Asp Head Defenders
Nobody talks about the Asp Head Defenders because nobody knows they exist. Out at the edge of the Great Divide, where the Drylands crack open into a labyrinth of canyons and dead-end ravines, a handful of sharpshooters and infiltrators wage a war that the rest of Lorado has never heard of.
Their enemy is the raider population breeding in the depths of the Divide. The Asp Heads believe that whatever resources lie buried in those canyons will eventually draw enough raiders to overflow, catching Lorado in a pincer between jungle horrors from the east and desert killers from the south. So they fight. They shoot from ridgelines and slip into raider camps after dark, sustaining themselves on weapons, food, and armor looted from the corpses of the people they kill.
That dependence on raider loot is the poison in the well. Recruitment is nearly impossible; their territory is too remote and too hostile for anyone with better options. The few who join are outcasts shunned from White Sands or mercenaries too reckless for anything else. And each year, a handful of defenders cross the line entirely, defecting to the very raider bands they swore to destroy. The Asp Heads are dangerous people, and the gap between defender and raider narrows with every passing season.
The tide in the Divide is rising. The Asp Head Defenders will inevitably fail. When they do, there will be nothing between that raider flood and the settlements of Lorado except open ground.
Their enemy is the raider population breeding in the depths of the Divide. The Asp Heads believe that whatever resources lie buried in those canyons will eventually draw enough raiders to overflow, catching Lorado in a pincer between jungle horrors from the east and desert killers from the south. So they fight. They shoot from ridgelines and slip into raider camps after dark, sustaining themselves on weapons, food, and armor looted from the corpses of the people they kill.
That dependence on raider loot is the poison in the well. Recruitment is nearly impossible; their territory is too remote and too hostile for anyone with better options. The few who join are outcasts shunned from White Sands or mercenaries too reckless for anything else. And each year, a handful of defenders cross the line entirely, defecting to the very raider bands they swore to destroy. The Asp Heads are dangerous people, and the gap between defender and raider narrows with every passing season.
The tide in the Divide is rising. The Asp Head Defenders will inevitably fail. When they do, there will be nothing between that raider flood and the settlements of Lorado except open ground.
