The metallic shriek of the star-iron broadsword hung in the freezing air above the glacier highway.
Grandmaster Yan Beichen stood atop the inner citadel battlement, his eight-foot frame casting a long shadow across the ice. The golden sword glyphs embroidered on his midnight silk robes shimmered with suffocating pressure.
Behind him along the obsidian parapets, twenty-five thousand elite imperial guards watched their preceptor with fanatical devotion.
For seventy years, Yan Beichen had instructed three generations of imperial princes in the supreme arts of the blade. He had never lost a single duel. His sixty-foot black star-iron broadsword had cleaved through the gates of thirty mountain sects during the great unification wars.
Vice-Commander Xiao of the imperial guard stood by the central ballista, his hand resting on his scabbard.
“The preceptor spent twenty years in deep seclusion refining the Nine-Dragon Star-Cleaving Form,” Xiao told his archers with quiet pride. “A single swing of his blade can split an iron mountain in two. No rebel swordsman can stand before him.”
Down in the allied lines, Captain Morvath looked up at the citadel with a pale face.
“Grandmaster Yan has never spared a foe,” Morvath whispered to Patriarch Shen. “When he draws that sixty-foot broadsword, the sword wind alone can level three rows of siege engines. His blade was tempered in the blood of dragons.”
