My conversation with Ferland had been a good one in that he had made a sound suggestion for how we might defuse the tension that had arisen among the kingdoms in the wake of Dranii's takeover of Volstaff, but I couldn't help feeling deeply disheartened by his assertion that it was futile to try and save the realm from being consumed by a second Great War. The cost of the the Great War had been catastrophic for all of the kingdoms. Hundreds of thousands had lost their lives and the scale of destruction was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. If there was even the slightest chance that a second Great War was going to break out then every effort needed to be made to put a stop to it, and right now the likelihood of the realm going to war was higher than it had been in the lead up to the first Great War.

The first Great War had small beginnings. Enraged by the last minute collapse of a political marriage between his son and the princess of Erst, the king of Volstaff, King Dorn, put into motion a harebrained scheme to kidnap the princess and force her to marry his son. The kidnapping was botched and the plan failed, and in retaliation King Rundell stopped allowing grain from Theran to be shipped to Volstaff, creating a food crisis in Volstaff which they attempted to alleviate by purchasing grain from their neighbor Dranii, who would only sell it to them at inflated prices. Desperate for food, Volstaff resorted to theft and skirmishes broke out between Volstaff forces and Dranii forces. Aseron, concerned about westward migration of desperate citizens from Volstaff, made the decision to start sending food aid to Volstaff, a decision that was met with disapproval by Dranii, whose relations with Volstaff had rapidly deteriorated, and by Erst, who wanted Volstaff to endure as much suffering as they were able to inflict upon them, while Theran, who didn't appreciate losing an entire kingdom as a customer because of a squabble over an aborted marriage, were growing increasingly impatient with the situation. The skirmishes between Volstaff and Dranii soon escalated into full scale war. Erst joined the conflict by using its navy to transport its soldiers to Volstaff's west coast, trapping Volstaff in a pincer. The Volstaff forces fought back against the forces of Dranii and Erst surprisingly well, and, sensing an opportunity to get payback on Dranii for blocking their coal exports, Kandalar joined the fray in support of Volstaff, followed shortly thereafter by Aseron, who were still smarting from Dranii's insensitivity to their concerns about immigration. The conflict spiralled out of control and got to a point where it wasn't possible for Theran to remain neutral. Dranii reached out to them for help and, in exchange for agreeing to give them a prominent seat at the table for the post-war talks in the event that they won, Theran sent their troops to the battlefield together with thousands of Undrian slaves that were conscripted into the Theran military. The combined forces of Dranii, Erst and Theran managed to overpower the forces of Volstaff, Kandalar and Aseron, bringing an end to the war.

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The fears that some of the kingdoms had about Dranii's growing influence throughout the realm were serious enough that it was entirely conceivable that somebody would decide that action needed to be taken to curb Dranii's influence and if they did then it was easy to imagine the other kingdoms getting pulled into what would inevitably become a second Great War.

Despite Ferland cautioning me that any effort to unite the realm was doomed I couldn't stop thinking about the need to do exactly that and how such a unification might be achieved. My sense was that reaching out to Theran in the hopes of securing an ally wouldn't be a total exercise in futility. Given how long they had stayed out of the first Great War it was safe to assume that they had no appetite for a second Great War, meaning they should be receptive to a reasonable proposal for a new order of the realm that would reduce the likelihood of the realm going to war again. I kept thinking about what I could do to make this a reality, even when I was supposed to be focusing on the issues that needed to be addressed in Aseron. The dwarves were continuing to arrive from the other kingdoms and rather than have them all go straight to Galand I wanted arrangements to be made for some of them to stay on in the villages that they passed through on their way to the north to help out with the construction of the new schoolhouses. The dwarves were highly skilled masons, I had seen this myself during one of my subsequent visits to Galand. The additional structures that they were building with the rock that they had quarried were flying up thanks to their stonemason skills and an innovative pulley system that they were using to hoist the rocks. I wanted the schoolhouses built fast and well but I also had in mind the expansion of the fields and the villages which the dwarves' skills would be a big help with. My hope was that the villagers would embrace the dwarves and their ingenuity and would benefit from knowledge transfer which would expedite our expansion plans. I spoke with Brumli about my plans for the kingdom and he had some suggestions for how to best achieve my ambitions. He suggested that we should adopt a large scale approach to water management through the building of dams and canals. Some of the dams and canals, he told me, could be constructed out of wood and clay, but the dams and canals that were going to have large volumes of water passing through them would need to be built from stone, a massive engineering undertaking that, Brumli assured me, they could handle. They had built a large dam in Grunheim to secure a water source for themselves and building it had not proved an overly strenuous test of their engineering capabilities. I asked him for detailed blueprints illustrating how these dams would be built and how they would work so that I could explain this new approach to water management that we would be taking to the members of the Governing Council.