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Behind you, Antoninus looks around with great interest while Mikail gawps. It is hard to blame him. The Cantonian Hall, like the great hallways outside, is similarly adorned with martial trophies, ancient battle armours and the banners seized the hands of dying enemies. You could spend hours, days, admiring the accumulated memorabilia and battles honours, but you only pass close enough to a few where a glance discerns the subject matter. A map of the formations in 2nd Battle of Zaira. A painting of the Siege of Mejidiyan. The helmet of some tribal chieftain from the Dardus Steppe Campaign. These are some of the names that catch your eye, though the names of the locations escape you. You had never heard of these places, let alone of the battles that have taken place there, but it appears these are wars and battles where the Cantonian Cohort, including sometimes specifically the 43rd Talon, distinguished themselves.
One in particular catches your eye, a banner held aloft a relic of some sort just outside the quarters of the 43rd Talon. On the banner is a list of 9 names in beautiful woven silk, gold writing on green fabric. At the bottom of the pennant, encased in a glass box of luxurious design, rests two items on red silken pillows. The helmet of a knight, a much older design, hewn near in half by some unknown weapon, and a single scale very much like the one you saw in the Comitas Chapter Master’s quarters.
<span class="mu-i">“That is roll call of the honoured dead from the 1st Battle of Zaira, somewhere to the south of here. Three of the 43rd Talon were among the final survivors of the Cantonion cohort left defending the Banner, dead to the last in its defence. According to our military tradition. Upon hearing of their valour, it is said that the Dragon spoke the name of each Cantonian Knight, and gifted a scale to the lodge of the 43rd Talon.”</span> Marshall Durand glances aside at you, his expression stuck somewhere between annoyance at the delay and his obvious admiration for the item and your interest in it. He brushes off the moment with a brusque comment.. <span class="mu-i">“A heathen honorific, but a high one. You will come to learn that we do not speak ill of our dead here, pagan or otherwise. ‘Honour the Ancestors’ are not empty words. Is that understood, Andrei?”</span>
<span class="mu-i">“Yes, Marshall.”</span> The dark scale gleams silently next to the centuries old relic, a fallen knight whose legacy you now inherit.
<span class="mu-i">“Good.”</span>
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