Dear Father,

I hope this letter finds you well. From what I hear, the capital has been in an uproar. The kingdom has never given much thought to summoners and for good reason. Recent events have only shown how volatile their practice can be. Their ideology itself is corruptive, teaching its practitioners to forge relations with suspect creatures rather than improve themselves.

That doesn’t mention the creatures themselves. We don’t allow foreigners onto our soil without extensive questioning but beings from other worlds may walk our soil with anyone’s invitation. Things that not only do not value our kingdom but do not value human beings. That is the only way to explain scum like the Grimoires and their thralls. The very thought is obscene.

While it would be best for everyone if the practice was banned all together, your letters showed the inherent danger of forcing their hands. If we cannot remove them, regulating them is the next best option. I do not question your decisions, but I advise keeping an eye on Javarius Tome. The family has done nothing notable in centuries, but they are the oldest summoning family in our history. It isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that their loyalty to their king may fall short of their loyalty to their elementals.

In other regards, the war effort is going well. I originally thought Marquis Guiness gave us such pitiable information because he intended harm to the crown, but the truth is there isn’t much more to the invasion beyond his words. Our adversaries aren’t an organized army. They aren’t even soldiers. They are a senseless green mob hurling themselves upon our blades. They don’t even have arms. The royal army hardly needs to do anything. I truly believe a tyrant across the ocean is sending his undesirables to die on our soil.

This can by no means be a serious invasion effort so I would put to bed any worries about a war with a foreign power. We should be finished with the cleanup by the end of winter and home before the first buds of spring bloom.

Give my regards to Mother.

Your son, Dowager kor Harvest, First Prince of Harvest

Dowager put down his quill with a tired sigh. The prince was a far sight from the man who had confidently marched at the head of the column of soldiers he led south. His pristine armor, the steel polished till it shone like silver, his breastplate decorated by a gold inlay of the stag that represented the royal family, was dulled in caked in mud. His silver hair, the mark of royalty, had grown unruly. He meant to have it cut but it went against everything he’d been taught to allow anyone near him with an unsheathed blade.

The only one he would trust with the duty was Sir Quintana, a former royal knight. The knight agreed to help as long as Dowager was fine being bald. The prince decided to simply keep it tied but unruly strands always managed to break free.

His clothes hadn’t had a proper wash in weeks, small debris somehow always managed to find its way into his boots, and he’d yet to sleep through the night since they’d constructed their war camp. First, from excitement. Then, from exhaustion. He would have never imagined that there would come a day he would be so tired he couldn’t sleep.

The insects didn’t help. The first night, there’d been so many, they could have covered him from head to toe. He hadn’t had a decent meal since hitting the road, but the bugs had been treating his army like a royal banquet for weeks. It was the environment. Something about the humid air, pungent plants, and copious amounts of mud meant they bred like…flies. As hospitable as it was for the bugs as big as his thumb, it was just as inhospitable to his army.

The southern half of the kingdom was less developed. Some of the capital’s nobles still thought of the land as wild. The history books said that the south had been ignored by the founders as it was far quicker to plant crops on the fertile plains near the eventual site of their capital than chop down the woodlands or contend with wet environs like Dowager was stuck in. With nothing besides what they could carry on their boats, they didn’t have the luxury of taking on time-consuming projects. Afterwards, few people of means cared to develop the land as they were loathed to be away from the capital.

Dowager was starting to believe that was all a bunch of bull. The truth was that the south, especially the part of it he was in, was an Abyss-cursed hell for any living creature. The goblins had come in from the southwest. When the prince set off, he pictured his army assaulting a beach. He imagined the creatures would try to disembark in the dead of night, but his men would be waiting. Fire casters would light up the night while the men peppered the creatures with arrows. They’d send them scurrying back to their boats before blowing them out of the water.

A war ended in a single battle. Dowager knew it was a dream, but he couldn’t help thinking it would be an auspicious start to his future reign.

The reality of his first war hadn’t come close to what he imagined. They had indeed made it before the goblins but that was the only thing that had gone right.

The first problem was that there was no beach. No shoreline. He would have settled for cliffs but all he could see for leagues was mud and strange squat trees growing in the shallower water. A shore had places that were good and bad to dock or beach a boat. That made it easy to predict where an enemy would make land.

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In the wetlands, every place was just as bad as the next. On the bright side, his enemies would have a terrible time securing their boats no matter where they landed. The thought of the small goblins pushing anything through the thick mud was hilarious.

On the bad side, it meant the creatures had no reason to be judicious about where they disembarked. Dowager had to defend the entirety of the wetlands, something that had stretched his forces thin. Even using a minimum of forces to cover the distance, by means of scouts and small groups of soldiers meant to delay the enemy until reinforcements could arrive, they were at their limit. Perhaps beyond them.

Dowager wasn’t the only man in the war camp so tired he could fall asleep while standing if he closed his eyes for too long. Their enemies were barely worth the effort of swinging a sword but running and fighting for days on end could exhaust even the best knights. Dowager didn’t have the best knights. Aside from Sir Quintana, he didn’t have any knights at all. Just regular men. Hardened by battle but regular men all the same.

The condition of their camps didn’t help. Dowager had experience camping. As part of his upbringing, he’d been brought on hunts against manabeasts. Nothing dangerous, as anything more than a nuisance had long been driven away from the lands surrounding the capital. Some of the trips required him to sleep outside. He’d always enjoyed the experience, as it was one of the few times he got to escape the tight confines of the palace.

He’d been excited to sleep under the stars for a few weeks. His one complaint was that he couldn’t bring Benny, a maid he’d taken a liking to recently, but he wouldn’t let the poor girl roll around in the mud with him. She paled at the sight of anything with more than four legs. The nightmarishly large bugs in the wetlands would make her faint with fear.

He also didn’t like the idea of fending off the attentions of the whole army. He already struggled to bridge the distance between him and his men. Discipling soldiers left and right because they couldn’t keep their eyes off the only woman in leagues wouldn’t win him any fans.

Though a part of him was sure that boat had already set sail. The camp conditions were truly terrible. The soft ground made it difficult to pitch their tents. On the first day, half the men got sick after drinking from a creek. That was after a water caster had purified it. He didn’t want to know what had survived the man’s spell, just thanked the saints it didn’t survive three castings.

Fires were harder to start and none of the wood was suitable for kindling. They could force it if necessary but with everything else draining the casters, it wasn’t worth it. They could make do with cold meals. As well as not bathing. Things lived in the larger pools of water, including worms half the length of his arm that drank the blood of men. Sometimes, it was hard to believe he was in the same kingdom.

None of his troubles were written in the letters to his father. That’d be far too embarrassing. He’d set off with all the confidence and bluster of a conquering hero. The last things he wanted anyone to remember about his first real battle was how he could not stop scratching himself or how badly his camp smelled after the whole army hadn’t washed in two weeks. They were fending off the goblins handily. That was all his father cared about so that was all he spoke of.

As for his failings, he could address them himself. Chiefly, his reluctance to take advice. He had been taught that giving too much weight to another’s opinion made him look weak. For royalty, perception was not simply important, but a matter of life and death. He didn’t blame his upbringing. The fault was his own and no one else’s.

He was the idiot that thought it was a good idea to ignore the words of a royal knight and a career soldier before that. He still didn’t like the idea of hiring mercenaries from Graywatch, as Sir Quintana had suggested, but letting the pirates deal with the goblins on the water would have made his life easier. Even if they only funneled the creatures to one stretch of mud.

The knight had also suggested hiring a local to guide them. Dowager had acquiesced, not wanting to offend the man by rejecting him twice. At the time, he’d thought that their detailed maps would suffice. The crown paid good money for them to be drawn and updated regularly, only losing to the inexhaustible resources of the Guiness family. The maps meant nothing when everything looked exactly the same.

The knowledge of edible plants and the best spots for hunting had lightened the load on their supplies. Perhaps most important, Dowager had learned many things about the kingdom he was meant to rule one day from a perspective he rarely heard from.

Overall, he wouldn’t remember his first war fondly, but Dowager knew it was a crucial learning experience. Both for his future as a commander and a king. He wasn’t embarrassed to be struggling in his youth. Everyone learned from failure, even heroes. He’d just have to make sure the history books weren’t too specific about his struggles.

“Your Highness,” a voice called from outside his tent. “A messenger requests to see you.”

“Both of you, come in.”

Dowager stood as two men entered his tent. The first in was the guard on duty. He looked disheveled and he only wore his breastplate. Technically, it was against the army’s regulations, but Dowager had learned after the first week that he couldn’t expect his men to be battle ready and alert at all times. During the first week, the tense men had been more of a danger to each other than the goblins.

Behind him, the messenger was in a much worse state. Trekking through the mud had understandably left him dirty. Especially his boots. His feet looked like he’d been the target of an earth caster. Dowager wondered how the man could move.

He opened his mouth but the prince stopped him from speaking with a raised hand. Dowager carefully folded his letter before slipping it into a prepared envelope. He poured a special wax over the paper before pressing his ring into it, leaving an impression of a stag head. He handed it to the guard. “Be careful, it’s not dry.”

“You got it prince.”

As the guard walked out, Dowager waved for the messenger to speak.

“Your Highness, more enemies have been spotted to the north. Near the third outpost.”

“Understood. Any change in numbers?”

“Sir, there’s been a major change. The approaching horde is three times the size of the previous ones but there is another problem. There is another creature with the goblins.”

“What?!”

“And it wants to speak with the commander of our forces.”

“…what?”