Chapter 170: Mobilization Begins
The kingdom had never mobilized for total war.
The Second Demeterra War — seventy years ago — had been a defensive action fought primarily by the standing military with militia support. The garrison revolts of fifty years past had been internal suppressions, not mobilizations. The minor border skirmishes that dotted the kingdom’s history were handled by provincial forces without centralized coordination. The Sovereign Dominion had never committed the full spectrum of its institutional capability to a single, unified military effort.
Until now.
The Mobilization Decree — signed by King Aldren, countersigned by Marshal Boreth, authorized by the Sovereign — was a thirty-two-page document that transformed every institution in the kingdom from peacetime to wartime configuration in forty-eight hours. The speed was possible because the institutional infrastructure existed — the framework had been designed by Zephyr during the kingdom’s founding era, updated by successive administrations, stress-tested during the Crimson Alert, and maintained by the Ministry of War’s contingency planning division, which existed for the sole purpose of ensuring that a piece of paper could convert a peaceful kingdom into a military machine without the chaos that typically accompanied such transitions.
Military Mobilization
Standing army: 84,000 troops, already deployed. The Southern Field Army (60,000) repositioned to the Ashwall’s central and western sectors. The Garrison Reserve (24,000) distributed across the Ashwall’s secondary positions and the kingdom’s interior defense points.
Militia activation — Stage Three (full): 225,000 militia troops, activated across all twelve provinces. The militia system — designed during the kingdom’s early years — converted every able-bodied adult between eighteen and fifty into a tiered military asset. Stage One militia: 60,000 trained reservists with previous military service. Already activated during the Crimson Alert. Stage Two militia: 90,000 partially-trained citizens with basic combat certification, activated now. Stage Three militia: 75,000 minimally-trained citizens whose primary contribution was labor — fortification construction, supply transport, field engineering — rather than front-line combat.
Total mobilized force: 309,000.
The number was impressive on paper. The reality behind the number was more complicated. Of 309,000, approximately 84,000 were professional soldiers capable of sustained combat against a blessed enemy. The remaining 225,000 were militia — citizens whose training ranged from competent (Stage One) to adequate (Stage Two) to "can carry a spear in the correct direction" (Stage Three). The militia’s value was not quality but mass: they could hold fortifications, transport supplies, build defensive works, and — in extremis — fill gaps in the line with bodies that the enemy had to spend time killing.
Economic Mobilization
The Ministry of Coin transitioned to wartime economic authority. The transition involved:
Crown emergency procurement: the government’s authority to requisition goods and services at fixed prices, bypassing the commercial market. Grain, metal, leather, timber, and medical supplies were designated as "Crown priority materials" — any producer or supplier was required to sell to the Crown first, at Crown-set prices, before private sale was permitted.
Industrial redirection: the forge-cities — Ironhold, Cinderpit, the Dwarfhaven manufacturing district — were directed to prioritize military production. Weapons, armor, siege equipment, and fortification materials displaced civilian goods. The economic impact was immediate: civilian construction halted, commercial metalwork orders were cancelled or deferred, and the forge-cities’ populations — already working extended hours — transitioned to around-the-clock military production.
Agricultural requisition: the Shimmerfields’ blessed harvest was designated as a military supply priority. Twenty percent of the province’s grain output was redirected to military supply depots — enough to feed the mobilized army for approximately three months, provided the harvest continued at its blessed rate and provided the supply chain remained uninterrupted.
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Religious Mobilization
Pope Harken issued the Pastoral Wartime Directive — a formal instruction to every priest in the kingdom to redirect their ministry from civilian spiritual care to military spiritual support.
The directive was structured. It had to be — the Crucible’s fifteen religions served different gods with different relationships to combat, and not every religion’s priests were suited for front-line military service.
Ordinist priests: full military deployment. Orderian’s Forge and Order domains made Ordinist healing and reinforcement blessings the backbone of the military’s priestly support structure. Every Ordinist priest in the kingdom — approximately 2,400 — was assigned to a military unit or a military hospital.
Pyreist priests: combat deployment. Vaelthyr’s Flame domain made Pyreist fire-warriors the most directly combat-effective religious element. The 800 Pyreist-certified combat priests were assigned to front-line units, with priority to the Ashwall garrison.
Howlist priests: military deployed to Northern Command. Fenrath’s Frost and Beast domains made the 600 wolf-beastman priests essential for the Frostmarch’s containment operations against the northern threat.
Bloomist priests: field hospital deployment. Veranthis’s Growth and Life domains (ironic, given that the enemy’s primary domain was Growth) provided specialized healing for biological hazards — poisoning, disease, organic contamination — that Ordinist healing addressed less effectively.
The remaining religions — Scriptism, Revism, Crushism, Gleanism, Tidalism, Bastionism, Starism, Quietism, and those aligned with the nascent Mechanist philosophy — contributed priests in smaller numbers, assigned to support roles: communication relay, archival documentation, morale maintenance, and the particular institutional service that every faith tradition provided in wartime, which was to tell frightened people that they mattered and that their fear was normal.
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Home Front
The mobilization’s most visible effect was in the cities.
Ashenveil — the capital, population 280,000 — transformed overnight. The Commercial Quarter’s shops, which had been selling peacetime goods to peacetime consumers, reconfigured their inventory to military supply. Leather workers who had been producing belts and bags began producing equipment straps and scabbards. Tailors who had been sewing festival clothing began sewing military uniforms. Bakers who had been selling bread to households began baking in bulk for military supply trains.
The population’s response was — as collective responses always were — uneven. Some embraced the mobilization with patriotic enthusiasm, volunteering for militia service before their call-up arrived. Some accepted it with resigned compliance, understanding that the demand was necessary even if the cost was personal. Some resisted, quietly — the small resistance of individuals who hid surplus grain instead of selling to the Crown, who paid bribes to have family members exempted from militia service, who engaged in the petty self-preservation that mobilization’s ideological framework classified as unpatriotic but that human nature classified as survival.
The Crown Guards — the city’s military police — received wartime enforcement authority: the power to arrest hoarders, requisition private transportation, and impose curfew in designated security zones. The authority was used sparingly. Aldren had given specific instructions: "Enforce wartime rules. Do not create wartime resentment. The citizens who resent us today are the militia soldiers we need tomorrow."
Children noticed the mobilization first. The schools — free public education was one of the kingdom’s most popular innovations — continued as normal, but the children noticed that their fathers were leaving, that their mothers were working longer hours, that the rhythms of civilian life were shifting toward something harder and more urgent. The children didn’t understand war. The children understood absence, and absence was the mobilization’s most honest tax.
Ryn watched from the Ministry of Whispers’ intelligence bullpen — the open-plan workspace where junior analysts processed the river of information that flowed from the kingdom’s intelligence apparatus into categorized, assessed, and distributed reports. He was not a soldier. He was not a priest. He was a boy who had volunteered for intelligence work because his skills — language, observation, analysis — were more useful behind a desk than behind a shield.
He understood the numbers. He understood the strategic picture. He understood, in the abstract way that young analysts understand, that 309,000 people were being repositioned like pieces on a board for a game that would be played in blood.
What he didn’t understand — what the numbers couldn’t teach and the briefings couldn’t convey — was that every one of those 309,000 was someone’s child, someone’s parent, someone’s friend. The mobilization was a military operation. It was also 309,000 stories, each one personal, each one terrified, each one hoping that their story’s ending would be a homecoming rather than a funeral.
Ryn processed the reports. The reports didn’t contain stories. The reports contained numbers, timelines, and recommendations. He processed them, and he tried not to think about the fact that the reports would eventually contain the word "casualties," and that word would convert stories into statistics.