Seydon of Arda
Raquor'daan
[Coreward :|: Expansion Region][Alliance Space :|: Sector 0801/ɶ]
[Dahomey System]
[Dahomey]
[The Greater Horn of Iron Region]
Tractor-pods burned along the Alliance Demarcation Zone drawn through North and South Jubah. Mediation talks between the northern 'Yondermen' and the JBLA disintegrated through systematic and purposeful reprisals aimed at castrating each others autonomy and logistical powers. Through the destruction of agro-pastoral livelihoods, outlier townships crucial to feeding inner population centres outside of Abomey, vicious warfare painted down tribal and ethnic lines that grew up through the dark Gulag Age. Rivalries the Alliance privately milked to secure resources out of South Jubah's underdeveloped territories, marshlands rich with natural reservoirs that did the Yoi~lee people no favours.
Smoke in cubic tonnage caught in the atmospheric wind stream curling downward the arctic. Painting over the highland interiors sprawled across Dahomey's equatorial midriff, colouring sunrise and sunsets bloody as hot gore, lingering constant after-tastes of burning rubber, oil, and flax in the back of breathing throats, stressing animal populations into premature migratory patterns weeks before a local wet season scheduled to storm the arid high country.
On a searingly bright, cloudless mid-morn, the only shadow cast from skyward was the eclipsing, winged strokes of a grunting HWK-290. An old Corellian light hauler, fixed with durasteel pinions, ident #112019. The Roach. Seydon of Arda banked carefully over open plains fifty metres below. He watched through stained canopy plexiglass at a thundabeast pack running in stampede from the sound of the 290's engines. The scanner-suite called up life-sign numbers in their hundreds of thousands. Their run excited flocks of viridian-backed pelicans and brown sagegoons from nests in low reed balls anchored by shallow, damp rivulets. He piloted through their feathered sore, following a rough inlaid course drawn on a console map screen. South by south east. Following old scars furrowed from extinct riverways. And while the wet season still waited three weeks on, the west bulwarks of old, toothed mountains were dusky from the weight of glowering, flashing thunderheads. Seydon ignored the tightening in his belly and flew on.
The coordinates were guesswork. He had bought information that was third-hand from a cantina elder. His brother whose third wife had a cousin had a story of an ancestor of his that once dealt with them. Water-thin information, few on Dahomey wished to speak after cat-eyed hellions. Much less to him. Another devil from the heavens. As it went, Seydon learned that if you wanted to contact this School in particular, you'd venture south over the empty highland country, onto arid steppes and plains. Just until you caught sight of a line of ancient peaks, white-capped during all seasons, and followed a broad, desiccated delta. Look for badlands. Search out a cut in the stone cowled in mist. Then venture on foot through a maze of stone and hope your prayers were strong enough to lead you to Meheimid.
Past increasing emptiness and open bare rock, he found the badlands. They were rolls of wrinkled earth and silt pushed by some great hand of god, cupped into smoothed and pinched knolls a hundred meters high. Long millennia of heat had dry-cooked the dirt into fragile combs. Sand-hawks watched from their nests implanted inside the earth-folds, as the 290 roared past. At true dusk, the fall and roll of distant thunder washing with eerie doppler sound, Seydon found the cut in the knolls and the field of drifting mist. He settled the Roach into landing configurations.
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Landing stanchions shock-absorbed into old bedrock, echoing hard returns of grating steel on red granite through the fuselage. Seydon left the process automated, retreating a module behind the cockpit and his living quarters. The loss of the Relentless meant a subtraction in his operating ability. A great deal of invaluable kit had been lost or destroyed. This new armoury, courtesy of [member="Jorus Merrill"]'s mechanical genius and salvage ability, was bare. He retrieved and belted on an old, armoured jacket and a utility belt-rig, weighed with multi-tools, a leather-holstered canteen, an herb satchel, a well-used axe and a heavy longknife. Razorlight and Winterfang, his treasured hunting swords, were sheathed across his back. Seydon ran a gloved hand over rough chin scruff and advancing whisker shadows and headed down for the debarkation air-lock.
Servo's cycled, air pressure equalized, and an iris of cut plexiglass and shielded hulling opened. Jejune winds gusted up the ramp, blowing fine grit against his eyelashes and mouth. Seydon held a hand against the sunlight as he walked out onto open plain. The thundabeasts and their avian tag-alongs were nowhere in sight, not the rising moisture stinking out of the far, far wetlands or the dark, stormy greenery part of jungle underbrush spanning back toward far, salty coasts. Ashen and orange bedrock and grey sand drew to the shivering horizon. Ambient warmth was thin but immensely hot, bereft of obvious moisture. Save for the unearthly mists hanging around the 290's clawed landing pylons hooking into the ground. That, Seydon decided, was an effect, rather than weather. A chill tried swimming up over his knees before it met the heat and dried. The Dunaan looked up into the long, narrow canyon way sliced into the badland gnoll.
About to step forward into unknown, he picked up a scram wail of high output atmospheric thrusters. The jet roar was twenty eight kilometres out, coming north from the Jubah nation. Seydon paused and watched a flickering gnat on the heat sweating horizon grow and unfold into a glinting hawk. Modest lines, economical profile, slim economics with the hulling wedging out to brace the reactor and engine housing. He knew it a glance: SH-LS-78 Winter Eagle, codenamed Iron Snake during development. He'd been the first to own and operate one, wrestling the prototype out from under Jorus' R&D staff. It later sold under auction. The Dunaan expected it was mothballed somewhere in a privatized hangar space under glacier tonnage, bought out by Midvinter's king-in-all-but-name.
They were a rare purchase. Often built custom off production line due to customer specific provisos. Safari hunter lost, Alliance surveyor, or someone with a penchant for remote work. Seydon flexed his hands, the muscles up his arms and down his back and legs. Waiting on the slowing vessel coasting up and blasting him with jet downdraft and hard silicate pebbles.
[member="Alcuin"]
