The small band of masked and armored riders had traveled across the Forever Plain and into the interior of The Wastes at the command of Tanzamia Clariq, the Royal Dame of the rover-city of Bur'heddam. The mounts they rode, called "Leeshiwunnem" were strange, mutant hybridized creatures. Distinctly mammalian in origin, their body structure and muscular were, if one compared them to Earth-Terran animals, partly camel and partly buffalo, but their the exteriors of their powerful bodies were scaled and ridged like the flesh of alligators and their long, lean legs were armored. Regardless, they moved elegantly and with great speed. The Riders had traveled down from the mobile city's last geostable-positioned location at the foot of the Wytthrim Peaks.
Bur'heddam had once been a military base built into the exoskeletal carapace of a monstrous beetle-like desert insect that had been cybernetically-altered and structurally redesigned to house a half dozen platoons of soldiers. That had been long, long ago, though, before the advent of the Long Death, and after the appearance and ascendancy of The Wound in Teshiwahur's seven planet solar system. Since then, an outlaw band of independent philosopher-warriors had seceded from the citizenry of the oppressive Emperium, no longer recognizing its legal authority over them as individuals or as a self-contained society and they had partially remade the huge multi-ton walking cyborg insect troop-carrier into a small city. Tanzamia Clariq, the fifth in a line of city-mayor's descended from the outlaw military commander Mikketh Clariq-Forjhane who had hijacked the roving base from the Emperium's continental army, was a fierce and ingenious leader dedicated to the survival of her people. Clariq's subjects were, despite the catastrophic sociopolitical and technological de-evolution of civilization following the discovery of that huge quantum tear in the deepness of the sky, hopeful their world would once more right itself and again achieve normality. They did not believe that The Emperium shared that hope and that the ruling dynasty was actively working to prevent their world from recovering from its debilitating planetary decline.
The fourteen riders, whom the people of Bur'heddam referred to as 'The Ket'Horreau', a title adapted from an ancient Teshiwahurian term for mounted police-cavalry, had been assigned the task of finding the termination point for the signal the scientific intelligence monitoring scientists at the mobile city had intercepted. Unbeknownst to the Emperium's Star Legion, the technologic covert intelligence agency at Bur'heddam maintained a constant surveillance tap on the Emperium's Planetary Defense Network's Security Reconnaissance Services. They listened to all transmissions and scanned the contents of all wired digital communications through the holes and faults in the crumbling network infrastructure of the collapsing empire.
They knew about the Star Legion's Code Evergray alert. They knew about the recall of the Spatial Network Fleet Watchship Ravenstear planetside from apehelionic orbit outside the moon Pex'Insava. They knew about the Ravenstear's subsequent planned dock at the militia outpost of Annet Galjeshir's Dre'Zaresch Spaceport, southeast of Koombari City. But more, they knew about the arrival of a Celestial Empyrean, an alien Messenger from beyond the distant Rimworlds, at the desolate necropolis of Shi'draih-Hakaba...
The Ket'Horreau would find this creature and extract from it the secret of its mission. And they would bring that information back to Bur'heddam and its ruler, Tanzamia Cleriq, to use as a weapon against the crushing influence of the tyrannical Emperium.
And they would let nothing stand in their way.
YOU ARE READING
The Withered Land, THE EMPIRE FALLS: HELL'S AVATAR
Science FictionD'Spayr, the EARLY YEARS ... nearly two decades before meeting the Sorcerer-Princess Nygeia and before encountering the Traveler In Red, a young journeyman Knight named D'Spayr encounters a dangerous secret sect, battles against an angel-like rogue...
