A flash, a scream, and just the moldering steam that hung in the cold Winter morning air as the arcane flame died down upon the rapidly-charred remains of the regular soldier. Lieutenant Matthew Regin had stood atop his barricade all night, the day before, and now was looking at another sunset and rise. After the retreat of the Colchis, it all went to shit. It fell apart when royal orders came down for the regular and drafted forces to pursue the “fleeing” invaders, which were at best ignored, or at worst, the messenger was attacked and murdered in outrage. What remained of the regulars, and many draftees, then revolted, and the Royal Knights were sent in to “restore loyalty and order”. For their part, the Parliamentary forces, namely the Arcane and the Engineering & Grenadier Corps, fell back to defend parts of the city from the fighting factions. For this, the other camps labelled them as an enemy; as traitors.
That was weeks ago now. Since then, the remnants of the regular army that fought the Colchis at the border marched on Lutetia, and the king fled to the Summer Palace at Val Roy. The regulars tried to impose martial law, but all their control of the city has meant is soldiers… doing what soldiers do when they take a city in war. The survivors of their “liberators’” brutalization and indignities, those who could, tried to flee to Parliament-controlled districts. Some were hung as “traitors”.
This was the quagmire Lieutenant Matthew Regin of the 3rd Squad, of the 1st Company, of the Parliamentary Arcane Corps found himself in. Like his fellows in the Parliamentary Engineering & Grenadier Corps, he was upon Lutetia’s White Walls defending against the tide of Colchis. And when the “water” receded, Regin saw what it left behind in the surf. What stood out in his mind were the "recruits"; the boys, children given barely-functional rifles, and the old men, and the gang-pressed vagrants, all as fodder. He recalled the sight of a child in a trench wearing a cavalry uniform, of all things, near catatonic. Like all the others, he took this “coronet” back to relative safety.
And so, this was how and why Regin stood at his post performing his duty as a living-weapon; a mage in service to Lycia, part of it anyway, given the state of it all. In between pushes by the regulars, his mind wandered in the numbing and anxious calm. Up until the invasion, he had been a student and The Sterling University where all sanctioned-mages are trained. Regin wondered if his classmates were… gone now, lost beneath the waves so to speak. The only reason he was even a lieutenant was that the original one for 3rd Squad leapt from the walls upon merely seeing the horde approach.
He also wondered, sometimes aloud, just what was even going on at that point. The invaders were gone, and he now was in an entrenched position in the capital of his country, killing his countrymen, fellow Lycians. But what was Lycia at this point? The king demanded what remained of his subjects die for vanity? Ego? And the regulars, these rebels, are just murderers and worse, lashing out at what is easy and in reach. They said their plan was to march on Val Roy come Spring, but… what if they don’t? And the Parliamentarians? What’s left of the legislature, Regin’s own father included, do little more than hide and bicker, like mice pressed too tightly in a small box. If he could feel anything, Regin would feel disgust.
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