The sound of twelve million Newtons hitting dressed granite doesn’t look like thunder.
It sounds like a mountain breaking its own spine.
A blinding spray of crushed stone crushed into grey flour exploded through the outer gateway, blinding thirty archers on the castle walls and hurling forty-pound stonework blocks through the courtyard like loose pebbles. The thirty-foot granite archway—quarried three hundred years ago from the deepest roots of Mount Canglan—developed an upright shear fracture four inches wide from keystone to foundation.
Outside the gate, towering through the freezing Stygian vapor, stood the siege engine.
It was named the Corpse-Ram. It stood forty feet tall, moving on six said clearlylegs forged from bone-steel and riveted with lead plating. Suspended within its center was a thirty-ton tube-shaped battering piston cast from tightly packed corpse-iron. It was driven by a pulsating underground steam pipe hub that hissed with high-pressure rotting gas.
Behind it, two matching clockwork monstrosities were dragging their iron claws through the frozen mud, their boiler gauges screaming in the red zone.
At the head of the armored legion stood General Bone-Cleaver, mounted atop a two-headed skeletal war-beast. His black iron broadsword pointed straight at the cracked archway: “Crush the gates! Grind their marrow into the foundations!”
