Deathless

Deathless Chapter Twenty-Nine: Emperor

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Emperor

The walls of Ictus City towered around the keep, its streets lined with canals  and waterways with small boats that served as the city’s transportation.

Ictus City had always been the gem of the South, one of the last bastions before one entered into the lawless settlements pocketed all over the South, kept in check only by the citadel of Oronthurin.

Ictus City had always taken its sustenance from the crashing rapids of the Frustum River, its people as fierce and as savage as the waters themselves. As opposed to the calm rushing waters of the Iamanus River, the Frustum was a dragon, and the people who sought to tame it even more ferocious than the winged beasts themselves.

And the governor of Ictus had done well to defend himself from the constant chaos that plagued the lawless South, where only a handful of small bastions holding out against complete anarchy. The walls of Ictus rose as a stronghold, as a final frontier against the South.

The Arlenian Trade Crisis had struck the South most especially, as many of its towns such as Southport, Lignum and Vallis depended heavily on trading their goods with that of neighbouring empires.

It was true that the decrease in trade had caused many residing in these towns to lose their jobs and eventually have to resort to banditry and piracy along the shores of the Frustum to feed themselves. However, it was Emperor Arseph the Mageslayer’s campaign in the South that had sealed their fate.

It was Arseph’s relentless assault on the South, on the towns and villages that the Everthorn Mages had commandeered in their advance, on the various forts that the Sentinels had once held. The Mageslayer had razed them all to the ground, plunging the South into yet another dark age of crime and lawlessness.

Ictus City’s governor had been forced to forsake all of the settlements on the city’s outskirts, and retreat behind the hulking walls of stone in order to spare his people from the constant bandit raids.

But the towering sentinels that the governors and lords of past had so earnestly attempted to maintain could stop Ictus, the City of the River, from being overwhelmed during the Arlenian Civil War.

Ictus City had been ravaged by Ashmur’s foot soldiers, as well as his elite juggernauts who had crushed Imperial resistance and secured the city’s renowned shipyards for their own purposes.

And from Ictus had sprung forth a mighty rebel Navy, that had wrested the entirety of the Archipel Islands from Imperial control.

Now, in the central hub of government in Ictus, the Paradome, that stood at the very centre of the city, from which all the city’s canals flowed to and from, was assembled the entire command force of Ashmur’s Grand Army.

Commander Eregar, commanding officer of Ashmur’s Fifth Contingent, sat between Commanders Romond and Caitlyn, heads of the Fourth and Sixth contingents, respectively.

Twenty-three commanders were assembled at this table, with only two missing: Commanders Thaswine and Rocfeld on the Island of Spires, busy establishing the rebel outpost there. Each contingent commanded about four thousand warriors each, building up to Ashmur’s eighty thousand strong Grand Army, all of which had assembled in camps along the Frustum River.

All five of Ashmur’s generals had also assembled in the Paradome’s war room, the room from which General Dosoyn the Burner himself had plotted his daring burning of Captain Gamaal’s entire pirate fleet moored at Southport. And now, from this very room, Ashmur planned yet another burning. The burning of an entire empire.