Dawn broke over the Frost Valley not with the golden splendor of morning, but with the cold, bruised purple of an iron sky.
A howling northern gale swept through the jagged mountain passes. It whipped sheets of frozen sleet against the barren granite slopes. Across the vast, snow-choked depression that separated the royal frontier from the Great Desolate Spirit Forest, the earth began to tremble. It wasn’t the sudden violence of an earthquake, but the deep, rhythmic, relentless shaking of two hundred thousand armored boots marching in lockstep.
The Ironclad Legion of the Golden Sun Empire had arrived.
From the high western ridges, the royal army poured into the valley like a slow-moving river of blackened iron. Column after column of heavy infantry marched six abreast, their lacquered plate armor clanking with every stride. Above their heads rose a forest of ten-meter pikes and serrated axe-spears, their steel points catching the dim morning light with a cold, murderous glint. Flanking the infantry were forty thousand heavy cataphracts mounted upon armored dragon-steeds, whose flared nostrils snorted clouds of white steam into the freezing gale.
Behind the forward legions rumbled the royal siege corps. Four hundred Dragon-Fire Siege Giant crossbows, hewn from hardwood and heavy with heavy brass brackets, creaked forward on massive spiked iron wheels. Each war engine was strung with the braided sinew of mountain thunder-beasts, primed to launch three-meter incendiary bolts capable of shattering castle walls. And behind them, guarded by hooded figures in dark, trailing vestments, rolled thirty…
