The sound didn’t travel through the air. It ripped the air apart and hammered the pieces into the stone.
Thirty-two forty-pounder lightning-guns discharged in a single, perfectly timed together salvo. A sheet of blinding, cerulean lightning lit up Mount Khor-Vann from summit to base, turning the swirling fog into a sea of blazing bright turquoise.
Ren Vale was thrown three feet backward into the gatehouse hall, his shoulders slamming against the granite wall.
The moving blast was so violent that the breath was punched from his lungs in a ragged gasp. For five seconds, his vision was entirely white, his ears filled with a roaring, electric-shock screech like a thousand wet iron plates grinding together at high speed. The smell of scorched sulfur and ozone filled the hall, thick enough to coat his tongue in copper-tasting slime.
Outside, the mountain shook with titanic fury.
The salvo had not struck the gatehouse. The Spire gunners, adhering strictly to classical siege doctrine, had targeted the deep-rock spine of the mountain. The narrow granite ridge that connected Cloud-Rest to the mainland.
Four hundred pounds of solid iron shot, charged with lightning-salts, struck the razor-backed ridge five hundred yards behind the castle.
The ridge shattered. Three hundred feet of ancient rock exploded into a geyser of crushed shale, boiling stone dust, and flying boulders. The Bridge of Sighs—the ancient giant raised stone road that was the guard post’s only terrestrial lifeline—snapped in two. The central arch collapsed with a sound like a splitting glacier…
