Whitefall was very different from Goldenveil.
Considerably larger, the city had two thousand three hundred houses and a population that had swelled steadily throughout the winter, fueled by the forced integration of two vassal villages and the bloody spoils of dozens of raids on goblin camps.
Now, with some seven thousand souls crammed within its dark wooden walls, the winter had been, without a shadow of a doubt, brutal.
Unlike Goldenveil, where every citizen—man, woman, or child—had received a decent portion of food to get through the cold season, in Whitefall only men of fighting age and their families were entitled to regular meals.
Women and children ate four times a week, on minimal rations calculated to keep them alive and nothing more.
Some elves, among the many rescued from the goblin camps Whitefall had purged, had even offered a form of nature magic capable of coaxing edible frost shoots from the frozen earth.
But they were ignored.
