The horn sounded like the bellow of a dying continent.
It was a deep, brassy, brass-throated roar that echoed off the dark rock ridges of the outer badlands. It shook through the ferro-concrete foundations of Gate 4 so wildly that loose mortar rained down from the ceiling joints. Across the five-half-mile expanse of the ash flats, the sulfur fog was suddenly pushed aside by a massive wall of displaced air.
Through the clearing mist, the ground trembled with rhythmic, sickening thunder:
THOOM... THOOM... THOOM...
Emerging from the eastern trench defile was the first heavy siege engine of the Sovereign Chimera Order: the Gorgon-Stitch.
It was a nightmare of engineered gigantism measuring sixteen meters in length and standing seven meters at the shoulder hump. Its massive chassis was built upon the skeletal frame of an ancient woolly rhinoceroid. But its forequarters had been broadened with grafted silver-steel struts to support eight segmented, pillar-like legs shod in riveted heavy-duty boiler plate. Its head was a horrifying cluster of six hydra-like masticating maws arranged in a nested circle around a central grinding pharynx, each jaw lined with jagged, diamond-edged carnassial blades.
Rising above its armored flanks were twin segmented scorpion tails, each the thickness of an oil pipeline. It ended in curved, hollow stingers dripping with black neuro-acid-burning venom.
