The barricade across High Street was anchored by an overturned Ducal steam-lorry and six huge Sun-Crown Carrara marble stone stands.
Lord Ren—the Ash Emperor—stood atop the cab of the steam-lorry, his heavy iron shin guards planted on the riveted boiler plating. The gale of time static whipped his grey wolf-fur mantle around his shoulders. But the warlord stood as motionless as an iron statue overlooking a frozen battlefield.
Before him, three hundred yards down the avenue, the Crimson Scourge was advancing in a tidal wave of living horror.
Over two hundred paradox chimeras—scaled fungal hounds, multi-jointed canal crawlers, and horrific swarms of leech-like red blowflies the size of sparrows—were surging through the mist, their hard-shelled claws clicking against the cobblestones with the sound of a million dry leaves. Behind the beasts loomed the physical structure of the un-burned quarantine station. Towering barricades of rotting black timber, strung with rusted iron barbed wire. It rolled forward like a creeping glacier of gangrenous wood.
Beside the steam-lorry stood the joint defense force. Eighty High court Guards armed with heavy repeating crossbows, and ninety Sun-Crown Legionnaires holding eight-foot bronze pikes.
The men standing behind the overturned lorry were not heroes. They were working-class laborers and conscripted royal soldiers caught in the meat-grinder of history.
