"Lost to us?" Tiberius echoed back, the words tasting strange on his tongue.
He could not think of a single moment in the last century where the South had ever truly been theirs to lose. To his recollection, it had always been a fractured landscape of petty, bickering principalities, stubborn and wild.As bloodthirsty for each other blood as for those of outsiders.
Still, if this development had caused such profound dismay in the old Ghost of Arlania... well, a man was only ever powerless when he deliberately decided not to grasp at the iron tools he was given.
