At the threshold of the underground dark rock shaft, Lord Ren stopped.
The Ash Emperor didn’t look down into the dark tunnel where the refugees were beginning to go down. He turned his back on the First Epoch shaft, his heavy iron broadsword resting against the lacquered iron shin guards of his right leg.
Across his scarred lower jaw, the white line of his crossbow injury burned with dark, crimson fury as he looked back through the ruined meat locker toward the burning avenue of the Middle Spires.
“The armory,” Lord Ren said. His voice dropped into the quiet, terrifying register of a monarch preparing a funeral pyre. “The Royal Citadel Armory is three hundred paces up the terrace road. It holds forty tons of black powder, five hundred repeating heavy steel crossbows, and sixty suits of forged dwarf-mail. If we seize the armory and barricade the Iron Bastion, we can hold the high stronghold for six months.”
The Emperor looked at Ren Vale, his slate-gray eyes blazing with ancient, unbending royal pride.
“A city that dies without a final stand,” Lord Ren rumbled, “is a disgrace to its founders. We have thirty armed court guards, forty dockworkers. An Emperor who knows how to fortify a gate. We take the armory. We hoist the black banner of Khorat over the Citadel. And when the glass-like beasts break through the walls, we give them an iron harvest that the poets will sing of for a thousand years.”
