Chapter 128: The Territory of Luchsenstein
The textures changed beneath her hand.
The open grasslands were smooth, interrupted by fine grooves representing paths and streams. The forests felt rough and ridged.
The mountains had been carved from darker stone, cool and uneven beneath her fingertips.
Even the marshlands had a strange, softer surface, almost as though the material itself had been treated to feel damp.
It was the first time Mirabelle had ever truly seen Luchsenstein as a whole.
Not as a name.
Not as a collection of villages, forests, and roads she only knew from traveling through them.
But as a living territory.
A vast stretch of land bound together beneath one title. Her title.
At the northern edge lay Rotwald.
The land gradually changed there.
Luchsenstein’s familiar hills and mixed forests opened into a broad steppe, the miniature surface becoming flatter and more exposed.
Mirabelle immediately recognized the region where they had found the Thorn-grass.
The stalks had looked wild and unremarkable then. Now she could see just how enormous the plains truly were.
They stretched toward Rotwald in long, open waves of land, broken only by narrow streams and occasional clusters of trees.
Her finger followed the border northward.
There were no dramatic cliffs or walls separating the two territories.
The land simply changed.
Luchsenstein became Rotwald so gradually that, without the markings etched into the edge of the table, one might never have known where one ended and the other began.
To the south, the territory narrowed between two great mountain ranges.
Mirabelle leaned closer.
The mountains rose steeply from the model, forming a natural corridor through the land.
Beyond them lay Zasar.
But before anyone could reach the passage itself, they first had to cross a vast stretch of forest.
The miniature trees there stood so close together that their branches seemed to merge into a single dark mass.
Even on the model, the forest looked ancient. Difficult to cross.
The road disappeared beneath the canopy for a long distance before emerging again near the mountain passage.
Mirabelle ran her finger along the route.
Days of travel.
Perhaps longer, depending on the weather and the condition of the roads.
Only then would the land tighten between the mountains, forcing every traveler, merchant, and army through the same narrow path before the world finally opened toward Zasar.
It was easy to understand why that passage mattered. Whoever controlled it controlled movement between the kingdoms.
Trade.
Messengers.
Soldiers.
Perhaps even war.
The mountain pass to the south was important. But it wasn’t unique.
It was merely one of three major routes through the mountain range connecting Zasar and Bergheim.
Luchsenstein controlled the central passage.
Fortunately for the duchy, the Queen of Zasar had never chosen it as one of her primary invasion routes during the war.
Instead, she had marched her armies through the two outer passes, attempting to encircle Bergheim from both sides.
Strategically, it had been the correct decision.
The maneuver had forced Bergheim to divide its forces, stretching its defenses across multiple fronts instead of allowing them to concentrate on a single battlefield.
As a result, Luchsenstein had been spared the worst of the conflict. Not entirely.
At one point, Bergheim had attempted to launch its own offensive through Luchsenstein toward Zasar. But on the southern side of the mountains, a massive barricade had already been constructed across the pass.
The scouts sent ahead returned quickly.
There was simply no way for an army of their size to break through.
The campaign had been abandoned before it truly began.
Compared to its neighboring territories, Luchsenstein had remained remarkably untouched.
Standing before the model now, Mirabelle slowly traced the mountain pass with her fingertip.
Only then did it truly sink in.
She could have awakened in a territory that had been devastated by the war.
One where villages had been burned to the ground. Where roads had become battlefields. Where fields no longer fed families because they had been trampled beneath marching armies.
Instead...
She had awakened in one of the few places fortunate enough to have escaped with little more than the constant fear that the war might arrive tomorrow.
Mirabelle’s gaze drifted west. There, the terrain softened again.
Several great lakes lay scattered across the land, their surfaces created from polished blue stone that reflected the sunlight pouring through the windows.
They looked almost real.
Beyond them, the ground darkened.
A wide marsh spread toward the western border, carved in uneven patches of black-green and gray.
Narrow wooden paths crossed some sections, though many vanished before reaching the neighboring territory.
The marsh looked difficult to navigate even in miniature.
Pools of still water. Reeds and soft ground.
Channels that shifted or disappeared.
A natural barrier, though not an impenetrable one.
Mirabelle wondered how many people lived in the smal clusters of houses there.
How many villages depended on fishing, peat, herbs, or whatever else the wetland provided.
How often roads vanished beneath floodwater.
How many travelers became lost.
To the east stood the greatest forest in Luchsenstein.
It stretched so far across the table that Mirabelle had to walk around the entire model to follow it. The forest began near the central villages and continued all the way toward the eastern border.
According to what she had been told, one could travel for days beneath its canopy before reaching the next territory.
The thought fascinated her.
Days beneath trees so dense that sunlight barely touched the ground.
Paths twisting through roots and stone.
Streams hidden beneath ferns.
Entire communities separated from the rest of the duchy by nothing more than distance and wilderness.
Somewhere within that vast green expanse lay the forest she already knew.
The one they had ridden through. Yet this wasn’t the great eastern forest itself.
It was merely one of its outer reaches — a sprawling arm of woodland that curved southward from the immense forest in the east, wrapping around the southern plains in a broad crescent.
The result was almost a natural basin.
On the model, it looked almost disappointingly small.
A narrow patch compared to everything beyond it.
And there —
Steinstein.
Mirabelle smiled the moment she found it.
The little settlement rested where she remembered it, tucked near the edge of the arm of the forest and connected to the main road by a thin line.
She traced the route they had taken with one fingertip.
The road through the trees.
The stretch that had required two or three hours on horseback.
It all existed here.
Every place she had visited.
Every place she had only heard about.
Every place where people woke in the morning, worked, argued, fell in love, raised children, and expected their Duchess to ensure that their lives remained safe.
Villages dotted the land between the major landmarks.
Dozens of them.
Some close to rivers.
Others hidden among hills.
A few so remote that the nearest road seemed barely more than a narrow trail.
Mirabelle moved around the table again.
She could have stared at it for hours.
There were farms she had never seen.
Mines marked along the foothills.
Ruined watchtowers.
Stone bridges.
Shrines.
Old roads no longer connected to anything.
Tiny symbols had been carved beside certain forests, lakes, and mountain valleys, though she didn’t yet understand what all of them meant.
For the first time, she truly grasped the scale of the responsibility waiting for her.
Luchsenstein wasn’t only the castle.
It wasn’t only the capital, her family, or the people she met in its halls.
It was all of this.
The mountains in the south.
The open plains leading toward Rotwald in the north.
The lakes and marshes in the west.
The endless forest in the east.
Every village in between.
Every road.
Every field.
Every person whose life depended on decisions made by someone sitting in a room far above them.
Mirabelle rested both hands against the edge of the model.
Outside the windows, the real territory stretched toward the horizon.
Inside, its smaller twin lay beneath her fingertips.
Bit she didn’t feel overwhelmed.
She felt fascinated.
And perhaps, somewhere beneath that fascination, the first true spark of understanding.
This was no longer merely the land she had inherited. This was the land she intended to change.
With a soft poof — far gentler than usual — a familiar cloud of smoke appeared beside her.
A tiny floating creature with its little tentacles emerged from it and immediately began circling the model with undisguised fascination.
Mirabelle smiled.
"So curious?" she asked. "I would’ve thought you already knew what all of this looks like."
The little creature bobbed in the air.
"You should know that I’m not familiar with every corner of the Beast World. I may be a System, but I’m neither omniscient nor the Beast Goddess."
It completed another slow circle around the miniature mountains.
"So while I possess an extensive theoretical understanding of your territory, and I can calculate the probabilities of certain events occurring in different locations, I don’t actually have access to a detailed map like this."
For a moment, Mirabelle was genuinely speechless.
That...
Wasn’t what she’d expected at all. Somehow, Pebbles was completely different from the image she’d had in her head of what a System was supposed to be.
"I see..."
It was all Mirabelle could think to say.
Before she could ask anything else, the sound of footsteps echoed up the spiral staircase.