Dusk spilled over the watchtower at Silver Creek Mine, illuminating the exquisite captured cigar in Earl Albert's hand.
He gently ran his fingers over its texture, his gaze passing beneath the tower's eaves to the mine square below.
Two armies were handing over defensive duties.
One was a legion formed from the combined Red Tide and Northern Frontier armies, its black uniforms making the soldiers look like reapers in the sunset.
As Albert watched, an emotion he could not quite name rose within him.
A few months earlier, he had worried that the Red Tide's rigid ways would grind the spirit out of the men of the Northern Frontier.
But throughout the campaign, he had seen not tamed beasts, but wolves that understood discipline.
The change pleased him, yet it also brought him back to that rain-lashed night ten days earlier, when they had fought their first battle.
That was the day he had realized just how powerful Louis's army truly was.
Rain hammered down from the heavens like a waterfall.
Albert still remembered standing in the mud outside Blackpine Castle as lightning tore the sky open, looking doubtfully at Lambert beside him.
Louis put a naive boy in command? This was a farce.
With Blackpine Castle's terrain, taking it without paying in lives was impossible, let alone suffering no casualties.
He had even decided that the moment Lambert mishandled the battle, he would take command and lead the charge himself.
Yet Lambert never gave him the chance.
The young man merely glanced down at the letter Louis had written himself, then raised a hand and pointed at an inconspicuous stretch of wall at Blackpine Castle's northwestern corner.
Several knights immediately scaled the wall without a sound, like shadows appearing out of thin air in the darkness.
Albert remembered it