Delara clan Perone took several deep breaths, trying to calm her nerves as she waited her turn to board the Seed Lance war-wagon. Today was a momentous day. This was to be her first exposure to real combat, her first chance to earn her Blood Stripes—the tattoo that signified she had taken that final step to become a true warrior, that she had taken a life in battle.

     It was the only thing she was missing. She had multiple gold medals for the annual Amazon National Games competitions, winning both long and short stick, pankration, and wrestling, getting bronze in kickboxing and the javelin toss, and finishing top ten in the high jump, quarter-mile sprint, shot put, and decathlon. She’d faced and defeated many blooded Amazons on her path to victory, and when they lost, Delara frequently felt a sense of condescension coming from them, the looks on their faces saying, “congratulations on winning this game—but it wasn’t a real fight, was it?” That was what she sought to prove today—that she had the will and fortitude to apply her skills in a true battle, to look death in the eye and not flinch.

      It was a part of herself that Delara doubted. She still remembered the first time she’d ever killed something. It wasn’t a pleasant memory. At eight years old, she’d been exploring one of the many caves in the severe, upthrust mountains of Amazonia, pretending to be a brave knight on a quest to slay monsters. And she’d found just such a beast, a ferocious badger that blocked her path, snarling at her with sharp vicious teeth. But she didn’t quail. She remembered her training and thrust the sharpened point of her homemade spear right through its heart. 

     She’d felt a rush of elation at her successful kill, which quickly faded as she examined her victim’s corpse. In death, the badger was no longer fearsome. It looked peaceful, all curled up, and kind of cute. Delara stroked its soft fur and began to feel ill. It got worse when she heard the squeaking sounds, and turned to see the badger cubs retreat further into a den in the cave wall. That’s when it hit her: she wasn’t any kind of hero. She was just a murderer. She was the sort of person that heroes defeated. She tried to rescue the cubs, but they retreated to the back of their den when she approached, and she nearly ended up trapping herself in the narrow entrance instead. Eventually she had to give up, and ran crying all the way home to the Perone clan tent, her spear forgotten, to throw herself into her mothers’ embrace, sobbing in piteous shame.

     She’d been seriously depressed for a week after, and a vegetarian for a month before her resolve failed. Her mothers hadn’t been angry or ashamed of her. They’d held her, and when she became capable of listening to reason again, they’d told her that, while there was nothing to be done about the mistake she’d made, the important thing was that she learn from the experience, to do better in the future. And, from then on, Delara had vowed never to kill an animal for sport—only in self-defense or for food.

    But that was a long time ago, Delara was twenty-two years old now, no longer a child, and the opponents she’d face today weren’t innocent badgers. They were a band of mercenary slavers known as the Korchra Reapers—and the simple word “slavers” told you everything about the type of scum they were. What’s more, they’d committed an unforgivable offense—they plotted to invade Amazonia itself, to abduct the free women of the Amazon nation and sell them off as chattel. This was an insult that could not be countenanced. For their arrogance, greed, and cruelty, they were to be put to the sword—every last one of them.

     Even finding the location of Amazonia was cause for war. No one outside the Amazon nation should have that knowledge. For Amazonia wasn’t a regular shardworld, like the other remnants of the old planets of the Zemyah system. Amazonia was in its own pocket dimension—or, more precisely—it was the nexus of four elemental planes of existence. Earth, Air, Water, and Fire all surged into a tiny fold in space, creating a small habitable world where all the elements met, recreating in miniature a version of the Material Plane the majority of sentient beings lived in.

     It was one of the many strange anomalies created in the Shattering, when powerful demonic aliens invaded from outside the universe to wage war on the gods of the Old Pantheon, some seven thousand years ago. During the war, some of the Reaver gods attacked a prosperous city-state known as Itanosia. This city was nearly undefended, for the men of the city had followed their army commanders out to face a diversionary Reaver force, despite the warnings of the goddess Shoskara and her oracles. 

     Her prophecy and subsequent pleas for aid ignored, Shoskara and her followers faced the Reavers alone, in a mighty battle that destroyed huge swaths of Itanosia—a battle that, against all odds, began to turn in Shoskara’s favor. One by one, the monstrous Reavers found themselves trapped and executed, as the goddess exacted painful vengeance for every life lost. And then the Reavers did something unexpected. They used the same magic they’d used to enter our universe, but this time, they used it as a weapon, tearing holes in reality itself—a tactic they’d later use en masse to rip all of Zemyah’s worlds asunder. These attacks were chaos embodied, just as likely to kill the user along with its target, but the spite of the Reavers knew no bounds. 

     Itanosia was lost, and Shoskara was gravely injured, but she managed to save her temple, along with her most loyal followers, as they were hurled into a new plane of existence. In this place, Shoskara and her priestesses were able to survive, safe and sound, while the rest of Zemyah was engulfed in the cataclysm of the Shattering. Shoskara focused her energies on creating order out of the surrounding elemental chaos, a land that was both wild and rich with resources of every kind. She named the new land Amazonia, and decreed that it should henceforth remain both secret and self-sufficient, separate from the world of men who’d abandoned them in their time of need.

     Travel to and from the outside universe was still possible, through the use of teleportation magic, and this was done often. But it should only be done by the Portal Mystics, the enigmatic order of witches who held the secret arcane knowledge of inter-planar travel. Delara could actually see them now, a rare occurrence, though they were a good fifty yards away, carefully checking over the many runes they’d carved into the field, at the terminal point of the four sets of twin steel rails of the seed lances.

     Somehow, these Korchra Reapers had got hold of the mystic codes that would allow someone to enter the plane of Amazonia, and were massing a raiding force. Delara didn’t know all the details, but she’d heard rumors that these mercenaries had gotten serious funding from somewhere, and their equipment included heavy siege weapons and other top-of-the-line military magitech hardware, like magitanks and giant war-golems. And, on top of that, they rode terrifying huge beasts into battle—monstrous spiders, bats the size of bears, and other horrible abominations from the Realm of Shadow, which spread its influence into the Reaper’s home territory.

     But the Amazons maintained an extensive, ancient, and very effective spy network, which (combined with the divine oracular powers of Shoskara herself) had allowed Amazonia to remain untouched by any uninvited guests for the past seven thousand years. That, and the dedicated warriors of the Amazon nation, who remained vigilant and prepared to quash any threat, as they were about to do today.

     A call rang out across the staging grounds, and was then picked up and amplified by the wardancers. These were the special troops who functioned as the Amazon’s battlefield communication. Each was decked out in colorful feathers and war paint, and carried a variety of instruments with them—drums, bells, horns, and flutes. As they began to board the seed lances they began a slow, steady chant, in time with their hand claps and drum beats, taking their places in what would be the most protected position of the vehicle—slightly to the rear of dead center.

     The seed lances were the specialized assault craft of the Amazon nation, designed to maximize the effectiveness of a teleportation-based assault. Essentially, they were rail cars, forty feet long and eight feet wide, with a massive steel ram affixed to the front. Currently, the sides of the lances were open, their thick steel-reinforced wooden planks folded outwards to serve as boarding ramps. Each lance rested on a long artificial incline, their wheels blocked. Once the lances were fully loaded with Amazon warriors and the Mystics were prepared, they’d signal for launch. The lances would be hurled down the tracks and the portals would activate a split second before the lances reached them. This would give the enemy no chance to block or dispel the portals before the full Amazon invasion force had passed all the way through.

     Delara ascended one of the ramps, behind two other Amazons, Cora and Rue, and took her place in the stocks: pens made from padded steel bars extending perpendicularly from the spine of the seed lance at regular intervals. Each pen held four Amazons, two by two, facing each other, belted in back-first against a set of bars. 

     Delara secured herself to the pen bars, along with her spear, the quick-release buckles all ready to go, when she felt some pressure against her heavy wooden shield as another woman squeezed into the space adjacent from her.

     Delara looked over and down, as the newcomer was about six inches shorter than she was, and dressed in lighter armor—a leather brigandine vest, and a steel-reinforced leather skullcap, though this was much briefer than Delara was used to seeing, as it had to accomodate its wearer’s large, black-and-white striped cat ears.

     The newcomer looked up at her with a familiar kind of eagerness, a wide smile plastered over her cute face, and Delara felt her heart skip a beat.

     “Hi there,” said the cat-eared girl. “You’re Delara, right? Nice to get smooshed up next to you like this—although, it’d be a lot nicer without all this armor and equipment in the way, don’t you think. I’m Mina, by the way.”