The horns didn’t blow all at once. They blew in contradiction.
From the courtyard above the cloisters, three distinct war-horns sounded across the dark rock castle walls at the same heartbeat. To the west, the heavy brass horn of the Ducal Heavy Guard sounded the royal charge of Year 740. To the east, the hollow bone-trumpets of the Red Mire Warlords wailed the blood-hunt of Year 512. And from the north, the shrill, silver clarions of the Sun-Crown Hegemony blared the holy purge of Year 810.
None of those armies had survived to the present day.
Yet as Ren Vale, Mira, and Chrono-Scribe reached the head of the cellar stairs. She pushed open the iron-heavy oak doors that led into the grand courtyard of the keep, the stone floor shook with the tread of eight hundred pairs of iron boots.
“The distributor cut triggered the contingency,” Chrono-Scribe Ren said, his cold eyes scanning the courtyard through the smoke. “When the children were unhooked from the transformer, the Great Spindle lost its living dampener. The Arch-Restorationist has dumped the piled up backward load directly into the regional casualty registers.”
Ren stepped onto the row of stone pillars, his mammoth ivory awl gripped low at his side.
