A lovely read!  Here are my thoughts:

Things I really enjoyed!

• The foreshadowing worked extremely well here.
• The necessity of ritual in the character, even in this setting, helps establish the sense of lore behind the Eternal Dynasty
• The description of the worn, battle damaged suit at the start really helped sell my on the situation right from the get go.

Thoughts if you ever revise this:

• A division of 4  sections made the story feel a bit choppy.  I think the second and third sections could have been fused into a single section.  Reducing some of the battle (full credit, I enjoyed reading it) could allow for more space to build characters and dialogue if desired.

Nit-picks

• Creature was repeated a fair amount in the third-section.  Additional words such as "monstrosity", " behemoth", etc could add some variation.

This was really an amazingly themed and written story.  Thank you for writing it for this jam!

a extremely great read! and with the eternal dynasty no less! and tea! an important part of every good plan, i say. also love the minis the story was baced around!  

That was absolutely delightful! I won't spoil it for anyone else, because the moment when I realized the comparison you were drawing was the high point of my read, but you took a relatively simple concept of an unconventional weapon and tied it into the narrative's imagery in a very, very charming way. Excellent work - and the last line was pure gold.

I like the overall narrative arc on this one.