The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Thirty-One

Starve or eat. Eat or be eaten. Live or die. Live placidly among a faceless herd of human meat or become a conquering survivor as a Hyaenirax predator.

The Tammoom, conspiring with The Dragon, had counted on the Hyaenirax's joy over being allowed access to an untapped food source to influence their decision to become co-conspirators and battle-mates in the plot to foster war on the turbulent and rocky seaboard. The Hyaenirax were, for the most part, famously apolitical and generally nihilistic, collectively seeing no point and no profit in becoming involved with the world of normal people, but as soon as they were convinced that there were new meat sources to plunder, their alienated neutrality quickly faded.

After all, it has been famously said that an army travels on its stomach...

The Hyaenirax horde descended on Peravendath like a homicidal tsunami. The intensity of the mass bloodletting became manic and unhinged. Qe'rithda didn't care. He had his orders.

It was on the seventh floor of the Centrum Palatea that he finally encountered Ymperatur Tomanus Grethvian. Within his spacious office, the Ymperatur stood in front of his massive tri-sectional desk which, positioned as it was under the triangular Seal of Authority mounted on the wall behind it, was bracketed by the flags of the Liberated State of Peravendath and of the Independent Federated Navy.

"Ah, I see. It's to be you. I wasn't sure who would be the one to walk through those doors after the killing started," Grethvian said calmly. As ever, his unruffled, unperturbed coolheadedness was thoroughly nerve-grating. The man always projected a quiet air of arrogant self-possession and superiority. "I've always known Peravendath had become too complacent, too soft, to truly be able to defend itself against a determined and more savage aggressor. I guess that is my own fault."

"It is indeed," Qe'rithda said, his equanimity matching the Ymperatur's dispassionate composure. "You underestimated the quiet fury smoldering in the hearts of your enemies. Any man who dares to don the mantle of kinghood must always, by necessity, intimately know the faces, and the hearts, of his enemies and be prepared for those men to forcibly wrestle that kinghood from him."

Grethvian raised an eyebrow. "Well said. I can see that you're a man of some education."

"I will admit that I am more than what my armor would suggest. Mostly, I am what I have been forced to become. I am a man of my times."

The Ymperatur smiled sadly. "Aren't we all? Oddly, I had somewhat hoped for more drama in this moment. I had imagined the hand holding the sword would belong to a former friend or colleague I had wronged, or to a vengeful criminal I had prosecuted and sentenced, or to a conniving and greedy competitor. Instead it's to be a death by proxy. I will fall to the sword of a man I know only by way of rumor and reputed infamy. I will die by the hand of a man who works for someone who will not stoop to executing the act himself. I suppose I am somehow not worthy of having a face-to-face audience with the person who has ordered and engineered my murder. So... You are, I assume, the Sword of the Tammoom?"

Qe'rithda nodded.

"And why does the Prophet-Lord of the United Tribes of Ometh Nastreq, son of Braiqsteff Sha-Norrin, exiled Prophet-King of Pnahrryagos, formerly of the Kingdom of the Underlands, see my death as something so great and necessary that he would burn and sack this magnificent city justfor the chance to spill my blood?"

"Vyngreak Norrin bears you no personal ill will. He does what he must for the good of the people. And for the future of this region now that the autocrats of the Emperium have remembered and rediscovered our existence. This is not about ages-old grievances and political vendettas nor is it about local blood-feuds between noble families. The Emperium will again visit their tyranny upon Peravendath -- and upon Ometh Nastreq, as well. Both our states will suffer for their presence. The reptile people of the Ke'Tareveel and the United Tribes under the Tammoom will not allow this to happen. There will be no deal-making, no drafting of needlessly complicated and purposefully ineffectual treaties. We will retain our freedom and autonomy and we will not be slaves to the World-Father," Qe'rithda said.