They said it was unity.
They painted it on every wall in the capital — great murals of soldiers marching shoulder to shoulder, different crests stitched onto different tunics, all pointing toward the same horizon. Coalition War, the proclamation read. A gathering of kingdoms to face a common threat. The Chancellor himself stood on the steps of the Crown Hall and spoke for two hours about brotherhood, about shared borders, about the duty of every able body to protect what had been built across generations.
He wore white the entire time.
The crowd below him was not white. It was grey and brown and patched-together, coats that had seen three winters without replacement, boots resoled with rope. Kael stood near the back of the square with his neighbor's cart blocking half his view, listening to words that seemed to float over the crowd rather than land in it. Unity. He rolled the word around in his mouth like a stone. Unity never needed so many graves.
He was twenty-two. He worked the grain mills on the eastern side of the city, the district they called the Low Quarter — which was not low in elevation but in everything else. He had lived there his whole life, same two rooms above the mill his father had worked before his lungs gave out from the dust. Kael had no quarrel with anyone across any border. He had barely made it beyond the city walls twice in his life.
The announcement came the following morning, posted to every district board in the kingdom. Conscription, they called it — though the word they used was selection, which Kael thought was a very elegant way of saying the same thing. Every male of working age from the Low Quarter, the Millside, the River Docks, and the Eastern Farmlands was to report to the registration office within three days. No mention of the Garden Districts. No mention of the Merchant Ring. No mention of the university quarters, where the Chancellor's own son was presumably still asleep.
Kael watched from the mill window as the recruitment officers moved through the Low Quarter streets. He noticed they did not write down names slowly, the way you might if you were carefully selecting. They wrote fast. Every name. All of them. The only men he saw turned away were the ones who could not stand without help, and even then, two of those were taken anyway and told they would find something useful for them.
An old woman next to him at the window, a flour-dusted baker named Maret, watched alongside him in silence for a while.
"They always take the ones who can't afford to say no," she said finally.
Kael didn't answer. He didn't have an answer.
He spent that evening fixing a loose board in the floor, the one that had always caught his foot in the dark. A strange thing to spend your last free evening doing. But it felt important to leave the room better than he found it, in case someone else ended up living there.
The third morning, they called his name.
He heard it from the square below before the officer even reached the door — someone had a list, and they were reading it aloud, and his name sat in the middle of it, between a dock worker named Sorin and a boy from the millside he barely recognized. He stood still for a moment. The loose board was fixed. The room was swept. His mother was three years dead and his father four. There was no one to say goodbye to, not really, which was either a mercy or the most quietly terrible thing he had ever thought.
He went downstairs.
He reported.
He did not say yes. He was never asked.