The peace broke on a moonless night in November.
Jarl Olafson, a cruel traditionalist who despised Bilal's "arrogance," marched a warband of one hundred hardened raiders into Bilal's valley. They didn't come to conquer; they came to burn the mill and slaughter the orphans to teach the Giant a lesson.
The alarm horn blew. Bilal's heart stopped.
"No. Not them. Not my family."
Bilal didn't have a formal army yet. He only had his seventy workers. They were strong from labor, but they were not killers.
Bilal put on his chainmail. He grabbed a massive, two-handed Dane axe. He looked at his workers. They were terrified.
"Stand behind me!" Bilal roared, his voice shaking the timber of the hall. "Do not break the line!"
The battle was chaotic, brutal, and ugly. It wasn't a glorious song. It was the sound of iron tearing through flesh and the smell of opened bowels. Bilal fought like a man possessed. He didn't use technique; he used sheer, overwhelming kinetic force, snapping shields and crushing chests. He was a force of nature, keeping the raiders away from the children's hall.
They won. The raiders broke and fled into the dark woods.
Bilal stood panting, his axe dripping, his body covered in minor cuts. He turned around to his people, forcing a smile to tell them they were safe.
The smile died on his lips.
Lying in the bloody snow were ten of his men. Ten of the original workers who had eaten from his bowl, who had built his mill, who had trusted his promise that they would never suffer again. They were dead.
Bilal dropped his axe. He fell to his knees in the red snow. He crawled to the nearest body—a young man named Torsten, who had just married one of the weavers. Bilal pulled the boy's lifeless body into his arms, rocking him back and forth, the tears finally breaking through his iron mask. He wept openly, screaming his grief into the freezing night sky.
From the doorway of the hall, Runa watched. She was thirteen now. She saw her invincible father broken in the snow, crying over the bodies of his men.
Something changed in Bilal that night. The "Gentle Giant" died in the snow alongside those ten men.
When the sun rose, Bilal stood up. His eyes were blank, cold, and calculating. He looked at the bodies, and then he looked at the horizon toward Jarl Olafson's lands.
"No more mercy," Bilal whispered, his voice stripped of all warmth. "No more open doors. We build a wall of stone. And we embargo Olafson's lands until his people eat their own 7boots."
He turned to Runa. She walked up to him, her face completely stoic. The playful little girl was gone. She had seen the cost of weakness. She looked at her father, nodding slowly.
The bond between them was no longer just father and daughter. It was General and Lieutenant.
Bilal realized the terrible truth of 11th-century leadership. "I cannot save everyone," he thought, his jaw clenching. "If I try to be the savior of the world, my own family will die. From now on, the world can burn. I only protect what is inside my walls."
He was twenty-six years old. But as he began to draw the blueprints for the stone fortress, his heart felt ninety-five. The Golden Age of innocence was over. The Age of Iron had begun.