The world will never forget the day that the Undying Emperor died; unfortunately, public opinion has assigned me responsibility for this occurrence and what followed, so I find myself in the position of writing this apologia of my subsequent conduct in order to clear my name of both the unwarranted complaints and compliments lodged against it. I am told that the Loegrian edition of my previous memoir, which addressed the events that took place in my life prior to the abrupt and coincidental falsification of one of Emperor Koschei’s best-known appellations, found good reception in that distant corner of the Empire of France. I presume this was because I was viewed in much of the French Empire, including the great northern isle of Loegria, as a hero. The Golden Empire was a distant rival to France in the great games of thrones and empires, and the Golden Emperor a storybook villain to most French subjects.
However, I cannot assume that you, dear reader, will have seen my self-indulgent memoir, as my prior life is surely of little historical interest. Thus, in this volume, I will not presume any familiarity on the part of the reader with my memoir, and I beg the patience of those who have already read my work or are familiar with some of the events therein via certain other works.
I can only hope that I will be remembered fondly for what I have actually done, rather than being lauded or vilified for my alleged responsibility for the death of a man long thought unkillable. What is the more likely explanation—that a largely untrained war mage unwittingly slew an immortal being with a spell so subtle that it bypassed the many public and secret wards protecting the capital city, or that mortal magics can never truly postpone natural death forever? The fact that this inevitable failure of mortal magics happened to coincide with the day of my arrival in the imperial capital should not logically imply that I am somehow responsible.
Alas, the coincidence of my arrival with the emperor’s death appears to have gripped the imagination of the greater part of the population of Europe, or at least the portion of it that concerns itself with the fate of the Golden Empire.
Many tales have been told of Emperor Koschei I, covering both the adventures of his earlier life and his two hundred thirty-one year career as a monarch. Some of those tales are purest fiction and others true history; for my part, as a citizen of the Golden Empire with a modest education in history thanks to the books made available to me in my youth, I know that the truths can be stranger than the fictions and that official history sometimes contains less truth than fairy tales. However, the uncontested central fact of the matter is that Emperor Koschei ruled an empire in a mostly orderly fashion, albeit with a disordered personal life and an arguably unfortunate habit of designating each new wife or mistress’s first-born son with the title of “Heir-Son.”
Aside from his personal peccadilloes, he was mostly well-regarded by his subjects. Most of the failings of the government of the Golden Empire were ascribed to the various noble houses that his heir-sons founded and the amorphous bureaucracy that grew up around the gradually narrowing focus of his attention. This should be no surprise: It is a well-known fact of history that the longer a ruler reigns, the more fondly attached his domain becomes to his continued existence. The citizens of the original Roman Empire looked back more fondly on forty years of Augustus than three years of Caligula. For most of the citizens of the Golden Empire, myself included, we had never imagined a future without the seemingly eternal presence of Koschei. What motive would any citizen have for removing the stabilizing pillar at the center of the Empire?
Certainly I had none.
But I digress; I have not even introduced myself. My name is Mikolai Stepanovich. I grew up in Ruthenia, which at the time accounted for most of the western portion of the Golden Empire, the other notably large portions being Cimmeria and Khazaria. In the natural course of events, I volunteered for the Imperial Army to serve as a mechanic a few short weeks after I attained the age of majority. Shortly after I signed up, the recruiter from my home village finally caught up with me but was fortunately neither able to arrest me for draft evasion nor induct me into the infantry due to my existing enlistment. Also fortunately, his horse recovered admirably well in spite of the hard use he put it to while trying to determine my whereabouts; his mare was quite clever as horses go and generally pleasant to talk with, in contrast to her owner.
My choice to join the mechanics was a very soundly reasoned one, founded in a simple truth: As long as they know their job well enough to avoid releases of high-pressure steam or unsecured mechs with balance problems, mechanics have good odds of surviving a full term of service—much better than steam knights, who face similar risks related to steam and heavy machinery combined with the risks they assume facing artillery, mechs, and enemy steam knights at the front line of battle. This covers all the important facts of my life prior to the events of my previous memoir.
Unfortunately, there was a small mix-up involving a borrowed uniform, and both I and my new friend Vitold (a fellow volunteer mechanic who had been arrested for theft and chose to volunteer as an alternative to sentencing) were put on a train to Wallachia as part of a special task force under the command of the notorious General Ognyan Spitignov. And not as mechanics, either; we had been mistaken for steam knights. After our commanding officer abandoned us, I found myself forced by the circumstances at hand to wander half the length and breadth of Europe under the assumed identity of Marcus Corvus, commander of a free company. Under that identity, I earned a reputation—undeserved, I assure you—as a war mage, as it developed that I had some small measure of magical talent.
After arriving in Venice, I salvaged an old shipwrecked galley, repaired it into working order with the generous and charitable assistance of the Venetians, and with the assistance of Vitold and others added a flux-powered rowing engine to compensate for our lack of trained oarsmen. We encountered a few pirates along the way and briefly stopped at Negroponte and Constantinople. In the case of Negroponte, our visit was brief because there was little for us to do there after returning a missing noble; in the case of Constantinople, our visit was cut short by an unfortunate incident involving one of my officers making an unauthorized visit to certain portions of Sultan Allaedin’s palace, necessitating an unusually rapid transit of the Bosporus Strait with our quinquereme ahead of the Sultan’s steamships.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
After crossing the Axine Sea and encountering the wreck of one of the Golden Empire’s two circular-hulled battleships, we passed through the Cimmerian Strait without incident and arrived at Rome-upon-Tanais, the capital at the heart of the Golden Empire.
Unfortunately, our arrival at the mouth of the Tanais River was not without incident. Our entry into the harbor was blocked by the whim of a greedy underminister—one with operational control over a substantial, if not particularly tall, magical barrier. This underminister, stricken by some combination of greed and lust, demanded a very large cash bribe or a substantially smaller cash bribe accompanied by one or two female slaves. In the process, he managed to insult both my beloved Katya (whose worth he declared minimal) and the sultan’s youngest sister Gulben (who felt that one hundred fifty Venetian ducats was a paltry sum in comparison to her open market value).
When I found these terms unreasonable and objected, the underminister confidently insisted I was in no position to negotiate; I decided to demonstrate my negotiating position in relation to his security responsibilities by firing a cannon over the too-low barrier, aiming for an airburst of an explosive shell over the city using a disused tower as an aiming point. The shot went a little low, striking the tower. This resulted in the destruction of much of the miscellaneous collection of junk that had been stored in the top room of the tower. (How miscellaneous was that collection? Based on the debris I saw, it included a badly taxidermied hare, a hollow carved wooden duck, a jeweled egg, and a silver needle, that last item having been snapped in two as it fell, grabbed by a raven eager to seize a glittering object.)
Entirely coincidentally, within a minute of when that shot was fired, Koschei suddenly dropped dead while holding court in a completely different building, at ground level. I cannot emphasize too strongly that the tower targeted by our shot was attached to a wing of the Imperial Palace that had been one of the Golden Emperor’s older abandoned residences, a disused smaller palace within a palace left moldering in place for the better part of one hundred fifty years without anyone using it. That wing was so decrepit and near to total collapse that even the servants were forbidden from entering it; that, when the emperor and his court were notoriously callous about the safety of mere servants.
It is not even as if the damage I did to the tower was particularly noteworthy given the fact that after the harbor cannons were turned on the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Imperial Palace ended up getting struck by more than a dozen poorly ranged shots from medium and heavy bombards, causing substantial structural damage. My warning shot had been fired from a small portable bronze cannon, a light field piece meant for anti-personnel work, hardly a major piece of artillery in the grand scheme of things. Hardly anyone would be able to pick out the limited damage I caused to the palace an hour afterward.
Still, in the absence of any true understanding of cause and effect, the superstitious mind is inclined to connect matters based on coincidences in time, hence the popularity of dubious arts such as astrology and the reading of tea leaves. (I myself was trained in the art of reading tea leaves by an old superstitious peasant lady; there really is not much to it other than the memorization of patterns like “bear,” “livestock,” “dismemberment,” and “waxing half-moon,” which the charlatan then stitches together into a prediction like “my aunt’s livestock will be ravaged by a bear at the next half-moon.” A wise charlatan is advised to stick to more cheerful predictions, however—my aunt forever after blamed me for the bear that got into the pigpen three weeks later.)
The simple facts are as follows: Nobody knows what magics Emperor Koschei used to extend his vitality for so long, or we surely would have seen regular imitators. What was the price of his deathless vitality? If there is anything that stands out, it is that it had been longer than usual since he had last taken a wife—Koshei’s death came about thirty years after Princess Maria died giving birth to Sergei, who was promptly titled as the Twenty-First Heir-Son by the mourning emperor.
So, let us begin the story where my previous memoir ended: The red haze of the barrier that had blocked my passage into the harbor was fading. A junior officer of the navy of the Golden Empire was holding up a magic mirror, trying to converse with an underminister who suddenly had more important things to do than try to shake me down for a bribe.
Editor’s note: Available for purchase wherever books are sold. The Loegrian edition of Mikolai’s first memoir is broken up into two volumes, Accidental War Mage and Intentional War Mage.
Editor’s note: This is not true. Please see in particular the effort Gibbs Edwards gave to investigating Mikolai’s origins in Volume IV of The Decline and Fall of the Golden Empire, as well as the speculations in Chapters 7-9 of Emanuel Khan’s Critique of Pure Reign (soon to be made available in an accessible Latin translation from the original scholarly Persian).
Editor’s note: We have obtained agreement with the Loegrian publisher of The Adventures of Ragnar Rimhamar to include a limited number of relevant excerpts from the first twenty-six volumes of the Loegrian translation of that popular work where we feel it appropriate to expand upon certain gaps or inconsistencies in Mikolai’s account, along with various other works and primary source documents, which will be included as appropriate.
Editor’s note: Numerous scholars and experts disagree. See, again, The Decline and Fall of the Golden Empire and Critique of Pure Reign. Unfortunately, no other sources have come forward to fill in the details of Mikolai’s origins.
Accidental War Mage available for purchase wherever books are sold, but for the next two weeks, Get it while it's hot!
Intentional War Mage is presently available for pre-order, if you want to make a strong signal of support.
A Son of the Dragon, the "sidequel" following Prince Vlad, is still ongoing if you want something else to read in the mean time. As a reminder, if you follow through my author profile,
