The dawn following the battle was a harsh revelation of our new reality. Oakhaven was a city of ghosts. The four men we had lost were not just soldiers; they were our best stone mason, one of our few skilled hunters, and two of the strongest plowmen. Their absence left gaping holes in the delicate fabric of our community. The victory feast consisted of our usual meager rations, eaten in somber silence as we looked upon the dozen captured raiders—our new, unwilling workforce.
Implementing the 'Lord's Mercy' was far harder than declaring it. The prisoners, stripped of their weapons and dignity, were sullen, fearful, and resentful. My people, nursing their wounds and their grief, saw them as a constant, bitter reminder of their losses. The air was thick with a toxic mixture of hatred and fear.
I placed the prisoners under Borin's direct command. It was a calculated decision. Borin, the pragmatist, had been skeptical of my mercy but was unshakably loyal to my command. More importantly, none of the raiders would dare challenge his authority. His one eye promised swift, brutal retribution, and the memory of the flaming gateway was a potent deterrent.
Their first task was the most ignominious: the disposal of the dead. They were forced to haul the bodies of their own comrades, along with the scorched remains of their chieftain, out into the desert for the vultures to claim. It was a grim, psychologically crushing task, designed to strip them of any remaining martial pride and firmly establish their new status.
Following that, they were put to work on the wall. They were rebuilding the very defenses they had tried to destroy. The men of Oakhaven worked on one section, the prisoners on another, separated by a line of armed guards. The silence between the two groups was a palpable wall of hostility. A dropped stone, a muttered curse, could have ignited a riot.
"This is a mistake, Castian," Kael warned me one evening, watching the prisoners being marched back to the sealed-off hovel that served as their barracks. "You are keeping wolves in our sheep pen. They are waiting. The moment we turn our backs, they will bite."
"Wolves can be tamed, Kael," I replied, though a sliver of doubt remained in my own mind. "And we are not sheep. We are shepherds. A good shepherd does not kill every wolf he sees; he teaches it to fear his crook."
My focus, however, was already shifting to the next, more complex task. The system's new quest, ['A CITY OF LAWS'], demanded I build a civic foundation as strong as our physical walls. This was a challenge far more intricate than engineering a well or planning a defense. I was not just building a city; I was building a society.
I gathered the elders—Borin, Kael, and three others—in the manor. I began by drawing in the dust, not a blueprint for a machine, but a diagram of a concept.
"What is a crime?" I asked them.
The question was met with blank stares. "It is… when someone does something wrong," Borin offered, after a long silence.
"Who decides what is wrong?" I pressed.
"You do," Kael said immediately. "You are the Lord."
"I am," I agreed. "But what happens when I am not here? What happens if a man steals bread from his neighbor? Do you bring him to me? What if I am in the fields? What if I am away? And what is the proper punishment? A beating? Do we take his hand? And who carries it out? The victim? His friends?"
I was planting the seeds of abstract thought into minds that had only ever known the simple, brutal immediacy of survival. I explained the need for a written code, a set of rules that applied to everyone equally, from me, their Lord, to the lowest prisoner. It would be a law that did not change with a man's mood or his allegiances.
The first law we established was simple, born directly from our recent trauma. 'Murder,' the unjust killing of another citizen of Oakhaven, was punishable by death. There was no debate on this point.
But theft was more complicated. I argued against mutilation, the common punishment in the kingdom I'd left behind. "A man with one hand cannot build our wall or plow our fields," I reasoned, appealing to their pragmatism. "He becomes a permanent burden. Instead, the thief must repay what he stole threefold. Once to the victim, and twice to the city, for he has not just stolen bread, he has stolen our trust, our peace."
This concept of restitution, of a debt to society, was revolutionary. We debated for hours, my system-unlocked knowledge of civic planning clashing with their deep-seated traditions of retributive justice. I didn't simply impose my will. I guided them, argued with them, led them to the conclusions themselves, so that the laws felt like their own discovery, not my decree.
We established laws for property—each family was granted ownership of their hovel and a small plot for a personal garden, all recorded by me. We established laws for civic duty—a portion of every man and woman's labor was owed to the community for projects like the wall and the canals.
And we established laws for the prisoners. They were to be fed and housed. They were not to be beaten without cause. But any attempt to escape, or any act of violence against a citizen, was punishable by immediate execution. It was a harsh law, but it was a predictable one. It was mercy, but mercy with a spine of iron.
To enact these laws, I created Oakhaven's first civic institution: the Council of Elders. They would act as judges for minor disputes, with me as the final court of appeal. This delegation of authority was perhaps the most radical idea of all. It was the first step in transforming my absolute lordship into a system of governance.
The city began to heal. The physical wounds of the battle scarred over. The rhythms of work returned. And under the steady, unyielding pressure of Borin's watch and the city's new laws, the prisoners fell into a routine. The simmering hatred between the groups did not disappear, but it banked, like coals under a layer of ash. The prisoners were no longer a monstrous 'other'; they were the men who hauled the stones, the men who dug the ditches. Their individual faces began to emerge from the hateful monolith of 'the enemy'.
One afternoon, a section of the wall where a prisoner crew was working collapsed, burying one of the raiders under a pile of heavy stones. His comrades stood back, afraid to act. Before Borin could even shout an order, two Oakhaven men from the adjacent crew rushed over without hesitation. They dug frantically, side-by-side with the other prisoners, leveraging the stones away to free the trapped man.
They saved his life. He was their enemy, a man who had tried to kill them a few weeks prior. But he was also a fellow laborer, and the instinct to help a man in peril, the shared experience of working the same stones, had overridden their animosity.
I witnessed the event from a distance. It was a small, fragile moment, but it was a profound victory. The Lord's Mercy was not just a decree; it was beginning to grow in the hearts of the people. We were not just rebuilding our walls. We were rebuilding our humanity. The quest to forge a city of laws was succeeding, not just on the dusty floor of my manor, but in the souls of my people.