The hooves of the black destrier struck the freezing mud of the Ashen Ravine with the bone-shaking weight of falling boulders.
General Varek Brand rode through the billowing sulfur smoke like a dark god of royal conquest. He was a broad, imposing warlord in his early fifties, his towering frame sheathed in overlapping dragon-scale plates of lacquered black iron edged in beaten gold leaf. An eagle-winged open visor framed a face carved from granite. Hollow cheeks, a thin, cruel mouth, and dark, hungry eyes that had watched fifty cities burn without blinking.
In his gauntleted fists, Brand wielded a seven-foot runic pole-axe. Its crescent steel blade and rear armor-piercing spike were etched with jagged glass-like runes that crackled with violent. It spat arcs of violet lightning, smelling of ozone and spark-charged sulfur.
Behind the general, two hundred mounted royal cuirassiers in full plate were advancing down the gorge. Their draw-reins were tight, their lances lowered in a locked wall of steel.
Brand’s dark eyes swept across the ravine.
He saw the shattered finger bone of his vanguard cohort lying in the bloody shale. He saw Thomas Miller’s soot-stained blacksmiths holding the line with nine-foot pikes. And then his gaze locked onto the Giant statue of Khorat.
