The freezing mist at the mouth of the northern necropolis didn’t merely roll forward. It parted like black curtains before the entrance of a royal monarch.
Out from the underground dark rolled a war engine that made the three-ton battering rams look like toys.
It was a huge nine-foot bone carriage. It was built from the stone-hard ribs and tusks of an ancient deep-sea giant beast. The six-spoke wheels, four paces in width, were bound in bands of hammered star-iron and studded with rusted iron spikes that crushed boulders into white powder as they turned. Drawing the monstrous contraption were eight skeletal drake-hounds. Reanimated apex hunting beasts of the northern ice tundra, each eight feet long, their ribs armored in bog-iron, their jaws lined with three rows of serrated bone fangs.
Mounted upon a raised ivory throne at the center of the carriage sat Patriarch Gui.
The patriarch was draped in heavy robes of crimson silk stitched with weeping souls. His skin was parchment-pale, stretched tightly over a skull-like face. His sunken eye sockets glowed with twin embers of baleful emerald fire. Resting across his knees was a seven-foot staff of blackened hardwood, topped by a fluttering three-sided banner of woven human hair and flayed skin: the Nine-Ghost Nether Flag.
