The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Fifty-One

Sent once more out into the Wastelands, a martial assembly of uniformed sinners, fanatics and murderers conscripted into a rough and battle-hardened military machine in service to a mad demigod, they had their dismal and dreary target in sight... and who could say what nightmares awaited them there?

They had gone from Ureeon Base in four massive flat-topped troop carriers, bulky non-aerodynamic aircraft shaped like blacksmith's anvils and each flying at an altitude just under the sub-tropospheric cloudline, held aloft by virtue of electromagnetic repulsor wave-technology. The troop carriers were old, the last remnants of a mighty fleet that had once numbered in the thousands. But the Emperium had experienced a major downturn in its fortunes, mostly due to the the destructive effects of The Long Death on Teshiwahur's solar system, and production on the great battle machines was eventually suspended as the Great Revocation pulled the world-spanning dominion back to Teshiwahur. The aging carriers were well-tended, their massive electro-dynamo power generators refitted to accommodate the latest advancements in Hegemonic Emperium propulsion science, but they were no longer at the cutting edge of the military technology at the World-Father's command.

But they were more than adequate for the job at hand.

Manduryus Ha'akmar, Supreme Battle-Marshal of the Armor-Guard Prime, leader of the Emperium's fabled Centaurius Emperii Primilion, carefully examined the strategic value of the topography and terrain surrounding the tattered and squalid metropolis on the horizon.

The totality of the scenery and purview left him slightly unsettled. It was a bleak landscape infected with the unrequited ghostly passions of kings and outlaws, of hunters and raiders, and he imagined could feel their greed, hunger and rage behind his eyes and under his skin like a teeming flood of angry soldier ants. His heart pounded and his blood coursed through his veins trailing the heat of stars. It made his head ache. He looked out past his own reflection in the viewport screen, an apparitional image staring soullessly back at him, and peered down at the land below. He did not particularly like what he saw.

Originally a Regency Principality, The City, which had once been widely renowned by the name Niyaddour, was an ancient place, an expansive rocky and dusty mega-acreage that held the bones for five different older iterations of itself. Since it had been rebuilt, it had become a rotting and deteriorating metropolis populated by mutants, refugees, brigands, spies and mercenary soldiers, a place that held little value to the Emperium. Even after Kolag Y'phree had instigated civil revolt against the city's aging, corrupt bureaucracy of decadent dukes and barons and decided to make The City his own, the urban municipality possessed no political cachet and no industrial eminence of which its denizens could boast. The City's somewhat tattered claim to importance lay only in the mysterious and fabled subterranean mines beneath its debris-strewn streets, supposedly played out and long abandoned, partially sealed closed, that the Warlord eventually decided to re-open, though on a far more modest scale than they had once seen. And in those mines was a mineral that turned out to be a dark wonder of nature that could just possibly reinvigorate the dying economy of the Emperium.

But ancient Niyaddour, now re-branded and advertised among the territorial region-states as The City, was loathe to surrender its slumbering secrets willingly... Reopening and resuscitating the mines had unleashed a localized ecological nightmare. Rogue ion-waves issued forth from underground, permeating the folded Precambrian layers of sandstone, ferromanganese compounds and primordial volcanic , crescent-shaped longitudinal layers of quartz composing the underside of the monotonous arid plain. The ion-waves rose from nearly two kilometers deep beneath the sand dunes and scrub –brush and mushroomed upwards into the sky for as high as sixteen to twenty stories and generated sizzling temperatures as high as 680 degrees Fahrenheit. The region surrounding Niyaddour, beyond the city's towering walls, was awash in negatively charged anion particles that luminesced and rapidly accelerated cell-death in organic substances and creatures. Not that those facts much alarmed Supreme Battle Marshal Ha'akmar. He knew his equipment and his men were well-shielded and ruggedized against the oppressive electro-ionization in the region. The soldiers of the Centaurius Emperii Primilion forces did not wear armor of the kind common to most of the Emperium's military. In fact, the flexible and joint-articulated, protective shielding that encased the bodies of his men wasn't true armor at all.