Verily the Decados are clever and treacherous adversaries. Their latest military advancement, I am told, came from the observations of the line's young scion Annele as she sported with her hounds in the palace garden.
The dogs, following a scent into the undergrowth, came upon a noxious drij-fungus, squatting phosphorescent and loathly in the shade. The dumb brutes pawed at it, and so the drij, as is its wont, exhaled a cloud of toxic spores upon the animals; and they whined, and bent nearly double, and stiffened, and slowly expired.
The guards sent to summon Annele for dinner found her chortling with childish merriment over the corpses of the hounds; and nothing would do but that Annele be entertained thereafter by a cunning execution engine built to emulate the drij.
When the war with the Van Geldens erupted, a few modifications on the original design were all that was necessary to concoct a terribly effective weapon of mass warfare as that platoon blasted by grenades carrying the Yellow Demise could attest, had any lived.
