For a long moment, Faelith remained lost in thought, her slender fingers tapping absently against the polished armrest of her chair.
Vassalage was not common in the Eternal Forest—quite unlike what one saw across the rest of the continent.
Not that there was any shortage of leaders willing to accept the vassalage of a defeated enemy. The problem, in fact, was quite simple.
When someone gained a vassal, their power grew by an enormous margin relative to their neighbors. With this newfound strength in hand, they became capable of securing a second vassal, a third, a fourth.
And so, everything snowballed—big, fast, and unstable.
Sooner or later, these vassals would band together and, in a bloody civil war, wrest their freedom back.
When that didn't happen, the outcome was even simpler: all the neighbors would join forces to crush their new common enemy.
