Chapter 74

The first signs of Vaelin's new war were subtle. A merchant in a neutral oasis reported that a royal caravan was selling iron tools at prices so low they were nonsensical. An Ashen scouting party discovered the wreckage of one of our new trading canoes in the southern delta, its crew missing, its cargo looted. My intelligence network, the Desert Rangers, began to find crude but effective counterfeits of our Iron tokens circulating among the outer tribes.

I stood with my council in the Hall of Records, the evidence spread out before us. Borin saw it as a prelude to another invasion. Grak was furious at the devaluation of his iron. But I saw the pattern. The system, with its new [GOVERNANCE] interface, allowed me to track the flow of goods and the stability of our currency in real-time. I could see the slight but steady inflation, the drop in demand for Ironpeak's exports.

"This is not the work of a general," I told them. "This is the work of a Master of Whispers. They are not trying to break our walls. They are trying to break our market."

Our simple iron currency, the foundation of our internal economy, was too vulnerable. It was easy to replicate for a kingdom with vast resources. To fight this economic war, we needed a currency as unique and as advanced as our society itself. We needed a coin of the realm.

My gaze turned to our booming industrial sector. We had mastered steel, but my metallurgy knowledge contained schematics for other alloys. One, in particular, caught my eye: a beautiful, corrosion-resistant bronze, made from a precise mixture of copper (which our scouts had recently discovered in the southern mountains), tin (which we could acquire from a new trade partner), and a secret, third element that gave it a unique heft and a silvery sheen. It was an alloy that could not be easily replicated without knowing the exact formula.

I devoted the resources of our nation to this new project. Grak's forges worked to smelt the new metals. Our best artisans, under my direction, crafted a set of master dies for the new coins. The design was a powerful symbol of our Confederacy. On the obverse, I chose not to put my own face—a symbol of a monarchy I was trying to avoid—but a depiction of the three great peaks that overlooked Oakhaven, a symbol of our land itself. The reverse was a testament to our unity: a stalk of wheat, a smith's hammer, and a goat's head, intertwined.

The new currency was to be called the 'Confederate Crown'. It would be issued in three denominations: a small copper piece, a larger bronze Crown, and, for the first time, a silver piece, alloyed from a vein of silver discovered deep in Grak's mountain, for high-value transactions.

The minting of the first Crowns was a solemn, state occasion. We melted down the thousands of counterfeit iron tokens we had collected, purifying the metal for our own use. Then, in the main forge, the first of the new bronze coins was struck. I held it up for the assembled council to see. It gleamed in the firelight, heavy, intricate, and beautiful. It felt like real money. It felt like power.

The introduction of the new currency was swift and systematic. We recalled all the old iron tokens, exchanging them for the new Crowns at a fair rate. The government-backed stability of the Crown, combined with its unique and difficult-to-forge nature, immediately restored faith in our economy. Our traders went out armed with a currency that other tribes and settlements quickly learned to trust and value far more than the cheap iron being peddled by the kingdom.

The Crown became more than money. It became a symbol of our sovereignty, our ingenuity, our stability. Every time a citizen used a Crown to buy bread in the market, they were participating in the defiance of the kingdom. Vaelin had tried to poison our economy. Instead, he had forced us to create one that was stronger, more resilient, and more advanced than his own. We had taken his economic attack and forged it into the very symbol of our national pride. The board was set for a new kind of war, and I had just put my queen into play.