The breach at Gate Eight was an ugly, ragged wound torn through the ancient stone by sky void-powder.
When Qiao Ming and Yan Zhiqiu arrived at the western transverse gallery of Entry hall 108, the air was choked with the acrid, metal stink of burned saltpeter and crushed snake-like. The ancient triumphal arch—which had stood for eight thousand years without a single mortar joint failing—lay in shattered ruins. A three-ton keystone had crashed into the center of the flat stone slabs, splitting the floor into jagged crevices through which dark, frothing water was welling upward from the lower water tanks.
Through the fifteen-foot breach in the wall, seventy shock-fighters of the Severed Horizon Order were pouring into the hall. Unlike the infantry stalled at the Shallow Gates, these men were light assault veterans. Armed with curved void-steel cutlasses, short repeating hand-ballistae, and round bronze bucklers inscribed with wind-walking glyphs that allowed them to leap across the rubble with unnatural, hungry speed.
“Kill the men! Capture the women for the ark-furnaces!” their lead officer screamed, leaping over a fallen column and slashing his cutlass down at an elderly refugee weaver who was struggling to drag a wicker basket of dried fish.
