The three-hundred foot clock tower that was the symbol of Vultheras’ Clockwork Palace was also the private residence of the royal family. Behind its exterior, armored in steel and bronze, were separate rooms for the royal children, the king, and queen if necessary. King Kalen’s bedroom was near the apex, just beneath the turning hands of its western clock face. …

Cid opened a dark, pinewood door and stepped inside a dreary room lit by a single green-shaded lamp. It was the former mayor’s office, furnished with brass-framed pictures, a large desk and set of chairs, and a bookcase of technical literature bound in colorful covers. Where the walls once heard meetings regarding the rotation of fields and arguments over grazing …

Princess Hannah followed duke Eddleston down a curving royal hall. Its brass and bronze walls were similar to the sub-levels, but they were decorated for extravagance with hanging lanterns, gold-framed artwork, and heroic busts on white-stone pedestals. Uniformed guards were posted at every door and they saluted when the duke passed with the princess in tow. Hannah knew it well; …

Hundreds of years before the fall of Vultheras, the fortress city that would become the capital of Bastilhas was called Yamahei-Zei and held by Zentai, a colony of the Empire of Yamahei. The Yameans were fierce and clever, but they were few and far from home. In the wake of the war that saw Zentai destroyed, the fortress and the …

While Princess Hannah rode an elevator to the surface, Atilonian staff were setting up their strategic board. Miniatures of artillery, infantry, tanks, and boats were placed on a paper map of the local geography. The tanks were placed ahead of the infantry in a row toward Vultheras’ central bridge, and the artillery had been lined in a half circle along …

Princess Hannah Darigon followed Duke Eddleston down the straight, bronze-plated halls of the palace sub-level. She wore a hot-pressed gray dress suit, fastened down the breast by eight gold buttons, and her dark-gray slacks looked rigid, but they were flexible if she came to blows. Her sharp black dress shoes gleamed and added a crisp tap as she walked with …

It was after the ninth bell in Cohenburg, a village fourteen miles south-southeast of Wenderguard, the mainland port that protected the central bridge. Atilonian occupation had converted its once-idyllic farmland into a staging area for their army. Gone were the fields of lentils and sweet peas; in their place were tents enough for thirty-thousand men, space for their cafeterias, their …

A man in a gray greatcoat walked briskly beneath fluorescent lights, through a brass-plated hall that was braced by bronze struts and bolted by steel. Doors on either side of the hall had been sealed by metal shutters, their brass placards removed, or melted by the head of a thermal torch. As per the Kalen’s emergency declaration, Protocol Sigma had …

Dawn had broken, but the sun was hidden behind the mountains, and so the land was lit in the blue shadow of a cold morning. From a hilltop a bronze-skinned man watched Vultheras, the sleepy city that emerged from the distant bay. He wore a blue greatcoat and an Atilonian cadet’s cap that fit snugly over his blonde hair, but …

In the College of Vultheras, in one of its musty libraries, hidden on an old shelf in some distant corner, one might find a book titled, “The Founding of Zentai and Other Histories” by a certain Abhender Norweg. He was a curmudgeonly explorer, old at the age of 27, that paddled the waters of Bastilhas in a wooden canoe. Scaling …