War inevitably came with sacrifice.
This was the consensus of all mature, rational people.
It was only that the Northlands' nearly half-century of peace had left many people instinctively unfamiliar with, and faintly estranged from, such sudden sacrifices when they first encountered them.
Under the slow evolution of Coriel's human feudal city-state system over thousands of years, most people subconsciously believed that whatever a lord's purpose in waging war, noble or otherwise, it was simply natural for citizens to answer their knightly lord's summons and fight on the battlefield at their lord's command.
If a knight or noble officer died in battle, the lord above them would at least issue a respectable-looking but actually pitifully insufficient pension for the sake of appearances and winning hearts, then have the knight's—or even a subordinate noble's—heir assume their father's duties and wait for the next summons.
This was the obligation borne by knights in exchange for enjoying their knightly fiefs and the envy of the lower classes.
But when it came to commoners, never mind pensions—being summoned meant it was standard practice to bring their own rations and weapons to the battlefield.
Once they died, they died. That was all.
For this too was the obligation they had to bear in exchange for the protection of knights.
It was precisely this long-standing, distant, and indifferent relationship with the nobility that filled the common folk with an instinctive resistance to military service.
Once a person died, they had nothing left.
And for that very reason, when the people of the Northlands saw the fallen Zelandian warriors—regardless of status or rank—placed in identical standard black coffins, and watched the Dragonbound Knights, who should have stood high above them, solemnly carry the coffins back into the city beneath their lord's gaze and everyone's eyes, the impact