[I] During the summit, back in Ashishia… [/i]

[b] HENZIL DEPRASH [/b]

[i]Deep in the decorative city keep of Dashash The Fifth Star dreamt…[/i]

The desert was alive with soul shredding howls that ripped and tore their way violently through the hollow wind. Death forced its crippling way through Henzil Deprash and chilled his spine, but he was not dead, no not yet. 

His vision blurred and a loud ringing pounded and ached his sore head as he gained a strained focus. His coarse mouth was wet with blood and the sand stuck to it as he lifted his beaten face out of the burning sands. He shook his traumatized head and a pain jolted across his broad shoulders and he groaned weakly, looking around dizzily. His large reptilian war beast, his fuwma, laid in a heap of pure muscle and scales beside him, its yellow large eyes were as lifeless as its limp body. A crude spear was jutting from its gored side through the leather saddle, and the sand mixed with reptilian blood was thrown everywhere, a clear sign of the great lizards horrifying collapse. 

He heard it again, blood curdling howls and deaths soft whisper. On the horizon he could blurrily see a black wave forcing its way closer. This wave howled harshly once again and Henzil remembered where he was and what he was doing. He tried to scramble to his feet in painful vain as the great gnoll army padded closer on sprinting legs. Henzil collapsed back into the loose sand, enveloping himself in a cloud of the sharp grains and a piddle of his own blood. He gasped, swallowing some of the sand and looked down in a horrible cough, and he saw his foot was broken and disfigured. With a frustrated and pained sigh he forced himself back up, snatching his long curved Ashishian blade to lean at the hip with. He groaned in a terrible fit of strenuous injury. He squinted, trying to focus his drifting sight, the horde was close, and the gnolls readied their crude and terrible javelins. Angry snarls drenched his mind in anguish as he noticed that their pale eyes were looking right at him, hungry for his ashen flesh, as they already have sampled the rest of his messengers brigade. 

Henzil leaned down, his leg muscle shuttering and shaking in a piercing pain as he struggled to stood back up, with a long iron headed sarissa in hand. Leaning against his bending blade and tucking the long sarissa under his pit, he pointed it weakly at the charging devils.

[i] Ashtoken die on their feet.[/i]

The horde was mere leaps from him, and he strained to lift the long pike higher,
[i] Ashtoken do not yield.[/i] 
Henzil felt a knot in his chest as the gnolls bared their fangs. They were so close it would be impossible to count the time until impact. The Gnolls leapt in the air, yellow teeth shining in the unforgiving suns bright blaze. 
[i] Ashtoken shall never falter.[/i]

There was a strong force that had grabbed Henzil and swept him off his feet, but it was not the thick flesh of a gnoll meeting the deadly sarissa, or even the crude jaws flashing at the end of a fierce lunge. No, it was a friendly hand that had fetched his limp body from the teeth of death.

Henzil looked up dazed as he now found himself on the back of a charging Fuwma. An Ashtoken sat in front of him swinging a mighty blade against the horde in an attempt to break free from the very horde he had charged into. “Gori,” Henzil muttered in amazement, his face still frozen with a lifeless visage gifted to him by ever present death.

The young general, Gori Lamillur sat proudly on a towering fuwma war lizard. The mighty beasts tail slammed into unfortunate Gnolls, and the sound of their ribs cracking shot through the air, coupled by the mighty singing blade Gori swung so expertly at his inferior foe who futility attempted to throw the pair off from the mount. Gori swung, and gnoll blood was cut so thick that it misted the air in a gory fog, covering the two in a red gleam. Finally, with the aid of greatly placed hacks and violent stabs, the fuwma broke free from the gnoll charge and began a controlled retreat. 

[i] One under ash, ‘Til the blessed desert bleeds.[/i]

The fuwma shot across the desert sands with tremendous speed, the angry mob right behind,baring their deep biting teeth. Gori looked back blankly at the sickly looking Henzil and nodded at a wet cloth bag that slapped the side of the saddle so precariously with the intense rhythm of the powerful lizards escape. Henzil untied the soaked sack and reached his arm all the way in, as the fuwma found the peak of a sand dune that blistered out of the landscape for all the gnoll to witness what’s to come.

Henzil’s fingers threaded through wet bristly hairs in the dark bag, Finally with another silent nod from Gori, he retrieved the strange feeling object. His arm slithered out from the bag and he promptly tossed it aside, lifting the object to the sun, his eyes wide with astonishment at the trophy. 

His fingers were crimson with dripping red blood, and to the horde he held a head, a head of matted hair and a toothy snout, the head of the great gnoll chieftain. Hezil looked at Gori cautiously, whose eyes were suddenly a sea of energy, and an explosion of battle fury. Gori’s throat rippled as a yell erupted from him, and all the gnolls turned their ghastly heads, and their charge halted.

Henzil lifted the mutilated head high into the air and repeated Gori’s yell with a powerful expulsion of dry air. The gnolls quickly grew enraged and yelled back in a limp emotional pain and frenzied their terrifying charge back into a destructive motion that crashed across the burning desert. 

Gori kicked the sides of his mighty war lizard, and with an obedient hiss, the heated chase continued.

Hezil shook violently in his throne, jerking his pale blue eyes open to the gilded hall of Dashash. His eyes darted around anxiously, and with a relieved sigh he began to laugh away the stress of his dream. The soft chuckle bounced heartily off the mosaic walls and copper embroidered carpets. He knew his beautiful daughters could hear him in the next room over, through the sandstone walls, but he was sure they were used to these episodes of his by now, and shook away any concern for their comfort-ability with another hissing chuckle.

Soon however his eyelids grew to be a burden once more, and he could feel his memory buzzing once more with a recollection of the Great Gnoll war, he knew then, that his dream was not about to end just yet as sleep once again conquered his mind.