Chapter 102: The Call of the Frontier

Tizzania was the wild, untamed frontier of the Cynthia Empire — a territory that seemed to have wandered in from an older age of the world and simply refused to leave.

It was, by any measure on a map, the second-largest territory under the Emperor's banner, and yet it felt entirely disconnected from the roar of the industrial revolution now reshaping Dian and Suebic City. Tucked away in the far north, Tizzania shared its western border with the Frisian Empire and its northern one with the volatile, sun-scorched deserts of the Imamah Empire, a land perpetually torn apart by clan warfare. That unusual geography had turned Tizzania into something of a cultural melting pot: Frisian migrants had crossed the border for generations in search of a better life, while desperate refugees fled south from Imamah's endless feuds. It ought to have been an uneasy mixture. Instead, the people of Tizzania had settled into a rough, practical harmony, bound less by shared blood than by the plain fact that surviving a northern winter required everybody's cooperation.

Only around thirty per cent of that vast landmass was actually inhabited. The remaining seventy per cent was untouched wilderness — ancient mountain forest, rolling hills, and valleys so deep the sun barely reached their floors — and it was home to some of the rarest, most dangerous beasts on the continent. While the rest of Cynthia raised factory chimneys and paved new highways, Tizzania's economy had stayed rooted in agriculture, hunting, and the old ways of the Adventurer's Guild. The Guild still ran much as it had for centuries: registering hunters before they vanished into the deep woods, checking over their equipment, and buying back whatever pelts and meat they dragged out again. It was a territory that felt beautifully, stubbornly stuck in the past.

Its ruler — until that evening, at least — was Count Arenia Gilmort.

Arenia was a man cut from the cloth of the old world. In his younger days he had been a renowned adventurer, spending years mapping the deep northern forests alongside a small, tightly-knit band of comrades. It was during those rugged years that he'd met his wife, Sonya, then a sharp-eyed clerk at the Guild registry with a reputation for turning away anyone whose gear didn't meet standard. Together they had raised two children. Their daughter, Misya, was now heavily pregnant and married to a wealthy merchant who oversaw the northern trade routes. Their son, Mason, had left Tizzania many months before to join Prime Minister Takuya's new administration, quickly becoming one of the Prime Minister's most trusted aides and taking charge of several key departments.

Then, a month ago, Arenia had sent a formal letter to Emperor Regis announcing his retirement — forcing Mason to abandon the capital and return home to take over the running of Tizzania.

That evening, the Gilmort family gathered around the great oak table in the dining hall of the Count's rustic estate. There was no electric light here, unlike the glittering mansions of the capital; the room was lit instead by the warm, restless glow of the hearth fire and a scatter of oil lamps, which threw long shadows across the beams overhead.

The mood, for the moment, was a genuinely happy one. Servants cleared away the last of the main course and set down warm berry tarts for dessert, and the conversation drifted, as it so often did lately, towards Mason's work.

Count Arenia, his beard greying now but his shoulders still broad from decades of outdoor labour, took a slow sip of his wine and studied his son across the table. 'So, Mason,' he said. 'I hear the blueprints you sent up to the capital finally came back. Does that mean it's official? Is this industrial city of yours actually going ahead?'

Mason — dressed in a sharply tailored administrative suit that looked almost out of place beside his father's heavy furs — nodded. 'It is, Father. Takuya signed off on it only yesterday. And it isn't only the blueprint — I've already started reorganising and rezoning the populated sectors. We're laying the groundwork for Tizzania's first mass-production factories.'

Arenia's thick eyebrows drew together. 'Factories,' he repeated, turning the word over as though it tasted strange. 'I understand the Empire has to change, Mason, truly I do. But what of the forests? Will any of this touch the old woods?'

Mason smiled — he knew exactly how fiercely his father loved that wilderness. 'You needn't worry about that. I drafted the environmental protections myself, and Takuya agreed to every line of them without argument. All of the new zoning will be confined strictly to the areas that are already populated, plus the ghost towns. There are dozens of villages sitting empty across Tizzania, Father — places our people abandoned when they went south chasing better wages in Suebic City or the capital. I mean to bring them home. We'll modernise the economy, yes, but the seventy per cent of this land that belongs to the wild stays exactly as it is.'

Across the table, Misya's husband leaned in, his eyes brightening with the particular interest of a man who thought in ledgers. 'And the infrastructure — is it true about the logistics lines, Mason?'

'It is,' Mason said. 'The Phase Three National Power Grid reaches Tizzania early next year — enough to run the factories properly. And the heavy-rail tracks are already being laid northward as we speak. Once they're finished, goods won't spend weeks crawling down here by carriage. They'll reach the capital in hours, by locomotive.'

Arenia let out a booming laugh, pride swelling visibly in his chest. 'To think — my own son is the one dragging the future up here by its collar. You've done well for yourself under Lord Takuya, Mason. Truly.'

'Thank you, Father.' Mason set down his fork and folded his hands, and something in his posture shifted — the easy warmth of a moment ago giving way to quiet attention. 'But you called this dinner for a reason. A special one, you said. So — what is it?'

The good humour in the room thinned almost at once.

Arenia went quiet. He looked down at his wine glass, watching the firelight dance across its surface, and when he finally drew breath it was slow and deliberate, the kind of breath a man takes before saying something he cannot take back. He braced both hands flat against the table's edge.

'I received the decree back from the capital this morning,' he said. 'The Emperor has put his seal on it. As of today, I've formally transferred my title.' His eyes found Mason's. 'You are the ruling Lord of Tizzania now, son.'

For a moment nobody at the table moved.

Mason blinked, and for just an instant his composure — the same composure that had carried him through cabinet meetings and policy debates — slipped. 'Father, I knew the administration was coming to me. I hadn't thought you meant to hand over the title itself. Not yet. Why so sudden?'

Arenia lifted his gaze. 'Because I'm leaving the estate, Mason. I'm going back into the deep woods.' He paused, as if testing the words for the first time himself. 'I'm going back to adventuring.'

'What?' Misya's cup rattled against its saucer as her hand flew to it too late; her other hand had already gone protectively to her belly. 'Father, you cannot be serious.'

Sonya's palms hit the table with a crack sharp enough to still the whole room. Whatever softness had lived in her face a moment ago was gone, replaced by the same flint that had once made green recruits tremble at the Guild registry desk. 'Arenia Gilmort, have you lost your senses? You are not twenty any more! I spent ten years behind that registry counter. I know exactly how many grey old men march into that forest chasing their glory days — and how many of them never march back out.'

'Mother's right.' Misya's voice cracked, fear plain beneath the anger now. 'It's far too dangerous, Father. You have a grandchild coming. Why risk it now, of all times?'

Arenia said nothing to either of them. He let the two women he loved most pour out their fear and fury without interruption, because he understood — clearly, painfully — that it came from love, not spite.

Across the table, Mason and his brother-in-law stayed silent, watching. Mason studied his father's face closely: beneath the wrinkles and the greying hair, something was burning there, raw and undisguised — a longing so old it had nearly been forgotten.

'Mother. Misya. Please,' Mason said at last, and something in his tone — level, unhurried, the same authority he'd learned at Takuya's side — cut cleanly through the noise.

Both women stopped and looked at him.

Mason turned back to his father. 'There's a real reason behind this, isn't there? Tell us properly.'

Something in Arenia's expression eased, gratitude flooding in behind the tension. He breathed out again, and this time his voice lost its formal edge entirely, stripped down to something plainer and more honest.

'I miss it, Mason.' His eyes shone, wet with a sadness that had clearly been building for years. 'Every morning I look out that window at the mountains and something in me aches. Thirty years I've sat behind that desk, signing tax ledgers and settling boundary disputes between farmers who can't stand each other. I gave my whole youth to this duty, and I don't regret it — but my body's failing me now, Sonya. My knees seize up every winter. My back won't straighten the way it used to. The window I have left is closing, and it's closing fast.'

He looked between his wife and his daughter, something almost pleading in his face. 'I want to feel damp earth under my boots again, just once more, while I still can. I want to smell pine in the morning and hear wolves calling from the ridge at night. I want to feel young again — properly alive — before my body decides that choice for me.'

Nobody spoke. The anger drained slowly out of Misya's face, leaving tears in its place. Sonya simply stared at her husband, and something in her chest broke quietly as she recognised, buried under thirty years of grey hair and duty, the same reckless young man she'd fallen for in that draughty registry office. She understood, in that moment, that keeping him locked inside this house would only kill him slower.

She let out a long breath, and it trembled on the way out. 'Fine, then. I'll pack my things. I'm coming with you.'

'No, Sonya.' Arenia shook his head gently. 'I'll be staying in the old hunting cabin with Theron and Corvinus — it's no place for you right now. Misya's time is close. When that baby comes, she's going to need her mother here, not chasing bears through the mountains.'

Sonya opened her mouth to argue and then closed it again, caught between the two people she loved most.

'It's all right, Mother,' Mason said softly, reaching across the table to cover her hand with his own. 'Let him go. I'll have the Guild send a senior ranger out to check on the cabin once a month, just to be sure he's still in one piece.'

Sonya looked from her son to her husband for a long moment. When she finally spoke, her eyes were wet but her voice had steadied. 'If this is truly what your soul needs, Arenia, then I suppose I can't stop you.' A small, sad smile crossed her face. 'But you'd better be careful out there. If some dire bear eats you before you've even met your grandchild, I promise you I will march straight into the afterlife and finish the job myself.'

Arenia's whole face broke open into a grin — wide, boyish, decades younger than it had looked all evening. Whatever weight had settled onto his shoulders with the title of Count seemed to lift bodily off him. 'Thank you,' he said quietly, looking round the table at each of them in turn. 'Thank you for giving an old man one last chance to chase the horizon.'

✽✽✽✽✽✽

Dawn the next morning found the former Count Arenia standing at the edge of the tree line, practically buzzing out of his own skin. He'd waited more than a decade for this particular morning, and he had gone to bed absurdly early the night before rather than risk losing a single hour of daylight to a late start. Thick fog still clung low to the ground, hiding most of the forest's edge from view, though even the little he could see of it — dark trunks fading into white mist — made something in his chest ache with anticipation.

A rough, booming voice called out from the trail behind him. 'Would you look at that. Here I thought I'd be the first one up.'

Arenia turned to find his oldest friend, Theron Brask, striding out of the fog looking entirely too pleased with himself and entirely too at home in this landscape for a man his age. Arenia laughed and crossed the clearing to clasp his hand.

'We're finally doing it, Theron. One last great journey.' He glanced past him, up the empty trail. 'Where's Corvinus? Don't tell me that old bastard's running late again.'

'Who are you calling an old bastard, you skimpy lump?' A third voice barked out of the mist before its owner had even come into view.

Corvinus Hale emerged a moment later, hauling a pack so enormous it looked as though it weighed as much as a small horse — pots, coiled rope, and bedrolls strapped to every available surface, clinking and rattling with every step.

Theron groaned at the sight of it. 'By the gods, Corvinus, why on earth did you bring all of that? We've already got the basics stashed at the cabin. You'll be exhausted before we're even halfway there.'

'Every single item in this pack is entirely necessary, I'll have you know,' Corvinus huffed, hitching the straps higher on his shoulders. 'You never know you need a thing until you're freezing in the dark wishing you'd packed it.'

Arenia only smiled, already used to the two of them bickering like an old married couple. 'Well, at least I brought the ale, so nobody has to sit around bored.'

He patted his own pack, and it answered with the unmistakable clink of glass bottles.

'My word, Arenia.' Theron's eyebrows shot up at the sheer volume of the sound. 'You do remember we're hiking into the deadly wilds and not throwing a noble's banquet, don't you? This is ridiculous.'

'And you're criticising me over him?' Corvinus said, grinning triumphantly.

All three men broke into deep, easy laughter, the kind that seemed to shave years off each of their faces at once. Whatever stiffness thirty years of political life and ageing joints had put into them seemed, for the moment, to simply dissolve into the morning mist.

'Right, well — we're all here, gear's been checked,' Arenia said, rubbing his hands together. 'Theron, did you manage to get the new bows?'

'Three of them.' Theron grinned and unhooked a long, cloth-wrapped bundle from his pack. 'Bought them off a merchant out of Dian City a fortnight ago. Newest design going.'

He pulled the cloth away to reveal three sleek, beautifully finished recurve bows, each one folded neatly in half.

Corvinus leaned in, eyes wide with genuine admiration. 'Would you look at the construction on that. Feels sturdy as anything, and it folds clean in two.'

'They're built around a locking metal hinge,' Theron explained, clearly pleased to have an audience. He snapped one of the limbs into place with a satisfying click. 'The wood's backed with laminated animal sinew along the belly of the bow — that's what lets you draw it back to full tension without the limb splitting or the wood giving out under the strain. Between the sinew backing and the improved limb geometry, these things put out nearly twice the armour-piercing force of the old wooden bows we grew up with. Roughly the same draw weight, but a far cleaner transfer of energy through the limbs when you loose the string.'

'Right, well — everything's ready, then,' Theron said, slinging the assembled bow over his shoulder. 'Shall we get moving? There's a whole forest waiting on us. I swear I can feel it getting impatient.'

Arenia nodded, a fire lighting behind his eyes that hadn't been there in years. 'I can feel it too. Time to feel young again. Let's go.'

The three old adventurers, each chasing some version of the same thing, stepped past the tree line together and vanished into the wild.

For the first hour or so the going was easy, the trail underfoot dry and familiar, the crunch of dead leaves beneath their boots almost meditative.

'So,' Theron said, using his walking stick to sweep a low fern out of the path, 'how did the family take the news? I can't imagine Sonya was thrilled.'

Arenia chuckled, rubbing the back of his neck. 'There was shouting, put it that way. Misya nearly fainted, and Sonya threatened to march into the afterlife and finish me off herself if I let some beast eat me out here. But they came round, in the end. They understand — this is where I belong.'

'Same story with mine,' Theron sighed. 'When I told my boys I was heading back up to the ridge, they looked at me like I'd gone properly mad. Offered to hire a dozen mercenaries just to escort me to the cabin door.'

'You two have it easy,' Corvinus called from the back of the line, still labouring under the weight of his pack. 'I've got three daughters and a wife. Four straight hours of weeping and scolding and lecturing before I got out the door. They packed me enough medicinal herbs to treat the whole continent.'

Theron laughed, batting a low branch out of his way. 'Speaking of the continent changing — there's talk going round the taverns, Arenia. People are saying you haven't just handed the title to Mason, but that he's planning to build a whole new city up here. Something about iron wagons running on rails?'

Arenia's chest swelled with pride he made no effort to hide. 'It's not just talk. Mason's got Prime Minister Takuya Kazuha's full backing. He's rezoning every abandoned sector to put up factories, bringing in the National Power Grid, and the heavy-rail lines are already being laid north as we speak — they'll be hauling goods to the capital before you know it. He's bringing back the people who left for the south, turning this whole territory into a proper economic engine, and somehow keeping the old woods untouched the entire time.'

'A rail line.' Corvinus shook his head, half in disbelief. 'Imagine living long enough to see the whole world rewritten under you.'

Theron's fist shot up without warning, and both men froze mid-step. The veteran hunter dropped into a low crouch, eyes fixed on the dense brush ahead, and Arenia and Corvinus's hands went instinctively to their weapons.

Something rustled in the ferns to their left. A small, stocky shape waddled out into the clearing — the thick body and coarse brown fur of a young bear cub, save for a single shimmering ivory horn jutting proudly from the centre of its forehead.

'Unicorn Bear cub,' Arenia whispered, unable to stop himself smiling as the little creature sniffed curiously at a tree root before bounding off, clumsy and delighted, into the undergrowth.

A blur of shifting colour flickered through the canopy overhead a moment later — a Rainbow Fox, its fur scattering the morning light into shifting, kaleidoscopic patterns as it leapt gracefully from branch to branch, chasing after a cloud of luminous insects.

Then came a sharp hiss, and Corvinus ducked just in time as a jet of sizzling, bright green liquid shot past his ear and struck the trunk of a nearby tree. The bark hissed and began to smoke where it landed, the fibres visibly dissolving under whatever caustic compound the bird had spat at him.

Perched on a branch above them sat a small, brightly feathered bird, already ruffling its wings and readying another mouthful of the corrosive sap for a second shot.

Theron scooped up a stone without breaking stride and lobbed it into the branches, sending the bird shrieking off into the canopy. 'Keep your eyes open, boys,' he said, entirely unbothered by how close the spray had come. 'This is still just the edge of the forest — everything out here's small, more curious than dangerous.'

He pointed his stick deeper into the trees, where the mist thickened and seemed to swallow the last traces of daylight whole.

'Once we're properly inside, near the cabin, it's an entirely different world,' he warned, his tone dropping into something more serious. 'The canopy blocks out the sun completely in places. The beasts get territorial, and some of the reptiles out there are the size of a royal carriage. We can't afford to get sloppy from here on in.'

Arenia tightened his grip on the folded bow at his shoulder, his heart hammering with a mixture of fear and excitement he hadn't felt in three decades.

'Wouldn't have it any other way,' he said, grinning, and the three of them adjusted their packs and pressed on, disappearing together into the dark, waiting heart of the wilderness.

✽✽✽✽✽✽

Several hundred miles south, in a private antechamber just off the Grand Assembly Hall of the Royal Keep, Crown Prince Julian was busy regretting every decision that had led him to be alone in a room with his eldest sister.

Princess Seraphina leaned back in her velvet chair, idly swirling a cup of tea, a wickedly delighted smile spreading across her face. 'So,' she said. 'I hear Suebic City is lovely this time of year. Especially the Food Valley district. Tell me, Julian — does Frisian royalty prefer sponge cake, or roasted coffee?'

Julian groaned and dropped his head into his hands, his face rapidly turning a shade of crimson that clashed badly with his formal collar. 'Please, Sera. I'm begging you. Stop interrogating my own knights. It's more than a little strange, having my guards report my personal business back to my sister.'

Seraphina laughed, light and musical. 'Oh, don't be so dramatic. I only asked a few logistical questions — how many times you tripped over your own words, mostly, and whether Princess Vanessa laughed at any of your jokes.'

'She happens to like my jokes,' Julian muttered, arms crossed like a sulking child. 'And for what it's worth, the walk went very well. Why do you even care this much about the details?'

Something in Seraphina's expression shifted — the teasing didn't vanish exactly, but it softened, making room for the sharper, more careful mind underneath. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. 'I care because you're my little brother, and needling you endlessly happens to be one of my sovereign duties.' A beat, and then her voice dropped into something crisper, more measured. 'But I also ask because Takuya needs to know.'

Julian blinked. 'The Prime Minister? Why would he care about my love life?'

'Because you're the Crown Prince of Cynthia, and she's Emperor Magnus's daughter,' Seraphina said patiently. 'If whatever's happening between the two of you turns out to be real — properly mutual, I mean — then everything about how we deal with the Frisian Empire changes overnight. Takuya would have to rewrite his entire diplomatic strategy around the possibility of a royal marriage. Your heart's got geopolitical weight to it now, little brother, whether you like it or not.'

Julian let his head fall back against the chair with a groan, the logic of it settling over him like a wet blanket. 'I just wanted to buy a girl a slice of cake, Sera. Why does everything I do end up in one of Takuya's ledgers?'

Before Seraphina could get another word in, the heavy doors swung open and the Royal Chamberlain bowed low. 'Your Highnesses. The ministers have gathered. His Majesty and the Prime Minister will arrive shortly.'

Julian's posture snapped upright at once, the sulking prince disappearing behind the composed, practised bearing of a Crown Prince, all in the space of a single breath. Seraphina, satisfied, offered him her arm, and together they swept out of the antechamber and into the newly rebuilt Grand Meeting Hall.

The room itself was something of a marvel. Takuya had done away with the old feudal layout entirely — gone was the great circular table where lords used to shout each other down — and replaced it with something closer to a modern parliament: tiered, semicircular rows of continuous oak desks curving round a central stage, arranged so that every minister in the room had a clear, unobstructed line of sight to the front.

The most striking addition, though, sat right there on every single desk. Rising from a heavy iron base was a slim metal stalk topped with a small wire-mesh bulb — the newest invention out of Viscount Inori Kazuha's electrical workshop, a device he called simply the microphone. A thin diaphragm inside the bulb converted the vibration of a speaker's voice into a fluctuating electrical current, which ran down through thick, rubber-sheathed wires beneath the floorboards to a bank of amplifying coils at the rear of the hall, before being pushed back out through matching speaker units mounted along the walls. The whole hall, in effect, had been wired into a single, centralised sound system — an achievement Julian still hadn't quite got used to.

Already seated in the tiered rows were most of the Empire's most powerful people. Duke Balmarrat Matthew sat near the front, poring over a set of military deployment maps. Count Aldric Sterling of Coriba was deep in quiet conversation with Chief Vane of the Homeland Security Department. Viscount Inori Kazuha himself was fussing over the wiring beneath his own microphone stand, while beside him sat Viscount Kaguya Kazuha, reading through what looked like a medical report, his brow furrowed in concentration. Behind them sat the newly appointed heads of the ministries of Education, Infrastructure, Agriculture, and Finance, filling out the rest of the chamber.

This was the First Annual Cynthia Government Planning Summit.

Unlike an ordinary session of the court, there were no minor nobles here today, no village heads or regional mayors — this closed-door meeting had been designed exclusively for the highest federal ministers, gathered to debate and refine the Prime Minister's first draft of the Empire's objectives for the year ahead. Everything was on the table: GDP growth targets, new industrial zoning, housing allocations, defence spending, export shipping limits. Only once this inner circle had picked the draft apart line by line would a final, polished version be presented to the territorial lords for their own review.

Then the heavy double doors at the rear of the hall swung open.

'All rise!' the Chamberlain called, his voice carrying clean across the chamber even without the aid of a microphone.

Every minister, general, and royal in the room came to their feet at once.

Emperor Regis walked the length of the central aisle first, his crown catching the electric light overhead, and a single measured step behind him came Prime Minister Takuya Kazuha, radiating the sort of cold, unshakeable authority that made half the room straighten their spines a little further without meaning to.

They reached the front together, where the architecture of the room made a very deliberate statement about the new order of things. Emperor Regis climbed a short flight of carpeted steps to a tall, ornate throne set on the main stage. Takuya, by contrast, stopped at a smaller, lower platform positioned directly in front of it — close enough to make plain where the real day-to-day power in the Empire now sat, low enough to remind everyone in the room exactly whose authority it still answered to.

Once the Emperor had taken his seat, the rest of the hall followed.

Takuya unlatched his leather briefcase and drew out a thick, bound stack of papers. At the Chamberlain's signal, a dozen royal staff swept down the aisles, distributing summarised copies of the Prime Minister's economic and infrastructural proposal to every desk in the room, while a single beautifully bound master copy was carried up the steps and set carefully on the Emperor's lap.

The Chamberlain stepped up to a small podium of his own, its own microphone stalk rising in front of him. 'Your Majesty. Prime Minister. Lords, Ladies, and distinguished Ministers of the Cynthia Empire,' he announced, his amplified voice booming out across the hall and making more than one of the older nobles flinch.

'I hereby call to order the First Annual Cynthia Year Planning Assembly.' He turned, gesturing towards the lower stage. 'I invite the Prime Minister of Cynthia to the podium, to open the federal briefing.'

Takuya Kazuha buttoned his sharp black coat, gathered his master ledger under one arm, and stepped up to the microphone. The hall fell utterly silent, every eye fixed on the architect of the new world, waiting for him to speak.