Chapter 71

Our Confederacy was a nation of islands—Oakhaven the green island of agriculture, Ironpeak the grey island of industry, the Ashen lands the sprawling, mobile island of the nomads. We were connected by treaties and trade, but we were separated by the tyranny of the desert. A journey that took weeks on foot or by mule was a barrier to true unity and rapid response. It was time to pave the desert.

I announced the Confederacy's next Great Work: the construction of the Iron Road. It would be a paved stone highway, the first of its kind in this world, connecting our major settlements. It would be an artery of stone and mortar that would allow our trade caravans to move with unprecedented speed and our armies to deploy to any corner of our realm in a matter of days, not weeks.

The project was of a scale that dwarfed even the construction of New Oakhaven. It would require quarrying and transporting millions of tons of stone, and grading a path across hundreds of miles of hostile terrain. Our burgeoning Ministry of Public Works, under the leadership of Jor, was given the monumental task.

The thousands of laborers we now possessed, many of them former prisoners who had earned their citizenship through their work, formed the backbone of the project. Organized into legions of their own—the 'Labor Legion'—they began the arduous work.

My engineering knowledge was pushed to its limits. We did not simply lay stones on the sand. We first built a deep, compacted foundation of gravel and rock to prevent shifting. We designed and built arched stone culverts to allow the rare but powerful flash floods to pass under the road rather than washing it away. We used our sappers from Ironpeak, with their knowledge of demolition, to blast clear paths through impassable rock ridges.

The construction of the road became a mobile city in itself. It moved slowly across the desert, a great army of quarrymen, masons, and laborers. It was supported by its own logistical train, carrying food from Oakhaven's farms and tools from Ironpeak's forges.

The first great leg of the road was to connect Oakhaven to Ironpeak. The effect was transformative. The journey, which had once taken the better part of two weeks for a heavy wagon, could now be made in four days. Trade exploded. Iron flowed into Oakhaven at a torrential rate, and grain and beer flowed back to the mountain, making Grak's people wealthier and better-fed than ever before.

The road did more than just carry goods; it carried ideas. People began to move between the cities. An Ironpeak smith might travel to Oakhaven to take a course at the Lyceum. An Oakhaven farmer might travel to the mountains to see the great forges for himself. The road was breaking down the psychological distance between our peoples, weaving them together into a single, interconnected nation.

It was also a profound statement of power. The road was a permanent, undeniable mark of our civilization upon the landscape. It was a declaration that the desert no longer belonged to the chaos of nature; it belonged to the order and ingenuity of the Wastes Confederacy. Any invading army would now be forced to either use our road, where they would be exposed and easily ambushed, or crawl through the wilderness while our own forces moved swiftly along our creation to intercept them.

As I stood on a hill watching the Labor Legion, a line of thousands of workers stretching to the horizon, laying down the stones of our future, I felt a sense of achievement that was different from winning a battle. A battle was a moment of destruction. This was an act of permanent, enduring creation. We were not just building a road; we were building the circulatory system of an empire.