The heavy hardwood gates of Camp Hope swung open with a deep, groaning rumble that rang against the surrounding mountain walls.
Through the wide gateway poured an armada unlike anything ever witnessed on a mortal battlefield. It wasn’t a counter-charge of armored war chariots, nor was it a finger bone of spiked siege towers bristling with heavy crossbows. It was a fleet of forty huge timber sledges, each over eighty feet in length, hewn from polished mountain hardwood and banded with glowing brass brackets.
Propelling these massive timber platforms across the frozen tundra were not straining draft oxen or chained war-beasts, but Da Shi and his eleven fellow First Epoch Obsidian Golems.
The twenty-foot titans of polished black dark rock stepped forward in perfect, timed together peace. Their broad stone feet crunched steadily through the snow, packing down wide, smooth avenues behind them. Carved into their broad granite faces were wide, cheerful stone grins, their deep sapphire rune-eyes twinkling with warm, glowing light. Resting their huge stone palms against the rear frames of the sledges, they pushed the multi-ton timber platforms across the snow as effortlessly as a mortal farmer pushing a wooden wheelbarrow.
As they walked, several of the golems effortlessly deployed fold-out pine benches and long frame stand tables from the sides of the sledges. They set them down upon the packed snow so that exhausted soldiers would have places to sit instead of kneeling in freezing slush.
