The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Forty-Five

It was cold and it was getting colder with every passing moment. The wind tore salty tears from Lumynn's eyes as he knelt next to a pulverized pile of masonry and twisted metal cradling the heavy, inert form of Akkitus Orthwaine.

The battered surface of Orthwiane's exo-mobile chassis was limned with a faint tangerine-hued gleam under what little light streamed down to the embattled city's debris-littered streets, and from cast-off lighting off broken neon signage and through the shattered entry portals of nearby buildings. The external segmentata breastplate sections on the multi-articulated, exo-chassis housed a wide assortment of action-command module functions while the highly-stylized winged raptor design embossed and etched onto the torso-armor's surface contained a series of very small LED lights. Those lights indicated, among other things, mech-system power-levels and biocybernetic sustainability telemetry. When the exo-chassis was operating at peak efficiency, they usually glowed a bright violet color. At the moment, those lights were more a dull, deep concord purple and a couple of the lights had darkened completely to black. The lighted indicators stated the obvious...

There wasn't much power left to support the continued existence of the courageous jetellin pilot.

"It is not safe here. Leave me," Akkitus said, the electronic timbre of his voice sounding faint with an undertone of hard static. "There's nothing you can do. I understood the risks when I detached from the ship's embryon-cable feed. You're wasting time. And that's time you don't have. Go."

Lumynn ignored Akkitus' plea and, turning his head away from the anthrobot helmsman, barked at Yllvanea Razora as she dazedly stumbled about nearby. His voice startled the wounded Red Archivist and she involuntarily emitted a startled yelp, but she quickly regained her composure.

"Nygeia's down! I can't rouse her! You have med-training, Archivist, set to finding some way to revive her. If we're left too long without her power, we're pretty much defenseless!"

A few body-lengths away, Yllvanea dropped to both knees and, hands trembling from the pain of her own injuries and from the cold wetness embracing them all in the ruins of the exposed boulevard, set to executing a quick and rough physical examine of the fallen princess.

Lumynn worked hard to keep a lid upon the boiling kettle of his turbulent emotions. He had to stay focused. He was, by nature, a strategist and so the chaos of his present situation was more than unsettling or alarming. He had to resist the urge to let his frustration lead him down a path towards certain calamity, but it was hard, so very hard to keep from being overwhelmed.

"We're all falling apart here. Nothing's working out the way it should. We should never have allowed ourselves to be out into a position like this, used as pawns between battling warlords. We're not mercenaries, not sellswords, and the Warlord knew that, but he didn't want to risk his own forces on a risky ambassadorial visit. We knew better, we all did, when Kolag Y'phree first suggested the assignment, but what could we do? We were guests in Niyaddour, living there at Y'phree's indulgence and under his protection. But I could see how very stressful it was for D'Spayr and Nygeia because they knew that eventually, the Warlord would demand something in repayment... And look at us now. Hunted, embattled, with all hands raised against us, the targets of monsters and devils. There HAS to be some solution, some way out, some way for us to regain control over our fortunes. There HAS to be..."

The sound of the Red Archivist's voice abruptly cut through his momentary reverie.

"Nothing major feels broken, there's some discoloration from bruising, but no visible wounds," Yllvanea rasped, blinking away water from her narrowed eyes, "Her respiration is rapid, but not overly so and it is consistent. However, her skin is hot to the touch, like she's burning up from the inside, and I can sense a lot of static electricity, actual charged ions, emanating from off her, surrounding her. From what little past reading I've done concerning practitioners of The Discipline and their catalogue of likely bio-reactions after energy projection and energy re-direction in Spellcasting, I think she's in a fugue semi-torpor. Mystic feedback from using War-Magycke pummels and drains the practitioner, like some kind of paraphysical psionic feedback."