Chapter 639: Grand Opening(1)

As the days wore on and the wind carried with it the scent of drying leaves and ripened fruit, the cold seasons passed rather quickly and the next harvest month drew to a close.

And with it came a welcome truth.

At last, a full year and three months had passed in peace.

It was not merely a lull in violence, nor a fleeting pause between campaigns. This was true peace—slow, golden, fertile.

The scars of the last war, though still present, had begun to scab over. That bitter conflict had pitted the Crown against a powerful coalition—the rebellious League in the northern provinces, the Princedom of Oizen and Herculia.

It had been a season of fire and ruin, yet the Crown had emerged bloodied but triumphant, basically sealing its dominion with the decisive victory at Aracina quickly followed with the Battle of Florium.

Now, even in the Crownlands—the very stretch of soil most frequently scorched by Oizenian raiders—peace reigned.

After all their proximity to a hostile country was one of the many reasons why the crown of Yarzat had been so weak before Alpheo’s arrival.

No watchfires lit the southern hills. No horns blew warning from the border towns. The seasonal raids that had once been as predictable as the spring rains had not come. For the first time in decades, the soil there knew only the iron of plows, not swords.

The change was more than coincidence; it was the fruit of war’s cruel harvest.

The high nobility of Oizen had been humbled, many captured in battle and many others killed . Their once-proud armies lay shattered in distant fields. A truce—stern and tightly worded—had been signed, binding both sides to three years of non-aggression. But no one doubted who would lose more by breaking it.

Oizen, fractured and licking its wounds, had entered a time of uneasy silence. Their new prince, Sorza Oizen, had inherited a crown barely fit to wear—held together with anxious compromise and a nobility divided in purpose. Whispers of unrest filled the valleys, and the eastern forests had become haunted with a new kind of threat.

Bandits.

Not the ragged beggars with clubs one might find in tales, but hard-eyed deserters apparently and men who had once served in lords’ banners, now turned rogue. They moved in small, clever bands—too few to fight in the open, too many to ignore. They struck like wasps: swift, precise, and gone before any reprisal could be mounted.

They raided lonely farms, extorted grain from isolated villages, ambushed merchants bringing salt or cloth through the passes. Their presence was a blight. But Oizen lacked the strength to swat them down. With no standing army to patrol the borderlands year-round, the response fell to small patrols—cumbersome and often too late.

And so, even as Yarzat flourished, its old rival rotted slowly from within.

Another long-standing affliction that had once plagued the people of the Crownlands—especially those living near the sea—was piracy.

In recent years, coastal towns and fishing villages bore the brunt of seaborne raiders: pirates who prowled the southern coast like wolves stalking unguarded flocks. They looted granaries, snatched livestock, and vanished with children and women into the misty blue of the horizon. The people had learned to live in anxious rhythms—fishing by day, boarding windows by dusk, sleeping with one eye open for sails that did not belong.

But that, too, had changed.

The Crown, under Alpheo’s watchful eye, had made a deliberate effort to shore up its southern waters. Watchtowers and fortifications had been raised along the jagged coasts, their beacons manned and their halls stocked. Garrisons of nearby cities were expanded to lend aid. More importantly, the Royal Fleet had been reforged into a patrolling force with teeth.

Galleys now combed the coastal waves in steady rhythm, their prows cutting the sea like sentinels on the march. Their presence alone was often enough to dissuade most pirates, who relied not on valor but on weakness to make their living.

While the more daring or desperate crews could slip past Yarzat’s vessels, it had become increasingly rare—and rarely profitable.

The truth was simple: with so many softer coasts elsewhere in the fractured princedoms, why risk everything plundering the most guarded shores?

However, such golden days of peace were never meant to last—not in a land where power was currency and silence only the breath before a storm.

While the Crown’s men traveled the countryside, collecting their grain levies with scrolls and seals in hand, far from the public eye, a storm was gathering.

A man—who, in recent years, had come to embody the very image of the princedom itself—was preparing his next move. Not a quiet maneuver of courtly influence, but a campaign of steel and fire. One that would shatter the century-old balance that had defined the southern realms and drag the entire region into a new and bloody Chapter.

A period that historians would come to name

the Anathema in the South, which would start an age of strife that would last for more than a decade.

But for now, the man who would light that flame was not seated at a war table, nor cloistered with his generals. No, he walked quietly through the winding paths of the royal garden, the evening sun casting golden hues across the polished stones and the last bloom of summer flowers.

At his side walked his wife. Her long black hair fluttered gently behind her in the breeze, her fingers resting softly in the crook of his arm. While he watched the sky with the calm eyes of a man measuring the heavens, she looked to the earth, tracing the hidden meanings in every turn of the garden’s design.

The birds sang unaware of what was coming, as the two strolled in silence among hedgerows and statues—one a man poised to set history ablaze, the other one of the few souls alive who knew the fire already danced in his thoughts.

"Are the preparations coming along well?" Jasmine asked softly, her voice barely louder than the rustling of the breeze through the hedges.

They had come to a gentle stop by a bush of blood-red roses, where her consort , leaned forward to admire one bloom in particular.

His gaze, however, did not linger on the flower but on a lone bee nestled in its heart, methodically gathering nectar with the single-minded purpose of its kind, which he respected by not interrupting its work and restraining his hands.

"They’re coming along just fine," Alpheo murmured, a faint smile forming at the corner of his mouth. "The grain stores are filled and sealed. The missives have flown to every corner of our realm. For the first time in decades—perhaps in the history of this fractured land—we will raise an army not cobbled together by few lords there and here but one that every lord shall answer to, without hesitation or deceit."

He watched the bee take off with a lazy buzz, spiraling upward into the warm afternoon air, giving out a small sigh with his nose in appreaciation. Only then did he lean closer, inhaling the fragrance of the rose left behind.

Jasmine’s eyes lingered on him, , a smile playing on her lips. "If I recall correctly," she said, "you marched to war last time with no less than three thousand men. I don’t think my father even saw so many soldiers together....Do you reckon you’ll break that record now that not a single noble dares to defy the call?"

The question, innocent on the surface, carried a deeper tone of satisfaction—the soft triumph of a daughter who now stood beside a man who had the thing her father never could, power.

Every success of Alpheo’s was a rebuttal to the ghost of the man who raised her without affection, made even better by the fact that she was sharing her bed with the same man who put an end to his reign.

"I suppose we could," Alpheo replied with disarming calm, his gaze drifting toward a patch of sunlight dappling the garden path. "But this time, we most certainly will not."

Jasmine’s brows drew together in a faint furrow. She blinked, not out of doubt but curiosity.

Why not?

The question bloomed quickly in her mind.

Wasn’t a larger army always better?

She asked the question aloud, and Alpheo answered without turning his gaze, as though he were discussing the weather rather than the fate of cities.

"Well," he began, brushing a speck of pollen from his sleeve, "it’s true that a larger army can cast a longer shadow. Intimidation is half the art of war. But in our case, too many men would become a burden rather than a boon."

He straightened up, hands clasped behind his back, and resumed his walk down the gravel path, Jasmine following at his side.

"Our first obstacle will be Herculia—the capital," he said, with a measured tone that held both calculation and disdain. "It’s protected by not one but two sets of walls, tall and thick. And while its garrison may be modest, the city’s own people will rise to its defense. A cornered city is the most dangerous kind."

He paused, plucking a leaf from a laurel bush as they passed. "Now, the famine that swept through their lands three years ago has likely thinned their numbers more than any census will admit. Still, even a starving population can hold out behind stone walls if pressed."

He caught himself, then shook his head slightly. "But I’m drifting. What I mean is: storming Herculia by force would be madness. We could lose half our army at the gate and still not take it. No, that’s not how it will fall."

Jasmine remained quiet, listening intently as her husband’s voice grew .

"We will not break down its gates with steel. We will not lose thousands on its walls. Herculia will fall by hunger and sickness. We’ll choke them slowly, inch by inch, until the city devours itself. And when it is weak, hollow, and desperate, we shall walk in—untouched, unbloodied. And of course, to accomplish such a deed, we have to last longer than them."

A smile curved on Alpheo’s lips then.

Not one of a man reveling in cruelty, but of one savoring a plan well set in motion. A gardener, watching his seeds take root and soon bloom into a beautiful flower.