Spiked iron pavises slammed into the salt crust in three interlocking lines.
Along the northern ridge, five thousand heavy siege infantry of the Iron-Blood Column moved with mechanical precision. Their blackened armor clanked like grinding gears, kicking up a white cloud of alkali dust.
To the east and west, heavy sand-strider cavalry formed two massive sweeping wings. The riders did not charge the crater.
Instead, they held their barbed lances level, screening the flanking passes and slowly funneling the open terrain into a single narrow corridor.
The iron jaws were herding them north.
Ahead lay a jagged tear in the wasteland. Two hundred-foot cliffs of black limestone rose like ancient obsidian walls, framing a narrow, waterless gorge.
Beyond that throat stretched the Sunken Salt Ruins—a sunken depression of bleached stone and salt obelisks, notorious across the frontier as a dry grave where trapped fugitives perished of thirst.
Elder Sterling leaped down from an alkali boulder, his longsword scabbard trembling in his white-knuckled grip.
