[Lauchenoiria]

Zichitla had been biding her time, watching the chaos of the world unfold. She watched as the Council of Kerlile grew weaker as their own daughters poisoned them with reformist ideology. She watched as Empress Calhualyana continued to spread herself too thin, with more and more foreign leaders taking an opportunity to test her. She watched as the democracies panicked at the rise of extremist parties, powerless to stop them without destroying themselves.

“They’re all so stupid,” she marvelled to herself, and to her other gathered Auroras. “They repeat the same mistakes time and time again, without learning a single lesson. Patterns of history repeat and even those who learned it fall into its trap. They are arrogant, hungry, selfish and cruel. Those aspects, I could respect, if they weren’t also so stupid.”

Layla, her second-in-command, merely nodded and agreed with these statements. They were less important than the plan, and the plan was coming along just fine. It was invisible, and it would stay invisible for some time. The incident with Huacue had been an aberration. It had been vital to gather the Auroras; it had not been vital to take vengeance on the Necatli. But nothing had come of it; and they had slunk back into the shadows from whence they came.

Zichitla had made the decision to leave the Huenyan subcontinent alone for the time being. It was imploding by itself, but too slowly for her to take advantage just yet. There were other targets that were far riper for her to strike.

One of these she had in part engineered herself, though events had progressed somewhat differently from her preference. The three-way civil war was not Zichitla’s doing; it was much too complex. She hadn’t reckoned on Navid being alive. She’d seen Hashemi’s greed and Shapur’s insanity; but what could possibly have possessed Hashemi to keep Navid alive? Clearly the man had no backbone if he was incapable of killing.

The Thraxians were also less bloodthirsty than Zichitla had bargained on. Their history had been one of random bloodshed before the unification of the country, and she had thought that provoking a civil war would have led to far more violence than had occurred. The three factions had quickly settled down into a stalemate, which was all rather boring. With Navid around, also, she needed a contingency.

But Navid was tomorrow’s problem. Today’s problem was Hashemi, who naturally had to die. This had been part of the plan all along. The Auroras would use him to provoke a war, and then dispose of him. And just when Shapur believed he was regaining control, would the second strike come. It had to look like Shapur’s work.

Which is why the assassin was a cat.

Oh, Zichitla was not as much of a fool as Shapur. For all her own arrogance, she knew that cats were near impossible to train, and would do as they like. It did not matter, if the cat’s claws were coated in poison, and the cat was sufficiently motivated to scratch Hashemi at an opportune time. The Saladian resistance to the Xiomerans had provided the inspiration for this method, too.

As much as it was difficult to train a cat to perform tricks, it is easy to train any living thing to react poorly to something which is associated with a negative memory. Zichitla herself still snarled sometimes when presented unexpectedly with an image of Calhualyana, as much as she was trying to prevent herself from doing so.

The details of Zichitla’s cat training will remain classified, but suffice to say that this cat had a very strong and very violent reaction to a specific perfume smell. On the morning of the assassination, one of Zichitla’s agents spilled a bottle of said perfume onto Hashemi’s outfit before a planned speech to his troops; when it was much too late to change the plans.

Angry, Hashemi both slapped and fired the agent, but her job was done. He begrudgingly clothed himself and set out to the venue; a village square near one of his faction’s makeshift borders. These speeches were common nowadays, with no real fighting. It was all a publicity stunt, to make the other factions anxious that an assault may soon come. It never did.

It was during this speech, when he was droning on about the falseness of Shapur’s cult (the one Hashemi had invented, not that anyone knew this) when the cat was released. And, as predicted, it made a beeline to Hashemi, jumping atop him and attacking him with gusto. The nearby guards ripped the cat off and bundled Hashemi away, but it was too late.

He seemed fine when he got back to his headquarters; just a couple little scratches from an animal that was everywhere in Zargothrax these days. He went to bed, angry at Shapur for the cat laws in the first place, and vowing to do something about the plague of felines the next morning.

He never woke up.