49 My Duty Is Here

When Ikaris and his companions left the inn a while later, they were all brooding, none of them taking the initiative to break the uneasy silence. The Warring Lands were different from what they had imagined.

As the name implied, emerging nations were continually at war with each other, the victors supplanting the vanquished, who were themselves quickly replaced by newcomers. Few immigrants managed to establish fiefdoms larger than a barony, and that was no accident.

This place was dangerous!

Deep in the Forsaken Lands, a wall twice as high as the Great Wall enclosed an immense territory ten times the size of the Earth. It was not to protect this blessed land, but to prevent a certain kind of evil from getting out.

The other name for the Warring Lands was the Rune Nightmare Realm. A bombastic name to describe a living hell that contrasted with the temperate climate, lush vegetation and abundant resources that this wonderland promised.