Chapter 431: Life cycle of Empires

"What happened here?" Belladonna asked, as her eyes glided over the sprawling city laid out before her.

It was a fortress town, meaning that the entire city was built to encircle a singular fortress. It was rather common, from what Belladonna had seen, at least for the larger cities. Although it meant that your lower class people were between you and an invading army, that was only a problem of perspective.

If you were a peasant or lower class whelp, it was a risk you were constantly living with, whereas if you were the type who could live in the castle, it was like having a buffet of prime ribs you could throw to the wolves so you had time to make your escape.

Beyond that, it also meant that the entire city was one large defensive structure. Not just from the huge wall, but from the way the streets were built. They weren’t the miserable grid based system that she knew all too well, which was all about efficiency and cramming as much as possible into the least amount of space.

Instead it was confusing, disorientating and seemingly nonsensical. With constant dead ends, winding roads that led right back to where they started and plenty of narrow streets that would bottleneck even the strongest of armies.

Numbers meant nothing if you couldn’t exploit them, and half of your army was completely lost. Of course you could fly to get over the labyrinth, but would you want to be such an easy and exposed target around Elves, who were most known in Belladonna’s world for their archery talents.

Adding to the defensive nature was how it was built, or more accurately, how it was grown. Every building was a mixture of magic grown stone, and living wood that had been twisted to form the perfect structure for the houses.

With the same magic that grew these houses, the Elves could turn their homes into deadly weapons, growing new walls from the earth or turning the house you were taking cover against into a wall of spikes to run you through.

However, it was not the same type of wood as the rest of the forest.

Since they lived around wood a lot, and built their cities as a connected network of it, the Elves had developed a special type of tree that meant their entire city wasn’t going to be completely destroyed by a rogue fire spell.

Ironwood was robust and strong, as tough as hardened steel entirely through the logs. Even the leaves it grew were deadly, as sharp as razor blades on the side yet could be plucked, folded and would degrade alongside the normal leaves.

You could hack at it and try to chop it down, but that would just send hundreds of iron splinters hurtling towards you, whilst your Ironwood encased enemy only lost a small fraction of their defensive capabilities.

"The same thing that always happens," Raev shrugged, as he sat on the edge of the wall and let his legs swing,

"War, Famine, Invasion, Revolt, Unrest, Incompetent leadership, just straight up bad vibes. It’s always one of those. In the end its just the life cycle of Empires to rise and fall. The survivors from this city went off to make a new one, that was probably where the dude you met was from."

"Yeah, probably... Still, I can’t believe this wasn’t made clear on the maps. I was sure I studied extensively and got the most up to date stuff."

"You got this area from Ludavingers Guide to the Forests, didn’t you?" Raev asked with a chuckle.

Belladonna laughed sheepishly, as in her mental Library she could see Aki pulling out that exact book from the shelf and looking at it in disgust.

"Knew it. Those books are like a century out of date. If you want up to date maps, ask travelling merchants or Sylvites. We love to get around and wander, as does the big lady, and even if she loves jokes she still likes people to be safe on the roads.

Here, you can have this. This is a recent map of your country at least."

Raev dug a parchment out of his pocket and held it out to Belladonna. It was rolled so tight that it looked like just another one of his joints, but when she unrolled it she did find it to be exactly what he said.

Although judging from the crudeness of the drawings, and the little doodles of himself on a few of the roads, Raev had drawn this himself.

She chuckled softly, putting the hand-drawn map - and the few herbs that were wrapped up in said map - into her [EternalCompanion].

"By the way, you never said which one this was."

"What do you mean?"

"You know, War, Unrest, Invasion. Which was it?"

This one was invasion, a Fell-spawn army attacked, wiped half of them out and chased away the other half."

"Fell-spawn army..." Belladonna’s face fell, as she felt a knot of guilt building up in her stomach.

"Don’t tell me that it was... you know." She gestured to herself.

Raev looked at her in confusion for a moment, before laughing and shaking his head.

"Oh! No, don’t worry about it spooky dude, it’s not your fault or your people this time. This is your cousin, I think it’s a cousin, the Rotten ones from the Gurr Horde."

The Gurr Horde, or more specifically a Gurn, was the Fell-Spawn sub-race that was composed of Undead like Zombies and Ghouls. They were often mistaken for the Ossein Legion, who were also Undead but were composed of more Skeletal Undead and Wights.

To most people, the difference didn’t really matter. Undead were walking corpses that needed to be purged, what did it matter what clan they hailed from. In fact, although she called Revenant a ’Rotten Corpse’ a lot, Belladonna wasn’t entirely sure which one he was assigned to. He used a mixture of zombies and skeletal Undead too, making it hard to figure out.

However, when she thought about the way that Raev called them her ’cousins’, a thought crossed Belladonna’s mind. She could get new abilities from killing her own kind, so did that extend to other sub-races of Fell-Spawn too?

It didn’t for the natural spawning undead, such as the ghosts. But perhaps there was some difference between them and the clan affiliated Undead that she was missing and could exploit.

"Hey Raev, do you think some of the Invaders are still here?"

He tilted his head, rolling the thought around in there for a few seconds as he took a long, deep drag of his joint that burned it all the way down to his fingers.

"You know," He said with a smoke heavy cough, "there might be."