A silence heavier than stone settled across the fifty square miles of the Three Crowns Basin.
It wasn’t the silence of a graveyard.
It was the breathless, stunned stillness of one point two million living men who had marched out to conquer a continent and found their swords turned into scrap iron without receiving a scratch.
Across four miles of meadow, nobody shouted.
Nobody blew a battle-horn.
Nobody beat a war-drum.
The only sound in the vast natural tiered arena was the soft mountain breeze rustling the dry grass and the distant, rhythmic hum of forty-eight armored trains gliding smoothly along the dark rock rim.
In the center of the valley floor, one point two million soldiers looked down at their empty hands.
