Roland's First Posting and a Fateful Meeting

In the early morning, pedestrians hurried through the streets of Revival City. Vendors called out their wares, while Beastfolk children chased one another, their laughter ringing out. In the distance, construction sites stood surrounded by steel reinforcement and scaffolding. Workers in hard hats crowded around breakfast stalls nearby, wolfing down their food. Farther still rose the furnace chimneys of the magic factories. Like pillars reaching the heavens, they poured cloudlike white smoke into the sky, while muffled thuds sounded from them now and then, like the beating of enormous hearts.

In a third-floor office of Revival City's City Defense Department, Roland silently watched the city through the window, his eyes filled with mixed emotions. It was his third day since arriving in Faoken aboard a warship.

Under the arrangements of Lieutenant Colonel Marda Ivanova, he had been appointed captain of Third Company of the Faoken Naval Training Force. He commanded 120 soldiers, most of them Beastfolk. He himself held the rank of lieutenant, the same rank he had held before leaving the service.

His daily duties were to lead Third Company through its regular training and oversee routine patrols and defense handovers between the docks and Revival City. Perhaps to test the abilities of someone brought in through a special recommendation, Third Company's training camp had been set apart from the main training base under Samantha's command. Roland did not know whether that had been John's decision or Marda's own idea.

The camp where they trained each day stood east of the Faoken docks, less than a kilometer from the sea.

Roland's office at the camp was a small, clean, freestanding building with a window facing the sea. From it, he could clearly see ships and warships coming and going. The office he occupied now, however, belonged to Revival City's