"That's all for today, students."

An audible groan echoed among the children in Cressia's Fencing in the Fine Arts class, but they quickly settled down as she spoke again.

"As you know, summer break is upon us, so this is our last class for the next few months."

Another groan reverberated through the old makeshift gymnasium.

"Now, before you leave, what do I always ask you to remember?" she asked.

"To serve and protect others!" the students replied.

"And what else?"

"To uphold our nation, our King, and our Prince!"

Cressia was pleasantly surprised at how well she'd drilled those dull, compulsory Zantzar platitudes into them. She waved them off with a smile. "Now, enjoy your summer break!"

"Thank you, Ms. Cressia!"

The horde of unwashed children rushed past her and out into the city streets, eager to play out their new fencing dreams. With that, another year of swordsmanship had been passed on to a new generation.

For Cressia, the year had been a roaring success. Her team of young fencers had demolished most of the neighbouring kingdoms in tournaments and duelling sessions between realms, leaving Zantzar the undisputed fencing leader on the continent of Mylea.

She was proud of her students. Over the past year of stiff competition, they had shown the same passion for swordsmanship that she herself had when she first joined the King's regiment several years ago. She had come a long way since the plucky young immigrant who travelled by sea to fulfil her dreams of becoming a world class fencer, only to find herself enlisting in a foreign army so she could train under the famed Zantzar Blades, the most prestigious group of fencers on the continent.

She was of a middling height, with sun-straw blonde hair that was ritually cut into a military bob style every morning, and elven ears so absurdly long that her youngest students thought they'd been pulled on in a battle with an Orc.

And she was an elf, in contrast to the human children that circled around her during their lessons together. They'd grown naturally accustomed to her, and so did their parents after the initial wariness around an elf had worn off.

They were thankful that their children found a hobby that kept their minds of the troubles that brewed on the Zantzar border. At times, Cressia was often invited in to their homes for a hot meal in gratitude for the work she did in the boroughs where she lived.

Hot meals that she gladly took, as the troubles that brewed on the border had severed her veteran pension down to a mere pittance. In the past few months she had leaned out considerably since her expenses began to wane.

In the middle of cleaning and putting aside the fencing equipment of Masks, foils and gloves, she realised her own summer now would be free again to do as she pleased, which for her was travelling across the world of Mylea.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

She would first visit her parents in the Elven Conclave to the west, and share what misadventures she'd found herself in that hadn't made it to their letters, and then she would visit another country where she hadn't been before.

Pendaline, Withendom and Turangate had already been crossed off her list: She wondered if she visit the snowy alps of Venada or the dragon cliffs of Yan-Bon-Mor instead.

She really, really wanted to see those dragons!

Zantzar itself was a deeply cloistered nation, largely in devotion to it's monarchy which had ruled it for almost a thousand years. Outside of a small harbour in the south it was landlocked between the other kingdoms of Mylea, whom at times in the past had tried to occupy it either through force or through underhanded diplomacy. 

It had resisted all efforts, but the trade off was a people who were incredibly clannish and closed off to anything that might've emerged from another nation state. 

In the cities streets she walked in there were flags fastened outside every Inn or Apothecary shop she passed by, always pointed in the direction of the White Spire, the royal residence that lorded over the place.

Conscription was mandatory, and her oldest students would soon be called up for the army in service to the King. Even the makeshift gymnasium were they trained had once been a barrack in the darkest days of the Zantzar-Pendaline Wars.

Such devotion to royalty ran through every aspect of Zantzar life, and it extended to how an elf like her, whose people had disposed of their own nobles once upon a time, was treated.

The people in the boroughs may have been kind to her, but the unnatural scent of bigotry had never went away in the city. She was often derided as a "royal-killer" who wouldn't hesitate to deliver the king's head on a platter to the elven radicals in the west. Even her Military Service hadn't shielded from such unfounded claims. She had long given up wearing her Bloodstone Ring, a medallion received for bravery under action, while she was out shopping in the markets.

Despite all those misgivings, she was content with the life she'd carved out here, especially how much she'd achieved despite the hardship in those initial first few years of military life.

She wasn't rich, but she was independent of her parents, and she was able to live alone unlike most of the people she'd grown up with in the conclave. The pittance she got weekly was still enough for a small thatch cottage to live in, and subsided her interests in books, writing and the materials needed to paint. 

So many military anecdotes coloured her attempts at prose and landscapes, especially from the Sea-Shanty Wars when the Zantzar Blades stood against a rogue armada filled with the worst miscreants of the Mylean Sea.

She enjoyed retelling the misadventures of daring swashbuckling escapades to her class between sets, how an hour of fighting tricky pirates was worth more then a thousand on the fencing mats. They loved it, and soon their hearts were set upon joining the newly established Navy to rid the Mylean seas of pirates.

As she came to that small cottage of hers, she noticed the postage box outside was stuffed to the brim with letters. They weren't the screeds of parents that were in trouble, they were stamped with the red seal of the King's Court.

All of them were.

She took only one, and made a mental note to keep the others as kindling once the Winter months rolled on ahead. Her cottage had little in the way of amenities, only a slender bed, a shelf for books and and a few easels which had bared the brunt of a few creative paint attacks. 

She sat on the bedside, and noticed the letter was addressed to a Rt. Captain Cressia Caravania, and sent by Marshal Weria on behalf of the Prince.

She remembered the Marshal very well. Short and stocky, always willing to lap up whatever his senior officers had told him to do, no matter how pitiful the Zantzar traditions seemed to an outsider like her.

But he was a good fighter nonetheless, willing to fight and had once once saved her life on the outskirts of the border in an ambush by Orcs. That same border where all the troubles of Zantzar seemed to be emanating from in these wretched days.

She broke the seal, and began reading what turned out to be a very strange proposal from the Prince of Zantzar indeed.