops for help, and Shiro told him thus.

“The petty kingdoms between Aillesterra and Drachenreach are not prideful places. They are home to the dregs of the world and legends cling to them like odors. The Cyclops brought with them a legend of slaughter. Leading only a paltry force, the Cyclops slaughtered over one hundred Drachenreach warriors. They were still living high off the purses of petty nobility. Who better to recruit against a backstabbing noble?”

Of course, no matter the quality of one warrior, one commander, a war couldn’t be won alone. They say (me mostly) that a great commander can be worth ten thousand extra soldiers, but that only becomes true after you have your first ten thousand soldiers. Reiko had to provide those, and provide she did. Not from her family’s fief, ford that was thoroughly occupied by her cousin’s troops. With but the two of them, they returned to the forests of Aillesterra and snuck into her cousin’s own city. With nearly every troop scouring the north for her, she went entirely unnoticed.

Therein, she picked at a forgotten crack in her family’s peace. Something that had been smoothed over and ignored with shadows and dust. She went to one of her family’s oldest retainers, a man too old to serve and yet forced to watch as his children had been conscripted. Despite all the motivation in the world, even he was constrained by propriety. Victory with him at her side would either require that she marry a man about to die of old age, or that her rule be unearned.

There was another solution though.

One’s vassals have a degree of freedom to change their allegiance in times of peace. While the old man never moved from his house, all the soldiers at his command decided at the same time that they were better off serving a new master. And so, she and the cyclops had an army overnight.

This force presented itself in the rear of her scheming family and marched without hesitation. Battle after battle was fought until she forced her usurper cousin to retreat for sanctuary in the south, thinking that the maritime families would take them in at least territorially. They were wrong. The families of the south(1) blocked the usurper on the roads and forced a confrontation.

Of course, the fight still favored the cousin by numbers, but as mentioned earlier a good commander is worth an extra ten thousand soldiers. The usurper was slaughtered and his head sent to the elders in a perfumed box. Reiko was inducted as the Holy Maiden within the year and the Cyclops went on to find new employment in the south, raiding the coasts of Giordana, the Misty Isles, and threatening Rackvidd.

Unfortunately for Lucius, no matter how much he pressed the man, he was able to learn nothing of the Cyclops’ tactics, their stigmata, or their origin. That last one confused him most of all, because he and I filled our war chest with bounties from those lands and had never heard of such rumors. The only conclusion he could reach was that the Cyclops’ legend had inflated after saving Reiko, an after-the-fact justification. As for their origin, they were probably a defector from Drachenreich. A one-eyed creature akin to a troll would hardly be surprising from that isolated land.

Lucius left the man imprisoned with a meager food ration and spent the following day going through the busywork of governance while considering his options. No matter how he thought about it, the fact that he had to fortify the port of Aliston before the Cyclops decided to become aggressive was the only smart thing to do, but he was already doing that. As a minor boon, he put the captured pirate ship up for auction and helped drive the price so high only a very confident merchant could afford it. That lined his chests enough to treat his soldiers and would eventually be one more revenue source for the city.

The problem troubled him late into the evening, and left a restless energy within him. He tried sitting at the docks, dining on sea food and sampling a local wine which left him wanting, but the frustration didn’t go away. He was nearly grinding his teeth as he stirred the leftover sauce. While he had been fighting, he had been able to absorb himself with that and pour out his energy upon his enemies, but back in the city he could only listen to what other people were doing.

At that particular moment, he was thinking that he should be having dinner with Kajsa, but was instead listening to Adam No-Last-Name discuss a cave system that had been found on the south side of the island, buried by the forest. They were still trying to figure out how the original chef had been in communication with the demon because it wasn’t just communication. Something like that could be done through dreams, through hallucinating on the kuku bud. Someone had given him the seed of the kuku plant to put into the steak as a warning. Probably how he had felled the pig, if that had been him at all.

A mere cave system, a place for clandestine locals to meet up with cloaks pulled over their heads and by the light of the moon, it was all so cliche that he could hardly stomach it. “Just bring a cadre of soldiers who have been misbehaving and make them map it out during the day.”

Adam scoffed. “You know, not all of us can brush off being stabbed by mutinous soldiers.”

Lucius sighed. “Fine, I need to get back out in the field again anyway. I’ll leave the rest of the paperwork to Lamdo.”

Adam grinned. “A wonderful idea, and I’ll be happy to join you so long as you’re between me and the prisoners, yeah?”

“Oh yes, use your local lord as a meat shield. I hear all the greatest knights in the realm do that.”

Adam laughed. “That’s how they live long enough to become the greatest knights in the realm.”

They both topped off their wine and gave a toast and would have gotten on with a good evening of drinking if not for someone at the docks sounding the alarm. They wailed upon the harbor bell and it was Lucius’ responsibility to go charging over to find out what the matter was. “Ship spotted!” the man in the tower cried. The duties of a harbor watchman might seem to some as a trivial job and a boring one, but I must stress that it really was anything but. Maintaining the fire at night, which marked the edge of the harbor, as well as safely utilizing the looking glass was a sought after and well compensated position. The lenses used, why I could go on for an entire essay about the careful grinding of glass to refract light properly, but this is not the place. Suffice to say, such a watchman still had to have excellent vision on his own, often leading to the hiring of young men, who sometimes made impulsive decisions in the name of wariness.

“Why would you ring the alarm because a ship was spotted?” Lucius roared.

This harbor watchman threw himself onto his railing and looked down, spotting his employer at once. The man cleared his throat and threw an arm out to the horizon. “Sir, black sails!” the man said, before the clash of steel rang out from the lighthouse.

While I might name off the various families and their relations to one another, it is not yet time in this narrative to go into such details. It will be years yet, in my pupil’s life, before war can finally be brought to their wooded lands. Then and only then will I lay the field with nobility.