The first full month of the spring campaign offered no thunderclap triumph.
No toppled monarch.
No banners hauled down from citadel towers in dramatic surrender.
But it brought motion.
Romanus didn't surge forward.
It enveloped.
Elheat's raids on the western coast struck like a smith's hammer—loud, brutal, efficient.
In the east, Julius moved slower, more deliberate, drawing his siege lines tight like a noose with each passing day.
The Francian Kingdom wasn't crumbling.
Not yet.
But it was shrinking, folding in on itself, as if even its borders had grown afraid of the dark.
And fear, Julius knew, could be a weapon sharper than any blade.
~
Eastern Advance Camp — Outside Bellenne
The fire had burned low, spitting now and then like it resented the cold.
Julius hunched over the latest scout reports, one hand on his sword hilt, the other flattening the creased corners of a worn township map now bloated with fresh red ink.
Three possible approaches.
