The march of one hundred thousand Elite Nether-Knights didn’t sound like footsteps.
It sounded like the relentless grinding of a land-wide glacier crushing an ancient forest.
Armored from horned helm to iron-shod sabatons in jagged plates of total-zero void-ice, each knight stood twelve feet tall. In their gauntleted hands, they held eight-foot frost-axe-spears carved from the frozen blood of dead gods.
They advanced in perfect, terrifying phalanxes across the underground floor, their dead violet eye sockets locked onto the golden vault gates of the Sovereign Core Chamber.
The air twenty paces ahead of them froze solid.
Cold air and oxygen condensed out of the air. It fell as a dense, blinding blizzard of liquid droplets that froze upon touching the stone.
“Destroy the mortal vermin!” a towering Nether-Marshal bellowed from the vanguard, raising his frost-axe-spear toward Frank’s tool trailer. “Shatter the gate! Let the eternal cold of the Nether-Void eat the heart of the world!”
Frank stood by his drafting table, calmly rolling up his twenty-four-by-thirty-six-inch thick parchment blueprints and sliding them into a heavy cardboard protective mailing tube.
