Writing Prompt: They were spread thin.

Fifteen minutes while the house is still silent. Timers (with muted alarm on). Let’s go.

Ah good old epic fantasy in the morning. Fun.

Tuesday, March 11^th: They were spread thin.

They were spread thing.  Each watchtower should have had a contingency of men at least twenty five strong.  Raiders were still a possibility and they couldn’t afford to have the watchtowers compromised.  However, with the battles raging further south, they were spread too thin to properly man the towers.  Each watch tower had only a contingency of five men.

It would hopefully be enough to sound the alarm and fent off those who would cause warning not to be passed.  There were many nights where if gave Commander Hadish nightmares.  He could picture one or all of the towers being swarmed in the night, the many villages and towns that depended on the warning given to get to safety being slaughtered.

If the warning was given in a timely manner then all villagers had a chance to evacuate the open air villages and seek shelter in the deep and fortified caves.  The area was riddled with them and each village knew how to reach the depths.  Supplies were maintained and if needed the individual sites could be fortified through a system of tunnels running through the entire area. The tunnels were marked of course, but only the trained could read the markings.  To seek the tunnels without knowing how to read the markers would be to seek death.  Without that knowledge navigation was hopeless. 

If one area was compromised, then it could be shut off.  They had done so in the past.  When the danger was cleared they then searched the tunnels.  Often they found the bodies of those lost in the twists and turns.  Once when he was still with the patrol, the commander and his unit came across a contingency of raiders who became lost and perished in the depths of the tunnels.

‘But without the watch towers, they don’t know to go to ground,’ he thought. He had argued for more men, but soldiers against the need for possible defense versus soldiers needed actively for the war was not an argument the king wished to hear.

The Commander accepted the ruling but still felt the worry churning in his gut.  The war was not one they were likely to win.  It was heresy to even think it, but in its fourteenth year there was no progress.  There was no real gain at this point either. The king’s father was drawn into the war and his son, now in his eight year of rule wanted nothing more than to do what his father failed to do.  He would not think of failure.  He would not think of the cost.

He would think of no end but victory.

There was grumbling among the others who did see what the war cost.  Many of whom had to pay the costs from their own lands.  The men they sent to battle couldn’t defend their lands.  Couldn’t work their fields or in their towns.  And they were being lost at a faster rate than they were being replenished.  Already populations dipped so low that some smaller villages had to be abandoned, combining with others so that they could survive.   

The grumbles were getting louder and while the king may have declared no quarter, the Commander suspected there was a limit beyond which his barons could be pushed.  He strongly suspected they were on the threshold of that.

As he paced slowly down the length of the corridor, trying to court sleep that would not come, he wondered at the cost of rebellion.