Excerpt: Empire

Atop a horse, I never feel steady. I’m always being pulled one way or another—up, down, forwards, backwards, but mostly side to side. I’ve been in this saddle for days now, part of a large campaign marching to Nolan. Which is a joke, I’m no more a soldier than I am a horseman. My father, however, desires me to be both. And both I would be.
“Come along, Your Highness, we must keep ahead of the troops,” General Myghal urged me. I just nodded, but I’m sure I looked a bit green. Then again, the General might believe that was my natural coloring. He rarely saw me otherwise.
I looked around at the landscape. This would be my last chance to see it quite this way, at least for many years. On our return, all of this land would be razed. I had seen it before. I wished it were not so. The trees were tall, lively birches and white oaks. They were not close together so thick green grew all between them. My horse Pryder had eaten huge mouthfuls of it on our last (official) stop. He too was preparing for the future dearth of vegetation. Seeing sky this blue raised my spirits, which everyone thought sulky back home. If only Father would allow me to leave Caluth when I wasn’t accompanying a military campaign. Why was the world above such a brilliant azure when in Ildon it was a desolate gray? Father would probably call it the color of civilization.
Beyond these trees, I could see the land slowly rolled up to the Alb Mountains in the distance. Sometimes those mountains seemed to glitter. My tutor said it was an optical illusion, but he said a lot of dull things like that. The common folk said that magical beings of light lived up in those mountains and that those brilliant flashes were them. There was no way of knowing who was right. The mountains had been forbidden to everyone in the Empire so long as Ilsæca had existed.