The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Twenty-Five

A glorious Death was their destiny.

They were each a Blood-Tear destined to fall from the Eyes of the Squamataun, the Wild Rain of Vengeance falling from a raging Diapsid heaven... Soldiers of Destiny, they were the "Voulsengi'ine", commonly referred to as the "Talons of Phafneir" and there were thirty of them, each a warrior hand-picked by Zhe'Kae-Chah himself to serve as an acolyte to the High Order. As acolytes, they each had willingly separated themselves from their egg-brethren and from each of their bloodline's pod-congregations, thereby abandoning their birth names. Instead, they each individually adopted the nomenclature of a different Battle Virtue, of which there were fifty-six from which to choose in their culture, then training their minds and their bodies in the expression of that Battle Virtue, becoming a living totem to the Way of Squamataum. They thus joined together collectively to exemplify the highest achievement of Saurotetramorph martial culture.

They were the very pinnacle of development in soldiers in the service to an ancient, angry and vengeful saurian god.

At the behest of the glorious Dragon, the Dark Prophet of the humans, the Tammoom, had called them to gather, to unify as a single multiple participant entity in service to their king and to their people, and to purify themselves as weapons of Righteousness in readiness for the Grand Purpose. The Talons of Phafneir were a First Strike capability option in the opening of the final battle between reptile and human in the coastal territories of the Pang Xa'Omathra region.

Their job was to covertly infiltrate a high-value target inside Peravendath and then to assassinate every government official they could identify and isolate. Failing that, they were assigned the task of maiming and terrorizing as many human bureaucrats as they could before they were captured or brought down by opposing forces and destroying as much of the physical Peravendathian governmental infrastructure as possible given the strike team's limited time and resources.

They were not expected to survive. They knew they would be outnumbered and outgunned by the military response to such an action. They knew. But it was their distinct honor to die gloriously as Voulsengi'ine and wet the soil in the homeland of their enemies with their blessed and purified blood.

The Tammoom had foreseen this as their destiny. Zhe'Kae-Chah had asked this of them. Their civilization expected that they act. And History Itself necessitated this act be done --- the Scales of Justice demanded to be balanced.

Revelation. Honor. Rage. Glory.

Draped in the photon emission, packet-masking veiling created by their personal battle armor's cloaking devices, moving silently atop floating hoverdisc jet-skates, the covert commando assault team invaded the wing of the Ministry of Urban Systemology administration building housing Vashnur Xhant's offices.

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The worst part of having security detail was the waiting. There was always the anticlimactic waiting following the flurry of precision-specific activity prepping for assignment. Questions of when is THIS happening and WHO is attending and when is THAT happening and who is attending and will there be any cross-pollination of attendees or any intersection in timing between the two events, is the site isolated or will there be annoying crowds of civilian traffic bleeding through the perimeter and who knows about the events and have those people been vetted..., these were the things they clarified and affirmed before they even donned their weapons-belts and trauma armor. Then they would get to the locations in question where they would wait for, hopefully, nothing to happen.