The silence in the subterranean chamber did not last.
It broke not with the mechanical scream of the Crown Furnace, nor with the frantic curses of Marshal Ors’s engineers across the chasm, but with the voice of Sir Cael Ardent.
The hero threw his head back against the crushed underside of the granite lintel. The blood dripping from his nose and ears sprayed outward in a fine crimson mist, catching the royal gold glare of the hovering celestial script. His chest expanded, the iron ribs of his breastplate groaning as he drew the scalding vapor of the flume deep into his battered lungs.
Then he roared.
“I DO NOT BURN THIS TOWN AGAIN!”
The words tore from his throat with a fury so monumental that the sound rolled through the vaulted stone corridors of the Old Hill like a thunderclap, drowning out the high-pitched shriek of the waking core. It was the roar of a man who had died six hundred times in the service of an empire that did not know his name, a man who had watched every street he loved turn to ash until the taste of cinder was the only thing left upon his tongue.
The golden letters of the mandate flickered violently, as if struck by a physical blow from an iron warhammer. The celestial text attempted to reassert itself, pulsing with frantic, blinding urgency against the vapor:
