"General! Captain Wintergate reporting as requested."

General Cassius Cornell turned around to see Lanik giving him a salute. He spread his arms and bellowed, "Lanik, my boy!" He took the man in a too-tight hug, squeezing him until it hurt. "You, old friend, were sorely missed. Come! We have strategies to discuss and elves to kill. Our lovely Magdalee..." He gestured to Captain Magdalee, who pushed out her hip and offered Lanik a sultry wink. "...and General Promagnus..." Captain Promagnus folded his arms and grinned at Lanik. "...were just telling me of an excellent opportunity."

He pointed to a circled point on the map. "The elves have doubled their security at this sub-fortress. We're certain that means a high-ranking official is there. Since we have practically no intel on how Aetheri government works, this could be a boon for us. If we can capture their leader, we could learn how they operate and deal a blow to their morale in the process. Here's the thing, though: we're strapped for ideas on how to capitalize on this. We tried catapult artillery, but their archers and damnable bomb arrows shoot our shots out of the sky as fast as we hurl them. We tried tunneling through the mountains, but they always seem to find them and block them off with these weird unmanned weapons. Siege engines are out of the question, and starving them out is proving ineffective. We need your brilliance, Lanik."

The region in question was the southern border of Aetherion. Being higher up north than most of the continent, it was bitterly cold for most of the year, rainy for half of it, and delightful for only a few months. A mountain range formed a natural wall between the two countries (the same range that made the border to Northaven, incidentally). The elves had foreseen the reign of the Imperium and contructed a formidable wall around their entire country well in advance, and the Imperium now faced the daunting task of scaling this wall built on top of the mountains.

"Well, just go around to a non-mountainous side of the wall!" one might argue. There's just one problem with that: the rest is ocean. And not just any ocean -  it was icy, monster-infested ocean, and the elven wall extended a ways out to sea, so no ground action was possible, eliminating the Imperium's main strength. And that didn't even account for the Aetheri navy and coastal fortresses. That was a whole other arena that Imperial military planners couldn't deal with.

With the whole nation practically a living fortress, this heavily fortified region was actually the weakest point that the Imperium believed it could take. If they charged at it headlong, they could probably destroy it, but with unacceptable casualties. General Cassius, whatever faults he had, was not brash, and would not waste his soldiers' lives like that.