The morning sun cast long, golden shadows across the crushed gravel of Haven-Hold’s Grand Municipal Plaza.
The air was brisk. It smelled richly of autumn frost, baked bread, and the lingering, sweet fragrance of spearmint confections.
In the center of the shattered stone square, the ancient World-Wyrm Terravorax lay asleep in the dirt like a huge hound resting beside a kitchen hearth.
Its fifty-mile body, stretching deep into the underground fault caverns beneath the Iron Range, was fully motionless.
The blinding crimson glare that had scared three empires for ten thousand years had vanished from its eyes.
Its massive, linked dark rock scales, once blistered with fiery melted rock waste and oozing acidic sulfur, were now cool to the touch and glowing with gentle veins of golden mana.
Giles Croft walked down the wooden ramp from the watching terrace. He carried his brass sighting scope under his left arm and a wooden slatted bucket of crisp red orchard apples in his right hand.
Up on the main watching platform, Toby Karr was peering through a brass sight heat gauge, recording the rapid heat fading away across the wyrm’s armored plates.
