Ten days and seven hours passed while Malakor’s handlers moved the heavy puppets to the siege lines and Vorn rebuilt his battered formations. Barnaby and Linnea kept Sterling alive with carefully rationed stabilizers while the mountain endured the continuing blockade.
Heavy iron greaves crunched through the frozen mud of the lower valley, leaving smoking black footprints in the frost.
Two towering crimson-armored figures strode into Siege General Vorn’s forward siege camp.
Each puppet stood nine feet tall, encased in overlapping plates of blackened bone, hammered brass, and blood-iron. Their featureless porcelain bone masks stared ahead with hollow sockets that burned with putrid, flickering purple soul-fire.
Thick, rubbery conduits ran along the napes of their necks down into their breastplates, visibly pulsing as dark, viscous Golden Core sediment was pumped through their mechanical veins.
As they halted before the command pavilion, a suffocating aura of quasi-Nascent Soul pressure washed over the encampment.
Heavy war-drakes shrieked in terror, throwing themselves against their iron corral gates until their snouts bled. Veteran ducal soldiers dropped to their knees in the mud, clutching their throats as their breath turned to foul, metallic mist.
General Vorn emerged from his tent, his scarred jaw dropping in naked awe.
