The wind was warm and sweet in summer's advent, the earth beneath him fragrantly verdant. Riding at the head of a force one hundred thousand strong, ten thousand mounted, was the headiest sensation he ever remembered feeling, an exhilaration that was powerful, almost sexual. He had the sense that the very earth was moving with him as he rode, surrounded in the fierce vibration, the deafening sound of his army on the move, blackening the landscape behind him. The closer the contingent came to the Manteids, the more powerful his excitement grew. While a number of those riding with him, commanders and foot soldiers alike, were responding, as he was, to the summons of the Cymrian horn, the vast majority, not being of Seren ancestry, were in full muster, primed, they believed, to lay siege to the Bolglands. It had initially been awkward to observe the confusion that the tiny minority of Cymrian soldiers was evidently experiencing. The great Moot, the legends said, was a place of deep power, where the very land itself enforced the laws of the Council, an agenda of minimal civility and contained behavior wherein the many factions of the Cymrian kingdom had been able to meet and conduct the business of keeping peace and planning the building of the empire.
