[puffyn]

---- Arcoscephale, Turn 27 ----

Life in the Sinking Land is mostly quiet with brief flashes of chaos.

I spend my days training. Many young men have asked to join our forces. The forge billows blow without ceasing to produce new shields and armor. It takes many years of training to master the 12-foot spears that the full hoplites use, so I've been organizing a new regiment of hypaspists, with 8-footers and lighter armor. The lack of flanking cavalry in this land severely limits my tactical options, but I hope the hypaspists can partially replace them. We spend most of the morning running through the swamps in full battle armor. I've lost a few in the sucking mud, but the survivors are incredibly fast and unafraid of snake swamps.

In the afternoons I work with my veterans. The long months fighting through the swamps left many of them with festering wounds. The priestesses of Apollo and Athena have been tending to them, though, and virtually all are now back to fighting trim. We practice the fundamentals: speed by charging in full armor, spinning the line and charging again for hours on end until the ground on the hillside has been churned into mud; precision by shredding a rope with just the points of a spear in mere seconds; strength by lining up six deep as we would in the phalanx and pushing over trees with our shoulders (somehow the old Spartan drill is less impressive when we use scrawny, half-dead tree-like bushes rather than mighty oaks).

In the evenings we have aristeia, one-on-one contests of fighting prowess. I have always been a good warrior, but lately there is no escaping the fact that I have become abnormally quick. Balachandra gave me a finely-crafted spear which I adore. Its balance and lightness would make any man formidable in combat and, when, in my dreams, I am back at Godsgrave mountain, now I have this spear and it turns into a rod of light in my hands and burns the undead before they reach Thymbre.

But it isn't just the spear, nor the long hours of training. Against the most skilled silver shield I draw the poorest weapons from the pool, and even then I must hold back or humiliate them utterly. They are so slow. When we go into aristeia it is suddenly as if time slows down to half-time. Dodging spear-points becomes, if not easy, at least possible, and I barely have to wait for openings— if I wanted to I could tap his armor with my spear in the first seconds of the fight. Of course I allow them some dignity in the battle, but of course I still win every time. I am undefeated now in the aristeia for three months, and every night it gets easier. I am grateful that my skills have developed to this point, but it is odd.

But yesterday morning my peaceful training schedule was interrupted by Ialysos, a competent old hoplite who patrols the province with the light troops who will never (for one reason or another) join the full phalanax. His force surprised someone spying on them on the road to Vorgunmarsh, and though he tried to stop them, the cardaces chased the spy down and gutted him with their spears. Only afterward, from the dead man's markings, did they learn that this was no local rebel, but a scout from the kingdom of Machaka. I have heard strange things of this land, but for certain I wish them no ill. As a practical matter it would have been nice to interrogate the scout and find out what he was doing so far north of his own kingdom. I will send their ruler a message of condolence.

And now this morning Balachandra and his second-half-brother-twice-removed-on-his-second-father's-side Nirmai are rounding up all the mystics from their various places of study, yelling something in the local dialect and gesturing wildly to the north. Ah well, I have written enough for today; I'd better go find out what the babble is all about.

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