The third manifestation didn’t arrive with drifting ash or floating starlight.
It arrived with the ear-splitting, bone-jarring crash of blackened iron plate striking oak deckboards.
The air on the barge St. Mira instantly grew heavy. So heavy that the rotten-egg smoke from the burning sandbags was crushed flat against the planks. The heat didn’t drop to the void’s total zero. It turned to the dry, choking heat of an iron foundry under siege, smelling of horse leather, cold steel, lamp oil, and wood-smoke.
Standing between Ren Prime and the burning gunwale was a man who looked like Ren Vale would look after thirty years of relentless land-wide warfare.
He was forty-eight years old, his broad shoulders wrapped in a high-collared mantle of overlapping iron scales lined with coarse grey wolf fur. His jaw was scarred on the left side by the jagged furrow of an assassin’s crossbow bolt, his dark hair cropped brutally short, his skin weathered like cured harness leather. His eyes—the same silver-grey as Ren’s—held the terrible, unbending stillness of an emperor who had signed twenty thousand death warrants before breakfast and forgotten every single name.
On the third finger of his right iron gauntlet rested an Uncut Iron Signet Ring, engraved with the stark, plain dark shape of a crowned skull.
