High upon the forward slope of the western knoll, beneath the fluttering black-and-gold banners of the Golden Sun Empire, a dozen seasoned generals sat motionless atop their armored war-steeds.
At their head was Imperial Grand Marshal Wu Zhan.
The seventy-year-old veteran sat rigidly in his saddle, his blackened plate armor scarred by sixty years of border warfare against southern beast-cults, northern nomad shamans, and rogue sword sects. His weathered face was normally carved from unbending granite, his iron-gray beard trimmed with martial care, his dark eyes accustomed to surveying battlefields soaked in cut limbs, smoking rubble, and dying screams.
For three painful weeks, Wu Zhan had carried a mountain of lead upon his aging shoulders.
He had known from the very first day Crown Prince Zhao Lie seized power that this campaign was madness. He had watched sixty thousand conscripts forced into blizzards without winter coats. He had seen baggage trains abandoned in mountain drifts. And he had listened every night to the painful moans of boys freezing to death in drafty bivouacs. He had marched toward the eastern border with a heavy, rotting dread in his gut, convinced that today he would watch two hundred thousand of his country’s sons ground into meat against the iron-hard barriers of an ancient entity.
