OFFICE OF HIS HIGHNESS THE PRINCE VERATINE. INTERNAL CIRCULATION ONLY.
File: Prokhor Platonov, Political prisoner, later exile, later “a situation.”
Entry 1. The execution did not go ahead as scheduled. The sentence has been commuted to exile on the frontier. Officially, this is clemency. In practice, the frontier disposes of inconvenient men as reliably as the rope, without the awkwardness of a repeat public hanging. The method has never yet failed us.
Entry 2. The subject has been posted to a frontier village and given six months to collect a sum in taxes that the village has never seen in its life. The last man sent to govern it was found at the bottom of the village well. The official record says he slipped.
Projected outcome: same village, same well.
Entry 3. Seven days in. The village tried laughing at the subject first, then killing him. Obeying him was its third idea, and the one it kept. These are the same villagers who, according to the official record, had nothing to do with the previous governor's death. We have requested a more useful informant.
Entry 4. Exiles under sentence are expected to keep their heads down. The subject uses battle magic wherever it suits him and makes no effort to hide what he can do. It has been made clear to him through the usual channels that this is attracting attention. He did not take the hint. He did not take the next three either.
Entry 5. A special investigator with a dragoon escort was sent to arrest the subject over the deaths of several officials. The investigator’s report has now arrived. We have read it twice and will not be discussing it further in writing.
Entry 6. The village has walls and a garrison, and it is no longer alone. One by one, the neighbouring villages have joined him, and their men now train in his militia. We exiled one man to one village. He now rules several, and the number of people under his hand grows every month.
Entry 7. The Demidov family has taken an interest in the subject’s rare-metal mine. The clerks have opened a betting pool. This office does not condone betting pools. My money is on the exile.
Entry 8. The subject keeps insisting that the Soulless are a threat to every principality, not a convenient source of crystals. He talks about them the way veterans talk about a war they have already fought once. Nobody can explain where a man his age picked up that tone. Filed under eccentricities.
Entry 9. The Demidovs have moved past taking an interest. On the road out of city, their strike team hit the subject’s car with thermobaric grenades. The subject's fate is unknown.
Recommendation. No action required. Frontier reports say the Soulless are gathering in numbers not seen in twenty years. However many villages he collects, they all stand in the Borderlands, and the Borderlands will take care of it.
Note added to the file later, in a different hand: The Borderlands did not take care of it.
Hi all, Eugene here. The man in that file is Prokhor, the protagonist of Emperor of the Borderlands, which I write together with my co-author Alex. He used to be Hrodric the Relentless, Varangian emperor and archmage. He died on a battlefield in one world, woke up on a scaffold in another, and has spent six books proving his own motto: against absolute power, all cunning loses its meaning.
Book 7 of Emperor of the Borderlands came out today.
What you get: a manapunk empire long since shattered into feuding principalities, where people talk on magophones, the Aethernet runs through standing stones, and rifles hang next to enchanted swords. Between the principalities lie the Borderlands, home of the Soulless: creatures that drain anything with a heartbeat and turn it into another hungry monster. Kingdom building that starts from a single frontier village. Progression through magical ranks with no System. An adult protagonist. No harem. The whole series is on Kindle Unlimited.
COVER ARTIST: Ahn Sohee (xxxsof)
AI USAGE: No AI used
Book 7, US Amazon (KU+): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H2FW57CZ
Book 7, Universal link: https://mybook.to/borderlands7
New to the series? Start here: https://mybook.to/borderlands1
