The Church of the Cowled Widower1 quaintly sat amidst a dense, marshy swamp. Its buildings were made of planks and built on stilts, with duckboard walkways acting as roads—no vehicle could pass through the dense muck beneath the walkways without quickly losing traction and getting bogged down. The trees around the Church and the village of its worshippers loomed overhead and blocked out the sunlight, filtering it down as an uncertain teal glow that reflected off the mirrored lampposts dotting the walkways.

Kvetoslava and the 107th saw, perpetuated, and fought worse than cultists with shotguns and muskets. The freshly christened Oberleutnant ran a hand down the front of his fresh chemsuit, thin and rubbery, with the blocky refraction camouflage already looking worn in places.

The riflemen ahead of him were equally worn, but carried themselves with the tense professionalism his anxious mess of infantry always wore on the eve of a risky fight. They painted their helmets with mud and jammed twigs in with the mud before the final approach, and it helped obscure their silhouettes just that much more. Kvetoslava abstained from wearing the distinctive officer’s feather in his helmet for the same reasons.

Captain Yeruti Roman did not have the same self-control and decided to cram himself into his regal gorget and breastplate. The feather at the crest of his helmet waved in the very slight wind under the tree cover.

Past the thick foliage they were nestled into for cover, Kvetoslava mentally noted the positions and routes the scant patrol on the edge of the village was taking. A single villager, wearing the tattered overalls and a wide-brimmed hat that so many Wraihohen peasants were accustomed to adorning during the wild seasons. The watcher began to approach and Kvetoslava tensed up. He put a hand on the rifleman’s shoulder to his left, and the gesture was mirrored quickly by every soldier with them like falling dominoes, even Roman.

Glad something from his classes stuck, Kvetoslava inwardly jeered before lowering his service rifle to the ground as slowly and silently as he could, going for something shorter. Knife or sidearm, Slava. Pick carefully. The watchman stopped right in front of them, and Kvetoslava had to restrain himself from leaping out and attacking immediately. He’s armed, with a scattergun no less. Why get so damn close?

Then the watchman unbuttoned his trousers and Kvetoslava understood. The knife will do. Cortisol flooded his body, his muscles tensed. The knife handle was pulled into a white knuckled fist so fast the button loudly snapped. The watchman’s eye flicked to Kvetoslava. The distance closed, the knife went into his throat, a gloved hand cupping over the cultist’s mouth and nose. A muffled gurgle whimpered out, and he went limp.

Kvetoslava let the body down and made a little bird chirp with his mouth—signal to move forward. The riflemen of his company began to slowly emerge from the treeline, followed by the two machine gun crews. A trooper walked up to him. Slava identified them within a moment as their jack of all trades—combat engineer, blacksmith and armourer—Geyfreyten Knechten Ailil “Soggy” Sluaghadháin. A sliver of her pale wrist stuck out between her sleeve and glove as she reached out to take the double-barreled scattergun from Kvetoslava. He went back to the bush to grab his rifle, and found Ailil pocketing shotshells from the cultist’s pockets.

Illegal under Article IV2, Subsection… fuck it, we’ve got more cultists to deal with. He ignored her and moved on, his boots clicking against the soft duckboard walkway, rifle shouldered. The captain was standing in the middle of the path in front of the church’s main doors, hands on hips, service revolver still in its holster. That idiot. “Ready, sir?”

The captain glanced back at him. His mask hung around his neck, and he had an uncertain expression on his face, features scrunched with internal division. He wasn’t ready for this, Kvetoslava could read it on his face. He hadn’t been ready for the Butte, he wasn’t ready for this, barely a half-measure in comparison. Kvetoslava patted the man’s shoulder. “I can handle the breach, sir. We need the flamers up front so we can torch the village, though.” The captain began to steel his gaze and nod—slow at first, but quickly becoming more eager.

“Aye.” He smacked his lips. Kvetoslava flinched at the deafening noise. “Aye, that’s right, Oberleutnant. You’re very, very right. I will go get them moved up safely and straight-backed. Yes, yes indeed…” He turned on a heel and marched off. Each snapping bootstep made Kvetoslava flinch harder than the last. Why don’t you just fire off that revolver into the air with excitement at witnessing your first kill, while you’re at it? Loud bloody bastard. He shook his head of the thoughts and turned to the door. A rifleman with a scattergun had the ugly teeth at the end of the bore ready under the knob of the door, while the ones behind him had their rifles slung in exchange for compact, folding clockwork machine guns, pistols and clubs. Those submachine guns weren’t standard issue—he beamed at that. A good Omelese friend working as an arsenal dump manager had lost these ten PM9 submachine pistols and two hundred rounds of ammunition.

Some local kids in the town around the arsenal had been known for their hooliganism, and stealing some gunked-up submachine pistol sidearms was well within their modus operandi. Kvetoslava looked down at the rifle in his arms, and took two steps back, face-to-face with the double doors. He calmed his breathing until the wire-reinforced lenses of his mask had stopped fogging, then nodded to the shotgunner.

Yeruti Roman looked back at the blackboard with the map stapled to it, then to the gathered men and women; about sixty in all, crammed tightly like sardines in the tent in their off-duty trousers and sleeveless tops.

“It will be a standard cult cleanse. Oberleutnant Shalev explained to me that you troopers had handled a mission like this before.” He turned to Kvetoslav on the other side of the map board, who nodded.

“It will be standard. The cultists appear to have stolen an automatic transmission valve body3 from a local self-driven carriage manufacturer, they’re likely using it to entrap a poltergeist or demon of some kind. Intelligence suggests they are not likely to be successful. Normally, this would be something for the local police, however the cultists are armed and defending their village against any outsiders. We were close, so the brass decided this would be a good way to keep us off our hands.” He left his commentary unspoken, but his opinion was clear by the discrete scowl on his face. Yeruti’s eyes darted between him and the crowd, and a brief but awkward silence fell over them before he continued.

“Ah, uhm, yes. The cultists are armed with rifled muskets and breach-loading shotguns. We suspect they won’t be a significant threat. It should be a simple affair, in and out before supper!” He emphasized his words with a swing of his fist around till it hung over his chest. The weary-faced soldiers had no reaction. His esprit de corps still needed some work.

The Equestrian skies above Ruby Beacon were dark, and from her place on the cliffside bench she could see the dim lights of fires cast across the land’s silhouette by the major burnpits. Her wings ruffled on her sides, and her hooves itched—something that she did her best to ignore. Not infected, just the Celestial Throne-forsaken dermatitis again. The slight clink of armour behind her snapped her attention and her head turned quickly. Need to stop going out alone at night. Going to get jumped one of these times. The pair of Night Guards wore navy-blue platemail armor; a peytral chestplate, crinet neck guard and chanfron head and muzzle coverage, paired overtop a cloak of chainmail. Their hooves were wrapped in the medical bandages alleged to help prevent contracting or spreading the infection.

“What can I do for you gents?” Ruby asked with a dim smile as she continued flicking her gaze between them and the cliffside. She was expecting a bloomer to come crawling over the side and rip a chunk out of her neck any minute now. The guard on the left gave Ruby a stiff salute and she cringed.

“Ma’am, you’ve been requested at the Guard Headquarters in lower Canterlot.” Ruby scratched at the fur and bushy sideburns on her face. It was an odd sight for a mare—an odd sight period, but on a mare especially, but any questions about it were quickly put off as being a tributary gesture to her father and grandfather, who wore the same bushy sideburns and goatee that she took to.

“Any reason given?” She forced herself off the bench by leaping over its backing. The two guards took steps backward to give her space, and she watched their expressions with hawklike attention. Swear to the Throne if one of their faces even twitch wrong, I’m going to lose it. The guard on the right shook her head.

“No, ma’am.” Okay then. Love this game that we’re playing… Damn it all. Ruby Beacon gave a curt nod, and followed behind the two guards as they about-faced and began trotting down the cobbled path the cliffside relaxation spot was built beside. Her eyes kept darting back to that cliff, expecting there to be a pair of eyes and dried out, black mouth watching. There never was.

The cobblestone roads of Canterlot were empty. It made Ruby’s hackles stand up. Even weeks ago, the city was bustling with activity. Carts would be left in the streets where ponies had stopped to rest at an inn or break fast at a nearby restaurant, gawking at the absurd high-class prices with their fellow carriage-bearers. The young could even be heard in the streets, often the little cheeky shit gangers who thought they were being tough when they bullied tourists.

Now, though? Quarantine had made the streets silent, and a mite more disgusting than usual. Trash was piling up, and the usual dwellers, homeless drunks mostly, who would flourish in the waste of others, were all missing or hiding. That scared Ruby more than the silence. Who is to say they aren’t hiding out in some alley, dying and sick, waiting for some poor sap to come by to bite the hell out of or cough spores onto?

The street turned abruptly, and the silence changed. The eerie quiet of an uneasily sleeping city became the hushed bustle of Cataphracts4 and Night Guards. Frisian horses5 and knife rest barricades choked with barbed wire covered the road, with small sandbag pillboxes behind them, protecting Polybolos6 ballista emplacements and their gunner teams. The buildings were all barricaded, with the alleys boarded up or tarped with a violet glow emitting from the passageway between knocked-out walls. The doors, save for one or two at the end of the rows, had been boarded up with iron and wood, the first and second floors windows too. If memory served—which, Ruby noted, it rarely did—the shops had belonged to out-of-towners. When the quarantine had been declared by the Royal Sisters, they were quickly repurposed for the field research hospital that stood in the place of quaint, hole-in-the-wall businesses on this quiet Canterlot side-street.

The Headquarters building loomed. Corrugated spikes covered the roof and angled outward from the edge of it. No Pegasi would be landing on it. The walls were bland, iron-reinforced martial masonry. Large, darkly colored granite bricks made up the walls, and slightly rusty, spiked reinforcements striped the walls. Few windows, and a few Pegasi perches on the upper floors to allow couriers easy entry and exit. Guards at sandbag-reinforced Frisian horse barricades all along the street. Each was adorned in a messy mishmash of chain, scale and lamellar armor, with cowled leather shawls covering rubber muzzle respirators and sack-hood face coverings of varied designs and model. Not enough to go around. Probably outsourcing to construction companies, Ruby noted.

The meeting room she was shepherded into was bland. A window was open, with a fan gently pulling the stale air and dust out and sending it out. Ruby could see several smoke trails even from her seat across the room from the window. The door opened, and her head flicked on a swivel. Unicorn, the dress uniform was very upper-crust, noble upbringing. His eyes were heavily bagged, and he was disheveled, though. Ruby relaxed a mite. If ever there were a first gesture of trust that got her attention, it was an officer showing they were bloody well a person and not some automaton.

“I’m quite sorry for pulling you at such a late hour, Miss Beacon. As you might imagine, things have been quite busy here and, well—” he paused, catching himself. The stallion cleared his throat before sitting down across from Ruby Beacon. She placed her hooves on the table in a mimicry of a fold.

“So, mister…?” He said his name was Rusty Lance. She flinched at that. He certainly looked like one. “Sir, what is it you need of me?” Ruby allowed herself to fall into the comfort of her military academy training. Her back straightened, wings tightly pressed into her sides, posture as regal as could be managed. With his tired eyes only looking more drained, Rusty explained what it was they needed of her. Her stiff military composure crumbled quickly.

That had been a week ago. The road she walked was heavy with debris from refugees and abandoned carts with no sign of the drivers, the contents intact. She flinched at every movement in the trees on their flanks.

Her column of ponies was forty strong—a platoon of old veterans with graying muzzles and thin bodies, making its way to their first assignment. Six two-mare auto-ballista teams, that’s twelve. Eight cataphracts, that’s twenty. Five marksponies, that’s twenty-five. The rest are magi-lancers and wagon-bearers. The orders rang clear in her head, and added to the building migraine Ruby was experiencing.

Manehattan is not expected to have any survivors. You need to burn it out. We’re relying on you to help prevent the spread of the infection. We’ll give you everypony we can offer, but it’s not many.

When she heard “not many” she wasn’t expecting the young and elderly, too young to enlist and too old to re-enlist, but here she was. Here they were.

Approach Manehattan from the South, the Pegasi teams on standby are trying their damnedest to keep the wind going North toward the ocean, but it’s an uphill battle. The wind moves at its own speed and direction, clouds and weather are getting out of control, too. We’re not happy about it, but it’s the situation. South is the safest way into the city. You’ll have to do a night march to get there so you arrive by sunrise, when the beyond-gone infected, the uh, bloomers, are least active.

The leather shawl she wore around her neck and shoulders chafed with her brass Day Guard junior officer’s peytral. A liberal spattering of black and slate-gray vertical stripes across it helped ward off the shine of the untreated metal. Her platoon of burners were decorated… well, similarly. The protective wraps around the legs had been deemed ineffective at preventing infection but did help with maintaining a grooming standard and preventing trench-hoof, so they were kept. They would be augmented with rubber sleeves on the legs that connected over the back like gartered socks. A chainmail cloak was optional. The leather shawl and cowl were not, however. It was a hooded and designed to help with dust and spore inhalation when paired with respirator masks. Unfortunately, they were underfunded badly enough that the masks were in short supply. They were given face masks made of canvas fasteners and cotton in lieu of the proper respirators. Field Surgeon had quickly disposed of them as soon as they were out of direct line of sight from Canterlot, and explained in no short order that they were just going to die choking wearing those. So, all of them, save for Ruby, tossed them. Ruby Beacon, ever the eager junior officer, kept hers around her neck, not trusting the veterans over the firm words of Knight Captain Rusty Lance of Her Majesty’s Royal Solar Guard.

On the march, the very same Field Surgeon (esquire) made many crass jokes to the fogeys Ruby was meant to be commanding about those damn leg sleeves, ones that got good chuckles out of them. She was appointed second in command in the event Ruby became unable to lead. Couldn’t have worded it more poorly if they were trying, she wagered. Field Surgeon was as her name suggested—a field surgeon. The esquire indicated the rank, the mare insisted. Ruby thought better and assumed the well-worn medical veteran was trying to find some way to make her life more interesting. As if anypony needs that right now…

She shook her head of those thoughts. The city was visible over the crest of the hill. Ruby barked an order to halt formation. Field Surgeon was the first to parrot the order, and from there it was halted. Ruby bit down on the edge of the map case poking out of her peytral and ripped it out, letting it clatter to the ground. She stomped a foreleg down on one end. She snagged a string hanging off the end in her mouth, tugged with her mouth and let the map come flopping out of the case. Field Surgeon took up position opposite of her, sitting down and observing the map. “Looks like we’ll be there in no time,” she proffered with a slightly cheery intone. Ruby flung a glare up at her before tracing the roads on the map till she found the one they were all cramped upon.

“Ye-ee-aaah, looks like it. Ahead of schedule, too.” She checked the sky, narrowed her eyes and made a snap assumption on the time.

“About on schedule, ma’am, but yes. I wager it’ll be good for our ponies to be off their hooves for a short while.” Field Surgeon smiled at Ruby. The junior officer didn’t return the smile. Her eyes were droopy and bloodshot. Field Surgeon gave her a sympathetic look. “Ma’am, it might be a good idea to rest your eyes for a half hour or an hour. You look exhausted. We need you at your best if we’re going to do this.” She reached out to rub her shoulder, but Ruby shot a glare.

“I’ll be fine, Field. Form a perimeter with, ah…” She closed her eyes, tapping her hoof against the dirt. What was her name? “Lily Blossom and Flitter if you don’t mind. I don’t want us to get jumped by a bloomer before the sun rises.” Field snapped off an eager nod and began barking orders. Ruby stowed her map back behind the plate armour on her chest and shook her head. Too much to do in too little time.

Oberleutnant Kvetoslava Shalev readjusted his grip on the rifle in his arms. The dump-feed jammed halfway through the fighting and turned the thing into a single-shot rifle. He got off two shots on the musketeer cultists he saw in the flanking pulpits in the back of the church. One dropped and never got back up, the other staggered. A comrade shot them between the staggerer between the neck and head. The round ricocheted against the metal pulpit and hit the stolen automatic transmission valve body hanging from a chandelier above. It cast baleful light on the corpse on the sigil below it. Once the rifle jammed, Kvetoslava hadn’t wasted the time to try unjamming it. He tossed it to the ground, pulled out his service revolver and got back to shooting.

The screaming would stay with him a while—they took the cultists by surprise. They were in the middle of a sacrificial sermon—some local girl from a few towns over was being disemboweled on the altar between the pulpits at the far side of the open-floor church. The cultists had turned and pulled iron on them as soon as they saw Slava and his soldiers.

It hadn’t saved them much time, but it didn’t save the cultists any time either. The time taken to draw was enough for shotshells to be rapidly placed by slamfiring their scatterguns into the crowd of robed worshippers. It sent them scattering to the wings of the church.

The submachine gunners were ordered forward, and back to back in the centre of the room firing outward, they gunned down the cultists without any real resistance. It was a good plan and a flawless execution. Nobody could’ve accounted for the girl, though.

Once the cultists dropped, the flamer team posted at the door ready to burn out the building once the friendly Sanitarii had cleared out of it. Maybe it was the way they had to pant through their masks to get any good air into their lungs, maybe it was the perpetual ringing that always came after a firefight, but nobody heard the priest whispering to the dead girl while he bled out. Someone saw it—a rifleman. Some fresh-faced brat that Kvetoslava had tried to keep off the action as long as he could. The brat drew his revolver and shot the priest in the back—all six shots. In any other kind of fight, Kvetoslava would’ smashed the side of his helmet with something hard.

He learned the hard way that cultists cheated when Slava watched his last commander get shot in the back by a priest who ignored the fact that the commander had blown his heart to pieces with a scattergun. The sigils painted on the ground—probably with her own blood—began to glow. Kvetoslava barked an order, the brat turned to look at him.

The girl was up and ripping his throat out with her teeth before he could get another word out. Nat shoulder checked Kvetoslava out of the way. Click-click-click. Her donut-packed flamethrower did the rest of the talking for the shellshocked officer.

That was an hour ago. Kvetoslava was chewing on a piece of jerky ration with his mask ‘round his neck, standing outside the marsh with his team as they watched it burn. The veterans in the company cracked wise about grilling meat while they sat around their Boardog7-drawn carriages. A small flock of Belorian Raptors8—beautiful little troodontid birds the size of a small dog—zipped past their halted caravan and a few soldiers looked ready to desert for fresh lunch. Kvetoslava paid them no mind, chewing on his jerky.

Three casualties taken. Two wounded—minor shrapnel from an exploding petrol tank we hadn’t predicted to be in a building, then a third, killed at the end of the breach into the church. Necrophage9 had raised some sacrifice from the dead as a last act of spite, it bit a trooper in the neck. Hauptegefreiter Nat Zahariev acted swiftly, and using her flamethrower torched the trooper and the flesh puppet before it could cause any more harm. We are uncertain at this time as to the actual witchcraft being cast by the Necrophage. Recommend quarantine procedure for the unit until the intelligence gathered from the village can be processed.

Kvetoslava spat the jerky out as a holler began to parrot its way down the column of vehicles. “We’re getting the fuck out of here, boys and girls!” “Load up!” and those sorts of things. He threw another glance at the pillar of smoke billowing into the sky from the marsh and felt a sense of dread. He shook it off and threw himself onto and into the Captain’s motor-carriage.

The road was bumpier heading out than it was going in. Bad enough to wake up Kvetoslava. His heart sank in his gut as he sat up, feeling the goosebumps prickling up his arms and down his back. “Fuck.”

The captain stirred on the bench across from him. “What is it, Oberleutnant?” he mumbled out as he rubbed his face and sat up. They were pouring over the information collected in the village till they passed out, Kvetoslava wagered. His memory felt foggy in that familiar way. Has to be it… Saint above Saints in Heaven, I pray to you that is the problem.

“Not sure, sir. I recommend we halt the column, something’s wrong.” The serious look Kvetoslava levelled at Captain Yeruti Roman silenced any arguing he might have done. An order was barked to the driver, then to the rest of the drivers until all the Boardogs had been halted in place.

Kvetoslava climbed down from the raised steps of the motor-carriage and let out a little grunt of irritation. Damn it all, my rifle’s still being serviced by Soggy. His revolver came out in its stead. A quick sweep in a cone around him and cortisol flooded his body as his revolver’s hammer was drawn back.

“Role call!” He barked through his mask, moving as fast as his legs could carry him without running. The vehicle at the back of the column was a tracked supply vehicle, a Tragenpanzer10, some new fangled model of motor-carriage that sported only caterpillar tracks and a diesel engine in lieu of a Boardog or a standard motor-carriage engine. Kvetoslava trusted them more than he trusted the damn motor carriages, but it was a moot point. They all used manual transmissions, which made them less susceptible to unsolvable reliability issues.

“Unterofficer Quirke! Give me a status report.” Unterofficer Faris Quirke shot up a salute to her superior officer. She told him much of what he already knew—his frustration was growing visible in the way his revolver hand bounced anxiously against his leg.

We’re in the middle of bloody nowhere, sir. We’re missing the radio vehicle, but the company appears to have made it through intact. Oh, and the preacher from third platoon said that he cannot hear Dog11 anymore, so that’s swell.

Kvetoslava was nearing his limit, but he took a deep breath. It tasted stale. “Okay, this is salvageable. Get everyone geared up. This convoy is a sitting duck, we need a perimeter established now.” He felt the dread seeping through the words as they came out his mouth at the first scream near the front of the convoy. He shot a look at Quirke, but she was already barking orders at the heavy machine gun team on loan from 4th Platoon.

Kvetoslava’s jog toward the front of the convoy was interrupted by a whisper that came from the trees. He froze, standing beside two armored Boardogs in full masks. Two beady black pupils on milky white backing stared at him.

His pistol barked twice before it managed to get within six feet, and by the time it was at his feet, all six shots had discharged out the cylinder and it was dead on the ground. He sprinted his way to the front of the convoy without delay, not even bothering to examine the corpse of whatever alien thing he had just shot dead.

Kvetoslava found the bloody stains on the ground. He followed the trail of red that led to the front of the motor-carriage, where an unmasked Captain Roman was clutching his neck while some hunk of shriveled, dead black equine covered in branch-like fungal growths laid on his lap, its head blown to unrecognizable bits by the hand-cannon of a personal sidearm the man kept. Kvetoslava holstered his revolver and offered a hand. Roman’s eyes darted between Kvetoslava’s hand and his masked face, before he took it.

By the time they had a proper perimeter established, and the outer ring of trees around the convoy had been knocked down and a proper defensive position was built, they had only one other casualty. They were an assistant machine gunner—it wasn’t Emil, he checked—who bled out. One of the freakish equines that attacked impaled him through the thigh with some kind of horn protrusion on its forehead, broke it off in his leg and screamed at him in fluent Escalian about missing socks. The soldier was found with his hands around the thing’s neck, dead on the ground. Cheap Company’s chirurgeon12 took a look at the bodies, and with two pokes at the corpses, screamed for a flamer team to get a burn-pit going. She kept one of the corpses, and let the flamers burn the rest in the dead machine gunner’s foxhole.

The chirurgeon stepped out of the medical wagon, tearing off her gloves with several vulgar swears in Omelese. Kvetoslava stood nearby, a shotgun balanced on his hip while two riflemen stood beside him. “What’s the diagnosis?”

The chirurgeon groaned. “I won’t know for a few days, monsieur Oberleutnant. The sickness that these… equines, appear to be infected with seems to have transmitted to the captain.” She tossed the long rubber medical gloves into the nearby burning foxhole and spat on one of the twitching equines as it murmured at her and tried to reach out. One of the riflemen beside Kvetoslava jabbed it with their bayonet then shot it for good measure. The sound made the chirurgeon flinch a little. “I pray that when I die and go to the Otherworld13, that piece of shit Necrophage is waiting, because by Saint Ludovic’s blonde ball-hairs I am going to strangle him to death,” she snarled before shaking her head derisively. Kvetoslava bid her a safe rest of the night, then made his way back to the captain’s motor-carriage.

Those few days passed by without another attack, and after several restless nights of fever, Captain Yeruti Roman died. His body was burned, Kvetoslava was given the honorary title of captain and the fat old bastard’s sidearm. He didn’t leave the motor-carriage for another day yet still.

Author's Note

Alphyrra's Almanac, Issue II

1 Occult ritual activities are a common occurrence on Phyrr, and while most are harmless, many of them may be involved in worship which involves activities such as ritual sacrifice, communion with eldritch entities, etc., and in those cases they are regularly hunted down and exterminated, which has been the "standard" response in almost all locations where these cults tend to be born as of the 3rd era.

2 Article IV, Subsection 2 specifies the legality of looting during warfare. It is referenced erroneously, as Article IV specifies that anti-cultist activity is exempted due to the potential dangers of items tainted by cult influence.

3 It is believed by many cults, and many scholars that the patterns present on certain machinery, specifically automatic transmission valve bodies and some small circuitry, can be used to capture paranatural entities such as various demons. This can be done intentionally by those wishing to perform deals with these entities, but it may also happen by accident, such as in the event of a paranatural entity passing through the automatic transmission valve body's position in Otherworld, causing it to become trapped. Most motor-carriage manufactures offer a clause in their vehicle leases for the removal of these entities, free of charge due to the, quote, "danger they potentially present when left unattended," though many mechanics will challenge this as being less relevant when compared to the formation of paranatural materials on the inside of the transmission causing short and long term reliability problems when not removed or properly consecrated.

4 Cataphract refers to heavily armored mounts. In Equestrian terms, this means heavy infantry equipped with anti-armor weapons, such as cannons, heavy buckling swords, etc.

5 An anti-cavalry barricade comprised of a pattern of logs run through a central beam. Known more commonly as cheval de frise barricades.
(courtesy of Wikipedia)

6 A magazine fed tripod-mounted ballista developed by the Equestrians for protection of outnumbered frontier settlements against hostile forces, such as Changelings and/or Diamond Dog gangs. Crewed by a gunner and loader.

7 A mount native to Escal and introduced globally following the end of the 3rd era. It has its genetic roots in the Terran dairy cattle, extensively mutated and altered at some point in Phyrr history, likely 0th or 1st Era. Preferred for their hardiness in rough conditions to equine horses (whom were reintroduced to human cultures in the 3rd era by an unknown party)
(Placeholder courtesy of All Yesterdays, fantastic book)

8 Belorian Raptors are a native bird to the continent of Ukrea and Paigobrath, which came to Wraihohen by the exotic pet trade and ended up becoming an invasive species by enough breeding in the wild. Craviisto-Gradd and their northern neighbor, Yascaida, allow open season on the birds during most seasons. Their meat is said to taste like chicken with the consistency of beef.
(Placeholder courtesy of nature.com, recreation of Jianianhualong tengi by Julius T. Csotonyi).

9 Necrophage (alt. form Necrophagus, noun, plural Necrophagi, Necrophages, interchangeable,). A Necrophage is classified as a type of occult worshipper with an unnatural connection to the Otherworld, specifically one who dabbles in life and death witchcraft, such as the raising of the dead, "miraculous" healing (often coming at the cost of others) and similar acts. In humans, they are easily identified by unnaturally pale "ghost-like" skin, unnatural physical strength despite physical gauntness and pronounced, miscolored veins, though these symptoms are considered to be largely based on historical myths about the Necrophagi built during the 3rd era, when they were a common sight before they were largely all killed off during the early years of the 4th era.

10 A Tragenpanzer is a type of militarised motor-carriage utilising caterpillar tracks. While this is considered odd for military vehicles, this is considered a common trait in civilian motor-carriages. It is a semi-armored caterpillar-tracked vehicle, with a distinctive bug-like appearance, earning them the moniker of "beetle-car" by infantry. They serve the dual purpose of either munition transport, artillery carriages, or on occasion ambulance lorries.

11 Dog is a commonly used term by members of the Baphelogan Church for their deity, who worship the goat-headed aspect of free choice and liberty by the name of Baphelogast, a deity with roots in pre-Phyrr monotheist religion. Being a demon in that religion, overtime it became a cultural habit to refer to Baphelogast (then Baphomet) as "Dog" instead of "God" as an act of religious expression in a time where they were persecuted. The habit stuck, and became a mainstay of the church and easy shorthand.

12 Chirurgeon is a rank of field surgeon held outside the traditional military rank structure, allowing for greater autonomy, though commissioned officers withhold the right to give orders to a Chirurgeon. Sometimes called "chop docs" by Craviist infantrymen due to a penchant for amputation during the Wasting Plague crisis of the '30s, they are highly trained for the time period and are well-respected, often coming from Omelone or countries like it.

13 Otherworld is the mirrored dimension by which many Phyrr's religions and occult researchers believe is the final resting place for "souls", human or otherwise. It is also believed to be the source of various paranatural phenomena, creatures and most notoriously "demons." It is considered to be a phantom dimension, which exists "on top" of reality, or at minimum this is the most popular theory, as it explains the common phenomenon of "demons" and similar entities becoming trapped within circuitry boards and automatic valve transmissions, like flies caught on a windshield.