Summary of Chapters 1 - 3

The prologue will not be summarized because it is a summary (of the setting) itself.

Lieutenant Lucius Atratus is introduced. He is seventeen and lives in Freboria, a northern province in the Monarchy on the border with the Republic. He is a talented mage, and, in accordance with his late father’s wishes, he attends the Freborian Military Academy with the intention of one day being a powerful officer-sorcerer in the provincial army. As a senior cadet, he has the rank of Lieutenant. He lives with his mother and sister. One day, during a raid on the town, the Count of Freboria is assassinated. Lucius and his friend Bentley Leeds pursue the escaping raiders with the intention of avenging the assassination when they are captured by invading Republican forces whose arrival coincidentally coincides with the raid.

Major Alexander Cutler is thirty-three and a medical officer in the Republican Army. His family lives in the central-southern “breadbasket” region of the Republic, but their farm raises horses rather than crops. He spends most of his time abroad in command of various field hospitals; even when there is no war, he is often deployed to disaster sites, away from his wife, daughter, and son. He also has close ties with his brother, an entrepreneur in the glass industry. When given liberty, he spends time with his family and paints. After celebrating Spring Festival with his family, he is ordered to the Saragian Peninsula, where he boards the FPS Oisau. This ship should take him to an island in the Ribecarian Gulf where he is to conduct a health inspection of a magic research laboratory. From there he is to sail to the northern shore of the Ribecarian, where he will be assigned a field hospital to care for soldiers wounded in the conflict with the Monarchy.

After being captured, Lucius is treated with oddly varying degrees of civility; while one soldier provokes him and then shoots him, one of the medics seems to sympathize with him. Here, he learns that mages of exceptional ability are being captured by Republican forces and sent off to a mysterious internment camp. After being treated for the gunshot, he is loaded onto a truck with other mages and sent southward. On the truck, he is routinely forced to drink a sedative that keeps him unconscious most of the time; clearly a precaution against his abilities. During the Republican celebration of Spring Festival, he and the other mages are able to escape at the cost of a guard’s life, but Lucius alone is recaptured. He is then treated more harshly. Shortly thereafter, he arrives on an island in the Ribecarian Gulf and is taken into a dungeon thereon. In a last, futile attempt to escape, he kills a guard, but receives no punishment beyond a nasty burn to the back from a wand used to subdue him. From another guard, Lucius learns that he is to be forced to aid in unethical magical research into “weapons of great potency” by a megalomaniacal Republican general under these grim conditions.