The fires eventually died, but the smoke lingered in the valley for weeks.
The immediate aftermath of "The Epic Punishment War" was not glory; it was a logistical nightmare.
The forest outside Axiomra was a scorched, blackened wasteland. The explosions and the chemical fires had sterilized the soil and terrified the wildlife.
Every deer, elk, and boar within thirty miles had fled.
Worse, there were nearly eight hundred enemy corpses scattered in the mud and ash.
Bilal stood on the battlements, staring at the carnage. He knew the 21st-century science of death: if those bodies were left to rot, the groundwater would be poisoned.
Cholera and typhus would sweep over his stone walls and kill the people the swords had missed.
"Strip them," Bilal ordered his men, his voice devoid of emotion.
It was a grim, horrific task.
The Green Tunic soldiers, their faces wrapped in vinegar-soaked cloths to block the stench of death, stripped the Swedish and Norwegian dead of their armor, their weapons, and their clothes.
The economy of Axiomra had flatlined. No merchants dared approach the valley of fire. With no trade coming in, Bilal had to recycle the dead.
The bloody, mud-stained tunics and wool cloaks of the enemy were not burned.
They were thrown into massive iron cauldrons, boiled in lye and ash to kill the bacteria, and then fed into the Water Mill's trip-hammers.
The clothes of the dead were beaten into pulp, dried on screens, and turned into the very Rag Paper that Bilal used to write his laws.
As for the bodies, Bilal could not burn them all; he didn't have the firewood to spare before winter.
Instead, he ordered mass trenches dug far downstream. The bodies were buried deep and covered with quicklime.
In three years, that soil would become the most fertile, nitrogen-rich farmland in Norway.
The enemy came to take his land; instead, they became the fertilizer that fed it.