Chapter 8: The Capital of Arwen
Personal System Calendar: Year 00014, Day 1-28, Month III: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6858, 1st to 28th day of the 3rd Month
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The Capital City, Rosette
When the snow melted it revealed a far more disturbing picture, everything it had been hiding underneath it was now laid bare for all to see.
The bodies that winter had naturally preserved came back all at once. Thousands of them, scattered across the streets of Rosette, Arwen's capital city. While the cold had kept them intact the thaw undid that quickly. The rot set in fast and the smell followed days after that. Carrion birds came in droves, but there were not enough of them and not fast enough to consume the rotting corpses. What they did do was scatter what was already there and make it worse.
Teams of soldiers were gathered and put to work. Their task was to collect the bodies, pile them, and burn them. Those with the fire element ability were pulled out from their regular units and assigned to the burning details. Mages who had spent their careers in combat were now spending their days standing beside stacks of corpses with their hands lit. It was grim work and the city smelled like death for weeks. The smoke from the burning piles drifted across Rosette and settled into everything.
The capital had not been spared from the fighting. One of the rebel factions operating within Rosette was connected to the minister who had quietly warned Maya Village about the king's assassins months ago. The rebels had been present in the city long before anyone on the king's side had fully understood the scale of it; they nested deep into the city's infrastructure through years of careful preparation.
The two sides had been forced into a temporary ceasefire during the worst of winter. Not by choice. Nature had made that decision for them and both sides had used the pause in their own way. The king's forces used it to consolidate positions and shore up their supply lines. The rebels used it to watch their movement.
They tracked the soldier routes through the city. They noted the cleanup details and how heavily armed each group was, how long each shift ran, where the handoffs happened and who was paying attention during them. They mapped where the gaps were and they waited for the weather to give them permission to move.
The moment the thaw came they acted fast. Ambushes on the cleanup crews first, quick and targeted, using the city's own streets and alleys the way people who had grown up in them always could tell which to use against people who had only been assigned to patrol them. More bodies fell on both sides. The piles being burned grew faster than the burning could keep up with.
The bodies that hadn't been collected yet were now a practical problem beyond the smell. Putrified liquids from the decomposing dead had worked their way through the soil and into the groundwater. People drinking from wells inside the capital began getting sick. Not all of them and not immediately, but the pattern was clear enough once enough people started showing the same symptoms. The wells were the problem and there was no quick fix for such contaminated groundwater. People stopped drinking from them and started competing for whatever clean water remained. That competition of course created its own problems.
Merchants who had stayed through the worst of winter began leaving. Nobles who had been waiting to see how things developed made their own calculations and followed. The capital was bleeding the people it needed most, the ones with resources and connections, while trapping the ones who had nowhere else to go.
The king could not leave. To abandon Rosette would be to lose it. So he stayed, and he made his decisions from inside a city that was rotting around him, and his decisions became what they always became when put into immense pressure.
Worse.
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The Bloody Day of the Mad King
The order came down to search every home in the capital.
Every door was to be opened. Every room was checked. Every corner turned out. No exceptions, no exemptions for rank or standing. The soldiers implementing the order did it the way soldiers do things when they've been told they will not be held accountable for how they do it. Homes were left in pieces. Families were pulled into the streets and made to stand while their belongings were thrown around behind them. People who had done nothing stood in the cold morning air watching soldiers go through everything they owned, and understood for the first time that the law no longer applied to them. Only to those enforcing it.
Martial law followed. No one was allowed to come in or out of the capital. Anyone on the streets was to be monitored and could be stopped at any time for any reason. The city became a tightly closed fist around everyone still inside it, basically choking everyone who remained.
It was effective, in the narrow way that brute force is sometimes effective. Most of the rebels still inside Rosette had already fled before this started. Those who hadn't were caught. The ones who were caught became the king's message to everyone else.
They were strung up on the city walls in ways meant to be seen and remembered. Their bodies dismembered and their organs were left hanging. Those who had sheltered rebels were given a choice: give up whoever was hiding with them or face the same. Many pointed fingers at people they had known for years, at neighbors, at relatives, anyone to make the soldiers look somewhere else.
Those who were branded as traitors had a mark burnt into the back of their necks with a hot iron. A circle and a reversed cross. There was magic involved in it and it worked into the brand and made it more than just a permanent scar. It was a restraint, permanent and unremovable, that functioned whether the person wearing it could use magic or not. It didn't take their will from them. They could still refuse orders. The brand simply ensured that refusing came with consequences built directly into their bodies. They were unable to fight back their captors nor was killing themselves even an option, the branding was cruel a form of torture that made sure to let them suffer.
The things done to those who refused to cooperate were made public. The king wanted his people to watch. He wanted them to carry the images with them. What was done to them covered every category of degradation a human being could be subjected to, without apparent distinction for age, gender, or condition. Women, men, children, the pregnant, the old. The only distinction the king seemed to make was in the variety of methods, as though he wanted the watching population to understand that his capacity for this was not limited to any one approach.
From pregnant women in pits fighting each other, to men raping other men and having their genitals removed and forcibly he eaten, to children being passed around to nobles for pleasure and other abuses like being worked to death, to having them murder and butcher the rebels that were captured within their homes, as far as having canibilize them alive those who refused were forcibly fed with it, it became their regular meal instead of what normally prisoners were fed with.
This period became known as the Bloody Day of the Mad King of Arwen. It lasted for weeks.
The king had intended it to break the rebellion's support base inside the capital. But what it did instead was add fuel to a burning fire.
Nobles who had stayed quiet through everything that had come before finally began to move, the king's actions were already far too inhumane to be even considered in having their silence. It was not all out of principle for most of them, but out of the calculation that a king capable of what they had just watched was eventually going to turn that same attention toward them regardless of how cooperative they had been. The political math had changed. Staying loyal to this king was no longer obviously safer than joining the people trying to remove him from his throne.
More recruits came to the rebel factions in the weeks after the Bloody Day had concluded, than it had come in the entire previous season combined. They came in droves of very angry mobs in a way that was different from what had come before. The previous anger had been the slow kind, built up over years of taxation and neglect and broken promises. This came like a fiery storm of fed up people being treated far worse than animals on the streets.
The rebels were not innocent of their own atrocities either. They matched the king's cruelty in the territories they controlled, different methods and different justifications but similar enough in outcome. Two sides committing the same category of crimes against the same population, each one using the other's actions as their reason for continuing.
That was exactly what the Cabal needed.
Death on this scale, sustained over this length of time, driven by this depth of hatred on both sides. It wasn't just a war anymore. It was a ritual, carried out by people who had no idea they were even freely performing one. Every life lost in the Sovereignty, every burning pile in the streets, every act of violence committed in the name of one side against the other fed into something the Cabal had been building toward for years. An offering of sufficient scale to open a door. The Great Evil did not need an invitation in the conventional sense. It needed blood, enough of it, spilled with enough intent, in a place the ritual had already designated. Arwen was just on the places selected for it and the ritual's first phase was nearly complete.
The Cabal's agents on both sides of the conflict kept the fire burning from underneath. A word here, a supply route there, information delivered to whichever side needed it to keep the other side from winning too quickly. Balance was the point. Not victory for either the king or the rebels. Just continued slaughter at the right pace.
They were both being played, by the same hands like a puppet. And they would never know about it.
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The Closure of the Borders
The Empire's embassy inside Arwen had long been evacuated when things deteriorated past the point of safe operation. A skeleton crew of intelligence agents had stayed behind, keeping low and sending what they could back to Director Thrace. Now, as spring brought the fighting back to full intensity, additional agents from the Imperial Intelligence Division had managed to slip back in through what gaps still existed in the borders.
Their entry had not gone unnoticed. The Cabal had embedded itself deeply enough into Arwen's infrastructure at this point that very little moved within the sovereignty without being seen. The agents were skilled and they made it through, but the Cabal knew they were there. Whether the Cabal would act on that knowledge or simply watch and let them report back on a situation already beyond intervention was unclear. For now the agents were operational and sending information.
The king, meanwhile, had sealed the borders entirely.
No one in. No one out. All overland entry points into Arwen had been closed and restaffed with soldiers loyal enough, or frightened enough, to enforce the order without question. The only remaining route connecting the northern and southern halves of this part of the continent was the Great Central-Western River, and that was a different kind of chokepoint entirely. The river was heavily regulated, its traffic controlled by major merchant groups who had purchased operating rights years ago. Independent merchants and smaller operators had effectively no access to it. Contraband trade, which had kept a significant portion of the region's informal economy moving for decades, now faced inspections tight enough to strangle it.
Kingdoms that depended on the overland routes were already feeling the effects. Trade that had moved freely through Arwen for generations was backed up or rerouted at considerable additional cost. The first formal economic sanctions against Arwen were arriving from neighboring kingdoms angry enough to act on it, and the backdoor channels that should have softened the impact were being levied and tariffed into uselessness.
Inflation inside Arwen was climbing. Things that had held value were losing it. Goods that had always been available were disappearing from markets. The merchants who had left the capital early had made the right call and the ones who stayed too long were learning that lesson slowly and expensively.
The king's closure of the borders had been intended to contain the rebellion. What it was actually doing was strangling the kingdom's economy alongside it. The two things fed each other. A starving population with no way out was not a population that became more loyal. It was a population that became more desperate, and desperate people made reliable recruits for whoever was handing out food and weapons and a reason to be angry.
One of the Imperial Intelligence agents inside Rosette put it plainly in his report to Director Thrace.
The situation was predictable in its trajectory. A closed Arwen meant an economically suffocating Arwen. The kingdoms dependent on those routes would not wait indefinitely. Military pressure to reopen the borders was not a distant possibility. It was a near certainty if nothing changed within the next two to three months. If that came to pass, an outside force pushing in would not simplify anything. It would add a third variable to a two-sided conflict and guarantee that whatever the outcome was, it would be bloodier than it needed to be and more expensive for everyone involved including the Empire.
The agent's recommendation was measured. The Empire should consider calling a meeting of the affected lords before the economic damage could reach a point where their patience would run out entirely. Not to intervene in the war directly. Direct intervention would make things worse. Simply to open the routes and contain the fighting to Arwen's interior. Let the kingdom resolve its own crisis without dragging the surrounding regions into it.
There was also a secondary note at the bottom of the report, separate from the formal recommendation and written in a different tone than the rest of it.
Something was driving this beyond the obvious factors. The pattern of escalation on both sides was too consistent, the timing too convenient. The agent could not point to anything concrete. But in his experience, civil wars that burned this hot this fast without burning themselves out tended to have something feeding them from underneath that wasn't visible from the surface. He had requested additional surveillance resources to look deeper into it.
Whether the idiot on the throne would listen to any of it was, the report noted in its final line, a separate question entirely.