Emperor Castellan the Fourth charged up the ballast embankment of Curve Four like a blazing sky comet.
His gold-trimmed war-stallion leaped across the sixty-degree drainage ditch, its golden iron-shod hooves throwing crushed dark rock into the morning air.
In his hands, the eight-foot Great Solar Blade burned with the blinding, terrible light of an unquenchable tiny star.
For three thousand years, the chronicle scrolls of Sol-Maras had declared the holy sword to be iron-hard.
Cast from astral gold and hardened in the sacred fire of the first dawn, the blade had split mountain crags, cut the necks of ancient sea-wyrms. Then it sliced through the gates of thirty old family fortresses.
“I’m the descendant of the Sun!” Castellan bellowed, his voice echoing across the basin. “No mortal stone shall bind the light!”
Fifty paces from the track, Castellan launched himself out of the saddle with terrifying divine agility.
Propelled by three thousand years of hereditary divine aura, the Emperor soared thirty feet into the air.
