The Storm King

The mood among the contingent sent from Shatufan started quite positive. All those sent on the expedition were eager to avenge their city from the depredations inflicted upon her by Leon Raime, despite the risks involved.

Brave men, all. Waraz was proud of each and every one of them.

Of all the commanders to send, in his humble opinion, he was the best in the city. He wasn’t the strongest mage in the city at only the eighth-tier, but he was relatively old, and his adventurous youth had been spent traveling the Storm Lands. During those travels, he’d worked as a mercenary, an assassin, a bodyguard for a Strategos, and other such violent pursuits. Upon his return to Shatufan, his home, he achieved the rank of Azadan but was an otherwise unremarkable politician. He rarely even showed up to vote on legislation, and spent so much time in his countryside estate that he hadn’t learned of the chaos in the city until messengers arrived weeks after Jamshid and the false King had been put to death.

Waraz had been offered the command for this expedition. He could’ve refused, but love for his home city and shame from seeing so many younger and magically weaker men volunteer while he dithered led him to accept the offer. Manuchehr himself, after holding a grand ceremony where he reassumed the post of Presiding Magus—without a city vote, Waraz had noted—assembled the riverine fleet they now took southward. Waraz was grateful for that, but all other matters of logistics for an expedition of ten thousand men were left to him and however many adjutants he could personally pull together.

The fleet was rag-tag, but in the few days he’d seen them sail, Waraz was impressed by the coordination between the sailors and warriors. How they might perform in battle against their foe’s hardened warriors worried him, but he was reassured not only by their numbers but also by the reassurances he’d received that Leon Raime wasn’t going to attack them. They weren’t going to attack his city if he had any say in the matter, this expedition was mostly about showing their anger and creating negotiating leverage.

Still, Waraz couldn’t quiet the note of worry in the back of his mind. He knew this was no true army. The citizen-soldiers of Shatufan hadn’t seen a major engagement in centuries, and nearly all who had been alive during that last major war had set sail down the Aesii by now. If a pitched battle were to be forced, he feared his people might easily break.

His confidence was boosted when his fleet met up with the ships and arks from Sentudon further down Southcourse. He knew first-hand the power of arks, and though both cities’ ships were only lightly armed, the arks would provide much-needed fire support for any battles ahead.

Nurox, the leader of the Sentudon forces, was an old acquaintance of Waraz’s, and they exchanged warm greetings upon meeting each other. To Waraz’s relief, Nurox ceded overall command fairly easily thanks to Waraz’s greater wartime experience, so integrating their separate and almost informal command structures was made easier.

Not to say that it was in any way easy, however—they still only had a couple days to coordinate their separate forces into one whole before drawing close to the agreed-upon staging ground. As much as he could expect it to, that first day with their joined forces went well.