The second war blade cleaved the marsh fog with a sound like tearing canvas.
Eighty yards above the churned earth, the Blood-Asura Colossus took a shuddering stride forward. Its iron-shod heel sank three feet into the black silt, crushing an iron mantlet and two shattered ballista carriages into splinters. The boiling crimson muscle along its four arms bulged beneath plates of blackened bone.
Fifty yards away sat Kaelen Vance’s ox-wagon.
The sixty-foot blood-halberd in the titan’s upper right hand swung in a vicious downward arc. The blade did not strike the wagon directly. It buried itself into the marsh fifty yards to the left, cleaving a trench forty feet deep.
A geyser of boiling sulfur and red mud erupted into the sky.
On the highest stone parapet above the fortress gates, Grand Chancellor Vaelen held both hands aloft. Crimson light bled from his fingertips into the central array spire.
“Feed the conduits,” Vaelen intoned, his voice echoing across the plain through thirty-six resonance horns. “The celestial alignment nears its apex. In twenty hours, all one hundred and eight altars drink together.”
Below the walls, the earth groaned.
