The wall of potion-made firestorm leaped seventy feet into the rain-soaked sky.
A roaring curtain of blazing bright white flame and liquid-fire spanned two hundred yards across the Riverbend track bed. The ties hissed wildly as the creosote boiled from the timber pores. The steel rails glowed a dull, menacing cherry-red beneath the heat.
He stood at the center of the arcane circle. Chief Pyromancer Ignatius raised his dragon-bone staff high, his lips peeling back in a triumphant snarl.
“Burn,” Ignatius screamed, channeling the collective mana of twenty royal court mages into the inferno. “Melt their wheels to melted rock waste.”
The twenty battle-mages channeled their life force through the glowing ruby foci atop their staves. The potion-made flame surged, hungry for iron.
*
In the cab of The Iron Bastion, the brass blowdown lever clicked into its locked rear notch.
Under two hundred twenty-four pounds of soaked pressure, thirty aimed atomizing nozzles mounted around the lower outer edge of the locomotive frame snapped open.
