The freezing mist of the Ashen Ravine smelled of crushed dark rock, damp wool, burning sulfur. The bitter exhalations of sixty men marching into what should have been their collective grave.
The ravine was eighty paces wide. A jagged earth-shaking wound cut through the fiery spine of the Karst Ridge by ancient river-floods. On either side, upright dark rock bluffs rose ninety feet into the grey winter fog, their black stone faces slick with frozen rime and long icicles. Beneath their boots, the road was a dangerous, churned slurry of crushed shale, snow, and fiery ash that sucked at leather soles with every step, threatening to throw a man off balance into the frozen ditch.
At the head of the sixty-man wedge strode Lord Ren.
The Emperor had discarded his frost-wolf pelt, moving stripped down to his blackened plate cuirass and scarred mail shin guards. In his right hand, he held his broad-bladed shortsword, its point resting low. On his left arm, he bore a heavy three-sided iron buckler stamped with the crowned skull of his dead empire. Behind him, locked shoulder-to-shoulder in three tight, disciplined ranks, came thirty guard post veterans under Sergeant Hobb, twenty soot-stained blacksmiths carrying nine-foot pikes under Thomas Miller, and ten burly draymen wielding heavy boarding axes and logging chains under Kael.
