The air inside the Granite Hall didn’t merely grow cold. It turned to the choking, rotten-egg chill of a royal battlefield.
The physical manifestation of Lord Ren was fundamentally different from the quiet, spectral entry of Magistrate Ren or Brother Ren.
The Ash Emperor crossed the threshold between the mirror’s silvered plane and physical reality. Then, the surrounding heat in the Granite Hall dropped ten degrees in a single second. The water dripping from the ceiling rafters froze into tiny, needle-sharp icicles. The breath of the sixty guards billowed in thick white clouds. And the air smelled heavily of horse-leather, charred pine, black gunpowder, and cold mountain iron.
He stood six feet four inches tall, clad in said clearlyplates of blackened star-iron that showed the gouges and hammer-marks of a hundred forgotten sieges. Over his breastplate hung a heavy mantle of grey wolf fur, pinned at the right shoulder by a bronze brooch cast in the shape of a cut crown.
His eyes—the same silver-grey as young Ren Vale’s, but hardened into unbending slate by forty years of sovereign command—swept across the hall.
He didn’t look at the guillotine. He didn’t look at Chief Justiciar Malvane. He looked at the thirty Templar sergeants in the well, his tactical test instant and complete.
