A book written by Forging Iron for NaNoWriMo 2014. It was written as a self-challenge: can you create a fantasy novel without magic? It is about a war in the land of Kostek involving two factions, nine races, disease outbreaks, gambits, and many, many casualties.
Tropes include:
- Chekhov's Gun: Vor Tekr injures his leg and is unable to feel anything in it. How is this a Chekhov's Gun? Well, later on, he gets his lower leg blown off by a cannon, but he doesn't feel anything and keeps fighting.
- Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Red Bokiro and Blue Bokiro.
- Combat Pragmatist: The Trajak faction invoke this heavily. From spreading a disease to causing massive deflation, anything goes.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Invoked due to the conlangs in the story. The Defet, Kydic, Trajak, and Vjulti each refer to their lands as (race) land, and their language as (race) language. It is implied the other races translate these names phonetically.
- Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Each race has one.
- Good Colours, Evil Colours: Inverted in that the Red Bokiro ally with the protagonists and the Blue Bokiro with the antagonists.
- Good Weapon, Evil Weapon: The side with the guy who uses the double-headed axe, the guy who uses the mace, the guy who uses the poisoned arrows, and the guy who uses the broken sword and dagger? Yeah, they're the good guys.
- Grey-and-Gray Morality: Both factions use torture and other underhanded acts that wouldn't fly today but one is mainly in self-defence and the other in aggression.
- Patchwork Map: Avoided somewhat, but there are still shades of it (A permafrost-covered tundra right next to a bog, and near that a fertile valley, for instance)
