Sigmund Year One, late November, Brittany Province, Fellan Bridgehead.
The snow in the northwest had come earlier than in previous years, and with greater violence.
The lead-gray curtain of sky seemed as if it would never melt open, and pallid flakes of snow, like torn-up cotton wadding, poured down day and night, burying the rolling mountains and covering all the life and all the wounds upon this land.
The mountains had lost their last trace of green, baring jagged blue-black rock; against that boundless backdrop of white, they looked like abrupt, icy tombstones.
Between heaven and earth, only a suffocating, monotonous pallor remained.
The old proverb said, "A timely snow promises a bountiful year," but that was for households that still had good fields, surplus grain, and hope.
In Brittany, a land stripped layer by layer by natural disaster, war, harsh rule, and greed, a land long since drained of its last drop of fat, heavy snow meant only one thing—greater death.
It meant corpses frozen stiff by the roadside; it meant thatched huts, already on the verge of collapse, crushed beneath the snow; it meant the complete severing of a path to survival that had never truly existed in the first place.
Fellan Bridgehead, this stone fortress guarding a key passage over a Rhine River tributary, had once been an important stronghold for shielding the province's southwest and monitoring the ferry tax checkpoints.
Yet now, this fortress where Kingdom Soldiers had once been stationed and Noble Banners had once flown had changed into another world. More precisely, it had fallen into hell.
Black smoke was the most glaring sight at this moment.
Black and gray, thick smoke laced with sparks billowed up from the fortress's towers, warehouses, homes, and even the wreckage of its stables, stabbing straight into the