At a construction site, an old man with white hair and a white beard set down the bricks in his hands, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and called out encouragement to those around him:
"Come on, lads, put your backs into it! Finish the work here this morning, and you can all go enjoy the Paskonja Festival this afternoon."
Cheers rose from the construction site.
In fact, they were already working overtime on a holiday. But what people resented often wasn't overtime itself, but having to work while their superiors took time off.
When their superior was working alongside them at the construction site, they had far fewer complaints.
The young men working at the site weren't professional construction workers. They were new recruits in the Silvermane Guards.
The old man was their newly appointed instructor, with extensive combat experience.
These young soldiers had assumed he would teach them combat techniques.
Yet in all these days, nothing he had taught them involved combat. Instead, he took the soldiers through the streets and alleys every day, helping wherever help was needed.
Some recruits had complained, asking what use any of this was. They had come to be soldiers, not volunteers.
Soldiering meant fighting, not hauling bricks, building walls, and running errands.
When the old man heard about this, he sternly rebuked that view.
In his eyes, fighting was certainly a soldier's duty, but before that, they needed to understand what they were fighting for.
Only by becoming part of the community and understanding what people knew and thought could they grasp the meaning of Preservation: protecting these living, breathing people.
As a veteran who had lived through Cocolia's era, the old man understood all too well that soldiers who failed to stand with the people would ultimately be reviled by