In the first few weeks after the war with the gnomes ended, the Empire seemed to breath a collective sigh of relief. It was not very significant to most people, in truth, although there were a few small celebrations for the victory, some organized by those people who wanted to show their loyalty to the Empire, and some springing up spontaneously.
Most might not have been very affected by the war, but for the peasantry, not having a war being waged always tended to be good news. If their side had won, so all the better. Some would look forward to the return of their brothers, sons or husbands from the war front, now hopefully to stay home. Some of those people would be disappointed; by their young men wanting to stay in the army and thus being deployed away from home, most likely. But there generally weren’t enough men missing to be soldiers that the communities had suffered severely from it, economically. Untrained levies had long since been sent home if they’d ever been raised in the first place. It was a good thing, too, since fields needed to be worked this spring.
Galatea was glad she didn’t need to eat, but she did acknowledge that most people were rightfully concerned about the matter of food.
She enjoyed traveling through the Empire at this time, there was something hopeful in the air, a positive atmosphere that was too often missing from the places she went to. She didn’t know how long it would last, if the next minor crisis would dissipate it again, so she was going to enjoy it while it lasted. And she did have a purpose instead of just aimlessly wandering through the country. She wanted to check on it, to see how the changes Regina and her Hive were causing propagated through the nation, and get a more ground-level view of the situation. She could have stayed in the palace in Cera and gone through hundreds of reports, if she was able to bear that, but some things you couldn’t see as easily in numbers on a page.
Or maybe she was just too restless to stay for long in one place, even if it was a palace. Either way, Galatea didn’t mind. She knew Regina expected her to go and travel at times, even without giving her prior notice, and there was not really anyone else she would stay for. She got along quite well with June and the members of the Hive, of course, but they weren’t close friends. Maybe in time. That was one thing she did have plenty of, and now that she was no longer stuck in a cave she could spend it how she wanted.
Maybe she would get bored of traveling at some point. She’d already decided to roam a little closer to home, so to speak, for the foreseeable future. It wasn’t like the Central European Empire didn’t offer interesting things to see.
At the moment, for example, she was heading through a perfectly normal, average town somewhere on the eastern side of Cernlia, and she could still see the changes that had been taking place. There was a fast-flowing brook beside the town, a bit too small to be called a river or to support anything beyond small boats, but it was enough to power a water wheel. Previously, it had been used simply for the town’s mill, to grind flour. Nowadays, a new and slightly more complicated water wheel had been built and another one was under construction. The new one led into a shed built close to the water, a succession of beams and gears reaching into it to power a line of potential mechanisms. Primarily saw blades and some kind of press used in smelting or working metal, Galatea thought, although she’d only caught a short glimpse.
The infrastructure was only one part of it, though, and she paid attention to the people, as well. The new road crews hadn’t come through here yet, so the streets were mostly packed dirt and sometimes cobblestone. Inside the town, they were only marginally better than outside. It urgently needed a new water distribution and sewage system, too. As a consequence, the smell would have been unpleasant — at least for biological life forms, Galatea didn’t care much one way or the other — and the locals tended to be on the dirtier side. Most probably didn’t have more than two sets of clothes and mended them whenever they got a new rip. But all that aside, the town was still colorful and lively.
A few banners and flower garlands were hung what seemed like randomly around the town, indicating this was probably one place that had had some celebration of winning the war, too. Some enterprising local had sewn a reasonable approximation of the new Imperial flag and it was flying from the largest structure in town, probably a guild house or something similar. It didn’t seem like there was a noble liege lord living here. The people were clearly busy, occupied with all the tasks that came with spring, but there was a certain cheer to the atmosphere. It wasn’t run down and oppressive like she’d sometimes seen during the civil war in this country. People stopped and talked to each other, smiling and laughing, children ran through the streets with most adults keeping an eye on them, and there had clearly been some recent work done to pretty up the place. Maybe it was because there was new trade coming into the town. The reduced tax burden, if not.
It certainly helped that Regina had laid out some new ‘guidelines’ and Kiara had adapted them into edicts for Cernlia, standardizing some tariffs and taxes that had previously been variable and effectively at the discretion of the local lord. The taxes had been lowered, mostly, to stimulate the economy. Galatea suspected that the nobles in the lower and middle parts of the hierarchy would be the real losers of these reforms, but she also suspected that Regina either didn’t care or considered that a feature, not an issue. The taxes to the crown still needed to be paid, with set schedules and requirements, and there was a growing bureaucracy instead of the personal relationships between lord and vassal they might have used to plead for exceptions or delays. She expected that unless a given lord was quick to jump on the opportunities offered by the new technologies and the structural change, they’d find their wealth, and consequently their political power, shrinking rapidly. Even if they did, it would still shift the source of that wealth and power to fit a new paradigm.
Considering just how large the wealth gap had been, Galatea didn’t much care. Feudalism was very much built on funneling wealth upward, and honestly a bit too similar to the mafia — the promise of protection for submission, a mentality centered around honor and reputation, economic exploitation, ultimately enforced with violence. Peasants had to pay high taxes, perform work for their lord, serve in his army, and got little benefit and less respect for it, even when, like in Cernlia, they weren’t legally bound to the land or held in serfdom. Whatever weird form of mercantilism might be the current trend couldn’t be much worse, at least.
Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.
It wouldn’t be too much longer until Regina made more active efforts to cut the land-holding nobles out of the chain entirely, Galatea suspected. Either by completely sidelining them or with new reforms, probably targeting property ownership.
She might have to use that newly freed-up army to put down revolts if that happens, Galatea thought, absently eying the people on the street and checking their System notifications. Then again, if she’s successfully fostering nationalism, and their local king or queen are on her side, would people actually follow their lords? Take up arms for them? The thought made her pause for a moment. It was easy to see that such a scenario could get ugly. There wouldn’t even need to be foreign interference.
Galatea made herself keep walking, picking up the pace, and made a mental note to check on the Nerlian court, in view of what she’d just been considering. They had been pretty quiet since the establishment of the Empire. The safe bet was that there were internal power struggles going on. Unlike Cernlia, they’d never listened to their king quite as much or been as unified, even if it felt odd to use that term for Cernlia, too.
For now, there actually was a reason Galatea had chosen to come here, instead of picking a town randomly on the map. She left the outskirts of the town behind quickly and then turned down a road to the left. Soon, another structure appeared, a bit of an annex to the town wall, with its own, smaller circular wall. Inside, a four-story building made mostly of stone was visible. She considered for a moment, then strolled in through the open gate from the town, which no one was guarding.
The first impression she had was that the place was empty. It didn’t look to be in disrepair, at least no more than the town itself, but there were few signs of life. She decided against pushing open the main door and instead simply went through it, twisting her mana a bit to make herself invisible in the spectrum of visible light. Mages might still feel her presence, but that didn’t seem to be an issue. She couldn’t sense anyone with decent talent for magic in the building.
The main room of the hall was large and airy, clearly laid out for more people than currently occupied it. On one side, there was a line of several counters, like you might see in a lot of businesses. All but one were unoccupied, and the young man at the remaining one was reading a book propped up against a stack of file folders. Galatea ignored him, stepping in and looking around.
This was hardly the first chapter house of the Delvers she’d visited, although it was remarkably empty. She’d expected that it wouldn’t be bursting with activity, but it still left her a bit surprised how few people there were. This should be the largest house of its kind in the wider area, only surpassed by the Delvers’ main base in western Cernlia. Had everyone here left for that one?
“Shouldn’t there be more people here to protect the locals from monsters?” she asked.
The clerk jerked upright, swearing loudly, as his book fell over. He blinked. Galatea just looked at him calmly. She’d made herself visible again as she was speaking.
“Who are you?” he asked, his voice full of trepidation rather than the bravado one might have expected.
“I’m Galatea,” she introduced herself.
He scrambled to his feet and bowed, although he didn’t look particularly surprised. Maybe he had guessed her identity, then. To be fair, her projected body was wearing an old-fashioned military uniform today, which one didn’t see much of here. “Welcome, Lady Galatea, how can I help you?” he asked.
“Yes, thank you. How about answering my question. Where is everyone?”
Now he mostly looked annoyed, not so much at her as the state of affairs she referred to, she thought. “Many of them have left,” he said. “Our order was needed for the war, and the headquarters is being built up. We have been consolidating, which means there are less Delvers in places like this.”
Galatea nodded. “Alright, I see. But surely there are still more of you here than this?” she gestured to the empty room and the almost as empty building.
The man shrugged lightly. “Out on missions,” he said laconically. “There have been reports of trouble on the road east. And apparently a new ruin has been found, the surveying for new construction in the south unearthed some stones.”
Galatea considered it. She knew there wouldn’t be many monsters here, it was too far from any hotspots like the Great Forest. That didn’t mean there couldn’t be other trouble like outlaws, of course. The latter part caught her attention more, though. “A new ruin?”
The young Delver shrugged again. “It is unclear how old the ruins are,” he said before she could clarify. “But we haven’t seen any records of there being buildings in that area, so they might be old. Most of the people here who weren’t occupied with something else went to look at it out of curiosity.”
She nodded. It wasn’t unusual for Delvers to have the first crack at places like that, it was probably one of the reasons they even kept houses like this open and acted like an adventuring guild much of the time. Of course, very few of such finds were actually ‘Ancient’ in origin. She might as well take a look, though.
“Alright,” Galatea repeated. “Thank you for the information, I’ll be off then.” She turned, then paused and looked back at the Delver. “You should still make sure there are more people available here. Send a demand to the headquarters or the capital, if necessary. Just to be safe.”
He frowned. “Sure, I’ll handle it,” he said, in a tone that made her wonder if he was being sarcastic. Still, it wasn’t really her problem and she’d given him her advice, so Galatea only turned around again and left the building.
Once outside, she turned to head south and walked, but after a moment focused on her magic again. Keeping scrying going while you were moving was difficult, but she had a lot of practice, including with more difficult matters.
There wasn’t much to see, however. Just a bunch of stones carefully being laid free by some Delvers with shovels. For all her knowledge, Galatea was not an archaeologist or even an architect, so they didn’t mean much to her. She couldn’t tell if the site was old enough to predate the Cataclysm or not, or from which century it would be. That presumably depended on local conditions, as well.
Oh well. She might still go take a gander at it, then teleport to Nerlia. She was planning to head through a few towns similar to this one and take a look around before she went to Nerlia-city. The Delvers could keep working on this site, she’d make sure to keep tabs on it occasionally, and maybe on other problems that arose. And she might mention the manpower shortage to some people. They were a little too close to Esemen to leave this part of the country unprotected, and since Galatea had no idea when or how soldiers would be deployed to cover it, it couldn’t hurt to have Delvers there.
But I’m still here to have fun, she reminded herself. It wasn’t really her job to worry about force projection or garrisoning troops. The Empire had enough people who did that.
Maybe she would take a break to go watch the ocean or something. Or seek out Volance or one of the other elementals for a chat. That could be fun.