The Departure!

The last few days of the Month of Frostfall had arrived, and the weather outside had grown cold enough to make people's teeth chatter. The deciduous forests around Mintai and Shafrund were no exception to the bleak scenery. The tree trunks had begun to bare themselves, while a thick layer of dead leaves had covered the ground since late autumn, like a gray, withered carpet spread across the forest in layer upon layer. Some areas farther north had even seen a few light snowfalls. Though they were not yet blanketed in silver, they at least heralded the coming winter of the Year of the Sword.

This was the worst month of the year in which to start a war. Yet the Holy War had chosen this time to begin. History was always so unreasonable—sometimes even more fantastical than the stories described.

In Fir Territory, amid the solemn atmosphere of war, only the Black Pine Forest outside Baron's Castle still stood tall and evergreen. Yet a deep, ghostly darkness seeped between the treetops, as if the entire canopy were a monster circling overhead. When the cold wind howled over the pine needles, it made eerie sounds that raised the hairs on one's body. Tonigell's guests stamped their feet and rubbed their hands beneath the trees in the courtyard, grumbling endlessly about the awful weather. Most of them were dressed in fine clothes and carried the airs of the great cities, clearly not locals. More than a dozen carriages stood side by side outside the courtyard, their black bodies covered in various crests. Each crest represented a family's glorious history. These nobles had come from all over Eluin, and most of them were visiting the remote backwater of Tonigell for the first time.

They had come for only one purpose: to serve