The collapse of the Cult of the Restored Dawn didn’t sound like an army in retreat. It sounded like a dry library burning in an abandoned cellar.
Across the high rim of the Shattered Crucible, the howling wind that had driven paradox squalls across the plains for three months died into an eerie, frozen stillness. Through the shattered roof vents, the grey winter twilight poured down upon the volcano bowl. It showed the true scale of the dissolving.
Along the outer edge castle walls, where hundreds of un-dead guardsmen and backward legionnaires had manned the barricades, the silence was total.
Without the Great Loom’s gold-silver metal shuttles to weave their contradictory timelines together, the soldiers simply came undone. There were no screams, no dying groans, no pools of bright red blood spreading across the stone. A guardsman would take half a step forward, his forged gold-silver metal breastplate would tarnish to dull lead. His flesh would dry into grey flakes of sloughed skin. Within seconds, an entire squad of the Two-Faced Cohort dissolved into brittle bone and rusted mail, collapsing into knee-deep drifts of sterile ash that blew southward on the rising gale.
Lord Ren climbed the iron ladder to the upper watching platform, his notched broadsword sheathed at his hip. The Ash Emperor stood against the cold sky, his dented iron mantle snapping in the wind as his scarred eyes swept the rim.
