In July, across all of Sauron.
It should have been the season of lush grass and fattening livestock, yet the land of Sauron was now steeped in an aura of death and despair utterly at odds with the vibrant summer.
Beacon smoke was no longer merely a signal warning of danger at the borders. More often, it rose from villages where internal resistance was being crushed and conscription forcibly imposed—a cry of alarm and anguish. Accompanying it were the wails of grieving households almost everywhere.
They did not weep for relatives already dead, but for the last remaining men in their families, soon to be taken away.
Harald had issued the harshest and most insane nationwide mobilization order since Sauron's founding.
To meet the coming final battle that would decide the fate of the nation, he had cast aside every scruple and shred of mercy.
The old conscription standards had at least required men to stand over one meter sixty, sturdy fellows capable of riding horses and drawing bows. But now, the markings on the recruiting officers' measuring tapes seemed to have lost all meaning. Even boys barely one meter forty-five tall, their childishness not yet gone and their bodies not yet grown, were brutally torn from their mothers' arms and shoved into lines reeking of sweat and fear.
This mobilization reached the horrifying level of "one man taken from every three," while in some regions where resistance ran fierce or loyalty was deemed wanting, it became "one man taken from every two," nearly draining those families of their last bloodline and labor.
Resistance was not absent. In some villages, people gathered to fight back. Old men and women took up pitchforks and Hunting Bows, trying to protect their children and husbands. What answered them, however, was even bloodier suppression.