[Year 1155 of the Trees. The morning after the wedding. Avarstad]
[Selas POV]
I woke up married.
Ilvëa lay curled against me, golden hair spilling across the pillow, one hand resting on my chest. She breathed in slow, deep rhythm, her face softer in sleep than she ever allowed it to be awake. The imperial wreath sat on the nightstand beside a half-eaten apple and the flower crown from yesterday, already wilting.
The wedding night had gone rather well.
I didn't move. Didn't want to. For the first time in centuries, there was nowhere I urgently needed to be that mattered more than this exact moment.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
Our first breakfast as a married couple was a disaster of the most charming kind. Neither of us knew where the other's cup went. I reached for the bread at the same time she did. We collided elbows twice. She poured water into a cup that already had water in it and didn't notice until it overflowed onto her hand.
We looked at each other. Burst out laughing. The awkwardness evaporated like dew.
"Temeryl and Lairis need to coordinate," I said between bites. "Stone foundations meeting living wood. If they don't align the growth corridors with the wall plans now, we'll be tearing things apart later."
"I'll speak with the Druids before noon," Ilvëa said. "Cuivorn's been… eager. It wants to grow faster than we can plan."
"Tell it to be patient."
"You tell a sentient tree to be patient. See how that goes."
She kissed my cheek, stole my last piece of bread, and left for Cuivorn. I watched her walk away, golden hair catching the morning light, and thought: this is my life now.
Then I went to work.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Years 1155-1200 of the Trees. The building decades]
[Selas POV]
Time moved. The Avari built.
Not all at once. Not in some grand dramatic montage where walls sprouted overnight and roads unfurled like ribbons across the landscape. It was slow, grinding, unglamorous labor. Years of hauling stone and mixing morite and arguing over drainage angles and waking up before dawn to find that last night's rainstorm had flooded the eastern canal again.
But we built.
The Inner Walls rose first. By the time we finished them, half the workforce had memorized every profanity in every language I'd accidentally introduced.
The canals followed, linking the Taurion to the moat system, giving us water control and transport routes in one. Bridges of stone and shaped wood spanned the channels at strategic intervals.
Then came the Great Walls. Massive. Twenty meters high, twelve thick at the base, with fighting platforms six meters wide and towers that rose another ten above the curtain walls.
Temeryl's masterwork, refined through years of trial and error and at least three complete redesigns when we discovered that theoretical engineering and actual soil conditions were rarely on speaking terms.
On the towers, Opheon's craftsmen and a new breed of specialists we'd started calling Mechanists installed the siege engines in three tiers. Light ballistas, compact and precise, mounted on swivel bases for tracking fast-moving targets. Medium ballistas with greater range and heavier bolts, designed to punch through armored formations or shatter siege equipment. And the heavy ballistas.
The heavy ballistas were my personal insistence, and getting them approved had been a fight in itself. Massive devices, requiring crews of four to operate and reinforced tower platforms to support their weight. Bolts thick as a young tree, tipped with hardened steel, capable of punching through anything short of a fortress wall.
{image: Ballistas }
I walked the walls with Temeryl on a clear evening when the foundations of the Citadel were finally being laid. Our stone heart, as we'd taken to calling it. The inner fortress on the hill, overlooking the Tree, ringed by its own moats and walls. The place where the Empire's last stand would be made, if it ever came to that.
"Three years for the inner fortifications," he said, running his hand along the parapet. "Another five for the Great Walls. The Citadel will take longer. The underground work alone…" He trailed off, doing calculations in his head that I'd learned not to interrupt.
"The tunnels are critical," I said. "Storage, escape routes, defensive fallbacks. And room to expand downward when we run out of room to expand outward."
"You're planning for a population we don't have."
"Yet."
He gave me that look. The one that said I know you're right and I hate it because it means more work.
"Yet," he agreed.
Below us, the city sprawled in its organized grid of streets and districts. Stone buildings with living wood woven through their upper stories, the first fruits of the uneasy collaboration between Temeryl and Lairis Patraël, the chief Druid.
Not quite stone. Not quite forest. Something new.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
Balga's farmers performed miracles of their own.
Four-field crop rotation was operational within the first decade. Orchards of apple and pear took root on the sunlit clearings south of the walls, their growth accelerated by Light in ways that still made the agricultural scholars among us shake their heads in disbelief.
Pastures spread across the nearest forest meadows, supporting livestock that grew healthier and larger with each generation of Light-assisted breeding.
The food supply stabilized. No one went hungry. But the labor problem gnawed at me.
"How are the plows?" I asked Balga during one of her weekly reports.
"Slow."
"We need more."
"Tell that to the iron ore. Or to Eol's apprentices, who forge exactly as fast as they forge and not a hammer-stroke faster."
"What if we—"
"No. You cannot speed up metallurgy by being impatient at it. I've seen you try."
She had a point.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
Cuivorn became the palace.
Not overnight. Over years of patient guidance, Ilvëa and I sitting at its roots for hours, communicating through ósanwë in the Tree's strange language of images and growth-impulse.
We'd send an idea: a chamber here, a corridor there, a hall wide enough for the Imperial Council to convene. Cuivorn would consider, in its vast slow way, and then grow.
Walls of living wood, smooth and luminous. Ceilings that arched like cathedral vaults, formed by branches growing inward and interlocking overhead. Windows where the bark thinned to translucence, letting starlight filter through in shifting patterns. Floors of root-wood, polished smooth by the Tree's own growth, warm underfoot in any weather.
We moved in the day the imperial chambers were ready. Left the wooden house without a backward glance.
Ilvëa took to interior design with the same relentless energy she applied to everything.
A room wasn't right until it was perfect, and her definition of perfect shifted weekly. I'd come home to find a wall moved three feet to the left, or a new alcove growing where a flat surface had been that morning, or an entire staircase rerouted because the original angle "didn't breathe properly."
Cuivorn didn't seem to mind. If anything, the Tree enjoyed it. Each change was a new growth-impulse, a new direction to explore, a new collaboration between plant-intelligence and elven aesthetics.
The plumbing was my contribution.
I'll spare the details. Suffice to say that Cuivorn, being a living organism, was entirely capable of processing organic waste into nutrients for its own growth. Our sanitation system fed the palace. The palace fed us comfort. Circle of life, rendered literal.
"Symbiosis," Ilvëa said when I explained the concept.
"Our toilet feeds our home."
"Please never describe it that way to guests."
{The Throne Hall of Cuivorn}
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
The tree-homes changed Avarstad.
Lairis Patraël, the lead Druid, cracked the problem within the first two decades. Seeds from Cuivorn, nurtured with concentrated Light and guided through ósanwë during germination, produced saplings that grew with directed purpose.
Plant them in the right spot, pour enough Light into them, and they'd grow into structures. Walls, floors, roofs, all shaped by careful communication between Druid and developing tree-mind.
{An example of a typical Avari tree-home}
Temeryl controlled where every seed went. The man guarded his city plans with the ferocity of a dragon sitting on gold. Every planting had to align with the street grid, the water system, the defensive layout, and approximately forty-seven other specifications that only Temeryl fully understood.
But when stone met living wood, when the careful stonework of the lower stories merged with the organic growth of the upper levels, something remarkable happened. The city stopped looking like a construction project and started looking like a civilization.
Then the breakthrough.
Cuivorn began generating its own Light.
Independently.
Without anyone pouring energy into it. The saturated wood had crossed some threshold, absorbed enough Light over enough years that it had learned to produce its own. Self-sustaining magical plants. A first in the history of the world, as far as I knew.
I sat at Cuivorn's roots the evening Lairis confirmed it and proposed something that had been forming in my mind for years.
A root network.
I sent the image through ósanwë: a web beneath the earth, Cuivorn's roots reaching out to touch every tree-home in the city, every Light-saturated tree in the surrounding forest. A single connected system. Information flowing through root-contact. Energy shared. Warnings transmitted. The entire forest becoming one organism under Cuivorn's gentle oversight.
Cuivorn considered this for a long time. I sat patiently, feeling the vast slow churning of vegetable thought.
Then acceptance. Eagerness, even. The Tree liked this idea. It wanted to reach further. Deeper. Connect more.
I also asked it to push its central taproot as deep as possible. Into the bedrock, if it could manage. Reinforcing the underground chambers. Stabilizing the soil. I had plans for what lay beneath Avarstad, and those plans needed a foundation stronger than anything stone alone could provide.
Within a few years, the second level of the city began to take shape. Suspension bridges linking tree-canopies, forming elevated pathways that Celestia's scouts and archers could use to traverse the entire city without touching the ground. An upper city growing above the lower one, connected by spiraling staircases grown directly from the trunks.
The Nandor had their tree-platforms. We had a forest-city.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
Time told its passage in small ways.
Grim the Younger reached his full growth and surpassed his father in every dimension. A massive wolf, dark-furred and amber-eyed, who patrolled the city walls at night with a gravity that made the sentries stand straighter when he passed.
Children born during the March were young adults now, taking up trades and joining the military and starting families of their own. The first generation raised entirely on the road, they carried the March in their bones. An instinctive understanding that safety was built, not given.
The children born in Avarstad were different. Softer around the edges. They'd never known hunger or displacement. They played under Cuivorn's branches and grew up thinking a sentient glowing tree was normal.
Both generations were mine. Both were the future.
Someone opened what could charitably be called a tavern near the southern gate.
"Charitably" because it was three walls, a roof of woven branches, and a barrel of berry wine of questionable vintage. It was packed every evening.
And somewhere in the standing orders that governed scout behavior, a note remained from years ago: avoid the great black bears of the deep forest. Do not engage. Do not provoke. Mark territories and go around.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Year ~1180. Council chambers inside Cuivorn]
[Selas POV]
The civilian development was ahead of schedule. The military development was not.
Not that we'd been idle. The Avari had trained in formations since the March, and every year the drills grew more sophisticated. Vertalas ran his warriors through maneuvers that would have impressed any professional army on Earth.
Celestia's scouts were ghosts in the forest, invisible and lethal and connected to a network of bonded animals that gave them surveillance capabilities no other force in Middle-earth could match.
But I was dissatisfied with our army system.
That had worked when we were two thousand refugees on a road. It wouldn't work for an empire.
"We need a system," I said to Vertalas.
He'd been waiting for me to say it. Probably for years. The look on his face said—finally.
The Avari were, in many ways, already primed for military service. Our culture was deeply physical. Pride demanded strength. Beauty and capability were so intertwined in Avari aesthetics that being visibly fit wasn't vanity, it was social currency.
Most Avari trained regularly on their own, sparred with friends, kept their swordwork sharp out of personal pride as much as practical necessity. Any random citizen of Avarstad could pick up a blade and defend themselves competently. Probably better than the average soldier in most human armies I'd read about in my previous life.
But that was exactly the problem. They could defend themselves. Individually.
What happened when twenty hundred orcs poured over the walls at dawn? What happened when fire broke out in the tree-home quarter and panic spread faster than flame? What happened when a scouting patrol stumbled into an ambush and the nearest reinforcements were civilians who'd never drilled a single emergency response?
Every Avari would fight. I had no doubt about that. They'd fight bravely, fiercely, and completely without coordination. Each one a hero. Each one acting alone. Each one dying alone, because individual courage without collective discipline was just a prettier way to lose.
We had a military caste, of course. Vertalas's warriors were superb. Drilled, disciplined, lethal in formation. But they numbered perhaps two thousand. Our population had grown to nearly ten thousand and was accelerating with every generation.
If the worst came, I couldn't afford to have three-quarters of my people standing around in confused terror while the other quarter did all the dying.
What I needed was simple: every single Avari, from the youngest apprentice smith to the most venerable Elder, trained in formations, emergency protocols, evacuation procedures, and basic unit tactics.
Not to turn them into career soldiers. To give them the reflexes that turned a panicked crowd into an organized response. So that when someone shouted "form ranks," every citizen in earshot knew exactly where to stand, what to hold, and which direction to face.
After their service, they'd go back to their lives. Smiths would smith. Farmers would farm. Artists would paint. Politicians would argue.
"Universal conscription," Vertalas said.
Everyone serves. Men and women both. A mandatory period of training and active duty that teaches the basics: formations, discipline, emergency response, field survival.
Even the Elders. Even the ones who'd been ancient in wisdom since before I was born. Age meant experience, not exemption. In a world where a three-hundred-year-old elf was just as physically capable as a thirty-year-old one, there was no excuse for ignorance of basic defense.
"Three categories," Vertalas continued. "Novices for the conscripts. Warriors for the professionals. Auxiliaries for the reserves."
Novices would serve their mandatory term, learn the fundamentals, and return to civilian life with skills they'd maintain through periodic musters.
Warriors were the career soldiers, the ones who chose the sword as their calling and devoted themselves to it with the same intensity Eol devoted to his forge.
Auxiliaries were the reservists, former Novices and retired Warriors who could be recalled in crisis, their skills kept sharp through regular training exercises.
"And the structure?" Vertalas asked. "We have centuries and decurions. That's served us well enough for a warband…"
"We need to build upward," I agreed. "The bottom of the chain works. Tens led by squad leaders, half-centuries, full centuries under centurions. That was designed for a column on the march. Now we need what sits above it."
This was the part I'd been looking forward to.
"The largest permanent formation will be the Legion. Four to ten thousand warriors, depending on need. Commanded by a Legatus."
"Legion." Vertalas tested the word. "Heavy. I like it."
"When multiple Legions operate together, the overall commander holds the rank of Proconsul."
"Proconsul," Vertalas repeated. "I assume that would be me."
"Legions divide into Cohorts, roughly a thousand strong, each led by a Tribune. Cohorts contain our existing Centuries. And I want to formalize the naming across the board. The old decurions become Hastati, leading Hastae. Half-century commanders become Princeps."
Vertalas was nodding slowly, mapping the structure in his head. I could see him layering the new ranks over the old bones of our March-era system.
"Two special designations," I continued. "Triarii. The best veteran warriors in each Legion, serving as the Legatus's personal guard and last reserve. They don't commit unless everything else has failed."
"The fist behind the shield," Vertalas murmured.
"And from the best of the Triarii, we select the Praetorians. My dynasty's guard. The Praetoria."
Silence for a moment.
"An Emperor's Guard," he said.
"For the Emperor's children. And their children. As long as the line endures."
He considered this. Then nodded once, decisively. "No separate military camps. Barracks integrated into every city and fortress. The army lives where the people live."
"Agreed."
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
The engineering and medical reforms followed within months.
Vertalas, having watched Opheon's craftsmen build siege engines and Temeryl's builders construct fortifications for years, arrived at an inevitable conclusion: these skills belonged on the battlefield too.
Opheon's reaction was volcanic.
"My craftsmen are NOT soldiers!" He slammed both hands on the council table hard enough to rattle the inkwells. "They are artists. Engineers. Scholars of mechanism and material. I will not have them conscripted into—"
"Nobody's conscripting anyone," I said, before Vertalas could respond with something that would escalate the situation. "New branch, separate entirely. The Mechanists."
Opheon's mouth stayed open for a moment, argument loaded, target removed.
"Career military engineers," I continued. "Trained in combat AND craft. They build bridges on the march, fortify camps after battle, maintain and operate the siege engines in the field. And they report to their own chain of command."
Opheon closed his mouth. Opened it. Closed it again.
"So… not my people."
"Not your people. Their own people. With their own training, their own doctrine, their own proud tradition of blowing things up in controlled and useful ways."
Temeryl was already sketching mobile ballista platforms. Reinforced wagons, pre-assembled in travel configuration, deployable into combat position within minutes.
The medical reform was smoother. Mireth Lëneris had been running the healers since the March, and she'd long recognized that battlefield medicine and peacetime healing were different disciplines.
"Two branches," she said. "Civilian healers for the hospitals and clinics. Field healers embedded with the Legions. Different training. Different tools. Same foundation."
"My field healers will have authority to order wounded pulled from combat," she added, and her tone made it clear this wasn't a request.
Vertalas bristled. "A healer countermanding a field commander's—"
"A healer saving a warrior who can fight again next week instead of dying today because his commander needed one more body on the line." Mireth's eyes could have cut glass. "Yes. That authority."
I looked between them. Two of my oldest advisors, two of my best people, locked in a stare that could have frozen the Taurion solid.
"Mireth's right," I said.
Vertalas's jaw tightened. But he nodded.
He was a pragmatist above all else, and pragmatism said that trained warriors were expensive to replace.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
The magic question was harder.
Every Quendi in the world generated Light. Every single one. It was as natural as breathing, as innate as heartbeat.
And in all the centuries since the Quendi first awakened at Cuiviénen, no one had developed a systematic way to use it.
The Avari were ahead. We could retain Light, direct it, pour it into objects and living things. We'd grown Cuivorn. We'd bred Light-enhanced animals. Our smiths infused metal with energy that made it stronger and more durable. Our healers accelerated natural recovery through Light application.
But calling any of that "magic" was generous. It was instinct and experimentation, not science.
"If we're the most advanced users of Light among all Quendi," I told the Council, "then we need to start treating it as a discipline. Not a curiosity. Not a folk tradition. A field of study with rigor and methodology."
I pointed to the Druids, the healers, the smiths, the animal handlers. "These four groups manipulate Light better than anyone else. Pool their knowledge. Find the common principles. Build a curriculum."
Amalaë Talkrimael, who'd never met an educational challenge she didn't want to wrestle into submission, volunteered to organize the teaching structure.
The military advisors perked up immediately. "Combat magic," Vertalas said, and his eyes had a gleam that usually preceded very expensive proposals.
"Decades away," I said. "At minimum. We're starting from nothing."
The gleam dimmed.
"But," I added, because I couldn't resist, "I have some theoretical concepts that might accelerate things. Light-storage crystals. Runes that can be charged with energy. Defensive wards. The ideas exist. What we lack is the knowledge to execute them."
The gleam returned, more cautious this time.
"No suitable advisor for magical studies yet," I concluded. "We'll grow one. The way we grow everything else around here."
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Year ~1195 of the Trees. Avarstad. A celebration]
[Talion POV]
Thirty years.
The Emperor had asked me personally. Sat me down in what was then a half-built council room, looked me in the eyes, and explained what he needed. Someone to live among the Sindar. Not in some quiet village on the fringes. In a real city. Close to the court. Close to power.
"You'll be alone," he'd said. "No backup. No extraction plan. If you're discovered, we don't know you."
I'd said yes before he finished the sentence. I was young and stupid and desperate to prove myself worthy of the trust he placed in his scouts.
I found my way to the Havens of the Falas, Círdan's domain, where the Falathrim built their ships and traded with every Quendi nation in Beleriand. A port city full of travelers, merchants, and strangers. One more displaced elf attracted no attention.
I learned the local customs. Took work at the docks. Made myself useful, reliable, forgettable. The kind of person everyone knew by face and no one thought about twice.
Getting close to Círdan himself proved impossible. The Shipwright was ancient beyond reckoning, surrounded by a court of loyal Falathrim who'd known each other for centuries. An outsider with a Nandorin accent and no lineage had no path to that inner circle.
But I didn't need the king's ear. I needed the city's.
Trade news. Political rumors. Which lords quarreled with whom. How Thingol's Eglath dealt with their neighbors. What the Falathrim shipwrights were building and for what purpose. Whether orc movements in the north were increasing or shifting.
The slow pulse of Beleriand's politics, felt through a hundred conversations in taverns and dockyards and market squares.
Every piece of intelligence went home through Astarion, my bonded hawk, who carried coded ósanwë impressions across three hundred miles of forest to the relay scouts at our eastern border.
Three decades of watching. Listening. Being someone else. Missing home with an ache that never dulled, only grew quieter.
A year before my return, my replacement arrived. A young scout named Heruvor, sharp and patient, with the kind of unremarkable face that disappeared in crowds.
I spent twelve months introducing him to my contacts, walking him through the city's rhythms, teaching him which dockworkers gossiped freely and which tavern keepers had ears sharper than they let on. When I finally wished him luck and walked out of the Havens for the last time, I felt lighter than I had in decades.
And heavier. Because the city I was leaving had become almost familiar, and the home I was returning to was a stranger.
When I reached Avarstad, they told me my new assignment —Teaching.
The Empire needed more people like me, and my thirty years of fieldwork made me the most qualified instructor they had.
I wasn't sure how I felt about that.
But orders were orders. And honestly, after three decades of pretending to be someone else, teaching others the craft sounded almost restful.
And now I was back. Sitting at a wooden table that smelled of berry wine and roasted meat, surrounded by the sounds of my own language spoken by people who didn't need to whisper it.
The city was unrecognizable. But I'd been prepared for that. My friends had shared memories through ósanwë. I'd seen Avarstad through borrowed eyes for years.
What the memories hadn't prepared me for were the small things.
The smell of baking bread drifting from a stone building with a living oak growing through its roof, branches forming a natural awning over the entrance. A child chasing a cat across a bridge made of interwoven tree-limbs twenty feet above the street, laughing, fearless, as if elevated walkways were the most natural thing in the world.
The sound of the city. Hammers ringing from workshops. Merchants arguing over prices at the southern market. A fiddle somewhere playing a melody I didn't recognize, something new, composed after I'd left.
Two young women walked past carrying baskets of luminous fruit that glowed faintly silver. Cuileli-enhanced produce, grown in the orchards near Cuivorn.
An Elder, ancient in bearing though his body was as strong as any youth's — sat on a bench near the market square, whittling a wooden toy for the child beside him. His fingers moved with the patient precision of centuries. The child watched, transfixed.
I sat with my family at one of the long tables near the southern market.
My father sat across from me, watching the dancing with the contented expression of someone who'd earned his rest. My younger brother beside him, methodically destroying a plate of roasted venison with the single-minded focus that had characterized him since infancy.
"So now we have our own Empire," I said, still adjusting.
"Technically," my father observed, eyes still on the dancers, "at the moment it's more of a city-state. Until we expand beyond the forest."
"Can I go dance?" My little sister had appeared beside the table, vibrating with impatience.
My father glanced at my mother. My mother's expression conveyed, in the subtle language of long marriage, that the correct answer was yes.
"Go ahead, sweetheart. Enjoy yourself."
She was gone before the last syllable landed.
I watched her disappear into the crowd and did what three decades of intelligence work had made instinctive. I listened.
"…called up as a Novice next month. My officer says the first week is the worst…"
"…the worst? My sister said the food alone nearly killed her. Have you tasted what they serve in the barracks?…"
"…the fish here is terrible…"
"…but the meat! Have you tried the venison from the place by the eastern gate?…"
"…my son wants to become a Druid. Spends every morning at Cuivorn touching the bark and whispering. I told him whispering doesn't help, it communicates through ósanwë, but he insists the whispering matters…"
"…finished my service as a Hastatus. Thinking about the Watch. Better hours. Fewer push-ups…"
"…many young ones want to apprentice under the Dark One. My cousin tried. Rejected for 'imprecise hands.' He's a trained carpenter!…"
"…that courtyard by the river invented a new berry drink. Sweet, but it sneaks up on you. Maethor tried three cups and told everyone the Law Code was 'actually quite elegant.' That's when we knew the drink was dangerous…"
"…do you think the Empress will ever get used to our cooking? She keeps adding herbs to everything. Last week she put something purple in the stew and nobody could feel their tongues for an hour…"
I smiled into my cup. Same Avari. But underneath the new titles and the stone walls and the glowing trees, the same stubborn, joyful, endlessly complaining people I'd missed every single day for thirty years.
My thoughts were interrupted by a pair of eyes.
Across the table, just past my brother's shoulder, a young woman sat with a group of my sister's friends. Dark hair braided with small silver beads. Laughing at something someone had said, her face lit by firelight in a way that did something complicated to my chest.
She was looking at me.
I became aware, with the horrible clarity of a trained intelligence operative, that my posture was terrible, my cup was empty, and I hadn't properly combed my hair since leaving the Falas.
Thirty years of maintaining a flawless cover identity among foreign elves. Thirty years of controlling every word, every gesture, every facial expression. And one girl with silver beads in her hair reduced me to a mess in four seconds.
I drained the cup. Straightened my back.
"Father," I said, keeping my voice carefully casual. "I think I'll go dance."
My father's eyebrows rose. My mother's didn't. She'd been watching me watch the girl for the past five minutes and was already smiling.
"By all means," my father said.
I stood. Walked around the table. Thirty years of living a lie, and this was the most nervous I'd ever been.
Her name, I learned approximately ninety seconds later, was Ailindë.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—

{BONUS: Cuivorn}
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[End of Chapter 15.1]
GLOSSARY
CONCEPTS
Citadel — The inner fortress of Avarstad, built on the hill overlooking Cuivorn. Known as "the Stone Heart." Ringed by its own moats and walls. Includes underground tunnels and chambers reinforced by Cuivorn's deepest taproot.
Root Network — Underground web of interconnected roots linking Cuivorn to every tree-home and Light-saturated tree in Avarstad. Allows energy sharing, information flow, and early warnings across the entire forest.
MILITARY RANKS & TERMS
Novice — Conscript serving mandatory military training. All citizens serve regardless of gender.
Warrior — Professional career soldier.
Auxiliaries — Reservist. Former Novice or retired Warrior, subject to recall and periodic training musters.
Legion (4,000–10,000) — Largest formation. Led by a Legatus.
Proconsul — Supreme commander of multiple Legions.
Cohort (~1,000) — Subdivision of a Legion. Led by a Tribune.
Century (~100) — Subdivision of a Cohort. Led by a Centurion. Originally established during the March, now formalized.
Hastae (~10) — Squad. Led by a Hastatus. Replaced the March-era "decurion."
Princeps — Half-century commander (~50).
Triarii — Elite veterans serving as a Legion's last reserve.
Praetorians — Finest Triarii selected as the imperial dynasty's bodyguard.
Praetoria — The Emperor's personal guard corps.
Mechanists — Military engineering corps. Siege engines, bridges, roads, field fortifications.
CHARACTERS
Lairis Patraël — Chief Druid. Developed tree-home cultivation from Cuivorn's seeds.
Ailindë — Young Avari woman. Friend of Talion's sister.
Heruvor — Talion's replacement as intelligence operative in the Falas.
Astarion — Talion's bonded hawk for long-range ósanwë relay.
PLACES
The Havens of the Falas — Círdan the Shipwright's port cities on the western coast. Location of Talion's thirty-year intelligence assignment.