The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Twenty-Four

Blood had run across the land in shin-deep pools. The bodies of the fallen had been stacked as high as a tall man's shoulders. Fires from the artillery fire concentrated there had burned for a full week beyond the end of that tragic clash. The hillside meadow had been, since that time, little more than a neglected, weed-overgrown mass cemetery.

But not now. Now the clearing was filled with the presence of the living.

This was where the army of the sadistic and predatory, cannibalistic Hyaenirax had gathered at the command of Vyngreak Norrin, the Tammoom, and they mingled with the mutated hordes of those cold-blooded, perpetually homicidal humanoid creatures called "Kadavereens", tribal, swamp-dwelling barbarians who lived in a fiercely competitive, closed society where ruthless bloodletting was the pinnacle of expression.

Qe'rithda, Sword of the Tammoom, stood next to the exoskeletal frame of his turbine-powered, single flier aero-glider and looked out across the eighteen rows, each row thirty-six men deep, of coarse-featured, feral faces of the ranks of armed men in the meadow with no small degree of dissatisfaction.

Qe'rithda was a broad-shouldered, thickly-muscled man of greater than average height and greater than normal athleticism. He was dressed in ceremonial armor that was a relic from another age, armor that was amongst the last of the still-working technological antiquities left from the Pang Xa'Omathra region's Hurengylle Dynasty, a regional familial political family from some three generations in the past. Qe'rithda, born of the Kohra'ander tribe, and who was no blood relation to those pale-blooded, sickly inbred aristocrats who'd acted as the tyrannical overlords for the Hegemonic Emperium's naval command force, was an ex-officer of the Ometh Nastreqian Sea Marshals Hazard Force. He had spent a tumultuous, and mercifully brief, period acting as the military Governor-General for the port-capitol of Peravendath harbor during the Second War of the Waves against the Peravendathian navy. Ometh Nastreq had decisively lost that military contest and Qe'rithda had been stripped of his commission and, for a time, imprisoned by the Peravendathians before being given a pardon by the new post-Emperium revisionist government which had seceded from the World-Father's crumbling, corrupt empire.

His upper body was encased in segmented, pewter-colored trauma armor composed of a custom-molded cuirass, with hinged breast and back-plates, over a long-sleeved chainmail hauberk, and a neck-protecting gorget, over which was an ornate sepia-colored, knee-length, kikko katabira-style duster cloak reinforced with hexagonal polyceramic plates. The shoulders of the duster cloak were implanted with conical steel spikes. His knee-high, jet-black boots were studded with palm-sized circular, silver medallions, each inscribed with the seal of the Ometh Nasteqian Sea Marshals Hazard Command. His weaponry was composed of two long swords, each a straight-edged combat saber with anodized blades, and he carried an ultrasonic frequency projector rifle in a sling-holster across his expansive back.

His helmet, the forward face of which had been forged to resemble the face of a hornet-like, winged insect called a "vrindi", completely covered his head. The bowl helmet was built with a moveable and collapsible protective, glare-coated visor was capped with a shark's fin-style comb that divided the headplate. The complete combat costume gave an observer the overall impression that Qe'rithda was more of a war-golem, frightening and implacably relentless, than he was a mere human.

A Major from the lead dragoon regiment of the Kadavereen's mounted cavalry, a man named Noamus, and a pair of Infantry Captains from the Hyaenirax's Mer'glackha Hunt Brigades, named Trez'grent and Jorande, stood at either side of the Sword of the Tammoom as the small band discussed strategy.

"Se'cham dwar, Mighty Sword of the Avenging Tammoom," Jorande said, using the standard salutation of respect. "Blessings upon your bloodline. May the cold light of the Black Heavens Above never blind your gaze."