30th of Forgerest, 250 AF — Sovereign's Eve.
The last day of the year.
The kingdom counted itself.
Census Day was not a celebration — it was an inventory. Every province, every settlement, every household submitted its data to the Ministry of Scrolls through the administrative infrastructure that the Sovereign had built for exactly this purpose: a network of census clerks, district recorders, provincial coordinators, and central analysts who processed the raw data of a million lives into numbers that a god could read.
The process took the entire day. From dawn to midnight, the data flowed — couriered from provincial capitals, processed at regional hubs, aggregated at the Ministry of Scrolls' central office in Ashenveil, and finally compiled into the document that the Sovereign received at the stroke of midnight: the Annual Kingdom Census.
