Homesteading in a fantasy world

While the actual war was finally over, I unfortunately couldn’t just go home. They still needed me to be the high general. Fortunately, most of the soldiers could be sent back, but we still needed to occupy and claim ownership of the defeated nation of Aetherhold.

While the people didn’t see actual war, they lost a lot of people, not just during the war but before it. It seems that the coming of religion wasn't as nice as I had expected, and before we got here, there was a lot of killing off the most religious people who did terrible things.

The population of Aetherhold was a little bit less than the population of the Triple Alliance. Now, it had fallen quite a lot, but there were still a lot of people left. Most of them were near the capital, so when our armies finally made it here after doing some detours, the harvesting season was fast approaching.

I wanted all of this, at least my involvement, to be over as soon as possible so I could go back home and do some harvesting, even with my broken body.

Things, however, didn’t seem like they would go so smoothly. The problem was the people; they were broken, and having them concentrated so close to each other was causing a lot of friction, like a lot, especially because everyone had a different opinion on how they should move forward.

A lot of people just wanted to destroy everything to do with religion and kill anyone who even thinks about it. Not everyone is so angry about it that they are willing to destroy. Some are even quite understanding, and while they know that the God, they were praying to was false, they believed that religion had good aspects to it. In some ways, they were correct.

If you don’t blindly believe and just look at the facts, true religious communities work together a lot more than non-religious ones, and as a result, they have a better support structure whenever life decides to get mean. Just as long as they don’t start blindly believing. Unfortunately, a few generations later, things usually don't go so well.

We have discussed this for almost two weeks, and the only reason the rest of the people haven't killed each other is because of our presence here. At first, everyone was in favour of just eliminating any presence of religion and people who spoke for it, but I was able to discourage those actions as I really didn’t want to be a part of genocide, especially when the people didn't deserve to be genocided against.

"I am getting tired of this, and our arguments are going in circles," I said to the gathered people in this makeshift meeting room. "We have only looked at one side of the problem and not talked about the other."

I was interrupted by the leader of Frontier's Collective. "Another problem? I’m starting to think this isn’t worth the time invested. Maybe we should just leave and let them kill each other however they please?"

My look made him shut up. "While I don’t disagree with you completely, there is the problem of us actually wanting to keep the land we are currently occupying. I’ve been thinking about that for a while now as the other discussion hasn't progressed in over a week now. Most of the people are here, but every one of us wants not just land but population as well, am I correct in thinking that?" Everyone nodded to that.

"That means if we can keep the population here in the capital, we will also need to finding a way to split the land evenly and make it so all three of us get a piece of the capital and its population is quite unfeasible.”

“A lot of the people living here also disagree with each other and are quite willing to fight, at least right now. From the scouting group, we know that there are a lot of abandoned villages where the population originally came from." I could see others starting to realize what I meant.

"Why don't we split the people up? Those who think similarly would go to similar villages. This would stop the current hostilities and give time for everything to calm down. Also allow us to properly divide the nation without having to worry about one of us getting basically all the population." A tentative agreement was made almost immediately, but there was a lot to discuss to get it properly figured out.

It took another week to gather all the information to find viable villages and towns to repopulate and make sure that the land would be divided not exactly evenly, but at least so it would make sense. The riches of the capital were divided also between the three of us, but they would mainly be used to restart the economy of this nation that would now be split into three.

There were still huge expanses of land that weren’t claimed between Aetherhold and our nations, but we still divided them up. So, when we finally got time and the population to properly claim those pieces of land, in the future, there wouldn't be any problems or border disputes. It also meant that we were at the end stretch, at least for me needing to be here.

The biggest problem actually didn’t turn out to be dividing the population, as they were quite eager to leave this place. The problem was food, as it always seems to be. The idiot had bet everything on this war and probably taking food from our lands.

The people were already starving, so supply lines would need to be made. The United Freeholds would probably need to support not just the conquered land but the other two nations as well, at least a little bit, because their projections didn't look good for the coming winter.

That was, however, the result of war, and when most of your working population was engaged in a war. Fortunately, the United Freeholds' fields were quite large, and with the druids and the land itself helping us all summer, the harvest looked to be quite bountiful. Still, us giving so much away would mean living on the razor's edge, as any unforeseen disaster would probably mean starvation for some.

When we all signed the papers, the world opened up to me, and while the two borders of our nations weren’t currently connected, I could still see everything inside this new part of our nation.

We gained the land that bordered the large river where we built the dam and headed south for quite a while. It also stretched all the way to the sea, almost looking like a corridor taken out of the land.

We gained 38% more population into our nation, split into two towns and 18 villages. This unfortunately meant we would need to build a really long road from the capital to the sea.

Now that all of this was done, I managed to convince Goose to take me home, while I left others to continue working on integrating the new territory and the people now a part of United Freeholds.

It was incredibly difficult to hold on to Goose, especially with my left arm that continued to give me trouble. Fortunately, we didn't have to go so fast, and I could just breathe in the fresh air and look towards the ground as it sped by. This was really relaxing and something I sorely needed.

What would have been at least a month’s journey back was now just a few hours, especially because we could just go straight over the forests and other natural barriers. The landing was a bit scuffed as I was completely tired by the end of the flight, but when I stumbled off Goose, and as my legs touched my very own land, I felt a surge of renewing energy. It couldn’t fix all the aches I was feeling, but it certainly was wonderful.

"Tim?" I yelled, and then I heard stumbling and falling in the house. "Rich, you're back?" Tim said with a happy voice as he rushed out of the house. I smiled back at him. "Let's fire up the sauna, and does Val have some good ciders currently available? I think that would hit the spot really well."

He didn’t even think for a moment and immediately nodded. What followed was blessed normality, which I grasped hold of with both hands, and I wasn’t going to let it go so I could slowly get back to a more normal mindset.