Only The Banners Change
A Witch Field Story
To fight one empire, he marches beneath another's banner and swears the oath that will begin a rebellion. But some oaths survive victory worse than defeat.
Chapter One Epigraph
“All things tend toward a center. History reveals where it was.”
— Cadrin Sol, The Architecture of Collapse
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Sandro Andreatta · Historian & Novelist
The Witch Field — Acceptable Loss
Book I of The Witch Field Trilogy
Witch-Major Irena Vahn has failed as a mentor. She let her student die—the chosen one who was supposed to save the Covenant. The witch field collapsed above him, destroying the city, the enemy, and the surrounding countryside. Irena survived, scarred and unable to forgive herself. The Covenant rewrote the history, carved their names into stone, and called it victory.
Four years later, Irena has become inconvenient evidence of a failure the Covenant wants erased. Exiled to a fort on the eastern frontier, she discovers the same magical pattern that killed her student. She recognizes the beginnings of another catastrophe.
Her search for answers draws her into a military system prepared to sacrifice the people it exists to protect. Having spent her career deciding which battles are worth her soldiers’ lives, she understands its reasoning all too well. Now Irena must decide how much she is willing to sacrifice for the next victory—and find a way to live with the loss she cannot undo. She counts her own life among the acceptable losses. Her friends, who have spent four years trying to keep her alive, do not.
I.Short Stories
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The Black Gloves
A Witch Field Story
Book cover by Guillermo Kelly
Lysa Teren can keep soldiers standing after fear and pain should have broken them. The state calls it a gift. The men she saves learn to call it something else. Every battle gives her another reason to use it.
III.The Book
The Witch Field — Acceptable Loss
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On the surface, The Witch Field – Acceptable Loss is a military fantasy novel set in a world based on the pike-and-shot period (ca. 1500–1650). An age that blends the best aspects of medieval warfare, like plate-armoured heavy cavalry, with large formations of infantrymen fighting with pikes and muskets. Artillery was the shiny new toy in this world, used to batter down fortresses that, in turn, had to adapt their construction. Warfare increasingly relied on cohesion and discipline, and on the early modern period’s most underrated participants: ditches and trenches. In this new world of modern wonders, weapons suddenly brought death from hundreds of metres away, killing even the most chivalrous knight in a single hit.
The bravery of one soldier was, seemingly, not as important anymore. Honour and bravery gave way to mass formations and warfare built around the strength of the many. And that power—belief—is physical in the world of The Witch Field. When enough men believe the same thing, stand together in formation, and fight cohesively, the witch field forms. Witches shape it to improve the men’s performance and keep them steady in the face of bouncing cannonballs, musket fire, and terrifying beasts. The power is limited, though. If kept active for too long without release, the field ruptures and kills those beneath it, so a witch must release it eventually. This creates a conundrum in warfare. When is the right moment to release the field and risk the men fleeing the battlefield? The Covenant’s new doctrine promises an answer to this very question. It creates armies that run on fear and exhaustion. Covenant commanders have every reason to want it, whatever it costs the soldiers.
Beneath the battles, this is a novel about friendship: friendships that have yet to form between people who must learn to rely on each other, and older friendships in which people struggle to reach somebody who is truly broken and fatalistic—and to find a way to live with them. Years of affection often only make it more difficult to understand and care for somebody who has stopped caring about themselves.
The novel’s main plot engine is its mystery, explored through the eyes of veteran practitioners. They already understand the witch field, and the narration takes some of that knowledge for granted. The reader must piece together its workings from clues and observations, learning the basics while the characters try to understand behaviour that should be impossible. The field can be observed and measured, but their findings increasingly challenge what they thought they knew. Their discoveries lead them through archives, archaeological sites, and governmental hearings.
The changing viewpoints also show the system at work while the investigation unfolds. Soldiers experience what the new methods do to them; engineers see what their calculations can achieve. Officials decide what can be authorised and what will enter the record. Each understands a different part of what is happening. The reader must make the connections, following both the mystery and the decisions of the people caught up in it.
Lastly, this is also a novel about systems: about the institution as a monstrous entity, how people sustain it, and how serving it changes them. The story follows the people making the Covenant’s methods possible. Not all of them are evil. In fact, the question of what evil is runs through this trilogy. Is an evil act a decision made by the person committing it, or something arising from circumstance? From a system driving people towards certain decisions, closing moral doors behind them until they can no longer go back?
The Witch Field — Acceptable Loss is also about the engineers, clerks, and government officials who look the other way or are driven by the belief that they are entirely correct about how to win a war, justifying everything with the prospect of victory. These are not heroes, but they could be.
Get release updatesComing 2027
IV.The World
World Map (work in progress)
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History & Ideas
The world of The Witch Field grew out of my interest in communities caught between rival empires. Throughout history, such communities emerged along imperial borders, including the contested lands bordering the Eurasian steppe. Their warriors were desperately needed for their military strength and intimate knowledge of the land: they could navigate dangerous rivers and fight across vast steppes where armies unfamiliar with the terrain struggled. Imperial rulers depended on them, exploited them, and found them notoriously difficult to control. That dependence gave frontier communities grounds to demand privileges and autonomy, which they then had to defend against the very powers they served.
That uneasy relationship inspired the Karsen, who draw on the Zaporozhian Cossacks of Ukrainian history and the Grenzers of the Habsburg Military Frontier. River pirates, skilled horsemen, and saber-wielding frontier soldiers, they expect their service to buy them the right to govern themselves.
My background as a historian made the early modern period a natural setting for this story. It is an era I would love to see explored more often in fantasy: a world of gunpowder, pikes, muskets, and star fortresses, where communities fiercely protective of their independence face states increasingly capable of imposing their will.
The witch field begins with a question loosely based on my reading of sociology and history: what if shared beliefs, shared stories, and collective memory exerted a measurable physical force? A starting point was, of course, the writings of the great Émile Durkheim, whose collective effervescence—the intensity people experience through shared action—became a basis for the witch field.
I then expanded it under the influence of Max Weber’s work on authority: why people obey, and what makes them believe someone has the right to command. Roland Barthes’s theory of myth informed how stories and beliefs become common sense, making arrangements created by people seem natural and beyond question.
Finally, much of the trilogy’s architecture relates to James P. Carse’s finite and infinite games: the distinction between winning a game and preserving the possibility of continuing to play. Do you structure a society around victory, or around its ability to continue?
For Irena, that becomes a personal problem. She knows how to win, which in the military often means deciding how many lives to spend to achieve an objective. She must reconsider what makes an objective worth the losses it demands. She must also learn that what seems an acceptable loss to her—her own life—is a loss her friends would be left to live with, and one they cannot accept.
V.The Field
The Witch Field
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The witch field forms wherever enough people believe the same thing. In battle, this takes its strongest form. Believing in survival, victory, and holding out for the men beside oneself creates such a strong physical force that the witch field forms. A witch can shape it to steady soldiers and coordinate their movements, helping to hold a line that might otherwise break in the face of artillery fire, infantry assaults, or war beasts.
Witches do not create the field. As the Kahldenmahr Witch Academy teaches its first-year students: "Compress to strike, release to endure." Compression increases the field pressure and improves the fighting abilities of men. Release reduces the field’s pressure and keeps it from rupturing and killing everybody beneath it.
The Physics Behind the Field
The magic of the witch field is partly inspired by sociology, as mentioned above, but it also draws on physics and engineering.
Load on a power grid: Imagine a modern power grid. Power flows through the system. If one transmission line fails, power flows through the remaining routes, which can become overloaded. A local failure can spread across the network and have a devastating effect far away from the original catastrophe. The magic system in The Witch Field series works similarly.
Criticality: Now imagine a pile of sand. Usually, you can add grains to a sandpile and nothing happens, but at some point, adding one more can trigger an avalanche. So, a small addition that previously did nothing to the system can trigger a larger collapse. There is always a final grain.
Engineering / load under strain: Imagine the Golden Gate Bridge. It is under load all the time. Its own weight, cars, trucks, the force of the wind. Where does the load go? From the vertical cables to the main cables, then through the towers into the foundations, with the massive anchorages at either end of the bridge resisting the cables’ pull. Cut one part, and you damage the system. Whether it continues to function depends on whether the strain can be redistributed. If it cannot, one failure can cause another.
In the witch field, some of those supports are people; some are things even Irena knows nothing about at the beginning of the story.