The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Forty-Six

In a rare moment of Unreality, standing confused on a blank and featureless plain of dry, powdery soil, he recalled the Emperial Ceremony of Glory and Devotion, the Rudechach K'uraq-Wahr, spoken back at the territorial capital at Plae'I'shein Jaharob, on the other side of the Forever Plain. It was like a dream pulled from someone else's life. He remembered the impact those words uttered by of Ou'Gustian-Krake, his Direct-Command Officer when he had been in the Outland Marshals Corp, when he'd been one of the legion of deputized Knights of Central Homefront Security, had made upon him.

"We serve. That is what we do. That is who we are. We humbly serve the Greater Good. We are the Chosen of Fate, the Soldiers of Justice. Honor is our shield. We speak the Truth, always and without regard for personal gain or political circumstance, and we Safeguard the Helpless. We fight for the welfare of All. We are those who were Broken, those who were Undeserving, those who were Lost, reformed, reshaped and remade. Reborn, our lives have been pledged to new purpose. Though we are not deserving of the Light, we stand against All that is The Dark. We fight for our Redemption. It is incumbent on Us, above all others, to Right the Wrongs. Against Us, no Evil shall prosper. We SERVE. We SURVIVE. We OVERCOME. That is what we do. THAT is who we are."

Ou'Gustian-Krake had given a speech that was more than merely an enthusiastic promotion of the Hegemonic Emperium's usual "Service to the World-Father in Unity Is Our Strength" propaganda. This had been a moral call-to-arms for a seasoned peacekeeping force. Since the unanticipated enactment of the Great Cosmic Revocation, the various mighty military services of the Emperium had been plagued by severe problems of morale as fighting men and women had seriously questioned their callings, questioned the truth of their roles in spreading the power of Teshiwahur throughout the solar system via conquest and colonialization. They'd begun to see the iron fist of Tyranny behind all their works. They'd stopped seeing themselves as heroes and had come to realize they'd become the murderous tools of a dictatorial Oppressor.

Krake's speech was just so much smoke behind which hid the unprincipled and unscrupulous falsehoods that had led to unimaginable bloodshed. Those words had been a clarion call to remind the troops of that for which they'd originally fought.

They were not mercenaries or sell swords or hired guns nor were they professional warriors or police. They were Knights.

Back then, to one young soldier, that speech had reignited the dying embers of a passion for Justice that he'd thought abandoned. Those words became ingrained in every atom of his being. For D'Spayr, born Draekasen Se'nurqille Predayas frae'Bluhd, Ou'Gustian-Krake's oratory had been more than mere words. They'd been a promise written large and in a flame that seared his very soul.

The people had been liars, but the words had been true.

"... we stand against All that is The Dark..."

He would not allow a misbegotten alien mutation like Ka'esh-Woganhi'e to pervert the existence of those he held dear.

That which now confronted him wasn't an illusion. It wasn't metaphorical. It wasn't magical. It was a different dimension, a dimension of the mind. It was a physical representation of an individual human being manifested by an incomplete collection of observations by a hostile, alien, non-human entity. A simulacrum projected by an alien mind and given physical presence on a different Plane of Reality. And the snarling, pantherish, homicidal thing that presented itself to him as "Princess Nygeia" was definitely NOT the woman he knew. Truth be told, it wasn't even human --- nor even, technically speaking, alive.

She "lived" but only inside the bubble-construct of Ka'esh-Woganhi'e's mental dominion.

Conventional Newtonian and Einsteinian physics defined and categorized the concept of "Reality" as the scientific quantification of the world through which organic beings travel as defined by the input of our human sensory aparatii. Thermodynamically speaking, the human sensory recognition of the existence of an infinite ergodic universe, meaning the cosmic physical Reality through which a human consciousness travels in its body, is limited by densities of microstates following particle paths through phase space, where the convective time derivative, i.e. the time rate of change of some physical quantity like heat or momentum, is zero. In other words, sentient entities occupying localized space see and feel environmental conditions and/or other sentient entities and those other entities see and feel them as they both occupy some point or collection of points in the stream of linear Time in the same localized space.