When Ren reached the northern low roof wall of Fort Karst, the cold wind had ceased its howling. He dropped into a dead, choking calm that carried the heavy reek of sulfur, wet harness leather, and unwashed thousands.
Beside him, Mira stood with both hands gripping the frosted dark rock merlon. Her charcoal shawl pinned was tight against the draft. Below them, on the stone-flagged firing step, eighty guard post veterans in rusted brigandines stood shoulder-to-shoulder with two hundred newly promise-bound refugees. Blacksmiths clutched heavy ash pikes with steel heads still warm from Miller’s forge. Draymen stood beside heaps of jagged dark rock cut stone blocks. And thirty teenage weavers held sixty-pound yew longbows strung with newly braided horsehair.
No one spoke. Every eye was locked on the southern horizon where the Karst Ridge sloped downward into the dead expanse of the Ashen Plains.
The plain had turned to iron.
Far as the eye could see through the leaden winter twilight. Then, four thousand veteran infantrymen of the Obsidian Legion were deploying in rigid, disciplined cohorts. Their overlapping plates of lacquered black steel absorbed the fading daylight. That made them look like a creeping tide of fiery glass. Banners of crimson silk, stamped with the three-headed raven of the Military Board, fluttered above dense forests of eighteen-foot pikes.
