The light filtering through the frost-laced windows of Castle Mitis had a colorless sheen—pale, grim, and cold. Winter had seeped into the stone itself, silencing the halls with a chill that made even the oldest bannermen feel the ghosts of seasons past.
Lord Gorvan Mitis stood before a tall, dust-veiled painting that stretched from hearth to ceiling. In it, a younger version of himself stood between a woman with warm eyes and a man with a scholar's posture. Their hands rested on his shoulders—an old family pose captured before fate sank its teeth into them.
His fingers gripped the edge of a small table beside the hearth, trembling not from cold, but from fury.
"They were too soft," he muttered, voice sharp like shattering glass. "Too gentle for this world."
His mother had been the first to fall to the airborne sickness that lingered in the lower valleys—a result of ancient Relict battles, they'd said. His father soon followed, weakened by grief and poisoned lungs. Desperate, they'd turned to House Zatack for aid, only to be bled dry.
The Zatacks had offered a cure. False hope. In return, they'd taken the most fertile farmlands Mitis owned—lands that had once fed three cities. Gorvan had been too young to stop it. But not now.
"They will pay," he whispered, not to the room, but to the painting.
A sharp knock pulled him from memory.
A servant entered, head bowed, bearing a sealed letter.
No insignia. No signature. Just a map, sketched in clean charcoal, overlaying known territories with paths unknown to the nobility. Bold red ink marked critical supply caches and routes like veins across a body.
At the bottom, a single line, penned in precise calligraphy:
You may begin.
Gorvan's mouth curled into a bitter smile.
"Marshal all the troops," he said to the servant, not turning away from the painting. "Today… we march."
By dusk, House Mitis had declared open war on House Zatack.
The announcement cracked across the political landscape like a thunderclap. Neutral nobles scrambled to solidify trade routes. Border cities began closing their gates. Minor factions picked sides—not out of loyalty, but opportunism. War always created voids, and voids begged to be filled.
Skirmishes broke out across disputed lands. Patrols clashed on frozen roads. Watchtowers burned in the night. Saboteurs danced in the dark, their blades drawing first blood long before legions mobilized.
Zatack's blockade strategy came swiftly. They locked down trade hubs, seized merchant passes, and braced for a swift victory by choking Mitis out. It had worked once. It should've worked again.
But this time, there was Fornos Dag.
Several cities away, beneath a defunct warehouse carved into the belly of a frozen hill, mana lamps bathed the cavern in a steady, colorless glow. Blue-white crystal embedded in the ceiling pulsed faintly with arcane rhythm, like an artificial heartbeat.
Fornos Dag stood over a long obsidian table, its surface cluttered with parchment, compasses, wax seals, and layered maps stitched together from generations of merchant records, smuggler tales, and city schematics. Around him moved a dozen figures—cloaked men and women bearing no insignia, their faces half-hidden in the shadow of their hoods.
The Architects, as he called them.
Not warriors. Not soldiers. These were the connoisseurs of shadows—survivors of old trade wars, descendants of the earliest Dag smugglers who once ran poison through noble vaults and letters across burning borders. Loyal not to gold, but efficiency. Their allegiance was to Fornos not because of his bloodline—but because he understood systems.
"If the Ash Company is my sword and shield," he said quietly, placing a marker on a narrow pass between mountains, "then you are my knives."
One of the Architects leaned forward. "And what shall we cut, my lord?"
"Paths," Fornos replied. "Invisible ones."
He gestured to a spiral of red across the mountain region. "This is where Zatack expects us to bleed. But we won't give them that. These," he tapped five green points north of the blockade line, "are hidden junctions—old smuggler burrows, some collapsed, some still viable. Reactivate them."
"And the caches?"
"Already stocked. Ironshop's silent furnaces did their work. Parts, food, mana reserves. Nothing excessive. Enough to keep Mitis moving."
Another Architect unrolled a parchment. "And the decoys?"
"Deploy them. Let Zatack chase ghosts. We'll feed them false routes through compromised merchants."
He paused, then added coldly, "And if any of those merchants have second thoughts… silence them. We cannot afford ripples."
They nodded. No questions.
Fornos returned to the center of the map. His fingers hovered over a Zatack-controlled granary, then two more further east. A triangle. Vulnerable.
"Granaries," he murmured. "They're storing for winter—twice as much as usual. Sabotage would be… inconvenient."
A woman across the table raised an eyebrow. "You want them burned?"
Fornos shook his head. "Not just burned. Some poisoned. Others just vandalized. I want inconsistency. Let Zatack spend their resources figuring out what's safe."
A beat passed.
"Fire," he added, "isn't just destruction. It's fear. People remember fire. They tell stories about it."
The Architects exchanged silent glances. One smiled.
Fornos straightened and drew a circle around a town situated along the likely path of Zatack reinforcements.
"Once Mitis starts pushing, Zatack will redirect reinforcements here. We'll need to reroute civilians through these roads."
"You intend to use them as shields?"
"No," Fornos said flatly. "I intend to use them as delays. Refugees slow armies. They cause disorder. Mitis will win this war if we can keep it moving. If Zatack keeps stopping."
Someone chuckled darkly. "Brilliant."
Fornos didn't respond. He wasn't interested in praise. Only results.
As the Architects moved to execute their orders, Fornos remained alone with the map. He could feel the war already playing out in his mind—routes, disruptions, firestorms, famine. He saw the inevitable disarray in Zatack ranks. He saw Gorvan Mitis's march like a rising tide, fed not by numbers, but by precision.
And he saw himself.
A merchant's son, standing at the center of a storm that noble houses had failed to control for generations.
He did not smile.
He simply began the next set of calculations.