Tyranny of Steel

Berengar was sitting upon his leather recliner within the sanctity of his study. Within these walls, he was relatively free from all of the stresses of the outside world, even if he was surrounded by piles of paperwork that never seemed to end.

As much as Berengar hated doing paperwork, it had become such a common routine throughout his tenure as a ruler that it was one of the few ways he could relax nowadays. As the days passed since his wedding to Linde, Honoria had grown rather impatient for her own ceremony that was on the horizon.

Quite honestly, Berengar did not know what to make of it, the girl had begun to throw some childish tirades over the simplest things, the brief moment of sisterhood that existed between Berengar ’s harem was unraveling at the seams, and with it, his peaceful days were coming to an end.

These girls were roughly a month pregnant, maybe less, and they were already driving him insane. As the days passed, he spent more and more time in his study, burning off his stress by overindulging in the endless horde of paperwork that continuously found itself lying upon his desk.

At the moment, he was overlooking Eckhard ’s report on the current political situation within the Kingdom of Bohemia. After years of bloodshed at the hands of the Hussites, corruption at the hands of the previous monarch, and the ongoing misconduct of the Catholic Church; the Bohemian people were fed up with all factions present within the realm, and many, especially the ethnic Germans of the Sudetenland had begun to embrace Berengar and his Regime.

As such, the Hussite Radicals, Moderates, and the remaining Catholic Loyalists had all lost any form of support from the common people. These men and their factions had been neutered without the people backing them. Any form of resistance that sprang up following Berengar ’s seizure of the Crown was quickly put down by Eckhard and the army of battle-hardened Austrian veterans who accompanied him.

Under the provisional government established by Berengar in the wake of his ascension to the position of King of Bohemia, agricultural reforms had begun to be implemented across the realm. Though it would take many months, perhaps even years, to see the effects of such measures, undoubtedly, food would soon enough no longer be an issue for the average Bohemian.

On top of this, tens of thousands of young German men from Austria poured into the realm, claiming Bohemian wives and beginning work on reconstructing the infrastructure of the war-torn kingdom. Things were starting to get back to normal; however, there was one serious issue that Berengar needed to address.