The northern scarp of the Great Divide didn’t open into grassy alpine meadows or quiet mountain lakes. It broke into a jagged, rotten-egg gorge choked with a permanent, choking canopy of greasy black soot and rotten-egg yellow steam.
Two leagues down the jagged fiery canyon, sprawled across a five-mile tiered arena of black dark rock and boiling river waterfalls, lay Vulcan-Khorat—the iron forge-capital of the continent.
Even from three leagues away on the mountain ridge, the sound of the city was a physical, moving blow against the chest. The rhythmic, ear-splitting THUD-CLANG, THUD-CLANG of forty-ton steam-driven forging hammers pounding armor plates in the lower works, with the high, screaming whistle of air-powered relief valves venting scalding steam into the soot-stained sky.
Ren Vale sat upon a weathered granite outcropping at the mouth of an abandoned stone quarry. He wrapped his blackened wrists in clean strips of boiled linen.
The five active Exclusion Axioms sat heavily upon his body like an invisible suit of lead armor. He had no wealth. The two copper bits in his pocket had tarnished into powdery green rust and crumbled through his seam. He had no divine grace. The consecrated mountain brook ten paces away had blistered his palms when he tried to wash his face. He had no noble sovereignty. The royal sentries at the border pass had laughed in his face until Lord Ren commanded their ranks from the shadows. He had no clean escapes. The flight from Alexandria-Khorat had cost the lives of…
