The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Twenty-Eight

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.