There was a time when the Empire believed in only one kind of waging war.

It struck directly, with force and certainty. No feints. No diplomacy. No understanding of terrain. Just a wall of steel and fire crashing forward in an overwhelming full frontal assault. The generals called it purity of doctrine. The soldiers called it glory.

Across the centuries, three campaigns — each more ambitious than the last — came to define the Empire’s legacy. Not for their triumphs, but for their ruin. Each ended in a cataclysmic defeat so profound that it brought the Empire to its knees, hollowed its strength, and pushed it perilously close to irrelevance. These failures are etched in the history books not as battles fought, but as warnings ignored — until at last, under new leadership, the Empire forged a different path.

The First Campaign was fought in the highlands, where the enemy’s language and customs were strange to the Empire. The generals drew no maps. They simply charged. The hills swallowed them whole. Few returned. This land remains unknown to the empire to this day and much distrust lingers hampering trade.

The Second Campaign took place in a gleaming valley beneath silver capped mountains full of a vibrant and productive populace. The Empire believed it could again conquer and assimilate this bastion of creativity and production, re-making the valley in it’s own image. The assault failed before it began. The enemy didn’t fight. They simply walked away, leaving the Empire to conquer an abandoned field of mud and grass. The Third Campaign crossed the sea, where the emperor laid claim to a distant inheritance long abandoned — but now, the Empire sought to rekindle it. There, two kingdoms already ruled in balance. The Empire arrived with unfamiliar banners and unfamiliar ways, demanding homage and parlay. They were denied. The assault was relentless and persistent, yet still faltered. The sea itself seemed to turn against them. Three campaigns. Three defeats. The same strategy each time — full frontal assult.

Those who survived the foray learned, and the Empire changed. It no longer charged blindly into the unknown — drunk on its own glory. Instead, it listened, it mapped, it forged alliances. It grew — not through dominance, but through design. Battles were still fought, but with new strategies. Victories came not only by steel and blood, but also through diplomacy and trade. Even the once thorny, thistle-choked lands seemed to yield more easily. And with that, prosperity followed.

But peace and prosperity breeds memory loss.

In time, the army grew happy and proud. A new generation of officers rose — brilliant, eloquent, and untested. Among them was one whose voice carried farther than the rest. His name was never recorded the same way twice, but the soldiers called him the Standard-Bearer.

He had read only of the Empire’s recent triumphs, never its older wounds. To him, success had come through strength, not subtlety. He studied the old war songs and saw poetry, not pain. When asked how he would lead, he said, “Straight through the center, as it should have always been.”

The elders warned him. “We charged three times and were thrown back three times. We changed because we had to.”

He smiled. “Then you lacked conviction. I do not.”

And so, the Fourth Campaign began.

Whether it ended in conquest or calamity, the Empire would not forget this time — at least for a while.