AZHARACH
Under the falcon's eye, the Clanholds spread out beneath you. Low mountains and hollers, lowlands bleeding into swamp and salt marsh, mangroves stalking the coasts and cypress over the hills, the rivers Coal, Mura and Tamas cutting through the green and brown like silver scars. Black stone hills. Volcanic lowlands. And, everywhere, the mark of industry. Tunnels, rails, emplacements, locks, dams, barriers. Green and vulnerable, the land belongs to the people and the people have repeatedly found it wanting. Roads and rails and walls and barriers knit the lush land together, a steel net catching a great green beast. And that was before, when beautiful flowers were grown even around the military garrisons, when tourists and merchants thronged the coastal cities, where there wasn't a single foreign flag you couldn't find on the airships crowding the Sky Roads, where new parents and medical students thronged around the Temple of Gaevir and the road-shrines of Edah welcomed pilgrims and the Scalite Houses of Scars taught exercises for good health. That was when the war was going to be over by Longest Day. That was then.
Now. The ravines have been torn open to access the lava beneath. The railways and smokestacks have metastasized like the kudzu which would swallow them if not salted back regularly. A pall of smoke hangs over every city, and many fearful eyes look north across the Zukoas to their smoggy neighbor, terrified that they will forget the sun like the Dominion has. Foreign inspectors stalk the indigo plantations, hungry for the import that dyes their uniforms. Army of the Internal inspectors in phthalo green rattle shopfront grates with their sticks, ensuring that rationing is being stuck to. Army of the External officers in burgundy coats no longer go home on leave; they stick around the base and fill out more letters of condolence to the clans and lodges of the lost. Only scouts and logistics officers visit the wayshrines. Only doctors and undertakers pray at Gaevir's temple. And in the House of Scars, they are taught to kill dragons, to kill Vesakh, to kill people with the wrong noses or the wrong cuts of coat.
Every hour, more guns are crated out of the ironshrines. Every day, another heavy mikanikal rolls off an assembly line. Every week, a new balloon takes off from the towers of Mhar Zirax. Every month, the shipyards of Bassault belch out another fearnowt. And every minute, a national spirit of industry, invention, and relentless progress finds itself slipping down the slope to fear of the other, fear of your neighbor, fear of yourself. Every moment, the wounds that Unification inflicted on the psyche are levered wider by bayonets and armor wrenches.
They are called the Obsidian Council for their unflinching sharpness of purpose. But their hearts are brittle, brittle. And each resulting shard from each subsequent loss works itself ever deeper.
