The impact did not sound like stone meeting wood.
It sounded like an iron church bell dropped from a belfry onto a frozen turnpike—a flat, concussive thump that drove the breath out of Noll’s phantom lungs and sent a shudder through seventy feet of solid limestone bedrock.
Under his boots, two river flagstones pulverized into white powder. His stone knees hit the floor with a force that cracked the mortar collars around his kneecaps, jarring the blue core chip in his chest so violently that his entire vision whited out into a spinning void of sparks. For half a heartbeat, he could not see the kitchen, could not see Tessa, could not see the soot-streaked ceiling. He saw only the endless, cold geometry of the Dominion ledger: thousands of glowing lines spreading across the Mere valley, every line straining under the vibration of the Crown artillery.
Then the weight settled.
It was not merely one oak beam. It was the entire western hip of the hill fort’s roof—twelve rafters of heart-timber, four tons of mortared river slate, two courses of ashlar parapet stone, and the sodden peat turf of the rampart earthworks that had absorbed eight days of autumn rain. All of it had broken free when the mortar shell struck the gable chimney, and all of it had converged upon the horizontal tie-beam that Noll was catching across his raised stone forearms.
