Night fell over the Shattered Crucible like a shovel of cold earth thrown into a grave.
Without the surrounding violet glare of the Great Loom to light up the clouds, the sky over the northern volcano bowl turned the deep, unbending black of dark oak-ink. A bitter frost drifted down from the Basalt Teeth. It settled over the heaps of twisted gold-silver metal and slagged copper until the wreckage of the Cult’s two-century ambition looked like the bones of an ancient giant beast stranded on a frozen reef.
At the southern gap of the volcano bowl rim. There, the road dropped toward the Plains of Ash, the refugee wagon stood tethered to two stunted juniper trees.
The wagon was scarred, its ash-wood sideboards scorched black by the siege. But Lord Ren had replaced the snapped left axle with an iron girder salvaged from the chimney pipe works. The draught ox stood with its head low, its broad flanks steaming in the freezing air as it chewed rhythmically on dried marsh grass Brother Ren had scavenged from the lower gully.
In the bed of the wagon, buried beneath three heavy horse blankets, Berserker Ren slept.
The giant had not stirred since they hauled him out of the mud. His massive, soot-blackened chest rose. Then he fell in slow, thunderous respirations that shook the wagon’s timber frame, his rough hands still clasped loosely around the wrapped wooden blade collar of his notched butcher’s cleaver. The blazing bright fissures on his skin had…
