Krypton Kingdom is a small kingdom by the standards of Celesterra, but a careful one. Its courtyards are kept in order. Its banners hang where banners are supposed to hang. Its officers attend ceremonies they are required to attend and avoid the ones they are not. Its military patrols the country between its eastern walls and the long line of darker green that marks the edge of Shadowglade Forest.
It is, in the chronicle now beginning, the first mortal authority to register the shape of Drexel's threat. Major Raven, who reads more reports than any other officer in the kingdom and has a memory like a careful clerk's, was the first to lay the small extra paragraphs from village magistrates side by side and find a pattern that refused to disappear. Captain Darius pinned Lieutenant Ryder's rank to him and warned him, plainly, that Raven did not waste men on routine. Ryder went to Shadowglade and measured.
The kingdom does not yet know what it is in. Its kings have not been told. Its priests, where it has any, have not been consulted. The work has remained, by Raven's deliberate choice, a small careful conversation between a Major and a Lieutenant and a few unmarked units. That is changing now. The column has marched out of Shadowglade and toward Darklume Cathedral, and the green country that lies between them has begun to be quietly prepared for the audience that Krypton is, without yet knowing it, walking into.