Danath Trollbane seethed with resentment. Stromgarde's militia received the lowest pay, ate the worst food, and wore the shoddiest equipment. Yet every time war broke out with the dwarves or trolls, the Militia Corps was sent to the front lines to lead the charge.
Fortunately, the royal family had been so "generous" as to send the Militia Corps into battle year after year, honing its fighting strength. Otherwise, with such meager equipment and supplies, its soldiers would not even have qualified as cannon fodder.
Stromgarde's refusal to treat its militia as human beings was nothing new. The Royal Court's discrimination against the Militia Force could be traced all the way back to the breakup of the Arathor Empire.
After the Arathor Empire enjoyed a century of glory following the unification of the great tribes, Emperor Thoradin and his Founding Brothers gradually withdrew from the center of Kingdom power, some growing old and others dying.
Without King Thoradin and the Founding Elders holding the royal family together, the great Original Tribes and merchants' guilds began another round of struggles for power within the Royal Court.
King Thoradin's descendants could not contain the escalating power struggle. The royal family had originally hoped to divert domestic tensions into war, but Emperor Thoradin and the Founding Elders had been far too formidable. They had beaten the forest trolls throughout the Eastern Kingdoms into complete submission.
The once-vast forest troll population had been shattered into scattered factions. The smaller troll clans were even more helpless against the powerful, unified Arathor Empire.
With no one left to wage war against, the royal family could only resort to political means to suppress the descendants of the Founding Elders' factions.
As the saying went, what rose to its peak was bound to decline. Without an undisputed center of