The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Eight

And today, they had been dispatched to this struggling, hardscrabble metropolis on Teshiwahur built atop the ruins of an ancient place called "Niyaddour". Today, they had been sent to The City... ***

The group had met inside the main chambers of a debris-strewn, dusty courthouse sitting unused at the rear of Kolag Y'phree's Municipal Services building, some five blocks away from his fortress-citadel sitting just west and north of The City's geographic center. The two-story building was an A-frame shape with a squared, single-story rear chamber abutted to its main body. Its interior still bore the decorative evidence of its former official use as a site for judicial legislating and there were a cluster of overturned, broken chairs strewn about the rail-enclosed jury box. On the cracked wall behind the raised judge's bench, the Great Seal of the Territorial Jurisdiction and the flags of the Emperium and its municipal confederated governments was partially covered in graffiti and some dried and crusted organic garbage. The shadow-dappled chamber was dimly illuminated by the light from a ceiling-mounted bank of incendiary gas tubules. Apparently, the power had not yet been completely cut-off to the building, even though there was power rationing in effect in certain sections of The City. Outside, a few motorized carts still operating with internal combustion engines passed strolling passersby along the cracked and pitted streets running perpendicular to the building. A trio of visiting low-level dignitaries taking an impromptu tour of The City rode by on miniature Leeshiwunnem, domesticated animals resembling hybrids of camels and buffalos with alligator-like reptile features, bred-down genetically to a smaller size so as to become transport animals. The area was mostly unpopulated which made it a prime location for a secret gathering.

The tragedy of the abandonment and decay of this tract of cityscape was that this was once the site of grand and important history for the people of The City. After wresting its fortunes away from being bound by its twisted, dark and sinister past as dread Niyaddour, The City had for a time been haven to an influx of human and non-human refugees, outcast survivors from the Okphalantene Advocation.

Driven by public religious hysteria following the appearance of The Wound in Teshiwahur's solar system, the Okphalantene Advocation was a religious Holy War wherein the leading spiritual caste in Teshiwahurian culture, the Okphalan Ke'Huery collectively took upon itself the mission to cleanse the Withered Land of all traces of non-native alien spirituality that had been spawned in Teshiwahurian culture since the Emperium had expanded across outer space and met with non-human alien lifeforms. The "unclean" alien heretics, whom the Okphalans largely considered to be soulless creatures, were physically driven past the edges of the Forever Plain and into the interior of the sprawling, now-nameless fortress-city where they saw a small measure of acceptance and recognition as "normal". And although the Okphalans forcibly sought to enforce their short-sighted vision of Teshiwahurian purity and piety upon The City's human population, the educated and metropolitan, urbane citizenry fought back, on and off the battle fields, eventually winning the day for tolerance and religious acceptance. The decrepit courthouse and grounds where D'Spayr and his companions now rendezvoused was the site of The City's great and historic legislative victory over the Okphalans, allowing the non-human aliens to worship their own celestial beings and deities within its towering walls.

But The City was destined to only be an oasis for such libertarian politics, inasmuch the crushing power and influence of the reactionary Okphalantene Advocation pushed past the metropolis' borders, taking their evangelical crusade far out to the Pang Xa'Omathra region and, ultimately, to the shores of the Pnahrryian Sea.

Two generations later, the district and the courthouse were allowed to fall into disrepair and ruin as more basic human needs and inadequacies took precedence over the grandeur and heroism of the Past.