Twenty years after the end of the Fourth Shadowwar, Thomas Gown is a happily married family man with a beautiful wife and a perfect son. When he takes his son back to Lexandria University to arrange for his wizardly education, however, he learns tha...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
It was a crisp, sharp morning in Tara, the capital city of the Kingdom of Belthar.
The two suns shone steadily out if the cloudless blue sky. A small comet poked its head above the hilly and uneven eastern horizon and the occasional tiny meteor streaked its way across the sky, ignored by the citizens bustling through the icy streets, their breaths misting the air in front of them to form clouds of frozen condensation that were carried away by the light breeze. A light sprinkling of snow crunched under their feet, and a group of children were scraping their blue and frozen hands along the brick walls and the few untrampled inches along the edges of the pavements to gather enough snow to make decent sized snowballs. A few coaches made their way slowly along the centres of the wide avenues, the horses picking their way carefully along the frozen ground, and flocks of birds, their feathers puffed up against the cold, gathered greedily around an old woman sitting on one of the park benches, happily throwing out carefully cut cubes of bread.
The King smirked with mild contempt as he watched the scene through the wall sized scrying mirrors hanging in one of the private rooms of his palace. He loved to spy on his people as they bustled about their lives. Working, eating, sleeping. As totally unaware of his surveillance as a colony of insects under the gaze of a naturalist. Owned by him. His to do with as he chose. He could send out his soldiers to arrest any of them he chose and have them thrown in the palace dungeons. He didn't have to make any specific charges or present any evidence that they'd done anything wrong. His word was enough. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of power that sometimes left him feeling almost drunk, that sometimes made him want to just cry out in delight. He loved being King! He loved how good it made him feel. He loved being in control, of being able to order things the way he wanted them. There were no limits to his power...
Except, that wasn't quite true, was it? There were limits, and they were closer to home than he liked to think about. Only a few hundred miles away, his armies were still struggling with the undead legions of the rak king DarkThorne, still holding out in the northern marches, and beyond them were the former northern provinces of what had been the Empire of Belthar. Now brand new kingdoms, busy gathering their own armies and casting greedy eyes on their neighbours, including Belthar itself!
There were more newly independent provinces to the south and east, totally encircling Belthar and isolating her from the rest of the world. They demanded heavy tolls for passage through their territories, and the tolls rose every year. And there were more enemies right here in his own court! Nobles and Generals who blamed him for the present sorry state of Belthar and who thought that the Kingdom (Kingdom, by the Gods! We once ruled an Empire!) would be better under their own leadership. It was intolerable! His rule was treated with a shocking lack of respect by those closest to him. Belthar itself was treated with contempt by the rest of the world, and it all stemmed from a single, all pervasive idea.
Twenty years before, Belthar had fought a war. A desperate war against a terrifying enemy that had threatened the whole world. Despite the universal threat posed by the Shadowarmies, though, Belthar had had to face them almost alone. Oh, there had been Fu Nang, another empire on the other side of the continent, and their ambassadors had managed to shame a few other nations and Kingdoms into sending a scant handful of troops north to help, but the truth was that Belthar had had to face the wrath of the Shadowarmies almost alone. Belthar had managed to win that war, breaking the Shadowarmies and reducing them to the undead hosts of DarkThorne that somehow managed to persist in the north, but the cost had been terrible. Belthar had been left with a pitiful remnant of an army that was only large enough to patrol its own borders. Maintaining an empire had been out of the question, and the Beltharans could only watch helplessly as one province after another had declared its independence and broken away. Consequently Belthar was now perceived as weak. Not only by the surrounding newly formed Kingdoms but also, much more importantly, by its own citizens. Even his own ministers, and the landowners who controlled most of the country's wealth.
