Perakkir
In the war that gave birth to the Kingdom of Falkaar, a daring assault by Argan Bloodpaw took control of an eyrie high in the mountains where the Traazorites kept an experimental strain of winged creatures. Known as Daklos to the Traazorites but as Peraks to their Faeler conquerors, their riders, the Perakkir, serve to this day as the Kingdom’s scouts.
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Telis Whitewing crept along the ledge, pressing herself into the mountainside until her back ached with the strain. She figured they had one chance at this, and she was not going to be the one to let everyone down. Argan’s orders to her had been clear. Take her band of owls up the ridge and slay the flying beasts in their lair before he launched the final assault on the tower below. Her group has spent the last day and a half at the ascent, a climb they would have normally made in a tenth that time. They could suffer no error, however, and as the beasts came and went on their patrols, the band’s camouflage had to be perfect and their movements, glacial.
Now they clung to a precipice, both literally and figuratively. The ledge on which they stood could not have been more than a pace wide at this point, and they had only a few minutes between the time the last flyer left the cave and the patroller just returned made his exit. By Telis’s silent count, that time was right…now.
Two quick bounding steps took her to the entrance, and she leapt inside, followed closely by her clansmen. Sure enough, the last Traazorite rider appeared from around a bend in the tunnel, in the process of loosening his chest armor. Thankful for that, Telis shot him in the right lung and raced past him as he dropped to his knees, knowing someone else would finish him off. She had no idea what she would find in these tunnels, but she knew to stay with the largest passageway, the one the peraks would have to use to reach their…nest. She ignored the one or two side tunnels she saw and kept on into the torchlit warren. Racing footsteps behind her meant her warriors kept pace.
They burst into an enormous, vaulted cavern and a dozen rapid actions played out in the blink of an eye, almost too quickly for Telis to comprehend. Arrows flew from her clansmen’s bows, dropping the enemies in the room like felled wheat. Others of her warriors ran forward to finish off those the arrows did not kill. Peraks flapped and screeched from ledges and perches scattered about the cavern’s walls, creating a cacophony with the screams of the dying and the shouts of her owls. Telis whirled on her band as the archers began to train their weapons on the flyers.
“STOP!” she commanded. They complied instantly, lowering their bows, confused, but dutiful. Those of her fellows slaying the wounded also obeyed.
“No, them kill,” she said, more calmly, indicating the few Traazorites still alive. “Leave peraks be. Watch for men,” she told the archers. They fanned out to cover the other entrances to the cave. Then she motioned to Naria, her mystic, to follow her.
Telis strode to a large outcropping in the corner of the cavern. She stopped just short of it and spoke firmly the only Chalish word she knew, the command to surrender.
“Lakan.”
She heard Naria gasp as a young woman in a dark blue robe slowly emerged from behind the outcropping, trembling in fear and holding her hands out in front of her in a gesture of submission.
“Telis, she caster,” Naria said. The mystic would know, Telis thought.
“I wondered.”
“She woman.”
“Yes, I see,” Telis replied. Rumors swirled about the fate, or even existence, of female casters among the sun-men. The young woman’s eyes darted all over the cavern and she still held her hands up against the arrow or sword point she clearly felt was soon to pierce her.
“Why think she here?”
“Not know. Might have to do with that,” Telis said, pointing to a large space behind the outcropping. A space filled with a dozen brush-formed nests; each nest filled with large golden eggs…
***
During the early stages of the First War, the war with which six Urdaggar clans hammered the Kingdom of Falkaar into lands formerly occupied by the Traazorite Empire, Jorav Korsar’s tribesmen captured an experimental perak aerie completely intact. This capture included the secrets by which this strain of peraks were able to live in so northern a clime where all others could not. While these secrets do not permit significant growth in the perak population or the ability to migrate their breeding grounds from the top of Spirelight Mountain in the Valsorns, they do permit the Falkaarans to maintain a corps of flying scouts known as the Perakkirin (Fa. “wyvern-riders”).
Ridden peraks, or daklos as they are known in Chalish, are used throughout the Empire as lookouts, enforcers, hunters and messengers. Each of those types of riders is armed and trained in a manner suited to their function. Throughout the many generations since riders began flying them in Falkaar, different combinations of weapons and armor and training and uses have been tried resulting in the form and function we see today.
A perakkir is armored in a suit of interlocking hard leather plates, reminiscent of the feared Daklos Ravager, but with an open-faced helmet and a design that reflects the outline of a perak in flight. They are competent with a sakhazet, as are all warriors of the Archbarony of Tlhar, but their primary weapon is the composite bow. Called upon to find armies more than fight them, the perakkirin still must contend with enemy scouts, and along Falkaar’s northern frontiers those scouts are themselves superb archers.
In the Falkaaran social structure, perakkirin are knights, although their formal title of Knights Ascender is hardly heard outside of courtly ceremony.
Peraks can live and hunt across the kingdom and into neighboring lands, but must return to the aerie to breed. A perakkir can be detached for duty as the Archbaron wills, though the balance of the cadre serves to patrol Falkaar’s northern border.
More than one freeband has attempted to enter the Spirelight Aerie and learn or steal the secrets of the perakkirin. All have failed…
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