The Barracks of the Desert Legion are not a single building, but a contained city of war—a sun-blasted grid of stone, canvas, and sand where thousands of soldiers eat, train, sleep, and break themselves into weapons for the Empire.
The complex sits just outside the capital’s inner wall, close enough that the Emperor’s banners are visible at dawn, far enough that screams from the training courts do not carry into civilian streets.
Buranti Oni’s unit is housed along the outer western span, where the stone gives way to open desert and the wind never truly stops.
The barracks are built in tiered rectangles, each ring assigned to a cluster of companies.
Inner rings house command, logistics, and veteran formations.
Outer rings are reserved for younger units, rotating detachments, and high-casualty roles.
Buranti’s unit occupies a low-status but high-throughput wing—rows of long stone dormitories with open fronts, shaded by heavy canvas awnings stained with sweat and dust.
The walls are thick, scarred with impact marks from decades of drills gone wrong. Hooks line the interiors, holding armor, water skins, and weapon harnesses. At night, the air smells of oil, leather, and hot stone.
Privacy does not exist.
Anonymity thrives anyway.
Adjacent to the housing block lies one of the Legion’s secondary drill courtyards—a massive sand-packed square the size of a city block, bordered by weapon racks and broken stone markers.
Here, training is loud, repetitive, and brutal:
Shield walls forming and reforming under shouted cadence
Endurance marches under full kit, sun unrelenting
Live-weapon sparring that leaves blood in the sand
The emphasis is cohesion, not brilliance.
Soldiers who excel too loudly are noticed.
Soldiers who endure quietly are not.
Buranti thrives here.
Behind the formal courtyard—technically outside the designated training area—is a stretch of unmaintained terrain known unofficially as the Dead Ground.
It contains:
Cracked stone foundations from an old siege platform
Half-collapsed watch posts
Wind-carved trenches and dunes
It is too close to the barracks to be considered desert.
Too inconvenient to be maintained.
Command tolerates its existence because:
Injured soldiers recover there
Veterans drink there
Recruits break there
Buranti trains there.
Alone.
Buranti’s unit is composed mostly of:
Young legionnaires
Transfers from failed companies
Soldiers deemed reliable but unremarkable
They are not disgraced.
They are simply uninteresting.
The unit’s rhythm is steady, disciplined, and forgettable. They complete drills on time. They suffer no unusual losses. They draw no commendations.
Perfect camouflage.
Buranti is known among them as:
Quiet
Meticulous
Excessively clean with his weapons
“Odd, but dependable”
No one questions why he sharpens chains at night.
No one asks why he never spars seriously.
Captain Rhel Marak commands the unit from a stone office overlooking the drill yard, barely fifty paces from Buranti’s barracks wing.
A career officer, Rhel is:
Middle-aged
Scarred
Exhaustingly competent
He values:
Order
Predictability
Units that do not cause paperwork
Rhel has noticed Buranti—but only as a statistical anomaly:
Never injured
Never late
Performance always exactly within acceptable margins
Too precise to praise.
Too clean to discipline.
Rhel’s instincts itch, but instinct without evidence dies quickly in the Legion. He files Buranti under “watch later.”
Later never comes.
The proximity is the trick.
Buranti trains so close to official grounds that no one imagines anything dangerous is happening. The Dead Ground is assumed to be a place of weakness, not refinement.
His Will remains folded inward.
His body absorbs the strain.
His chains never sing where ears can hear.
In a legion built to crush individuality into unity, Buranti has learned the oldest survival tactic of all:
Become background.
There are soldiers who rise through acclaim.
There are soldiers who rise through blood.
And then there are those stationed close enough to power to be seen—
yet never looked at twice.
Buranti Oni sleeps within sight of command banners,
trains within earshot of officers,
and prepares for a future no one has assigned him.
Yet.