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glance at his parents, Ryuu followed him.

 
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER THREE
     
     
    The sounds of battle died away, leaving behind an eerie silence, a natural honoring of the dead. But the smells lingered, impossible to forget. It was the smells that haunted him day in and day out. If he wasn’t watched like a hawk by so many, he would have thrown up. But that was not a possibility here.
    Prince Akira sat on a horse, his balance and poise reflecting the cycles of training he’d already accumulated despite having only seen ten cycles. He followed his father as they inspected the troops recovering from the battle. They were trying to retake the Three Sisters, the single large pass that exited the south of the Kingdom. To hear his father tell the stories, this battle was just one of a much larger cycle. Ever since the collapse of the Great Kingdom over a thousand cycles ago this pass had been controlled by the Southern Kingdom. It was only in the past fifty cycles that it had become a site of contention between the Southern Kingdom and Azaria, the people to the south of the mountains.
    Akira would have loved to see an actual Azarian. The one people, although divided into three kingdoms now, were all the same heritage. Azarians were different. They were supposed to be taller and darker skinned. Every man and woman of their people was said to be equal in battle skill to three of the Southern Kingdom troops. Akira had quizzed his father on the Azarians relentlessly when he had been younger, but his father had always pushed aside his questions. It wasn’t until two moons ago he realized it was because his father hadn’t known the answers. They only ever encountered the warrior class, and neither nation had managed to push far into the other, due in large part to the Three Sisters.
    The Three Sisters was so named because of the triple peaks that rose almost exactly in the middle of the pass, which was a three days journey for an army. The pass was the sole route wide enough to march an army through, but it was still narrow. It was easy to defend and hard to take, which made it a target of prime importance both for the Azarians and for the Southern Kingdom.
    According to his father, Lord Azuma, the pass had belonged to the Southern Kingdom for as long as their records lasted. The Southern Kingdom had never pushed south beyond the mountains. The mountains were a natural defense, and the land to the south was desolate. They hadn’t even known the Azarians existed until they took the pass for the first time. It kicked off an endless pattern of violence. One side would spend an enormous amount of troops to retake the pass. It was always brutal and slow, and often it would take entire cycles. There was never enough time to establish more than a foothold on the other side of the pass before winter would set in and the pass would close down.
    The rulers of each nation had come to realize this, and major offensives in the pass were now rare. There was an unspoken agreement between the two nations, an understanding that the pass could be the death of either nation. The Southern Kingdom faced constant, unrelenting pressure from the Northern and Western Kingdoms, and couldn’t spare enough troops to retake the pass and launch a major offensive into Azaria. Besides that, no one was sure Azaria was even worth conquering. No spy or scout had returned yet, another mystery that needed solving someday.
    This lack of knowledge intrigued Akira, who was relentless about acquiring knowledge of his world. He knew that someday he would be the Lord of the Southern Kingdom, but even at the age of ten, the idea didn’t interest him in the least. He wanted to understand this world, know the people and the places, and see it all.
    Azuma had inconveniently interpreted his son’s curiosity about the Azarians as the battle dreams of a future Lord. Akira’s father had been made on the battlefield and he expected the same from his son. Every day Akira