INTERLUDE: A KINGDOM OF CRUELTY AND FEROCITY ---
"You know you were born from monsters, don't you? That's why they can never accept you. You're not like them and you never will be. You're a fanged, web-winged mistake born into an angry race of scaled misfits who can't decide whether to fear and worship you or murder you in your sleep."
The words, spoken by the Dowager Queen, his aunt Nai'wrimmeh-Feui, forever echoed in his fevered brain, fueling his perpetual rage.
He was a mutant spawn of the Caimaninae and he had become king...
They were amongst the first beings to march into daylight from out of Pang Xa'Omathra's dark, marshy Maunja'hral Groves, a tribe of sentient reptiles who built a society centered around the arts of predation and the science of warfare. They were, for the most part, a coldly logical people, driven by the pragmatic nature of their appetites as hunters and as non-human, bipedal serpents and shaped by their physical environment, under Teshiwahur's greater-than-Earth gravity, to assume a more-closely-human morphology and outlook on the creation of their civilization. They knew, instinctively, that they vied with the scurrying, rapidly-multiplying mammals whose evolution paralleled their own for dominion over the coastal territories of the vast continent they shared.
Viable agricultural farmland was in short supply in the territories that composed the bulk of the Peravendathian harbor and so large collections of native herd animals did not develop near the coast. Different types of wild cattle were imported from deeper into the continent's interior, making the lizard-folk beholden to the human ranchers for their desperately-needed meat supplies and the other products gleaned from animal shepherding through butchery, like tanned leathers for clothing, animal horns for weaponry and fatty, sebaceous oils for candle-making, soaps and the making of topical ointments to protect the skin of the lizard-folk from the relentless, drying light of planet's dual suns. Fishing the ocean for the harbor's supply of "Lar'ai'weks", thirty-foot long, aggressive carnivorous dinosaur-fish that hunted in packs like seagoing wolves, "Plahrn", sardine-like fish that traveled in huge, fast-moving schools, and "Karmagdees", large pack-animal, whorl-shelled tentacled creatures that resemble cuttle-fish, did not provide the competing Saurotetramorph tribes with enough raw protein energy to feed their many hatchlings. The lizard-folk were, honestly, only modestly talented as fishermen. Their true nature was to prosper as warriors --- their genius was in the realm of warfare. And, anyway, the humans far outstripped their abilities in boat-building and in oceanic navigation and the human physiology reacted far more favorably to sea-based protein. However, the mammals weren't, at least at first, as gifted in the development of technology as the lacertilian warrior-clans, who were the planet's first metalsmiths and were inveterate tinkerers, but the mammals more than made up for their lack of originality with their natural ability to copy, adapt and improve upon the Tekk that the reptile-people invented.
The Saurotetramorphs quickly began to see the writing on the wall. The more learned thinkers amongst them could see that the mammals would eventually gain dominance over the region and the natural enmity between the two species would spawn war after war after war until the reptile tribes were finally driven from their land.
So the bestial, fractious, battling tribes of the Five Great Nests decided to at last cease hostilities amongst themselves and unite to thus create the First Supremacy of the Pod-clans to sit upon the Kei-Qwah, the throne of kingship over all the Saurotetramorphs. The Pod-clans became The Houses of the Diapsid Tribes and thus the Saurotetramorph who sat upon the throne became the Protector Imperious.
During the reign of those first few Houses from the Kei-wah, the terrible influence of the mighty and tyrannical Emperium spread across the master continent of Qundin and even extended down into the non-glacial wilds of the polar southern continent of Teros Argashinn. For the most part, the massive armies of His Imperialness Draggyn Han'Khainus-Galorketh, The World-Father, tried to stay out of the war of evolution being waged on the Peravendathian coast, but there came a time when the bitter chaos of the region extended beyond the borders of Pang Xa'Omathra and caused turmoil and an interruption of the great hegemonic empire's own war efforts in controlling their empire out among the stars. That was something that could not be tolerated. Political affairs on Teshiwahur absolutely had to maintain a reliable status quo so as to not divide the World-Father's attention between establishing and maintaining a galactic empire and dealing with the racial and territorial squabbles of the peoples at coast of the Cold Sea. The Emperium sent in a pacification force to control Ometh Nastreq and Peravendath for over two dozen solar orbital heliars, the equivalent of thirty-three Earth-years. But then, the interplanetary empire fell and the World-Father called home his hegemonic military forces back to the capitol core cities of the Emperium and Ometh Nastreq and Peravendath were once again left to their own devices for survival.
After that, ancient tribal antagonisms and old vendettas once again inflamed the region.
So it was that, many generations of strife and conflict later, the reptile scientists, those known to be amoral Sauromorphan Phylogenticists, broke and mapped the biogenetic code for their species. It was through that amazing act that the mutants and the bio-synthandroids of the Incubatorium gene-factory were created.
But what NO ONE knew was that the evolution of the Pang Xa'Omathra region was subtly guided by the hands of The Overhelm, a secretive cabal of other-dimensional, alien ultrabeings also called Void Gods. Virtually immortal, they were strange beings who each controlled a different paraphysical aspect of the dimensional Outlands at the edges of the greater Multiverse. They had powerful extrasensory psychic influence over the lesser biological entities within their spheres of influence. It had been the Void Gods who had given the reptiles the inspiration, and the eventual gift, of untangling the very seeds of their creation. And it had been the Void Gods who, through manipulation and dark magick, kept the fierce flames of evolutionary bigotry and species-hatred alive in the hearts and minds of the weak and the bitter on both sides of the racial and cultural divides. No one knew...
And if anyone HAD known of it, if they came to truly understand what it was that was going on at the edge of the Cold Sea, under the shadow of the massive spinning rock called The Ke'Tareveel, they would have wept indignantly, cursing Fate, and cursing all of Creation.
Because the Void Gods played a heartless, ruthless game competing against one another where the expansive spilling of blood, both human and reptilian, was an irresistably addictive delight.
To such as they, Life, as human beings understood it, was a relentless storm of endless warfare played out for their amusement.
Worse still, the reptilian being named Zhe'Kae-Chah was among the favored of the multitude of silly, primitive gnats they controlled. The Dragon, and the weapon of the cruel and pitiless fury that motivated his every decision, was foremost among their most cherished pawns.
The words still haunted him. "You know you were born from monsters, don't you?"
... end of Interlude ...
Zhe'Kae-Chah, massively muscled arms folded behind him under the inner arc of his relaxed wings, stood before the open dual doors to an expansive balcony atop the northwest turret of one of Ometh Nastreq's architecturally-ornate, palatial minstry buildings. He smiled frostily as he watched the skies. His vision was eight times more keen than even the best and most optically-gifted of Teshiwahur's human huntsmen. With a patience that bordered on lassitude, he watched a shiny metallic dot in the distance approaching at a diagonal to the centermost street and boulevard layout of the government center, flying under the military's parameters for defensive radar. He could see they were trying to use the glare from the planet's setting suns to help mask their approach from any observers below.
It was Captain Rae'vynn Wyyng's ship, the Aerieakon.
He did not turn around at the approach of the warlord, Arvenall Dampiko, and his trusted commander, Mikaas Drem. The Dragon lazily tilted his head towards them and said, his thick, reverberant voice rumbling, "Soon the killing will begin in earnest."
* * *
Since childhood, after the wintry passage of a particularly violent storm, he had always wondered, listening to the hushed and awestricken talk of the superstitious peasant folk with whom he'd once lived, whether or not there really were such things as "gods". Science told him there were not.
His senses told him otherwise.
He was transfixed, holding his breath, his eyes locked on the impossible scene playing out in front of him. Vashnur Xhant couldn't believe what he was seeing. He was an educated man, a man of science and methodical analysis, a man who had experienced many things as he'd traveled the world, and he did not fall prey, as so many of his brethren did in these strange times after the advent of the The Wound and the Long Death, to fringe beliefs and superstition. He'd led a long and complex life wherein he'd seen many unique and, some would say, mind-bending wonders, but he had never imagined he'd ever see something as staggeringly and extraordinarily preternatural as what he saw now.
He had heard about the wide range of abilities that the ancient and mysterious science called The Discipline bestowed upon its practitioners, but he had assumed that most those stories were blatant exaggerations or superstitious fictions.
He did not think so now.
Several environmental containment alarms within the damaged building had gone off since the assault had begun, bleating sirens and harsh klaxons adding to the nerve-jangling chaos that had driven the officials and staff inside the building to dire hysteria. Xhant himself was naturally attuned to the fluctuations of the interior climature by virtue of his own extrasensory telecognitive ability of aerokinesis.
When the Saurotetramorph raiders had triggered the effects of the Laukenmass Lazulux in the Administration Building's downstairs understructure, Xhant could feel the abrupt supercharging of the ions traveling through open spaces running along the traffic corridors and the subsequent flash-fire tearing of the air's molecular bonds even through the thick stone and steel flooring. The birth of the colossal pressure wave in advance of the hypersurface light cone produced a pressure in Xhant's temples similar to the sudden onrush of a migraine headache and the nerves under his skin jangled with a flush of electrophoretic heat. His mind's eye was overwhelmed by the image of the hypersurface wave rushing through the halls and corridors, into and up through stairwells, and in through open doorways and under archways leading upwards from the blast's epicenter.
He was a scholar. He had more than a passing knowledge of the astrophysical elements that underpinned the limited scope of the universe that human beings could perceive. He knew about solar storms and sunspots, supernovas, collapsing stars and nebulae, event horizons and black holes and he knew that the expanding field of the onrushing hypersurface light cone was capable of warping Space-Time into a physically oppressive hammer that would pound their immediate vicinity into particulate ash. He knew.
And on some primal level, so did the team of furious reptile-commandos battling Xhant, Yllvanea Razora, the Traveler in Red, Lumynn and the rest in the chamber. The fury of a star, channeled through the forbidden technology in a mythical weapon, had them in its crosshairs. The raging power of a dying sun. In the more poetic, and more portentious, metaphorical phrasing of the Withered Land's common folk, the Reaping Scythe of the Wrathful Priest of the Pale-Eyed People had been unleashed.
It was coming. It would kill them. They couldn't get away.
And then Nygeia spun about to face the open lobby beyond the Grand Advisor's chambers and, her eyes squinted shut in a face reflecting an inner ferocity he could scarce imagine, she began rapidly muttering a lengthy string of words in a hard-edged, gutteral tongue. It was a language Vashnur Xhant had never before heard, but he felt a strange sense of familiarity with it upon hearing those peculiar sibilances, like something remembered from a particularly disturbing dream.
The Princess' ever-present walking stick, the segment-banded, ornament-encrusted cane topped with an unidentifiable oval crystal, was upright and floating perpendicular to the floor. Defying gravity and hovering in mid-air. Xhant recalled she'd briefly referred to it as a lightning staff. It was moving on its own, travelling through the air in an orbit encircling her just beyond her arm's reach. Its motion was animated, its speed increasing or decreasing as it moved with her, forward and back, or to the side, seemingly alive, as if it were watchful and protective of its owner. It made the Grand Advisor think of a totemic guardian from antiquity come to life.
Nygeia then strode five determinedly purposeful steps forward towards the lobby, her hands extended in front of her, palms outward, the airborn lightning staff floating directly in front of her, between her outstretched arms...
Then the wave hit. The impact of the wave caused the chamber's walls to ripple and flex as if they were composed of fluid, while the floor beneath them heaved in undulating quakes. It felt as if all the air in the room had suddenly been burnt away. There was a ragged sound like the scream of a jet turbine engine revving at high-spin that then devolved into a sharp cracking noise, as if something massive made from fired ceramics had broken into a thousand knife-edged shards...
Bathed in what he instinctively understood to be a lethal halo of corruscating radioactive energy, the Princess Nygeia stood tall, arms extended and her hands outstretched, as she weaved a pirouetting pattern of dance-like movements that transformed an oncoming tidal wave of deadly blue-white light into a web of delicate and lacey, azure nothingness.
... and the jarring sound of demonic laughter emanated not from the sorcerer-princess, but from her floating lightning staff as it greedily drank in the lethal brilliance of hypersurface light cone ...
Xhant felt his insides twist and turn to glacial water at the sound of that disembodied laughter. It was the laughter of something insane and inhuman. It was a sonic lash whipping across the minds and souls of everyone in the chamber.
The Saurotetramorph raiders screeched and burned, their thick, scale-plated skin falling off from them in disintegrating ribbons that left only smoky smears in the air, and they were lifted high from off the floor by the impact of the wave. Their energy weapons, as they fell from their lifeless fists, exploded in small eruptions of sparks and flame-bursts, melting to pools of rapidly cooling slag.
The wave speedily crested, becoming painfully, eye-searingly bright. Then next, the light was simply stamped out, extinguished, gone.
Blinking through tears and past the purplish-orange nimbuses occluding his recovering vision, he could see Nygeia's silhouette, the voluminous hood and cowl of her cape masking her face and the lightning staff once more firmly held in her hands. She was standing motionless, her posture indicative of the importance of her triumph: strong and prideful. Wisps of indigo-hued smoke wafted from off her body.
In the ensuing stillness, Xhant could hear his heart beating as though it were a drum. He would have sworn it was loud enough for all the occupants in the room to hear.
Alive. They were alive.
Impossible.
Vashnur Xhant stared at Nygeia and the thought he'd entertained mere moments past became more than an idle observation. It became a realization.
"In this New and Bastardized World Order under the shadow of The Wound, some among us have become like gods ... and like devils."
* * *
His ears rang from the repetitive concussive eruptions of the flame-jets as the incendiary weaponry of the marauding breach-platoon targeted the island's defending militia forces. The bright orange and yellow firebolts launched from the flame-jet cannons mounted atop the backs of the charging, lupine hound-cavalry melted the woven plastic shielding and metal-infused ceramic plating worn by the Peravendathian militiamen into steaming, cinder-strewn puddles. Nearby, something blew up spectacularly, sending a hurricane of shrapnel out into a wide, circular blast radius that included a troop transport vehicle and its many occupants. The armored vehicle flipped over on its side, spilling out wounded and dying men caught in the plumes of smoke and flame. Photon pulse-rifles and multi-barreled portable mini-bomb auto-rifles chugged and coughed swarms of projectiles at the incoming, hound-mounted invaders, but their defensive attack was ineffectual. The muscular, wolfish, dog-oxen the breach-platoon rode were savagely snarling veterans of past military campaigns, unaffected by the deafening cacophony of battle and unafraid of the distractions presented by the automated war-machinery the Peravendathian militia employed.
Qe'rithda, Sword of the Tammoom, was in his element. He rode at the front of the ground force that was composed of Commander Noamus and his Kadavereen mounted cavalry. Hyaenirax Captain Trez'grent's Mer'glackha Hunt Brigades had infiltrated further into the city in advance of Qe'rithda's charge from the hydro plant and were likely overrunning the central aerodrome airfield. The bedlam and havoc of battle was a balm to his usually moody, darkly depressive mental state. He revelled in the chance to challenge what he saw as the random fecklessness of Fate and embraced the opportunity to seize his own destiny from celestial deities who played humans as fools. Good or bad, just or unjust, triumphant or failure, Qe'rithda the Outcast fought more than an army of enemy forces as he led his platoon deeper into Peravendath from the plundered access point of the Mondraykile Hydro Plant towards the center of the main island across the vehicle-cluttered super-expressway bridge. The Sword of the Tammoom fought his own ghosts and demons, the memories of his shortcomings and his failures, as much as he strove against the white-hot fusillades of blaster-fire and the molecule-disintegrating swings from fragmentation axes that targeted him as he rode atop three-quarters of a ton of bone-armored hybrid wolf and wild bull running at forty miles an hour.
With the fall and sacking of Peravendath, there would at last be no more remaining evidence of the past corruptive influences of the World-Father's Emperium. There would be an end to the remaining sway of its soulless, atheistic, nullifidial supremacy over the native, pantheistic faith of the True Tribes of the Pang Xa'Omathra region. There woud be an end to the military aristocracy. The racial and societal divides between the bloodlines of Teshiwahur, the stratification of their continental culture between the Ran'Jaddath, the Qa'Sarkoon, the Cid'Ammar and the Yur'seyn'Ahktar would be dissolved. The natural indigenous peoples of the region could at last regain their stature and mastery over their divinely-bestowed lands and confront the calamity of The Long Death head on, denying The Wound its dominion over Teshiwahur. The True Tribes would again be ascendant.
The world would again be set to right. This was the exalted credo of The Tammoom whom he served. This, he told himself, was why he killed so many and so often.
Someone had to save the Withered Land. Vyngreak Norrin, he who was leader of the United Tribes of Ometh Nastreq, son of the Great Teacher Braiqsteff Sha-Norrin, exiled Prophet-King of Pnahrryagos, and King of the Underlands, knew the Truth of the One Way and he, Norrin, was that Savior. And Qe'rithda was blessed to be His Sword.
And the duty of The Sword was to spill the Blood of the Unworthy.
Peravendath would fall, collapsing into a river of blood, and a purer, clean New World would rise from its murky, filth-ridden rubble.
And then, when that was done, the Tammoom and his people would turn their eyes towards the reptile-folk and the kingdom of The Dragon...
Even as he swung his straight-edged combat sabers, beheading a rifle-toting militiaman who dared block his steed's path, he luxuriated in his lucid daydream. That inattentiveness would lead to his downfall.
A metal superhuman riding atop a massive, thundering lizard-beast that moved like a muscle-bound rocket was coming straight at he and his platoon. The beast looked to be of a species still strongly connected to its distant, prehistoric past while its rider was doubtless a product of advanced Emperium cyberprosthetic technology. Qe'rithda did not recognize them nor know what faction they represented in the raging conflict that had seized the boulevards of the multi-island metropolis, but he deduced they were not his allies. Behind his helmet, the Sword's eyes widened in alarm, however, when he noticed that his force's Power-hammer Incinerator guns had no effect at all on either the metal warrior or his heavily-scaled, ridge-backed steed.
While on their side of the confrontation, Akkitus Orthwaine and D'Spayr's Veranus Halodean battle-mate saw the rapidly approaching line of invading soldiers as no more than yet another obstacle in their path to Vashnur Xhant's chambers in the beleagured Ministry of Urban Systemology administration building. As it drew nearer, the mighty Halodean unleashed a heart-freezing roar that shook the air like a mortar blast.
Within seconds they collided. Violently.
* * *