AN: A little short and scatterbrained for my liking but I don't want to make you guys wait anymore, so here it is.
Chapter 1, War for the Border Princes.
It had been only a couple months and I was already feeling the pressure of waging war against an entire region. It took quite a bit of rapid shuffling to make sure my exhausted soldiers got to recuperate after the constant battling and marching they underwent. Those who had been left to defend house and home while we were gone had to step up and fast in these last couple months.
The first month was just making sure we weren't overwhelmed via sheer numbers and thank the gods that we had so many mages now. Numbers had really started to swell in the year before I left for Karak Drazh with just over a thousand known mages with various degrees of knowledge in Drachenruhe, most of them concentrated in Drachenhohle, the capital and headquarters of the mage council.
Now it was time for their end of the bargain to fully come due and help crush the attacking forces under foot. Between the widespread use of the aegis spell and hundreds of mages that rode off to do battle on the various fronts we had, we had managed to survive mostly intact. Casualties were in the thousands and we had lost dozens of mages already by the end of the first month and now another month later it was not quite double the losses but it was bad enough for me.
It was truly fortunate that we had grown our population as much as we did from the people flocking to our banner, both from the borderlands and the collapsing empire that was slowly rotting away. Hundreds of thousands now lived within the borders of Drachenruhe which now was expanded to the north and south.
The bits of land that had been to the south of Drachenruhe and east of Mud Mound was now under my control and so were the places to the east of Akendorf and north of Drachenruhe. It was taking soldiers off the battlefield to garrison all these pieces of land and ensure the safety of my new subjects which is why the dual surprises that just arrived was so important, more now than ever.
First was the letter from Hadebrand Adorf declaring his support and fealty to me as his queen with ten thousand of his soldiers already marching to my aid under his command. Second was the small army of dwarf slayers that had shown up, apparently they had all thought that this time of year was a great time to start seeking their doom in the borderlands and act as mercenaries for cheap.
Naturally I purchased the contract of every last one of the thousands strong force. The timing of it was great but I wished my stomach would stop rebelling, seriously I had thrown up for the two last weeks or so and I was really tired of it. Oh! Someone's at the door, that's probably lunch. I quickly got up and opened the door, the massive metallic deadbolt now leaning against the door frame with a slight thud instead of its usual state of blocking off the door.
In that instant of opening the door, I smelled one of the most foul things I have ever smelled in my life and that had a LOT of stuff on that list. Stumbling away from the door, I grabbed the trashcan that I had off to the side and threw up into it. I looked up at the dish in the now very nervous servant's hand, it was steak and potatoes and the very thought of eating steak right now turned my stomach.
What? I loved steak, why would I… Oh fuck. It just clicked in my mind, I was pregnant. I hadn't noticed my last two periods, I've been having morning sickness for the last two weeks, and now meat I could eat just fine yesterday, I couldn't stand the thought of today. I must be seriously dense, no wonder I'd been getting weird looks from everyone and they had started coming up with excuses recently as to why I should be cooped up in here and not on the battlefield or aiding spell research.
Granted, I was going to have to avoid the battlefield for a while even if I wasn't pregnant. The last dozen battles I had fought had been massacres and a little morale draining for my side, there were not many who wanted to clean up the blackened soot and charred body parts that I left behind in my wake.
And I needed to help orchestrate the entire war instead of running around mindlessly swinging my sword at things even if I was amazing at doing that. Ulrich and Cobbelly might have done a good job while I was gone but they did NOT want to do that again anytime soon which meant I needed to do my job as the ruler and take a break from being our superweapon.
Still, they should have at least mentioned the possibility of it to me, they've known me for over five years now. They knew I sucked at subtle things like this, they had gone over things with me enough to have realized that, they even cracked jokes about it every once and a while. I might be better than Drax but that wasn't exactly a high bar to reach.
Oh gods, I'M going to be a parent, ME. I can barely take care of myself, let alone another person. Granted, I've had a surprising amount of success with kingdom building, current events excluded, and a very large section of the multiverse has heard of what happens of that one time I got made a regent and I ended up destroying the kingdom that many fables have called a utopia.
I had intellectually known I would probably be forced to have kids at some point in order to avoid the stresses of being heirless caused Camelot and led many to join my own banner in rebellion against my father. But now I had to consider more than who I would have to fuck to get pregnant, that had been solved with what had to have been the threesome between myself, Ida, and Anders.
A large part of me wanted to create an obscenely powerful version of the Aegis of Me that held some sort of offensive capabilities and just keep my kid stuffed in there for the rest of their lives however long that would be. But not only would that go against my own beliefs and be entirely a utterly terrible idea for many reasons but my kid would definitely hate me for pulling a rapunzel on them. Which, admittedly, was a massive part in why I won't do so no matter how much I wanted to.
Maybe my kid shall inherit some of my magic resistance? The way Chaos infects people was generally either via magic radiation or from the person inviting them in themselves for whatever poisoned benefits they could get. While I doubt my kid could inherit my fiat backed anti divination but most people get by without anything like that so my own should be just fine, probably…
I should take up blacksmithing again, it's been over almost two decades since I've last banged metal against an anvil but if I'm going to have a kid then they need to be able to bitchslap bloodthirsters by the hundred before I'm going to feel safe and that means they need a weapon and armor and outside of a dwarf runelord or lizardmen slann deciding to make it, I was the best choice for powerful magical items at the moment.
It would take years, possibly an entire decade before I would be able to satisfy myself with my level of work and I would have to shift most of my magical study to making magical items but it would be worth it for my child. Sure, I could cash in my newly earned favor with the dwarfs for armor sets for my kid but I had intended for that to be used for getting their aid in fortifying the Blood River which I would then take over the space between it and Drachenruhe as my own and use that to block any invading greenskin waaagh.
Yeah, I was definitely going to take up blacksmithing again, maybe hire a dwarf to make sure I don't fuck up too badly when figuring out my basics, but maybe not that far actually. I doubted I would be very well liked as a student for a dwarf, I did not have a good personality for learning under them or even for interacting with them for long periods of time. I may like them as a race but man, my personality and preferred way of life does not match up well with their culture.
So, I avoided as many personal interactions with them as possible without being rude and tried to be on my best behaviour and actually think before speaking whenever even possibly in their presence or if it could get back to them. Exhausting but not upsetting them was worth it.
Oh shit. I had started mentally rambling the instant I realized I was pregnant but the poor servant was still in the middle of the doorway with my would be meal. A quick check and thankfully it seemed that I had instinctively maxed out my mental time acceleration the moment I had registered my pregnancy and had gone into panic mode, so I hadn't been lost in my head for too long..
Sorting myself out, I decelerated and informed the poor man that it seemed I wouldn't be able to eat beef for at least the next few months and to let the kitchen know. The man quickly nodded and almost bolted back to the kitchen in order to escape the awkward situation that had been caused by the food he had been carrying. I had forgotten to ask for a replacement meal but I could tough it out until dinner with the couple fruits I kept on hand for when I got hungry in between meals.
Less than an hour later, the man showed back up with some fish and a salad. Luckily my stomach didn't rebel against me at the thought of eating fish and I took a break for lunch. I had never been so glad that I had pointed out the various local herbs that I remembered people using while cooking. It might have taken a bit to catch on but the massive reduction in bland foods being sent to me was well worth my efforts.
Seriously, I now understood why people went to war over spices, having to eat bland or over salted foods after living off of the average American's diet of fast food and the occasional home cooked meal was hell. I had given serious thoughts towards conquering Araby for their spices before I settled for figuring out what local herbs can be used to make food taste good.
Hopefully once this war was over, I could get our food culture going and share the wealth of having actually decent food. I might be a little spoiled when it comes to certain things in comparison to most living in this world but damn it, I wasn't going to give up good tasting food! And even if I have to grow massive amounts of crops myself to ease my consciousness, I was going to have my food the way I wanted it.
It still amazed me how random my thoughts could get, started off working on war documents, realized I was pregnant, went into paranoid parent mode, and somehow got onto the topic of conquering Araby for their spices because I dislike eating bland food and then finishing it off with growing my own spices somehow to ease the guilt of spending a bunch of money on spices.
Well, it was time to get back to work. As much as I enjoyed the mental distraction, I still needed to get all this paperwork finished and then go to my afternoon meetings before dinner and then the last minute details being worked out afterwards. I might dislike how much this digs into my life, but at least I now have the faint hope that my kid or one of their own children will take pity on me and take over as ruler in a few decades.
Pregnancy sucked, really, really sucked. Between the food cravings, mood swings, physical changes, and dealing with the overprotective morons I called friends, it wasn't something I was enjoying having to deal with. But in just another four or so months, I would finally pop out my kid and I won't have to deal with this ever again.
Or at least that's what I kept telling myself. Bah! I refuse to get lost in thought about this yet again, in a blatant change in topics, the war was currently at a standstill from winter sweeping through. With the aid of the dwarf slayers, Hadebrand's men, and the small trio of minor Border Princes down south near the Blood River, we were able to take hold of a significant sum of land.
I held the entire stretch of the road following the Skull River from Black Fire Pass down to Barak Varr and just a little bit past that to the west. For the most part, everything east of the Skull River, be it to the north or south, was mine. Only a small stretch of land south of the Blood River and north of the Badlands was still under Border Prince control but part of that was because I had no intention of going any further south than the Blood River.
The other part was that the prince of that land had not declared war on me as they had been too busy dealing with the stirred up greenskins from my passage through the Badlands. To the north in the Forest of Gloom there were still quite a few greenskins to deal with but that was nothing new.
Now with winter forcing everyone to take shelter to avoid all of their troops dying from the cold or lack of supplies as foraging becomes more and more scarce, I could get my house in order from growing more than ten times our previous size. Drachenruhe might have been rather large for a princedom but that had nothing on the number of princedoms that had fallen to my forces.
With each piece of land I took, I had to make sure they wouldn't be turned to ruins and burnt to the ground by the wildlife that filled the borderlands while I did battle with everyone else. With a month or two before hostilities could resume, I was shuffling around what I could without risking a surprise attack from a prince that didn't mind the casualties that attacking right now would cause.
It was hard work to do repairs to walls and buildings during winter but it was one of a few, very rare chances we were likely going to get before the war ended and I wasn't going to let it pass me by. I might be stuck in Drachenhohle for a while to avoid people freaking out and to prevent anything from harming my unborn child but I could still hound everyone else into doing the work I wanted.
What we did in the next couple of months was going to be vital to our ability to continue waging war against the united Border Princes. It had been mostly men that had been conscripted into waging war against my people and that left a lot of women and children alone and very lightly guarded.
This meant we had to leave enough troops behind every single time we took over a settlement and drained our already limited manpower. My plan was to train and arm the least risky settlements so they could defend themselves and let me pull more of my troops from their garrisons without leaving those left behind to die.
It was still dangerous to train and arm people whose loved ones you've killed but I had a few things going for me. One was that they would not be able to reach anywhere near the level skill and experience of my own soldiers in the short time they would be trained. Another was that they would also be armed with weapons that while decent and good enough for their purpose, are not nearly as high quality as the average soldier's gear.
It wasn't like I would be able to pull off what I have with normal soldiers, I had them all armed with weapons and armor made by the now very skilled blacksmiths that had to listen to dwarfs grumble about their shoddy work constantly and had fought a constant war against the beasts and greenskins that surrounded us for years.
And that didn't mention the veterans of my campaign against the now formerly known as the Black Crag. A fair number of which had gotten gifts of custom armor and or weapons in recognition of feats they had done. Now after resting from that campaign, they were ready and raring to go to war against the enemies of Drachenruhe.
We might have been heavily outnumbered but the majority of their armies were hungry, poorly armed, peasant conscripts that would really rather be anywhere else than charging the battlelines of Drachenruhe. That does remind me, I should put some thought into changing the overall name of my now oversized princedom. Drachenruhe worked when it was just the area surrounding Drachenhohle and we had stretched it to fit in Mud Mound but it no longer fit what my people had become.
Maybe Drachenreich? Realm of the Dragon wasn't a bad name although I think that it might invite trouble from actual dragons, they probably won't be too happy with a human nation taking their name. Eh, I wasn't going to need a new name anytime soon. I've at least got months before the war ends and the speech I would have to give would be the perfect moment to announce it.
I was probably going to end up unifying the entire Border Princes wasn't I? I already had about a third of it under my control, all it would take was to take half of the remaining princedoms under control and the rest of them would surrender. I wasn't going to be the ruler of a princedom for much longer, I was going to be crowned queen of an unified borderlands and ruler of a faction that actually mattered in the eyes of the old world.
No longer would I be able to avoid dealing with the three emperors of the decaying empire, Tilea, Estalia, Araby, Bretonnia, and everyone else. I was going to have to be, I shuddered at the thought, diplomatic with my new peers. It was already far too late for me to stop this, it was probably too late by the time I had agreed to take on the halflings all those years ago when Cobbelly decided to follow me in defending his former homeland.
It was fortunate that I had a dim light at the end of the tunnel, my children or grandchildren might volunteer to take the throne from me and I'd be able to do fun stuff like recklessly mess with the boundaries of reality via magic or wage an one woman war against the entire skaven under empire.
Might have to work my way up to that last one, maybe I could start with Karak Eight Peaks? Probably not, it was going to take decades before I was willing to drop this burden off on the shoulders of any descendant of mine and with Karak Druzh right next to Karak Eight Peaks, it was going to be a decade at the most before I decided to repeat my feat of reclaiming a lost hold.
Whatever the case would be, it was time to get back to work, or rather bugging everyone else into doing their work as they tried not to hover around my now clearly pregnant self.
Chapter End.
