You return to Glenzor on the first of May. The rain ceased quickly several days ago, and the last few days of your approach saw impressive black clouds transform into white ghosts, and felt biting wind turn to warming breeze. The welcoming soldiers are glad to see the year's excessive rainy season end, but know full well that, combined with the early and sudden change to warm weather, the desert city on the coast is in store for an extremely hot, humid summer.

Despite its wartime character—empty and quiet with an edge of fear, tension, and ethnocentrism—arriving in Glenzor is, well, as close to arriving "home" as you get these days. Familiar homes, familiar beds, familiar faces, and, possibly best of all, the rare, familiar feeling of security. The guardsmen patrolling the city wall, with their ceremonial horned helmets and spiked full plate, are no longer a novelty; nor are the military encampments outside the city, the three Parthinonian war galleons patrolling the coast, or the tight formations of guardsmen patrolling the streets. This is all commonplace now.

For the first time, now, you notice that businesses are closing down. One-Eyed Willie's is just one example of an establishment that relied on foreign moneys, its windows now dark, its doors locked. Such a train of events is a bad economic sign—as these businesses close, more foreign money leaves and less enters, a familiar chain reaction in wartorn nations. The wounded from last summer's battles, snowed in during last winter, are now beginning to return, and fresh reinforcements are being sent to war. A bruised Glenzor is settling into the second year of war.