The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Thirty-One

The Sword of the Tammoom led his determined cadre of mounted troopers up the entry ramp and into the main foyer of the Magistrate's Parliamentary Centrum Palatea. They charged past a madly running and scurrying throng of hysterical clerks and bureaucrats, and high-ranking administrative pages who were exiting the Palatea building's legislative chambers amid heavy blaster fire and the threat of impalement upon the electro-javelin's of Qe'rithda's attack force.

The Parliamentary Centrum Palatea was essentially Peravendath's royal palace, the imposing and ornate structure that housed the offices of Ymperatur Tomanus Grethvian and the city-fortress' governing council.

The Ymperatur and the Chamber-Lords, the Major-Generals for both Interior and Exterior State Security and their accompanying staffs, and the Exchequer Division's Island Law Bureau all held their main offices inside the Centrum Palatea. So, in order to protect so many august personages, the Peravendathian Higher Unified Special Civilian Services Militia was also headquartered there and, as such, were in charge of building security. No less than a dozen squads of eighteen men each were stationed at the building with at least four squads on active duty on-site at any one time. In the many, many solar orbital heliars since Peravendath had organized itself as a jurisdictionally codified, hybridized Parliamentary-Democratic Aristocracy, no one had ever dared attack the Centrum Palatea and certainly not any of the Chamber-Lords. But with the ascendancy of The Dragon to the throne of the Saurotetramorphs on the Ke'Tareveel, and with the rebellious, frequently violent uprisings driven by their oceanic neighbors in Ometh Nastreq, such things once thought unthinkable had become dreaded possibilities... With the foremost among those things being the actual invasion of Peravendath's main island by a ruthless enemy force.

It would have been thought that the sudden arrival of a even a well-armed mobile enemy force inside the boundaries of a city, part of an island chain, populated by nearly two hundred thousand people would be doomed to failure. After all, those renegade adversarial invaders would be cut off from both reinforcements and supply lines and be limited in the effectiveness of their attack by the very geography of the target city's layout, but Qe'rithda and company, though they rode at the forefront of the wave of invaders, were not the spearhead of the attack. That honor belonged to the cannibalistic Hyaenirax... Upon realizing that the Hyaenirax were loose and hunting among them, many of Peravendath's defenders lost heart. It is one thing to fear the savage ferocity of an enemy ---

It was another thing entirely to fear being eaten alive by them.

The calm and precise execution of long practiced defensive battle strategies gave way to a very singular, terror-driven, every man and woman for themselves survival mentality.

For most the population, the fear of rampant, rapacious cannibalism was a holdover from the early days of the The Wound's effects upon the cultures of Teshiwahur. In those days, when the once-mighty Emperium discovered that, for all its technological might, it could not stave off Teshiwahur's fall into barbarism courtesy of natural disasters like massive continental infernos caused by solar flares, huge earthquakes, unpredictable volcanic eruptions and planetary orbital instability that fractionally shifted the planet's polar orientation. Many metropolitan centers were deprived of food, water, power and even fossil fuels for primitive transportation. Hordes of people became ill and died, overwhelming the public service infrastructure, and so many of the poor, the disaffected and the sick became nomads, wandering from one tekk-oasis to another, trying to regain access to the civilization they once knew and depended upon, seeking a reinstatement of creature comforts of the past. But that did not work. The planetary magnetosphere and microwave emissions from the solar systems dying twin stars prevented the interconnected planetary computer networks from ever again working. And that is when the final collapse into cruel and primitive barbarity began. That's when the brutal realities of desperation drove large groups of human beings into doing the unthinkable. The once-forbidden, formerly inconceivable, conscienceless consumption of human flesh became a valid option of survival. Morality was all too often the first casualty of survival in the face of catastrophe.