The Grand Valley of the Three Crowns was named for the three jagged granite peaks that rose like royal coronets above its southern rim.
It was a huge natural tiered arena, fifty square miles of flat, marshy meadow surrounded on all sides by nonstop dark rock bluffs eighty feet high.
For hundreds of years, the basin had been the traditional muster ground where the emperors of Aethel-Terra gathered their hosts before embarking on land-wide campaigns.
Now, it was filled to overflowing with the largest military force ever assembled in recorded history.
One point two million soldiers occupied the valley floor.
There were four hundred thousand infantry of the Holy Solar Empire under Emperor Castellan the Fourth, five hundred thousand berserkers and heavy cataphracts of the Krell Empire under Grand Warlord Vrax, and three hundred thousand shadow-warriors of the Umbral Court under Shadow-Archon Malanthir.
Over one thousand huge timber siege towers, trebuchets, and rolling battering rams filled the meadow.
Their ornate silk pavilions—gold-trimmed cloth-of-gold for the Solar Orthodoxy, crimson bull-hide for Krell, and midnight silk for the Void-Court—covered the plain like an ocean of arrogant color.
