Lipé clutched her blunted training blade tight in a shaking paw, bringing it back up into a defensive stance as she circled her opponent. The other Rovskyr warrior was larger than her, with a more typical sandy colouring compared to her white and gray. Pash-To had been in her company for some time now, and was certainly no pushover in the training ring. Still, he'd never quite managed to best her, not for want of trying. From the outside this might have appeared to be little more than a routine sparring session, but to Lipé it was a matter of great importance. When one of her warriors called on her to spar, she could not refuse. If she turned down the bout or, Great Seed forbid, lost, her authority would be called into question. She would have it no other way, of course. If she could be bested then she no longer had the right to lead. That was the ancient way of the Rovskyr warrior, forgotten by the bureaucrats huddled safely away in the burrow-cities of the Starlit Plains.
Then she noticed it: the slightest twitch of muscle beneath Pash-To’s sandy fur. She launched forward at lightning speed, her opponent barely bringing up his blade in time to parry the strike. He was knocked off balance, teetering as he deflected her blows until, finally, he fell onto his rump, sending dust billowing about him. He looked stunned for a moment, whiskers twitching, large dark eyes slowly blinking. “How'd you know I was about to attack?” He asked, his bulk belying the small, squeaky voice characteristic of their kind.
“Why would I tell you that eh? So you can use it against me next time?” Lipé snapped. Then, unable to contain it, she broke into a grin and reached out to help the other warrior back to his feet. “That was a good match. You almost had me.”
“You always say that and it's never true.”
Lipé wished that were the case, and was glad it was how Pash-To perceived it, but the truth was that he'd had her on the ropes more than once. Not recently, not since she'd learned his tells, but if another warrior could come as close as he had to defeating her…
No, she wouldn't think of it. There was far too much to worry about already without fretting about the tenuousness of her position. She looked up at the brooding sky, her nostrils filling with ozone. There was one such worry.
The Dragon Queen, or the Queen of Thunder, or perhaps the Empress of the March; all names the shaggoth obviously disliked. Whatever you called her, Grakko Thunderhide was a formidable force, ancient beyond years, and not one that Lipé would readily contend with alone. Except, of course, that she had.
***
Grakko Thunderhide hauled herself up onto a promontory overlooking the dust bowl in which her followers had set up camp for the night. Fires dotted the expanse, a warm mirror to the cold stars above. Laughter rang out through the night, met by the howl of a loupare in the distance. The waft of ale intermingled with the stench of curing leather and the reek of pipesmoke in her nostrils as she huffed the night air, but it wasn't enough to drown out the ever present ozone. The smell of the coming cleansing. She breathed deep.
The clang of metal against metal rang out across the encampment like a peal of thunder drawing Grakko's gaze. It was coming from the new band of Rovskyr that had recently joined in her campaign to retake her ancestral homelands. It was, she reflected, their ancestral homelands too. Though scholars like that irritating duardin following their camp might claim that the Rovskyr were native to the Starlit Plains, Grakko knew better. She knew from experience.
Her name- Grakko- back then, it had meant something. Little lightning, a shining spark of hope for her people. Births were rare among her people, and her father had near coddled her when she was a whelp. Her memory was long, exhaustingly so, and those times were shrouded by the fog of history, but she remembered fragments. The warmth of her father's embrace; an afternoon doze on soft grass after her first hunt; looking up at the mantle of stars in the heavens above and seeing only wonder and possibility, not the cold indifference it inspired now. One such memory was her father taking her to what she now realised was a loose sort of diplomatic session with the rovskyr burrow-city whose range overlapped their clan’s hunting grounds. She'd been delighted by the shows of martial prowess put on by the small, fuzzy creatures, the largest of which would have fit comfortably in her father's palm. They'd changed in their exile, become insular, shied away from any interaction with outsiders. Not this Lipé though, she reminded Grakko of those warriors dancing through the mists of her memory.
Grakko had been surprised when the rovskyr, known to her fellows as the Starblade, had marched right into the centre of Grakko's camp and demanded a duel. Grakko had bellowed a mighty laugh at first, but fell silent as she saw the look of grim determination on the diminutive warrior’s face. Lipé must have known from the start that there was no way she could win, that she was putting her life in the hands of a stranger who could crush her without a second thought. But what right would Grakko have to lead if she would do such a thing? Grakko could understand that. Her philosophy was much the same: if the strong could not fend for the weak, what right had they to claim dominion over them? The fight had not been any kind of contest, Grakko’s thunderblade sweeping Lipé’s sword from her hand in a single motion. Nobody had expected anything else. When a nearby orruk had let out a guffaw of laughter as the rovskyr bowed, Grakko had singed him with a sharp crackle of lightning, and nobody else had dared laugh as she had held out a hand to the other warrior.
That was the way of things, back in the old days. Before the Sigmarites had burned the fields and slaughtered the prey until none remained. Before they had butchered her father as she screamed, dragged away by clanmates as he covered their escape. Then, the strong had protected the weak, held an uplifting hand out to those who could not fend for themselves. Sometimes it had been brutal, yes. Bitter wars for supremacy had scarred these lands more than once before the sigmarites came, but they were honest bids, and never destroyed so much that things could not be rebuilt when peace returned. That was the way of things, yes, and it would be again. The warriors of the past danced through her head as her father roared joyously, his thunderous footfalls receding into the mists of time once more, and she knew that her path was just.