At noon on the sixth day of the siege, the mist over the Ashen Plains rolled back like a funeral shroud.
From the northern curtain wall of Fort Karst, Ren Vale looked down into the throat of the mountain pass. The winter sun hung low and pale in the steel-grey sky. He cast long, sharp shadows across the frozen scree. The cold was bitter, biting through wool and leather. But nobody on the castle walls was shivering from the wind.
Every eye was fixed on the massive iron behemoth crawling out of the Obsidian Legion’s staging lines.
The Giant statue of Khorat.
It wasn’t a traditional wooden battering ram. It was a clockwork titan of heavy-duty warfare, engineered in the deep foundries of the capital. Sixty feet long, thirty feet wide, and clad in three-inch plates of cold-rolled black iron and beaten lead, it moved on eight massive, iron-rimmed wheels that crushed the frozen shale into powder beneath its passage.
At its center, roaring like a caged dragon, sat a potion-made high-pressure steam boiler forged from heavy bronze, venting plumes of scalding, sulfur-tainted steam from four upright smokestacks. Suspended within the iron belly of the machine was the ram itself. A sixty-foot solid trunk of forged black iron, five feet in width, its head shaped like the crowned skull of a horned ram and tipped with runic silver.
