Three times the Chimean empire has marched on Phriorys, and three times the green dragon Pyaganos has thrown it back without losing his hold for a single season. The marches fall across roughly a century, the first around 3285 SD and the most recent in 3358. The empire calls each one a campaign and numbers them in its records. Pyaganos, who keeps a Chimean legion-standard mounted in his trophy caves, has never bothered to give them names.
What Chimea wants at Phriorys is not, in the first place, the dragon's hoard, though eight centuries of accumulated gold under Thyrak-Vor is a lure the treasury never quite forgets. What it wants is the hills themselves and what they would mean. Chimus styles itself a civilization rather than a band of cave-exiles who got lucky with conquest, and a civilization cannot have its southern border drawn by a beast. Phriorys is open, fertile, visible from the Suki Jungle's edge, the most accessible ground in the whole Dygon Beastlands. That a single dragon holds it, hunts Chimean travelers across it for amusement, and tolerates the empire's traders only as flattering spectators is an insult the court in Chimus cannot leave standing. Each march is an attempt to answer it. Each repulsion makes the insult worse.
The three marches
The first column went south expecting a beast in the way of a frontier. It was a reinforced cohort with engineers, sent to seize the northern hills and build the kind of fort the empire builds on any border it means to keep. Pyaganos let it cross the open ground, watched it begin its earthworks, and then burned the work parties off the hillside one at a time with the precision he is vain about, leaving the engineers for last so the soldiers would understand there was no hurry. The favored tribes ran down the men who broke and fled, driving them north across the grass like game beaten toward a line. A few reached the Suki Jungle alive. Pyaganos had let them.
The second march, a generation later, came with a plan. Chimean generals had spent the intervening years mapping the dragon's hunting circuits, charting the seasons of his ceremonial hunts, convinced that a beast so visible must be predictable. A full detachment of the empire's strength moved in the gap they had charted and reached the foot of Thyrak-Vor itself. Pyaganos was waiting on the summit, because the gap they had charted was the one he had let them see. He took his time with that one. He released men and hunted them again, the way he does with game he is enjoying, and burned the valley around the survivors until the only way out was back across ground that would not hold a fire for them to shelter behind.
Two hundred years they will study me and call it intelligence. I have studied them for one afternoon and I know everything that matters: that they cannot stop coming, and that they are at their most beautiful in the moment they understand I let them in. — words the favored tribes attribute to Pyaganos, after the second march
The third march, in 3358, was the most careful of all. By then the empire had Outpost Viyen and three decades of merchant reporting from the dragon's own border, and it built the campaign on that intelligence, certain this time that it had read him. Pyaganos turned it into a hunt that ran the better part of a season, and when it was over he sent the senior survivors home unharmed with their wounded and a clear path north. He wanted them to carry the account back. He wanted there to be a fourth.
What the court will not read
This is the engine the empire refuses to see. Pyaganos does not repel Chimea to be left alone. He is vain past any rational measure, theatrical in everything, and a great nation that keeps sending its legions for him to burn artfully is the finest tribute he has ever been paid. He calibrates each repulsion to humiliate without discouraging. He spares enough men to guarantee the next attempt. To him the marches are not a war he is winning but an audience he is cultivating, and the worst thing Chimea could do to him is decide he is not worth a fourth try.
The court in Chimus reads it exactly backward. Each defeat enters the records as a tactical error to be corrected: the first column was too small, the second trusted a false pattern, the third should have struck in a different season. The one thing the doctrine cannot write down is that there is no correct season, because the empire is not failing to solve a problem. It is feeding one. And it cannot write that down because Chimus is a city built to prove that a beast does not bound the empire. To admit Phriorys is unconquerable is to admit the marble was a lie, and the court would rather spend another legion than admit that.
The rule has one exception, and the exception is the darkest part of it. Hollin Emberling, the war-minister now arguing hardest for a fourth march, was a junior officer on the third. He watched Pyaganos release men and hunt them down for sport, and he understands better than anyone in the precinct that the dragon is farming the empire for spectacle. He argues for the fourth anyway. His conclusion is not that Chimea should stop but that it has been arriving too small to deny the dragon his game, and that a march heavy enough leaves Pyaganos nothing to play with. The man who saw the trap most clearly is the one walking the empire back into it. Whether he is right, or whether he has simply found a sophisticated way to want what his ambition already wanted, is the question Chimus has not answered and is running out of time to ask.