Dubhaine Family/Brigdha/Roleplays/2017/September

September 6th -- Morning -- Oligarch

The guards at the ruins of the Great Gate of Oligarch were sheltering from the noonday sun, content that the few remaining pickets of the Northern Host could do nothing to threaten their day. Their battered wargear and bruised bodies told the tale of recent battle, the desperate defence of these once imposing walls as the war engines of Elves and Men wrenched ancient stoneworks from their moorings. The work of long-vanished Orcs, haughty Elven Lords and the mighty men of Fontan's glory crumbled to ruin.

It was here amidst the rubble and detritus that Garas had mounted his desperate defence, calling all able-bodied burghers to the defence of their homes. A host at once glorious in its might as it was ludicrous in its juxtaposition: old soldiers in ill-fitting cuirasses; young boys in the hand-me-down hauberks of their grandsires; bureaucrats in their ostentatious but impractical dress armour; peasants armed with billhooks and reaping knives; hoydens and gentlewomen with their skirts trailing and a motley of umbrellas, cooking implements, pokers and brooms, for one brief moment united in their hatred.

Such a host could never be wielded in open battle, but here in the moraine of fallen masonry, littered with the scree of burnt houses and broken war machines, even the haughtiest warlord could meet an undignified end.

The nobility were want to dismiss such militias as final acts of desperation and perhaps they were right to do so, but Brigdha new the truth. She'd seen that fear in the eyes of battle-hardened veterans, the gorge choking their throats as they realised the true power arrayed against them. A Citizen Militia was not an unthinking mob. It was the raw expressed power of the termite mound when a small boy foolishly thrusts a burning branch into its midst. There for but a brief moment the desire to build so common to all social creatures becomes the incandescent will to kill.

And why should not the people of a great city such as Oligarch feel that rage when foreign princes destroy so much that they'd striven to build? When their brave soldiers had given their all what other outlet for their rage could there be?

Such thoughts were not comfortable for those who drew lines on maps and moved their armies like chess pieces, and Brigdha had known more than her fair share of those in her long career. The martial popinjays who thumbed their nose at Fontan's Assembly were a fine example of that breed, all glory and honour but little humanity or soul. She'd noted an old KDF banner as she passed a company of guardsmen in the colours of Nivemus on the long road from Commonyr, her dark robe wrapped around her frail frame as she leaned heavily on her staff for comfort. Few of their eyes registered the itinerant old woman and those that did had little in the way of kindness to them. A defeated Lion still craves its meat.

Had the watchers at the gate been less mauled, had their relief at surviving so dreadful a siege been less, had the long days of fighting not tired them beyond endurance, perhaps they would have seen Brigdha's approach. Perhaps.