Life inside the walls of what Bilal now secretly called Axiomra was an anomaly of history.
To walk through the heavy gates was to step through a portal in time. Outside, the world was a freezing, monochromatic hell of brown mud, grey skies, and the constant, sour stench of unwashed bodies and animal dung.
Inside Axiomra, the air smelled of burning pine, baking yeast, and—most shockingly to visitors—lye soap.
Bilal had engineered a localized paradise. The main roads connecting the Great Hall, the forge, and the hospital were paved with flat stones.
Beneath these stones, he had dug shallow trenches that vented the waste-heat from the massive forge fires.
In the dead of winter, while the forests were buried in snow, the central plaza of Axiomra was a steaming, dry sanctuary where children ran barefoot.
But this luxury bred a new, insidious danger: Arrogance.
The first generation of orphans were now sixteen and seventeen years old. They had grown up eating beef liver, boiled milk, and fresh salmon.
They were towering, muscular, with flawless skin and perfectly straight teeth. They knew mathematics. They wore brightly dyed green and red wool.
And they had begun to look down on the outsiders. Bilal heard a group of his teenage soldiers laughing at a passing merchant, mocking the man's missing teeth and filthy tunic.
Bilal knew that arrogance was the cancer of empires. He decided it was time for the "Reality Tour."
He gathered twenty of his oldest orphans, including Runa's husband, Leif, who was still young enough to need the lesson. He ordered them to strip off their fine green tunics and wear plain, rough spun wool.
They rode out of the valley, leaving the heated stone behind.
For three days, Bilal led them through the neighboring villages that belonged to rival Jarls.
The teenagers were horrified. They saw children their own age with bellies swollen from intestinal worms. They saw women looking fifty years old at the age of twenty-five, their backs permanently bent from grinding grain with hand-stones.
They smelled the overpowering reek of rotting flesh where a villager was dying slowly of gangrene from a simple wood-chopping cut.
On a cold ridge overlooking a particularly miserable, mud-drenched settlement, Bilal stopped his horse. He turned to look at his pristine, horrified students.
"You think you are better than them?" Bilal asked, his voice cutting through the freezing wind. "You think you are born of superior blood?"
The teenagers looked down, deeply ashamed.
"Look closely," Bilal commanded, pointing to a starving boy shivering in the mud below. "That is not a lesser creature. That is you, if I had not walked through the snow ten years ago. You are tall because I fed you. You have teeth because I gave you clean water. You can read because I gave you paper."
He rode his horse closer to them, his dark eyes locking onto each of theirs.
"The moment you believe you are naturally superior to the man in the mud, you adopt the mindset of a Demon. Our wealth is not a crown to wear; it is a tool to lift them up.
If any of you ever mock a starving man again, I will personally strip you of your citizenship and leave you out here. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Jarl," the teenagers answered in unison, their voices thick with newfound humility.
When they returned to Axiomra, the teenagers didn't swagger. They walked through the stone gates and literally knelt to touch the warm paving stones.
They threw themselves into their work with a desperate, passionate gratitude. Bilal had cured the rot of privilege before it could take root.