Yasmilina slowly opened her eyes when a bell rang out, stretching languidly and arching her back to offer her naturally bronzed flesh to the setting sun. Rising from her sun-lounger the young-looking woman walked across the balcony, stepping through silk curtains into her small apartment’s bedroom. As her youthful looks suggested, although humanity had long been modified to prevent the appearance of aging, Yasmilina was nineteen and less than a year away from leaving teenage-hood, not yet even a tenth of the way through her projected lifespan. Taking a plain leather harness, upon which were the heraldic badges of her city and its militia, from her wardrobe Yasmilina shrugged into the garment, adjusting the broad torso straps to cover her well-shaped breasts and then smoothing the pteruges descending from its belt to hang straight against her toned thighs.
Removing a shortsword from the container next to the wardrobe Yasmilina buckled the weapon onto the belt at her left hip. As she turned away to head out the teen retrieved a set of bracers and sandals from the wardrobe, strapping herself into them and thus departing clad in the equipment of a guardian.
It took only a few minutes for Yasmilina to go from her apartment to the watch tower she was assigned to, at the north-west corner of Dejah's central district. After looking out over the grassland at the base of the cliff to the west of Dejah, catching sight of her counterpart on the wall of the district built to the north, Yasmilina slumped into a chair with an air of boredom. Dejah had not been attacked since before the birth of her father a century ago and military service was largely regarded by the youngest generation of the population as a waste of time. Even though she'd been raised by career guardians Yasmilina did see the point of military service but even still she considered it tedious.
Straightening as she caught herself starting to fall asleep Yasmilina rose from the chair, glancing over her shoulder at the lights and sounds of Dejah Central's parties, before stepping forward to lean against the parapet. The grassland looked peaceful, despite the variety of dangers she knew were out there, and the woman stayed in place for a few moments, soaking up the final rays of light. A quiet humming drew her attention skyward and she looked on as a low-flying sky-boat, no doubt a courier bringing in news, flew towards Dejah Central.
A trio of small objects were thrown over the side of the flier when it moved above her watch tower and the primed bombs they were exploded upon impact. The released energies turned the watch tower into a ruin, hurling chunks of shrapnel in all directions, and dug craters in the street just inside the wall. Almost instantly after the explosions, alerted by both them and the panic rapidly spreading across the central district, a swarm of fliers from the Dejahan militia rose from the primary dockyard to the east to capture the sky-boat.
Yasmilina knew none of this though, her shattered body utterly buried beneath all the rubble displaced by the explosions. The nineteen-year-old gasped out her last in darkness, her life constantly flashing before her eyes as her mind faded away.
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