I must start with a disclaimer. I am not the best storyteller, and I do not intend to be one.

  With that stated, we must go back two centuries ago to start this story. It had been a handful of months since you fled and we received the message that you were an assassin. Whether that claim was real or not, it matters not for this story.

  Many things had happened in those previous months, but most importantly, it was when we expropriated your lands and conducted several investigations there.

  What about the guard, you ask? I was hoping you would take longer to ask that, to be honest.

  Of course, the family was devastated, but none thought you had killed him. Though now that I am looking at you, it is evident that you did. I will not ask for specifics. We are all here with blood in our hands, do not act like you are the only one.

  Anyhow, Jafar's family was left without a breadwinner, so I gave them a little opportunity. Your absence from the palace was heavily noticed; Rani grew grumpier without her toy, and my workload increased severely. I offered Aya to be my personal scribe as she was the brightest mind I had seen for someone of her age, therefore securing for her the position of scribe of commoners in the future if she were to comply.

  Relax, Ayad.

  No, I did not reap her. I always prefer older people, in any case, I was interested in Mirah, not Aya. How amusing that you are not even surprised by the idea, but we must admit that the housewife had quite the body for a commoner.

  But coming back to the subject at hand, Aya accepted the deal. I also offered her your accolade as by Ydazi law there had to be an heir if possible, so that made her the matriarch of the Ayad family.

  Aya Ayad. It was amusing back then, and it is still now.

  Rani, you say? She accepted the offer without any fuss. She wholeheartedly believed that by basically taking hostage Mirah and her, you would come. Of course, you never did.

  …

  As I was saying, Aya Ayad did her job, therefore reducing my load greatly. It's astonishing how a girl who had barely reached the two digits of age could be this competent. You were already competent, but Aya was even more so.

  But we have focused too much on the Ayads. You honestly do not seem to know what has happened to the world, so let me put it bluntly. The war that we had been expecting with Loyata sparked.

  Most sultanzade and emirs were mobilized to the war. Most out of pure bloodlust, all out of free will. We were raised for violence and war, raised in violence and war even if Ydaz had been at peace for half a century. In a way, it was the only thing that we knew.

  Amusingly enough, Rani and I were declared the commanders of the military. A sultry diplomat and an underage girl. Truly the best commanders out there.

  Do not ask me why, even now, I still do not have an answer. Well, I have a hint, but I will reserve it for a bit later for the sake of compelling storytelling.

  …I stated that I did not intend to be the best storyteller, but I will still act like one, nonetheless. And what is a storyteller without a flair for the theatrics?

  Going back to the subject at hand, the guess I had back then for why we were made the commanders of the military mostly stands: Aaliyah-al-Ydaz did it because it was amusing to her.

  So there we were, Rani and I, leading the army of Ydaz against the Loyatan Coalition. We expected to stomp them out, but there was a variable we had not accounted for.

  Quantity.

  You see, we did expect the Loyatans to employ assassins. We did not expect the Loyatans to be assassins.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  The numbers that should have been in the tens were in the thousands, and they had been preparing this invasion for a long time now. At that point, we did not know it, but the reason for this unprecedented number of assassins was my half-brother Hassan. Do you remember him?

  He killed your mother? I did not hear that story, huh.

  Be as it may be, Hassan had been disinherited by our mother and he fled to Loyata, where he decided to teach Nurture to the assassins. Assassins are feeble as drugs not only take a toll on the mind but also the body, so having them learn Nurture created a positive feedback loop where the assassins could allow themselves to muster more forces as their members would survive their twisted vital arts.

  This is not to say that these troops were great in quality, but an assassin was far more competent than a soldier at killing, so these assassins in the thousands were an army of their own.

  And Loyata still had their army.

  We felt the might of the assassin army when they overran the whole eastern fortifications of the country in a single day. There is no need for sieges when you can just infiltrate the fortress and execute their defenders, after all.

  So the Loyatan-assassin army marched fast.

  We had not been to combat once and Aaliyah-al-Ydaz had already had enough. Oh, she left the position of 'commanders' still on us, but it was obvious that when Aaliyah-al-Ydaz was on the field, she would be the one commanding.

  We had orders to hold the line at our encampment located between the Ridged Highlands and the Whistling Sands. With our intelligence, we knew for a fact that as numerous as the assassins and the Loyatan army were, we still outnumbered them by almost three times. Let alone in quality. We were a professional army, they were just a step up from levies. This was a question that was on all of the sultanzade minds during those days: why bother attacking? Loyata could not win, the assassins could not win. So why attack?

  There was a reason for that, of course.

  The head of the assassin offensive was my half-brother, and as many delusions of grandeur Hassan had, he was not retarded. Though Rani liked to argue otherwise.

  But those days we had to hold until the arrival of the Sultanah would not be easy ones.

  The assassins had long infiltrated inside the Whistling Sands, and as you may know, that place hosted the greatest concentration of monsters in the Qiraji. We had not expected their mastery over drugs, and we certainly had not expected them to control the monsters.

  Control is too strong of a word, though. The assassins had baited the monsters lingering on the dunes with their drugs and brought them head first to the encampment.

  They were so many…

  Monsters cannot do anything against cultivators. Even I could just handle multiple of them at the same time with my handful of Haya. Older sultanzade were divisions of their own if not outright legions. But the same could not be said for the soldiers. And sultanzade were sultanzade, so they did not want to spend their breath squashing rabid animals. Well, some did, but only for the thrill of the hunt. They ended up giving up out of exhaustion.

  I am mostly convinced that the assassins threw all the monsters of the Whistling Sands at us. Djinns and feral dwellers are somewhat manageable, even by foot soldiers. But rocs were menaces. Overgrown birds with many meters of wingspan and with talons sharper than swords, their sight alone infused fear into the weak.

  Normal arrows would not kill one unless you hit them right on the eye, and maybe you do not know of archery, but that was still hard for sultanzade donning the sense stance. So you had these flying behemoths that could grab two soldiers easily with their claws and drop them a few seconds later, killing those two soldiers with the height, and then gravity killing a handful of others when the human projectile inevitably hit the ground.

  Many soldiers died, but even after exterminating the whole monster population, we still had many more. But what mattered was not the quantity of soldiers we had remaining compared to the incoming invaders, but their enthusiasm.

  Ayad, wars are won with two key elements: food and morale. And we had just lost one of them after losing many soldiers to the local fauna. At least we had not lost the former as the first thing we expected for the assassins to do was poison our water and rations, and sabotage our supplies, so those were impenetrable with the amount of guards we dedicated to protecting them.

  But still, the damage was done.

  Maybe not in the body of the war machine, but its mind.

  Some of the more military-savvy sultanzade did point that out, but Rani and I were the commanders. Now, I may have had martial training, but martial training does not exactly correlate to military one, even less experience. And if it was not the case, I was still a child by most accounts. Rani was even less capacitated for that.

  It is an amusing thing, really. Those sultanzade that pointed out our diminishing morale did not bother to help the soldiers in their majority.

  But yes, those were exhausting nights dealing with monsters. Thousands of them, and each one could require ten troops to kill them without losses. Not that they allowed themselves to be surrounded by ten soldiers. Aaliyah-al-Ydaz came a few days later as she had promised, but she did not like what she saw. A damaged and exhausted camp when we were supposed to be a military hegemony. It was the morning of…

  …

  Come in.

  How about we take a little break?