The mortar shell struck forty paces to the left of the central stronghold.
It didn’t detonate with the honest crack of black powder. The bronze casing shattered against the dark rock low roof wall. Then, it released a five-fathom dome of violet, boiling chronological slurry. Where the liquid touched the stone, the rock didn’t shatter into shrapnel. It un-solidified. Two hundred tons of fiery dark rock devolved backward through three million years of deep-rock history. It dissolved from dense, cold stone into a bubbling soup of red-hot magma and sulfur gas before splashing down the mountain face like boiling wax.
Three militia watchmen standing on that section of the wall didn’t even have time to scream.
The retroactive wave washed over their boots. One instant they were men in their forties with grey beards and patched sheepskin jackets. The next, their bodies un-grew in a blur of terrifying, reverse biology. They shrank into scared boys of twelve, then into squalling infants wrapped in giant wool tunics, before tumbling into the boiling magma where the low roof wall had been.
A collective shriek of pure, animal terror ripped through the eighty defenders huddled behind the leftover breastwork.
“Fall back!” a sergeant roared, his matchlock carbine clattering from his numb fingers onto the gravel. “Fall back to the tree line! The stone is turning to water! We can’t fight that! We can’t fight weapons that eat your years!”
