Life on the Home Front

FROM THE SHARN INQUISITIVE — Human Interest Section, 995 YK: "Mrs. Tara Kellam, aged 74, of Lower Dura, remembers the day the war started. She was nine years old. She remembers her father being called up and her mother selling the family's everbright lantern to buy flour. She remembers the lightning rail running full of soldiers for weeks. She remembers when they stopped running entirely. She has lived through the entire Last War. She would like the newspaper to know that she is very tired."

For most civilians across Khorvaire, the Last War was not a distant political dispute but a daily encroachment upon safety, stability, and identity. While soldiers waged campaigns at the front, those behind the lines contended with food shortages, conscription notices, and the particular anxiety of not knowing which rumours to believe. Entire generations were born into war with no living memory of peace. To them, the thunder of an airship patrol overhead or the distant glow of arcane artillery was simply the sound of the world proceeding as it always had.

In cities like Sharn or Flamekeep, the war expressed itself through tightening laws, curfews, and the slow reorganisation of civic life around the needs of the state. Public festivals were restructured to serve morale, and the rhythm of daily life was increasingly dictated by war bulletins rather than market seasons. In rural communities, where the threat of occupation was more immediate, villagers became quietly expert at hiding valuables, disguising loyalties, and moving people overland without drawing attention. The lightning rail — symbol of a united Galifar — still ran, but passengers shared carriages with troop requisitions and sealed military crates. (Today the system is divided, split into eastern and western circuits by the Mournland; reestablishing the conductor-stone paths across Scions Sound and the dead zone is often discussed in the halls of power, but formidable challenges remain.)

Over time, the presence of the war became ambient — a weather system of uncertainty that coloured every decision. Engagements were delayed, family heirlooms sold, and dreams of education or travel deferred indefinitely. Yet communities persisted through it. Bards repurposed old songs with patriotic new verses. Artificers converted farm tools into self-defence mechanisms. Priests officiated weddings near trench lines. Survival, for a hundred years, was its own kind of resistance.

NOTICE — posted in a Fairhaven bakery, undated: "Due to crown requisitioning, wheat flour is available only on Mol, Wir, and Far. Rye flour is available daily. Spell-component reagents are not sold here. Please stop asking."

Rationing and Shortages

Khorvaire's war economies demanded strict rationing even in resource-rich regions. Civilian access to goods was often limited not by any shortage of raw materials but by the logistical choices of their ruling nation — choices that almost always favoured the front. Healing draughts, spell components, and even mundane supplies like nails and parchment were subject to regional requisitioning by crown agents. Cities and towns still suffer from shortages in the aftermath of the war; nations are recovering, and most essential services and goods are available in major cities, but there is always the possibility that something you want — a luxury item or a spell component — simply is not available, or can be acquired only through the black market.

Food was the sharpest hardship, and it struck unevenly. Karrnath suffered some of the worst food crises on the continent. In the early decades of the war, a combination of plague, disrupted Mabaran manifest zone rituals — the Seeker practitioners who had maintained those rituals for generations were deployed elsewhere or displaced by the religious upheaval surrounding Kaius I's embrace of the Blood of Vol — and, depending on who one believed, deliberate interference by agents of Lady Illmarrow brought Karrnath to the edge of starvation. It was partially this catastrophe that led Kaius I to make the Blood of Vol the state religion and to embrace necromancy as a military resource: the dead, at least, did not need to eat. Even after the immediate crises passed, food insecurity remained a constant in Karrnath through the war's final decade, amplified by the famine of 996 YK (an early winter and governmental mismanagement, with hoarding by regional warlords making things worse). The Code of Kaius mandated rationing that the populace accepted willingly — Karrns frown on excess of any sort and approve of swift punishment for waste.

Elsewhere, scarcity was less existential but no less felt. Ration tokens or magically sealed distribution glyphs were common in major cities, and wherever official systems existed, black markets followed. Counterfeit ration marks changed hands in back alleys. Alchemists brewed unstable substitute tonics when standard healing supplies dried up — a far cry from the proper Jorasco "coppers" that soldiers received at the front. Tailors turned salvaged skycoach canvas into serviceable clothing. House Cannith's supply of manufactured goods, normally distributed through established trade networks and gorgon-marked forgeholds, was redirected toward military contracts, leaving civilian markets to improvise. Even the dragonshards that powered everbright lanterns and everyday magic were requisitioned for the war effort — the art scene in Cyre collapsed in part because dragonshards, once used for brilliant artistic displays, were no longer available for anything but military use.

"You learn to eat what's there. Karrnathi bread is dark and heavy and tastes like endurance. Brelish stew is whatever fell in the pot. Thrane militia rations come with a prayer card and no salt. The Aundairians somehow still had cheese. Nobody knows how." — Veteran, nationality unspecified, tavern in Starilaskur

Refugees and Displaced Peoples

The war uprooted tens of thousands across the continent — farmers fleeing scorched fields, merchants driven out of besieged cities, minority populations scapegoated for political convenience. These displaced people were rarely welcomed wherever they arrived. In neighbouring territories, they were treated as burdens, as spies, or as enemy sympathisers by association. Camps formed outside city walls, built from salvaged timber and necessity, populated by people who had lost not just their homes but the social fabric those homes implied.

The great houses responded variably. House Ghallanda, whose identity is bound up in hospitality and the provision of food and lodging, organised soup lines and modular shelter structures that became fixtures outside several major cities — providing for those who stayed free of charge and, other than insisting they keep the peace, making no significant demands of the refugees. House Jorasco dispatched healers to military encampments with far greater reliability than to refugee populations, a disparity that generated no shortage of bitter commentary in the decades that followed.

But no displacement was more total — or more politically freighted — than that created by the Mourning on 20 Olarune 994 YK. In a single day, the nation of Cyre ceased to exist. Over a million people were killed. Those who survived were soldiers fighting in enemy territory when the mists rose, farmers and merchants who had fled toward the borders in time, or wealthy Cyrans who had been abroad when the catastrophe struck. Former nobles found themselves in rags. Scholars and artists ended up in alleyways. The Cyran diaspora became, almost overnight, a politicised symbol that every surviving nation handled according to its own interests.

Breland, under King Boranel's royal decree, opened its borders without condition. The refugee settlement that grew from this gesture is now called New Cyre — though "city" is generous for what remains largely an organised camp on the eastern Brelish grasslands, ranging from a roughly hewn downtown to an outlying tent city, presided over by Prince Oargev ir'Wynarn, last surviving child of Queen Dannel. Oargev was serving as Cyre's ambassador to Breland on the Day of Mourning. He now holds court as a king in exile, obsessed with discovering the truth behind the destruction of his country and desperate to gather Cyre's displaced children to a rebuilt nation — whether in the Mournland or on new ground. Breland's generosity, however, did not extend to active integration: no serious effort was made to lift Cyran refugees out of poverty or bring them into the civic fabric of their host nation. Many remain stateless and dispossessed, neither fully inside Breland nor able to return to what was theirs. The King's Dark Lanterns actively infiltrate the refugee community, monitoring anti-Brelish sentiment. Even the Brelish, for all their practised tolerance, tend to treat Cyran refugees as second-class citizens.

Other nations were less charitable. Thrane refused to provide land, absorbing some Cyrans into Silver Flame outreach programmes while redirecting most elsewhere. Karrnath treated the initial wave of refugees as prisoners of war, holding them in camps until the Treaty established them as civilians. Zilargo admitted a community to Dragonroost quietly and then placed them under continuous Trust observation — the gnomes' form of hospitality being, as always, inextricable from surveillance. In Q'barra, refugees built a region now called Hope almost from scratch — only to find themselves culturally at odds with the New Galifarans already settled there. New Galifar was founded by Cyrans who had left early in the war under Ven ir'Kesslan in 928 YK; the cultural gap between those who fled early and those who lost everything in the Mourning is vast, and there is little sense of kinship on either side, though the economic benefits of cooperation typically overwhelm the underlying animosity.

LETTER — intercepted by the King's Dark Lanterns, New Cyre, 997 YK. Sender unknown: "Oargev speaks of patience and diplomacy. We have been patient. We were patient while they burned our fields. We were patient while they sold our weapons to our enemies. We were patient while our nation died. Tell me, how much more patience do the dead require?"

Magical Surveillance

War, everywhere, produces paranoia — and Khorvaire's paranoia had arcane tools. Scrying rituals, message interception, and divination contracted to private parties all became standard instruments of wartime governance. The line between military necessity and civil surveillance moved steadily in one direction throughout the century.

In Breland, the King's Dark Lanterns operated with broad authority to monitor communications and infiltrate communities suspected of disloyalty — their more than five hundred domestic agents and roughly a hundred abroad giving them reach into virtually every significant population centre. House Sivis, whose sending stones and message networks formed the continent's communication infrastructure, operated under wartime pressure to flag suspicious patterns — off-hour transmissions, coded phrases, contacts with enemy nationals. In Aundair, the Royal Eyes — already a sophisticated divination-focused agency — expanded their operations into domestic crowd monitoring and the tracking of perceived dissidents. The Argentum served a similar function for Thrane, operating under the Church's authority and carrying the additional weight of theocratic sanction. In Karrnath, where martial law under the Code of Kaius placed near-absolute power in the hands of local commanders, the surveillance infrastructure was simply the military itself — citizens accused of crimes had no benefit of jury or independent judiciary.

Privacy became a luxury. Families who could afford anti-scrying wards were left largely alone. Those who could not were more vulnerable to interrogation, especially in mixed-blood districts or neighbourhoods with histories of cross-border sympathy. This asymmetry bred resentment that persisted long after the Treaty of Thronehold. A sending stone found on a dockworker meant something very different than the same stone in the pocket of a merchant with a Kundarak account.

Propaganda and Censorship

Every nation maintained, by one name or another, a ministry of information. News was filtered through war councils before it reached the public. Publications required approval from state-aligned scribes or magical censors. In Thrane, the Church of the Silver Flame blended civic bulletins with scripture, framing the war as a trial of faith as much as a military conflict. In Cyre, before the Mourning, the Royal Voice of Galifar used illusionary projection to render defeats as "strategic resets" and retreats as "repositioning for strength." In Karrnath, the crown commissioned propaganda posters throughout the war in such quantities that many Karrns today have kept them in their homes as mementos — images of skeletal soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder with the living, of iron-jawed officers beneath the Karrnathi crest, of simple slogans that acquired the weight of prayer through a century of repetition.

Artists, poets, and performers were recruited or silenced. House Phiarlan's entertainers — whose Serpentine Table espionage network operates behind the house's public identity as the continent's foremost entertainment institution — became instruments of soft propaganda across multiple nations simultaneously, something few civilians understood and fewer still would have believed. The canonical comparison is apt: asserting that Phiarlan ran a spy network was, to most people, about as credible as claiming a beloved celebrity worked for a foreign intelligence agency. But the entertainers were there, in the courts and the salons and the army camps, and the information they gathered and the sentiments they shaped moved through channels no declared agency could have accessed.

Censorship was not only state-directed. Communities enforced it on themselves. Children reported parents for unpatriotic statements. Storeowners who failed to display the correct symbols found themselves subject to tax inspection. It became dangerous not merely to oppose the war but to appear insufficiently committed to it — a distinction that blurred over the course of a century until few could remember where it had been drawn.

FROM A KARRNATHI PROPAGANDA POSTER — widely reproduced, circa 970 YK: "YOUR NEIGHBOUR SERVES. YOUR BROTHER SERVES. THE DEAD SERVE. WHAT IS YOUR EXCUSE?"

National Mythmaking

Over the war's long duration, each nation developed a founding myth about its own role in the conflict — a story that explained not just what had happened but why it had been necessary, and what it meant about the kind of people they were.

Breland championed itself as the reluctant defender of ordinary liberty — practical, tolerant, unbothered by the ideological excess of its neighbours. Brelish heroes were celebrated less as embodiments of abstract righteousness than as defenders of individual rights, practical freedoms, and civic life. The common sayings associated with Breland praise self-possession, tolerance, plain dealing, and the dignity of ordinary people. The Brelish ideal is not purity but resilience.

Thrane claimed divine mandate, teaching that the Silver Flame had always foretold a purging conflict and that the nation's theocratic turn was not a departure from tradition but a fulfilment of it. Many Thranes genuinely believed — and were encouraged to believe — that victory would hasten the promised earthly heaven. Thrane's white mourning cloaks, Flamic architecture, and the soaring arches of its fortified churches all served to make the faith visible in everyday life, ensuring that the national identity and the religious identity were indistinguishable.

Cyre maintained that it alone had been in the right, the legitimate heir to Galifar's throne, martyred by jealousy and foreign manipulation. Cyran glamerweave — once the most colourful fashion on the continent — became Mourningwear after 994 YK: entirely black, cut in the traditional Cyran style, worn as both grief and defiance.

Karrnath embraced what it called the iron harvest of martial discipline — the image of a people who endured what softer nations could not, and whose dead served their nation still. Karrnathi military aesthetics were worn with civilian pride: heavy stone architecture, obelisks and monoliths lining the streets, the constant presence of memorial grounds giving many Karrnathi cities the feel of museums.

Aundair told itself it was the cleverest — the nation that won by wit what it could not win by numbers, that valued education and arcane sophistication above brute force. Aundairian deep-blue campaign dress became fashionable precisely because it declared the wearer's allegiance to a nation that prized intelligence.

These narratives were not incidental. They were actively constructed through educational reform, revised arcane textbooks, and the deliberate erasure of shared Galifaran heritage from civic memory. Children recited oaths infused with nationalised lore. Even fashion was mobilised. Ask a Brelish mason or a Cyran refugee what the Last War was really about, and the answers will differ sharply — not because one of them is mistaken, but because the war produced different truths for different people, and most of those truths were shaped by the nations those people grew up inside.

"I teach Brelish history to Brelish children in a Brelish school. They will learn what Breland did in the war. They will not learn what Breland did to Cyre, because that is not in the curriculum. I do not write the curriculum. I teach what is there." — Schoolteacher, Wroat, speaking anonymously

Suppressed Defeats

Not every loss was reported. Entire campaigns vanished from public record. Families of fallen soldiers often received misleading notifications — death by training accident, killed by treacherous magic, or silence where a letter should have been. Karrnath's wartime records, maintained by a combination of state scribes and Ministry of the Dead administrators, were subject to revision whenever political circumstances made accuracy inconvenient.

Veterans who remembered too much found themselves reassigned to distant posts, pressured into sanatoriums, or — in more extreme cases — simply not heard from again. The dead could be honoured or forgotten, but only in the forms that served the story their nation needed.

Manufactured Heroism

To fill the voids left by suppressed defeats, heroes were made. Some were real soldiers whose stories had been polished into legend; others were composites, or outright fabrications distributed through illusionary crystal receivers and street-level broadsheets. Names became national icons before anyone had confirmed whether such a person existed. Statues were commissioned. Songs were written. In Thrane, figures were retroactively canonised; in Cyre, illusionists produced spectral performances of princes whose appearances were indistinguishable from theatrical staging.

These figures served more than morale. They became instruments of compliance. Criticism of war policy could be reframed as disrespect to the honoured dead. Dissent was dishonour. Schools assigned essays on emulating champions. House Phiarlan distributed illusion-accessorised figurines at a discount in lower-ward markets, ensuring that even those who couldn't afford the official commemorations had something to feel.

By the war's end, many civilians knew more about manufactured heroes than about the actual campaigns they had lived through. A soldier might come home to find his deeds unrecorded while a glamour-projection of a martyr was mourned continent-wide. The truth had been displaced by something more manageable — and comfort, like rationed bread, was easier to distribute when shaped into familiar forms.

OVERHEARD AT A WAR MEMORIAL UNVEILING — Sharn, 997 YK: "My father fought at Cairn Hill. He isn't on this memorial. The man who is on this memorial wasn't at Cairn Hill — I checked. But he has a statue now, and my father has a pension that doesn't cover his rent. That's the war for you. The statues go to the story. The pension goes to the person who lived it."