The Grand Citadel, symbol of House Vance’s eighty-year dominion over the northern province, was being systematically dismantled by an eighty-foot centipede from the pre-cataclysm deep pit.
Marble towers that had stood for ages leaned at precarious angles, their foundations cracked by the Disaster-Alpha’s thrashing coils. Gold-trimmed tapestries depicting ancient victories burned in the green, acid-splashed wreckage of the banquet halls. Meanwhile, the survivors of the dragoon regiment fled down the service stairwells in mindless, blind panic.
On the terrace, Julian Vance scrambled backward on his hands and knees. He wept wildly as the Disaster-Alpha’s massive, three-sided head dropped toward him.
The creature’s breath smelled of decomposed slate, sulfuric acid, and the rotting marrow of a thousand underground victims. Its four pairs of clicking jaws, each six feet long and rimmed with serrated black teeth, opened wide, dripping skin-burning beast-blood onto the marble three feet from Julian’s polished riding boots.
“Father! Help me!” Julian shrieked, his voice cracking into a high-pitched, childish whine.
Gregory Vance didn’t draw his old family saber to defend his son.
The Iron Guard, whose name had scared commoner apprentices for two decades, threw his ritual weapon to the floor, hitched up his velvet-lined cape. Then he bolted down the western row of stone pillars with the wild, undignified desperation of a cornered sewer rat. He didn’t look back once. His boots slipped in the blood of his fallen guards as he sprinted toward the private escape tunnel leading to the lower bluffs.
