Tilverton.
It was the most important border city along the three routes crossing the Stormhorn Mountains within Cormyr. With the Anauroch Desert to its west and a mountain pass leading to Cormanthor to the east, it had always held immense military significance for Cormyr.
The elves of Cormanthor had always kept to themselves and stayed out of Cormyr's way. Yet for the past thirty years, it was said that Zelandia in the Northlands, together with the Silvermoon Federation, had been steadily pushing into the Anauroch Desert.
Thanks to the day-and-night tree-planting and reforestation efforts of a group of druids from the Moonshadow Archipelago, the northwestern corner of the Anauroch Desert had now been utterly transformed. Forests of green cacti and seas of bright yellow ice plants had already crept close to the Standing Stone Plains and the Black Road.
When the Cormyrians first learned of this, they did not believe it would affect them in any way. Some even mocked the Northlanders for their foolishness, while others admired their persistence.
Some joked that if the Northlanders turned the Anauroch Desert into a forested sea, then Cormyr would no longer have to spend every day wrangling with the elves of Cormanthor over logging.
In their minds, the Northlanders were not even on their list of threats. After all, by Cormyrian reckoning, even the flourishing Water-Drawing City had a population of only six hundred thousand.
Meanwhile, the Kingdom of Cormyr possessed a thousand years of long-standing history and tradition. According to the most recent household census, their kingdom had a population of eleven million, three hundred and sixty thousand!
In the eyes of some Cormyrian nobles, they were not all that different from those famed empires of history.
But more than ten years later, when they discovered Orc tribes beginning to appear