The dry moat beneath Bastion Four was eighteen feet deep and thirty feet wide, its upright scarp revetted in smooth, dressed dark rock cut stone.
Into this stone hall, dragging himself along the frozen flat stone slabs with shattered knees and bleeding elbows, crawled Chieftain Ymir-Krag.
The twenty-four-foot titan was a ruined giant statue.
His legendary mammoth-skull armor was crushed into white powder, his left knee tendon was cut, and forty steel flechettes were embedded deep in his chest and shoulders.
Dark, steaming azure blood dripped from his beard, freezing into icicles as it struck the paving stones.
Yet, driven by the dying embers of his ancient elemental soul, Ymir-Krag reached the base of the castle wall.
He dug his huge, frost-bitten fingers into the narrow mortar joints between the three-ton granite facing blocks.
His arm muscles bulged with terrifying, spasmodic power as he tried to drag his thirty-eight-ton bulk upward, his breath hissing in ragged, steaming gasps that frosted the stone five feet in every direction.
