The crash of the Iron Ram against the dark rock low roof wall sounded like a falling mountain striking an iron anvil.
The three-foot-thick stone wall didn’t simply crack. The ram’s bronze head made contact. Then, three million foot-pounds of striking force, coupled with four thousand pounds of white-hot chronological steam, blew up outward in a blinding, bone-shaking wave of violet fire. The center of the stronghold crumbled into a howling blizzard of crushed dark rock shrapnel and boiling, un-burned chronological slurry.
Thirty men and women stood directly in the blast lane.
Under normal laws of siegecraft, their bodies would have been thrown thirty paces into the rear ditch, broken and scattered. But Lord Ren’s Iron Promise held them with the unbending cruelty of forged steel. Their boots were anchored to the dark rock. Their skeletons were locked in rigid, unmoving defiance.
Because they couldn’t fall, they absorbed the full, cataclysmic fury of the blast while standing upright.
Dark rock shards as sharp as razor-flint tore through wool tunics, sheepskin aprons, and leather jerkins, shredding muscle and shattering ribs. But far worse than the stone was the time slurry. The violet discharge soaked into their wounds, eating away at their living balance like liquid acid. Flesh blackened into rotting rot in seconds. Lungs filled with blood as chronological back-pressure aged their lung blood vessels fifty years in a single heartbeat.
