------------- College Days - Jay

Early summer days in the high mountains were always refreshing. It was something she had become acquainted with from her time in Xanthius and along the border of Equideyea. However, her strong memories of that place were always soaked in blood and terror. It was the height of the Crystal War, the first of the Three Wars. Atheae had paratech airships outfitted to drop massive explosive devices onto troop formations and fortifications from thousands of feet up. They’d moved a large portion of their Air Force to the north, along the Equideyean border, and based them in Xanthius. They were preparing for a massive raid across the Deep Desert to destroy reinforcements coming from the Frelenat seitches. But Frelenat spies had uncovered the plot and a raid was planned.

She was a Psi-Warrior deployed with the Symballan Elite Desert Guard, an allied force that worked in close cooperation with the Frelenat of the Deep Desert. She’d managed to gain additional psionic training while deployed, and had made the rank of Sergeant. A thousand of them went into the base of the cliffs of Xanthius, into the UnderDark tunnels and passages and the great Deurgar complex beneath the city. Their mission was to take the elevators, move topside and destroy the airships on the ground. They succeeded but barely two hundred of them returned. They had all been decorated for gallantry and their unit won the highest award the Holy Symballan Empire had to offer, the Golden Phoenix. It would be another two years before she spent that political capital.

Jarah Mahdi Beni-K'Dar al'Durran was born the eldest child of a common shopkeeper in the small east valley town of Durran. Her two younger brothers followed her into military service, in the tradition of an ancestor who’d served the Empire with distinction over a century ago. Her mental faculties were revealed early in basic training and she was sent to the east to train with a special group attached to the Church of Isis, the Darava Ha'Zoual, a unit of psionics preparing to fight the prophesied Great Enemy. Jay never really cared that much about the Great Enemy. She’d preferred to focus on the one right in front of her, namely, the Atheaens. In her years of service before the Three Wars, she patrolled the Deep Desert and came to think of the seitches, the rock outcroppings and desert caves standing like islands over a sea of shifting sands, as her second home. As her eyes changed, so too did her perspective. When her little sister came for a visit, on her way to Xanthius to join the temple there, they laughed and joked, but there was little of the old Jay left. The little girl had been buried under the years of discipline. She was Sergeant Jarah al’Durran now.

After the war, with her sister in the west, the rest of her family dead, and her enlistment up, she spent that political capital. She got a transfer to the Feyhd’ahki, the elite guardians of the priesthood and nobility of the Empire. As her first billet, she was assigned to her little sister and the Temple of Isis at Syvasmyr. So, she took an airship and flew west, coming to Kar’Dhaer on the first day of summer. She checked in and found there were no quarters for a Master Sergeant of the Symballan Feyhd’ahki, and resisting the urge to throttle the acolyte that didn’t seem to understand anything about military rank, decided to move in with her sister. When papers arrived by courier informing her that she’d been accepted into Kar’Dhaer Academy, she thought that the papers belonged to someone else. If only.

------------- Credits

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