Interlude: The Situation

The history of the Highserk Empire began in the northern states, a region where war never ended, where small lords’ lands were so tangled together that wartime was what they called peacetime. In its earliest days, the Highserk Empire had no more land than a goblin’s forehead, a state so slight it could be blown away. Yet through repeated national crises, it kept surviving, swallowing the small lords around it.

Even when such a Highserk Empire defeated several small lords in war and annexed them, its overreaching expansion drew blows from the neighbors that remained and led to self-destruction or stagnation. That was the way of states in the northern region, and the surrounding countries never doubted it.

The first to notice something was wrong was the Commercial Trade Federation of Liberitoa. One of its vassal states had been badly beaten in a war with the Highserk Empire and asked its home country for reinforcements. To tighten its hold on the vassal state and to give its army training, Liberitoa sent ten thousand men, an excessive number for a small state. With the vassal’s troops, that came to fifteen thousand, and the Highserk Empire’s army was less than half that.

The terrain also favored Liberitoa, and everyone thought it would end in a great Liberitoa victory, but the result was a crushing defeat for the Commercial Trade Federation of Liberitoa. The vassal state, too, was made to cede part of its territory to Highserk.

Liberitoa revised its view, struck by the strength of soldiers unthinkable in a small state and by the battle-hardened Highserk people, and paid a high price for the lesson. The next victim was the old Kanoa Kingdom. A border lord, who found the growing Highserk Empire a nuisance, clashed with Highserk over control of the river. The fighting ended in only six days, and the provincial noble’s entire territory was lost. The head of the house and his whole family were killed in the fighting, and the land was seized by Highserk, root and all.

Here, Ferrius Craist, one of the mid-sized states, saw the threat of the Highserk Empire for itself, but welcomed another mid-sized state having its strength sapped by an upstart, offered neither cooperation nor aid, and chose to watch. After that, with Highserk holding the justification of a defensive war, the old Kanoa and Myard bowed to the Empire as well, leaving three mid-sized states in the north. Now that Highserk’s territory had grown to match or exceed a mid-sized state’s, it was unclear how far its appetite for land would extend.

The territory that had been as small as a goblin’s forehead had become among the most prominent of its neighbors. On top of that, the decisive battle of Aidenberg and the pursuit that followed had left the Kingdom of Ferrius’s army half paralyzed. If the Kingdom of Ferrius fell to the Highserk Empire, no neighboring country could stand against it. The immovable three great powers would hardly move first, and the calculating Highserk Empire wouldn’t do anything that harmed the three great powers’ interests. The anxiety and fear of the neighboring states were about to bring about events that could never have happened in peacetime.